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This is the second in a three-part series that follows the manifesto as both a form of writing and a way of intervening in the world. The first article stayed with the right to declare, and with the peculiar authority speech can acquire once it enters public space. Here, the question shifts. What happens when that speech moves beyond the person who utters it and begins to speak in the name of others? The third article will return to the question that began this journey, and ask what remains of the manifesto when its forms and purposes keep changing. By the end of the first article, the whole path had narrowed to a word almost too small for the history that had led us there: we . Small as it is, “we” can carry an entire collective into a sentence. The moment it appears, the voice speaking is no longer solitary. Other lives gather inside it, with their bodies, experiences, interests, loyalties, injuries, and differences. Some may have helped write the words. Others may encounter them later and discover that they, too, have somehow been gathered into this pronoun, whether or not they ever agreed to stand beneath it. Perhaps this is why “we” has always sat so comfortably inside the manifesto. The form has a taste for voices that grow larger as they speak, for groups that step suddenly into public view and demand to be seen and heard. We, the workers. We, the artists. We, the oppressed. We who have come to end what has been and announce what should come next. And yet the more assuredly this “we” enters the sentence, the more difficult it becomes to ignore the question hidden inside it. Who are the people gathered here? Who decided that one voice, or a handful of voices, could draw so many lives into a single word? In the first article, we saw how a manifesto can help produce the very collective it claims to speak for. That power becomes more charged once we enter the history of feminist manifestos, because across the twentieth century the category “women” itself begins to lose the apparent simplicity of a name capable of gathering everyone it invokes. It becomes a contested space, shaped by arguments over who can be seen within it and who disappears even as it is named. So this will not be a chronological history of feminist manifestos. I am more interested in the moments when the collective pronoun stretches its borders a little wider and then, from somewhere along those borders, hears a voice it had failed to notice. Seen this way, the history of the manifesto may also be a history of resistance to the word “we”. Mina Loy, when “You” Enters the Sentence In 1914, Mina Loy wrote a text with the disarmingly plain title Feminist Manifesto. It begins with a judgement that leaves little room for politeness: “The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate.” She then turns to women themselves. When she reaches the professional and commercial opportunities beginning to open up to them, she asks a question whose sharpness lies in its simplicity: “Is that all you want?” Loy had moved close to the world of Italian Futurism and had written texts that engaged with it while also making fun of it, just as questions about women and their place in society were becoming increasingly present in her early work. There is also something strikingly ironic about the fate of this manifesto. For all the force of a voice seemingly designed to provoke its audience, the text remained unpublished in its own time and did not appear in print until 1982. That is a curious fate for a piece of writing belonging to a form built around the very act of making oneself public. The manifesto raises its voice, yet for decades there is almost no public space in which that voice can be heard. The irony deepens when we look at how Loy chooses to speak. Futurism had been deeply in love with “we.” Marinetti and his companions entered language as a group already certain of itself, sure of what it loved, what it despised, and what it wanted to throw out of history. Loy borrows some of that energy and some of the manifesto’s commanding tone, but she shifts the arrangement. She speaks to women more often than she settles comfortably inside a ready-made female “we.” “You” moves to the front of the sentence. It addresses women who are asked to rethink what they have learned about marriage, chastity, love, and economic dependence on men, and to question promises of equality that might simply preserve the old structures of their lives under newer names. The text can be violent, unsettling even by contemporary standards, and some of its proposals need no defence for us to see what they do within the history of the manifesto. Loy takes a form that male avant-gardes had learned to wield with extraordinary confidence and carries it somewhere else, into a space where the group being addressed is no longer entirely certain that it is a group at all. The distance between “you” and “we” becomes political. To say “you” to other women is to acknowledge that some space remains between the speaker and those she addresses, and that emancipation has not yet become a shared identity in which everyone can comfortably recognise herself. The woman reading Loy’s manifesto may be a wife who believes in the marriage Loy attacks, a woman for whom chastity remains a value, or someone who simply does not recognise herself in the version of liberation being offered to her. Loy therefore places us very early before a problem that will follow us through the rest of this essay. Speech that wants to liberate a group can also assume the position of knowing that group better than it knows itself. Perhaps that is why Loy’s “you” is more troubling, and more interesting, than any ready-made “we.” The collective is still a possibility, an address, something that might yet come into being. The manifesto does not meet a homogeneous audience already waiting for it. It is trying to awaken in the women it addresses a desire to leave behind the positions through which they have learned to understand themselves. Power returns here by another door. Who gets to tell a woman that the life she has chosen is not free enough? Who gets to draw the outline of liberation for her, and then ask her to recognise herself inside it? When One Woman Almost Invents Her Own Collective In New York in 1967, Valerie Solanas began distributing the SCUM Manifesto. She sold copies herself on the streets of Greenwich Village. This is a long way from the political organisation that commissioned Marx and Engels to write its programme, or from an avant-garde movement entering the pages of a major newspaper to announce its birth. Here we have a woman writing almost alone, and a text that speaks as though an entire revolutionary force already stands behind her. The opening tells us immediately that Solanas did not come to the manifesto in search of moderation. “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore,” she begins, before moving swiftly toward overthrowing government, abolishing money, full automation, and some of the text’s most extreme propositions concerning men. The world Solanas describes is so exhausted and corrupt that, in her telling, it demands a radical transformation of political life, economic life, and relations between the sexes. Anger fills the page until it becomes a way of taking possession of speech itself, a refusal of the rules that require women to enter public life reasonable, measured, and polite enough to deserve a hearing. And yet SCUM sounds, from the very beginning, like the name of a group. A reader can imagine an organisation, women who might belong to it, a project carried under that name. The closer we come to the actual moment of writing, however, the harder it becomes to locate a stable collective behind it. The text arrives before the group and behaves as though naming it might already be enough to give it a kind of reality. With Solanas, a single voice fills the entire page. Anger gives it enough reach to speak of women, men, society, and the future as though she were standing at the centre of a map and could see the whole terrain at once. We do not need to settle the old argument over how seriously or satirically the SCUM Manifesto ought to be read to understand what it adds to our question. A name exists. A voice speaks with enough confidence. Soon the reader begins to imagine those who might be standing behind it. Solanas’s anger becomes a force in its own right. Women who have long been expected to explain their pain in a reasonable and civilised language find in the manifesto a form in which exaggeration and aggression can themselves take on political work. Solanas does not ask permission to be persuasive, nor does she make much effort to become acceptable within the system of speech she is attacking. Her voice imposes itself through sheer volume. The problem of representation remains. The larger the voice becomes, the more people it may sweep into its speech without ever making them participants in it. SCUM brings us back to an almost elementary question. Can an individual declare a collective into existence? And if so, when does that invention become a political space in which others can meet, and when does it become a way of borrowing their voices? When “We” Is Made in a Room In New York in 1969, Redstockings published its manifesto. The text belonged to the rising Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States and took a radical position, understanding women as an oppressed group within a system organised around male dominance. This time, the manifesto was issued in the name of a collective that already existed and called on women to join in a common struggle. But the “we” of Redstockings was not built on the page alone. It was also taking shape through a practice that became central to one strand of the feminist movement: consciousness-raising groups. Women met in apartments and small rooms and spoke about marriage, sex, work, motherhood, beauty, fear, domestic labour, and all the details each of them may previously have thought belonged only to her own life. Then the stories began to answer one another. Patterns started to appear. One woman believes that the problem she is having with her husband belongs to their particular relationship, and then another woman tells a story almost exactly like hers. A third speaks about a sense of failure, and gradually the group begins to see the social conditions that make the same feeling recur across so many lives. What had seemed individual begins to acquire a collective shape. What each woman had experienced as private pain becomes readable within a larger arrangement of power. Consciousness-raising thus becomes a way of producing political knowledge from ordinary experience itself. There is something almost scene-like about this moment in the history of “we.” The collective forms while women are speaking. They place their experiences beside one another and begin to notice regularities that were invisible when each story was lived in isolation. Their experiences are not identical, and the room does not magically dissolve their differences. Yet a “we” begins to emerge when what had long been sealed inside private life turns out to be connected to structures larger than any one person. The pronoun carries a different force here than it did with Loy or Solanas. There is no longer a single writer addressing women, and no group name that seems almost to be invented by the text itself. There are women meeting, a shared practice, a language taking shape between them, and then a manifesto that gives that language a public form. In such a moment, the word “women” can carry enormous political weight. If what each woman thought she was suffering alone is happening to others as well, then those experiences can begin to be read as effects of a shared position within a structure of power. “We women” can move scattered grievances toward analysis, and analysis toward organisation. And it is precisely when the “we” succeeds that the question of its borders begins to appear. No experience enters the room untouched by everything else. Each woman brings with her race, class, social position, sexuality, and her relationship to work, the state, and the family. What looks common when attention is fixed on relations between women and men may change considerably once other relations of power enter the frame. If experience is going to serve as a source of political knowledge, then another question becomes unavoidable. Whose experiences made it into the room in the first place? Which women had the time, the space, the language, and the possibility of being present, so that their lives could help define what counted as “women’s experience”? But Which Women? In 1977, a text appeared that did not even carry the word “manifesto” in its title. The Combahee River Collective Statement was written by a group of Black feminists who had been meeting since 1974 and organising both within their own collective and in alliance with other progressive movements. Yet the statement performs much of what we have learned to recognise as the work of a manifesto. It declares a position, names the systems of power it seeks to confront, identifies the group speaking, and offers an understanding of the world meant to guide political action. From the outset, the collective identifies itself as a group of Black feminists. That apparently simple qualification is enough to shift the entire geography of “we women.” Black women do not enter political life from a single position that can be reduced to their oppression as women. Racism, sexism, class, and gendered domination work together in shaping the conditions of their lives. The Combahee statement therefore articulates an understanding of interlocking systems of oppression years before “intersectionality” became widely used in the form we know today. The crucial move lies here. The problem cannot be solved by making the category “women” larger and adding a group that happened to have been forgotten. The category itself has to be examined. When the experience of some women is allowed to stand for “women’s experience,” others can remain present under the name “women” while disappearing from the substance of what the category describes. When a Black woman tells a feminist movement that “we women” does not fully describe her experience, she reveals that the group’s claim to universality was built from particular positions that eventually forgot to name themselves as particular. At the same time, the women of Combahee had to negotiate other collectives capable of saying “we Black people” while allowing the oppression of women to disappear inside that “we,” or “we on the Left” while racism and gender inequality were pushed into the category of secondary concerns. A Black woman can therefore find herself facing more than one collective pronoun promising belonging while asking her, as the price of entry, to divide her experience into parts. This is perhaps what makes Combahee so decisive in the history of “we.” The collective does not simply replace one supposedly pure community with a more inclusive pure community. It exposes something far more difficult: the impossibility of innocence in the collective pronoun. Every “we” is spoken from somewhere. It carries a history. It illuminates some relations of power more clearly than others. From here, we might say that the history of the manifesto is also a history of objections to the collective pronoun. Whenever a “we” succeeds in gathering people under a single name, there remains the possibility that a voice will emerge from within it and ask what that unity has cost. The objection may feel like a threat to the movement. More importantly, it forces the group to look again at what had become invisible inside its own image of itself. The question then becomes how to build a collective that knows its boundaries are neither natural nor permanent, and that the people gathered under one name will not necessarily meet power from the same place. What If “We” Did Not Need a Common Origin? When Donna Haraway published the text that would later become widely known as A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985, the search for a stable feminist unity had become increasingly difficult. Haraway herself wrote about the crisis of political identity affecting parts of the American Left and feminist movements, and turned toward another way of imagining collective action, organised through alliance and affinity rather than through the endless search for a single identity capable of containing everyone. Her cyborg is a hybrid figure, one that unsettles some of the borders we rely on to organise the world: human and machine, natural and artificial, body and technology. For our purposes, what matters most is what this figure does to the fantasy of a pure origin or an essential identity. Political groups sometimes like to imagine that their members were, somewhere deep inside themselves, already a community before power divided them. In that story, liberation becomes a matter of peeling away what history has done to us until we recover an original unity that was there all along. The cyborg unsettles that dream. It begins with mixture, unstable boundaries, partial identities. And from there comes one of the text’s most fertile political possibilities. People can act together without first having to prove that they were the same to begin with. They can build alliances from different positions without requiring one another to dissolve those differences simply to make the word “we” possible. Haraway thinks through this possibility in terms of affinity rather than identity. Alliances can grow out of political choices, relationships, shared interests, and forms of resistance, while identities remain partial and even contradictory. For the manifesto, this shift unsettles the whole history of the collective pronoun. It becomes possible to imagine a “we” that no longer needs to tell itself that it is a single body. The group begins to look more like a provisional political arrangement among subjects who know they cannot be reduced to a complete, finished identity. They choose to meet around something without turning that meeting into a story of common origin or pure belonging. The strength of “we” may lie precisely in knowing that it will never be able to say everything about the people gathered within it. None of this makes politics easier. Alliances require negotiation. Difference does not disappear because we announce our respect for it, and the absence of a single identity does nothing to eliminate unequal power within a group. What changes is what we ask from the collective pronoun. “We” can become an agreement to act together while allowing difference to remain visible, rather than a promise that everyone gathered within it is fundamentally the same. At that point, the search for the finally correct “we,” the one capable of holding everyone without friction or dissent, begins to lose its meaning. These texts suggest something else. The collective pronoun is itself a political practice. It brings people together so that common action can become possible, and in doing so it also draws the boundaries of that togetherness. Those boundaries rarely stay quiet for long. A voice may appear there and say that the experience described as common was never hers. A group may discover that the name which once gave it strength has begun, in another moment, to hide differences that now need to be seen. The name may remain and acquire another meaning. Or an alliance may form without asking its members to become interchangeable versions of one another before they are allowed to act together. Perhaps the political strength of “we” lies in keeping the possibility of common action open while allowing difference to remain visible. A collective name becomes most dangerous when it stops being a meeting place and begins to take away from those inside it the right to define themselves. The manifesto makes this tension particularly visible, perhaps because it has always had a taste for long sentences and confident declarations. It speaks as though something has become clear enough to be announced, only for politics to return from inside that very clarity and open the questions again. Every manifesto “we” therefore carries within it the possibility that a voice will emerge at its edge and say to those speaking in its name: you do not speak for me. That voice need not mean that the collective has failed. It may be one of the things that keeps unity from hardening into silence. But another problem now comes into view. The manifesto has changed its form, mocked its own rules, been written by individuals and collectives, addressed a “you,” spoken as “we,” and even imagined alliances that no longer depend on a homogeneous identity. So what, in the end, still makes a manifesto a manifesto? The third article will return to the small book that set this entire journey in motion, Irene Vallejo’s Manifesto for Reading, and ask what happens when the word “manifesto” is carried by a text more interested in caring for something than in tearing it down.

Three political poles currently dominate Israel’s day-to-day political life in the run-up to the elections for the twenty-sixth Knesset, scheduled for October 27. The first is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, allied with the most extreme currents of religious Zionism. Facing him is Naftali Bennett of the nationalist right, in alliance with centrist Yair Lapid. The third, emerging from the military establishment, is former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, who may prove to be Netanyahu’s most dangerous rival. Opinion polls shift constantly. Yet one fact has remained unchanged so far: none of the three poles appears capable of achieving the breakthrough needed to form the next government. What their electoral platforms share most strikingly is an absence: no issue genuinely connected to the rights of the Palestinian people or their future in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip occupies any meaningful place, while the role of Arab parties in Israel is ignored. Anyone following the daily negotiations and observing the internal maneuvering behind both declared and secret alliances can grasp the extent of the opportunism and the pervasive logic of political blackmail governing relations among parties and political forces. This is particularly true of smaller formations and those betting on their ability to tip the balance, such as Avigdor Lieberman, a secular Zionist, as well as representatives of religious parties engaged in constant one-upmanship over extremism and demands. From that perspective, the way these forces deal with the Palestinians becomes understandable within the same logic, morally as well, once one adds the psychological barrier created by the October 7 attack, which erected a wall higher and uglier still than the concrete separation barrier. In this context, one may conclude that the coming elections will differ from previous ones in several respects. For Netanyahu, their outcome is an existential political and personal reckoning: either he remains in government or he ends up in prison. This has driven him to intensify his efforts to put his own house in order, against the backdrop of the wars unfolding in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, and the Golan. The blood of Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians has thus become fuel for the current electoral campaign. Meanwhile, Knesset member Tzvi Sukkot, from Religious Zionism, declared: “We kill one hundred women and children in a single night and nobody cares. So why not kill more? The process of dehumanizing the Palestinians is now complete.” These remarks were reported in an article by journalist Jack Khoury published in Haaretz on May 18, 2025. What is now unfolding in multiple forms throughout the West Bank, and what is being called the “settlers’ revolt,” seeks to settle the fate of the West Bank once and for all in favor of annexation and the imposition of Israeli sovereignty. This shift reflects the movement of the overwhelming majority of Israelis away from the secular, democratic Zionist current once embodied by the labor movement, particularly at the time of the state’s founding. None of the three poles disputes the substance of Sukkot’s remarks, even when Netanyahu feels compelled to describe the ugliest forms of violence merely as “riots” that damage Israel’s image. Nor do the three poles fundamentally differ over the implementation of the E1 settlement project east of Jerusalem, except on formal aspects that do nothing to alter the course of events. This means that whoever wins the coming elections will not depart from this trajectory. The two-state solution is rejected by the prevailing Israeli mindset, while the destruction of the Palestinian political and administrative entity will continue to be regarded as a necessity enabling the completion of annexation, Judaization, and the extension of sovereignty over “Judea and Samaria,” in their terminology. A Dangerous Parting of Ways After kites were found near the Nahal Oz settlement, behind the security fence surrounding the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army announced, after examining them, that no suspicious or dangerous substances had been found. Israeli threats of escalation nevertheless followed. Hamas cadres were arrested, and the air force carried out strikes on hospitals and tents, killing civilians. At the same time, Israeli diplomacy has been speaking in international forums about the existential threat posed by these kites and their thin strings, while those who have lost their lives disappear from the debate. Military-level statements have also indicated that the next phase would involve plans and thinking that could lead to a renewed occupation of Gaza City in order to eliminate what remains of Hamas. Through this Gaza model, combined with what is taking place in the West Bank after Palestinians have been stripped of their humanity, an electoral equation emerges in which the number of dead and wounded steadily rises in order to harvest votes. We simply do not know how much more blood will have to be shed for one party to gain an additional seat in the next Knesset. All this, while the world witnesses in sound and image what is happening every day, points to the end of the secular and socialist Zionist project in whose name the State of Israel claimed to be a democratic oasis in the Arab desert and the representative of Western civilization in a Middle East portrayed as savage. The debate within Israeli elites calling for entry into a post-Zionist phase and for solutions based on recognition of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination also appears to have come to an end. These elections inaugurate a dangerous parting of ways, nourished by biblical myths and Talmudic rituals, in the service of the triumph of the idea of Greater Israel across the 27,000 square kilometers and more of historic Palestine, to which other occupied and annexed territories, such as the Golan, could be added. It was also in this alarming context that an open letter signed by 102 former British and French diplomats was published, stating that “Palestine is being erased before the eyes of the world.” In the letter, dated August 22, they called on the British and French governments to implement the rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, suspend certain forms of economic and military cooperation, take concrete measures against investments linked to settlements, and use British and French political and economic influence to preserve the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state. The response of governments, however, remains far below what is required. The transformation of “democratic” Israel into a “biblical” Israel makes the challenge facing the Palestinian and Arab peace camp even more complex. It now goes beyond the mere ability to preserve the Palestinian political entity and revives the idea of historic Palestine as the counterpoint to Greater Israel. And insofar as the birth of the State of Israel was a European-American undertaking, fairness demands that the birth of the State of Palestine be one as well.

It is a war of attrition in every sense of the word. Yet much of the time, it is being kept simmering at a low level, as was the case overnight from Sunday into Monday and in the early hours of the new week. Late Sunday evening, the U.S. military said it had detected – most likely by satellite – Islamic Revolutionary Guard militiamen preparing two rocket launchers capable of dispersing mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Shortly after the announcement, the U.S. military launched overnight raids on Revolutionary Guard positions on Larak Island, killing and wounding several people, according to sources within the Revolutionary Guards. In retaliation for the attacks, the Revolutionary Guards launched several ballistic missiles early Monday toward two U.S. bases in Jordan. The Jordanian military said it had intercepted the missiles before they reached their targets. Later Monday morning, the United Arab Emirates said it had neutralized a drone in its airspace. Some confusion prevailed around midday Monday over the location targeted by the U.S. airstrikes. Initially, U.S. sources denied that Larak Island had been targeted, saying instead that the raids had struck Kharg Island. But by Monday evening, a U.S. official confirmed that Larak had indeed been hit. In any event, President Donald Trump offered a significant clarification on Monday, saying that “the energy center of Kharg Island is being reduced to rubble.” The White House chief also said that the US military would respond to the missile attacks launched by the Revolutionary Guards early Monday. “There will be a response, and we are going to hit them hard,” President Trump said, suggesting that the U.S. retaliation could come overnight Monday. Against this backdrop, a senior U.S. official said Monday that President Trump was considering a plan to resume airstrikes against the Revolutionary Guards in an effort to prevent them from laying mines again in the Strait of Hormuz. It is worth recalling that the Trump administration recently said that the U.S. military had completed mine-clearing operations in the Strait, which would explain the Revolutionary Guards’ attempts to mine it again. To close this chapter on the Iran-U.S. war of attrition, the Revolutionary Guards said Monday that any U.S. attack on Iranian positions would be followed by a response “ten times stronger, given that there is no target in the region beyond our reach.” The threat was implicitly criticized Monday evening by the Iranian president, who said that a possible resumption of military operations would not be in Iran’s interest. Aoun in Athens On the Lebanese front, President Joseph Aoun paid an official visit to Athens on Monday, where he held talks with his Greek counterpart, Konstantinos Tasoulas, and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. President Tasoulas stressed on the occasion that talks between Lebanon and Israel would help Lebanon achieve its independence and foster an atmosphere of prosperity, in line with the implementation of Resolution 1701. On the ground, Israeli aircraft carried out four strikes late Monday afternoon on the town of Mansouri, in the Tyre district.

Some people spend their lives accepting their lot, while others take their destiny into their own hands. This is all the more difficult for a woman living in a man’s world. And yet… some women chose to fight, succeeding in breaking the taboos of their time. Whether they wielded a brush, a pen, scientific instruments, or their voices, they made their mark on their century with a boldness that at times bordered on scandal. From Artemisia Gentileschi, defying Italian society and the courts five centuries ago, to George Sand, who traded the corset for the freedom to write; from Camille Claudel, the deeply wounded artist, to the rigor and genius of Marie Curie, and the universal voice of Oum Kalthoum… these women succeeded in overcoming social prejudice. In a series of articles, we invite you on a journey through time to meet these rebellious women. In the pantheon of women who shaped the 20th century, Oum Kalthoum holds a prominent place. The “Star of the East” was not merely a singer with an inimitable voice. Above all, she was a true pioneer. In a stifling society, Fatima Ibrahim es-Sayyid el-Beltagi made her mark through exceptional talent, strategic intelligence, and unwavering determination. Singing in Disguise as a Boy Oum Kalthoum was born at the dawn of the 20th century in a modest village in the Nile Delta. At her birth, her father, Ibrahim, a religious man, gave her the name Oum Kalthoum, after one of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughters. The name refers to someone with a full, rounded face. From the age of six, she honed her extraordinary gift for singing by listening to her father chant verses from the Quran during ceremonies in nearby villages. To allow her to accompany him, her father came up with the idea of disguising her as a young Bedouin boy, as it was unthinkable at the time for a girl to perform in public. This period provided her invaluable training. Quranic recitation ( tajwid ) is a spiritual and vocal discipline that helped her develop powerful breath control and exceptionally clear pronunciation of Classical Arabic, which would later become one of her greatest assets. This first act of transgression was the first step in a lifetime spent pushing boundaries. The Conquest of Cairo When she arrived in Cairo in the early 1920s, Oum Kalthoum was just a young peasant ( fellah ) from the Nile Delta. Cairo’s elite looked down on her rustic manners, accent, and attire. To overcome this snobbery, she embarked on a relentless program of self-education. She surrounded herself with intellectuals, devoured classical poetry, refined her vocabulary, and learned proper etiquette and French. Within a few years, she turned the tables: her flawless command of Classical Arabic became her chief weapon, winning the admiration of the elite and intellectuals alike. Birth of “Kawkab es-Sharq” In Cairo, Oum Kalthoum immersed herself in a vibrant artistic world, run exclusively by men. At that time, the profession of female singer – the ‘awalim – was associated with loose morals and even prostitution. For a woman from a conservative religious family like hers, singing in Cairo’s theatres and cabarets was considered a disgrace. Far from allowing others to dictate her choices, she decided to take complete control of her art and career and to set her own rules. The Creation of a Persona From an early stage, without marketing or image consultants, Oum Kalthoum invented the concept of the “untouchable star.” She built a fortress around her public image, imposed strict discipline on those around her, dressed with understated elegance, and refused to play the seduction games of the entertainment world. On stage, she adopted a distinctive posture. She transformed her vulnerabilities into symbols. Suffering from an eye condition (Graves’ disease), she began wearing austere dark glasses that added to her air of mystery and authority. The famous silk handkerchief that she would endlessly fidget with on stage, initially used to wipe her sweaty hands caused by stage fright, became her signature accessory. Even her severe bun was part of her persona, adding to her authority and aura. A Visionary Ahead of Her Time As early as 1934, she recognized the importance of modern media and became the first artist to sign a contract with the newly established Egyptian National Radio. Her concerts on the first Thursday of every month became veritable secular masses, emptying the streets from the Mashreq to the Maghreb. She negotiated her own contracts with formidable resolve and quickly became the highest-paid and most respected artist in Egypt. Absolute Artistic Excellence She personally selected her lyrics from among the greatest poets of her time, such as Ahmed Shawqi or Ahmad Rami, who was reportedly secretly in love with her. She pushed her composers, including the famous Riad al-Sunbati, to their limits. In 1964, she collaborated with her longtime rival, composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab, on the mythical song Enta Omri . Thanks to her extraordinary gift of improvisation, a song could last more than an hour, depending on the audience. She did not merely perform; she also directed her own musicians. She pushed them – event though they were the finest musicians in Egypt – to surpass themselves until they achieved perfect harmony. One of them is said to have remarked: “We do not play for Oum Kalthoum. She improvises, and we follow.” She sang of love and became the undisputed icon of tarab , an emotional and musical trance reminiscent of the techniques of blues and jazz technics, while commanding her audience with a single gesture of her hand.

"What is the veneration of a founder worth when his life's work is undone by those who claim to be his heirs?" In a previous article, commenting on the saying "charity begins at home," we showed how Lebanon's history constantly oscillates between internal communal selfishness — retreating into one's sect at the expense of the state — and external ideological "altruism" — prioritizing regional causes at the expense of the homeland. In both cases, the vision of a strong, prosperous, and democratic Lebanese state has been sacrificed. Let us take the analysis further. In a letter published by L'OLJ, lawyer Carole Chelhot wrote some harsh but deeply accurate lines about this fatal fragmentation: "Lebanon's failure is no longer territorial. It is political, moral, and institutional. The administration has been handed over to patronage networks, public services distributed as personal favors, and the law negotiated according to power dynamics (…). The state, which was meant to transcend the communities, has become the spoils they divide among themselves (…). This is where the memory of Elias Hoayek ceases to be reassuring and becomes an indictment. The Maronites love to call him the father of Greater Lebanon. They celebrate his name, invoke his legacy, and honor his beatification. But what is the veneration of a founder worth when his life's work is undone by those who claim to be his heirs? (…) How many Maronite leaders have understood that protecting Christians does not mean weakening the state to preserve privileges, but rather building a state strong enough that no citizen needs a protector?" How can we repair the fragmentation and identity-based retreats that are delaying the emergence of a Lebanon that aspires to the Greater Lebanon founded in 1920? Every community in Lebanon must reflect on its own path. And perhaps it would only be right to begin this historical and political examination of conscience with the Christians — and specifically with the Maronites — who were the driving force behind Greater Lebanon. They were the first custodians of Patriarch Hoayek's vision. We know the sorrow — indeed the dismay — that Patriarch Hoayek felt in the face of the lack of civic responsibility shown by the political class of his era, and the desperate appeal he made for the moralization of public life in his final message to the nation: "The Love of the Homeland." "Administrative and Pastoral Insularity" After the Second Vatican Council, the Maronites and all Eastern Catholic Churches were urged by the popes — most notably by John Paul II — to work in unity and to build Lebanon together with Muslim communities, in a spirit of communion and service. To no avail. On the political front, the same wheeling and dealing, the same scheming, the same miscalculations continued right up to the catastrophe in which we now find ourselves. On the religious front — the only domain over which they have full control — the Eastern Churches continued to resist calls to coordinate their pastoral work, their projects, and their aspirations. The impression has always been one of "every man for himself": "our" saints, "our" ceremonies, "our" broadcasts, "our" armchairs, "our" seats of honor. For years, the most clear-sighted among her sons have had the courage to quietly reproach the grande dame of Lebanon's Churches "for having enjoyed the privileges that came with the creation of Greater Lebanon (1920) without fully assuming its duties; for having planned for herself rather than for the homeland she had founded; and if any good was done through her efforts, for having done so in a spirit of domination rather than a spirit of service." It is high time to step out of the shadows and call things what they are. "If there is no personal encounter with Jesus Christ, there will be ethnicism disguised as Christianity," Pope Francis once said — perhaps with the autocephalous Churches of the Orthodox world in mind. One has to wonder whether this judgment applies equally to the Churches of Lebanon, which coexist on the same territory yet operate in administrative and pastoral self-sufficiency. Role-playing and borrowed identities The accusation ought to be extended to all the communal components of Greater Lebanon. Nearly a century after the death of its founder, the State remains cruelly "unfinished" (to use Chelhot's word), and citizenship is smothered by the most basic form of communitarianism. Much of the blame lies with a State that has surrendered its own identity and has renounced, in particular, the teaching of history. How many Lebanese have grown up without a history textbook, without memory, and therefore without the foundation of knowledge needed to shape and anchor their identity — relying instead on scraps gathered as much from truth as from error, as much from happy memories as from communal traumas? How many Lebanese, including the author of this article, knew nothing of Patriarch Hoayek until just four months ago? Was establishing a "national education" really too much to ask? Or, once again, was laxity mistaken for wisdom? The same judgment can be applied to military service, that incubator of citizenship — keeping in mind that neither national education nor military service should ever be taken for granted, but must be renewed with each generation. "The land of missed opportunities" For as far back as anyone can remember, Lebanese communities have embodied borrowed identities, shaped by external pressures or historical imagination. Today, it is the Battle of Karbala that is being re-enacted in South Lebanon. Politics is, of course, the realm of ambiguity par excellence, but one gets the sense that our history has been nothing but a succession of remakes and catastrophic role-playing exercises. All of this because the particular Churches, lulled to sleep by the most rigid clericalism, and the Lebanese State, hollowed out by its oligarchs, lacked the courage and the political will to show us where the treasure of our human and spiritual identity lay — the ideal of pluralism, freedom, and tolerance that once lifted Lebanon to greater heights. Without lining anyone's pockets. As a Christian philosopher friend of mine puts it, "Lebanon is, par excellence, the homeland of missed opportunities." Among those missed opportunities — and let us never forget it — were the nocturnal apparitions of the Virgin Mary above the dome of the Syriac Orthodox basilica in Mouseitbeh in 1970. A heavenly visit that was ridiculed by the clergy of the Eastern Catholic Churches, who were nonetheless well aware of the twin apparitions of the Virgin in Zeitoun, Egypt, in 1968, and of their worldwide impact. It was yet another warning sign to which these Churches refused to pay the slightest attention. "What the Spirit says to the Churches" Since then, however, the spread of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council has fortunately fostered a greater sensitivity among the clergy toward "what the Spirit says to the Churches." "Too often," said Hans-Peter Kolvenbach (1928–2016), former Superior General of the Society of Jesus, "we forget the opening chapters of the Book of Revelation, where the Lord moves from one Church to another to approve and disapprove of what is happening there, and above all to announce what is to come. He continues to speak to us, especially in times of crisis, through the voice of the Theotokos and of so many other witnesses — who hold no magisterial office, yet speak with an authority from On High." By applying the principle of "charity beginning at home," the Churches of Lebanon must finally understand that they have two levers at their disposal to save Lebanon and, with it, the Christian presence there: their support for the rule of law, in a spirit of service rather than "domination," and their genuine, uncompromising unity "as Christ willed it and by the means He willed." By standing united, by placing themselves at the service of a culture of Lebanese citizenship, and by avoiding any retreat into identity politics—even at the cost of relinquishing some of their levers of power (the partial de-confessionalization of the civil service or of electoral law, as provided for in the Taif Agreement)—the Eastern Churches would fulfill their noblest mission: bringing Lebanon closer to its founding vision and turning Lebanese diversity into a strength rather than an inherent fragility. For even if the branches are corrupt, "the stump is a holy seed" (Isaiah 6:13).

While the United States has promised an 'economic D-Day' for Iran, this strategy can only become fully effective with the cooperation of China, Iran's top oil importer and leading supplier of military technology to the mullahs' regime. After six months of war in the Middle East, Washington has reason to worry about the quagmire this conflict—initially expected to last only a few weeks—has become. With no quick military solution in sight, the Trump administration has chosen to strangle the Iranian regime by introducing new sanctions targeting not Tehran directly, but its trading partners, in order to isolate the Iranian economy. Chinese entities are among those affected by this sweeping plan from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has called on Beijing to fall in line. The Shanghai Summit The situation is so urgent that it has turned the summit marking the 25th anniversary of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) into a last-chance meeting for the Iranians. The Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Indian leaders are expected in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, on Monday and Tuesday, along with six other Central Asian nations. Among them: Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, as well as Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. While China is clearly in the crosshairs of the new U.S. sanctions regime, Beijing has brushed aside these threats, insisting instead that it will firmly defend its interests and its partnership with Iran, a country it considers a major ally. This standoff risks further escalating tensions between Beijing and Washington, ahead of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's planned visit to the U.S. capital in September. Iran has been resisting sanctions targeting it for decades by mobilizing complex international financial networks to circumvent them. Beijing is a major buyer of Iranian oil. It often settles its bills in renminbi—China's currency—which falls outside the reach of U.S. sanctions. Moreover, even if maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz were to be cut off, China could continue receiving Iranian crude via Central Asian road and rail routes. Costs vs. Benefits As a result, Chinese purchases have indeed declined, but what remains is what Tehran needs to survive total economic suffocation. According to experts interviewed by AFP, the new sanctions announced on Monday target certain Chinese entities accused of helping Tehran acquire critical technologies. However, the United States has so far refrained from sanctioning the Asian country's major financial institutions. Beijing and Washington spent much of last year mired in an escalating trade war, until the fragile respite brought about by the meeting between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in October 2025. For its campaign against Iran to have any real impact, Washington may need to 'offer incentives' to Beijing to encourage the Asian giant to come on side, says Lim Tai Wei, a professor specializing in East Asia at Japan's Soka University, as quoted by AFP. As such, China will only consider cooperating with the United States 'if the costs of supporting Iran were to become significantly higher than the strategic and economic benefits' of continuing to do business with the country. Trump Multiplies the Distractions Meanwhile, in Washington, President Donald Trump watches helplessly as a series of setbacks mount, casting a shadow over the upcoming midterm elections in November. A renamed lake, shocking social media posts, bare-minimum engagement with the press… Trump no longer wants to talk about Iran or inflation—the two issues that are dragging down his presidency. His approval ratings are at an all-time low, and the Republican Party fears a crushing defeat in November during elections that will determine control of Congress — which has been majority conservative until now. The 80-year-old Republican is once again employing a strategy he has often used: stirring up noise in an attempt to drown out an unfavorable backdrop — in this case, a string of polls, each more damaging than the last, on his record. This week, Donald Trump briefly captured the media spotlight by announcing he was renaming Lake Ontario, on the US-Canadian border, "Lake America" — a move that infuriated Canada. Far-right influencer Matt Walsh also called the idea "politically stupid," seeing it as a "gift" to the American left. It must be noted, however, that in this context, anti-immigration policy remains one of the few areas where the Republican president has stayed true to his stated course. The administration has been heavily promoting its mass deportation campaign, which the Democratic opposition has frequently condemned as cruel. The Department of Homeland Security, for instance, released a video on Thursday showing shackled Haitian nationals being boarded onto a plane, after Washington revoked a status that had allowed them to enter the country legally. The video, set to music, was condemned as degrading and racist by opponents of Donald Trump. Beyond that, the conflict in Iran has dragged on far longer than the few weeks the White House occupant promised, and above all, Americans are still waiting for the cost of living to drop, as he had guaranteed. "The greatest president" His administration is piling on emergency measures ahead of the elections across various areas: massive imports of foreign beef to drive down prices; buybacks of US Treasury bonds to reassure markets; and an express mission by the CIA director to try to dissuade Russia from targeting a NATO country, according to the American press. Donald Trump, who has always relished impromptu exchanges with groups of journalists, is doing so less frequently — or cutting them short when he does. At the start of his second term, he would easily hold hour-long unplanned press conferences, sometimes every day. He now prefers, as he did this week, to sit down for lengthy interviews with MAGA-friendly hosts, where he faces no pushback. The Republican continues, however, to post prolifically on his Truth Social platform in a "trolling" style — gratuitous provocations designed to generate a viral reaction. This week, he posted a "ranking" of several American presidents that outraged his opponents. Lincoln and Washington were rated "very good," Clinton "average," while Biden, Obama, and Carter were deemed "failures." He himself, unsurprisingly, appears at the very top — alone — as the "greatest" president.