Wars have erupted in several Middle Eastern countries, and Israel has gotten involved in all of them. It took on Hezbollah in Lebanon, eliminated most of its leaders, and dismantled most, though not all, of its military capabilities.
Hezbollah remains at the center of controversy, both inside and outside Lebanon, while US Envoy Tom Barrack continues his shuttle diplomacy in an effort to broker an agreement by which the group hands over its arms, Israel withdraws from the five points it occupies within Lebanon, and the reconstruction process can begin.
Hezbollah could potentially be made to give up on its arsenal through an agreement. However, no agreement can resolve the issue of the party’s ideology, nor its ambition to return to the pre-war status quo or its base’s hostility toward the institutional framework developing around the new president.
State institutions have historically coexisted with parallel bodies backed by foreign actors. Any deal to disarm Hezbollah would only be the first step on a long and difficult path toward a political system that can integrate the bulk of the party’s supporters and sympathizers into its new institutions.
While the US envoy has stressed that dealing with Hezbollah is a domestic issue, he has conditioned every objective (economic aid, reconstruction, prisoner release, and full Israeli withdrawal from the south) conditional on its disarmament. The party, for its part, continues to firmly reject this demand.
The "strongest painkiller" came in the form of the ceasefire agreement between Iran and Israel after 12 days of bloody warfare. During that time, the United States and Israel destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and undermined its uranium enrichment capacities. However, they did not fully eliminate its nuclear project.
At the same time, the US managed to contain the threat that Iran’s Iraqi proxy factions pose to its bases in the region. Nonetheless, those groups have not disappeared, and the Popular Mobilization Forces’ insistence on integrating into the Iraqi army defies the Americans, as well as many of the Iraqi factions themselves.
The problem with the "painkiller" of the Iran-Israel war is that it has yet to address the central issue, Iran’s nuclear program. Despite preliminary talks with the Europeans, Tehran has announced that it would not cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and that it remains committed to enriching uranium for peaceful purposes. These positions show that the ceasefire has not come close to offering a comprehensive solution and bringing Iran into the fold of the global system.
Although regional circumstances suggest that it, too, should "quiet down" for at least 60 days, the period discussed for a truce, Israel refused to sign a ceasefire agreement in Gaza. Such a deal would impose new obligations Israel is unwilling to accept. In turn, Hamas has failed to grasp the dynamics of Arab, regional, and international power balances, which repeatedly caused the talks to fail.
Hamas’s declared willingness to relinquish control of the Gaza Strip the day after the war ends does not resolve other critical questions, chief among them what happens to its weapons. Will Hamas hand over its remaining arms to the new administration that will govern in Gaza? Will it conceal its light weapons? What will become of its remaining members, and what role will they play in the Gaza Strip after the war?
Turning this temporary "calm" promised by the truce into a lasting settlement necessarily entails granting the Palestinian people their legitimate rights: the establishment of an independent state and an end to the occupation.
Regardless of whether the Israeli and American negotiating teams return to Doha to resume talks, the truce cannot evolve and grow into a comprehensive ceasefire and viable peace process without new forms of pressure, first and foremost domestic Palestinian reform. That is, restructuring the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.
The Palestinians cannot simply rely on symbolic gestures like the French president’s promise to recognize a Palestinian state in September- a statement dismissed by US President Donald Trump as meaningless. Effective American engagement that helps broker a genuine peace deal based on the two-state solution, which much of the world supports and Israel continues to reject, is needed.
The principle of de-escalation should not be dismissed out of hand, nor should any agreement, however fleeting, that spares lives be belittled as a pointless "painkiller." We must recognize that such agreements, or "painkillers" as they have been called (whether in Iran, Lebanon, or potentially Gaza) can open the door to durable systematic solutions. These stopgaps will not resolve the region’s problems, but they can serve as a necessary first step on the path to comprehensive, and possibly surgical, treatment.
