For decades, the idea of a Lebanon free from Hezbollah has been dismissed as unrealistic – if not naive. Yet history tells a different story. The foundations for such an outcome were laid long before Hezbollah emerged, and revisiting them today may offer the clearest path forward.
The current war cycle has stripped away any remaining ambiguity about Hezbollah’s role. It is no longer simply a “resistance movement” but a strategic arm of Iran operating on Lebanese soil, often in direct contradiction to Lebanon’s own national interests.
If Lebanon is to survive as a sovereign, pluralistic state, it must confront this reality and embrace a framework – rooted in past precedent but adapted to present conditions – that enables Hezbollah’s exit from the military sphere.
A forgotten precedent
There was a time when the Israeli-Lebanese border was not defined by constant conflict. Following the 1949 armistice, the frontier remained relatively quiet for decades. Even amid broader regional tensions, Beirut – then dominated by a Christian-led political order – left open the possibility of future normalization with Israel under favorable circumstances.
The Lebanese civil war that erupted in 1975 transformed the reality in the south. Palestinian armed organizations, chiefly the PLO, entrenched themselves in the area and turned it into a forward base against Israel.
During the First Lebanon War in 1982, Israel forged ties with the Christian Phalanges led by Bashir Gemayel, who was elected president and assassinated shortly afterward, and then with his brother Amine Gemayel.
Out of this context emerged the May 17, 1983, Israel-Lebanon agreement, which – although short-lived – still offers a useful template: mutual recognition and normalization; Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon; and deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in the south to dismantle and disarm armed organizations.
Hezbollah’s transformation
From that same war, however, emerged an actor that has since defined Israel’s northern front ever since: Hezbollah.
From its inception, and through tight organizational, ideological, and financial links with the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah reshaped the self-image and sociopolitical position of Lebanon’s Shi’ite community.
Loyalty to Tehran was elevated beyond strategy and framed as a religious obligation, binding Hezbollah not to the Lebanese state but to Iran’s revolutionary project. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, described his fighters as ready to go wherever Ayatollah Khomeini ordered, to defend the revolution. He portrayed Hezbollah as part of a single Islamic state whose soldiers are prepared to become a “time bomb” in its defense. That fusion of religious martyrdom, transnational Shi’ite identity, and Iranian revolutionary ideology has framed Hezbollah’s behavior ever since.
After Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the security zone in 2000, Hezbollah rebranded itself as “the defender of Lebanon,” which had forced Israel back to the international border. Yet under Iranian pressure, it continued to wage low-intensity war against Israel, using issues such as the Shebaa Farms as justification to retain and expand a massive independent military infrastructure.
Hezbollah’s confrontation with Israel in 2006 resulted in widespread destruction inside Lebanon, prompting even Nasrallah to acknowledge that he would not have ordered the cross-border operation had he foreseen the consequences. Yet the organization’s fundamental calculus did not change.
The events following October 7, 2023, reinforced the pattern. Hezbollah’s decision to join the confrontation with Israel raised fears of a large-scale incursion into the Galilee, supported by its extensive military infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
Material captured by the IDF in southern Lebanon later confirmed that detailed plans for such an operation existed. The confrontation culminated in massive devastation across southern Lebanon and in the death of Nasrallah on September 27, 2024, before a fragile, externally brokered ceasefire was reached on November 26, 2024.
A narrowing window for action
Despite that ceasefire, Hezbollah has persisted in acting against Lebanese national interests, and in line with Iranian strategic goals. From the perspective of international norms and Lebanon’s formal commitments, the state has no real alternative but to move toward disarmament of Hezbollah, as mandated by a UN Security Council resolutions calling for the dismantling of militias and the establishment of a demilitarized zone between the Israeli border and the Litani River.
In practice, however, successive Lebanese governments have lacked both the capacity and the will to confront Hezbollah, while the human and material costs for Lebanon have grown with every conflict cycle.
For Israel, this reality is unacceptable. For Lebanon, it is unsustainable.
However, there is a realistic path forward that lies in revisiting and updating the principles embedded in the 1983 agreement. A revised version of that agreement could anchor internationally guaranteed mutual recognition and security arrangements, phased Israeli redeployment from the Litani line, robust deployment of the Lebanese Armed Forces in the south under a strengthened international mandate, and a verifiable timetable for dismantling Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.
For this to happen, Lebanon’s political class would have to accept openly what many of its members already acknowledge privately: that Hezbollah’s current status – as a state within a state, guided from Tehran – has become incompatible with Lebanon’s survival as a sovereign, pluralistic polity.
Until such a strategic decision is made in Beirut, Israel will likely insist on maintaining a security zone up to the Litani River, and on preventing the organized return of the Shi’ite population to devastated villages that could quickly be remilitarized.
The hard choice before Lebanon, therefore, is clear: either assume responsibility for disarming Hezbollah and normalizing relations with Israel, with agreed border adjustments and international backing, or live, for the coming years, with an Israeli-controlled buffer zone on its soil as the de facto price of leaving Hezbollah’s weapons in place.■
Lt. Col. (res.) Shaul Bartal is a research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and researcher at the Instituto do Oriente at the University of Lisbon.