There is a moment in every peace process when hope and suspicion are indistinguishable. Lebanon may be approaching such a moment. Before it arrives fully, it is worth studying the map left by those who walked this road before us — some who found stable ground, some who found quicksand, and some who were handed a document designed to be refused.
What Lebanon Can Learn from Those Who Went Before
The Egyptian lesson: peace requires a state that can decide
The Egyptian-Israeli peace of 1979 has held for nearly half a century — not because it was loved, but because it was built on something real. Egypt had a functioning state, a unified military command, and a leader, however authoritarian, who could make a decision and implement it. Sadat knew precisely what he was trading: the Sinai for recognition, sovereignty for normalization. The deal was legible. The sacrifices were named.
Lebanon today is not Egypt in 1979. It is a country where no single authority controls its borders, its arms, or its political narrative. Any peace process that does not first reckon honestly with this reality is not a peace process — it is a performance.
The Syrian lesson: process without purpose
Syria's intermittent negotiations with Israel across several decades produced nothing, partly by design on both sides. Damascus used the talks to manage international pressure; Israel used them to signal moderation without conceding territory. Neither party entered the room with genuine intent to exit transformed. The lesson is blunt: a peace process without political will on both sides is simply diplomacy cosplaying as diplomacy.
Lebanon must ask, with clear eyes: what does Israel actually want from this process? Security guarantees it could enforce militarily regardless? Normalization that reshapes the regional order in its favor? Or a genuine, durable arrangement that requires it to give something of weight in return?
The Palestinian lesson: the danger of the impossible offer
This is where the stakes become existential. At Camp David in 2000, Yasser Arafat was presented with what was described in Western capitals as a "generous offer." History has been more honest. What was placed before him — no contiguous Palestinian state, no meaningful resolution of the refugee question, no full sovereignty over Jerusalem — was an offer structured to be refused, so that the refusal could become the story. Arafat walked away and was made to carry the blame for the collapse of peace. The occupation continued. The framing succeeded.
Lebanon must understand that this playbook exists, that it has been used, and that it can be used again. If the current process is designed to extract a Lebanese "no" to an impossible set of conditions, then the goal is not peace — it is legitimization of whatever comes next, with Lebanon cast as the obstacle.
What a serious process would look like
A genuine peace process has identifiable features. It requires internal Lebanese consensus — not just government signatures, but a national conversation that includes all communities and addresses the question of Hezbollah's arms within a broader security framework, on Lebanese terms. It requires preparation: legal, technical, and political clarity about what Lebanon can and cannot accept, and why. It requires communication — with the Lebanese public, with Arab partners, with the international community — so that no deal can be signed in a room and then disowned in a street.
Most critically, it requires that Lebanon enter any negotiation knowing its own red lines with the same precision it expects of the other side. A country that does not know what it is willing to accept is not negotiating — it is waiting to be told.
The question Lebanon must answer first
Before asking whether Israel is serious, Lebanon must ask whether it is serious. Not about peace as an abstraction, but about the specific, difficult, internally divisive work of building the consensus and the institutional capacity that a real peace process demands.
The road taken by Egypt required a state. The road taken by the Palestinians was mapped for them by others. Lebanon must draw its own map — or risk walking into someone else's.
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