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The speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, recently announced that a framework agreement had been reached with Israel to start talks on border demarcation between the two countries.
An agreement described by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as “historic” paves the way for a final settlement of the maritime boundary dispute, allowing the two sides to begin exploring for gas in its territorial waters.
Negotiations to reach a formal final agreement will begin on October 12-14, and the Lebanese and Israeli parties will sit at the negotiating table under US auspices and the direct supervision of the United Nations through ” UNIFIL “.
The initial agreement recalls how what is known as the axis of resistance has been treated since 2000, the date of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, with the Lebanese demanding at the time to begin to demarcate the borders, and to start the demarcation process under the supervision of the United Nations, but this path was kept slow due to many points of contention between Sides.
Parallel to the demarcation process, Hezbollah was clear from the first moment of the withdrawal, as it linked its role of “resistance” (that is, its weapons) to the Israeli withdrawal from the Shebaa farms and the Kfarshouba hills.
On the second day of the Israeli withdrawal, Nasrallah said in a letter from the city of Bint Jbeil on May 26, 2000: “I advised you (then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak) to get out of Shebaa Farms and solve this problem, and The days will show that you have no choice, and we International resolutions do not concern us. Rather, we understand that there is occupied Lebanese territory that must be returned to Lebanon. ”
From that date, the border demarcation file continued to be the subject of discussion, until the oil file appeared in territorial waters, and the conversation about demarcation resumed, which is what former Prime Minister Saad Hariri tried to do when he was chief of the “national unity” government between 2009 and 2010. And that came as a result of the Saudi-Syria agreement in what is known as the “Sin – Sen” agreement.
Hariri’s first attempt failed, so he tried again in 2016 after the presidential agreement that returned him to leadership as an ally of the Free Patriotic Movement. At that time, he confronted Berri again, as happened in the first attempt, to return and confirm, after his meeting with Pompeo in August 2019, Beirut’s commitment to “follow the path of negotiations on our land borders and maritime “, undertaken by the United States.
However, since the United States seriously entered this file with the arrival of the administration of President Donald Trump, Berri was the only mediator who had all the keys in hand, despite the fact that Article 52 of the Lebanese Constitution assumed that “The President of the Republic negotiated and concluded international treaties in agreement with the Prime Minister. Provided that it is approved by the Council of Ministers, in the procedural conclusion stage, and by the Chamber of Deputies, in the cases provided for in the referred article for its legislative conclusion.
In this context, writer and political analyst Elie Fawaz told the Al-Hurra website: “What was standing contravenes all customs and traditions, since there is no just authority in what he was doing, but in the Lebanese way , the strong can do whatever he wants, especially in what matters to him. Of course, this file is a priority for the Shiite duo because it affects them in more than one field. ”
And when the maritime border dispute began, it was the US envoy at the time, Frederick Hoff, who oversaw its handling between 2011 and 2013, and oil and gas sector expert Laurie Haitian told Al-Hurra that , “In cases of border conflict such as is the case between Lebanon and Israel, the custom was to divide the disputed area equally, which did not happen. Rather, Hove proposed that Lebanon would get 60 percent compared to 40 percent of Israel, but there was no government at that time to take the initiative. ”
Haitian added: “The Americans considered that gas could be a means of cooperation between the two countries, but Lebanon was not interested in this matter until there was a government and the presidential agreement was given, and the issue of border demarcation became a priority and that is why we saw more than one party who tried to take the file from the president of the Council. ” The parliamentarians, however, were unsuccessful. ”
So far it does not appear that the issue of land borders can prevent reaching an agreement, and the roads are closely connected with unclear contours, and Haitian notes that “the tactic begins when real negotiations begin, which do not have a deadline, since that the Israeli side demanded a time limit, but Lebanon refused to specify a deadline for the completion of the agreement. ”
The President of the Republic, Michel Aoun, will follow up the negotiations with the Prime Minister, and a delegation of deputies, ministers and experts from the Lebanese army will be formed, which has developed many technical skills in the recent period, which will allow it to manage the border demarcation process was good, according to people familiar with the file who continued on their way. Many years ago.
And if the framework agreement was a first step towards reaching an agreement that would demarcate the maritime borders of the eastern Mediterranean, and in boxes 8, 9 and 10 disputed between the two parties, there is still doubt about the future of the process of negotiation, which returned to normal after Berri abandoned the file in favor of the State. Lebanese.
Fawaz says: “The president of the parliament used to act as if he were the one to decide on this matter, and the constitution is clear in the powers that are granted to him and, of course, does not include anything of what has happened in the negotiation file. border “.
Fawaz believes that in any case, “and at this moment, that is, the moment of the sanctions, it seems that there are those who decided to send positive messages to the Americans, in order to reduce the pressure imposed on Lebanon, specifically on Hezbollah”, And this is what Haitian agrees with: “The moment is political and the objective is clear: Take the pressure off us.”
A few days ago, French President Emmanuel Macron criticized the intransigence of the Shiite duo and their lack of commitment to form a “mission government”, and Nasrallah responded that he gave everything possible, and there are those in Lebanon who say that the gaze of the duo was directed from the moment Macron announced his initiative, to the Americans. All they were doing was buying time.
