The framework signed in Washington this week solves nothing, because it asks Hezbollah to do the one thing it will never do voluntarily: surrender its weapons. Disarmament is not a clause to be haggled over; it is the party’s reason for being. Naim Qassem said as much — no normalization, no gains for Israel, the resistance as “the pillar of Lebanon’s independence.” Strip away the diplomatic varnish and the message is simple: the guns stay.
That leaves Lebanon two roads, and both are dark.
On the first, Israel keeps its boots on Lebanese soil, citing Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm as the standing justification for occupation. Every strike and every leaflet drop deepens the very enmity the framework claims to dissolve.
On the second — the road Hezbollah’s own MP, Hassan Fadlallah, named aloud when he warned of “civil war” — the Lebanese state tries to enforce the deal itself. But the army that would do the enforcing is weak, under-equipped, and sectarally mixed. Order it to disarm Hezbollah and you do not get disarmament; you get an army that splinters along the same fault lines as the country it serves. As Rami Khouri put it, “the Lebanese army by itself cannot disarm Hezbollah.”
Either way, the struggle turns inward. And an inward-turned struggle in Lebanon carries a name the region remembers too well. The old alignment reasserts itself — Christians and Sunnis wary of Shiite arms, Shiites convinced that surrendering those arms means surrendering themselves.
We share the alarm, with one caveat: collapse is not yet destiny. Lebanon has hovered on this brink before and stepped back from it. But brinkmanship is not a policy. A framework that outsources the hardest question — who disarms Hezbollah, and how — to a hollow state and a reluctant army is not a peace plan. It is a fuse, and someone in Washington has just handed Beirut the match.
Photo: ChatGPT