Lebanon and Israel, two neighbors officially still at war, are due to start unprecedented negotiations on Wednesday October 14 under the aegis of Washington to delimit their maritime border, with a view to removing obstacles to hydrocarbon prospecting.
After years of American diplomacy, Lebanon and Israel announced at the beginning of October these talks which will be held within UN premises in Naqoura, a border town in southern Lebanon, a "historic" initiative according to Washington.
Just weeks after normalization agreements with Israel signed by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain at the White House, but also with the approach of the US presidential election, observers are questioning the symbolism of these developments for the president Donald Trump.
Beyond this bilateral dispute, these talks take place in a regional context of strong tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean around hydrocarbons and the delimitation of maritime borders, which also involves Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, among others.
Negotiations in Naqoura are due to begin in the morning on a base of the UNIFIL, a UN force deployed to monitor the border.
Washington as mediator
The Lebanese and Israeli delegations will be in the same room, according to Lebanese officials.
On Wednesday, mediation will be provided by US Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East, David Schenker.
Diplomat John Deschent will then take over.
If Israel spoke of "direct negotiations", Lebanese officials assure them that the two delegations will not speak to each other.
Two soldiers, an official from the Petroleum Authority and a specialist in the law of the sea, represent Lebanon, while the Israeli delegation is made up of six members, including the director general of the Ministry of Energy, a diplomatic adviser of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Chief of the Army Strategic Affairs Directorate.
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Lebanon insists on the technical and non-political nature of the talks, which are crucial for this bankrupt country which has embarked on the exploration of offshore hydrocarbons.
In 2018, Lebanon signed its first exploration contract for two blocks with an international consortium.
Problem: part of one of the blocks, number 9, spills over into an area of 860 km² that the two neighbors are fighting over.
A source at the Israeli Ministry of Energy assures that the maritime delimitation can be resolved "in a few months" if the process goes smoothly on the Lebanese side.
"We are under no illusions. Our goal is not to create any normalization or peace process," the source added.
The talks come after three years of "intense [American] diplomatic efforts," according to Washington.
"The Americans lobbied before the presidential election to announce a new diplomatic achievement," said Hilal Khashan, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut, adding that "Lebanon has no better choice to be able to work in Block 9" .
In Lebanon the announcement of the talks received a suspicious reception.
For the daily Al-Akhbar, close to the Shiite Hezbollah movement, the talks are "a moment of unprecedented political weakness for Lebanon" and Israel is the great "beneficiary".
“The launch of a negotiation mechanism, direct or indirect, […] is a victory for the enemy,” the daily said on Monday.
Clashes still ongoing with Hezbollah
But the parliamentary bloc of Hezbollah assured that these talks had "no link with any reconciliation […] nor with the policies of normalization".
The last major confrontation between Hezbollah and Israel dates back to the summer of 2006. A devastating war lasting just over a month left more than 1,200 dead on the Lebanese side, mostly civilians, and 160 on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.
Since then, routine tripartite meetings have been organized by UNIFIL with senior officials from both armies.
According to the UN, the talks on a demarcation of the land border will be conducted separately within the framework of tripartite meetings supervised by UNIFIL.
For this process, the political scientist Hilal Khashan mentions a major obstacle: "In the event of an agreement on the land border, the question of Hezbollah's weapons will then arise".
The Shiite movement is the only Lebanese faction not to have abandoned its arsenal after the civil war (1975-1990), using its role of "resistance" to the Hebrew state as justification.
According to Hilal Khashan, "Hezbollah will not agree to give up its arsenal".
With AFP
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