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How does one speak of a man who loathed making noise? Who shunned grand gestures and every form of display, even though his brilliance and nobility, much to his own chagrin, were locked in thoroughly unfair competition with his extreme modesty? The task is particularly difficult. All the more so because the man himself, never fond of the media, interviews, honors or public exposure, would have disapproved of the rather perilous exercise undertaken by the author of these lines. And yet it is precisely because Sheikh Michel el-Khoury, who passed away on July 4, 2026, just shy of one hundred, had chosen the path of silence and discretion, faithful to his leitmotif that “one must serve rather than serve oneself,” with the state and its primacy taking precedence over everything else, that speaking of him now seems absolutely necessary, at a time when Lebanon is undergoing such profound decay. All the more so because his vision of Lebanon and of its role remains more relevant than ever. May he show some indulgence toward this attempt, which is less that of a journalist than of a loyal and grateful friend, to bear humble witness to what he was and to what he will remain in memory, if only in the memories of those who had the privilege of knowing him and spending time with him. The Two “Fathers-References” Brilliance. Nobility. Silent devotion to the public good, the state and the homeland. If one had to choose a triptych with which to approach Sheikh Michel’s immensely rich and complex personality, it would be this one. Béchara el-Khoury, the first president of the sovereign Lebanese Republic, had judged correctly when he once let slip this superb, laconic remark: “My son Michel is a prince. What am I saying, a prince… an archduke!” Michel el-Khoury was indeed a grand seigneur of Lebanese politics, in the most honorable and graceful sense the expression can hold. A prince in the service of the Republic and democracy… in the irrational age of the mastiffs and wolfhounds of Lebanese politicking, obsessively in pursuit of honors… and patrons. But could it have been otherwise when the name of his father, Bechara, was inseparable from the independence of Greater Lebanon, and that of his spiritual father, his uncle Michel Chiha, from the Lebanese Constitution? Escaping the father’s name was impossible. So much so that, even past the age of ninety, and despite an exceptional career in public life and an impressive culture, he would note, with a certain weariness, that the media still continued to saddle him with his father’s first name, as though his own were still not enough… Fate was ironic. It had never ceased taunting Sheikh Michel, with no regard for his advanced age, his career or his experience. The Journey of a Rebel Yet from his earliest youth, the man had fought the very concept of political inheritance and nepotism, which naturally placed him in conflict with his own family. He certainly admired, respected and was deeply attached to the paternal figure. As an adolescent, he had watched him defy, at the risk of his life, the rifles of the Senegalese soldiers of the French Mandate when, in November 1943, rude, insulting, threatening and violent, they came to the presidential palace in Kantari to take him to the citadel of Rashaya. The episode remained engraved in young Michel’s memory to the very end, all the more so because his mother, Laure Chiha, suffered a cardiac episode that day, from whose after-effects she would die a few years later. The Mandate authorities had refused emergency assistance to the First Lady: they first had to make sure that the president was in detention… One may therefore say that Sheikh Michel lost his mother as a collateral victim of the struggle for the independence of his motherland, Greater Lebanon… That same mother who had asked him to promise never to enter politics, and to whom he had, quite precisely, promised nothing… Yet when the head of state, whose close entourage had already been touched by corruption and undermined by clientelism, decided to renew his mandate, the son rebelled and left the family home to seek refuge with his mentor, Michel Chiha, who was himself opposed to Sheikh Bechara’s anti-republican initiative. Nor was the quarrel confined to the purely familial sphere: in September 1950, Sheikh Michel spoke openly at Michel Asmar’s Lebanese Cenacle to criticize his father’s course. Bear the name, yes. But not at any price. Here is an excerpt from the lecture: “We achieved independence. And then what? What has the state of independence done? What has it accomplished in building the state, building the homeland and building the citizen? Nothing. We have gone backwards… to Ottoman habits and colonial practices. We have returned to corruption, negligence and decline… Those born with the independence of 1943 are growing older without our having made the effort, or fulfilled the duty, of bringing them together as true Lebanese… We must eliminate the remnants of the past and this deadly inertia of obsolete methods inherited from the Mandate and earlier periods; we must also remove a moral obstacle: the mentality of ‘divide and rule.’” The son of independence thus chose… independence. And it remained a constant, a coherent and assumed choice throughout his career, despite his long-standing affinity with Chehabism. As when, after the war, he decided to resign during his second term as governor of the Banque du Liban because of his firm opposition to Prime Minister Rafic Hariri’s policy of indebtedness. Hariri urged him to remain in office, despite their disagreements and in the name of their friendship. Sheikh Michel’s reply was, as usual, cutting: “It is so that we may remain friends that I am leaving…” Although he presided for a time over the Destour at the threshold of the civil war, Michel el-Khoury refused to turn it into a traditional party and tried, unsuccessfully, to modernize it. He even dared, ultimate sacrilege, to propose to Raymond Eddé, son of his father’s arch-enemy Emile Eddé, a merger with the National Bloc in order to counter the rise of the militias and the siren call of violence… only to receive an icy reply from the “Amid”: “Never will the son of Émile Eddé place his hand in that of the son of Béchara el-Khoury!” Raymond Eddé, statesman though he was, was no Charles de Gaulle… The General, for his part, had shown himself considerably more chivalrous, and more reasonable, when Fouad Chehab, then president of the Republic, entrusted Sheikh Michel with a mission to the Élysée aimed at halting the sale of French-owned land in Lebanon to the Palestinian banker Youssef Baidas. De Gaulle, who rose for no one, received the son of his old adversary standing, surveyed him from the height of his imposing frame and told him in a tone that brooked no reply: “I know whose son you are… One day, you will regret having driven the French out of Lebanon!” Be that as it may, the French president then facilitated the young emissary’s mission, which proved successful. It was in the wake of that mission that, in 1967, Michel el-Khoury was asked by Jean Kaplan of the Suez Group to take charge of Banque Libano-Française, marking the beginning of a long career in banking. The Man Behind the Scenes Michel el-Khoury gradually became the man of subtle political and diplomatic missions, carried out in the shadows, first for Chehab and then for Charles Helou, who entrusted him with the leadership of the strategic National Council for Tourism, which enabled Chehabism to pursue a genuine parallel diplomacy discreetly. It was a role that suited him perfectly, entirely in keeping with his personality as a servant of the state and a man behind the scenes, far from the glare of the spotlight… even though he also served as a minister, notably as minister of Defense before the Six-Day War. In that capacity, during meetings with his counterparts and with Arab military officials, he was able to see, from facts and projections alike, that the region’s armies faced a crushing defeat by the Israel Defense Forces in the event of confrontation. The gulf between the reality of the balance of power and Nasser’s populist rhetoric was alarming. The defeat, followed by the extraordinary wave of popular fervor surrounding the Egyptian rais, left a lasting mark on him. He immediately recognized in it one of the region’s most persistent ills: the hold a leader could exert over the collective imagination even in the face of disaster on such a scale… That discretion, combined with elegance, also ensured that he would be regularly consulted and carefully listened to by foreign chancelleries. Guided by an ethical and political framework whose sole driving force was service to the homeland, its independence, sovereignty and permanence, Michel el-Khoury was undoubtedly one of the rare political figures who asked for nothing for himself… which made him a man worthy of trust. Because he was incorruptible. An official mission to Ernest Bevin, in Attlee’s Britain, had taught him an unforgettable lesson in this regard. In the aftermath of the war, he had thought, purely as a gesture of courtesy, of offering chocolates to his British interlocutors at a time when the country was still suffering privation. But the gift was returned to him: in a country still subject to restrictions and rationing, public officials would not accept privileges unavailable to ordinary citizens. Michel el-Khoury remained deeply marked by this. What he admired was not austerity for its own sake, but the almost sacred idea that a public official must be subject to the same rules as everyone else. For a man who would spend his life denouncing clientelism and corruption, the anecdote amounted to a lesson in civic virtue. Values for Lebanon But how, then, does one tell the story of a nearly invisible man, a man who, like his great friend, lifelong companion and confidant Fouad Boutros, burned all of his archives before his death so as to leave no trace? A man who systematically refused to write his memoirs, despite repeated requests from various quarters, including the author of these lines? A man who left behind only one meditative, intimate, introspective, anguished and sublime work, Ruptures vespérales , strongly evocative of one of his masters, Emil Cioran… and signed with a pen name, Michel Delescure? Precisely through the values that guided his political action and run through his entire career. Thus, when speaking of Bechara el-Khoury and Michel Chiha, Michel el-Khoury would express a visceral rejection of the very notion of “tolerance,” contemptible in his eyes, and insist instead on the importance and meaning of “sharing,” which the two men held in common and which he had inherited from them. This foundational idea of “sharing” no doubt explains the attachment of Michel el-Khoury’s two “fathers-references” to Greater Lebanon, the National Pact and living together. For Chiha, Sheikh Michel explained, the confessional system was ultimately meant to lead toward an inclusive citizenship, not sink into tribal sectarianism. As for Bechara el-Khoury, according to Sheikh Michel, he had argued in the manuscript of the fourth volume of his memoirs, destroyed during the war in the fire that consumed the Kantari library, that his successor as president of the Republic should be Riad el-Solh, the Sunni prime minister… a sign that the system was not meant to ossify, but on the contrary to evolve, and that what mattered was a specifically Lebanese sense of belonging, not residual affiliations… Michel el-Khoury would defend this guiding conception to the end. It also explains his rejection, in Chiha’s spirit, of the State of Israel, which he regarded as the antithesis of Greater Lebanon’s pluralist model and which, in his view, played a pivotal role from its creation in 1948 in sabotaging the young Lebanese state and its development. Indeed, during a visit to the United States in the 1960s, he became embroiled in a public verbal clash with a university professor who, during a conference, openly defended Israel’s designs on neighboring countries… That man would go on to become the all-powerful future secretary of state under Nixon. His name? Henry Kissinger… It also explains his contempt for populism and for fascistic sectarian excesses within the various communities. Uncompromising when it came to independence and to a certain vision of Lebanon, and capable, when necessary, of silencing an adversary with a single well-aimed retort, Michel el-Khoury was above all a man of mediation, measure and dialogue, faithful to the teachings of his mentor Chiha. Thus, when President Elias Sarkis sought, through Sheikh Michel, then serving his first term as governor of the Central Bank, to mediate with the Palestinians in order to preserve the continuity and functioning of state institutions, Bachir Gemayel, the dominant Christian strongman in East Beirut, threatened to humiliate him publicly on the grounds that he was betraying Christian esprit de corps. In the same republican spirit, Michel el-Khoury firmly opposed all para-state and anti-state ventures, from the Syrian occupation to the militias, against whom he once physically placed himself as a human shield to protect the Banque du Liban building and its employees when gunmen attempted to storm it, and later to Iranian influence exerted through Hezbollah. On February 6, 1984, as the Amal uprising split the army and plunged the capital back into violence, he watched the country unravel and said: “The Pact has shattered.” On March 14, 2005, violence rekindled a measure of hope after the assassination of Rafic Hariri. The Syrian occupation came to an end, only to be replaced by Tehran’s yoke. Sheikh Michel, who had been active in the Kornet Chehwan Gathering under the aegis of his friend Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, another convinced “Chihist,” joined the March 14 coalition… only to find there the same endemic sickness he had fought throughout his life: struggles for power, sectarian and identity-based retrenchment, and the mediocrity of decision-makers… all of which led to the nightmare of Michel Aoun’s “consensual” election to the presidency of the Republic, in his eyes the quintessence of populism and a symbol of anti-republicanism. The spirit of Bechara el-Khoury’s independent Lebanon, Michel Chiha’s republican Lebanon and Fouad Chehab’s institutional Lebanon was being trampled underfoot in the service of the personalization of power, demagoguery, populism, and the primacy of blackmail and power politics over democracy and the institutional spirit. “Without Freedom, Lebanon Is a Fiction” At bottom, his entire conception of Lebanon rested on a difficult articulation between freedom, pluralism and independence. A critic of the Lebanese system? Nostalgic for its confessional rigidities? Far from it. That was not Sheikh Michel’s way. For him, despite its flaws, the system had preserved one irreplaceable good: freedom. Political, intellectual, religious and economic freedom, without which Lebanon, in his eyes, would lose even its raison d’être. Despite its defects and failings, the pluralism of Greater Lebanon was the guarantor of that freedom, and any project seeking to dismantle it, dilute it, his father had not had Antoun Saadeh executed for nothing, or break it apart under any pretext or name whatsoever, constituted a real threat to that fragile equilibrium standing sentinel over liberty. “Without freedom, Lebanon becomes a fiction,” he stressed. Yet that freedom could not survive without evolution. From the 1960s onward, Sheikh Michel advocated a gradual transition away from political confessionalism, the primacy of competence in public administration, civil marriage, and eventually the secularization of the state. But not through revolution. “It is possible to change the system from within the system itself,” he would say in substance. Any lasting reform required, first of all, a transformation of mentalities through education and citizenship. For Sheikh Michel, Lebanon possessed something profoundly precious: precisely this ability to enable different communities to live together, what René Maheu called a “style of civilization.” But the country had betrayed that vocation by allowing confessionalism to degenerate into clientelism, identity-based enclosure and an instrument of foreign interference. The Pact, Yes, but the Human Being Above All Deeply attached to the Pact, Sheikh Michel faulted its authors for having left it vague, allowing the Lebanese to quarrel over its interpretation while ultimately agreeing never truly to define it. Before the Taif Agreement, he therefore called for a new pact built around new common objectives for all Lebanese, along with a struggle against a form of collective defeatism and the creation of genuine opportunities for progress for all. “The Pact was a necessary foundation when it was established, but it becomes a negative foundation if one wants to make it the basis for building a nation. The positive foundation necessary for the construction of modern states is not to be found in the Pact.” For him, the problem clearly did not lie in texts alone, but in people. “We must accelerate the citizen’s apprenticeship of citizenship, so as to make him a good citizen; then it will no longer be impossible to build a good homeland,” he wrote in 1970. He added: “The fundamental need is to create a party based on a doctrine, bringing together the different components of which Lebanon is made. If such a party existed today, I would be the first to join it. I would have assumed my share of responsibility and fulfilled my duty in this field.” “The system needs great undertakings: first will, then education, then morality (…) I have found that change and reform must begin in school, in the family environment, through education.” Above all, citizenship required that every Lebanese be able to “feel well,” meaning that he or she must enjoy living conditions capable of strengthening attachment to Lebanon, he noted. “The Pact of 1943 cannot endure for long if one of the groups that accepted it is condemned to a difficult life. (…) A person becomes attached to his homeland only if he finds there the conditions that allow him to live decently.” And he stressed: “It is not enough for Lebanon to be a living example of Muslim-Christian coexistence; Christians and Muslims must also possess a permanent and certain will to remain Lebanese.” By the 1970s, however, his judgment of political leaders was already unsparing: “We sometimes demand the impossible even though we know it is impossible, and yet we continue to demand it. Why? Because some people do not really want to do anything.” A Neutrality Inseparable from Living Together Above all, Sheikh Michel defended a singular conception of Lebanese neutrality. Not isolation, but precisely its opposite: Lebanon’s ability to be present in several worlds at once, Arab without being absorbed, open to the West without being subordinated to it, speaking to everyone without becoming anyone’s satellite. A neutrality of openness and sovereignty. “But for that, Lebanon must produce and know what it is,” he would say, and above all remain itself. Years later, he added: “Lebanon is a frontier running through every Lebanese. But that frontier is also a weld.” In other words, pluralism and living together enriched the Lebanese individual with a complex personality, enabling him to feel and think with members of other communities through a model of empathy, potentially defusing what Amin Maalouf would later call “murderous identities.” That, for him, was the true Lebanese way of being. More than half a century later, this “Chihist”-inspired formulation of Lebanon’s vocation, in a world increasingly sealed into identity-based enclosures, remains strikingly relevant. The vision of positive neutrality that Michel el-Khoury formulated at a lecture at the Lebanese Cenacle in May 1961 bears a remarkable resemblance to the way this principle remains vital to Lebanon’s survival in 2026: protection from other people’s wars, far removed from any temptation toward autarky, while preserving an active Lebanese role in its environment. The Debt of Loyalty But one story perhaps best illuminates the importance Sheikh Michel attached to empathy and alterity in his conception of politics, in keeping with the integral humanism defended by Chiha. It concerns his traumatic experience in Iraq under President Chamoun, which taught him, in a far more brutal fashion, a fundamental lesson in the ethics of life. He had just lunched in Baghdad with the young King Faisal II, for whom he was supervising a construction project, when, on July 14, 1958, the revolution overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in blood. Michel el-Khoury then saw workers on the construction site erecting gallows for the royal family. One worker confided to him that one of them was intended for him, because he was “a friend of the king”… The chief engineer of the site saved his life by rushing him straight to the airport. Back in Beirut, he realized that night that his hair had turned white: he had not felt fear in the moment, but the body, for its part, had kept the account. Years later, when his providential savior in turn found himself in danger, imprisoned and sentenced to death in Iraq, Sheikh Michel mobilized his connections, notably through Fouad Chehab, to obtain his pardon and enable him to leave the country. He succeeded, at least for a time: the man was later assassinated after returning to Iraq. For Sheikh Michel el-Khoury, a debt of loyalty is never extinguished. It was a maxim he would make his own in both his personal life and his political conduct. Nearly half a century later, he continued to speak of that man with a troubling mixture of gratitude and anxiety, still wondering whether he had proved worthy of the man who had saved his life. Nobility of soul either exists or it does not. It cannot be invented. Perhaps that, in the end, was what Bechara el-Khoury had glimpsed when he called him an “archduke”… The Renaissance Man Michel el-Khoury was also a man of almost disconcerting breadth and eclecticism of culture. Names would surface casually in conversation, without his ever thinking to derive prestige from them: Chaplin, whom he met in London, Cioran, Stockhausen, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, among so many other writers, artists, thinkers and distinguished figures from the political, religious, social and cultural worlds. He could move effortlessly from a discussion of the Lebanese Constitution to contemporary music, from Chiha to Paul Valéry. During a trip I made to Sète in 2018, he asked me to pay my respects in his name at Valéry’s grave, another of his masters. Sheikh Michel, the gentleman always impeccable in his refinement, had no need for displays. He had no need to be demonstrative. No greed, no hunger for honors or recognition. Ruptures vespérales , the only intimate trace he left behind, instead reveals a man haunted by solitude, identity, time and, above all, absence. “It is fear, in the end, that makes me write, a phobia of absence,” he confesses there. Every word he traced thus became, in a sense, a weapon against erasure. There is something both strange and moving in the contradiction: Michel el-Khoury, who feared absence and struggled against nothingness, nevertheless refused to organize his own posterity. Or perhaps, quite simply, living itself, the acts of life he left behind in the memories of those close to him, was the only posterity he needed, one worth far more than the trappings of an illusory glory recorded on perishable paper… For this Renaissance man, almost universal in his curiosities, writing thus became a form of existential resistance. Lebanon’s Death in His Soul Can one live, for better and for worse, until one no longer wishes to? At ninety-five, Michel el-Khoury would say to his rare visitors: “My friends are no longer of this world. I have long outlived my time on earth. But Death does not want me…” His political disillusionment had been immense. From his youth onward, he had tirelessly denounced less the imperfection of institutions than the mediocrity of those who distorted them. “Too many people serve themselves, and too few serve.” Perhaps his entire political disillusionment was contained in that sentence. His former classmate Hassan Rifai, who had shared the same school bench with him at La Sagesse, would reach much the same diagnosis in his own way before his death in September 2025. Fouad Boutros did too. And Samir Frangié, who had already been battling cancer for some time, chose, after March 14’s capitulation to Hezbollah and the compromise that brought Michel Aoun to the presidency of the Republic in 2016, to withdraw from everything and return home to die, deeply wounded by political disillusionment and bitterness. Along with a few others, they belonged not to a generation miraculously spared populism, for their era had more than its share, but to another political tradition, one synonymous with restraint, competence, devotion to the state and the conviction that dialogue remains a foundational element of politics. But Michel el-Khoury’s disillusionment eventually reached something far deeper than politics. In September 2020, during the centenary of Greater Lebanon, one month after the Beirut port explosion, he confided to me over the telephone: “I am no longer proud to belong to this Lebanon. I no longer recognize myself in it at all. I do not want to rest in Lebanese soil. I wish to be buried in France.” Coming from the man who had written that “Lebanon is an act of faith before it is a political formula,” those words carried the violence of an intimate rupture. The tragedy of losing the motherland had struck once again. Michel el-Khoury left this world on tiptoe. He withdrew behind the doors of his home when his body could endure no more, then faded away as he had served: with complete discretion. During our last telephone conversation, he swallowed back his sobs before telling me: “Michel, wherever I go, you will always be with me, and I know that I will always be with you.” Sheikh Michel had spent his life erasing his traces. But, may he forgive me, he did not succeed, and never will, in erasing that trace.

In Damascus, Tuesday evening's announcement by the leader of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of the group's dissolution and the integration of its fighters into the Syrian army remains a landmark event due to its highly symbolic significance. It speaks to President Ahmad al-Sharaa's determination to rebuild a state capable of embracing all Syrian communities and ethnic groups — some of which, like the Kurds, had eventually developed their own institutions. This is precisely what the Turkish presidency noted on Wednesday, stating that "at this stage, the dissolution of the SDF represents an important step toward stability in Syria." Neighboring Lebanon, meanwhile, continues to wrestle with its own contradictions. On one hand, the official discourse reflects — proportions kept in mind — what Ahmad al-Sharaa is doing in his own country. On the other, the reality on the ground continues to assert itself forcefully, standing as an obstacle to any progress toward Lebanon becoming a genuine state in the true sense of the word. By continually trying to accommodate this reality — which can be summed up by the influence of the Amal-Hezbollah tandem, hostile to any change to a destructive status quo that has persisted for decades — and by banking on the passage of time, official Lebanon is missing one opportunity after another. The question of Hezbollah's disarmament remains one of the main obstacles to rebuilding the state. President Joseph Aoun continues to advocate for direct negotiations with Israel as the only way, he said Wednesday, to avoid another war with Israel, allow the army to reassert control over the territory, secure the release of Lebanese prisoners held by Israel, and rebuild southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, he acknowledged that these talks are running into obstacles, though he did not elaborate on the matter. It was U.S. Ambassador to Beirut Michel Issa who was more forthcoming. Speaking after a meeting with the Grand Mufti of the Republic, Abdel Latif Deriane, the diplomat stated plainly that no agreement capable of ending the hostilities could be reached as long as Hezbollah did not surrender its weapons. Michel Issa questioned "why Israel should be asked to do everything while Hezbollah does nothing," expressing surprise that the Lebanese state was piling demands on Israel while refraining from asking Hezbollah to hand over its arms. This is the main obstacle to resuming bilateral negotiations, with the eighth round expected to take place in early September — a date that had yet to be confirmed and still has not been. The American ambassador remained vague on the subject, saying only that technical discussions take place whenever an issue arises. He noted delays in implementing what had been agreed upon during previous rounds of diplomatic and military negotiations. Meanwhile, as the Lebanese army continues to seize weapons likely destined for Hezbollah at the Lebanese-Syrian border, the Israeli army is pressing ahead with its operations in southern Lebanon. It announced Wednesday on its X account that it had destroyed more than 400 "terrorist" infrastructures over the past several weeks and seized large quantities of weapons and military equipment. Military threats and economic pressure On the U.S.-Iran front, the confrontation continues through an exchange of threats and economic pressure. That pressure is beginning to show results, as evidenced by the continued collapse of the Iranian rial and the long lines forming at gas stations across Iranian cities. Iranian authorities continue to insist, however, that they are fully prepared to weather the situation, despite the economic difficulties acknowledged by President Masoud Pezeshkian. Tehran thus claims to have rebuilt its military capabilities following the conflict, "thanks to the arrival of new systems from the defense industry, the army, and some also imported from abroad," according to its army spokesman, Mohammad Akraminia. Four power plants are also said to have been rebuilt. On the economic front, President Pezeshkian continues to advocate for "dialogue and negotiation," while insisting that Washington will gain "nothing" through its unprecedented new economic pressure. The United States, for its part, appears intent on maintaining the unprecedented economic D-Day until after the U.S. midterm elections in early November, according to senior American officials cited by AFP, which is relaying Israel's Channel 12. According to the same channel, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly outlined two objectives on which the United States plans to focus in the coming months: increasing economic pressure on Iran and normalizing the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, in order to restore oil traffic through this strategic waterway. On this subject, President Donald Trump, who reaffirmed on Wednesday that Iran's Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei is not dead but "gravely wounded," stated that "all mines had been removed and/or destroyed in the international waters of Hormuz." On his social network, Truth Social, he also announced that the strait "was under American control" — a claim Tehran has denied — and threatened Oman with bombardment should the sultanate "get in the way" of the United States' path through Hormuz, currently Tehran's only remaining point of leverage. On Wednesday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced "certain agreements" with Oman regarding the management of the strait, "concerning each country's share of the strait's waters and Iran and Oman's respective shares of its revenues," according to their spokesman, Hossein Mohebi. The CIA Director in Moscow Also at the center of Wednesday's news was a rare visit by the CIA director to Moscow on Tuesday. Donald Trump, however, downplayed its significance, describing it as "semi-routine." He stated, during an interview, that the trip was linked neither to Iran nor to Russian threats against NATO. According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, it falls within the framework of "exchanges between intelligence services." It remains the case that Russian President Vladimir Putin is set to meet with his Iranian counterpart next week, on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump rightly drew attention to an aspect of the war in Iran that some Western political leaders and media outlets have conspicuously overlooked: the humanitarian dimension of the Iranian crisis, and, more specifically, the murderous and appalling conduct of certain power centers within the ruling establishment in Tehran. As part of their campaign of repression and coercion, they have resorted to the near-daily execution and public hanging from cranes of schoolchildren, teenagers under 18 and young university students, seeking to terrorize the population and create an atmosphere of fear designed to suppress any attempt at a popular uprising. “The failing Islamic Republic of Iran is not paying large segments of their military, while at the same time killing protesters, even when they are not protesting, at levels not seen before. It is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions,” President Trump said bluntly. It is precisely these executions of teenagers and young people “on a scale never seen before” that certain supposedly “right-thinking” Western political leaders and media outlets refuse to acknowledge. In doing so, they normalize this abhorrent practice of hanging people from cranes, as well as abducting teenagers – several cases of child abductions and disappearances have been reported in recent days – in an attempt to create a coercive climate of terror before the situation spills into the streets under the mounting pressure of an increasingly severe socioeconomic collapse. No Reaction Yet to the Economic D-Day On the practical front, political and economic circles around the world are closely watching to gauge the real impact of the economic war – dubbed the “economic D-Day” – officially and dramatically launched on Monday by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Reactions from European and Arab countries are still awaited, particularly when it comes to implementing the measures announced by Secretary Bessent. As we wait for the repercussions of this economic D-Day to become clearer and settle into focus, the ever-present issue of the Strait of Hormuz is once again coming to the fore, further underscoring the deep divide that continues to separate Washington and Tehran. President Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. Navy had informed him that all the mines threatening traffic through the Strait of Hormuz had been destroyed or removed. U.S. officials cited by Axios said that, over the past several months, underwater drones had inspected the strait and detected around 100 mines, which were subsequently destroyed or removed by private companies. The officials said that clearing the mines would facilitate the movement of ships through the strait, “allowing oil exports to international markets to increase.” Against this backdrop, President Trump said that the Islamic Republic had been warned that any vessel attempting to lay new mines would be destroyed without delay. He also pointed to close and meticulous satellite surveillance of the entire length of the strait, but also – and this is the crucial point – of the three nuclear sites destroyed by U.S. aircraft in June 2025 and, above all, of the underground nuclear facility at Pickaxe Mountain, built deep inside a hard granite mountain near the Natanz nuclear complex. The Pickaxe Mountain facility is difficult for U.S. aircraft to reach, and according to various Western sources, Iran is secretly carrying out uranium-enrichment work and assembling long-range ballistic missiles there. The Iranian Regime Resumes Its Stalling Tactics Faced with the U.S. escalation against the Islamic Republic, the mullahs’ regime responded Tuesday by reviving its traditional stalling tactics, clearly aimed at buying time, as it has done for more than two decades, ever since Tehran’s clandestine uranium-enrichment activities came to light in the early 2000s. Apparently at the behest of the mullahs’ regime, the Iranian and Omani foreign ministers met in Tehran on Tuesday for talks that the Iranian regime described as “constructive.” A joint statement issued after the talks stressed the need to resume shipping through the Strait of Hormuz “while preserving the sovereignty and rights of both countries.” In this regard, the statement revived the Iranian proposal, repeatedly put forward by Tehran, to create “a temporary joint corridor through the strait, alongside a joint mine-clearing operation.” This is a way for the mullahs’ regime to maintain the perception that it controls the strait and is solely in charge of managing it… In Syria, Kurdish Forces and Institutions Join the State On an entirely different front, Tuesday, August 25, was marked by a major development of great historical and symbolic significance. Late in the day, Kurdish forces commander Mazloum Abdi announced the dissolution of the Kurdish militia known as the SDF, which had been backed and supported by the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. At the same time, Abdi announced the dissolution of the autonomous administration and all Kurdish bodies attached to it, which will be integrated into Syrian state institutions. The integration of Kurdish forces and structures into the state was formally sealed at a meeting between President Ahmed al-Sharaa and Mazloum Abdi. The chapter on the latent conflict between the former Assad regime and the Kurdish minority, which was largely ostracized by Presidents Assad, father and son, thus appears to have been closed… What remains is to turn this qualitative leap into reality and firmly consolidate it.

In April 2026, Wissam Saadé delivered four lectures at the University of Bologna. The first, at the invitation of Professor Giovanni Giorgini, was entitled “The Prophet and the Philosopher: The Hierarchy of Knowledge between Avicenna’s Falsafa and al-Kirmānī’s Ismaili Neoplatonism.” Its text is presented here in a revised and expanded version, as part of a series of ten articles. This series explores the intellectual landscape of Neoplatonism in Islam through a comparative reading of Avicenna and al-Kirmānī. Although both thinkers share a broad Neoplatonic horizon, shaped by a metaphysics of emanation, a hierarchy of being, and a synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought, they develop two distinct philosophical projects: Avicenna within the Peripatetic tradition of falsafa , and al-Kirmānī within the framework of Ismaili theology. Despite the differences between their respective intellectual contexts, their systems remain in constant dialogue around the nature of knowledge, the relationship between reason and revelation, and the ascent of the soul. Their respective projects also embody two contrasting conceptions of the political, illuminating different ways of thinking about the place of philosophy in relation to authority, law, and the organization of the community. This article constitutes the tenth and final part of this series. X - Leo Strauss: Esoteric Writing and the Recovery of Practical Wisdom in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy In the context of the Theologico-Political Treatise , Spinoza’s approach functions as a brilliant form of political neutralization. By relegating theology to the realm of the imagination and assigning philosophy to that of the intellect, Spinoza sought to “contain” theology by lowering its metaphysical status. Theology remains a necessary “salvation for the ignorant,” providing a simplified moral code centered on justice and charity that maintains social order. For the philosopher, however, Reason is liberated to pursue the “knowledge of the whole” without ecclesiastical oversight. Yet the more delicate point is that, for Spinoza, while philosophy cannot as such be popularized for the masses, it must nonetheless exert an influence on the common people through the medium of politics. Without this political mediation, the alternative would be the reverse: the unchecked dominance of the passions or the return of theologico-political tyranny. This leads us to understand the inherently conflictual nature of this political mediation. Filippo Del Lucchese, a leading contemporary scholar who emphasizes the central roles of conflict, power, and the “multitude” in Spinoza’s thought, argues that politics is the battlefield on which reason attempts to organize the multitude. This organization is essential to prevent it from being weaponized as an instrument of tyrants. In his work, particularly Conflict, Power, and Multitude in Machiavelli and Spinoza , Del Lucchese rejects traditional “liberal” interpretations that view the state as the product of a social contract aimed at achieving a static and definitive peace. Instead, he contends that, for Spinoza as for Machiavelli, conflict is not a failure of the state but an inescapable and productive force in political life. Within Leo Strauss’s interpretive framework, Baruch Spinoza emerges not merely as a critic of religion but as a profoundly strategic thinker whose philosophical project unfolds under conditions of prudence and concealment. Strauss characterizes Spinoza as a “master of deception,” suggesting that his apparent moderation conceals a more radical intention. Religion, in this reading, is reduced to a “necessary poison” for the multitude, an instrument of social cohesion rather than a bearer of truth. Spinoza’s redefinition of faith as mere obedience marks a decisive contraction of its epistemic scope: by severing faith from knowledge, he effectively disqualifies theology from making truth claims that could rival those of philosophy or science. The consequence is not an outright refutation of religion, but its quiet marginalization. From a Straussian perspective, the celebrated “separation” between theology and philosophy is less a principled settlement than a tactical armistice. It allows philosophy to survive within a world still governed by theology while gradually eroding the intellectual authority of revelation. Spinoza’s seemingly respectful treatment of Scripture, his “kindness” toward the Bible, can thus be read as a gesture of strategic domestication: religion is not destroyed, but retired from the domain of truth. In this sense, philosophy secures its autonomy not through open confrontation, but through a subtle reconfiguration of the terms of discourse. This interpretation, however, has been contested by contemporary scholars such as Jonathan Israel and Steven Nadler, who regard Strauss’s reading as excessively conspiratorial. Against the hypothesis of esoteric manipulation, they emphasize the sincerity of Spinoza’s project. His reduction of religion to a minimal ethical core, justice and charity, is understood not as a covert strategy to dismantle revelation, but as a genuine attempt to establish civil peace in a context marked by sectarian violence. On this view, Spinoza does not seek to deceive the multitude, but to make coexistence possible by articulating a form of religion stripped of dogmatic antagonism. A further dimension of Strauss’s interpretation emerges in his pairing of Spinoza with Machiavelli. For Strauss, the two form a transhistorical “duo” of covert revolutionaries, jointly responsible for inaugurating the modern project. Machiavelli, described as the “teacher of evil” in a technical rather than moral sense, initiates the break with classical political philosophy by lowering its aspirations. The central question shifts from “How should men live?” to the more pragmatic “How do men live?”, a transition that replaces the pursuit of the summum bonum with the imperatives of security and power. Yet Machiavelli’s innovation remains, in Strauss’s view, incomplete: his political realism lacks a systematic response to the enduring authority of religion. It is here that Spinoza intervenes. By providing a metaphysical and epistemological foundation for Machiavelli’s political insights, he completes the modern turn. If Machiavelli supplies the political technique, Spinoza neutralizes its principal obstacle: the theological claim to superior authority. Through biblical criticism and the strict delimitation of faith, Spinoza ensures that the “priest” can no longer challenge the “prince.” What was in Machiavelli a persistent conflict between political and religious authority is transformed, in Spinoza, into a stabilized order, ultimately compatible with democratic forms of governance. Reason becomes the instrument through which the multitude is organized, no longer as a volatile force but as a structured component of the state. Yet for Strauss, this apparent achievement conceals a deeper loss. The conjunction of Machiavelli and Spinoza produces not only the modern state but also the “modern crisis.” By lowering the horizons of human aspiration to security, utility, and peaceful coexistence, modernity sacrifices the very notions of greatness and truth that animated classical philosophy. What remains is a civilization oriented toward comfort and self-preservation, but deprived of any substantive account of the good life. In Strauss’s view, Spinoza’s “sin” was his effort to sap the vital tension between Athens and Jerusalem, that essential friction between Reason and Revelation, or Philosophy and Faith. By contrast, premodern philosophers sought to maintain this tension through a delicate “esoteric” equilibrium. They did not aim to neutralize one in favor of the other; rather, they lived within the contradiction, preserving the sovereignty of the Law for the many while safeguarding the freedom of the Intellect for the few. These philosophers recognized that their rational inquiries often threatened the very social and religious myths required for communal stability. Consequently, they wrote for a dual audience: the masses, who received a message of piety and law, and the philosophical elite, who could discern the “hidden,” often heterodox, rationalist meanings between the lines. Strauss, Phronesis, and the Art of Writing Strauss argued that modern political science has failed precisely because it attempts either to ignore or to resolve the theologico-political problem. In his view, Machiavelli and Spinoza are the primary culprits in this regard. He advocated a return to the “ancients,” Plato and Aristotle, and to the “medievals,” above all Maimonides and al-Fārābī, admiring in particular the way Islamic and Jewish thinkers handled this tension. Unlike the Christian tradition, which employed “Natural Law” as a means of harmonizing reason and faith, the Jewish and Islamic traditions understood religion primarily as Law, Torah or sharī ʿ a . This structural reality forced the thinker to become a “political philosopher,” one who publicly respects the Law while privately pursuing the Truth. For Strauss, “writing between the lines” is a form of phronesis . It is the “practical wisdom” of knowing what to say in public in order to satisfy the “city,” while reserving dangerous truths for the “few.” If a philosopher lacks this phronesis , he either becomes a target of tyranny or, worse, inadvertently prepares the ground for a new kind of tyranny by being too “honest” about the instability of social myths. Al-Fārābī and Maimonides are, in this sense, the supreme masters of the “art of writing” because they operated in worlds where religion was defined as Law. This created a unique structural pressure: the philosopher could not simply disagree with “dogma”; he had to navigate an encompassing legal framework. Strauss’s discovery of al-Fārābī’s Philosophy of Plato marked a turning point in his own intellectual career. He argued that al-Fārābī used Plato as a “mask” through which to discuss his own radical ideas about Islam. Strauss noted that in al-Fārābī’s summaries of Plato, he often conspicuously omits or downplays the immortality of the soul. For Strauss, this “silence” itself functioned as a loud signal: al-Fārābī was suggesting to the philosophical elite that the afterlife might be a “pious myth” necessary for social order rather than a philosophical truth. Al-Fārābī thus reimagined the Prophet as a “Philosopher-King” or “Supreme Legislator.” By framing the Prophet in Platonic terms, he subtly suggested that the essence of prophecy is political science. He presented the Law as a set of symbols intended to guide the masses toward virtue, while the philosopher understands the rational “demonstration” underlying those symbols. If al-Fārābī used masks, Maimonides used traps. In the introduction to The Guide for the Perplexed , Maimonides explicitly warns the reader that he will employ contradictory statements in order to conceal the truth. He lists seven reasons why a book may contain contradictions. The seventh is the most famous: contradiction may be used deliberately to conceal a truth that the common reader is not prepared to grasp. Maimonides describes metaphysical truth as a flash of lightning in a dark night. His writing strategy mimics this image: a truth is revealed in one chapter, only to be “covered over” by a more traditional or exoteric statement in the next. Maimonides also treats the most sacred parts of the Torah, Ma ʿ aseh Bereshit and Ma ʿ aseh Merkavah , as corresponding to physics and metaphysics. Strauss argues that Maimonides’ “secret” was a radically Aristotelian understanding of nature and divinity, one he could disclose only indirectly in order to avoid charges of heresy. Strauss admired al-Fārābī and Maimonides precisely because they did not try to “harmonize” Reason and Revelation in the Thomistic manner. They left the tension unresolved. For them, the Law was the nomos of the city and Truth the physis of the world. They inhabited the “gap” between the two, using writing itself to build a bridge that only the worthy could cross. While al-Fārābī and Maimonides lived within the “gap” between nomos and physis , Baruch Spinoza sought to close it permanently. Where al-Fārābī used a “Platonic mask” and Maimonides “intentional contradictions” to keep philosophy private and protected, Spinoza used critique to make the philosophical spirit public and political. He exchanged the “noble dissimulation” of the ancients for the “naked truth” of the Enlightenment. In Strauss’s eyes, the medievals were more realistic because they accepted that the “City” and “Philosophy” would always remain in tension. Plato, Esotericism, and the “Impossible City” According to the Straussian perspective, this “reading between the lines” is a perennial feature of the history of philosophy. Strauss’s interpretation of Plato is defined by the conviction that Plato wrote esoterically, shielding his most radical insights beneath a “surface,” or exoteric teaching. This necessity arose from two motives: protecting philosophy from political persecution and preventing the destabilization of shared beliefs essential to a healthy society. Strauss maintained that the Platonic dialogues are never direct statements of Plato’s own views, since the author never speaks in his own voice but only through characters such as Socrates. In this context, Socratic irony becomes a form of “noble dissimulation,” a method by which a superior mind conceals its wisdom either to avoid giving offense or to guide worthy students toward deeper truths. Where a thinker such as Karl Popper reads Plato’s Republic as a literal blueprint for a totalitarian nightmare, Strauss argues that it is, in fact, a profound critique of political idealism. He famously characterized the Kallipolis as “The Impossible City.” Strauss contended that this “city in speech” is intentionally presented as unattainable because it requires a radical abstraction from the human body, including the abolition of private property and the dissolution of the family, both of which human nature strongly resists. By exposing the extreme, and often grotesque, measures necessary to achieve “perfect” justice, Plato was not drafting a utopian manual. Rather, he was warning against the fanaticism that arises when one attempts to impose a perfect political order upon an imperfect world. For Strauss, philosophy is inherently subversive. By its very nature, it interrogates the “opinions” that serve as the foundational pillars of any stable society. Every “city” requires “pious myths” or “noble lies” to preserve its internal cohesion and unity. Yet because the philosophical life reveals that the city’s laws are rooted in convention ( nomos ) rather than nature ( physis ), the political order, and the tyrant in particular, will always regard the philosopher with a fundamental, and perhaps justified, suspicion. This is the enduring lesson of the trial and death of Socrates. To survive the perennial threat of tyranny, and to prevent radical philosophical inquiry from inadvertently unraveling the social fabric, Strauss contends that thinkers must master the “Art of Writing.” This esoteric strategy allows the philosopher to appear on the surface as a law-abiding, even traditional, citizen. Meanwhile, the most destabilizing insights remain “hidden between the lines,” reserved for the select few capable of confronting the “truth of the whole” without lapsing into nihilism or revolutionary fanaticism. Philosophy, Tyranny, and the Temptation of the “Platonopolis” Ultimately, the relationship between philosophy and tyranny constitutes the supreme “theologico-political” problem. Strauss explores this tension primarily through his famous dialogue with Alexandre Kojève in On Tyranny , his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero . He argues that philosophy and tyranny are not merely polar opposites but are inextricably linked by a mutual, if fraught, necessity: the philosopher requires the city’s protection, while the city requires the order that only authority can provide. Throughout history, philosophers have been seduced by the prospect of advising the tyrant, or the enlightened despot, in order to bring about a rational social order. The philosopher’s temptation is to transform the world into a “Platonopolis,” a place where the pursuit of truth is institutionalized. Yet Strauss issues a stark warning: when a philosopher seeks to rule directly or to guide the hand of absolute power, philosophy collapses into ideology. By becoming an instrument of statecraft, it loses its essential “searching” or skeptical character, sacrificing its freedom to the demands of political totality. Falsafa as a “Cautious Enlightenment” In the Straussian interpretation of intellectual history, the falsafa tradition, comprising a transreligious linguistic community of Arabic-writing thinkers, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians such as Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī, offers a unique meta-framework that stands in sharp contrast to both Latin Scholasticism and the modern paradigm. While the Latin West sought to harmonize Faith and Reason into a transparent, systematic totality, best exemplified by the Summa Theologiae , the falāsifa maintained an “energetic tension” between these two poles. They did not seek a final, public reconciliation; rather, they lived within the contradiction, employing esotericism as a strategic necessity to protect the purity of the philosophical quest while respecting the social and normative requirements of religious Law. For Strauss, this medieval model represents a “cautious Enlightenment” rooted in phronesis , providing a vital critique of the Western Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The latter was founded upon the conviction that the “exercise of reason” should no longer be restricted to a rare elite but disseminated among the masses. Strauss contends that this project of universal disclosure neglected a long-standing tradition in which truth was recognized as potentially destabilizing, harmful both to the social fabric and to thought itself if exposed without restraint. By seeking to lead the “common people” toward rational thinking without mediation, the modern Enlightenment inadvertently paved the way for nihilism, stripping society of the “noble lies” and shared prejudices necessary for stability. In this context, Strauss identifies a fundamental “lowering of the bar” in early modernity. Thinkers such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke replaced the classical pursuit of human excellence and virtue with a focus on “peace and security.” This shift transformed politics from an art concerned with the cultivation of character and the vision of the philosopher-king into a technical science preoccupied with “rights” and bureaucratic management. Machiavelli’s primary error, in Strauss’s view, was the destruction of the noble lie. By suggesting that lying is structurally bound to politics without distinguishing between its base and noble forms, he eliminated the protective distance between philosophical inquiry and political necessity. The “two-truths” doctrine attributed to falsafa , the distinction between an esoteric, demonstrative truth for the elite and an exoteric, symbolic truth for the public, was thus a safeguard. It allowed thinkers such as al-Fārābī, Maimonides, and Avicenna to navigate the volatility of the masses and the rigidity of institutions. Strauss’s “conservatism” was therefore not a reactionary rejection of reason, but a “rescue mission” aimed at rehabilitating the rational traditions of antiquity and the Middle Ages. He argued that the absence of caution, the modern principle of “truth for all,” converges with the dynamics of “post-truth,” in which unmediated exposure leads to the erosion of genuine meaning. Beyond Strauss: The Return of “Philosophical Religion” Ultimately, however, the nuanced distinctions among these philosophers are precisely what is lost in Leo Strauss’s interpretation. Their respective relationships to the crystallization of falsafa as a “philosophical religion” diverge significantly. From my perspective, the impulse to constitute falsafa as a philosophical religion reached its most potent expression only in the works of al-Kirmānī and Avicenna, although they pursued markedly different strategies. Al-Kirmānī functioned as the “organic philosopher” of the Fatimid project, arguably sacrificing the autonomy of philosophical reason to serve ideological ends. Avicenna, by contrast, achieved this through a conscious decoupling from his Ismaili background; yet, from a strictly Aristotelian vantage point, he engaged in a form of “heresy” by developing the concept of the “Sacred Intellect” ( al- ʿ aql al-qudsī ). The investigation of the concept of a “philosophical religion” demands both rigorous inquiry and heightened conceptual vigilance, particularly when tracing structural continuities between medieval metaphysics and modern rationalism. In the eleventh century, Avicennism emerged not merely as a school of logic, but as a project of philosophical religion. By transforming the Aristotelian “Unmoved Mover” into a source of ontological emanation, Avicenna established a framework in which the human soul’s highest objective is conjunction with the Active Intellect. This system suggests that the philosopher and the prophet draw from the same source. Yet while the prophet receives truth through imaginal intuition, the philosopher attains it through discursive reason. Consequently, falsafa is elevated into a path of spiritual realization that is functionally equivalent, and often intellectually superior, to the observance of traditional religious Law. Parallel to this, the Ismaili project, as articulated in the thought of Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī, constituted a comprehensive philosophical-religious endeavor. Al-Kirmānī functioned as the “organic philosopher” of the Fatimid state, synthesizing Neoplatonic emanationism with political theology in order to provide the regime with a metaphysical foundation. From al-Kirmānī to the Druze Tradition The Druze tradition represents the most distinct historical instance of a community founded explicitly upon such a philosophical religion. Unlike traditional creeds centered on a personal, volitional deity, the Druze faith is rooted in a highly technical Neoplatonic cosmology. Its primary scripture, the Epistles of Wisdom ( Rasā ʾ il al-Ḥikma ), consists of philosophical and theological epistles rather than a conventional scriptural narrative. The “Five Limits” ( al-Ḥudūd ), including the Universal Intellect ( al- ʿ Aql ), the Universal Soul ( al-Nafs ), and the Word ( al-Kalima ), among others, provide a philosophical map of the cosmos. Within this framework, these metaphysical principles are also embodied in figures occupying specific positions within the sacred hierarchy. While Avicenna and al-Kirmānī primarily addressed scholarly and initiatory elites, the Druze project effectively “socialized” these philosophical building blocks, employing them to define a resilient communal and spiritual identity. Spinozism as a Modern “Philosophical Religion” If these medieval precedents are maintained, a critical question emerges concerning the status of Spinozism in the modern epoch. While Spinozism transcends a mere hermeneutic of Baruch Spinoza’s personal corpus, it fundamentally constitutes a philosophical religion in its own right. Although the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus formally mandates a sharp demarcation between theology, relegated to the sphere of social obedience, and philosophy, understood as the sole domain of truth, the Ethics effectively collapses this distinction. In the latter, these spheres are reintegrated into a singular, immanent “religion of reason,” in which the traditional pursuit of piety is subsumed by the intellectual drive toward metaphysical necessity. In this light, the Ethics functions as an ultimate scripture. Written with geometric, almost ritualistic rigor, it serves as a manual for “blessedness” ( beatitudo ) and liberation from the “bondage” of the passions. It fulfills the traditional religious function of providing a path to salvation, yet does so without the need for church, clergy, or revelation, grounding the sacred entirely within the exercise of the intellect.

This is the first in a three-part series tracing the manifesto as a form of writing and a way of intervening in the world. The first article looks at the history of declaration and the authority it gives to those who make one. The second turns to the struggle over the pronoun “we.” The third asks a slightly different question: what does a manifesto become when it is less concerned with tearing the world down than with protecting something within it, or reminding us of what still deserves our care? It began with a small book, Irene Vallejo’s Manifesto for Reading , and with a comment from a reader who felt the title had promised something the book did not deliver. He had expected a theoretical reflection on reading, books, and libraries, perhaps something closer to the work we associate with Alberto Manguel. Instead, he found intimate, scene-driven pages returning to memories of reading, schools, libraries, and first books, at times articulating feelings many readers already share. His objection was, at heart, straightforward: Where is the theory? Where is the research? Where is the new argument that justifies placing a word as weighty as “manifesto” on the cover? We can, of course, disagree about Vallejo’s book. We can find it beautiful or slight, and ask what it really adds to the vast library of writing about reading and our relationship with books. But the objection itself took me somewhere that seemed more interesting than the book that had provoked it. What, exactly, has the word “manifesto” promised us? When did we become so certain about what a text must contain in order to deserve the name? And where did this particular image of the manifesto come from, the one that makes us expect theory, a programme, rupture, or something radically new? The word carries such cultural force that it is difficult to hear it without also hearing some noise around it. In the modern imagination, the manifesto is associated with a group announcing itself, with a programme intent on changing the world, with an enemy whose time has come to be named, or with a language that does not hesitate long before telling us what must fall and what should be born in its place. The Communist Manifesto may come to mind, or the clamour of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, or that self-assured “we” entering a sentence the way someone enters a room already knowing they intend to rearrange everything in it. At times, it almost seems that a manifesto cannot fully convince us of its name unless, somewhere in its pages, we hear a fist strike the table. Yet even a brief encounter with its history reveals a form of writing far more unruly than this image suggests. The word was not born in the hands of revolutionaries alone. It did not remain the property of politics for long, nor did it preserve a single form once artistic and avant-garde movements took hold of it, followed by feminist, anti-fascist, and other movements. Each time a new group adopts the manifesto, it seems to stretch the form slightly toward its own needs and add to it a function that may not have been visible in its earlier uses. So before returning to Vallejo at the end of this series, it may be worth going back to a time when “manifesto” had not yet become synonymous with revolution. The question running through its history may begin less with “What is a manifesto?” than with another, more intimately tied to power: who has the right to declare? In the Beginning, There Was the Declaration The word manifesto comes from the Italian and from the verb manifestare . At its root lies the idea of making something manifest: making a position, an intention, or a matter visible and known. In early modern European usage, the term referred to a public declaration explaining the motives behind an action already taken or announcing the reasons for one still to come. When it entered English in the seventeenth century, it largely retained this meaning: the holder of a position brought an intention into public view and made it known to others. Linguistically, the movement appears simple. Something exists first on the inside, as a decision, intention, or position, and is then pushed outward into a shared space where it becomes visible. Politics enters the moment we ask about the conditions of that visibility. Who, in the first place, could turn a private decision into a public matter? Who possessed the paper, the printing press, the platform, and the legitimacy that would make people receive a declaration as speech worth hearing? In the earlier stages of this history, we encounter rulers, states, and religious and legal institutions. There are royal manifestos explaining the causes of wars or disputes, declaring one state’s position toward another, or giving a political decision a public form through which it could circulate. The Folger Library catalogue, for example, preserves a manifesto issued in the name of King Charles II in 1672 against the States General of the United Provinces. It bears little resemblance to the romantic image that would later emerge of the rebel printing a manifesto at night and distributing it among the people. It belongs to the world of sovereignty and diplomacy, to a moment when declaration was one of the means through which power made its decisions present before others. This does not mean that the manifesto was once monarchic and then abruptly switched allegiance to revolution. Declarations, proclamations, and pamphlets circulated early on within religious, legal, and political disputes, while the European public sphere itself expanded with the spread of print, the growth of readership, and the increasing number of actors seeking to be heard. What matters most is that, with political modernity, the relationship between declaration and authority began to change. A form once used to make the will of the powerful visible also became available to those who wanted to contest their right to speak, name, and represent. This shift changes the order of the relationship between speech and power. In the most direct model, the ruler declares because authority precedes the statement and gives it weight. The modern political manifesto begins to test another route. It speaks first, and through that act of speaking attempts to claim a position that was not guaranteed before it was declared. We might see this as the beginning of the manifesto’s modern life, when declaration ceases to be merely the effect of an existing authority and becomes one of the means through which the authority of speech itself can be made. 1848, When a Collective Searches for Its Voice It is difficult to move through the history of the manifesto without stopping, at least once, at the Communist Manifesto . Its importance lies not only in its status as perhaps the most famous political manifesto of the modern era, but also in the image it helped cement: a form in which an interpretation of the world meets an account of the forces struggling within it, while a collective comes to understand itself as bearing a historical interest to which the text gives clarity and political direction. The first edition appeared in 1848, but the story began earlier. At the congress of the Communist League held in London in late 1847, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were commissioned to draft a theoretical and practical programme for the party. The text was then written in German and sent to press in London at the beginning of the following year. In this case, the source of legitimacy appears relatively clear. An organisation already exists, knows that it wants a text capable of declaring its vision, and chooses two people to write it. At first glance, the relationship seems stable. There is a group, a political project, an interpretation of conflict, and then a text that gives these elements a form capable of facing the world. This may be one reason the Communist Manifesto left such a powerful mark on our imagination of what a manifesto is. It links the interpretation of reality to the will to change it, writing as though an idea is not fully realised until it becomes capable of moving something beyond the page. Yet the relationship between the writers and the collective in whose name they speak is more complicated. Marx and Engels are not “the workers of the world,” nor does the text imagine millions of workers gathered around a table dictating its sentences. They write from within a political project that sees itself as part of the workers’ movement while also granting itself the capacity to read the direction of the struggle and to understand the historical interests of the class it seeks to organise. In that small distance between those who write and those in whose name they speak lies a tension that will return throughout the history of the manifesto. To speak for a group is also to define what binds it together, what harms it, how its situation should be understood, and perhaps what it ought to do to escape it. The manifesto’s “we” is therefore never a neutral grammatical pronoun. It is a position constructed within the text, and it often carries with it a claim to representation. The Communist Manifesto adds another, more intriguing movement. The group it addresses exists socially without yet having achieved the political form the text imagines for it. Workers are dispersed across different places, their conditions vary, while forms of exploitation recur in ways that connect their experiences without always being visible to them as a shared condition. The manifesto wants this multitude to recognise itself as a force with a common interest. By the time it reaches its famous call for the workers of the world to unite, it has moved from describing what exists to addressing a political possibility that has not yet been fulfilled. The text seems to tell a dispersed group that there are more connections among its members than everyday life allows them to see, and that if they come to see themselves differently, they may also become something different. Here we encounter one of the manifesto’s most fascinating qualities. Sometimes a “we” already exists and writes its manifesto. At other times, the manifesto becomes the space in which that “we” begins to discover its image, or even to produce it. In such cases, the manifesto participates in the process through which a group reimagines itself, names what its members share, and gives political shape to what it might become. There are “we’s” that write manifestos, and manifestos that write the “we.” Yet this capacity also gives the act of declaration a more ambiguous face. Whoever makes a group visible in language also participates in defining its image, organising its experience, naming its interests, and proposing the way it might understand itself. This may help a group recognise its strength, but it also gives whoever formulates its discourse a position that exceeds the simple transmission of its voice. The manifesto thus carries a tension within it, one that will return later, between its capacity to give a collective a language in which it can recognise itself and the power exercised by whoever formulates that language in its name. This question will only become more complicated as we move further through the history of the form. When Artists Discovered the Pleasure of Declaring At the beginning of the twentieth century, something like an explosion took place. Politics was no longer the only sphere fascinated by the manifesto. Emerging artistic movements discovered that declaring a revolution against art could be at least as exhilarating as declaring one against government. The word “manifesto” entered the vocabulary of the European avant-gardes with force. It appeared at the heart of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Vorticism, and other movements that were forming, splitting, and redefining themselves at remarkable speed. Their attraction to the form reflected a desire to give artistic practice a language through which it could declare its position, explain its relationship to what had come before, and state what it wanted to change in the relationship between art, its audience, everyday life, and history. The manifesto therefore found in the avant-garde a home that suited it almost intimately. A movement that understands itself as a break with the past needs a moment in which to announce its appearance. And that announcement need not remain a promotional supplement to the artwork. It can become part of the work itself, an extension of its performance in public space. One of the most famous of these moments came on 20 February 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto appeared on the front page of Le Figaro . The text proclaimed a break with the past, celebrated speed, machinery, industry, and movement, and tied the beauty of the new world to the energies of technology, violence, and war. Marinetti wanted his reader to feel that an entire era had suddenly grown old and that another age had already arrived in the noise of engines and iron. The Futurist programme and the violence it carried remain important, but what concerns us here is the performance of declaration itself. Marinetti enters public space in the voice of a “we” that barely knows hesitation: a “we” that is awake while others sleep, that knows the old world has ended before others have recognised its death, that sees the future and is impatient to accelerate its arrival. The moment the newspaper publishes this voice, the movement the text declares becomes more real through the very act of speech. Futurism does not need to be fully formed in reality before it announces itself. The declaration participates in its creation. Once again, the relationship between legitimacy and speech shifts. Under older forms of authority, legitimacy preceded the declaration. In the Communist Manifesto , the organisation existed before the text that would give it a public form. With the avant-garde, the boundary between declaration and existence itself begins to blur. A movement can acquire part of its reality at the very moment it dares to announce itself. The text becomes part of the event it describes. Perhaps this is why the avant-gardes loved the manifesto so much. They live on a founding exaggeration, the conviction that what preceded them is over and that what follows will never be the same. The manifesto gives them a space in which this exaggeration can be written as though it were a reality just beginning to take shape. Yet creating a “we” through language brings with it a question less suited to celebration. Every group that draws its own outline also draws, in the same gesture, the limits of what it is not. For Marinetti, the past was an enemy, old artistic institutions a burden, and tradition something to be crushed. The manifesto also glorified war and expressed contempt for women, before parts of Futurism would later become entangled with Italian nationalism and Fascism. The problem here concerns political worth as much as legitimacy. The ability to create a collective tells us nothing, by itself, about the justice of that collective or the world it hopes to build. A manifesto can open space for those who have been denied speech. It can also create a group that draws its strength from determining who must remain outside it. A Manifesto That Mocks Manifestos Less than a decade after Marinetti’s manifesto, Tristan Tzara wrote the Dada Manifesto 1918 . If Futurism had pushed the manifesto’s certainty to its limits, Dada chose to play with that certainty from within, as though it had entered the house built by manifestos and begun removing the doors. Tzara writes a manifesto while declaring himself against manifestos, just as he is against principles. He mocks the writer who, in order to produce a manifesto, is expected to become angry, issue judgements, and present what he says as final truth, then embraces contradiction rather than attempting to conceal it. The text would become one of the best-known examples of what might be called an “anti-manifesto.” What is striking is that mocking the genre did not expel the text from the history of the genre. On the contrary, the Dada Manifesto remains one of the most famous manifestos of the twentieth century, as though the form possesses a peculiar ability to absorb objections directed against itself and continue living. That tells us something important. If we require a manifesto to contain a clear programme, Dada gives us a text suspicious of programmes. If we demand consistency, it chooses contradiction. If we look for a system of principles, we find a writer openly distrustful of principles themselves. Even respect for the form in which one is writing does not seem necessary for a text to remain part of the manifesto’s history. What, then, survives when these conditions fall away? Perhaps the act of taking a position and making it public, even when the position itself consists in doubting the solidity of all positions. It is difficult to understand this playfulness if we separate it from the Europe of the First World War. Dada emerged from a world in which words such as “reason,” “civilisation,” and “progress” had become less innocent than they had long claimed to be, after modern civilisation had demonstrated its capacity to organise death on an industrial scale. In this context, absurdity ceased to be merely an artistic whim, and contradiction acquired another function: to cast doubt on a reason that promises order while producing catastrophe, and on a language that grants itself the authority to explain the whole world before demanding that others live inside its explanation. The manifesto’s function expanded once again. It could now sabotage the language in which projects and programmes were written and unsettle the rules that had given the form its shape. Part of its longevity may lie precisely in this flexibility, in its ability to betray its ancestors without being easily expelled from the family. Cairo, 1938: When an Insult Becomes a Banner Had the story of the manifesto remained confined to London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, it would have been easy to tell it according to one of the familiar narratives of modernity: Europe produces forms and ideas, and those ideas then begin their journey toward the rest of the world. But ideas do not travel in sealed boxes, nor do they arrive in empty cities waiting to be filled. When an idea moves from one place to another, it enters a history that was already there. It comes into contact with its languages, conflicts, institutions, and relations of power, and it changes in the process. In his essay “Traveling Theory,” published in The World, the Text, and the Critic , Edward Said traces what happens to ideas and theories when they leave the conditions of their first appearance and enter a different time, place, and set of conditions of reception. A travelling idea does not carry with it a meaning sealed against change. The new context puts it to new uses, may diminish some of its force, or may give it a force it did not possess where it first emerged. Seen from this perspective, Cairo in the late 1930s becomes more than an “Arab chapter” added to a history written elsewhere. On 22 December 1938, a manifesto appeared in Cairo in Arabic and French under a title whose brevity was part of its intelligence: Vive l’art dégénéré , “Long Live Degenerate Art.” Georges Henein wrote the text, which was signed by thirty-seven artists, writers, and intellectuals. The moment was tied to the emergence of the Art et Liberté group, which would become one of Egypt’s most remarkable Surrealist experiments. Its members moved within an international network of artists and writers while inhabiting an Egyptian moment with conditions of its own, shaped by British colonial domination, rising nationalisms, social and cultural conflicts, and urgent questions about freedom and the relationship between art and what takes place beyond the museum or the studio. The title itself accomplishes in three words what might otherwise require pages of explanation. The Nazi regime had used the label “degenerate art” to mark modernist art, condemn it, and push it beyond the boundaries of what could legitimately be recognised as art. The 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition made that naming part of a broader cultural policy that determined what counted as legitimate art and displayed what it rejected as evidence of degeneration to be despised. The artists in Cairo could have defended this art by insisting that it was not degenerate. But doing so would, in some sense, have left the authorities with the right to determine the meaning of the word and decide where it applied. They chose another path. They reclaimed the name itself and reversed its value by declaring, “Long Live Degenerate Art.” With that small intervention, the direction of the word changed. What had been designed as a condemnation became a site of solidarity. What had been intended as a stigma turned into a banner that could be raised. The discussion shifted from trying to clear modern art of the charge of “degeneracy” to questioning the authority that had appointed itself the right to formulate the charge in the first place, and to determine what would be recognised as art and what would be pushed beyond its borders. Here the manifesto enters a struggle older than the history of manifestos themselves: the struggle over who possesses the authority to name and who gets to fix the meaning of names. Who decides what is natural and what is deviant, what is respectable and what is corrupt, what deserves to be called art? If power can act on reality through the names it assigns to things and people, then seizing the name once used against you and changing its value can become a way of reclaiming part of the right to define yourself. The importance of Vive l’art dégénéré goes beyond this linguistic reversal. Its signatories declared their solidarity with modern art being repressed in Europe, rejected the subjection of art to criteria of race, religion, and nation, and called on artists and writers to confront the fascist assault on creative freedom. From Cairo, an issue that might initially have seemed European became part of an artistic and political position articulated within Egypt, without dissolving the Egyptian context into Europe or reducing Egyptian artists to mere echoes of what was happening there. Art et Liberté was not a mailbox through which Cairo received the latest news of Surrealism from Paris. It was part of a network taking shape in more than one direction, drawing what it needed from the languages of Surrealism and the manifesto and placing them within local conditions inseparable from colonialism, nationalism, conservatism, and conflicts over the meaning of art itself. Perhaps the problem begins with the phrase “the movement of ideas,” which suggests that an idea reaches completion in one place and then travels intact to another. What happens in practice is usually more complicated. Ideas are rewritten as they move from one context to another, and the new place gives them questions, adversaries, and addressees that were absent at the moment of their first appearance. Cairo therefore appears as one of the spaces in which the manifesto was reformulated and given a new meaning within its own context, rather than as a location to be appended to an already complete European history. Vive l’art dégénéré also adds another function to this history. So far, we have encountered a text seeking to transform the political order, another announcing the birth of a new art, and a third mocking the very idea of declaration and the certainty that accompanies it. In Cairo, the manifesto moves somewhat away from the language of destruction and revolution without becoming any less political. It turns toward another task: defending something that has become endangered. Here is an art being confiscated and condemned, and a power seeking to determine in advance what may appear and what must disappear. The manifesto makes the defence of that art’s freedom into a public position. It reminds us that declaration can also be used to protect something already in existence from being pushed toward disappearance. This opens another possibility for the manifesto. It can turn toward what already exists when that existence becomes fragile, give it a public presence, and transform its defence from a matter concerning only those who produce it into a cause worth declaring. At this point, the image we began with starts to look narrower than we had assumed. The very different trajectories that have carried the name “manifesto” have expanded the meaning of declaration itself and made it difficult to reduce the form to a programme, a theory, or a call for rupture. Perhaps this is why the question raised by Vallejo’s book was larger than the book from the beginning. One movement nevertheless recurs from text to text, whenever a position leaves silence or the margins and claims a place for itself in public space. Sometimes that speech draws its legitimacy from an authority already in place. At other times, the act of speaking itself becomes an attempt to acquire the legitimacy it needs in order to be heard. Perhaps this is one of the manifesto’s most enduring qualities. It begins from the assumption that something deserves to become visible, and that making it visible can itself alter the position of the speaker within the space they enter. In this sense, declaration does more than bring a position into public view. It places the speaker in a new relationship with those being addressed and with the power they confront, contest, or seek a share in. This is where the question becomes more complicated. Whoever declares also participates in deciding what deserves to be seen, how it should be named, and who is being called to stand alongside it. Once “we” enters the manifesto, the writer’s voice begins to carry other voices within it, and the right to declare becomes tied to another, more sensitive right: the right to speak in the name of others. Who is included in this “we”? What is supposed to bind them together? Did the group exist before the text, or did the text itself help imagine it and draw its boundaries? And what happens to those standing at those boundaries, hearing words spoken in their name without recognising themselves in them? Perhaps this is the paradox the manifesto leaves us with at the end of this first journey. A form of writing that, over the course of its history, claimed for itself the right to appear and to speak eventually finds itself confronting the question of power once it begins speaking for others. The second article will begin from a word that appears small, but carries within it a long history of belonging, representation, and exclusion: “we.”

The last dance of death began with the 2007 coup against the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority, a direct consequence of the emergence of dual power after Ismail Haniyeh was elected prime minister. His primary task, however, was to implement the policy of the popularly elected president of the Authority, within a hybrid electoral system under which voters elect half the members of the Legislative Council through a single-member district system, casting their ballots directly for individual candidates, while the other half are elected through party lists, with the entire territory treated as a single electoral district. The number of seats won by each list is determined according to the percentage of votes it receives. As defined by the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian National Authority is a body exercising limited self-rule over three categories of areas in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, each governed by its own security and administrative arrangements. These operate amid overlapping powers between the Palestinian security services and the Israeli occupation army, alongside systematic settler activity, backed by security and military protection and by financial resources enabling the construction and expansion of settlements in the West Bank. At the same time, the Palestinian National Authority was grappling with two major issues: the first concerned the fate of East Jerusalem; the second, the question of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the diaspora, who in fact make up roughly half of the Palestinian population. The foregoing reveals a profound problem in the policies adopted to devise solutions capable of meeting Palestinian aspirations without colliding with the effort to produce a historic settlement with the State of Israel, one that would lead to its withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. At the heart of this problem was the fact that the Palestinian National Authority based its policies on adherence to international political legitimacy and, as the authority created by the Oslo Accords, relied on the political and legal framework they had established. Hamas, once it gained representation within the Authority, based its decisions and positions instead on the concept of historical and religious right, rather than on the concept of political right as recognized by the international community. This gave rise to an objective conflict between historical right and political right, a conflict for which it was difficult to find a workable formula for coexistence within a single authority. Coexistence between the presidency of the Authority and the premiership thus collapsed within a year of the elections, paving the way for the confrontation that ended with Hamas’s takeover of the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip in 2007. An Impossible Coexistence Ismail Haniyeh’s government won the confidence of the Legislative Council at the end of March 2006. Yet coexistence with the Palestinian presidency quickly unraveled, reaching its climax in June 2007, when Hamas security forces launched a broad assault on the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip. According to United Nations figures, the clashes left 161 people dead, including 41 civilians, 11 women and 7 children, and around 700 injured. What happened suggests that the movement’s leadership failed to appreciate the scale of its popular electoral victory. It also lost the political flexibility that might have allowed coexistence to continue for at least a few more years within a fledgling Palestinian democracy. The bloody method of resolution likewise reflected the predominance of security and military thinking over all other considerations and demonstrated a choice to seize the levers and institutions of power by force, even though the prime minister and many ministers themselves belonged to the movement. In this sense, the democratic process did not appear, in the movement leadership’s view, to be an end in itself so much as a means of reaching power and taking control of its institutions. The effects of division and the takeover persisted for nearly two decades, during which the democratic process was paralyzed not only in the Gaza Strip but, by extension, in the West Bank, the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and trade-union life as well. This led to the continuous erosion of national institutions and to the predominance of emergency and temporary policies over state-building policies with a clear strategic dimension, until managing division became a substitute for building the institutions of a state. As for Hamas rule in Gaza, it moved toward strengthening its security apparatus to consolidate control, while building military capacity to resist the occupation. This time, however, following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, confrontation no longer relied primarily on suicide attacks, but on rockets and military operations launched from tunnels and underground positions. In parallel, the “tunnel culture” became part of economic life in the Strip, with tunnels used to bring in goods and commodities for both civilian and military purposes. At one stage, the “tunnel economy” was even presented as a solution to a deteriorating economy, while unemployment exceeded 40 percent of the labor force and poverty rates rose to record levels. For the Hamas leadership, this reality was not sufficient reason to reconsider its model of government. Its social and economic cost was instead treated as the price of “holy jihad” and confrontation with the occupation, waged through rockets fired from a distance and operations launched from underground. At the same time, the movement was conducting permanent negotiations on a parallel track with Fatah and the other factions in search of national reconciliation among “brothers.” In other words, the de facto authority in Gaza combined the entrenchment of division on the one hand with the management of reconciliation talks on the other, a political paradox that persisted for many years. Reconciliation Games Hamas was shocked by victory, just as Fatah was shocked by defeat. One effect of the shock of victory was that confusion and hesitation came to dominate positions and statements, reflecting a degree of apprehension among those who had never tested themselves in government before and who only took the reins of power for the first time after winning the elections. After decades of exaggerated mobilization around claims of integrity, abstention from power and its corrupting influence, and devotion to struggle and martyrdom, the position of Islamic Jihad deepened this confusion. The organization announced that it would refuse to sign the “National Conciliation Document” issued by the leadership of the prisoners’ movement in Israeli jails, on the grounds of its continued rejection of the Oslo Accords, which formed the political and legal basis of the Palestinian National Authority. It declared that it would remain faithful to its jihadist line, away from power and the corruption it brings. Most factions, by contrast, signed the document known as the “Prisoners’ Document,” which contained provisions combining support for the PLO’s effort to establish an independent Palestinian state with the adoption of resistance within the framework of national consensus. These provisions were later transformed into the “National Conciliation Document for Comprehensive Dialogue,” adopted in Ramallah and Gaza on June 25 and 26, 2006. Yet these attempts failed to produce a formula for national partnership in power until Saudi Arabia entered the reconciliation process, leading to what became known as the “Mecca Agreement” in February 2007. The agreement went beyond the National Conciliation Document and moved toward establishing an actual partnership and division of power between the two poles of the Palestinian political system, Fatah and Hamas, and between the presidency and the premiership. On this basis, Ismail Haniyeh’s government was formed in March 2007. Yet the spring of reconciliation lasted less than three months. Everything collapsed in early June that same year, when forces and security agencies affiliated with Hamas seized the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip, viewing this as the shortest route to monopolizing power and returning once again to a policy of accusations of treason and exclusion. This situation continued for four years before Egyptian mediation intervened again, leading to the “Cairo Agreement” in May 2011. Failure was repeated, and this time Qatar advanced a new initiative that led to what became known as the “Doha Declaration” in February 2012. Then came the “Beach Agreement” in Gaza in April 2014, which succeeded in forming a national consensus government headed by Rami Hamdallah. It too did not last long, however, and the chain of reconciliation initiatives was broken for nearly three years before Egypt renewed its role in sponsoring the reconciliation process in 2017, culminating in the second “Cairo Agreement.” Algeria then made its own attempt to produce reconciliation in 2022 through what became known as the “Algiers Declaration.” The final episode in this succession of initiatives came from China, which sponsored an understanding between Fatah and Hamas and led to what was called the “Beijing Declaration” in July 2024, without that declaration becoming an implementable agreement either. We thus ended up with a long series of attempted agreements, with Arab and foreign states involved in mediation and sponsorship, while the Palestinian National Authority continued to pursue a policy of flexibility and accommodation. Yet the net result remained zero. Public cynicism toward the process became widespread in Palestinian society, to the point that the principal negotiators appeared to have nothing new left to discuss. A common saying emerged that what was taking place amounted to nothing more than “reconciliation tourism,” a repeated performance of a scene in which little remained to be hidden after the dirty laundry had been aired in public. After Al-Aqsa Flood Next November, when the elections scheduled for the Legislative Council are due to take place, if they are indeed held, they will fall in the first month of the fourth year of “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the attack that generated an ongoing war of extermination and displacement at varying levels, one that ceasefire agreements and blockade alike have failed to end. For the spilling of Jewish blood, as in the October 7, 2023 attack, is treated as license to spill Palestinian blood and more, becoming a new banner for an enduring conflict after the failure of the first historic settlement through the Oslo Accords. Everyone has come to understand that dismantling Oslo from either side is far easier than building a complex peace process. It is enough for a gunman to shoot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin while he is calling on Israelis to embrace peace for the entire edifice to collapse, and enough for Hamas to carry out a suicide attack for the Palestinian National Authority’s inability to protect its people to be exposed. The Israeli army then resumes its functions as an army of occupation, while settlers move forward with the construction of additional settlements, leading ultimately to the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over most of the West Bank. At the same time, Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir calls for dozens of Palestinians to be killed every day, permanently and systematically, until Gazans are convinced they must emigrate. The present scene is deeply connected to a series of mistakes committed by the Palestinian National Authority in managing its internal conflict with all those who contributed to a return to violence. This lies at the root of the failure of the continuing attempts, over four decades, to produce a formula for joint action between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas. In this regard, the author of these lines wrote the following conclusion two years ago, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence on November 15: “The question of reconciliation is not the responsibility of Fatah, since the movement’s political weight does not entitle it to lead this process, but rather allows it to help bring it about. Nor can any reconciliation be discussed, or any dialogue conducted, in a way that bypasses the social and political contract represented by the ‘Palestinian Declaration of Independence,’ as the highest reference document for all, until the promised Palestinian constitution is completed. Likewise, Hamas’s considerable weight does not give it the right to disavow the social and political contract as long as Palestinian society remains committed to it and continues to struggle in accordance with it. Hamas, as a movement in rebellion against the political order grounded in the Palestinian national interest, has no right to set the rules of dialogue for reconciliation, even if the factions agree with it, because undermining legitimacy and departing from it is the starting point for the failure of dialogue. This is what we witnessed in the ‘Beijing Declaration.’ Likewise, identifying Hamas’s rebellion as an internal rebellion requires the Palestinian Authority to engage it in dialogue only on Palestinian soil, not in any capital. The logic and purpose of reconciliation are based on bringing the movement back within the framework of legitimacy through a change in its behavior and policies, not by bending legitimacy and the law or bypassing the substance and text of the ‘Declaration of Independence.’ The repeated talk of ‘reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization,’ rebuilding it, ‘sanctifying national consensus,’ and all the terms derived from these expressions, which have no precise meaning or credible definition, merely serves to paper over contradictions in favor of a tribal approach that usually ends in accusations of treason. It weakens our national choices and opens us up to agendas that are not Palestinian.” Finally, our understanding, conduct and strategies for building the State of Palestine must be reconsidered on the basis that it cannot afford to conflate the concepts of revolution and the philosophy of old liberation movements, on the one hand, with the concepts of state-building in the contemporary world, on the other. In this brief overview, it is worth noting that the Palestinian National Authority committed two errors that have never been discussed with the methodological rigor required to preserve the political order grounded in the Palestinian national interest. The first error occurred during the transitional phase of implementing the Oslo Accords, from 1993 to 2000, when President Yasser Arafat adopted a policy of containment, accommodation and fraternity toward Hamas, even as the movement was openly waging war to bring down the agreement and practicing violence through suicide attacks. In practice, this entrenched the duality of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The second error occurred during preparations for the second Legislative Council elections in early 2006, when Hamas was allowed to participate without first declaring its adherence to the national choices established by the “Declaration of Independence” and to the Authority’s commitments toward Israel and the international community. This error was not linked solely to President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision. It was also connected to the exceptional pressure Washington exerted at the time. The relevant archival documents must therefore be made public so that we can objectively assess the event and its continuing consequences for the fledgling Palestinian political system. The paradox is that Hamas adapted to the laws and rules of the Oslo Accords while continuing to raise the slogan of bringing them down to this day. Disregarding the major national choices enshrined in these documents, together with the duality of power, shattered the internal sources of strength of the Palestinian political system and enabled the opponents of Palestinian statehood to pursue their policies, as we are witnessing today. Finally, the failure of the settlement between the two peoples can be summed up in the success of extremism on both sides in reproducing violence, and in the failure to achieve justice. The political settlement crafted by the ruling elites lacks a concept of historic reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, a reconciliation protected by social forces with an interest in rejecting violence and grounded in justice.