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news Analysis
Biden Hopes to Parlay Lebanon Cease-Fire Into a Broader Regional Peace
With a deal to end more than a year of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, the president turns his attention back to stopping the war in Gaza before leaving office.
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transcript
transcript
President Biden praised the truce, which would stop the fighting between Israel and the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah.
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Under the deal reached today, effective at 4 a.m. tomorrow local time, the fighting across the Lebanese-Israeli border will end. Will end. This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities. What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed. Civilians on both sides will soon be able to safely return to their communities, and begin to rebuild their homes, their schools, their farms, their businesses and their very lives. We are determined that this conflict will not be just another cycle of violence. We, along with France and others, will provide the necessary assistance to make sure this deal is implemented fully and effectively. Let me be clear: If Hezbollah or anyone else breaks the deal and poses a direct threat to Israel, then Israel retains the right to self-defense, consistent with international law. And just as the Lebanese people deserve a future of security and prosperity, so do the people of Gaza. They too deserve an end to the fighting and displacement.
Finally, President Biden got his Rose Garden peace deal. It was not exactly the one he has been straining to land for most of the past year, but it was a breakthrough nonetheless — and, coming after a bitter election, a sweet moment of validation.
The question is whether the cease-fire in Lebanon that Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday will be the coda to his diplomatic efforts in the Middle East or a steppingstone to more sweeping agreements that could at last end the devastating war in Gaza and potentially even set the stage for a broader regional transformation.
If it holds, the Lebanon cease-fire by itself could make an important difference. It was designed to restore stability along the border between Israel and Lebanon, permitting hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians on both sides to return to their homes while providing a buffer zone to ensure Israeli security and offering an opportunity for Lebanon’s government to reassert control over its territory from a weakened Hezbollah.
But as he stepped out of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden on a sunny November day in the winter of his presidency to hail the agreement on Tuesday, Mr. Biden clearly had grander ambitions still in mind. “It reminds us that peace is possible,” he said. “I say that again: Peace is possible. As long as that is the case, I’ll not for a single moment stop working to achieve it.”
With just 55 days left in office, Mr. Biden is racing against the clock of history. He would prefer to be remembered as the president who set the Middle East on a path toward a lasting settlement of longstanding animosities than one who turned over a mess to his successor.
With the Lebanon accord in hand, Mr. Biden said he would now renew his push for a cease-fire in Gaza, working along with Egypt, Qatar and Turkey, and he called on both Israel and Hamas to seize the moment. He described the cataclysmic violence that Palestinians have endured in Gaza in more visceral terms than he typically has over the past 14 months of war.
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