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In 2010, Israel violently intercepted the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship chartered by a humanitarian NGO to bring aid to the Gaza Strip, which was under Israeli blockade at the time. This was the last straw, and the incident brought the simmering hostility between Erdogan's government and the Jewish state out into the open. (AFP)

Opinion

Portents of an Israeli-Turkish Clash in Syria

By Youssef Mouawad

Published Sep 5, 2026 - 13:25

The war has not yet ceased in our south, and already it threatens to break out among our neighbors. In other words, we live on borrowed time, lurching from one conflict to the next. And for good reason! The bombing of a Syrian base very nearly escalated into an all-out clash between Ankara and Tel Aviv. That was on August 18, and Benjamin Netanyahu didn't mince his words: his country would not tolerate a Turkish military foothold that could spread into southern Syria. The warning was all the more forceful given that eight strikes had targeted the Abu al-Dhuhur air base, just 70 kilometers from the Turkish border. It's worth recalling, too, that since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, Erdogan has become the chief mentor of the new Syria under Ahmed al-Sharaa, helping rebuild its armed forces and turning it into a strategic partner. This is no longer Hafez al-Assad's Syria Was it this renewed tension between Ankara and Tel Aviv that prompted a meeting between Syria's top diplomat, Assaad Chaibani, and Mossad chief Roman Gofman, in Jordan on August 23? Yet this quiet parley did not spark outrage across the Arab world the way Anwar al-Sadat's surprise visit to Israel did in 1977. A taboo was officially broken—and indeed, who would have imagined such talks taking place under the Baathist regime? Israel might have been expected to welcome this, but contrary to expectations, it halted neither its airstrikes nor its territorial incursions, as seen on August 27 in Quneitra. The fact is, things have changed. Under Hafez al-Assad, Syria was a regional power that, while not exactly formidable, was feared by its immediate neighbors, Arab or otherwise. No one wanted to pick a fight with it, which allowed it to pursue, within certain limits, an assertive foreign policy that often bordered on provocation. As a result, thanks to the autonomy it exercised and the room to maneuver it granted itself, Syria had become, at least geographically, a buffer zone between an "Erdoganist" Turkey flaunting its unabashed brand of Islam on one side, and Israel, a state Jewish to its core, on the other. But now, in a country worn down by Baathist mismanagement and ravaged by years of civil war, Turkey has begun staking its claims—and will inevitably find itself face to face with an Israel that occupies part of Syrian territory. What can we expect? Given the outsized egos of both Netanyahu and Erdogan, and assuming both leaders remain in power, we should brace for an epic showdown across Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, or even other territories. This will be a fight of feints and dodges, of underhanded tactics as well as head-on attacks, close combat, and rising tensions right up to the breaking point. And this despite a September 2025 report from the Congressional Research Service concluding that direct confrontation between Turkey and Israel remains unlikely, precisely because both states are well aware of the cost such a war would entail. Still, in the realm of conflict studies, leaders and other elites don't always act rationally! All the more so since, in the eyes of Israeli observers, the slogan now popular in Anatolia—" Make Turkey great again "—hardly reassures the Zionist state. Washington will find it increasingly difficult to contain or keep apart two adversaries already gearing up for battle. Turkey, the new Iran? Yes, that's one hypothesis, but only in a face-off with Israel, since Syria has overnight become a zone where 'two security perimeters overlap' — the Turkish and the Israeli, the Muslim and the Jewish. And it can't be ruled out that Shiite militancy, that mobilizer of " proxies ," might end up allying itself, even if only temporarily, with a 'Muslim Brotherhood version' of political Islam championed by Ankara! So we would have, against all odds, a Hezbollah backed by its former enemy, Ahmad al-Sharaa, an Islamist who emerged from Jabhat al-Nusra and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham! Against a common adversary, a reversal of alliances is always legitimate and opportune. But this would only be a tactical alliance, dictated by the exigencies of the moment, one that couldn't presume anything about the future. With Arab nationalism now out of the picture, Turkey won't settle for economically capturing the Syrian market of 25 million consumers: it will want to wield political influence in Damascus, and to that end will deploy its military and security apparatus. Since the shaky power of the Syrian president can't fulfill certain sovereign functions or oversee the various branches of the state, it will inevitably turn to the expertise of its northern neighbor. Does this mean Turkey will get sucked into the spiral of 'announced belligerence'? Everything points that way, and we can already see the early signs of a spiral reminiscent of the US involvement in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson. Indeed, if the Syrian state intends to rebuild itself, it will first need an army capable of quelling the centrifugal tendencies of the Alawites, the Druze, and other factions calling for the country's breakup. And it's up to Ankara to provide that and to bolster the central authority based in Damascus. But Israel, which has gotten into bad habits in Syria and intends to keep its freedom of aerial action there, cannot tolerate an army built along NATO lines that could serve as a proxy for a neo-Ottoman venture. And Lebanon, from primary stage to secondary stage? A new stage is now set for a new script that will define new rules of the game! What will become of Hezbollah, caught in a trap? Well, in that scenario, it could benefit, even if only partly, from Damascus's logistical support — support it has sorely lacked since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. And perhaps, through a shift in the tectonic plates, Lebanon would move from being the initial stage to being merely a secondary stage of a regional conflict. But frankly, that would do us a lot of good!

Today's Essential

Israel releases four civilians and steps up its strikes on Lebanon

By LevantTime . - Published Sep 5, 2026 - 00:55

The ICRC convoy carrying the released civilians left the area occupied by Israel in southern Lebanon and traveled to the point marking the start of the zone controlled by the Lebanese authorities. (AFP)

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced on Friday that it had transferred four more people released by Israel to Lebanon, a day after the release of a first civilian. They are three Lebanese nationals and two Syrians, according to the ICRC. This is the first time such an operation has taken place since negotiations between Lebanon and Israel began in April under US auspices. During the last round of talks in August, Beirut had requested the release of a first group of its nationals captured by Israel in southern Lebanon, where Israel is at war with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. Their relatives estimate their number at around thirty, including fighters from the Islamist movement. In a statement, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun thanked the United States and the ICRC, saying the release "confirmed the soundness of the position" taken by Lebanon, which is engaged in negotiations with Israel that Hezbollah rejects. On Thursday, the United States praised "the government of Israel and the government of Lebanon for demonstrating good faith through these initial steps," expressing hope that this would "serve as a foundation for broader discussions on other civilian matters." The two countries are set to hold another round of negotiations in September, though the date has not yet been set. According to the Israeli prime minister's office, Thursday's announcement "follows efforts by Israel and Lebanon to locate and repatriate the remains of Jewish community leaders who were kidnapped and killed in Lebanon" between 1984 and 1986. Israeli strikes intensify On the ground, Israeli strikes killed three people and wounded 23 others on Friday in southern and eastern Lebanon. Israel stepped up its strikes in the region on Friday, after announcing Thursday evening that it had taken control of the Ali Taher mountain ridge, which had served as a strategic position for the pro-Iranian Hezbollah and overlooks Nabatiyeh, among other areas. The army will now reinforce its positions there in order to "prevent the enemy from retaking the area," said Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz. A strike also hit the Tyre region, particularly the village of Rmadiyé, according to the National News Agency (NNA). For Trump, the war in Iran is "small potatoes" Regarding the war in Iran, US President Donald Trump sought on Friday to downplay its impact on the United States ahead of the crucial midterm elections. "A lot of people aren't calling it a war. I call it a military conflict, because it's small potatoes for us. It's not a big deal. We did Venezuela, and we did that," he told reporters in the Oval Office when asked about his vice president, JD Vance, who had said the day before that he didn't want to call the conflict a war. With fuel prices surging because of the war and threatening to cost Donald Trump's Republicans their majority in Congress in November's midterm elections, his administration is working to downplay the scale of the conflict. According to the president, the United States is carrying out "targeted strikes," insisting that it is "not currently engaged in fighting." He also claimed that the United States controlled the Strait of Hormuz and had wiped out Iran's armed forces. "What we've accomplished is remarkable. We took control of Venezuela, and we've essentially taken control of Iran," he said.

Homage

Hassan Rifai, the Wise Rebel

By Michel Hajji Georgiou - Published Sep 4, 2026 - 23:28

What remains of Hassan Rifai is the image of a respected, composed jurist, an authority on administrative and constitutional law, arguing in a calm, quavering voice as he pointed out the deviations and failings of politicians in relation to the parliamentary democratic system and the Constitution. And yet, the former MP and minister, who died on September 3, 2025, was also a man in revolt. A dissenter. Even at one hundred. Especially at one hundred! He had been one as a child, haranguing crowds in Baalbeck against the Mandate, and remained one throughout his career as a lawyer and parliamentarian. At one hundred, utterly disillusioned with the Republic and its buccaneers, his quiet anger had not subsided. “Lebanon is an impossible country!” he told the author of these lines in an interview conducted a few years before his death and never published. But make no mistake. Hassan Rifai was neither a nihilist nor someone who rejected everything outright. He had fought all his life for a certain idea of Lebanon. More specifically, for Greater Lebanon, united and plural. And he appreciated the Lebanese experience for what it was worth, including all that was positive in it. But human beings had disappointed him. And yet it was precisely the human being he was seeking. He never found that person on the Lebanese public stage. At least not in the service of the Republic. Rifai was a man of law, always elegant, irreproachable, everything one would expect of a man of his moral and intellectual stature. But he was also uncompromising. Merciless, even. No doubt his attachment to his country and its democratic system had led him to acknowledge only one loyalty: a certain code of values and a certain idea of the Republic. That was why he was critical of every mistake and every abuse, beginning with those committed by his own political friends. He spared no one. Neither communities nor clans, neither religious leaders, he was secular himself, and certainly not political officials. No one escaped his scrutiny, and Rifai took a certain pleasure in dismantling the myths and received ideas that portrayed this or that president of the Republic or prime minister as an exceptional leader. His yardstick was objective: the consistency of actions with democratic principles. As a result, no one truly found favor in his eyes. The conclusion was devastating: none of the country’s leaders, throughout its history, had genuinely respected Lebanese parliamentary democracy. None. That did not mean he placed everyone on the same footing. He had enough critical distance to recognize the qualities and shortcomings of each. He liked to quote Léon Duguit: “Constitutional law has no safeguard other than the good faith of those who apply it.” He had almost made it his republican credo. And his verdict was merciless: that good faith, quite simply, he had not found. Too many politicians, and not enough statesmen. And above all, a great deal of lying and hypocrisy. One day, a senior political figure advised him: “Do not build roads for people. Otherwise they will stop coming to you.” Despite the respect he had for this political ally, the remark left him bewildered and shocked. It contained an entire conception of power: never permanently solve the problem of those one claims to represent, because once their need disappears, so does the very reason for their dependence. The project of the state was thus postponed indefinitely. Or, at the very least, whenever good people did exist, the system prevented them from reaching positions of responsibility. Rifai was a rebel, yes, but one armed with the rigor and precision of a master craftsman of administrative and constitutional law. That was undoubtedly what set him apart within Lebanon’s political milieu. He was rebellious enough, in any event, to pay a price for it. In August 1982, he survived an assassination attempt after opposing the Israeli diktat. At Taif in 1989, he was almost cast out for having immediately discerned the existing flaws and the traps added to the constitutional reforms. From 1992 onward, under the Syrian occupation, he endured political ostracism for opposing the security apparatus underpinning Syrian tutelage and Rafic Hariri’s policies. But he was fair. He could oppose political confessionalism while acknowledging that abolishing it at the present stage would be disastrous for Lebanon, and that a system of majority rule based purely on numbers would once and for all toll the death knell of the Lebanese formula and of the Christian presence in Lebanon. He could agree that Christians had been wronged by the constitutional reforms of Taif, Sunnis too, he maintained, while at the same time recalling the excesses committed in the exercise of power by presidents of the Republic between 1943 and 1990, and warning against a nostalgic return to those practices under the refrain of “Christian rights.” A drift toward a presidential or semi-presidential system would, in his view, endanger Christians. The importance of the parliamentary system inherited from the French Third Republic lay precisely in the fact that the president of the Republic was not politically accountable to the Chamber of Deputies. That placed him, according to Rifai, in a privileged position. Above the fray, he could steer the ship of the Republic safely into port without becoming bogged down in struggles for power. That moral responsibility to preserve the Constitution and the Republic was, in his eyes, far more important than any political responsibility. But the principal parties concerned still had to be persuaded of that. Rifai could recognize the importance of administrative decentralization while refusing to allow that demand to become an ideological slogan concealing separatist ambitions. In this regard, he recalled that Beirut and Mount Lebanon had been favored in the construction of Greater Lebanon, while the peripheral regions, particularly his own, Baalbeck, had been neglected. That had contributed to weakening Lebanese national sentiment, which ultimately depended on well-being grounded in respect for human dignity. Commitment to citizenship presupposed that everyone be treated equally in terms of development. Without equality among citizens, sovereignty could only falter. That, indeed, was the meaning of his first speech in Parliament in 1968. The events that followed gave that warning a singular gravity. Economic, social and territorial imbalances contributed to fueling the demands of the left and of part of the Muslim street in a country already strained by sectarian tensions, foreign interference and the growing power of armed organizations. They thus contributed to the gradual weakening of the state, before the war, successive occupations and the emergence of para-state structures. Ultimately, Hassan Rifai embodies something of that Lebanese model of the cosmopolitan, complex personality who stands outside communal and partisan trenches, enjoys almost unanimous respect, especially beyond political circles, yet is consulted within those same circles only when needed and for self-interested reasons. Lebanon does not like minds that are too independent and too unruly, even if its system still contains cracks through which such people can exist and make themselves heard. They are tolerated, but they must remain on the margins. The survival of the state of zaamat and the state of jamaat depends on it: a system that invariably prefers turning to foreign patrons rather than to people capable of generating, proposing and implementing solutions from within. Lebanon’s political system and its protagonists detest the notion of responsibility, which they find profoundly anxiety-inducing, and prefer dependence or, worse still, servility. Yet Rifai repeatedly said, once again quoting Léon Duguit: “Where responsibility lies, there lies power.” Should it then come as any surprise that in Lebanon, where responsibility is nowhere to be found, power is nowhere to be found either? Or, more precisely, that it is always elsewhere?

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The Pope in Lebanon: Without Peace, the “Message-Country” Will Not Survive

Ali el-Amine

•

Published

Pope Leo XIV is set to bring a powerful message to Lebanon: “Blessed are the peacemakers.” A unifying call, with deep religious resonance, that resonate cross its religious communities, while carrying a clear political weight for a country exhausted by decades of conflict – a nation for whom the time has come to leave the tunnels of violence behind and step into the light of peace. Firstly: Supporting the Christian Presence and Affirming Its National Role This message stems from the Holy See’s careful attention to what Lebanon has endured – and continues to endure – particularly its Christian population. For the Vatican, Lebanon is the most sensitive “laboratory” in the Middle East for Muslim–Christian coexistence, and a potential model of what John Paul II, three decades ago, described as a “message-country.” In this context, the Pope’s visit represents a clear show of support from the Vatican for the Christian presence in Lebanon. It underscores the Holy See’s role as a guiding authority, both in nurturing the community internally and advocating for it on the international stage. Lebanese Christians are not an isolated minority; they belong to a spiritual and political structure that spans from East to West. The visit reaffirms that their role within the Lebanese state cannot be marginalized. Yet the papal message goes beyond mere reassurance. It carries an appeal to all internal factions to rise above sectarian fanaticism and commit to the national project. Christians, the papal message suggests, are more than just a community – they are bearers of a universal human message within this country. Secondly: A Message to Iran… and the World The Pope’s call for peace is more than a moral exhortation – it is a public political statement. From Beirut, the Vatican sends a clear message to Iran: Lebanon cannot survive as long as it remains a theatre of conflict, war, and both regional and international rivalries. The slogan “Blessed are the peacemakers” is not merely a theological mantra. It is a pointed, if subtle, rejection of the logic of arms and violence, a reminder that only diplomatic and political solutions can rescue Lebanon from its downward spiral. Thirdly: Lebanon, a “Message-Country” Between Past and Present In 1997, John Paul II presented Lebanon with a historic document entitled Lebanon, a Message-Country , aimed primarily at the nation’s internal communities, with the goal of strengthening coexistence and affirming the state’s pioneering role. Today, Pope Leo XIV’s message can be seen as an international extension of that document. Lebanon can only truly be a “message-country” if it restores peace, distances itself from regional conflicts, and rebuilds its relationships with neighbours, the wider world, and even its adversaries. Peace is not merely a moral choice – it is the sine qua non condition of the Lebanese state’s very existence: a prerequisite for reviving the economy, defining national priorities, and asserting sovereignty across its territory. Peace, ultimately, is the path to the “message.” The Pope’s visit is far more than a ceremonial occasion. It is a high-level political intervention, a reminder to the Lebanese people that their state can only recover if it breaks free from the axes of war, restores its neutrality, and chooses to be a force for peace rather than a battleground for conflict. Lebanon – the “message-country” – can only be born from a Lebanon at peace.