For the first time<\/span> in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel\u2019s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022<\/a> and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon\u2019s flags were hung next to one another \u2014 a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.<\/p>\n A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon<\/a> was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously<\/a> undermined by Israel<\/a>. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said<\/a> on Thursday, could lead to the \u201copportunity to forge a historic peace agreement\u201d with Lebanon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024<\/a>, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone<\/a> that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut\u2019s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days. <\/p>\n Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands<\/a>, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.<\/p>\n While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed<\/a> the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is \u201cno longer a card in anyone\u2019s pocket,\u201d Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah \u201cwill cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,\u201d<\/a> the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations<\/a> between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking<\/a> increasingly fraught<\/a>. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced<\/a> after the ceasefire that it was the result of the \u201cresistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.\u201d Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News<\/a> that this was the \u201csame ceasefire agreement\u201d reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel\u2019s belated co-sign.<\/p>\n While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf \u2014 with Iran\u2019s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly<\/a> on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal \u2014 it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon\u2019s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding<\/a> the state\u2019s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon\u2019s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel\u2019s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being \u201call talk and no action\u201d<\/a> on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel\u2019s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened<\/a> that the Lebanese state itself would pay a \u201cvery heavy price\u201d by way of Israel destroying \u201cLebanese national infrastructure\u201d and the \u201closs of territory\u201d to Israeli occupation.<\/p>\n After Israel\u2019s military launched \u201cOperation Eternal Darkness<\/a>\u201d on April 8, killing more than 300 Lebanese civilians and bringing war to places in Beirut that had not been attacked since the 1980s, Lebanon\u2019s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam came out and insisted<\/a> that \u201cno one but the Lebanese state can negotiate on behalf of Lebanon.\u201d Aoun further said Lebanon could not accept negotiations on its behalf by anyone else, and that this was a \u201csovereign matter\u201d above all else, even amid ongoing Iranian military pressure to bring Lebanon into the ceasefire. Israel, whose diplomats refused to speak with the Lebanese government in early March on the basis that Lebanon was not \u201ccredible,\u201d and whose U.N. ambassador said \u201cdialogue with the Lebanese government cannot stop the fire from Lebanese territory,\u201d suddenly decided to focus all its efforts on arranging unprecedented negotiations.<\/p>\n Lebanon\u2019s ambassador claimed after talks concluded that she had raised the ceasefire with the other representatives (Axios confirmed<\/a> the prospect was brought up \u201cinformally\u201d), but neither the Israeli nor the American officials stated the talks were to achieve a ceasefire. The prospect was in fact \u201cpeace,\u201d a long-term settlement between the two nations, or as Leiter, Israel\u2019s ambassador, put it, to affirm \u201cwe are on the same side, we and the Lebanese\u201d and that Lebanon would \u201cno longer be occupied by Hezbollah.\u201d<\/p>\n Leiter has made the issue of peace with Lebanon one of his top priorities since being appointed in early 2025, saying in an interview<\/a> with PragerU last May that he was \u201cupbeat\u201d about Lebanon, as well as Syria, potentially joining the Abraham Accords<\/a>, perhaps even before Saudi Arabia. He also told reporters this week that he had spoken<\/a> with Lebanese officials about a future in which one could cross the border in a \u201cswimsuit to vacation on the beaches of both countries.\u201d Beyond these liberal platitudes, Leiter himself has had a significant past \u2014 one deeply intertwined with Israeli expansionist politics that he now strenuously denies applies to Lebanon.<\/p>\n Amid all of this outpouring of peace, those supposedly advocating for it are in the same government as those advocating Lebanon\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n The first West Bank settler to be selected as ambassador to the United States, Leiter was an early member of the Jewish Defense League, an organization the FBI later described as a right-wing terrorist group<\/a> and led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose members committed mass shootings of Palestinians, plotted to bomb American mosques, and attempted assassinations of U.S. politicians. Leiter was then a member of Kach, Kahane\u2019s political party, which was later banned as a terrorist organization inside Israel itself. During this period, Kahane advocated for a wide-scale deportation of Arabs from Israeli-occupied areas as well as from Israel itself, and labeled southern Lebanon as part of Israel\u2019s \u201cminimal\u201d<\/a> borders. Leiter left the party in the 1980s, claiming Kahanism came from \u201ca weakness of character,\u201d<\/a> but made these criticisms in his capacity as a leader of the Hebron settlement movement in the occupied West Bank, attempting to paint those who advocated peace with the Palestinians as just as misguided.\u00a0<\/p>\n As ambassador to the United States, Leiter told the Lebanese news outlet This is Beirut<\/a> in late 2025 that Israel and Lebanon \u201chave a history,\u201d recalled the disastrous economic conditions in Israeli-occupation southern Lebanon with a smile, and said southern Lebanese used to line up in early in the morning at the border every day to seek economic opportunities in northern Israel. \u201cWe\u2019d be more than happy to see that again,\u201d Leiter said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n While the Israeli government has constantly demanded the Lebanese Army do more to disarm Hezbollah and impose Lebanese sovereignty over the country\u2019s south, Leiter has made no indications that Israel would accept any military build-up, even by Lebanon, at the border with Israel, saying<\/a> in a visit to occupied Syrian territory last November alongside Netanyahu and Katz that Israel could no longer tolerate \u201cforeign armies\u201d on its border. Leiter has also warned certain other Lebanese allies, such as France, should stay \u201cfar away\u201d from these negotiations, and said, \u201cthey are not a positive influence, particularly not in Lebanon.\u201d France had previously advocated for direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel but had also condemned Operation Eternal Darkness and called for the Iranian ceasefire to apply to Lebanon as well.<\/p>\n While the Israeli negotiating team has been explicit that the talks were intended to get the Lebanese government to ally<\/a> with their country against Hezbollah, there was another goal at work, one not reflected by the photo ops: to legitimize the indefinite occupation<\/a> and depopulation of southern Lebanon.\u00a0<\/p>\n In an interview on Israeli TV about Israel engaging in negotiations with Lebanon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted<\/a> that \u201cno one will disarm Hezbollah for us\u201d and said a peace agreement between the two countries would serve to \u201cgreatly legitimize\u201d Israel\u2019s position. He also said he would push for the Israel Defense Forces to remain up until the Litani River, which Smotrich last month described as the location where Israel\u2019s \u201cnew border\u201d<\/a> must be.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"WASHINGTON,](\"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-2271338104.jpg?fit=8640%2C5760\")
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