Israel has abandoned the “land for peace” formula that has governed its dealings with Arab neighbors since 1967 and is now telling Lebanon that Beirut must disarm Hezbollah before recovering its territory, according to Hussain Abdul-Hussain, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Speaking to a Jewish Policy Center webinar on April 23, Hussain said Israel is “flipping the script” by holding a buffer zone inside southern Lebanon until the Lebanese government takes responsibility for violence originating from its soil. “We will not withdraw and hope that you’ll be peaceful toward us,” he summarized Israel’s new position. “We will keep the land until you become peaceful.”
Hussain, who was born and raised in Beirut, Baghdad, and Baalbek and whose new book The Arab Case for Israel was recently published, traced the arc from Israel’s 1982 invasion, through the stillborn May 17, 1983 peace agreement killed by Hafez al-Assad’s militias, to Israel’s UN-certified withdrawal in 2000 and Hezbollah’s October 8, 2023 decision to open a second front “in support of Gaza.”
A Buffer Zone and a Yellow Line
The IDF now controls 55 depopulated Shia villages in a strip calibrated to the roughly six-mile range of Hezbollah’s shoulder-fired, guided anti-tank missiles, weapons that proved especially lethal to Israelis during the 2023-2024 fighting, Hussain said. The IDF calls it a “forward defensive position.” Roughly half a million displaced Lebanese Shia are now “living as displaced people in tents in Beirut and Mount Lebanon.”
Unlike Israel’s security zone of the 1980s and 1990s, he stressed, there will be no Lebanese population to govern and no cover for Hezbollah ambushes. Anyone crossing what both sides call “the yellow line” is “taken out.” Hussain pointed to the IDF killing of a Hezbollah “journalist” who crossed the line as proof Israel intends to enforce it.
Talking Past Each Other in Washington
Last Thursday produced the first direct Lebanon-Israel talks since 1983, with the two countries’ ambassadors meeting in Washington alongside the U.S. ambassador to Beirut and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the two delegations “are talking past each other,” Hussain said. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam frame the talks as a vehicle to “stop the war and get our territory back” and say little about disarming Hezbollah. Israel’s position is that disarmament is the predicate for peace.
Hussain nevertheless praised the Aoun-Salam government for rejecting French and Spanish proposals that Lebanon be folded into the Iran ceasefire, and for a March 2 cabinet resolution instructing the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to disband Hezbollah. Washington, he argued, has long conflated Lebanon with its Iranian occupier and should not “be doing Iran’s job for them” by refusing to engage a weak but distinct Lebanese state.
Strings Attached
The roughly $1 billion in U.S. aid to the LAF over the past decade has come with almost no conditions, Hussain said, and the LAF commander is “a corrupt guy who’s in Hezbollah’s pocket.” He argued Washington should tie future assistance to measurable benchmarks and to a change in combat doctrine that still designates “the Israeli enemy” rather than the illegally armed Hezbollah as the army’s principal adversary. “We let them get away with saying one thing in English and something else in Arabic,” he said, urging that the U.S. “call them out” and impose “KPIs and benchmarks.”
Drawing the lesson from Oslo, Hussain said both the Gaza peace plan — UN Security Council Resolution 2803 — and any Lebanon deal must specify “the sequence of order” so that territory, reconstruction, and economic aid follow, not precede, disarmament. The Gaza plan is “stuck at point four” because Hamas will not disarm, he noted, and Lebanon risks the same frozen outcome.
Optimism, Qualified
Hussain said he is more optimistic than his host because Israel has designed its posture so that stalled talks do not force an Israeli retreat. “No one now can pressure Israel to withdraw,” he said. On Iran, he predicted that a sustained U.S. oil blockade will force Tehran to shut in wells within roughly 20 days, costing half a million barrels per day of production “forever” and bringing the regime to terms. “Gaza is — we’re over the finish line. Lebanon, we’re near the finish line. Iran, we’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.”
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