Articles

This series of articles offers a wide-ranging overview — both thematic and chronological — of the various relationships between music and the space of the City across the ages. The first in the series, divided into three parts, examines the origins of the bond between music and 'the' political — both as concept and as practice. It is somewhat perilous to attempt to date with precision the beginnings of politically engaged music. What is certain, however, is that it did not begin with Bob Dylan, nor with the Negro spirituals , nor even with La Marseillaise … but with music itself — that is to say, in fact, with the very beginnings of the organisation of society and its relationship with the notion and practice of power. It is possible to say, without too much risk of error, that music has constituted, in this sense, one of the means available to men seeking both to govern and to escape that governance. The right question to ask is not when music became political. It always has been. The question is rather: what kind of politics are we speaking of, in whose service, against whom, and by what means? There is no simple or clear-cut answer to these questions. Music, like everything that operates within the symbolic imaginary, inhabits the world of nuance. It thus serves, simultaneously, both sides… or rather a vast multitude of sides… even those that refuse to constitute themselves as sides. It celebrates the sovereign and conspires against him, often in the same breath, sometimes to the same tune. At once power and counter-power — since time immemorial. This ambivalence, far from being an accident of history, is rooted in the very nature of sound, which acts upon bodies before it reaches consciousness, and crosses boundaries that the written word cannot traverse. Music can be heard without necessarily being understood… and constitutes a form of resistance that ontologically resists censorship… Political power has always needed music, and has always feared it for the same reason. And it is precisely this founding paradox that this series sets out to explore. Sound, a Matter of State This axiom had already been formulated with great acuity by ancient Greek culture. Plato thus saw music as one of the foundations of civic life. Certain musical modes of the era, such as the Dorian — austere and virile — were deemed, in this perspective, suited to forming courageous citizens; others, too languid or too stimulating, threatened the order of the City and had to be proscribed. The Republic treats music as an affair of State because Plato had understood very early that music shapes bodies before it shapes minds — a central idea in Greek philosophy. It installs dispositions, interior rhythms, or ways of inhabiting time that, in the eyes of the Greeks, are political before they are aesthetic. Aristotle may nuance Plato's thought, and Pythagoras may reduce it to numbers, yet all three agree that sound cannot be analysed under the sign of neutrality. It 'governs' at times, at other times “disturbs” or “offends”, and sometimes does both simultaneously. Even when it takes no position in the strictly political affairs of the City — that is, in the stakes of power — it participates, by its very existence, in the political space, and in the formation of the citizen and his thought. The Greek intuition traverses traditions that have no contact with one another, yet arrive at the same practical conclusions. In Confucianism, ritual music is the mirror of the moral and political order of the realm: a sovereign whose music is just rules with justice, and a sovereign whose music is corrupt governs a state in decomposition. The Book of Rites , for example, establishes precise correspondences between musical modes, seasons, and political virtues, because music, in this cosmology, participates in the same principle of resonance that connects Heaven to earth, grounding political hierarchy in cosmic harmony itself. Music is at the heart of the constitution of order. In Japan, the Norito — ritual formulas chanted to the kami , spirits, divinities, and sacred beings — simultaneously organise the relationship to the sacred and the social hierarchy, just as the Vedic hymns of India establish a cosmology in which sonic order and social order partake of the same principle… And this was very probably the case since Sumer, whose royal lyres of Ur and hymns to Inanna already bear witness to a deep entanglement of sonic rite, dynastic power, and cosmic order. What all these traditions share, in fact, is a fundamental mistrust of “unregulated” music, because it is a source of power and therefore, potentially, of danger. For all organised political societies, viewed from the perspective of hierarchy, music — and art in general — that escapes all control is capable of producing a disorder that is not confined solely to the aesthetic framework, but can spread politically into the civil and political space. This is why all great civilisations, without exception, have sought to regulate it, while also granting it — precisely because of this danger — a central place in their most important ceremonies. To pose the problem of music in terms of political philosophy is immediately to pose the problematic of the tension between power, authority, freedom, censorship, and despotism. The “Bard's Paradox” But every form of control has always had a reverse side, or even a boomerang effect — the famous “return of the repressed”. The very same societies that regulate music also give it the means to subvert that regulation. It is no accident that Cacofonix is constantly reduced to silence at the banquets in Asterix. Fulliautomatix the blacksmith — the most brute and martial figure of power — insists that he “sings off-key”. He must therefore not sing at all. The underlying idea is far deeper than the simply hilarious anecdotal leitmotif of Goscinny and Uderzo: Celtic bards who sang the genealogy of the king possessed a dreaded power of defamation. A well-crafted musical satire could ruin a reputation, destabilise an alliance, or even precipitate a downfall. The Occitan troubadours who composed for seigneurial courts were simultaneously inventing a coded language of courtly love that constituted, depending on how one reads it, a resistance to ecclesiastical authority, or a cartography of desire that refused the boundaries imposed by the feudal order. Likewise, the griots of West Africa, guardians of dynastic memory and official musicians of royal courts, were also the only ones authorised to say in public what no one else could formulate without risking their lives. Their function of praise was inseparable from their critical function. They verbalised “the truth”, to be sure, but from the only position that made this possible… formalised proximity to power. This paradox — of being in the service of power as a condition of possibility for resistance to power — constitutes the permanent structure, the backbone of the relationship between sound and politics. One must first be admitted to the courts in order to be able to satirise them. One must sing the saints in order to slip between their praises a message that only the initiated will decipher. Or one must master the legitimate forms so that their subversion remains legible. This logic of détournement, perhaps the most discreet and most durable political gesture music has ever accomplished, was to find in the classical Arab world its most accomplished formulation. The “Double Language”, from Hafez to the Maqamat In the classical Arab world, this tension takes — beyond the merely musical — a particularly elaborate form, through the melodic system of the maqamat , which structure all Arab music, creating a cosmology of sound in which each mode corresponds to emotional states, moments of the day, or dispositions of the soul. The maqam Rast invites clarity and balance; the Hijaz , with its characteristic augmented second, evokes desire, exile, the nostalgia for an elsewhere that bears no political name but carries an existential one… the ancestor of the saudade ? The poet-musicians who traversed the Abbasid, Umayyad, or Ottoman courts used this system as a language with a false bottom: what the surface of the text said was audible to all, but what the modal structure and melodic ornaments communicated was legible only to those who knew how to truly listen through the melody. It is in this space that Rumi composes, writing in Persian, at the heart of Islamic Sufism rather than within the Arab courts properly speaking, yet animated by the same intuition: that sound, in the mystical intoxication of the sama , guides the soul back toward a direct relationship with the divine that short-circuits clerical mediations and, by extension, temporal ones. Hafez of Shiraz does the same: each ghazal about wine and love is simultaneously a metaphysics, an eroticism… and a critique of power. And far from being accidental, this ambiguity is aimed specifically at surviving censorship… by rendering it impossible. How does one ban a poem about love without admitting that one sees politics in it…? Pure genius. Many other chapters would merit their own unhurried attention: the polyphony of the Renaissance and its bitter conflicts of jurisdiction over sacred sound, the Lutheran chorale as a weapon of the Reformation, baroque court music in its absolutist splendour from Versailles to Vienna. It is nonetheless in eighteenth-century Europe that the debate on music and freedom will truly take on an explicit philosophical form, openly claiming its own political status. And it is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who will be its centre of gravity.

Between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the statements reflected a positive atmosphere, but the underlying realities of this summit between giants should become clearer over time. Iran, for its part, continues its provocations. Between Lebanon and Israel, an extension of the truce and future military cooperation. This week was marked by crucial talks whose repercussions will be felt during the next phase. From the very beginning of the week, attention was focused on preparations for the US-China summit in Beijing and the third round of negotiations between the Lebanese and Israeli delegations in Washington. At the Beijing summit, from a symbolic standpoint, the welcome reserved for US President Donald Trump was spectacular and commensurate with the importance of the event. In their different styles, the American and Chinese heads of state conveyed crucial messages regarding their future economic cooperation and talks on international issues of common interest. Among these issues were Taiwan, which China seeks to annex while the United States supports its independence, and Iran, a traditional ally of China. How are these two issues now interconnected? Time will tell. But certain signs are already pointing to emerging trends. In an interview, President Trump asked the Taiwanese authorities not to proclaim the country’s independence on the basis of Washington’s support, something Taiwan ignored by issuing a declaration asserting its independence immediately after the summit ended. As for Iran, the issue was extensively discussed during the summit, as expected. The American and Chinese presidents displayed a common position: the need to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. President Trump clearly stated that his Chinese counterpart — who had received Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi a few days earlier — is prepared to contribute to the negotiations. Another important indicator emerging from the summit is that China is now expected to purchase oil from the United States, which would reduce its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and the Strait of Hormuz… and, indirectly, on its Iranian ally. Although there is still not enough hindsight to properly assess the results of this summit, President Trump’s statements deserve close examination. Indeed, he told reporters at the conclusion of the summit that he could accept a “freeze” on uranium enrichment in Iran for a period of 20 years if he had “the necessary guarantees.” The process of indirect negotiations is not dead either, as indicated by the Pakistani Interior Minister’s visit to Tehran this weekend. But the tone seems to have changed abruptly over the weekend: the White House chief said in passing during a statement that “his patience with Iran is running out.” On his social network, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself on Sunday with the US military in the background over the Strait of Hormuz, accompanied by the enigmatic caption: “The calm before the storm.” This aligns with persistent reports carried by Israeli media suggesting growing American conviction that a return to war is necessary — a “50% probability,” according to an Israeli official. European initiatives Regarding the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians continue to assert their right to control this maritime route. Iran also claims to have received calls from European leaders to discuss the conditions for secure passage through the strait. In exchange for what? Another major event this week was the meeting of BRICS foreign ministers, also held Thursday in India. This ministerial conference addressed, among other topics, the Middle East and became the scene of a dispute between the Iranian and Emirati ministers, with the former taking the opportunity to accuse the United Arab Emirates of being “partners” in the Israeli-American attack against his country… even though, it should be noted, Iranian missiles have struck the UAE since the beginning of the conflict. No joint official statement was issued on the war in Iran, precisely because of the disagreements between the two countries. Another noteworthy development: another ally of Iran, Russian President Vladimir Putin, spoke on Saturday with his Emirati counterpart Mohammed bin Zayed regarding the Iranian conflict, according to Reuters. The official statement specified that “both sides emphasize the importance of the political and diplomatic process.” An attempt to pull Iran out of its isolation? Finally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embarrassed the UAE this week by claiming to have made a “secret visit” to the country at the beginning of the war. Abu Dhabi quickly denied the claim. The country has been attracting increasing media attention, especially since its spectacular withdrawal from OPEC at the beginning of May. In Lebanon, extension of the ceasefire The Lebanese week was marked by negotiations in Washington on Thursday and Friday between a Lebanese delegation headed for the first time by the highly experienced former ambassador Simon Karam, and an Israeli delegation once again led by Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter. The negotiations addressed both the political and military situations. This third round — since early April — began under intense pressure: fighting continues to rage in southern Lebanon, with Israeli advances beyond the Litani River this week; increasingly virulent statements from Hezbollah accusing President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam of “treason”; and reports of American “concerns” regarding the process. The results of these talks, however, were not reflective of this difficult beginning. On the one hand, the process did not collapse, as some had feared, since the next round has already been scheduled by the Americans for early June. On the other hand, even though the details of these closed-door meetings have not yet all been revealed, concrete results emerged: a 45-day extension of the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, and the launch of a “security process” beginning with a meeting between military officials from both countries on May 29 at the Pentagon. Unfortunately, the announcement of the ceasefire was not followed by any action on the ground, even as Lebanese authorities attempt to implement a truce that would be respected “by all parties,” according to information leaked on Saturday. According to those same reports relayed by the local press, President Joseph Aoun reportedly asked Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri to convince Hezbollah to cease its attacks so that the cessation of hostilities would be observed by both parties. The pro-Iranian party reportedly responded that it would do so if Israel also committed itself. Yet on the ground, tensions appear instead to have escalated: the Israelis issued evacuation orders north of the Litani, and sirens continue to sound regularly in northern Israel because of Hezbollah drones. These drones, precisely, which genuinely trouble the Israeli army by its own admission, are also likely to negatively affect Lebanon. According to a report cited by local media, the Israelis are considering a deeper occupation than the 10 kilometers already taken, given that the threat no longer comes only from missiles whose range can be calculated, but from primitive explosive drones that are difficult for defense systems to detect. Salam in Syria Another figure who drew attention this week was Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who stood out with a very firm statement reaffirming the Lebanese state’s position regarding the Washington negotiations process and rejecting all accusations of “treason” directed at him, just as they were directed at the president. Moreover, Mr. Salam was received on May 14 in Damascus by Syrian President Ahmad al-Chareh. In statements following the visit, he reiterated that “Lebanon will no longer accept remaining a platform for operations against friendly countries,” clearly pointing the finger at Hezbollah, even as Damascus regularly dismantles subversive networks linked to the group, which it accuses of seeking to destabilize the regime. At the same time, bilateral talks addressed coordination efforts regarding negotiations with Israel. The exact significance of these discussions should also become clearer in the coming period, especially given that Syria itself continues to suffer regular Israeli incursions in the south of the country. Also noteworthy this week regarding the situation in Lebanon was a strange episode revealed on May 15 concerning a Lebanese “complaint” filed with the UN and dated April 21, accusing Iran of interfering in Lebanese affairs and dragging Lebanon into the war with Israel. The information was not denied by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry for several hours, before it eventually issued a clarification that appeared aimed at softening the initial report. In a statement, the ministry asserted that it was not a “complaint” but rather a “letter” to the UN in which it responded to indirect Iranian accusations against the Lebanese state in the case involving the targeting of four Iranian “diplomats” in a Beirut hotel at the beginning of the war (the Iranian complaint against Israel insinuates that Lebanese authorities were aware of their relocation). A new episode further reviving the already well-established tensions between Iran and the Lebanese authorities.

An exceptional artistic return by Lebanese visual artist Walid Raad, after forty years or so spent in New York, to exhibit his work once again at the Venice Biennale, then at the Festival d'Automne in Paris. A major exhibition that opens with the "inverted chassis" of a Volkswagen Beetle, in an avant-garde visual art space rich with inventive ideas born from the shaping of imaginaries, denouncing the organisation of wars and new bombs, without any faltering in the balance or mechanisms of conception. It is an art that weaves the play of ideas with fictional archives around the geopolitics of the Middle East and the "war market" — a market that endures on the terrain of artistic competition, allowing the best to triumph illusorily in the invention of imaginaries, imaginaries distinguished by a poetic irony constructed in the gaps of Lebanese memory. Who does not remember the bombardment launched by the American navy following the first bloody and suicidal attacks carried out by the doctrinaire Hezbollah movement in February 1984 against American Marine forces stationed in Lebanon — attacks after which the warship USS New Jersey, bound for Lebanese shores, fired sixteen 300-inch shells towards Syrian and Druze positions, shells each weighing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle? Hence the name the Lebanese gave to these projectiles: the "flying Volkswagens". One of these shells fell in the garden of the teenage boy in the village of Bmariam in Mount Lebanon. Walid Raad and his cousins then turned the bomb crater into a swimming pool to play in. This is the war that can be re-experienced, or played in, in order to inhabit peace after the fact — with a great artist, a major figure in Lebanese contemporary art, born in 1967, passionate and convinced by his firm belief that human truth is under attack. War thus becomes something ordinary. This is how things present themselves in the reports of power. As though it were error itself that was being staged. No less seductive than truth, so long as approaching it is an entirely different matter. Since 1993, Walid Raad has lived in the United States, returning to Lebanon roughly every month, where members of his family still live in Beirut. In 1997, he participated in the activities of the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to collect and evaluate the visual heritage of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. For decades, his works — exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Documenta in Kassel — have distinguished themselves as the output of a central figure in the SFA, Arab Science Fiction, a current that critiques official narratives and is recognised in particular through the artistic inventions of a group of Lebanese artists living there or members of the diaspora, all sharing the same obsession with the gaps in their country's memory. He has shared exhibition spaces with many colleagues, such as Rabih Mroué, Akram Zaatari, Khalil Joreige, and Joana Hadjithomas, and is currently alongside some of them at the Psykalis Bay Foundation in Milan, as part of the exhibition "Crossroads: Beirut Contemporary". The exhibition evokes "a city shaped by cycles of construction, destruction and post-war reconstruction not as a linear heritage, but through damaged archives, unstable ground, fragile materials, and temporal discontinuities". Walid Raad is known as an "inventor of fake news about the Middle East", creator of fictitious archives around the war he experienced in his childhood, situated within a movement of free art — in the manner of free poetry — forming part of the political, social and cultural narratives of a youth torn between commitment, realistic utopia, and rebellion. He currently exhibits black-and-white archival photographs of an American fleet, in what resembles an intimate perception of narratives mixing weapons and childhoods. But where does the boundary begin between fiction and reality in what the eye perceives of the dense fires of war in the Middle East, the means of survival, and an image still visible there — visible through the many layers of a frozen memory, haunted by the chasm of the war crater and of play? He rests his gaze to rediscover what remains of that childhood once stripped of its false pretensions. Beauty draws its source only from the singular wound visible in his works, where he decides to break from withdrawal from the world and proclaim a provisional solitude, however deep. This is the same era of the nineteen-eighties, when the Lebanese armed militias assigned code names to the leaders of the various factions, each bearing the name of a flower. Raad writes in the exhibition catalogue that the woman responsible for devising this coding system had studied botany at the American University of Beirut, and had also made a collage of Hosni Mubarak's portraits with a peony head. He recounts how Yasser Arafat, the target of numerous assassination attempts, never slept in the same bed twice, and how an obsessive historian had reconstructed these various layers by browsing — in the manner of Sophie Calle — hotel rooms in Paris and Cairo to capture the photographs he exhibits, which resemble documents from that period. These observations appear as "reliable" information, until one realises that he is playing in the "excavations of war", just as the child had played in the "bomb crater". These "falsified" photographs, these "empty beds" sometimes occupied by "PLO leaders" during an "impossible warrior's rest", allow one to glimpse, through them, an entire people. One searches for "surviving corpses", or for "a cause that never sleeps". Some of these images are authentic, others have been fashioned to become so in the labyrinths of fiction — as he had been doing since 1989, the year in which he founded his collective named "The Atlas Group", a gathering of "fictitious researchers" (dissolved in 2004 and counting only one member: Walid Raad himself). Today, more simply, he archives new falsified archives in the face of the "scarcity of reliable archives" on the contemporary history of Lebanon. Through the technique of Arab Science Fiction (SFA), Walid Raad poses, in a post-war context, questions about political structures, memory and reparation in a country that has witnessed successive wars. Through an approach at once satirical, modernist, mythological and poetic, worked through by a recurring obsession, all of these works respond in their own way to the logic of trauma and the rhythmic and compositional repetition of yesterday's war — or tomorrow's — within destinies from which death is erased in its pain, in a mockery of fate and history, because the war has never stopped and the fabricated truths remain too harsh to express the eternal conflict. Raad stands against a fragile symbolism, that is, against stopping at the memory of childhood alone — the child cannot live without growing somewhat. He is nothing but a toymaker, and what importance does that have, as Nietzsche would say? Raad plays the role of artistic authority in all that it implies, contains and demands. Not in the sense of a decisive political statement, but according to the dramatic givens of the state of war, as an instrument of irony against the game of the absurd and the violations, blunders and aggressions it commits. This might help to rid oneself of the feeling of discouragement — and if we could manage that, everything might be possible in Lebanon. Six other Lebanese artists will join Walid Raad at the Venice Biennale, an ensemble that says something of the strategic position of this artistic arena in contemporary debates around memory, archive, narrative and forms of expression in a harsh geopolitical context, that of the ongoing wars.

A relatively calm weekend beginning on both the Lebanese and regional fronts, with the exception of ongoing military operations in South Lebanon and certain sectors of the Bekaa. This Sunday, May 17, should formally mark the start of the extended ceasefire, lasting 45 days, decided Friday during the third round of direct Lebanese-Israeli negotiations held Thursday and Friday in Washington under the auspices of the State Department. Even if Israel officially gives its approval for this new ceasefire (it could hardly refuse), nothing suggests that Israeli air strikes on Hezbollah infrastructure or the elimination of pro-Iranian party officials through targeted air raids will be suspended. Awaiting the hour when the truce begins, Saturday was marked by an intensification of Israeli air raids and heavy artillery bombardments against the positions of the Shiite faction in several villages in the districts of Tyre, Sidon, and Nabatieh, causing the population to flee toward the city of Sidon. Meanwhile, an Israeli drone was flying over the capital and the southern suburbs at very low altitude. At the regional level, political circles are still waiting for the decision that President Donald Trump should make shortly regarding the conflict with Iran, in light of Iran's final position on American peace proposals. On Saturday, Pakistan's Interior Minister traveled to Tehran to discuss with Iranian leaders the possibility of reviving Pakistan's mediation with the United States before the situation deteriorates militarily. Iranian Maneuver At this stage, Iranian sources reported on Saturday discussions launched by 'certain European countries' with the Islamic Republic to find a way out of the explosive problem of the Strait of Hormuz. Should this initiative by certain European countries be confirmed, it would inevitably result in a rehabilitation of the regime and a strengthening of its position against the Trump Administration. In practical terms, the Iranian government persists in wanting to take advantage of the current crisis to attempt to impose its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz in order to generate substantial revenues that would allow it to offset some of the losses suffered during the armed conflict with the United States and Israel. According to certain sources, Tehran is seeking to circumvent the unanimous international refusal of any direct toll policy that the Revolutionary Guards were trying to impose on countries using the strait. For the Islamic Republic, the alternative solution being examined by the Ministry of Economy would be to collect, not a toll, but a kind of financial contribution in exchange for 'services' provided to ships transiting this maritime route. Among these 'services' would be 'insurance' covering specific risks. Such a disguised 'tax' would generate particularly high revenues, exceeding what a conventional toll could ensure. The regime would not be satisfied with this kind of state 'extortion'; it would intend to push the maneuver further by making a unilateral decision to substantially expand the maritime zone of the strait that it is attempting to bring under its sovereignty! The question remains whether the United States, and especially the European countries, will agree to back down in the face of Iranian blackmail…

In a world where only self-interest holds sway, what can a country like Lebanon do when an internal faction works directly in the service of Iran and wages war against the Lebanese State and its institutions? Lebanon can do nothing so long as there is no national consensus on how to conduct the direct negotiations with Israel in Washington. More importantly, it can do nothing without acknowledging that a price is owed if it wishes to free itself from the Israeli occupation that Hezbollah, and behind it the Islamic Republic of Iran, has brought about. What we have here is nothing more than Lebanese impotence, born of the inability to affirm that Lebanon is a free and independent state, master of its own decisions on war and peace within its own territory. It is in 2026, once again, that Lebanon must establish that its State is the genuine State, that it is not the state of Hezbollah, which is itself nothing more than a brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, nothing else. It is striking to observe, in the run-up to the Washington negotiations, that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri did not meet Simon Karam, head of the Lebanese delegation tasked with negotiating with Israel. Beyond that, no meeting took place at the Baabda Palace between President of the Republic Joseph Aoun, the Parliament Speaker, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam before Simon Karam headed to Washington. Such a meeting was nonetheless imperative, in the presence of the Lebanese negotiator, in order to attest that the Lebanese State stands behind him and to enable him to say that he represents that State in all its components — Christians, Sunnis, Druze and Shia alike. In concrete terms, this means that Lebanon came to the table without being able to guarantee full and undivided support for its delegation, which nevertheless negotiated with the Israelis in Washington under American sponsorship. Lebanon nonetheless chose, with a certain courage, to negotiate with Israel, even as the Jewish state continues its war against this small country whose fate remains in the hands of the Islamic Republic governed by the Revolutionary Guards. The Lebanese delegation negotiating with the Israelis had one single question to answer: is Lebanon prepared to pay the price of its defeat, yes or no? To answer that question, it first had to acknowledge the defeat itself. Nothing speaks more eloquently to the scale of that defeat than Israel's control over 68 villages and towns in the South, which it is methodically destroying, compounded by the displacement of one million two hundred thousand Shia citizens from southern Lebanon. This question lies at the very heart of what Lebanon is enduring, for the country cannot go on bearing the weight of a time bomb: on one side this enormous number of occupied and destroyed villages, on the other this mass of displaced persons. In terms of figures, in terms of the number of villages and towns under Israeli control, Bint Jbeil included, with its particular symbolic weight, Lebanon has no choice but to absorb the reality born of losing two wars against Israel. The paradox is that, in essence, Lebanon had no original connection to either of those wars. Both, the "Gaza support war" of 2023 and the "Iran support war" that followed the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei on 28 February 2026, were part of the Iranian expansionist project, which has never seen in Lebanon anything more than a bargaining chip to be brandished by Tehran. Is Lebanon prepared to pay the price of two wars that were imposed upon it by force and from which it emerged utterly crushed? This question cannot be evaded; it imposes itself if Lebanon intends to avoid further destruction and displacement, and if it genuinely refuses the return of Israeli occupation. For what Lebanon must finally admit is that Israel is not a charitable organisation. Lebanon needed a national consensus to answer that question. This means, simply, that Simon Karam could not leave for Washington in search of an end to the renewed Israeli occupation without such a consensus, one that would naturally include Nabih Berri, who seems to have preferred, rather than direct negotiations, to provide Hezbollah with the cover it demands of him, Hezbollah, which is itself under the total domination of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Israel will continue its aggressions against Lebanon for as long as Hezbollah's weapons remain, and Lebanon will have to keep seeking ways to rid itself of them, until the day it asks itself a question of absolute simplicity: what is the price of the Israeli withdrawal and the guarantee of the return of inhabitants to their villages and towns in the South, or what remains of them? Once that price is known, a united front will be needed, rather than leaving the entire burden of negotiations to rest solely on the shoulders of the President of the Republic and the government represented by Nawaf Salam. Ultimately, what does Lebanon want? Does it want to recover its territory, on the grounds that the restoration of its territorial sovereignty constitutes for it the priority of priorities… or does it prefer to remain an Iranian "terrain," that is to say, a hostage of the Revolutionary Guards?

The march to the slaughter had been filmed: it is not every day that 288 civilians, including 12 children, are massacred. The scene unfolded in the southern suburbs of Damascus, in the district known as Tadamun — and “by the book.” We are in 2013. More than 24 videos captured scenes of chilling horror, including the following: pro-government militiamen lead civilians, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, to the edge of a trench; they shove them in before opening fire indiscriminately to kill them. The bodies, we are told, were then burned and buried with a bulldozer to erase all traces. As the ultimate abomination, these “exploits” of the Assad dynasty were filmed in detail by the executioners themselves. By a twist of fate, this incriminating footage began circulating widely on social media from 2022 onward and became emblematic of the regime’s brutality. A piece of evidence showing one Amjad Youssef — the main star of this horror film — calmly dispensing death! Selective justice is not justice for all ! This low-ranking Syrian operative was arrested by Syrian authorities at the end of last April, and one can imagine the jubilation that swept through the victims’ relatives and the population at large upon hearing of his capture. Yet, when he appeared again on screen during a broadcast aired by the Syrian Ministry of the Interior, he delivered rather astonishing confessions: he took full responsibility and claimed to have acted alone, whereas everyone expected him to implicate his superiors in order to save himself. It then became clear to all that this was a forced confession intended to shield and exonerate certain figures of the fallen regime who had allegedly switched sides. The public began to wonder whether the current government had struck unspeakable deals with these renegades, whose names are already circulating discreetly. It was suggested that this was probably done for security reasons and to ensure stability and calm in certain regions of the country. But that was not all. Malicious tongues also insinuated that bribes had been paid to officials within the security apparatus (1). This led a researcher at the Conflict Studies Center of Utrecht University to remark: “We have moved from transitional justice to selective and cosmetic justice” (2). Indeed, a justice system that focuses on certain culprits rather than others cannot guarantee transparency. Acting on his own initiative? At the beginning of this month of May, another sinister figure — this time a general — was arrested: Khardal Dayoub had been implicated in the August 2013 chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta. The operation left around 1,500 victims, including more than 400 children. Who could forget the sight of corpses with foam at their mouths? More than ever, accountability is essential: the Syrian people have the right to the truth. And let no one come onto national television to tell us that this general, in a moment of poor judgment, acted on his own initiative! Michael Safi & Melvyn Ingleby, “Syria arrests suspected leader of Tadamon massacre”, The Guardian, April 24, 2026. Melvyn Ingleby & William Christou, “Security or justice? Syria faces post-Assad reckoning after string of arrests”, The Guardian, May 4, 2026.