Lebanon, Where Laws Ban Any Contact With Israelis, Is Seeking Peace With the Jewish State

In an extraordinary White House visit, President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon, a country whose citizens are prohibited from contacting Israelis, says that his goal is to make peace with his southern neighbor. Mr. Aoun spoke Tuesday as the Israel Defense Forces handed over a village in southern Lebanon to the Lebanese Armed Forces. That first step in a pilot program agreed between the two countries could eventually lead to a full Israeli withdrawal from areas it holds to prevent Hezbollah from threatening northern Israel. Mr. Aoun was reportedly hoping that in their meeting at the White House Tuesday, President Trump would announce a date for full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. No such date was announced. The Israelis are “in the process of doing that, they’re redeploying into other sections,” Mr. Trump said.The atmosphere at the White House was nevertheless chummy. “I would like to thank President Trump and his team for the historic visit and for the historic achievement that we did together by signing the framework with the ultimate objective of ending the state of hostility between Lebanon and Israel forever,” Mr. Aoun said.Mr. Trump was similarly eager to please his guest. “If the president wanted me to speak to Hezbollah, I would,” Mr. Trump said after noting that Mr. Aoun knew how to compliment his host. Mr. Aoun “knows how to get to me. He can have anything,” the president said. “I don’t think Aoun wants him to talk to Hezbollah,” a Lebanese-born analyst at Washington’s New Line Institute, Dania Arayissi, tells The New York Sun. Mr. Aoun is eager to prove his government’s ability to combat Hezbollah while the Iran-backed terrorists threaten his life and vow to launch a Lebanese civil war if agreements with Israel materialize.While Israelis are in awe of Mr. Aoun’s expressed commitment to end hostilities, they are skeptical that the Lebanese army is a match for the Iran-backed Hezbollah. Israel will stay in Lebanon as long as Hezbollah is armed, the chair of the Knesset’s foreign and security committee, Boaz Bismouth, told a forum at Jerusalem. “The only body that can defend the Israeli north is the IDF,” he said.The pilot program, meant to demonstrate the Lebanese Armed Forces’ ability to disarm Hezbollah, was launched on Tuesday at the village of Zawtar. Lebanese troops, though, apparently veered off the agreed route, and the IDF fired a few warning shots in the air. In a major change of strategy, the Lebanese Armed Forces now agree for the first time to search private homes in southern Lebanese villages. Hezbollah has used such homes near the Israeli border to set up arm depots, missile launchers, and entrances to attack tunnels. The new LAF strategy is a welcome sign for Israelis and Americans. Tehran, though, is financing its Lebanese terror proxy to the tune of $1 billion a year. “You can’t ask the Lebanese Armed Forces to take on groups like Hezbollah without being properly armed and prepared,” Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat of Michigan, told Lebanese television on Tuesday while on a visit to Beirut. Ms. Slotkin, who is on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, has a bill allocating $36 million to arm and train LAF special forces.Mr. Trump said the administration “has a plan” to bolster the LAF, a vital tool, Mr. Aoun said, for Lebanon’s survival. “Without the LAF, everything will collapse,” Mr. Aoun said. “We don’t want that. I think President Trump doesn’t want that.” In the civil war of 1975 “the first institution to collapse was the LAF,” Mr. Aoun noted. “As a result, we saw the emergence of many local militias, as the south was empty, allowing the Palestinians from the south to launch attacks against Israel.”Even before that, in 1955, the Lebanese Parliament enacted a law that banned all citizens from contacting Israelis. While Hezbollah and its supporters invoke that law to this day, Washington is reportedly pressuring Beirut to revoke the writ. Meanwhile, the Lebanese ambassador to America, Nada Moawad, on Mr. Aoun’s behalf, recently launched direct negotiations with her Israeli counterpart, Yechiel Leiter. Israel created a security zone inside Lebanon “not because we have territorial ambitions,” Mr. Leiter told Fox News on Tuesday. “We’re there in order to protect the northern border so that Hezbollah will not come storming across the border as Hamas did in October the seventh to slaughter our civilians or fire missiles into our towns and villages.”

Lebanon, Where Laws Ban Any Contact With Israelis, Is Seeking Peace With the Jewish State

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