Articles

While the reservations surrounding the US-sponsored framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel are numerous, profound, legitimate, and entirely justified, given the text’s failure to secure any meaningful gains for Lebanon, this does not mean that Lebanon should embrace the Islamabad track or the Switzerland agreement between Washington and Tehran, whose collapse, far from being unexpected, resulted from a combination of political and non-political factors. This fragile Switzerland agreement clearly reflects the deep mistrust between the two opposing sides. Tel Aviv has consistently sought to fuel and deepen that mistrust in pursuit of its own immediate interests: resuming the war from where it left off, further degrading Iran’s military capabilities, even if doing so failed to bring about the regime’s collapse, contrary to the expectations or hopes entertained during the early stages of the conflict. At the same time, it serves Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by buying him additional time, improving his standing ahead of the parliamentary elections, while allowing him to continue delaying, slowing, and stalling the judicial proceedings against him.

Tensions have been rising since the beginning of the week between Washington and Tehran following new Iranian strikes on vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The negotiation process is not dead, but appears weakened. Hezbollah, for its part, is threatening to re-engage in southern Lebanon if war breaks out again, as attention turns to Lebanese-Israeli talks scheduled for next week in Rome. On Sunday morning, U.S. forces announced they had carried out, overnight, a third wave of strikes targeting more than 140 sites in Iran, in retaliation for a new attack by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on a commercial vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Following the U.S. raids, the IRGC wasted no time in launching — and expanding, as is their custom — attacks against several Gulf countries, specifically Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Kuwait… as well as Jordan, a country that Iran added to its list of potential targets amid the escalation of recent days. Even the Omani mediator was not spared. The attack on the Sultanate of Oman came just hours after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's visit to the sultanate!

The FIFA World Cup extends far beyond the realm of sport. As a global event, it temporarily suspends the routines of everyday life and brings millions of people together around a shared collective narrative for the duration of a tournament. In Lebanon, this competition takes on a particularly meaningful dimension. In a country shaped by successive crises, migration, and social divisions, the World Cup makes moments of celebration feel especially precious — almost rare. For clinical psychologist Sandra Khawam, supporting specific teams is rooted first and foremost in family history, often shaped by emigration. "The family factor plays an important role. Due to wars, crises, and successive waves of emigration, many Lebanese families have scattered across the world," she explains.

This third installment introduces a series of essays offering a broad survey, both thematic and chronological, of the many ways in which music has interacted with the political sphere throughout history. If Beethoven’s rebellion against Napoleon may be seen as something of a founding moment in the tension between music and political commitment, it does not, for all that, redefine the older and more ambiguous relationship between melody and power, whereby an ideology can carry entire masses of people along in its wake. Nineteenth-century Europe illustrates with particular clarity how music can simultaneously build nations and become an instrument in their service. In this respect, Giuseppe Verdi offers a revealing example of music’s ability to carry entire peoples by giving musical form to collective trauma. In 1842, he composed the opera Nabucco , which recounts the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II and the captivity of its surviving inhabitants in Babylon.

The long and interminable conflict sparked by the Iranian mullah regime's endless transgressions will likely go down in history as a conflict defined by the verbal diarrhea that all parties engage in, throwing up a thick smokescreen that barely conceals their internal failures and, above all, a bewildering and pervasive incoherence. This incoherence manifests almost daily in actions that are completely at odds with the bellicose, deeply irrational statements made on all sides. Iran's leaders, for example, have chosen to pursue a lasting, strategic agreement with the United States. Yet at the same time, they continue to label the US an "enemy" and the "Great Satan" that must be brought down and "inevitably" avenged, sooner or later, no matter the circumstances — as stated on Saturday evening in a communiqué attributed to the new Supreme Leader, the elusive and mysterious Mojtaba Khamenei, about whom it remains unclear whether he is still alive, and if so, whether he is truly in full possession of his mental faculties, or whether, on the contrary, his virtual presence is being kept alive in people's minds by Tehran's new powerbrokers, who attribute decisions and positions to him as events unfold and the balance of power within what remains of the Islamic Republic continues to shift.

In ordinary life, we inhabit what anthropologists call a milieu : a space infused with memory and human relationships, made up of the home, the village square, the neighborhood shop, the mosque or the church, and the road to school. In wartime, place is transformed into space. It becomes an object of measurement and management: range, field of vision, supply line. The shift is from meaning to function, from dwelling to calculation and enumeration. It is as though the land were stripped of its story and rewritten in the language of war. War fractures our sense of belonging. Belonging is ordinarily built through stability and the quiet repetition of daily life: the same road, the same faces, the same habits. Once a place becomes threatened, belonging gives way to a state of anxiety. One remains attached to a place that may have to be abandoned at any moment. What emerges is a form of “provisional belonging”: you love the place, yet no longer trust that you will be able to remain there. This paradox leaves a lasting fracture within.