Ceasefire that took shape in a week: Lebanon and the diplomacy of exhaustion

At four in the morning on November 27, the guns fell quiet along the Blue Line, and the quiet was the first sustained one in months. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon had taken shape in a single week, negotiated in the final days of the American administration’s term, and its terms were the ones that the diplomats had been circling since the summer: the Lebanese armed forces would be the only authority bearing arms in the south, the Hezbollah fighters would withdraw north of the Litani, the Israeli forces would pull back from the territory they had taken, and the implementation would be monitored by a committee of the United States, France and the parties, with the resolution that ended the 2006 war as the frame. The agreement was announced on Tuesday and took effect before dawn on Wednesday, and the speed of the final week was the measure of how much the two months of war had cost both sides.

The war that the ceasefire ended had begun as an echo of Gaza. The Hezbollah rockets that started the day after the October attacks opened a second front, the exchanges across the border intensified through the year, and the summer’s escalations, the beeper explosions, the assassinations, the strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, the invasion of the south, carried the conflict to a scale that the 2006 war had never reached; the displacement was counted in the hundreds of thousands on both sides, the Israeli evacuees from the north and the Lebanese refugees from the south, and the exhaustion was the diplomacy’s raw material.

The diplomacy itself was conducted in the shadow of the American transition. The outgoing administration’s negotiators carried the talks to completion in their final weeks, and the completion was read, by the parties and the observers alike, as the demonstration of what the American presence in the region can still do when it is applied to the narrowest end of the conflict; the incoming administration, which had promised to end wars, inherits a ceasefire that it did not negotiate, and the inheritance is the context for whatever comes next.

The deal’s terms carry its weaknesses inside them. The monitoring committee has no peacekeeping force behind it, the withdrawal schedules are tight, and the questions that the war left unanswered, the future of the border disputes, the settlements, the status of the weapons that the resolution was meant to address, are deferred to the diplomacy of the months ahead; the ceasefire is a pause in the conflict’s current form, not a settlement of the conflict’s causes, and the difference is the reason the celebrations were accompanied by warnings.

The wider region watched the ceasefire with the knowledge of what it did not solve. The war in Gaza continues, the hostage talks remain stalled, and the architecture that the region’s conflicts share means that the Lebanese ceasefire can hold while the Gazan war rages, or unravel with it; the deal was described by its architects as the beginning of the process that the region needs, and the beginning is all that the week has delivered.

The ceasefire took shape in a week, and the week’s work was the diplomacy of exhaustion. The parties had fought themselves to the point where the terms they had rejected for months became the terms they could accept, and the negotiators, American and French, supplied the last of the push that the calendar required; the deal took effect at four in the morning, and the morning brought the first quiet that the south of Lebanon and the north of Israel had known since the summer. The quiet is real, the quiet is fragile, and the quiet is, for now, the news.