Emmanuel Navon

The Israel–Lebanon agreement exposes two opposing strategies: defeating Iran’s proxies to restore sovereignty, or appeasing them while pressuring Israel.

The framework agreement signed in Washington between Israel and Lebanon is more than a bilateral security arrangement. It is a strategic test that reveals the choice facing governments that claim to seek regional stability: either roll back the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies, or accommodate them while pressing Israel for concessions.

Lebanon’s tragedy has not been a lack of international sympathy. It has been the absence of sovereignty. No state can be sovereign when an armed militia, financed and guided by a foreign power, controls territory and decides matters of war and peace. No government can restore national authority while a terrorist army stronger than its official forces drags the country into wars its citizens did not choose.

That is why Hezbollah’s rejection of the agreement is so revealing. Hezbollah does not oppose it because it weakens Lebanon. It opposes it because it weakens Hezbollah. The logic is simple: Israeli withdrawal must be linked to the removal of the threat that forced Israel into Lebanon in the first place. Withdrawal while Hezbollah remains armed on the border would not be peace. It would be a countdown to the next war.

The agreement exposes two competing doctrines.

The first says that pacifying the Middle East requires defeating, isolating, and containing the Islamic Republic and the militias it has armed across the region. In Lebanon, this means disarming Hezbollah. In Gaza, it means ending Hamas rule. In Yemen, it means stopping the Houthis from threatening shipping. More broadly, it means restoring the monopoly of force to sovereign states.

The second doctrine says the opposite. It assumes that Iran and its clients are permanent features of the region and must therefore be accommodated. It treats Tehran as indispensable, Qatar as a useful channel to Islamist movements, and Israel as the party most easily pressured. Diplomacy, in this view, means managing radical actors rather than defeating them.

That approach has failed wherever it has been tried. In Lebanon, it produced a Hezbollah state within the state. In Gaza, it turned aid and reconstruction into instruments of war for Hamas. In Yemen, it enabled Houthi attacks on global trade. It confused de-escalation with stability and temporary quiet with peace.

Governments now have to choose. They cannot support Lebanese sovereignty while tolerating Hezbollah’s arsenal. They cannot defend international law while accepting that Iranian-backed militias decide when sovereign states go to war. They cannot claim to support stability while asking Israel to make concessions to the forces that made stability impossible.

French President Emmanuel Macron has chosen the second path. His Middle East diplomacy increasingly rests on the belief that stability can be achieved by engaging or rehabilitating actors that helped destabilize the region. The reported preparations for a presidential visit to Damascus, together with France’s growing convergence with Qatar’s regional diplomacy, illustrate that choice.

France is entitled to pursue its own policy. But it should be honest about its meaning. Pressuring Israel while rehabilitating Damascus and moving closer to Doha is not realism. It is appeasement.

The Lebanon agreement points toward a different path. It says that sovereignty matters; that militias cannot hold states hostage; that Israel’s security requirements are not obstacles to peace but preconditions for peace; and that the Iranian project can be rolled back when democratic governments and sovereign Arab states act with clarity.

This lesson matters beyond the Middle East. Countries dependent on Middle Eastern energy, open sea lanes, and freedom of navigation have a direct stake in whether the region is stabilized by restoring sovereignty or destabilized further by rewarding armed proxies. For Japan and other responsible democracies, this touches energy security, maritime order, and the credibility of rules against coercion.

Diplomacy works only when anchored in reality. And the reality is that the Islamic Republic and its proxies have been the main engines of war, terrorism, and fragmentation in the Middle East.

The Lebanon agreement will not implement itself. Hezbollah will resist it. Iran will try to sabotage it. Some governments will try to dilute it in the name of de-escalation. Others will argue that Israel must move first, withdraw first, concede first, and trust that its enemies will moderate later.

That logic has already been tried. It produced rockets, tunnels, militias, and war.

The alternative is to restore sovereignty, disarm militias, isolate the Islamic Republic, and make peace possible by removing the forces that make peace impossible.

That is the choice facing the Middle East. It is also the choice facing every government that claims to support peace in the region.