The 60-day window that the American-Iranian memorandum of understanding set aside for negotiating a final agreement has now closed. Tension is rising, and there is no visible path toward addressing the causes of the war.
As the United States and Israel move deeper into their election seasons, the odds of a major political breakthrough in the near term keep falling and Lebanon remains suspended between war and non-war. Israel has not withdrawn. No progress has been made over Hezbollah's weapons. And negotiations keep stalling against Israeli conditions that demand of the Lebanese state precisely what it has so far been unable to deliver.
The result is a closed circle. Israel ties any withdrawal to Lebanese action on the weapons; Hezbollah shows no willingness to address the weapons in any way that would let the state shift Israel's position. The Iranian factor remains very much in play through contacts with the party and its fighters that Iranian officials have made increasingly little effort to conceal.
Between a direct Israeli occupation and a disguised Iranian one, the space for sovereign Lebanese decision-making keeps narrowing, and the authorities find themselves facing two occupying powers contending over their own soil. But does a deadlock of this kind mean the state must simply wait for Israeli and Iranian positions to change, and for the US-Iran confrontation to resolve itself? Or is there something it can do in the meantime, without waiting for the grand settlement?
There is an alternative to waiting. Certain steps would attract less attention than the questions of withdrawal and weapons, but they do not matter any less. Why should the state not begin exercising its authority in full, and asserting its sovereignty, wherever it is actually able to do so?
Months ago, the government declared that Beirut must be a city free of weapons. Why not turn that into something larger - a project covering the cities and regions where the state can extend its authority without colliding with the party's parallel military structure? Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Zahle, Jounieh, Jbeil, and others besides: most of them reject the party's weapons and its conduct and would welcome the return of the state in full.
Sovereignty is not merely a military and security deployment. It is the state present in every dimension, until official institutions become the citizen's only point of reference. What is then at stake is not an artificial "pilot area," or an experiment confined to a patch of the map, but a model Lebanon - one that begins in the regions the state can genuinely govern and expands, step by step, toward those it cannot govern today.
This approach does not solve the problem of Hezbollah's weapons directly and it will not produce an Israeli withdrawal on its own. What it does is change where the state stands in the equation. The difficulty is not simply that the state cannot disarm the party. It is that the state has yet to demonstrate it can confine weapons to its own hands and enforce the law even where the party has no military structure to stop it. If it cannot impose its authority where that obstacle does not exist, how is it to persuade the Lebanese, or anyone abroad, that it can handle the harder problem?
The same logic applies to the negotiations. The government has taken unprecedented steps, among them entering direct talks with Israel, and those steps now need something on the ground to prove they were serious. A state's credibility, regionally and internationally, is built by converting its declared positions into actual measures. If it succeeds in establishing a sovereign model across most of the country, its negotiating hand strengthens: state authority, a single set of weapons, and a single law become the rule, and the armed exception becomes both more conspicuous and harder to defend. A move of this kind would also expose the nature of the two occupations contending for the country and would allow the state to draw on friendly countries, the US above all, in the effort to recover its territory.
This is why the shift from "pilot areas" to a model Lebanon matters. A pilot area may prove that a limited experiment can work; it does not prove that a state exists. But a government reclaiming its full functions wherever it can reach, sets in motion something cumulative - redefining the citizen's relationship to the state and holding every political force to a single standard: where the state can govern, it must govern. The government cannot carry this alone. It will take political, economic, and social forces pulling together, and popular pressure that demands a state, rather than merely demanding that the state solve every great problem at once.
The Israeli occupation may last a long while, as may Iranian influence and the question of Hezbollah's weapons, all awaiting some shift in the regional balance of power. But waiting for a comprehensive solution cannot become an excuse for suspending the work of building a state. A government cannot always start from the hardest point. It can start from wherever it has the capacity to act.
So rather than asking when all Lebanese territory will come under the state's sovereignty, we should be asking why the state should not exercise full sovereignty, starting now, over the areas it can already reach. Pilot areas do not make a model Lebanon. It is Lebanon as a state that makes all its regions models.
