WhatsappLebanon may get direct U.S. flights, but Israel retained control of the country’s south.
A great deal of media coverage has focused on U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to lift the decades-old ban on direct commercial flights between the United States and Lebanon. However, the real story is not what Trump gave Lebanon, but what he did not.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun traveled to Washington seeking American pressure on Israel to withdraw fully from Southern Lebanon. He left without it. Trump refused. That refusal is a significant diplomatic victory for Israel, and specifically, for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.
Lebanon walked away with a symbolic prize: restored commercial air links. Israel kept what actually matters: the strategic high ground in Southern Lebanon.
The symbolism is worth examining closely because it is thinner than it appears. The United States may now technically permit airlines to fly to Beirut, but the U.S. State Department still maintains a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for the country. Hezbollah remains deeply entrenched throughout Lebanon, and Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport has long been associated with its influence.
Any airline weighing service there will ask the same question: Is it safe? Today, the answer is self-evident.
The substantive achievement here is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s diplomatic framework, negotiated together with Israel, which ties any further Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon to Hezbollah’s complete disarmament. That condition changes the entire calculus.
No serious observer believes that Hezbollah will voluntarily surrender an arsenal built over decades—though its stockpiles are far less than their peak three years ago—while the organization continues to function as a state within a state. Lebanon’s government either could not or would not rein in Hezbollah before Oct. 7, 2023, and it lacks the capacity to do so now, given how deeply Hezbollah sympathizers are embedded within the Lebanese army itself.
In practical terms, the Rubio framework allows Israel to remain in strategically vital areas of Southern Lebanon until Hezbollah disarms, a condition that may never be fulfilled. That is precisely why this agreement represents such an important diplomatic success. It converts an open-ended demand for Israeli withdrawal into a conditional one, and the condition is one Hezbollah has every incentive never to meet.
Israel has learned this lesson before, at great cost. For years, Israel was pressured into a series of unilateral withdrawals. It left a swath of southernmost Lebanon in 2000, and Hezbollah transformed the vacuum into a massive terrorist fortress. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Hamas turned the territory into an Iranian and Qatari-backed launchpad for massacre and war.
The lesson should be painfully obvious by now: Territory abandoned to jihadist organizations does not become peaceful. It becomes the staging ground for the next war.
Trump has repeatedly articulated a principle that much of the world still refuses to accept: to the victor go the spoils. That principle is not about revenge. It is about deterrence. When aggressors lose territory as a consequence of the wars they launch, future aggressors think twice before starting the next one.
Lebanon allowed Hezbollah to dominate a significant portion of its country, build an enormous terrorist infrastructure and launch years of attacks against Israeli civilians. Successive Lebanese governments failed to dismantle that military machine, despite repeated international commitments to do so. Now Lebanon is asking Israel simply to leave again while Hezbollah remains intact, which would repeat the very mistake that produced this disaster in the first place.
Trump understood that. He declined to pressure Israel into another reckless withdrawal, offering Lebanon a symbolic diplomatic gesture instead of a strategic concession. That was smart diplomacy.
If we are serious about Trump’s philosophy that victory must carry consequences, Israel should stop thinking only in terms of temporary security zones. The areas from which Hezbollah launched its war against Israel should never again become launching pads for future attacks. Real peace requires consequences for aggression, and the only language jihadist movements have consistently understood is that launching wars against Israel carries permanent territorial costs. That is the lesson Israel should finally take from both Lebanon and Gaza.
Trump has already pointed the way. Israel now needs leaders willing to follow it through to the end.
