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“Why Did You Stop Writing?” I’ve been asked that question several times lately. I picked up my phone and asked Michel: “How do you write when you’re numb?” “One letter at a time,” he replied. And so the letters began to scatter across my imagination. I watched them come into being, only to refuse to become words. They gathered before me, never quite finding their place. Do you know how many words are born, one letter at a time? These very words are being written and read at this very moment. You and I bring the same words into existence. Time alone separates us. They are born and they die within the same breath. Between the one who writes and the one who reads, there may be nothing except that fleeting moment when they meet in a single word. But how do you write what does not die? What remains engraved in someone’s memory, in an age where words crowd one another until they can scarcely breathe? Every day, hundreds of them pass before our eyes, just as smiling faces pass across our screens, only to fade away. Very few remain: those that touched us with sincerity, awakened our senses, stirred our conscience, or made us pause, if only for a moment. Then comes the drought. The kind no one sees. People sometimes imagine that a writer stops writing because the desire has disappeared. The truth is often simpler: sometimes the writer has merely lost the path back to the imagination. They sit before the blank page as one stands before a door whose key has been lost. Writing is a gift. Work is what refines it. And that work demands daily discipline: returning to the page even on the days when no idea comes to visit, even when we doubt every sentence we write. Inspiration, however much we may celebrate it, is never enough on its own. Only discipline brings the writer back to the desk, day after day. But how can anyone remain faithful to such discipline in a country where no day resembles the one before it? In a country that wakes each morning to a new crisis, a new fear, a new uncertainty; where attention has become a rare currency; where gathering oneself before gathering one’s thoughts is already an achievement. We let ourselves be consumed, or perhaps we are consumed despite ourselves, by everything that drains us. Our days swallow us whole. We chase details, obligations, urgencies. We try simply to make it through the day with as few wounds as possible. Reaching the imagination becomes a journey longer than writing itself. Not because imagination has abandoned us, but because the road leading to it has become crowded with everything that keeps us from ourselves. Perhaps we do not fear silence as much as we fear growing accustomed to it. That busyness might become our natural state, and writing nothing more than a promise forever postponed, waiting for a stillness that never comes. If only words knew how to find their way back to us whenever we lose our way to them. And yet, whenever I think words have deserted me, I discover they were never far away. They were simply waiting for the noise to subside. Waiting for me, too, to become still enough to hear the voice of the first letter. Perhaps I never stopped writing. Perhaps I was only searching for that first letter worthy of being followed by another.

The funeral of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was one of the largest state funerals ever held in the Middle East. Popular emotion overwhelmed the official ceremony, transforming it into a spontaneous farewell as immense crowds accompanied their leader’s coffin to its final resting place in 1970. In November 2004, three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia, bid farewell to the Palestinian symbol Yasir Arafat. Paris honored him with the dignity reserved for monarchs, Cairo welcomed Palestine, while in Ramallah every official arrangement was overtaken by the sheer weight of popular grief. Palestinians carried the coffin on their own shoulders, their eyes overflowing with tears for the man who had forged their national identity. His passing was rendered even more poignant by Ariel Sharon’s reference to “the hand of fate.” The Palestinian people answered with unmistakable defiance: “Do not rejoice. Justice is on our side.” In Britain, the world witnessed in 2022 what was arguably the most magnificent state funeral of this century: that of Queen Elizabeth II, attended by hundreds of heads of state, government leaders, and reigning monarchs. Every detail of the ceremony had been meticulously planned by the late Queen herself. It reflected the institutional wisdom of the monarchy through her own character and her deeply pragmatic vision of the state, society, and public life. One could almost imagine that she had consciously accompanied her own funeral, content with what she had accomplished for both the Crown and the Kingdom. Yesterday, millions of loyal followers of the Supreme Leader marched behind Ali Khamenei, shedding abundant tears with remarkable discipline. Surrounding him stood only a handful of foreign dignitaries, but countless generals and senior officials of the Islamic Republic. The ceremony thus became a vast demonstration of loyalty, now the regime’s foremost source of strength after the destruction of its power. Yet such a display is unlikely to persuade the tens of millions of Iranians who watched from afar that the security apparatus, even with the backing of the regime’s faithful supporters, is capable of preserving the system on its own. In reality, the procession seemed less like the funeral of a leader than the funeral of the regime itself, a regime that, when its own day of collapse comes, will find no one left to accompany it. A Cascade of Challenges The first statement came from the Supreme Leader, who declared: “We will certainly take revenge, and soon.” In doing so, he invoked the language of religious obligation, effectively calling upon anyone capable of carrying out such an act. The rhetoric immediately recalled the fatwa issued decades earlier by the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling for the killing of the British novelist Salman Rushdie following the publication of his celebrated novel The Satanic Verses . The second statement came from the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who announced the “closure of the Strait of Hormuz until further notice.” Although the Supreme Leader did not explicitly identify the target of this promised retaliation, the crowds gathered at his predecessor’s funeral filled that silence by chanting, “Death to Trump” and “Death to Netanyahu.” Between threats of assassination and revenge issued by the regime’s highest religious authority, the announced closure of the Strait, and attacks on commercial shipping in Omani territorial waters, the conflict has entered a new and far more dangerous phase. The initial understanding between the parties has collapsed, the truce has unraveled, and competing interpretations of broadly worded provisions have given way to a renewed exchange of military blows, each side acting according to its own capabilities. Many of those who criticized the wording of the memorandum overlooked one fundamental point: it had already fulfilled Washington’s primary objective by enabling the United States to disengage from the war in its original form. The Iranian leadership, so confident in its negotiating skill, quickly discovered that what it regarded as “Persian cunning” was no match for American statecraft. In international affairs, practical outcomes are determined by actual balances of power rather than by political swagger or clever tactical maneuvering. It was sufficient for Washington to acknowledge, at least for the time being, Iran’s sovereignty over the Strait, while confining that recognition strictly to internationally recognized territorial waters. Meanwhile, coordination with the Sultanate of Oman enabled the U.S. Navy to bypass Iranian restrictions by using the southern maritime route running along Oman’s coastline. Tehran thereby lost its last meaningful strategic card, while simultaneously alienating a mediator that had long remained cooperative and remarkably accommodating, even within its own territorial waters. This marked the turning point that unsettled the Iranian leadership. Having substituted the “Strait card” for the “nuclear card,” it believed it had successfully diverted negotiations away from their original objective, namely changing the regime’s behavior, toward a debate focused solely on whether the Strait of Hormuz would remain open or be closed. In doing so, the White House succeeded in reshuffling the strategic deck, both on the American domestic stage and within NATO, following the outcomes of the Ankara Summit. Before the Supreme Leader’s funeral procession had even come to an end, Iran’s military leadership discovered that reality had fallen far short of its expectations. The victories it had promised its own public evaporated faster than a stick of incense burns away. If the euphoria surrounding what Tehran portrayed as a diplomatic triumph following the announcement of the memorandum ultimately disappeared along Oman’s southern maritime corridor, the mobilization of millions of supporters chanting slogans of death and revenge remains incapable of altering the actual balance of power, even if it temporarily boosts the morale of a people living under oppression and led by a leadership largely indifferent to the cost of its own policies. The Iranian leadership thus found itself confronted with the American-Omani alternative, one designed to keep the Strait of Hormuz permanently open in accordance with international law. It is against this backdrop that the recent surge of radicalization and recklessness should be understood, reflected in attacks on passing commercial vessels, on several Arab Gulf states, and on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. One fact, however, stands out. Iran has shown extraordinary caution in avoiding any direct strike against Israel. Likewise, a direct military confrontation with the United States Navy remains entirely out of the question. This reflects a straightforward strategic calculation. From Tehran’s perspective, attacks against commercial shipping and Arab states do not provoke Washington’s anger. On the contrary, they encourage those same countries to purchase additional American air defense systems. At the same time, the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, have no intention of allowing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to drag them into a war on Tehran’s timetable or under its chosen conditions. They possess a defensive strategy rooted in a position of strength and increasingly exercise an influential regional and international political role. If mediation constitutes one expression of that strategy, it serves broader long-term political objectives. This has become even more apparent since Oman moved away from its previous posture, while Qatar’s mediation has gradually been reduced to its financial dimension, Doha continuing to hold substantial Iranian assets frozen under international sanctions. Meanwhile, Islamabad, Riyadh, Cairo, and Ankara continue to maintain open channels with the Iranian presidency and the Foreign Ministry in order to preserve diplomatic mediation. Every day, these four capitals reaffirm their opposition to war and their determination to extinguish its flames through the application of international law, particularly regarding freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. That, precisely, is where the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has suffered its most significant defeat. We have now entered a war of attrition on multiple fronts. Day after day, Iran’s new leadership provides the White House with everything it needs to sustain this war through the end of the year. Such a trajectory serves the American president’s domestic political agenda while also strengthening his position internationally. It unfolds against the backdrop of a noticeable easing of partisan tensions in the United States, without suggesting that genuine political unity or consensus has taken hold within the superpower that continues to shape much of the global agenda. An Independent Decision For the first time, the Lebanese state is actively shaping its own future through a clear-eyed and realistic assessment of international conflicts, particularly the ongoing confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran. That confrontation has resulted in the return of the Israeli occupation to South Lebanon, alongside continuing violations of Lebanese airspace. It has also, for the first time, drawn Hezbollah into a war against Israel in support of Gaza and Iran following the death of Ali Khamenei, even as the organization now stands outside the former equation of “Army, People, and Resistance,” following the implementation of the state’s monopoly on arms through its legitimate institutions. It can therefore be argued that, without the decision establishing the state’s monopoly on arms, Lebanon would never have been able to enter negotiations that produced the memorandum. That agreement now requires sustained political stewardship and the management of highly complex files, tasks well within the capabilities of Lebanese diplomacy, whose experience in Arab and international affairs has long been recognized. Most of those criticizing this bold and courageous step are the very same actors who fundamentally oppose the principle of the state’s monopoly on arms. They likewise maintain reservations about the Taif Agreement and the regional and domestic balance it established. Consequently, objections to the Lebanese-Israeli negotiating track cannot be separated from broader opposition to those two foundational decisions, even when some claim, at least rhetorically, to support the Taif Agreement while acting in ways that contradict it. At its core, this is a confrontation between a recent past burdened by policies that treated Lebanon as a geopolitical arena for investment rather than as a nation deserving construction and sacrifice, and a new approach enjoying broad international and Arab support. That support reflects an understanding of the heavy burden imposed by external interference, pressures that exceed the Lebanese state’s capacities and confront it with challenges vis-à-vis Israel that are not of its own making. This understanding has been embodied in successive United Nations resolutions, foremost among them Resolution 425, which settled any dispute regarding Lebanon’s sovereignty over its southern borders. That resolution addressed a historical period extending from the aftermath of the June 1967 War and its consequences, including the rise of Palestinian armed struggle launched from southern Lebanon. It also provided the legal framework for Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, allowing the Lebanese state to begin the long process of recovering from successive wars. Today’s negotiations, which build upon the body of international resolutions supporting Lebanon, most notably Resolution 1701, form part of a broader international and Arab effort fundamentally committed to Lebanese sovereignty. That commitment rests on clearly established foundations: the Constitution, the National Pact, the Taif Agreement, the Presidential Oath of Office, and the Ministerial Statement. It is this foundation that enables Lebanon today to make constructive use of both international and Arab legitimacy in narrowing, through political means, the imbalance of power with Israel. That imbalance, however, cannot be reduced without engaging the United States administration itself, the ultimate guarantor of the Hebrew State. Those who seek to belittle Lebanon’s present political efforts to secure understandings capable of protecting the country and opening a path out of its deep crisis are, in reality, attempting to turn the wheel of the state backward in pursuit of narrow interests that bear no relation to Lebanon’s destiny as both a nation and a sovereign state. Against the backdrop of this new war of attrition between Washington and Tehran, safeguarding Lebanon from the repercussions of the Strait of Hormuz has become more important than ever. Iran continues to invest wherever opportunities remain. The more its strategic cards collapse, the more determined it becomes to reclaim control over Lebanon’s independent national decision-making.

While the reservations surrounding the US-sponsored framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel are numerous, profound, legitimate, and entirely justified, given the text’s failure to secure any meaningful gains for Lebanon, this does not mean that Lebanon should embrace the Islamabad track or the Switzerland agreement between Washington and Tehran, whose collapse, far from being unexpected, resulted from a combination of political and non-political factors. This fragile Switzerland agreement clearly reflects the deep mistrust between the two opposing sides. Tel Aviv has consistently sought to fuel and deepen that mistrust in pursuit of its own immediate interests: resuming the war from where it left off, further degrading Iran’s military capabilities, even if doing so failed to bring about the regime’s collapse, contrary to the expectations or hopes entertained during the early stages of the conflict. At the same time, it serves Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by buying him additional time, improving his standing ahead of the parliamentary elections, while allowing him to continue delaying, slowing, and stalling the judicial proceedings against him. Supporters of the negotiating option in Lebanon, regardless of whether it is direct or indirect, a distinction that events have now overtaken, can today argue that this approach spares Lebanon from becoming directly entangled in any renewed war between Washington and Tehran. True, the war has not stopped in Lebanon, and Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty continue on a daily basis. Yet the situation has not, at least so far, deteriorated into the total collapse of the front as it did in previous months. This may well be linked to reports that the US administration informed Benjamin Netanyahu that the Lebanese track was not contingent upon the collapse of the Switzerland agreement. However, this fundamental observation, namely Lebanon’s exclusive right to negotiate on its own behalf and its equally legitimate right to reject any attempt by another state to negotiate in its place, in contradiction with the most basic principles of sovereignty, principles that should be protected against violation regardless of its source, does not diminish the right of Lebanon’s political forces to criticize the framework agreement and point out its shortcomings without immediately facing accusations of treason from every direction. It is true that the Lebanese people have reached an advanced stage of collective exhaustion after enduring an endless cycle of recurring wars. No party can any longer justify dragging the country into conflicts that exceed its capacity to endure. The scale of destruction across southern Lebanon now makes it imperative to move beyond traditional approaches based on igniting wars that produce no meaningful outcome. Yet it is equally true that the many flaws embedded in the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel are unacceptable and incompatible with Lebanon’s national interest. The Lebanese state must acknowledge them as such and treat them as shortcomings that warrant renewed negotiations. In practical terms, what will strengthen Lebanon’s official position is rebuilding a national consensus around the negotiating process through the adoption of a coherent negotiating plan founded on national principles and constants that cannot be compromised. Foremost among these are establishing a timetable for Israel’s withdrawal and preserving Lebanon’s right to seek legal redress against the aggressor before international bodies. Strengthening the state’s position certainly does not require denying Lebanon’s various political forces the right to criticize it. Still less should it mean accepting Israel’s involvement in implementing decisions that are, by definition, the responsibility of the Lebanese authorities, particularly the issue of establishing the state’s monopoly on arms. This is already a sensitive and complex decision, one from which there can be no retreat if Lebanon is finally to build a functioning state after a delay that has become both intolerable and unacceptable. Ultimately, however, Lebanon cannot rely on the notion that the Lebanese state should call upon Israel or seek its assistance in carrying out the task of establishing the state’s monopoly on arms, nor can it accept placing the Lebanese Armed Forces in a position where they are effectively placed under the scrutiny of the Israeli military in the performance of their national and military duties, under a security tutelage superior to their own. Even if this was never the Lebanese negotiator’s intention, and certainly not one of his objectives, it nevertheless constitutes one of the practical consequences of the framework agreement: the absence of a clear timetable for Israel’s withdrawal, rebranded instead as a “redeployment,” together with the novel concept of “experimental zones,” which, in practice, subject the Lebanese Army to a daily test. At a minimum, this risks placing it in the midst of an internal confrontation that Israel could exploit to shift the conflict into Lebanon itself and broaden the scope of the confrontation. At the same time, certain Lebanese actors have no choice but to align themselves with the broader national consensus that rejects war and refuses to see Lebanon once again become either the fuel or the battlefield for settling regional conflicts, particularly at a time when those conflicts appear to be entering a new phase of escalation. They must place the higher national interest above all else, bridge the deep divide that has emerged between them and the rest of Lebanese society, and undertake a serious reassessment of the transformations that have unfolded over the past three years, transformations that require new approaches to the liberation of occupied territory and the opening of a new chapter. While Israel cannot be absolved of its aggressive designs against Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, it must also be acknowledged that the decision to enter the support war was both hasty and devastating. It failed to achieve its intended objectives and resulted in enormous human and material losses, squandering the historic achievement of the liberation of 25 May 2000, when Israel withdrew, for the first time, from Arab territory unconditionally, without a peace agreement or even a security arrangements agreement, in what appeared at the time to be a humiliating flight and retreat. Israel sought to erase that image through the last two wars and continues to do so today. To be perfectly clear, Lebanon is in no position to provide support to Tehran, nor should it be expected to do so. Such an undertaking far exceeds the country’s capacity to bear. As for the statements declaring that Hezbollah will not leave Iran to face the United States alone, they reflect a profound denial of the new realities and a striking absence of even the most basic forward-looking vision of the phase now unfolding. More fundamentally, they strike at the very heart of Lebanon’s national interest. The worst possible outcome for Lebanon and the Lebanese people would be to find themselves subjected to a dual tutelage: an American-Israeli tutelage on one side and an Iranian tutelage on the other. Between the two, it is the Lebanese people, and they alone, who pay the price.

Tensions have been rising since the beginning of the week between Washington and Tehran following new Iranian strikes on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The negotiation process is not dead, but appears weakened. Hezbollah, for its part, is threatening to re-engage in southern Lebanon if war breaks out again, as attention turns to Lebanese-Israeli talks scheduled for next week in Rome. On Sunday morning, U.S. forces announced they had carried out, overnight, a third wave of strikes targeting more than 140 sites in Iran, in retaliation for a new attack by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on a commercial vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Following the U.S. raids, the IRGC wasted no time in launching — and expanding, as is their custom — attacks against several Gulf countries, specifically Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait… as well as Jordan, a country that Iran added to its list of potential targets amid the escalation of recent days. Even the Omani mediator was not spared. The attack on the Sultanate of Oman came just hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's visit to the sultanate! These attacks reflect the atmosphere of the past week, during which tensions steadily escalated until the flare-up recorded over the weekend. On Sunday evening, U.S. forces launched fresh strikes against Revolutionary Guard military infrastructure, which in turn resumed their attacks on Gulf countries, most notably Kuwait. Tensions between Iran and the United States were already evident at the start of the week. Growing increasingly frustrated with Iran's behavior, President Donald Trump had nonetheless stated that he wanted to give them a reprieve until the burial of their former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, scheduled for July 9. The Iranians, for their part, used this event — postponed since March (Khamenei had been killed in joint Israeli-American strikes on February 28, at the start of the war in Iran) — to stage a show of force from July 4 to 9, claiming that "millions" of "supporters" took part in gatherings marked by weeping and lamentation, both in Iran and in certain regions of Iraq. Particularly striking were the slogans chanted during these popular and official demonstrations: they directly called for the death of President Trump. In this context, leaks to American media this week reported Israeli warnings passed to the U.S. president regarding an Iranian plot to assassinate him. Another sign added to fears for Trump's safety: he arrived at this week's NATO summit, held in Turkey, aboard his new presidential aircraft — a gift from Qatar — but departed on the older presidential plane (considered far more secure), "for security reasons," according to U.S. media. Indeed, Trump's statements reflected the escalating mood throughout the week, with American strikes resuming even before Khamenei was buried on July 9. As early as July 6, the U.S. president warned: "There will either be a deal with Iran, or we will finish the job." To that was added a pointed remark on July 8: "The ceasefire is over." On top of that came sharp criticism of Iran's leaders, whom he called "liars" and "sick people." His anger not only reflects his outrage over threats against him personally, but also serves as a response to the repeated attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the Guards' stubborn determination to maintain their grip over this crucial waterway. Talks under fire On July 10, Trump did walk back his position somewhat, stating that "the Iranians have asked to resume talks, and we agreed." Indeed, Pakistani and Qatari mediators worked intensively throughout the week to prevent the negotiations from collapsing altogether. Reports suggest that talks are continuing in some form in Oman, a claim backed by a statement from Iran's Foreign Ministry on Sunday. What appears to have changed, however, is that negotiations will now proceed under fire rather than under a ceasefire. Regarding Iran's internal situation, the absence of new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei from his father's funeral has drawn attention from numerous media outlets and political circles, raising the question of who is actually governing Iran today. That question is becoming increasingly pressing, especially as the hardline wing of the regime appears to be gaining the upper hand over the moderate camp. In recent days, bellicose statements have come almost exclusively from the Revolutionary Guards. The rhetoric of chief negotiator Mohammad Ghalibaf, the Parliament Speaker, has followed suit: on July 10, he declared that the war in the Middle East "will not end with Iran's surrender," then doubled down on Sunday with another jab: "The era of unfair deals is over." How far can Iranian intransigence go? The country's economic situation is dire, yet the Revolutionary Guards appear intent on playing for time by exploiting rising oil prices through threats to close the Strait of Hormuz. In any case, the escalation remains relatively contained for now, as all sides wait either for a new truce or for a miscalculation that could throw the doors wide open to a broader conflict. Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Rome On the southern Lebanese front, the situation remains unchanged, with the Israeli army continuing to dismantle Hezbollah infrastructure. The Shiite militia's leadership has nonetheless announced that it "will not leave Iran to face this alone if the war resumes." The attacks over recent days on the Lebanese scene have been largely verbal, with the pro-Iranian camp lashing out against the Lebanese state's decision to engage in direct talks with Israel. These attacks drew a firm response from Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, who traveled to the Baabda Palace on Friday at the head of a sizable parliamentary delegation to express support for Lebanon's legal framework governing direct negotiations. Those talks are set to continue next week in Rome, despite Lebanese reservations about the change of venue, amid fears that Washington's involvement might diminish — something American officials have flatly ruled out. US Ambassador Michel Issa moved to dispel those concerns on Thursday during a round of meetings with senior officials, including President of the Republic Joseph Aoun. In that context, the US Ambassador announced the arrival of an American military delegation in Lebanon to oversee the implementation of the framework agreement between Israel and Lebanon (signed on June 22), particularly regarding the gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of the Lebanese army in two pilot zones in the south. The US delegation met with the army command on this matter toward the end of the week. Presumably to improve the chances of these talks succeeding, the Israeli military command ordered Israeli units to freeze "sensitive operations in southern Lebanon" at the request of the Americans. The other major news of the week was the confirmation of the Lebanese president's visit to Washington on July 21. It is worth noting that Joseph Aoun still refuses to include a direct meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of the visit — Netanyahu having announced earlier in the week an upcoming meeting with President Trump. Macron in Syria The past week was also marked by the NATO summit in Turkey, attended notably by President Trump, but above all by President Emmanuel Macron's visit to Damascus on July 6 — the first by a Western head of state since the change of regime in December 2024. The visit was an opportunity to discuss cooperation and economic matters, at a time when the new regime is seeking to consolidate its ranks and engineer a recovery. But it also provided an opening for terrorists — apparently the Islamic State group, according to Syrian authorities — to carry out a double bombing not far from the hotel where the French president was staying. A reminder that the security situation in Syria remains precarious.

The FIFA World Cup extends far beyond the realm of sport. As a global event, it temporarily suspends the routines of everyday life and brings millions of people together around a shared collective narrative for the duration of a tournament. In Lebanon, this competition takes on a particularly meaningful dimension. In a country shaped by successive crises, migration, and social divisions, the World Cup makes moments of celebration feel especially precious — almost rare. For clinical psychologist Sandra Khawam, supporting specific teams is rooted first and foremost in family history, often shaped by emigration. "The family factor plays an important role. Due to wars, crises, and successive waves of emigration, many Lebanese families have scattered across the world," she explains. This dispersal has created a distinctive emotional geography. Lebanese communities have settled in Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, and elsewhere — yet they have maintained strong ties to their homeland, not only geographic or administrative ones, but emotional ones. These bonds surface in family stories, memories, habits, and sometimes symbolic loyalties. During the World Cup, these attachments can shape the way people identify with sports teams. Supporting a foreign team can thus indirectly mean supporting a piece of one's own family history, personal memory, or migratory journey. Football as a universal need for identity Beyond the Lebanese context, Ms. Khawam points to a broader, universal mechanism. Football, she argues, fulfills a need to identify with anchors that feel stable, visible, and affirming. "When a team embodies stability, success, high performance, and iconic figures, it naturally becomes an object of identification," she notes. Fans are not simply following a sporting result — they are following a narrative. They track progress, the possibility of victory, the pushing of limits. This identification works like a symbolic mirror, in which individuals and communities project their personal or collective aspirations. In the Lebanese context, this dynamic takes on a particular character. Ms. Khawam notes that Lebanese society is marked by identity-based and communal divides that also structure forms of belonging. Football can therefore become a space onto which these divisions are projected. Supporting a team is not purely a matter of sporting preference — it can sometimes reflect a symbolic or identity-based affiliation. "People identify differently, backing one national team over another," she explains. The football pitch thus becomes a space where allegiances shift and latent social tensions can be replayed in symbolic, codified form. An emotional escape The psychologist also highlights another essential dimension: collective escapism. In a country like Lebanon, battered by economic, political, and social crises, the World Cup acts as a pause — a space where the weight of daily life is set aside for the duration of a match. "People come together, sharing a sense of unity, joy, pride, and collective excitement," she says. This pause matters because it opens up an emotional outlet rarely available in everyday life. Football allows heavy realities to be transformed into a shared experience of lightness, where one team's victory becomes everyone's victory — almost symbolic in nature. This collective intensity is also driven by group dynamics. In gatherings, emotions are not confined to individual expression — they feed off and amplify one another. Ms. Khawam describes this phenomenon as a crowd effect, where joy, excitement, and sometimes frustration are amplified by collective dynamics. She does emphasize one important point, however: incidents remain the exception. They do not represent the norm, but rather a visible anomaly. Group dynamics can nonetheless alter individual behavior. The relative anonymity, the power of the collective, and the emotional intensity of the moment can lead some people to act in ways they normally would not. In certain cases, this can escalate to excessive or even violent behavior. A heated altercation between fans escalated into a brawl and then a shooting during a match between Brazil and Japan in Wadi Jilo, in the Tyre district (South Lebanon). Six people were injured. In this sense, football can act as a sounding board for social and political tensions. Certain conflicts can surface through sporting rivalries, with teams becoming symbolic vessels onto which deeper allegiances, divisions, or frustrations are projected. Yet for Ms. Khawam, it is important not to reduce the phenomenon to this interpretation alone, since these projections coexist with an equally central festive and unifying dimension. Passion: between camaraderie and excess Sergio, 22, from Jbeil, captures this ambivalence on a more personal level. "I support Germany, first because Lebanon doesn't qualify for the World Cup, and also because I have a deep appreciation for that team's style of play — it's been with me since childhood," he says. Matches are often watched with friends, which doesn't rule out tension. "It starts with jokes, then things can get heated. Sometimes it even gets physical. But we always end up cooling down," he says. The passion for football, despite its excesses, ultimately returns to its original purpose: a space for togetherness. Jad, 28, a Beiruti who supports the French national team, embodies this festive dimension. "France has been part of my life since school, especially with Mbappé now. It's a team I've followed alongside my brother — it's become a family tradition," he explains. During this 2026 World Cup, victories spark celebrations. For him, these moments go beyond sport: "For a few hours, we forget about everyday life." In Jounieh, Maya, 32, an Argentina fan, describes an attachment rooted in family heritage. "It's a passion my father passed down to me during the Maradona era, and I've kept it alive through Messi," she says. Even without joining fan gatherings, she experiences the World Cup in the intimate setting of family life. "My sister lives in Buenos Aires, and during matches we send each other videos as if we were sitting in the same living room." Karim, 24, a Brazil supporter from Tripoli, describes a more mixed experience. "The game, the samba, the yellow jersey… it's a deep passion," he says. But he also acknowledges rising tensions: "Defeat can really stir up emotions. The arguments on social media, the rivalries… everything intensifies." He recounts scenes of conflict: "I witnessed insults being thrown and tables knocked over in restaurants. I chose to leave." Ultimately, the World Cup proves to be a deeply ambivalent phenomenon. In Lebanon, this ambivalence is particularly striking. In a country that has been searching for its identity for decades, it is sometimes easier to rally behind another nation's colors than one's own.

This third installment introduces a series of essays offering a broad survey, both thematic and chronological, of the many ways in which music has interacted with the political sphere throughout history. If Beethoven’s rebellion against Napoleon may be seen as something of a founding moment in the tension between music and political commitment, it does not, for all that, redefine the older and more ambiguous relationship between melody and power, whereby an ideology can carry entire masses of people along in its wake. Nineteenth-century Europe illustrates with particular clarity how music can simultaneously build nations and become an instrument in their service. In this respect, Giuseppe Verdi offers a revealing example of music’s ability to carry entire peoples by giving musical form to collective trauma. In 1842, he composed the opera Nabucco , which recounts the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II and the captivity of its surviving inhabitants in Babylon. Va, pensiero , the nostalgic chorus of the exiled Hebrews, captured the hearts of the Milanese, who recognized in it the reflection of their own trauma as a people living under Austrian rule. As the chorus sings, “O my homeland, so beautiful and so lost!” , Jerusalem becomes a metaphor for all of Italy. Va, pensiero gradually emerged as one of the symbols of the Risorgimento . The beauty of Verdi’s music gave audible form to a collective suffering that had not yet found a political expression. National consciousness would come only later. Here, music precedes politics and provides it with its emotional and affective body. Yet Verdi’s opera contains no deliberately political message in itself. Ultimately, the chorus speaks neither solely of the Jews nor solely of the Italians, but of exile. Its vocation is universal, and that is precisely why it has become the song of all those who have lost their homeland, their home, or their freedom, continuing to move profoundly different audiences nearly two centuries after its premiere. In this sense, the Italian patriotic reading of the opera gradually asserted itself over time, far more than at the moment of its creation. The “political context”, that collective consciousness rooted in a particular time and place, thus adopts the work as the emblematic anthem of a cause. A Restless River Even more fascinating is the melody capable of inspiring entirely different sentiments across borders while undergoing remarkably little musical change. The melody known as Fuggi, fuggi, fuggi da questo cielo , an Italian madrigal attributed in the early seventeenth century to the composer Giuseppe Cenci (though almost certainly older than he was), offers a striking example. A few decades after its appearance, it became better known, as an instrumental dance, under the titles Ballo di Mantova or Aria di Mantova , notably through the work of the composer Gasparo Zanetti in 1645. Or, more simply, as La Mantovana . Its original text was nothing more than an allegory of the seasons, calling upon spring to drive away the harshness of winter. There was nothing political about its original intent. Its destiny, however, would prove profoundly political. Like a European river, the melody travelled across borders without a passport, assuming different identities and functions among different peoples. In Bohemia, Bedřich Smetana incorporated it into Vltava to celebrate the river as a symbol of the Czech nation under Habsburg rule, turning it into an act of cultural patriotism. In Romania, by contrast, it circulated simply as a folk song under the title Carul cu boi , with no particular political meaning. Then, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Jewish pioneer Samuel Cohen adapted that same Romanian version to the poem Hatikvah , transforming the melody into the musical vehicle of the Zionist aspiration for a Jewish homeland, before it was ultimately adopted as the national anthem of the State of Israel. Over the course of three centuries, the nostalgia of an Italian spring awakened Czech national feeling, became one of the emotional foundations of Zionism, and even served for a time as a lighthearted interlude for Romanians before the German progressive rock band Pell Mell transformed it, in 1972, into the remarkable Moldau , on its album Marburg . Three distinct national identities, three different collective memories, three political aspirations, sometimes contradictory, all carried by the very same melodic substance. This alone shows that music does not contain a fixed political meaning within itself. Rather, it is a kind of vessel that history fills and empties according to its own needs. Perhaps that is precisely where its power lies: in its extraordinary capacity to carry almost anything… and, for that very reason, to become the object of every form of power. Playing Wagner Against Shostakovich It is perhaps with Richard Wagner that this “availability” reaches its most dangerous, even cataclysmic, limit. Wagner’s œuvre is monumental, ambiguous, traversed alike by grandeur and peril. Epic. Excessive. In the hands of a deranged hypnotist of the masses, animated by supremacist delusions and an ecstatic desire for extermination, it becomes a dangerous hallucinogen. Woody Allen captured its lethal potential perfectly in one of his trademark sarcastic lines, when a character in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) remarks: "I can't listen to that much Wagner, ya know? I start to get the urge to conquer Poland." Yet it is Coppola who most powerfully grasps the pathological momentum of Wagnerism in Apocalypse Now (1979), where Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore revels in the spectacle of Vietnamese forests consumed by napalm while The Ride of the Valkyries thunders in the background. One might come to the German composer’s defense by arguing that he could never have foreseen that his work would become, for Adolf Hitler, the ideological equivalent, magnified a thousandfold, of the Beatles’ Helter Skelter , through which Charles Manson believed he heard a call to the satanic ritual that claimed Sharon Tate’s life in Los Angeles in August 1969. Yet what the Nazis made of Wagner cannot simply be dismissed as an accidental distortion. It may instead be read as the activation of one of the work’s own latent possibilities: its celebration of myth as the foundation of national community, its vision of the people as an organic and almost mystical entity, its distrust of rational mediation. Its conservatism. Its supremacism. Its antisemitism. If the Valkyries resounded during Nazi Party ceremonies, this was not propaganda in the ordinary sense of the word. Wagner had understood, before anyone else, that music could make people believe in what did not yet exist and forge a community through shared emotion long before that community existed in reality. The Third Reich carried that power to its catastrophic conclusion. Hitler restored to the Valkyries their original mythical face: that of bloodthirsty warrior figures, far removed from the heroic splendor with which German Romanticism had adorned them. In the end, Wagner inevitably brings us back to Beethoven’s act of rebellion against Napoleon and to the immense power that may rest in the hands of great artists. What would he have done had he witnessed his vision of German supremacy materializing in the crematoria of Auschwitz and Buchenwald? Would he, like the Austrian master, have rebelled? Or would he, too, have succumbed to the surrounding megalomania? The question deserves to be asked. There is, however, another figure at the opposite end of the century, and at the opposite end of the political spectrum: Dmitri Shostakovich. Here, the movement is exactly reversed. To compose his Seventh Symphony under the bombs falling on Leningrad, and to have it performed in the besieged city by musicians who were themselves half dead from hunger, was this not to turn the most institutional form of Western music into an act of existential resistance? Where Wagner, perhaps unwittingly, opens a path toward nihilism and death, Shostakovich affirms that life endures precisely where power seeks to prove that it has already ended, filling with meaning the very time that war strives to empty of all substance. From Versailles to Monoprix Yet the tension between music as an instrument of power and music as resistance to power is by no means confined to great works of art. It is woven into the most ordinary and often the most invisible forms of a society’s sonic life. National anthems are as much technologies of belonging as they are songs. They generate emotional unity where interests diverge, drawing individual bodies into an imagined community through the simple act of standing together and singing. They should be understood as political devices disguised as music, or, more precisely, as political devices that function precisely because they are experienced as music rather than ideology. One cannot argue with an anthem; one can only refuse to join in. And that refusal is immediately perceived as a political act. Jimi Hendrix understood this perfectly in 1969 at Woodstock, when he tore apart The Star-Spangled Banner with his electric guitar. Serge Gainsbourg grasped it just as clearly when, with his characteristic taste for provocation, he reinvented La Marseillaise as reggae under the title Aux armes et cætera (1979), provoking, during a concert in Strasbourg the following year, the fury of military veterans determined to bring his performance to an end. Military music follows exactly the same logic as national anthems, stripped to its barest expression. The drum that sets the soldiers’ pace also deprives them of their individual rhythm, absorbing them into a collective cadence that erases hesitation, fear… and personal judgment. To march to the beat of the drum is, in a sense, to entrust one’s body to the group while awaiting the moment it will be surrendered to death. And, on reflection, does the background music that fills today’s commercial spaces not operate according to the same principle, albeit on a different scale, regulating the pace of movement, sustaining an emotional state conducive to spending, and making a space feel welcoming while simultaneously making it easier to control? From the minuets of Versailles to the pop music of Monoprix, the same fundamental movement persists: enveloping bodies in sound so that it may take hold of them without ever asking their explicit consent. Donald Trump vs. Leonard Cohen Closer to our own time, an episode that might at first seem anecdotal reveals something essential about the persistence of this relationship. In the summer of 2026, Donald Trump once again, just as he had during his first presidency, attempted to appropriate Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for use at his political rallies, prompting another icy rebuke from the late singer’s family. Cohen had died on the eve of the 2016 presidential election. What matters here is not so much the family’s entirely understandable indignation. Trump’s attempt to appropriate Hallelujah merely reenacts an age-old mechanism through which power seeks in music an emotional legitimacy that it is incapable of generating on its own. In 2026, Hallelujah is not, strictly speaking, a political song. Like so much of Cohen’s work, it is a meditative psalm about fractured grace, desire, and defeat. Yet its beauty and its universal recognition make it precisely what every form of power covets: a raw emotion that short-circuits judgment, galvanizes, and carries people away. By seeking to appropriate Cohen’s quest for grace, Trump is attempting to drape himself in a measure of prestige before his supporters. In reality, however, he merely makes himself look ridiculous. More than anyone else, Cohen had, from the second half of the 1970s onward, turned his back on any politicization of his work and on any deviation from the spiritual calling that lay at the heart of his music. The Cohenian experience is, above all, a mystical one. One must first rise above oneself and open one’s heart before entering the Canadian songwriter’s ceremonial universe. Needless to say, such an experience is fundamentally beyond the reach of populism, especially when it is infused with supremacism, cynicism, and mercantilism. The proof is plain enough: to appropriate Hallelujah on the one hand while issuing death threats against Bruce Springsteen on the other, as the President of the United States is doing today, is rather like aspiring to the Nobel Peace Prize while simultaneously seeking the destruction of a civilization. The Foundational Shock Indeed, what the Trump episode, occurring in the United States of all places, ultimately reminds us is that while music has always served as an instrument of power, it has also, at the very same time, remained one of the rare spaces from which that power could be challenged from within its own forms. And it is precisely because sound travels differently from language, because it can be heard without necessarily being understood, because it crosses borders that writing cannot, because it acts upon the body before reaching consciousness, that it has so often carried forms of resistance beyond the full grasp of censorship. The modern protest song, whose history this series seeks to retrace, was not born in the drawing rooms of Europe, amid the smoke-filled cabarets, or in the white countryside of North America. Nor does it descend in a direct line from medieval troubadours or Elizabethan ballads. It was born instead from a historical upheaval of unparalleled violence in the modern Western world: the uprooting of African musical traditions from their native soil, their passage through the brutality and humiliation of the slave trade, and their transplantation into a society that recognized them only as noise, as labor, or as a threat. This upheaval produced something that nothing in the soundscape of eighteenth-century white America could possibly have anticipated. A refoundation. Modern music, in its ability to express what ordinary language cannot, to resist where direct speech becomes impossible, and to forge a collective body in dissent, was born out of that violence. To understand how that came about, we must pause over what happened in the plantations, the Black churches, and the dusty crossroads of the Mississippi Delta, as well as over the legendary pact a so-called “mediocre” guitarist is said to have sealed with a mysterious, dark stranger on an imaginary night by the side of some forgotten road… Nothing in the soundscape that preceded Black America prepared the world for what slavery was about to bring forth.