Ambassadors meet for historic talks in US amid deeply fraught Lebanon-Israel tensions

Eve Irvine is pleased to welcome Simon Mabon, Professor of International Politics and Director of the Richardson Institute for Peace Studies at Lancaster University, specialising in Middle East studies. He is also Director of SEPAD (the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-Sectarianization Project). He sees the current conflict between Lebanon and Israel as one defined more by layered, overlapping sovereignties. The scheduled talks between Israeli and Lebanese officials are, on the surface, historically significant. Yet they risk being misunderstood if treated as conventional diplomacy. The central issue is that Israel is not solely confronting the Lebanese state, but Hezbollah: a hybrid actor that straddles the boundaries between political legitimacy and armed resistance.