Two ambassadors will walk into the State Department on Tuesday and do something no representatives of their governments have done since 1993: sit across from each other and talk.

That this is happening at all — Lebanon and Israel have been in a state of war since 1948 — is remarkable. That it may change almost nothing on the ground is the problem.

A Historic Handshake, With an Asterisk

The Washington meeting, mediated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, brings together the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the United States alongside the US ambassador to Beirut. A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described it as the first direct, high-level diplomatic contact between the two governments in over three decades.

“This conversation will scope the ongoing dialogue about how to ensure the long-term security of Israel’s northern border and to support the government of Lebanon’s determination to reclaim full sovereignty over its territory,” the official added.

Translation — Israel wants Hezbollah disarmed. Lebanon wants a ceasefire. Neither side appears willing to move first.

Hezbollah’s Veto

Before the envoys had left for Washington, Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem delivered his verdict. “These negotiations are futile,” he said in a televised speech on Monday. “No one has the right to take Lebanon down this path without internal consensus among its components — and this has not happened.”

Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is not merely a militia operating in Lebanon. It holds seats in parliament. It runs a social services network that sustains communities the Lebanese state has long neglected. It receives funding and strategic direction from Tehran — and it has made clear it will not abide by any agreement that emerges from Washington.

This is the structural problem at the heart of Tuesday’s meeting. The Lebanese government is negotiating on behalf of a state it does not fully control. Israel knows this. The United States knows this. And Hezbollah is happy to remind everyone.

Six Weeks of Devastation

The talks follow a brutal chapter in a conflict that has displaced more than one million people in Lebanon.

Since Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2 — entering the broader regional war triggered by the killing of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei — Israeli strikes have killed more than 2,000 people in Lebanon, according to Lebanese health officials. More than 350 of those died in a single day last week, many in central Beirut, after Israel struck 100 times in 10 minutes. Lebanon says Israel destroyed 40,000 homes.

Hezbollah has fired rockets into northern Israel daily, killing at least 12 soldiers and two civilians, and fought Israeli ground forces that invaded southern Lebanon. Over the weekend, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz visited troops inside Lebanon, where Katz vowed to eliminate the Hezbollah threat “just as we did in Gaza,” including the demolition of homes to prevent them from becoming what he called “terror outposts.”

The Iran Shadow

These talks do not exist in isolation. They come during a fragile two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran — one that has been undermined by a continued dispute over whether the truce extended to Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Negotiations with Iran in Pakistan failed to produce a breakthrough on Sunday, according to France 24.

The failure of those Iran talks looms over Washington. If the United States could not extract concessions from Tehran through direct engagement, the prospects for a breakthrough between Israel and a Lebanese government that lacks authority over its most powerful armed faction are slim.

The math is unambiguous: 80 percent of Jewish Israelis believe Israel should continue fighting in Lebanon regardless of developments with Iran, even if it means friction with the US administration, according to a poll published Monday by the Israel Democracy Institute.

Diplomacy or Dress Rehearsal?

A former Israeli defense official, speaking anonymously, put it plainly. It would take “a lot of imagination and optimism” to think the issues could be resolved in Washington on Tuesday, adding that Israel would likely “create a buffer zone in the north very similar to what we have in Gaza.”

Israeli airstrikes continued hitting border villages into Tuesday — the same villages Israel says it is seizing to create a “security zone” to prevent cross-border rocket fire. An official briefed on Israel’s strategy told NPR that Israel is preparing for a long-term occupation of southern Lebanon.

The two governments are talking. The question is whether the conversation is the beginning of a process or a diplomatic performance staged while the machinery of war grinds on.

In Beirut, expectations are characteristically blunt. “There will never be peace between Israel and Lebanon,” said Ali Abboud, a 37-year-old standing by the rubble of an apartment building, waiting to learn if his sister’s remains would be recovered. “I thought that before this happened, and now I feel it even stronger.”

Sources