A week before the signing, a friend in Lebanon messaged me. He wasn’t optimistic. People at home were almost out of hope, he wrote, and the talks in Washington were the only lifeline left. If they fell apart, Iran would get the keys to the country back, and Lebanon would lose another decade to misery.
I’ve thought about that message every day since the ceremony, because it caught something the coverage didn’t. Everyone wrote up the pilot zones and the troop redeployments along the Litani River. Those are real, and they’ll be fought over for months. Almost no one stopped on the sentence that actually moves the ground under all of it: the first clause of the Trilateral Framework, signed on June 26, in which Israel and Lebanon recognize each other as sovereign neighbors with the right to live in peace, and commit to ending the state of war between them.
A Lebanese government has not put that on paper since May 1983. That deal lasted barely a year before Beirut, leaned on hard by Damascus, walked away. The 2022 maritime agreement everyone praised at the time didn’t come close. American officials shuttled between two rooms precisely so that the Lebanese side would never have to acknowledge Israel. This time, both governments signed in one room.
So let me say plainly what I think it is. It may end up mattering more than the Abraham Accords. Those were a real achievement, but they were also the easy kind of peace. The Emiratis, the Bahrainis, and the Moroccans were never going to go to war with us. Lebanon is the country that just did.
I’ve seen the Hezbollah lawmaker warning that the state can’t enforce any of this without a civil war. I’d take the threat more seriously if it came from strength. A party that could still quietly kill this deal wouldn’t be promising to burn the house down over it.
What actually holds the agreement together has nothing to do with signatures. Hezbollah is broken. For 20 years, the party sold its own community a single idea: that the resistance kept them safe and the Lebanese state did not. The war that started in February buried it. Hezbollah took casualties it still won’t put a number to.
Hezbollah a liability for Lebanon
Iran walked out of its own collision with Washington weaker and distracted. And the Shia south is rubble, with the money to rebuild sitting in Beirut, released only if this framework holds. My friend’s despair is the evidence. People who once saw the weapons as protection now look at them and see the reason their towns are still flattened.
The people who got this done should be named. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the most genuinely pro-Israel figures around President Donald Trump, pushed a grinding, thankless process across the line when most of us assumed it would collapse. That is historic, and it is his.
Deal an accomplishment for Netanyahu as well
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earned his share. We go after him constantly on this page, and we will again soon. But this was good for us, and he is entitled to be proud of it. So is our ambassador in Washington, Yechiel Leiter, among the best we have ever sent. He has worked this region for decades; he isn’t playing to a crowd back home, and he does not get fooled.
None of it is safe yet. Iran rebuilt Hezbollah once and may try again, and the real contest now is speed: Can Tehran rearm it before Beirut disarms it? Last time, Iran was rebuilding a confident proxy inside a state that let it happen. This time, the proxy is broken, and the state has signed its name to the other side.
There’s no clean way to end a column about a war that isn’t over, so I won’t pretend otherwise. The clause is signed. That much is real.