BEIRUT—Any visitor to Lebanon these days could be forgiven for thinking they have been transported thirty years back in time. Israel is occupying a tract of south Lebanon that almost exactly matches the configuration of its ill-fated “security zone” in the 1990s. Hezbollah is back to its daily “resistance” attacks against Israeli troops in south Lebanon and occasionally firing rockets (and now fiber-optic guided drones) across the border into northern Israel. Lebanese civilians in the south flee their homes and tread the well-worn road north to escape the violence. Israelis living in northern communities grumble that the government is not doing enough to eliminate the Hezbollah threat. It is as if nothing has changed over the past three decades. Even the current hesitant diplomatic track has echoes of more than four decades ago, specifically May 1983, when a weak Lebanese government was prodded by the Reagan administration into a broad security agreement with Israel, which was at the time occupying most of the southern half of Lebanon.
History is threatening to repeat itself with fresh proposed negotiations between Lebanon and Israel egged on by the Trump administration. As in 1983, a chasm of differences lies between the two sides, and it is uncertain whether it can be bridged. The negotiations are also splitting the Lebanese, with Hezbollah vehemently opposed to the idea of negotiating with Israel, describing the talks as a “grave sin.”
Indeed, this current war has inadvertently revitalized Hezbollah’s “resistance” narrative at a time it was facing extreme pressure—domestically, regionally and internationally—to lay down its weapons. The Lebanese government now faces an even harder struggle to find a means of persuading or forcing the party to relinquish its arms. Even its support base, initially aghast and angered at Hezbollah triggering this latest destructive round of fighting on March 2 by firing rockets into Israel, has begun to drift back to the party’s ranks.
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There are two likely reasons for this: First, despite some initial anger, many Shias began feeling a sense of communal pride in seeing the “resistance” back in action against the Israelis, especially given the level of violence being inflicted on Lebanon by Israel and the rising civilian casualty toll. The second reason is that a sizable percentage of Lebanon’s Shia population has become internally displaced, forced to seek shelter in mainly non-Shia areas, knowing that those host communities are in general not feeling well-disposed toward Hezbollah. This attitude has left many Shias feeling vulnerable and looking to Hezbollah for protection.
Pressure on Aoun
Initial discussions have already been held by the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors to Washington under the auspices of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. US President Donald Trump on April 30 repeated his hopes of an imminent meeting at the White House between Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, placing Aoun under unwanted pressure. On May 4, he explicitly stated that the timing was inappropriate for a meeting with Netanyahu and that efforts should concentrate first on a security agreement to end the conflict.
While Aoun and the Lebanese government support negotiations to end the fighting and secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces, meeting Netanyahu before the negotiating process has even begun risks inflaming domestic politics even further. That is especially true given the massive level of destruction being inflicted on villages and towns inside Israel’s new occupation zone bordered by what it calls the “Yellow Line.” Entire villages are being razed to the ground, effectively turning the occupied border belt into a depopulated wasteland (apart from three Christian villages whose residents have been permitted to stay). Since the fighting renewed on March 2, more than 2,600 Lebanese have been killed and over eight thousand wounded. More than one million people have been internally displaced.
A mid-April cease-fire agreement led to a cessation of air strikes in Beirut, although both Israel and Hezbollah have continued to trade fire in the south on a lower scale than before. The April 16 cease-fire agreement explicitly calls on Lebanon and Israel to negotiate under US auspices “with the objective of resolving all remaining issues, including demarcation of the international land boundary, with a view to concluding a comprehensive agreement that ensures lasting security, stability, and peace between the two countries.” This is a lofty aspiration given the current situation and probably one too far for Lebanon. Lebanon’s primary objectives in the negotiations are for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to withdraw from Lebanon, an end to the ongoing air strikes and demolitions, the return of detainees, reconstruction assistance, and the resolution of outstanding differences over the path of the joint Lebanon-Israel border. A full peace with Israel currently is a bridge too far for a divided Lebanon.
The Israeli demands focus on disarming Hezbollah and preventing it from rearming in the future, alongside security guarantees for its northern border. Israel appears more open at this stage to the notion of a full peace with Lebanon. The key to the success of the negotiations is whether or not Hezbollah can be disarmed. Hezbollah is adamantly refusing to surrender its weapons and has wholeheartedly rejected the idea of the Lebanese state negotiating with Israel, particularly during a time of occupation and conflict. “These direct negotiations and their outcomes are as if they do not exist to us,” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Naim Qassem said in a statement on April 27.
Feels like 1983
This is where a comparison with the ill-fated 1982-83 negotiations becomes relevant. Those talks began in late 1982, several months after Israel invaded Lebanon and occupied Beirut, leaving the Lebanese state weakened and fragmented after eight years of civil war. The current process emerges from another destructive confrontation that has left Israel again occupying territory in the south. In 1983, Washington was not merely mediating but actively engineering an outcome aligned with its strategic objectives—stabilizing Lebanon, securing Israel’s northern border, and curbing Syrian influence. Today, the United States appears to be pursuing a similar approach, encouraging and facilitating negotiations within a broader goal of weakening Iran’s regional posture by neutralizing Hezbollah’s military role in Lebanon. In both 1983 and in 2026, negotiations, from Lebanon’s perspective, began from a point of external coercion and domestic weakness rather than shared political alignments and balance of influence.
Syrian President Hafez al-Assad was not a party to the 1983 negotiations—he vocally opposed them. Syrian forces were deployed in Lebanon, and Damascus exerted influence over several powerful Lebanese militias. By the final phase of negotiations in May 1983, the core text of the agreement contained references to an Israeli withdrawal and security arrangements in south Lebanon. The agreement did not legally require a Syrian troop withdrawal, but the US negotiators assured the Israelis that Damascus would withdraw its forces once the IDF had left Lebanon. However, Assad refused to comply and pressed his Lebanese allies to undermine the agreement. The agreement was never implemented in full and was annulled in March 1984. By the following year, the Israeli military had withdrawn to its “security zone” in south Lebanon and spent the next fifteen years being bled by Hezbollah before withdrawing in May 2000.
The present negotiating process risks a repeat of the earlier failed agreement. If Hezbollah continues to refuse to disarm, Israel’s primary objective will remain unanswered, which could lead to a resumption of the war. If, on the other hand, the Lebanese government, under US pressure, attempts to impose disarmament using the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), it risks triggering serious internal instability and a possible collapse of the army, an outcome that Aoun and LAF commander General Rudolph Haykal adamantly seek to prevent.
The parties, therefore, should avoid the temptation to overreach. A limited, incremental security arrangement—one that reduces immediate risks without attempting to resolve every underlying issue—may be both necessary and achievable. Such a deal would require some give and take from both sides as an interim measure to bring some stability to the Lebanon-Israel border before tackling the tougher issues. It would not be easy, and may well fall short of Washington’s ambitions, let alone those of Israel. But a framework that seeks simultaneously to secure Hezbollah’s disarmament, reassert Lebanese sovereignty, and pave the way for peace risks repeating the errors of 1983, particularly as the chief opponents of negotiations—Hezbollah and its patron Iran—have effective veto power over the entire process.
After all, Hezbollah has rediscovered its “resistance” raison d’être, and it too is viewing the current conflict through the prism of its past thirty-year-old confrontation with Israel. On May 1, Hezbollah released a propaganda video titled “Remember Well.” The split screen showed video footage taken between 1982 and 2000 of Israeli troops under attack and being evacuated by helicopter alongside similar images from the current conflict. The video “shows how the history of Resistance against the Israeli occupation in South Lebanon is repeating itself,” Hezbollah says. Plus ça change ….
Nicholas Blanford is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. He is also a Beirut-based defense and security consultant.
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Image: FILE PHOTO: Alaa Dahnoun, 12, who said she survived an Israeli strike that forced her to flee with her parents to Beirut, looks out through her apartment's damaged window after a 10-day ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel went into effect, in Nabatieh, Lebanon, April 18, 2026. REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra/File Photo