The Gaza peace plan of Acting Prime Minister of Lebanon, Najib Mikati, has the right kind of tentative promise. Its first strength is that it comes from a country that has more to lose from an escalating war than any state, as its horrific 1980s civil war shows.
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Ideas for agreements from stakeholders are better than hopes of US-brokered agreements. This is because the historical record shows that when US presidents broker high-profile agreements just before an election, their successor usually scuttles it. Better therefore if the West instead backs the Lebanese proposal.
The Lebanese pitch is for a five-day pause to fighting in Gaza. During these five days, Israel and Egypt would both open gates to flows of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. A significant number of hostages would be released the other way through these gates.
Then a sequenced architecture of commitment would be negotiated: you do X; if you deliver, we do Y; then you do Z, etc. In the Lebanese architecture, if the initial hostage releases are delivered, Israel will agree during those five rocket-free days to a swap of Palestinian hostages in Israel in return for all Israeli hostages in Gaza, as the next step.
Next, an international peace negotiation would be institutionalised. As The Economist says: "If it can get off the ground, Mikati's proposal would channel the worst violence Israelis and Palestinians have seen in decades into the most serious peace effort since the collapse of the Oslo Accords."
Mikati's pitch is that if this plan succeeded in producing a workable peace agreement, not only would Hamas voluntarily disarm, so would Hezbollah (in Lebanon). Mikati professes optimism about disarming both. He is aiming high. I like this because the evidence in my Peacebuilding Compared project is so far that (a) dozens of unsuccessful peace processes are needed before one is successful; and (b) some should aim breathtakingly high. That is because high ambitions inspire more parties to initial engagement with peace, even if many fall off later after ambitions are frustrated.
In this case, the breathtaking ambition is to disarm Hezbollah at the same time as Hamas so that the defence of the state of Lebanon could become a normalised national defence, instead of a Lebanon weakened politically and economically by one political faction that controls military might.
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Actually, Lebanon's proposal does not aim as high as Netanyahu's. If Israel really did succeed in "wiping out" Hamas (not that it would), it would almost certainly then have to "wipe out" Hezbollah, and that would be like the US, China and all the allied powers of World War II aiming to "wipe out" the Nazis, their army, and wipe out all Japanese troops as well.
Western powers learnt that outcomes can be bad from the hubris of ignoring the peace diplomacy of African presidents to secure a peaceful transition in Libya in 2011. The folly of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy's and former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton's advocacy of the alternative of regime decapitation and a regime-change war instead spread Islamic State terror south from Libya across Africa. This outcome was just as the wiser heads of the African presidents had warned. The world still has more terrorism than it had before the war in Libya and Iraq.
Let's listen and take more seriously ideas of local stakeholders in peace from the global south this time. As of today, Hamas, President Biden and Prime Minister Netanyahu all at least seem to be moving in the direction of supporting the first Lebanese step of a five-day pause and substantial hostage releases. Let's keep listening to Lebanon and growing a widening peace.
- John Braithwaite is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the Australian National University.
