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Passing away on December 9, 2019, Môrice Awwad remains an exception in the Lebanese cultural and literary landscape. This is the portrait of a rebellious man — shortlisted in 2015 for the Nobel Prize in Literature — and of his visceral relationship with the mother tongue, the vernacular, Lebanese, which he turned into his banner, his matrix-territory, and his reason for being. Môrice Awwad was born in 1934 into a Greater Lebanon still at its first hesitant steps, yet already traversed by the tension of everything to come: independence, the golden age, then violence and the return to servitude. But it is not his birth that matters so much as the birth of language inside him. One must imagine that Awwad was immersed — almost literally — in a Lebanese linguistic placenta, strange as the image may be, in the entrails of his mother. “I remember hearing my mother cry when I was still inside her,” he would later write. From childhood on, in the house in Bsalim, a bond forms — and it will never come undone: the language of his mother — spoken Lebanese — becomes his first home. The only one that will never crack. “My language is my mother’s language,” he said. And it was no slogan. The language inherited from the maternal figure was a physical truth, an incorporated memory, a fidelity preceding any act of will. The mother tongue is, in some sense, the Lacanian mirror stage that gives the child its first awareness of self. All the more so since the father figure is absent. There is a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father — violent and absent — pushed to its extreme, such that Môrice, born Khoury, “adopted” the name Awwad until his death, and even further, twisting it into Môrice Kfargharib. The father’s name replaced by the name of uprootedness, of the foreigner. The vernacular axis will remain intact until the end — and in this context one better understands the desire to territorialize language as an anchoring point so as not to dissolve. His entire existence — the Ghazir seminary, returns to the village, years in printing presses, French readings, religious hesitations, assumed poverty, nights of writing — orbits around this single center of gravity: never abandoning the first language, the one given in a gesture of tenderness and necessity. To write, for Awwad, is not to separate verb from body: “When I write, I caress a body,” he said. And that body is always the same: the mother-language. The language-matrix: the place before language Everyone talks about the “Lebanese dialect.” Not Môrice Awwad, who speaks instead of a womb. He does not see Lebanese as an inferior speech, but as a matrix, a birthplace, a space where something begins anew with each syllable. The qāf becomes a hamza — as though he wished to amputate the word of an oppressive, outdated figure — the father? The final h disappears because it never breathed in the houses. Rules give way to breath. None of this is a linguistic bricolage born of chauvinistic narcissism. It is a return to origins — to the language before grammar, before separation, before school, before the State. When he translates The Little Prince or the New Testament, Awwad does not “vulgarize.” The process is one of integration, of reincarnation into the national uterus. He gives the text a grain, a warmth, a tremor, and brings the word back to the place where it becomes flesh. Leonard Cohen sang: “Show me the place where the Word became a man,” with its double spiritual and erotic resonance. Awwad does not even need to be shown the place of creation. He knows it. He lived there for nine months before breathing. And he offered it the Word. The “naquis” of language: tradition, rupture, continuity Môrice Awwad moves between several worlds: Levantine oral tradition, Christian thought, classical Arabic poetry, Latin and French influences, the traces of war. He refuses to choose: he carries them all. In this sense, his thought is not “separatist,” not enclosed within the illness of identitarian narcissism. If it were, he would remain entirely foreign to the infinite spaces that refuse all enclosure — the spaces of poetry-freedom. But he never yields on the essential: neither classical Arabic nor literary French can express what only the matrix-language knows how to say. He remains a poet-passer, but also a poet-insurgent: he refuses that Lebanese be relegated to folkloric ornament; he rejects the idea that only sacred languages can carry the universal. He forges a modernity that does not declare itself — it writes itself within tradition. His work does not balance two poles: it resolves an inner conflict. The mother-language triumphs over the school-language. The total coherence: language, homeland, combat In Môrice Awwad, everything holds together. The man may appear theatrical, even eccentric in his flair for panache, his excessive eroticization of the Word, his persona of a wild poet. Yet he is perfectly coherent. There is not poetry on one side and engagement on the other. The same language serves to write a love poem, denounce an injustice, and say “Lebanon.” Eroticism transmutes, when the moment requires it, into patriotic songs, and he finds himself engaged in struggles for sovereignty, liberty, and human rights — but never as a follower. Rather from the deep conviction that defending the matrix-language is necessarily defending the motherland and the mother-territory. One might even say he ends up eroticizing them both. His place within the engaged Lebanese intellectual lineage appears precisely here: at the crossroads between Kamal Al-Hage and Said Aql. With Aql, he shares the audacity of extracting Lebanese from its subordinate status, without falling into ideological excess. With Al-Hage, he shares the idea that language is an ontological pillar. But here their paths diverge. Al-Hage, a disciple of Bergson, despite his “Lebanist nationalism,” remained faithful, until his assassination, to Arabic as an essential philosophical language, bearer of duration, becoming, and spiritual mission. Awwad crosses the threshold the philosopher did not: he leaves behind the inherited language to embrace the real territory, the one spoken in the villages, in the kitchens, in the mouths of mothers. Where Al-Hage inscribes Lebanon in the metaphysics of Arabic, Awwad inscribes it in the living matter of Lebanese. It is no longer theory or spirit, but body and flesh. The first spiritualizes the nation; the second incarnates it. The first writes for consciousness; the second for breath. Awwad pushes Lebanese nationalism to its most radical conclusion: the country is not a concept — it is a language that comes from the womb. Kazantzakis and the fraternity of womb-languages This matricial gesture draws Môrice Awwad close to a discreet constellation of writers who understood that poetry begins when language consents to become flesh again. Kazantzakis liberating the demotiki, Lorca bringing Castilian back to the Andalusian duende, Joyce fracturing English to let Dublin seep through, Pasolini elevating Romanesco to epic stature, Darwish breathing the village back into classical Arabic, Theodorakis revitalizing the rembetiko in Greece under the colonels. All did, in their respective worlds, what Awwad does in Lebanon: they returned to language its womb, its night, its grain, its wound. Their works, so different, share the same conviction: a language lives only when it returns to the one — or the place — that engendered it. The mother-language, the school-language: a Lacanian reading In a seemingly simple phrase, Môrice Awwad reveals his entire inner mechanism: “Lebanese is the mother’s language; classical Arabic is the language of schools.” In other words, the first heals and envelops: it is love, tenderness, warmth. The second corrects, disciplines, imprisons in a mental lattice. The Lebanese language is freedom and life as one emerges from the womb; Arabic is a cold, soulless boarding school. In Lacanian terms, this is lalangue: the bath of signifiers where meaning has not yet separated from the body. Awwad says it, in his disarming audacity, in his own way: My hand is immersed in the Lebanese language like an embryo in its mother’s womb. How many writers have had the courage to probe their soul deeply enough to restore the language to such amniotic intimacy? And when he confesses having cried only twice — at his mother’s death and at Assi Rahbani’s — he spontaneously links the two matrices of his life: the biological one and the musical one of the country. Roland Barthes would have recognized in this the grain of the voice: not the word, but its density. The work: engendering Lebanon in its language The 57 books — poetry, theater, novels, translations, liturgy — that Môrice Awwad leaves behind, as the testament of his mother-work, are less genres than returns. Each text brings something back to the first world, to the first voice. To translate the New Testament into Lebanese is to say: the Word must become voice before becoming concept. To Lebanese-ize The Little Prince is to ask the world to begin again in the mouth of a child from here. The poet does not seek universality; he creates it through fidelity to the most intimate local root: the oldest womb. The poet of the matrix Despite appearances, Môrice Awwad did not seek to give Lebanon a new language. His path is not identitarian. It is not, strictly speaking, political. Awwad merely returned language to the entrails of the land — of his mother, whether of flesh or of limestone. He returned to language a womb-earth. Or, more exactly, a place of origin. A reason to survive in a regional environment perceived as desert-like, cold, synonymous with death, the opposite of the placenta of life. In a country where everything increasingly decomposes — borders, institutions, identities, and above all culture — Awwad reminds us that the only thing that does not collapse is that which returns to the beginning: the mother-language. That which distinguishes us. That which identifies us. In this sense, Môrice Awwad’s struggle was not linguistic. It was vital. A country may lose its sovereignty, its parties, its armies, its symbols, its dreams and illusions, even its bearings. But it survives only if it keeps its matrix-language. And this is why, even today, he remains what he always was: the man who returned to language its maternal womb.

In our first article, we looked at the circumstances that gave rise to Nostra aetate , the Vatican II declaration on the Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions. Clear and precise, the text leaves nothing in the shadows and avoids a different “substitution”: replacing the Church’s mission with dialogue. But that is another story. Regarding the Jews, Nostra aetate explicitly rejects the notion of collective responsibility for Christ’s death, as some have interpreted passages of the Gospel, including the crowd’s cry: “His blood be on us and on our children!” It makes clear that “what happened during the Passion cannot be ascribed indiscriminately either to all the Jews then living, or to the Jews of today.” A Gesture That Says It All The centuries-long tension between Synagogue and Church was powerfully symbolized by Pope John Paul II during his jubilee pilgrimage to the Holy Land in March 2000. At the Western Wall, the Pope, alone and with bowed head, placed a note containing his prayers in a crack between the stones – as Jewish worshippers do. The gesture followed his visit a few days earlier to the Yad Vashem memorial, where he condemned anti-Semitism and honoured the memory of Holocaust victims. The Vatican later published the text of his note: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who, through history, have caused suffering to your children, and in asking Your forgiveness, we wish to commit ourselves to living in true fraternity with the people of the Covenant.”(26 March 2000) Not a Diplomatic Pardon In doing so, the Pope acknowledged the suffering inflicted on Jewish communities worldwide after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and asked forgiveness – not a diplomatic pardon, but a plea before God for the pain endured by the “people of the Covenant.” By using this phrase, he emphasized that the covenant with Israel endures, transcending history and independent of the Church’s own mission. The Israeli rabbinate and Jewish communities worldwide rightly saw this as an irreversible turning point in Jewish–Christian relations. Through this declaration, the Catholic Church rejected the doctrine of substitution, which held that all promises made to Israel were transferred to the Church, and rooted the enduring spiritual bond between Christians and Jews in a shared commitment to the will of the God of Abraham.

The two years following Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel have marked a decisive turning point not only for the Levant region but for the entire Middle East. In this ongoing regional upheaval, Iran has not escaped unscathed; indeed, it has been severely affected. In a context of heightened geopolitical turbulence, the Islamic Republic of Iran now faces a dual challenge: to regain its prestige on an international level, and, simultaneously, to restructure itself internally so as to be prepared for the various scenarios that could rapidly emerge on the horizon. Bluster on the international stage is no longer an option. Iran’s dual support for the Houthis and Hezbollah, in particular, must be carefully weighed in light of the risks involved, foremost among them those posed by President Donald Trump, who, for the time being, remains the most powerful figure on the international stage. Should China – his main competitor – force him into a direct, fierce confrontation with them, one could then expect President Trump to settle any dispute in a manner that safeguards his reputation and almost unassailable position. China has no desire to intervene in a Middle Eastern powder keg; it prefers to wait for the right moment to exploit the situation to its advantage. Domestically, Iran must take preventive measures to prepare for all scenarios that could arise in the event of the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Three potential outcomes are conceivable. First scenario – The religious leadership quickly appoints a successor to the Supreme Leader, and Iran remains as it has been since 1979. But do the Pasdaran truly have any ambition other than to follow the directives – at least ostensibly – of the Supreme Leaders? Could some of them harbour the aspiration, having already played the role of a “state within the state,” to become the real rulers of Iran? What would they do if, exploiting even a temporary vacancy at the top of the religious hierarchy, the population – particularly young people and women – took the initiative to spark a revolt, or even a popular uprising, or at the very least the first stirrings of one, to assert the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom?` Second scenario – Civilian authority seizes the reins of power. The choices and conduct of the President of the Islamic Republic, since assuming office, suggest that he is biding his time. Evidence for this includes the recent establishment of a National Defence Council (NDC) and the high-level endorsement of Ali Larijani, a moderate, to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC). Could this be a transitional arrangement intended to enable a swift move to seize power? President Massoud Pezeshkian presumably expects that the population – particularly the youth and the country’s active forces – would support such an intervention. The circumstances surrounding his predecessor’s accidental death, which allowed him to ascend to the presidency, raise concerns and prompt the question of whether there was an intentional design to appoint the current president in order to pave the way for greater moderation. Third scenario – The population would immediately and forcefully, if not violently, express its desire for change in the country’s governance, exhausted as it is under the weight of increasingly unbearable sanctions imposed on Iran. Public frustration is particularly heightened by the regime’s mistakes regarding women and young people. This discontent manifests itself, among other ways, through covert yet tangible actions carried out by Iranians living abroad or political refugees via social media networks. Such a situation risks escalating into a civil war, the outcome of which would be both uncertain and deeply concerning. The second scenario would undoubtedly be the most desirable, yet it risks leading to clashes between the civilian authorities and the leaders of the Pasdaran. The stance of the regular army – which is not the strongest against the Pasdaran – and of the troops forming the backbone of the Revolutionary Guards will, of course, be decisive, as will any prudence or long-term vision exhibited by the Pasdaran leadership. As for the third scenario, it is one that no one desires, either in the region or in the West – not even China. Nevertheless, a large-scale popular movement could be co-opted by the President, which would effectively return the situation to the second scenario. The worst outcome is therefore not necessarily inevitable. For the time being, the Supreme Leader remains firmly in command. He is attempting to strengthen and consolidate national sentiment without relinquishing control, yet doing so in a measured, rational manner. Can a policy of “iron hand in a velvet glove” be maintained while achieving the goal of preserving a strong and united nation? In the shadow of such a dual Iranian and regional context, are the regime’s senior figures today primarily concerned with the Houthis and Hezbollah, while Ali Khamenei is politically and personally weakened and facing Israeli threats? Probably not. If that is the case, the hour of Hamas and Hezbollah will have arrived.

Holy Father, at the moment when you are about to set foot on the soil of Lebanon and Turkey, on the threshold of this wounded Levant that was once one of the cradles of believing humanity, we dare to write to you. The aim is not to add one more voice to the concert of protocol speeches. That would be of absolutely no interest. Empty formulas, glittering but soulless, you will hear in abundance during your visit. This letter asks of you something at once simple and vertiginous: to take up the torch. The torch of Francis. That of an integral humanism which strove, against all odds, to grasp the Gospel in its most naked form: the dignity of every human being, fraternity as the only possible horizon of politics, religion freed from identitarian idols. Beyond words, your predecessor performed acts that, seen from here, carry the weight of historical turning points: – the al-Azhar congress on citizenship and living together; – the Abu Dhabi Declaration, a true “preamble to the preamble” of human rights, where God and human dignity cease to be set in opposition; – the visit to Najaf, to Ayatollah Sistani, a gesture of immense significance within a Shia world that Iran had sought to confiscate in the service of an imperial project; – the encyclical Fratelli Tutti , which sets against the globalisation of hatred a civilisation of fraternity. All of this, Most Holy Father, already composes a new “Holy Alliance,” as the immense scholar Antoine Courban noted. Not the one of thrones and cannons, certainly, but that of the consciences which refuse holy wars, whether waged in the name of God or in the name of those “political religions” that deify the nation, the race, the tribe, the party. Your journey to Lebanon and Turkey is inscribed within this heritage. Yet it comes at a moment when the world, and our region in particular, seems to be toppling toward the exact opposite: the age of walls, of borders and identitarian fractures, of populisms feeding on fear of the other. Of Putins, Orbáns, Le Pens, J.D. Vances and their more or less avowed imitators, who manipulate the cross as a banner of separation, who mock the culture of mediation and of bridges built to reach toward the other. And unfortunately, they are currently winning audiences. Hatred has always been a powerful engine of History. It is here that Lebanon enters the scene. John Paul II said it in a formula that has become almost a cliché, therefore almost inaudible: “Lebanon is not merely a country, it is a message.” Yet this message is not mystical; it is political in the noblest sense. It says that it is possible to organise a polity where one does not first ask the other who he is, from which rite, which confession, which tribe, but how he can participate, with all the others, in a shared public space. Like the spirit of convivencia of Andalusia in former times. In the last century, this wager took flesh in what was called “Greater Lebanon.” It was an act of audacity. Certainly not a “historical error,” as today’s opportunistic advocates of partition claim. A fragile promise, and certainly not an anomaly to be corrected. Far from being the cause of our dramas, Lebanese pluralism has been their victim, when the culture of connection was replaced by the culture of exclusion, when citizenship was betrayed by warlords, their militias, their foreign patrons. We must re-read, now more than ever, Samir Frangieh — the only genuine visionary of the past two decades, who loved Lebanon in full knowledge of what made it unique in this world: its living together, its deep desire for radiance and peace. This was not a political choice. Samir saw in Lebanon a human model of civilisation against barbarism. Today, some, within the Christian community itself, wish to settle accounts with that wager. Exhausted, wounded, terrorised by wars, occupations, economic crisis, they no longer see in Lebanon anything but a “historical error,” and in Christianity anything but an identity to be fortified. They dream of sectarian federalisms, of homogeneous cantons, of alliances of minorities under the protection of new tsars who “defend Christian values.” At the very hour when the alliance of minorities is itself in full agony, drained of substance, reduced to what it has always been: the ruins of a hegemonic project and a collective enslavement to tyranny in the name of an illusory and fallacious protection. They have forgotten that every time the Christians of Lebanon retreated behind walls, they lost; and that every time they engaged in a project larger than themselves, they weighed far beyond their numbers. Youakim Moubarak, Nasrallah Sfeir, Youssef Bechara, Michel Hayek, Samir Frangieh, and so many others, have carried another vision: that of a “Church of the Arabs” in dialogue with Islam to renew the Orient together; that of a Lebanon-message in which the role of Christians is not to be protected as a frightened minority, but to guarantee the common space, to “weave and reweave the bonds” between the components of the country and the region. Most Holy Father, if we write to you, it is not for you to come and flatter our nostalgias or bless our fears. It is so that you may help us, through your word, to disarm them. We need you, from Beirut as from Istanbul, to state clearly that the future of the Christians of the East lies neither in the arms of new Caesars, nor in the fantasies of the fortress, nor in the dreams of autonomous ghettos, but in the struggle for a unitary, civil state founded on citizenship, guarantor of the freedoms of all — of a Middle East at last united in the peace of brothers, the kind capable of moving mountains. We need you to recall, with the quiet force of Francis, that: – to speak of “minorities” rather than citizens is already to accept the fragmentation of the political community; – to sacralise identity against equality in rights is to betray both the Gospel and the inheritance of human rights; – to invoke Christ in order to feed hostility toward the foreigner, the refugee, the different, is to desecrate the cross, not to defend it. We need you to show, through gestures and words, that Bucharest, Budapest or Moscow — and indeed Washington in its current state, and Tel Aviv — cannot become, for the Christians of the Levant, substitutes for Rome; that identitarian, closed, xenophobic Christianity is not an acceptable variant of Christianity, but its mortiferous caricature. Your passage through Lebanon can be, for us, an examination of conscience. You will find a country drained of its blood, a dismembered state in quest of a reconstruction that remains at this hour improbable, if not impossible, in the shadow of the militia and of political appetites; a society tempted by cynicism or despair. You will find Christians divided, some fascinated by the sirens of sectarian protectionism, others so weary as to wish to leave. But you will also find, often in the shadows, a multitude of women and men who continue, day after day, to embody the culture of connection: teachers, physicians, activists, priests, imams, journalists, ordinary citizens who, without grand speeches, live together as one breathes. These are the ones who must be confirmed. Most Holy Father, we ask you to take up the ideas laid down through al-Azhar and Abu Dhabi, extended by Fratelli Tutti , and to apply them explicitly to Lebanon; to say that this country is not a “Christian reserve” to be saved at the last moment, but a fragile laboratory of citizenship to be saved for everyone; that one cannot defend the Christians of the Levant by sacrificing precisely that which justifies their presence: a certain art of living with the other. We do not ask you to take sides with this camp or that faction. We ask you to take sides with the only cleavage that matters: the culture of connection against the culture of exclusion; integral humanism against identitarian nihilisms; Lebanon-message against Lebanon-ghetto. If, from the height of your ministry, you were to confirm this choice, you would give to the Christians of Lebanon — and, with them, to their Muslim fellow citizens — beyond simple comfort, a renewed responsibility. That of becoming once again, not the frightened guardians of an enclosure, but the artisans of a common space where, at last, “all peoples form a single community,” not through the erasure of differences, but because each one accepts that the dignity of the other limits his own fear. Then perhaps, in this ravaged Levant, your visit could be one of those rare moments when history hesitates, when one chooses between the temptation of the citadel and the risk of the bridge. It is that risk that we beseech you to encourage. From Lebanon, in the heavy night of our time, we write to you with this single certainty: either we shall be brothers, or we shall be, for one another, the permanent temptation of the enemy, and the artisans of our own disappearance.

One year to the day, Bashar al-Assad collapsed, dragging down with him half a century of dynastic tyranny, disguised as modernist “secularism” and as a bulwark against chaos. Good riddance. Good riddance to a regime that turned Syrians into the raw material of an industry of terror, in the name of a pseudo-Arabism grafted onto the so-called “alliance of minorities,” alternately handed over to Iran and Russia, and, ultimately, so convenient for Israel. Good riddance to a power that transformed the Alawite community into both a human shield and a commercial asset, and that survived only by incarcerating “God Himself” in the underground hell of Saydnaya. Good riddance, too, to the comforting fiction according to which barbarism was the price to pay to avoid something far worse: chaos, Islamism, a war of all against all. Syria paid the highest price to prove that the worst option was him. The opening of the prisons, the exposure of the regime’s “black sites,” acted like a delayed electric shock. Many who still clung to denial or to self-serving nuance finally confronted the monstrous nature of this system—unless they were afflicted by moral blindness, a scourge sadly transversal across eras and cultures. Syria discovered that it had not merely lived under a dictatorship, but inside a fully assumed concentrationary universe, where fear was not an exceptional instrument, but the very grammar of power. The families of the disappeared received—alongside proof of the horror—the atrocious confirmation of what they already knew: their dead were not “collateral damage,” but the fuel of a regime. No one will mourn Assad. Not even his allies, who abandoned him before his fall. Not even his army, which did nothing to protect him. Assad belongs to the mass grave of History—to put it plainly, to its garbage dump. Into this void stepped another name: Ahmad al-Sharaa. The former warlord, ex-Jolani rebranded for the chancelleries, became in record time the face of post-Assad Syria. He traded fatigues for a suit, the lexicon of the fatwa for that of “reconstruction” and the “national pact,” shortened his beard and adopted a tie—yet never fully erased the memory of what he once was, despite all efforts. For the international community, Jolani’s metamorphosis into Sharaa enabled a sleight of hand: no longer dealing with a genocidal pariah, but with a “presentable” president. The question was no longer what he represented for Syrians, but what he allowed others to settle and close. In the same movement, Syria reopened to the world after half a century of autarky serving a mafia family draped in the costumes of the Alawite community and a hollow Arabism. At that level, so much the better. The gradual lifting of economic sanctions, the return of investments, Damascus reopening to liberalism—all of this represents a major step. For a country drained dry, ruined by war, corruption, and the combined predations of militias and foreign patrons, the mere sight of returning capital, reopened air routes, cranes on the horizon amounts to a silent revolution. But it is an economic revolution still suspended, in the long term, from a political question: who benefits from this opening, and under what conditions? One can only hope that, for once, it will be the Syrian people. Yet a somber shadow looms over the picture. More than somber: sinister. For this opening to the world has not been accompanied by a genuine democratic transition. Neither the new Constitution—hastily stitched together to secure the permanence of the new power—nor the bloody treatment inflicted on the ground upon Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish minorities signals a clean break with past logic. The façade has changed, the vocabulary has evolved, but old reflexes remain. Sharaa has not managed—if one puts it mildly—thus far to address Syrian territorial unity and pluralism otherwise than by reverting to the old reflex: brute force. The security apparatuses have not been truly dismantled; transitional justice remains a slogan; unspoken red lines continue to tightly frame political speech and freedom of organization. Militias operate with impunity where sovereignty is supposedly being restored. The shabiha have merely changed sides. Granted, the transition is difficult. Sharaa did not inherit a state, but a field of ruins: zones under foreign influence, de facto autonomous enclaves, a mosaic of militias that have not all disarmed, a hypertrophied informal economy, a society exhausted and traumatized. He was endorsed by the international community in exchange—no doubt—for a more or less avowed adherence to the Abraham Accords—what Assad could not offer openly but practiced under the table. The implicit message is clear: you are recognized on the condition that you enter the regional arrangement as it stands, with its compromises, hypocrisies, and red lines. Iran and Russia have been replaced, for the new master of Syria, by a Saudi-Turkish Sunni umbrella, overseen by the international community and, above all, by Washington. Is this a good thing? The future will tell. In any case, once again, no one will mourn the murderous remnants left by Khamenei and Putin on Syrian soil—while praying that history does not repeat itself under Syria’s new geopolitical configuration. Israel, for its part, distrusts a strong Sunni regime that might one day revive the Palestinian cause: in this worldview, the enemy is first and foremost the Sunni. Other minorities are downgraded when needed, instrumentalized when useful. Crude Machiavellianism. Tel Aviv is preemptively enforcing a de facto buffer zone in Syria, exploiting part of the Druze minority, ensuring that the new Syrian state can never become a structured pole of resistance—and to pressure the new regime into yielding and making peace. But none of this in any way absolves the regime of massacres committed against innocent civilians on a communal basis, nor does it justify ethno-confessional score-settling on the coast. One does not wash away half a century of crimes by producing, in turn, a new cohort of martyrs. A crucial test awaits Sharaa: to definitively turn the bloody page of the Assad regime while respecting—despite colossal challenges and traps on all sides—freedoms, democracy, pluralism, human rights, human dignity and its finality, the right to life. To break with the logic of the permanent internal enemy; to understand that security is not built against society, but with it; to accept that the Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish communities are neither scapegoats nor alien bodies to be punished, but integral components of the national pact. Thus far, however, it must be acknowledged that one year on, Sharaa has not fully managed to erase either the Assad within him… nor the Jolani. And there lies the tragedy. One naturally recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning about the deepest trap in any exit from tyranny: the tyrant is overthrown, but the mental structure he patiently forged is not dismantled in one stroke. Totalitarianism is not merely a state apparatus. We are dealing with what the psychoanalyst Chawki Azouri calls the “Pinochet syndrome”—the internalization of a regime’s archaic practices into the collective psyche over half a century. Beyond the barbaric state lies regression into barbarism itself, despite the revolutionary impulse, stifled and crushed by the regime along with its symbols of civic dynamism. Assad succeeded in installing an entire mode of perceiving the world, a full pedagogy of fear, like Orwell’s Big Brother. Year after year, he instilled the idea that the other is a threat, that disagreement is subversion, that order is maintained only by force. Society eventually absorbed these patterns as second nature—to the point that the fall of the master is not enough to erase them. Syria, one year after Bashar, still bears the scars. Mistrust circulates like an old muscular reflex; the temptation of the internal enemy remains the easiest mental shortcut; the obsession with security outweighs political risk-taking; and the very idea of authentic pluralism continues to frighten a society trained for fifty years to consider difference as a breach. The tyrant is gone, but tyranny has not yet moved out: it inhabits gestures, silences, habits, survival reflexes. This, ultimately, is the real challenge awaiting Sharaa—assuming he is capable of it and, better yet, convinced of it: not merely managing the post-Assad era, but healing the interior of a society contaminated by decades of terror, re-teaching a people that freedom is not a danger and that the state is not a predator. Arendt would have phrased it differently, but the idea is the same: one truly exits a totalitarian regime only when fear ceases to be the mother tongue of politics. As long as that grammar remains intact, the country risks less a return to the old order than its reproduction under another name. One does not dismantle a concentration camp to build another.

Even under heavy bombardment, even upon being chased by Syrian revenge or international justice, Hezbollah’s zealots will never dissolve into the national melting pot. They will not behave like the partisans of the Amal Movement, who are so typically Lebanese in their flaws, their rhetoric, their compromises and convenient settlements. And there is indeed some reason for that, as our contemporary history offers a precedent that still raises doubts. No one has forgotten what happened to the Lebanese Forces upon accepting the Taif Agreement and laying down their arms. They paid the heavy price: their leader was imprisoned, and their cadres were persecuted and even liquidated. Their convictions however remained intact, and their numbers did not significantly shrink. Their resilience was praised and attributed to their ideological indoctrination—an indoctrination that did not prevent them from reintegrating into secular civil life. This raises a legitimate question: can the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih and its sacred dimension truly fit within a state governed by the rule of law, a state that is supposed to be grounded in the principles of individual freedoms and secularism? Naivety and Blindness Meanwhile, well-meaning voices keep repeating: “Hand over your weapons, return to the State’s fold, you will have the place that is rightfully yours.” But Hezbollah, long before becoming a militia the size of an army, emerged from a centuries-old religious-political movement. To turn it into a party like any other would be to deny its essence. And besides, Hezbollah has no intention of dissolving itself. Even if it agreed to disarm and disband, the Iranian-backed party is not ready to give up Lebanon, their capture and trophy. The Iranian establishment has infiltrated our administration to the point that its parallel networks hold real decision-making power—not just the ability to block decisions. The deep state that Hezbollah has taken over functions as “an invisible power, undetectable within the legal institutions of the Republic, yet influencing major political decisions and social dynamics.” American envoys who take turns watching over Lebanon keep repeating this warning, while the formal executive authority rejects the obvious and prefers the comfort of denial. The German Example of Denazification After World War II, the Western Allies undertook to eradicate Nazism in the occupied zones. They conducted investigations focusing on the education sector, as well as on the legal, financial, and media professions. The process was democratic but yielded limited results. On the Soviet side, however, the approach was very different and more successful: large-scale purges, summary executions, and one-way tickets to the gulag. How to “De-Hezbollize” the Public Sector? Back to Lebanon, a nation stuck in a dead end. Our country cannot reform while tolerating the current reality. What would be the point in keeping officials loyal to a foreign power and linked to Tehran’s apparatus? To pull Lebanon out of its crisis, much more is needed than disarming and disbanding a militia. Yes, indeed, far more is required than simply demilitarizing the party of the ayatollahs.