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Shortly before the last U.S. presidential election, JD Vance gave a speech in Washington in which he laid out his vision of what U.S. strategy in the world should look like. In essence, he stressed that Washington should focus its policy on the situation in Asia. In that context, he noted that in other sensitive regions of the world, the U.S. administration should be able to rely on its allies while providing them with the necessary support. In other words, Mr. Vance argued that in the Middle East, for example, “Israel and the Sunni states” should take responsibility for their own defense by countering Iranian expansionism, with U.S. support. Likewise, Europe should be expected to provide for its own defense while also benefiting from American support.

Human civilization has been built upon the capacity for transmission. Tradition – from the Latin tradere , meaning “to transmit” – lies at the heart of progress. To borrow Le Corbusier’s words, it is “the unbroken chain of all innovations and, by that very fact, the surest witness to the projection into the future” (1) . In Sacrosanctum Concilium (2) , the Second Vatican Council recalls that “the liturgy expresses the faith of the Church as it has been transmitted through the centuries.” The Liturgy Tradition is transmitted through the liturgy, a true synthesis of all the arts. All the senses are involved: space, light and acoustics are conceived to serve the rite. As Father Pavel Florensky wrote, “in the church, space becomes theology” (3) . The fragrance of incense is a symbol of prayer rising to God: “Let my prayer be counted as incense before you” (Ps 140:2). The coolness of the stone in ancient churches is itself the tactile memory of the centuries. The warmth of candles embodies the light of Christ, victorious over darkness. Song is prayer; “To sing is to pray twice,” according to the phrase attributed to Saint Augustine (4) .

I - The Importance of Immediate History and Its Definition Faced with the catastrophe we are living through, with an open war that is destroying and erasing the traces of life in South Lebanon, with the displacement it is causing and the economic and political collapse affecting Lebanon as a whole, faced also with the failures of the state and its institutions in dealing with the aggression and its consequences, particularly its failure to fulfill its duty to impose its sovereignty over all its territory, which was one of the fundamental causes of this war in the first place, and faced with its confusion in addressing the economic and financial situation, particularly corruption on the one hand and the educational future of the present generations on the other, I turned to the book Writing History , from the “History and Social Sciences, History and Memory” series, published by Afrique Orient in Casablanca in 2014. It includes a text by Bernard Paillard entitled “Immediate History,” meaning what takes place in the moment itself.

This series of articles provides a better understanding of the current situation in light of the past, steering clear of impassioned, ideological, or romantic narratives that overlook the facts and leave readers to draw the necessary conclusions. The previous 17 installments revisited the events surrounding Hezbollah’s rise to power from the Taif Agreement through the first half of President Michel Sleiman’s term. Between 2008 and 2011, before the Syrian war, Hezbollah still had no military training base or combat deployment in Syria. Bashar al-Assad’s regime, then backed by its police institutions and army, tolerated no foreign armed presence on its territory.

The American phase initiated by the Lebanese authorities as part of their efforts to consolidate their sovereign authority, in the face of Hezbollah’s strategy of dismantling the central state, is drawing to a close. It was obvious from the outset that the numerous meetings held by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Foreign Minister Joe Raggi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly could in no way lead to concrete resolutions or practical results. It is common knowledge, indeed, that the meetings held by the various world leaders on the occasion of the traditional UN gathering each September rarely go beyond the framework of formal exchanges and consultations.

Over the past decades, and even more clearly in recent years, Israel has demonstrated the extent of its formidable military power. It has managed to strike its adversaries on multiple fronts, use its intelligence, technological and military superiority to impose new realities, and establish itself as one of the region’s strongest military powers. But this is where the great paradox emerges: what has Israel gained, strategically, from all these victories? A military victory becomes a historic victory only when it produces a reality that is safer and more stable than the one that preceded it. The problem is that the project of “Fortress Israel,” or “Israel as a military empire,” may achieve successive victories on the battlefield while simultaneously accumulating ever greater levels of rejection, hostility and isolation around Israel.