The future of the Middle East hangs in the balance – and so does ours

By Sacha Wigdorovits [i]

It is a “historic opportunity for peace”: this is how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sold the immediate ceasefire with the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon imposed on him by US President Donald Trump on Thursday evening.

“I hear the message well, but I lack faith,” says Goethe’s Dr. Faust. Most Israelis feel the same way. This applies not only to the supporters of the opposition parties, whose leaders immediately condemned Netanyahu’s cave-in on a massive scale. It also applies above all to the population in the north of the country, which has been suffering from rocket fire from Hezbollah for years. They had hoped that the Israeli army’s current campaign in Lebanon would definitely put an end to this danger.

If Netanyahu meets Lebanese President Joseph Aoun for peace talks in Washington next week, as President Trump has announced, he must therefore deliver! Not just for the sake of his country, but because otherwise his political fate is definitely sealed.

Because no one in Israel has forgotten that the massacre of October 7, 2023 took place during his term of office. Netanyahu is trying to shift responsibility for it and has so far successfully prevented a truly independent investigation. But ultimately, the saying that was written on a small wooden plaque on the desk of US President Harry S. Truman will also apply to him: “The buck stops here”. By which Truman meant: “I am the one who is responsible.”

In the case of the peace negotiations with Lebanon, this means that any result that does not lead to the complete disarmament and disempowerment of Hezbollah is a personal defeat for Netanyahu. The same also applies to his opponent Aoun. The Lebanese government also has a duty to disband the terrorist group. But for them, failure would probably have less serious consequences. After all, it has already failed to keep similar promises in the past. That is why it cannot be expected to do so now either.

Whether the two negotiators will succeed in conjuring up a joint solution to the “Hezbollah” problem with American help is questionable. It is certainly to be hoped, in the interests of both countries. And it is not impossible. Especially as the chances are greater if Lebanon and Israel work together than if the Israeli army has to do it alone. But it will be difficult. Because of the current – premature – ceasefire, the Shiite terrorist organization is not sufficiently weakened to allow itself to be disarmed without resistance.

On the other hand, a good long-term solution seems completely hopeless in the case of the negotiations between the USA and Iran, which are taking place in Pakistan. After all, the Israeli and Lebanese governments have a common goal: the disempowerment of Hezbollah. But in the case of the USA and the Islamist regime in Tehran, this is not the case at all: they are not even remotely on the same stage.

The USA is right to want to take everything away from the mullahs that would enable them to produce and proliferate nuclear weapons. The Islamist hardliners in Tehran, on the other hand, do not want to be deprived of precisely this potential. Otherwise they will never be able to achieve their declared goals – the destruction of Israel and dominance over the West and the Arab world.

The negotiations between the USA and Iran therefore seem doomed to failure. However, as US President Trump is under pressure domestically due to the war in the Middle East, a lazy compromise cannot be ruled out. The main victims would then be the Iranian people, who have been suffering under their inhumane regime for decades, and Israel, whose most dangerous opponent could once again pull its head out of the noose. But the Arab states in the Gulf region would also be unhappy. Because they also hope that the danger posed by the mullahs in Tehran can now be definitively eliminated by the USA and Israel.

It is also a fact that this danger also exists for us in Europe in the medium and long term. But nobody wants to hear it here. In the revolutionary 1960s, “Imagine there’s a war and nobody goes” was painted on many house walls. The only thing missing was the second part of the sentence, because it was unpopular then – as it is today: “Then the war will come to you.”

[i] Sacha Wigdorovits is President of the Focus on Israel and the Middle East association, which runs the website fokusisrael.ch. He studied history, German and social psychology at the University of Zurich and has worked as a US correspondent for the SonntagsZeitung, was editor-in-chief of BLICK and co-founder of the commuter newspaper 20minuten.