Articles

In Iran, the fate of the new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is in question, and a highly strategic Iranian island has been targeted by US aviation. On the Lebanese front, Israel continues its ground offensive despite some diplomatic breakthroughs in recent days around the idea of direct negotiations with Israel, launched by the Lebanese government; a proposal that remains dependent on the situation on the ground. For the second consecutive week, the Middle East is living as if in fast forward. The attack on Iran by the Israeli and American armies continues, with intensive bombings reaching, on March 14, the highly strategic Iranian island of Kharg, north of the Persian Gulf. This island houses large oil infrastructures that were intentionally spared by the Americans, while President Donald Trump indicated that military installations had been reduced to nothing. The attack on this island constitutes a fundamental development as it poses a potential threat to Iran's oil exports.

People often spoke, especially before the war, of the « Lebanese miracle », of Lebanon compared to the phoenix rising from its ashes. A beautiful image… Except that by constantly rising from its ashes for more than half a century, the Land of the Cedar is today out of breath… Especially since it is undermined from within by a party that in no way cares about « the interest of Lebanon and the survival of its people », as President Joseph Aoun aptly emphasized in his online intervention addressing the leaders of the European Union. The head of state did not hesitate to put his finger on the wound by openly accusing Hezbollah of having reactivated the South Lebanon front to « serve Iranian interests », stating that the objective of the group allied with the Pasdaran is to provoke « the fall of the Lebanese state » to subsequently claim that it alone is capable of confronting Israel.

Gaza Is the Future The AI-generated image for the “Gaza Riviera” project captures, in all its seductive beauty, the real-estate imagination of President Trump and his son-in-law Kushner. It stretches across 365 square kilometres of golden sands lapped by the warm waves of the Mediterranean, under a climate that the wealthy of colder countries can only dream of. From this image, only the landowners are missing — people who have no place in the scene to come, not even as cleaning staff or construction workers, much like the recently freed dark-skinned slaves who built and maintained Washington with their muscles and sweat at the time of its founding, and who make up the majority of its population to this day.

Israel sets as a precondition the disarmament of Hezbollah before any negotiations — a demand it knows in advance to be beyond the reach of the Lebanese state, since the decision of war and peace remains, to a very large extent, outside the framework of that state's institutions. Israel has nonetheless taken a notable step by appointing Ron Dermer as head of its delegation to negotiations with Lebanon — a senior official close to decision-making circles, and particularly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This appointment lends the Israeli move undeniable political substance and sends an unambiguous signal to the international community: Israel is ready to engage in a high-level negotiation process.

It is no easy task to compress, within a few lines and paragraphs, the trajectory of a great historian who lived nearly a century and who remained, until his final days, immersed in research, writing, and reflection — his mind never ceasing to follow what unfolded in his homeland. His cause was always singular: Palestine. Walid Khalidi, who left us just days ago, gathered throughout his long life many remarkable qualities, the most defining of which — attested repeatedly by those who knew him and borne out by his research and books — was that he served as the guardian of the Nakba's narrative and the very man who dismantled the Zionist account of Palestine.

The war between the Iranian Islamic Republic, on the one hand, and the American-Israeli axis, indirectly including Europe and the Gulf countries as well as Turkey, on the other hand, concludes its second week this Saturday, March 14. This first phase of the conflict focused essentially, on the Western side, on the elimination, from the first hours of the offensive on February 28, of some forty members of the Iranian military and political high command, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, followed by a massive and continuous aerial bombardment aimed at destroying the regime's military and administrative infrastructures.