Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down Tuesday with the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the United States at the U.S. State Department in Washington, marking the first direct diplomatic talks between the two countries in more than 30 years. Nobody walked out with a deal. That wasn’t the point.
“It’s a historic gathering that we hope to build on,” Rubio said at the opening of the session. His framing set the tone: this wasn’t a negotiation so much as a reconnaissance mission, two sides testing whether shared geography can survive shared grievances.
The talks are meant to prepare the ground for something larger. An Israeli official briefed on the strategy, speaking to NPR without authorization to do so publicly, called the session “preparatory.” Rubio put it plainly himself, saying “The hope today,” was to “outline the framework upon which a permanent and lasting peace can be developed.” He didn’t stop there. The endgame, he said, meant “bringing a permanent end to 20 or 30 years of Hizbollah’s influence in this part of the world.”
Getting there won’t be simple. Lebanon wants a ceasefire locked in before anything else moves. Israel wants Hezbollah disarmed first, before any permanent arrangement takes shape. Those aren’t minor procedural differences. They’re the core of the disagreement, and Tuesday’s session didn’t resolve them. Israel is also preparing for a prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon, which Israeli officials have framed as a security zone designed to keep Hezbollah fighters away from the Israeli border. Israeli airstrikes continued hitting Lebanese border villages as recently as Tuesday while that buffer zone kept expanding.
The numbers behind the conflict aren’t abstractions. Lebanese health officials say Israeli strikes have killed more than 2,100 people in Lebanon. According to Israeli authorities, Hezbollah fire has killed at least 12 soldiers and two civilians on the Israeli side. Israel’s ground invasion of southern Lebanon destroyed an estimated 40,000 homes, according to Lebanese officials, a figure that explains why even the basic logistics of a future agreement look complicated.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz both traveled into Lebanon over the weekend to meet with invading troops. Katz was explicit about Israeli intentions, saying the country would eliminate the Hezbollah threat “just as we did in Gaza,” which he said includes tearing down homes to prevent them from becoming what he called “terror outposts.”
Hezbollah didn’t sanction any of this. The militia publicly called on Lebanon’s government to cancel Tuesday’s talks before they started. Lebanon showed up anyway, over that objection. The two countries don’t have formal diplomatic relations, which means that arriving in the same room for the same conversation is itself a departure from the norm.
See LAIST’s coverage of the talks for more on what the session looked like from the outside.
The meeting also lands inside a fragile regional moment. A two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran has been straining under disputes about whether the truce actually covers Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. That ambiguity has kept the regional temperature high even as diplomats try to talk things down.
It’s worth being clear about what Tuesday was and wasn’t. It was the first face-to-face contact between Israeli and Lebanese officials in more than three decades. It wasn’t a path to peace, not yet. What Rubio and both delegations seem to be betting on is that showing up, repeatedly, can eventually produce something more than just a room full of people who don’t trust each other.
Whether Lebanon’s government can hold that position against domestic pressure from Hezbollah, and whether Israel can sustain a diplomatic track while continuing military operations, are questions that don’t have clean answers right now. What’s certain is that 2,100 deaths, 40,000 destroyed homes, and 20-plus years of cross-border hostility don’t get resolved in a single Washington meeting. Rubio said as much himself.