When Israeli and Lebanese officials signed a US-brokered framework in Washington on June 26, recognizing each other’s sovereignty for the first time in decades, I felt something I rarely allow myself in this region: hope. As a Palestinian refugee who has spent a lifetime watching armed factions devour the people they claim to defend, I understood at once what this moment could become. And I understood, just as quickly, who would try to strangle it in the cradle.

I was born in the Old City of Jerusalem when it sat under Jordanian rule, and I was eight years old when the Jordanian government, not Israel, moved my family into the Shuafat refugee camp. Since then, I have learned one lesson over and over: the deadliest enemy of an ordinary Arab is almost never the soldier across the border. It is the armed man on his own street who insists he is fighting for you while he decides whether you eat, whether you speak, and whether you live. I have watched Hamas do this to Palestinians in Gaza. I am watching Hezbollah do the same to the people of Lebanon.

The framework is real and serious. Israel and Lebanon affirmed the right of each state to exist in peace and committed to a sequenced process in which the Lebanese army restores authority over all Lebanese........

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