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BEIRUT: The Lebanese Cabinet met at the Presidential Palace on Tuesday to discuss the most sensitive item on its agenda: the disarming of Hezbollah and the need to restrict control of weaponry to the state.

However, ministers faced pressure from Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Naim Qassem, and his supporters amid external diplomatic counterpressures.

The session, chaired by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and attended by President Joseph Aoun, lasted for about five hours, with the proceedings shrouded in secrecy. It concluded with an announcement by Salam that the Cabinet had decided to continue the discussions, and to implement proposals presented by US envoy Tom Barrack, during their next meeting on Thursday. They will also ask the Lebanese army to develop a plan to restrict control of arms to the state by the end of the year, and present it to the Cabinet by the end of this month.

A political observer told Arab News: “Lebanon has received foreign diplomatic calls to refrain from delaying the approval of the arms-restriction clause and setting a timetable for its implementation. Otherwise, Lebanon will be left to its own fate, in the absence of any guarantees that Israel will, in return, withdraw from the positions it still occupies within Lebanese territory.”

Qassem responded to the Cabinet meeting with a vehement speech in which he said: “The state must take steps to ensure protection, not strip its citizens and resistance of their power. The international community cannot intervene merely to demand that Lebanon achieve Israel’s goals.”

Beginning on Tuesday morning, the army carried out security operations on the old Sidon road that separates Beirut’s southern suburbs from the city and its eastern suburbs. Their activities blocked demonstrators who attempted to leave the area on motorcycles during the Cabinet meeting in a show of support for Qassem.

It came as political and security officials intensified coordination in an attempt to contain street protests and prevent any activity they feared might threaten stability.

Beirut has been gripped by anxiety in the past few days, which has affected normally vibrant evening street activity. On Monday night, dozens of Hezbollah-supporting motorcyclists roamed the streets of the capital, chanting “long live Hassan Nasrallah,” the former secretary-general of Hezbollah who was assassinated by an Israeli airstrike on southern Beirut in September last year.

During his speech, Qassem said that “any discussion about Lebanon’s future security must be based on a comprehensive national security strategy, not on timetables aimed at disarming the resistance.”

He rejected the demands that Hezbollah disarm, warning that any attempt to impose such action without broad national agreement would fail.

“The resistance is an integral part of the Lebanese fabric and of the Taif Accord itself,” he said, referring to the 1989 agreement that ended the 15-year Lebanese Civil War.

“Therefore it cannot be treated as a matter subject to a vote, or cancellation by a numerical majority. Rather, it must be discussed through national consensus, out of respect for constitutional and charter principles.”

Ignoring this reality, regardless of international or regional pressures, would “undermine the foundations of stability in Lebanon,” he added

Qassem also said that “the American presence in Lebanon aims to dismantle the power and capabilities of Hezbollah, and Lebanon as a whole,” and the latest, third memorandum on the issue from Barrack, the US envoy, was “worse than the first and second.”

He added: “Among its provisions is the dismantling of 50 percent of Hezbollah’s infrastructure within 30 days, including hand grenades and mortar shells, i.e. weapons considered simple, and these measures should be completed before Israel withdraws from the five remaining points on the border.”

Qassem said that “what Barrack brought is entirely in Israel’s interest” and added: “We cannot adhere to any timetable for dismantling Lebanon’s power that is implemented under the umbrella of Israeli aggression.

“If Israel chooses a large-scale aggression against Lebanon, missiles will fall upon it. All the security that Israel has worked to achieve for eight months will collapse in a single hour.”

He added that if Hezbollah surrendered its weapons, “the aggression will not stop, and this is what Israeli officials are saying. We will not accept being slaves to anyone. To anyone who speaks of concessions under the pretext of halting funding, we ask: what funding is he talking about?

“Prime Minister Nawaf Salam boasts of his commitment to taking measures to liberate all occupied territories, but where are these measures?”

The atmosphere in the 24 hours leading up to the Cabinet meeting was increasingly tense. Pro-Hezbollah activists took to social media to recall the bloody events of May 7, 2008, when the group’s members, wearing black shirts, took to the streets of Beirut and Mount Lebanon and clashed with supporters of the Future Movement and the Progressive Socialist Party, in an attempt was to overturn a decision by the Lebanese government at the time to confiscate the communications network belonging Hezbollah's Signal Corps, and to dismiss the then commander of Beirut Airport Security, Brig. Gen. Wafiq Shuqair, who was close to Hezbollah.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, government ministers from the Amal Movement stressed that they supported efforts to restrict control of weapons to the state. Fadi Makki denied that ministers from Amal and Hezbollah would withdraw from the session, and Hanin Al-Sayyed said she would “vote in favor of restricting Hezbollah’s weapons.”

However, Rakan Nasser Al-Din, a Hezbollah member of the government, said only: “Anything will be done according to its requirements.”

A proposal circulated later on Tuesday stated that Lebanese authorities will “refer the implementation of the arms-control agreement to the Supreme Defense Council, headed by the president of the republic. This referral means assigning the Lebanese army the responsibility of planning and preparing for the implementation phases, as the matter relates to technical military matters. Some weapons need to be destroyed, while others need to be dismantled.”

During a speech on Aug 1., celebrated annually as Lebanese Army Day, President Aoun told the country that “this is a fateful phase and all illusions have fallen. Let us together make a historic decision to authorize the army alone to bear arms and protect the borders for all of us.”

LONDON: Politics often gives rise to unexpected partnerships, which might at first glance seem illogical — even outright irrational. But for those who broker them, there is usually some inherent logic. In the case of the partnership between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, however, they can also be twisted and destructive.

The relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas, which began long before the Oct. 7, 2023 attack that triggered the war in Gaza, is a prime example of a complete misreading by the Israeli prime minister of the true intentions of this fundamentalist organization, which would have tragic repercussions for both peoples.

What brings Netanyahu and Hamas together is that neither appear to have any interest in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a compromise that could lead to a two-state solution. For the longest-serving Israeli prime minister in the country’s history, averting an end to the conflict based on ending the occupation and agreeing to a two-state solution is his life’s mission.

James Dorsey of the Middle East Institute believes Netanyahu has developed a symbiotic relationship with the hardliners on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide as a tool for sabotaging any progress toward a peace process — let alone a successful conclusion.

One telling instance came soon after Netanyahu was first elected as prime minister in 1996 and Israel unexpectedly dropped the request made by his predecessor, Shimon Peres, for Hamas political bureau member Mousa Abu Marzouk to be extradited from the US, where he was a resident, against the advice of the security establishment.

This enabled a major Hamas figure to continue his advocacy for armed resistance freely from outside Gaza after his deportation to Jordan.

One might think that a right-wing leader, at a time when other Hamas leaders were in Israeli jails, including its founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, would be keen to put someone with Abu Marzouk’s history behind bars.

That is unless Netanyahu already saw the potential in Hamas, with its total resistance to Israel’s existence, of keeping him in power, allowing him to become increasingly authoritarian, and leaving the two-state solution as an eternally hypothetical option.

In the symbiotic relationship between the two, Netanyahu needed Hamas and Hamas needed Netanyahu, because they justified each other’s existence in convincing their respective constituencies that they are each other’s antidote.

Preserving the relevance of Hamas in Palestinian politics and the conflict with Israel have become key instruments in Netanyahu’s strategy of preventing Palestine from becoming a state, mainly by maintaining divisions within Palestinian society.

The victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council election against the governing Fatah movement played into the hands of Netanyahu. He further relished the violent split in Gaza a year later between Fatah and Hamas, which left Fatah, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, in control of the West Bank and Hamas in control of Gaza.

With the Palestinian polity divided politically and territorially, and bad blood between the two factions, Netanyahu saw more than ever the opportunity to divide and conquer.

He is not the only one in Israeli politics to harbor this Machiavellian approach. Bezalel Smotrich, now Israel’s finance minister and one of the most extreme representatives of the settlers’ movement in the cabinet, told the Knesset Channel in 2015: “Hamas is an asset and Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is a burden.”

Speaking to Israeli media outlet Makor Rison in 2019, one of Netanyahu’s closest advisers, Jonathan Urich, praised the Israeli prime minister for succeeding “in achieving severance” between Gaza and the West Bank and “effectively smashed the vision of the Palestinian state in those two regions.”

One of the ploys to keep the Palestinian political system divided and paralyzed, many times with the unfortunate helping hand of Palestinian factions themselves, is to make it impossible to conduct free and fair elections. Such elections would offer the victor both domestic and international legitimacy, allowing them to advocate with enhanced credibility for an end to Israeli occupation.

On the rare occasion that holding elections seemed to be possible, as was the case in the spring of 2021, Israel created obstacles, such as ignoring the EU’s request to access the Palestinian occupied territories to observe the elections, in violation of the Oslo accords, and refusing to allow for East Jerusalemites to vote, knowing that without their participation, no Palestinian leader would agree to hold elections.

Elections, therefore, have not been held for nearly 20 years. This democratic deficit is constantly exacerbated, allowing Israel under Netanyahu to maintain that neither the leadership of Gaza or the West Bank are legitimate or credible entities with which to conduct peace negotiations, and question why it should negotiate with one faction while the other might reject any agreement anyway.

It is hardly an honest argument for an Israeli prime minister who has undermined every attempt at reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. Worse for him and Israel, it served to maintain the apparent status quo, which imploded in the deadliest day in Israel’s history on Oct. 7, 2023.

In Netanyahu’s world, it is impossible to separate between what serves him personally and his political creed. Still, the leitmotif of opposing the two-state solution goes back to the Oslo accords. His name is closely associated with incitement against the agreement and those who signed it. It propelled him to his first term as prime minister and five subsequent terms.

When he expressed support for a two-state solution, it was for tactical reasons, under US pressure, or because he tried to form a coalition with more centrist elements in Israeli politics, but without conviction or the intention to ever make it happen.

When he returned to power in 2009, Netanyahu was more determined than ever to weaken the Palestinian Authority and its president, Abbas, with measures such as downgrading the cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian security forces in their fight against Hamas.

Years later, in 2018, when Abbas decided to entirely halt the transfer of money to Gaza, leaving the Hamas-led government teetering on the brink of collapse, Netanyahu was the one who came to its rescue, with the ill-advised idea of encouraging a flow of cash from Qatar, literally in suitcases, into the hands of Hamas.

It was alleged that $30 million passed through the Rafah crossing into Hamas coffers every month until October 2023. In addition, under the current Netanyahu government, Israel sanctioned more work permits than it had ever allowed prior to Hamas winning power.

While it improved the dire economic situation in Gaza, it provided Hamas with the resources to build tunnels and purchase weapons.

It has gradually transpired that Netanyahu was warned by security chiefs in the months leading up to the Oct. 7 attack that Hamas was preparing for another round of violence with Israel. At that point, however, he was too invested in the paradigm that Hamas had been pacified and had no interest in rattling the Israeli cage that might risk its hold on power.

A future independent state commission of enquiry into the Oct. 7 attack will have to address the folly of Netanyahu in propping up Hamas and how it enabled this major security lapse to occur.