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“I am but a small cloud drifting across the sky, knowing neither where it goes nor whence it came.” Some souls defy every border and elude every label. Gibran Khalil Gibran was one of them. At once celebrated and strangely insufficiently known, he remains among the most compelling figures of the twentieth century. Born in Lebanon, he came of age amid the restless energy of Boston and New York City. Through his work, Gibran quietly disproved Rudyard Kipling’s famous assertion that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In his life and writing, he embodied both the spiritual depth of the East and the rational modernity of the West. Too often reduced to the extraordinary global success of his masterpiece, The Prophet – long regarded as one of the most widely read books in the United States after the Bible – Gibran was a complete artist, a “seeker of the absolute” who wielded the paintbrush with the same intensity as the pen. His work still resonates today with striking modernity. Was he a painter, a philosopher, a poet, a writer – or all of these at once? Having met him in Paris, Auguste Rodin is said to have remarked: “The world awaits a new William Blake, and he has been born in the East.” Like Blake, Gibran did not see himself as a writer who painted, but as an artist whose inner vision found equal expression through the pen and the brush. To better understand this singular figure, one must look to the influences that shaped the thinker, the writer – reputedly among the most widely read authors in the world after William Shakespeare and Laozi – and the painter whose ethereal works sought to reveal the human soul stripped of its social disguises. 1883–1931: A Life Between Two Worlds Gibran Khalil Gibran was born in 1883 in Bsharri, a Christian village in northern Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire, into a Maronite Christian family. His grandfather was a priest. He was only 12 when his mother emigrated with him and his two sisters to Boston, seeking refuge from poverty and from an alcoholic husband. Their early years in the United States were marked by hardship and loss. His half-brother, sister and mother all succumbed to tuberculosis. Between 1908 and 1910, Gibran returned to Beirut to study at the Collège de la Sagesse before moving to Paris, where he spent two years at the Académie Julian refining his artistic technique. It was there that he encountered, among others, Auguste Rodin. Women and Gibran Woman is the temple of life.” “In the eyes of a woman one can read the history of humanity, for she carries within her both the mystery of creation and the power of unconditional love.” Women occupied a central place in the life of Gibran Khalil Gibran. He regarded them with reverence and profound respect, never merely as objects of desire. As he himself often acknowledged, his life was shaped and sustained by extraordinary women. Though he never married, he loved several deeply. Throughout his life, he called for the emancipation of Arab women, urging them to break free from the constraints of tradition and patriarchal society. Foremost among the women in his life was his mother, to whom he was devoted with near-total reverence. He admired the courage she displayed in leaving everything behind to emigrate to the United States in search of a better life for her children. One anecdote captures particularly well his relationship with women. During his years in Paris, a model who posed nude for artists was so moved by Gibran’s gentleness and respect that she became deeply attached to him. As a gesture of gratitude, she insisted on washing his clothes each day, without accepting payment. Mary Haskell She was both his mentor and his patron, and played a decisive role in his life. It was Mary Haskell who introduced Gibran to New York’s artistic and publishing circles and helped launch his career. Though she was ten years older than him, she remained the only woman Gibran ever asked to marry him. Their relationship is documented in Mary Haskell’s journals, published after her death. May Ziadeh It remains one of the most beautiful and unusual love stories in modern literary history. Gibran lived in New York, while May Ziadeh – the pioneering feminist writer and intellectual – lived in Cairo. For nearly twenty years, they exchanged letters without ever meeting in person. Their correspondence blended intellectual debate, emotional support and a form of almost mystical passion. The relationship perfectly embodied Gibran’s conception of love: a communion of souls transcending physical attachment and geographical distance. He regarded her as his spiritual counterpart, his alter ego. One should also mention his close friendship with Barbara Young, his secretary, who during the final years of his life, assisted him with his English writings.

On 10 May 2000, Raymond Eddé passed away, at the end of an exile of more than two decades in Paris. Eddé was, in the Lebanese political landscape, a wholly atypical figure. A certain reading of history retains of him today the image of an idealist and stubborn man, cut off from reality – since he refused all political compromises that sought to plug temporary gaps in the dyke by reflex of immediate survival, at the expense of the fundamental values of the Republic and the elementary foundations of the State, from the Cairo Agreement to the Taif Agreement. Unbending, the Amid? And yet, paradox of anachronism, it was the opposite that his own community reproached him for: his refusal to be swept along by currents of identitarian testosterone, and his rejection of the sweet songs of the sirens and the machine guns, unlike the popular parties and armed organizations of the era. Like Michel el-Khoury, leader of the Destour, the Amid of the National Bloc continued to hold back the escalation to extremes, opposing the temptation of arms that was ravaging the Lebanese and Christian street, including among his own supporters. Violence ultimately wore down his resolve. Victim of a series of assassination attempts by the various belligerents, he chose to leave. Without knowing, no doubt, that this departure would be permanent. The Man Who “Was Right” A piece of political folklore has it that Raymond Eddé asked that the following be inscribed, as an epitaph, on his grave: “Here lies Raymond, who was right.” The Amid was anid – obstinate – whenever it came to holding firm on his backbone of political ethics. Over time, however, the formula has not been without mixing admiration, irony and even a certain bitterness. As if it were the epitaph of a certain mode of political conduct – too idealistic, if not naive – that refuses to bend and adapt to Lebanese political realities. It defines almost an anthropological category: the honest but powerless Lebanese political figure, ill-suited to Machiavellian virtù . A “loser,” in a sense. Thus, the petty-political Lebanese time has retained of Raymond Eddé the image of a man who saw the catastrophes coming, but who, by refusing compromises in order to keep his hands clean, ended up isolated, exiled, and almost transformed into a Maronite Cassandra – where instincts preferred to follow utilitarian and populist zaïms or “men of the field” in military fatigues. And it is no doubt true that Eddé was himself a victim of his political rigorism when he refused Michel el-Khoury’s proposal to unite the Destour and the National Bloc to create a national counterweight to vatenguerrisme , at the beginning of the 1970s. “Never will the son of Emile Eddé take the hand of the son of Bechara el-Khoury!” he had replied to Sheikh Michel. And this was probably one of the Amid’s political errors, since the absence of the political centre that this national axis might have represented opened the way to an escalation to extremes, and behind it, to a puppet master named Hafez al-Assad, who knew how to exploit internecine quarrels in order to reign for three decades over the land of the Cedar. Function and Stature Nevertheless, in the present circumstances, it may be worth dismantling once and for all the myth of “idealism” and “utopianism” that continues to surround Raymond Eddé – the unloved figure of Lebanese communitarianism, all the more so of its sectarian, identitarian, populist and martial tendency. Raymond Eddé – and the author of these lines did not know him personally, but draws his conclusions from the man’s positions and trajectory – is without doubt the most unpopular of the Christian political leaders (unless it be, supreme irony, Bechara el-Khoury). Why? Because the power that interested him was not the political power coveted by traditional politicians. Eddé was in quest of an authority capable of genuinely embodying something beyond itself: a body of knowledge, an inner bearing, a coherence, an experience, a capacity for transmission, even a form of spiritual or intellectual nobility. He distinguished instinctively between function and stature. In this, he maintained a very ancient rapport with legitimacy – almost Greek or medieval in kind. True authority, not coming from status alone, necessarily had to flow from an adequacy between being, word and deed. For him, authority seemed compelled to satisfy two simultaneous requirements, rarely united: a genuine verticality of knowledge, experience or thought, and an organic recognition from below, from the human real, from the terrain and the living community. If he failed in the test of reality, it was not because he refused to roll up his sleeves. It was because he refused to play the strongman and the militiaman. A considerable difference. He refused to succumb to the illusion of the solution through violence. And in that, he was indeed right. And unfortunately, Lebanon being what it is, he is right every day, without variation. Eddé combined culture, depth and a certain popular recognition grounded in positions of principle, not in acts of war. Not popular in the raw electoral sense, but in the sense that his word genuinely reached people, circulated, transformed, generated free adherence rather than imposed obedience. Eddé created the political, there where others have done nothing but undo it for half a century. One finds here something very Mediterranean, almost antique once again: the idea that authority is not merely an institutional mechanism, but a living relation between a person and a city. A legitimacy tested in duration. In this, as in many other things, he was entirely coherent. Perhaps too coherent for a politician? The Beautiful Losers Beyond this, was Raymond Eddé a “loser,” as an entire current “school” of political thought suggests – a school that measures success in terms of crowds drawn to rallies and ballot boxes? As, after him, figures like Nassib Lahoud or Samir Frangieh, to cite only a few? The time has surely come to shatter once and for all the myth that a figure who does not seek the cult of personality as the foundation of its political legitimacy is necessarily to be discarded from politics or relegated to the margins, in the name of realism. To be wrong with Sartre rather than right with Aron? No. Certain figures now constitute specific landmarks precisely because their knowledge has been tested, recognized, embodied. They have traversed the contradiction of the real world without entirely losing their backbone. They have embodied a form of truth that was not rewarded by immediate history. And this gives more weight to their words, not less. These figures have often seen the disasters coming, understood the impasses, refused certain compromises – and then lost in spite of it all. Or sometimes because of it. There is in them something tragic in the noble sense: not so much the romantic posture of the “cursed” as the confrontation between lucidity and the balance of forces. They reveal something difficult to accept: that being right protects neither from failure, nor from isolation, nor from destruction – but perhaps from dishonour. Leonard Cohen gave his second novel a sublime title: Beautiful Losers , translated into French as “Les Perdants magnifiques.” The translation diminishes the force of the oxymoron. These “losers” are not “magnificent.” They simply inhabit a register that is not the same as that of others. Their giant wings will not allow them to walk among the crowd. Lebanon is full of tactical victors and historical losers. Many of those who won the symbolic or military wars left behind them emptiness, ruin or fear. While certain “vanquished” figures preserved a form of moral legitimacy because they had perceived something essential about coexistence, sovereignty, violence or human dignity. Raymond Eddé is one of them. He accepted to pay the price of his clear-sightedness rather than betray his reading of the real in order to belong to the camp of the victors. One might say he was inhabited by an almost Sophoclean tension, preferring just defeat to degrading victory. Not out of a taste for defeat, no. But because a victory bought at the price of falsehood or blindness would have ended, in his eyes, by becoming another form of ruin. And it is no doubt for this reason that he never truly wished, in his deepest self, to become president of a Republic that has not ceased, more than twenty years after his departure, to sell itself, again and again, to the highest bidder, rather than resolve to exist.

We keep talking about “globalization” as though the word still had a shared meaning. It no longer does. Or rather: all that remains of it is its economic shell—globalization as such: capital flows, supply chains, digital platforms—while its soul has vanished. Globalization as openness, as the promise of a world made more habitable for all, as the search for a shared language among cultures, is in the process of dying. And yet that form of globalization was never merely a material reality; it was a moral horizon. It rested on a simple, almost naïve idea: that repeated contact among peoples, cultures, imaginaries would eventually disarm the temptation of war. Distances reduced by technology, by transportation, by the abolition of customs borders… People would meet at universities, festivals, NGOs, international institutions; they would build compromises, treaties, exchange programs. They would learn to live together, for lack of a better option. That horizon was born with a specific generation: the baby boomers. A generation traumatized by the Second World War, by industrial extermination, Hiroshima, the discovery of the camps. A generation for whom the word “universal” was not a philosophical abstraction, but a response to the abyss—to Hitlerism, Mussolinism, Francoism, to the horror of Auschwitz. Openness against concentration camps. From this emerged the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations, the European Union, the major cultural and scientific institutions that tried—awkwardly, imperfectly—to construct a shared space. This generation endowed itself with a language: that of integral humanism. A humanism that did not reduce human beings to their communal identity, that did not dissolve them into the market alone, that did not sacrifice them on the altar of a jealous transcendence either. A humanism that placed the dignity of each person at the center, against the fetishes of race, confession, clan, or nation. That generation is now disappearing. And with it, the symbolic architecture that made an open form of globalization possible. We have indeed entered, for some time now, the famous Gramscian interregnum: “The old world is dying, the new one struggles to be born, and in this twilight, monsters appear.” The old world was one in which the universal still had a place, if only as official hypocrisy. The new one is taking shape before our eyes: a world of blocs, walls, proxy wars, digital platforms that fragment societies into hostile tribes. And now artificial intelligence, which sends everyone back to “their” truth, narcissism as intellectual comfort—yet another virtual addiction under the guise of progress. Between the two, monsters proliferate: authoritarian regimes that speak the language of democracy in order to hollow it out; populisms that turn social anger into hatred of the internal enemy; religious, ethnic, civilizational identitarianisms that turn otherness into an ontological threat. Hatred has unfortunately become the structuring affect of politics, where the will to live together—even fragile, even wavering—once carried the hope of a better world. Probably up until the watershed disaster of September 11, 2001. Hatred and violence used to be the shadow cast by conflicts; today they are their openly embraced engine. The border is no longer an instrument of regulation but a fetish brandished as a totem. Walls are erected, customs barriers raised like weapons, fantasies of a return to closed sovereignties flourish—as though material interdependence could be repealed by decree. There is a cruel irony here: at the very moment when exchanges have never been so intense—data, images, capital, goods circulating at the speed of light—imaginaries are closing in. We no longer dream of a shared world; we settle for defending fortresses. A shattered postulate The cultural globalization of the baby boomers was certainly Western, sometimes arrogant, often asymmetrical. But it contained a measure of self-risk: one went toward others, confronted them, allowed oneself to be transformed. It assumed that the world could not be divided into culturally airtight blocs. That postulate is now shattered. The twenty-first century is being written in a closed plural: “Christian civilization” versus “Islamic civilization,” “the Russian world” versus the “decadent West,” the “true people” versus “cosmopolitan elites,” “us” versus “them,” everywhere, all the time. This is what Francis ceaselessly denounced until his death. The question is no longer: what do we share? but: what separates us, and how can it be exploited? Integral humanism, for its part, is caught in a vise. On the side of markets, it is disqualified as naïveté: what matters is no longer the person but the profile, the data point, the consumer segment. The individual is thus pulverized into measurable, monetizable behaviors. On the side of identities, it is denounced as a Western ruse: the universal would be nothing but a mask of domination, a moral varnish laid over colonial power relations. The response: a return to “authentic” belongings, to supposedly preserved communities, to tribal passions. Caught between the cynicism of global capital and the resentment of wounded identities, integral humanism no longer finds a political space. It survives in institutions on the verge of ossification, in diplomatic discourse, sometimes in a few individual consciences. But it no longer structures the social imaginary. Perhaps most worrying of all is the generational rupture. The baby boomers carried within them the direct or transmitted memory of the catastrophes of the twentieth century. They had seen where radical dehumanization leads, and it was this memory that made credible—despite everything—the promise of a fragile universal. Subsequent generations grew up in a world already globalized, already connected, but also already fractured. For them, the universal often appears as an exhausted discourse, an official narrative with no grip on reality. They live with economic precarity, the climate crisis, repeated wars, informational vertigo. Survivals of a bygone world The most natural reflex is no longer openness but defense: defending one’s job, one’s territory, one’s identity, one’s comfort, one’s narrative. In this context, figures of openness become inaudible. Whether they speak in the name of faith, reason, human rights, or literature, they seem to be speaking a foreign language. They appear as survivals of a bygone world—one in which it was still believed that dialogue could bend reality. “Strongmen,” by contrast, reassure. Whether they are called Putin, Trump, Erdoğan, MBS, Netanyahu, Orbán, or Le Pen, they all respond to an intrinsic fear of being swallowed, absorbed, erased of all difference in a world that, through technology, had reached a culminating point of mimetic proximity among peoples and their particularities. Should we conclude that everything is lost? That would be too simple, and too comfortable. The death of open globalization does not mean the end of the universal as a demand. It means that the historical form this universal took—the one constructed by the baby boomers, with their institutions, treaties, and grand narratives—is running out of breath. What remains is the naked, brutal question: how can we still speak of human dignity, of rights, of the common, in a world that has ceased to believe in them? We will probably have to begin again from below, in cities, schools, associations, in those minuscule places where individuals stubbornly continue to believe that the other is not first and foremost an enemy. Integral humanism will not be reborn from a diplomatic summit or a new treaty, but from a counterculture: a culture that refuses hatred as a mother tongue and withdrawal as a horizon; a culture that does not confuse the memory of wounds with the perpetuation of vengeance. Open globalization may be dead. But as long as there remain men and women capable of saying “we” beyond their tribes, and of rising beyond the “me” to celebrate and promote a culture of connection, the universal will not be entirely buried. It will move forward limping, against the current, without illusions, certainly. As it always has. But it will find its way. A phrase attributed to Burke held that “evil is the inaction of good people.” So we must unite—and act.

An unprecedented Lebanese initiative practically stole the spotlight locally on Wednesday from two major events: the resumption of Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington and the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing. On the eve of these two crucial meetings due to their impact on the regional conflict, Beirut submitted a memorandum to the UN in which it challenges claims made by Tehran to protest to the UN Security Council against the Israeli strike that killed four of its diplomats at the Ramada Hotel in Raouché last March. In this memorandum, Lebanese diplomacy criticizes the Islamic Republic, accusing it of violating the Geneva Convention on diplomatic relations and interfering in Lebanese internal affairs, according to Independent Arabia, which reported on it. Lebanon also accuses Tehran of drawing it into a destructive war that does not concern it through its military arm, Hezbollah. This initiative by the Lebanese Foreign Ministry, aimed at putting facts in their proper context, is part of a continuing effort by the government, which had banned Hezbollah's paramilitary activities and declared Tehran's ambassador to Beirut, Mohammad Reza Chibani, persona non grata. Its significance on the eve of the third round of Lebanese-Israeli talks in Washington lies in the dual message it sends: on one hand, the determination of the Lebanese state to move forward with the process supposed to allow it, in due course, to restore its sovereignty over the entire territory. On the other hand, an official, though implicit, Lebanese acknowledgment of Hezbollah's allegiance to the mullah regime. In the text, Lebanon affirms its right to hold Iran internationally accountable and to ensure it bears the consequences of its repeated violations of its international obligations, according to Independent Arabia, which said it had access to the document's contents. The media reported that Lebanon had filed a complaint with the UN. However, in a clarification issued in the evening, the Foreign Ministry specified that it was actually a response to Iranian letters addressed to the Security Council. Beirut chose to respond because Tehran had presented inaccurate information in its name. Iran's ambassador to the UN had seized the Security Council after the attack, accusing Israel of a serious violation of international law by targeting four Iranian diplomats who were exercising the functions of official representatives of a sovereign member state on the territory of another sovereign state. Lebanon, for its part, explained that the so-called diplomats killed were actually members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It based its claims on photos of them in military uniforms with their ranks clearly displayed. Beirut provided these clarifications to the UN because in its letter, Iran had stated it had informed Lebanese authorities of the four diplomats' travel to the Ramada Hotel before their assassination. Lebanon, however, stated there was no coordination, citing an official note from March 16 in which the Iranian embassy acknowledged that it had not been able to inform the Foreign Ministry of the presence of the four diplomats at the Ramada Hotel. Furthermore, the ministry recalled that it had requested an updated list of Iranian diplomats in Lebanon twice without receiving a response. Beirut also detailed in the document the harmful interventions of the IRGC in the country and reminded, to illustrate a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, the launch of the first coordinated attack with Hezbollah since the beginning of the war in February. It was on March 11, a week after the government's decision to ban Hezbollah's paramilitary activities. That day, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps itself announced the coordinated strikes during which about fifty sites were targeted in Israel. A Political Lever Far from having a direct impact on Thursday's Lebanese-Israeli dialogue, the Lebanese initiative is nonetheless likely to serve as a political lever for a Lebanon eager to prove it wants to regain control of decisions on war and peace, heretofore mortgaged by Hezbollah. This signal is all the more critical as Israel remains focused on securing its communities on the northern border with Lebanon. For now, Lebanon's main concern remains halting hostilities that have already claimed at least 2,882 deaths, including 200 children. It is around this objective—rejected so far by Israel—that Thursday's two-day talks between the Lebanese and Israeli delegations will open, led respectively by former ambassador Simon Karam and Yechiel Leiter, head of the Israeli diplomatic mission in Washington, and composed, among others, of military officials. The discussions are expected to be difficult due to divergent priorities. Lebanon wants above all strict respect for the ceasefire of April 17 and an end to Israeli destruction in border villages to allow the return of displaced southerners. Israel, for its part, demands a clear plan for Hezbollah's disarmament, a condition it had already set in November 2024 in the ceasefire agreement that ended the war also launched by this pro-Iranian group in support of Hamas in Gaza. Tel Aviv had already made clear it will not withdraw from the buffer zone it continues to expand in the south as long as Hezbollah remains considered a threat. To reaffirm its determination to neutralize this group, the Israeli military intensified strikes Wednesday against Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. It also targeted four vehicles in the Chouf and southern Lebanon coastal areas. A total of nine people were killed, including two children. Evacuation calls were also issued for villages. Residents of nine localities in the Israeli line of fire were ordered to leave toward open areas. The Beijing Summit At the regional level, attention is focused on the talks that U.S. President Donald Trump will have with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during his two-day visit to Beijing, where he arrived Wednesday. A summit with major global stakes, from international trade to war in Iran to Taiwan. The American president should notably seek China's help in his diplomatic confrontation with Iran, especially since it risks leading to a resumption of military operations should Tehran maintain its positions, which are unacceptable to Washington. Central to the negotiations is the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran remains determined to control because the revenue from tolls exceeds that from oil sales, Tehran stressed Wednesday. An option practically unacceptable globally due to its strategic geopolitical and commercial impact. Another important matter on the agenda of the Beijing discussions is economic cooperation, to which Donald Trump attaches particular importance, as evidenced by the composition of the delegation accompanying him, made up of about fifteen top business executives.

In the first chapter of this series of texts on the grand sweep of History and that of my son, Raphaël — "The Time of the South, the Time of the North" — the subject was the difference between the countries of the South, where History is still on the march, and those of the North which, according to Fukuyama, are living through "the end of History." But in its conclusion, the text returned to an intuition of the poet Etel Adnan, according to whom Lebanon — where the past resurfaces permanently in the present — is becoming "the prototype" of the world of tomorrow. Of course, this relationship to time may seem counter-intuitive to defenders of the historiographical tradition according to which History has a direction. A tradition that finds its origin in the biblical history of David, as related in the Books of Samuel, and which has since been taken up by the many philosophies of History that proliferated in the nineteenth century. But anyone with an interest in historiography knows that, alongside this vision, there exists another tradition in which historical time is described as cyclical. This was the case with the precursor of the philosophy of History, Ibn Khaldun, in his Book of Lessons published in the fourteenth century, and, in the twentieth century, with the great philosopher of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, who defended a vision of History in which fragments of the past can surge into the present. And anyone who follows current events knows that today, on a global scale, we are witnessing the return of many such fragments. 1 – What historical era are we reliving? One of the most frequently evoked returns, particularly in the West, is of course that of the 1930s of the last century, when Europe was contaminated by fascism. With the raised arms of certain American politicians, the demonisation of the far left, and a definite rise in antisemitism accompanied by hate speech targeting Muslims, one can readily understand why this analogy recurs so often in public debate. Even though I subscribe to this reading, for my part I have the impression that we are witnessing above all the return of a more distant era — one that goes back to the sixteenth century, when, after the discovery of the Americas, Europe began to produce a discourse on its own civilisational superiority. One of the founding episodes of this turning point was the Valladolid Controversy, where, in 1551, theologians and jurists debated the nature of the Amerindian peoples in order to determine whether they were the legitimate owners of their lands or whether, according to Aristotle's criteria, they could be identified as "natural slaves." Even though this debate "officially" concluded with a recognition of the humanity of the Amerindians, this discourse subsequently only grew stronger, culminating in the nineteenth century with theories on race and discourses on the civilising mission, so as to justify an imperial logic and the expansion of colonial territories. 2 – The return of the discourse on civilisational superiority If it is precisely this language that seems to me to be resurfacing today, it is first of all because Netanyahu uses it to sell his many massacres in the Middle East as a "clash of civilisations," presenting his country as the one defending the values of the Judeo-Christian West. But when one sees the many acts of desecration committed by the Israeli army against Christian religious symbols — as is the case in Lebanon — one is justified in relativising the clash of civilisations theory. For this reason, more than Samuel Huntington's theory, it seems more accurate to speak of a return of the civilisational discourse. A discourse that also appeared recently from the lips of Marco Rubio at a conference where he referred to the era of Christopher Columbus and the conquistadors as a symbolic period of Western greatness. Delivered before an audience of European leaders, the aim of this conference was to invite them to ally themselves with the United States in order to reconnect with that past which, as we know, was above all made up of territorial expansion, the subjugation of peoples, and the erasure of civilisations. Of course, as a Lebanese person, I cannot but be alarmed to hear a minister of the world's foremost power referring with pride to this historical era. But what is even more alarming is that recourse to this "archaic" discourse is also being made by the pioneers of future technologies. 3 – Accelerationism Such is the case, for example, of Alex Karp, the controversial head of Palantir, who, in his manifesto for "the future of the West," recently published on X, makes explicit reference to discourses on civilisational superiority: "Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive." And when one considers that Palantir sells surveillance software to the CIA and to Israel, and that he makes no secret of his admiration for Netanyahu's policies, there is reason to worry for the inhabitants of the Middle East — and, I believe, for the world at large. In any case, it is a strange irony that Alex Karp should have wished to write a doctoral thesis in Frankfurt in order to associate his name with that philosophical tradition. A strange irony, because if that school was once the home of luminous thought — such as Walter Benjamin's concept of the "aura" — it now finds itself associated with an entrepreneur close to a current of thought, the "Dark Enlightenment," that seeks to accelerate the advent of a new civilisation freed from the slowness of democracy and governed by the efficiency of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence. All of this gives the impression that it is as if the debate initiated in the sixteenth century were returning, but with a civilisational hierarchy based on the mastery of algorithms and artificial intelligence, and that the question once posed at the Valladolid Controversy — on the humanity of the Amerindians — is now mutating into the question of what use humans will be in such a civilisation. What is to be done in the face of the probable arrival of this civilisation? I do not know, but chance had it that at the moment of the publication of Alex Karp's manifesto, I was discovering at the cinema a film whose action unfolds in the sixteenth century: Magellan , by the Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. 4 – “Magellan” and the Ghosts A pictorially splendid film which, as its title suggests, traces the journey of this Portuguese navigator who, in the sixteenth century, completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, and who, upon reaching the Philippine islands, encountered the resistance of "indigenous" chiefs who, out of fidelity to their ancestral culture, refused forced Christianisation. Despite some factual errors, what is striking about this film is not only its resonance with current events, but also its way of depicting every character as an anti-hero. No glorification of anyone whatsoever — only exhausted, vulnerable, and viscous bodies. To put it another way, this is far removed from the Hollywood biopic aimed at glorifying a historical figure, and further still from the very enthusiastic description that Marco Rubio gave of that era in his speech. And where this anti-heroic approach hits its mark is that it condemns no one in particular, but reveals how a system — in this case colonialism — enslaves everyone without distinction between colonised and colonisers, and casts them all into violence. And one can well sense how, in the future, even those who today sell us the civilisation of "techno-colonialism" with broad smiles will themselves be enslaved by the technology they are championing. But so as not to end on a sombre note, I will evoke the end of the film, which relates the Battle of Mactan, where Magellan was killed by warriors led by Lapu-Lapu. This victory made Lapu-Lapu a legendary figure in the Philippines, where a city bears his name today. But by choosing to depict Lapu-Lapu as a spectral figure, Lav Diaz lends credence to the thesis that this character may never have existed — perhaps his way of saying that the victories of supposedly superior civilisations will never be definitive, since they will be haunted by the spectre of those they tried to subjugate. And it is of this importance of spectres that the next chapter will speak.

As political circles await clearer indications of President Donald Trump’s true intentions regarding the trajectory of the standoff with the Islamic Republic – following Washington’s outright rejection of Tehran’s response to the latest American “peace” proposals (though what kind of “peace” is actually being discussed remains an open question) – attention on Tuesday, May 12, turned to reports of an Israeli incursion north of the Litani River, the first such move in the current context. Since the disastrous war launched by Hezbollah in July 2006 – for what many viewed as purely Iranian considerations – every international and regional initiative, negotiation and security arrangement had focused on stabilizing the area south of the Litani. United Nations Resolution 1701, as well as the ceasefire brokered in November 2024 following yet another self-destructive war initiated by Hezbollah, centered on ending all militia presence within that clearly delineated southern zone. Following the third frenzied – and no less self-destructive – war launched by the pro-Iranian party on March 2, 2026, ostensibly in retaliation for the death of the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, Israel immediately signaled its intentions, stressing its determination to establish a buffer zone in that same area south of the Litani River. The high-profile announcement of an Israeli military incursion north of the river, along with the establishment of a permanent position on the outskirts of the town of Zawtar al-Sharqiyeh, marks, in many respects, a “break” with the entire international diplomatic and security process governing southern Lebanon since August 2006, when the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1701. Tel Aviv also reported clashes in the area with Hezbollah militants, fighting that it said lasted three days. The significance of the disclosure of this major development lies in its timing: it comes on the eve of the third round of direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, scheduled for Thursday, May 14, in Washington under the auspices of the Trump administration, and in the presence of former ambassador Simon Karam – a participation that lends a new political dimension to the bilateral discussions. The message directed at the Lebanese authorities appears clear: if no tangible progress is made toward the disarmament of Hezbollah’s militia, as stipulated by Resolution 1701 and the November 2024 ceasefire agreement, the Israeli army will not limit its operations to the area south of the Litani, as initially indicated, but will not hesitate to expand its campaign by crossing the river northward. Israeli political leaders in Tel Aviv have, in fact, raised that possibility explicitly. Some sources have even gone so far as to suggest that the Israeli military could advance as far as the Zahrani River, south of Saida. The Jewish state could justify such an escalation of its military operations in southern Lebanon by citing the renewed attacks carried out by the pro-Iranian party against northern Israel. As recently as Tuesday evening, several explosive-laden drones launched from southern Lebanon crashed inside Israeli territory near the border, wounding a number of soldiers. The Regional Dimension As tensions rise on the Lebanese front, uncertainty continues to surround developments on the Iranian front. The explosive issue is expected to feature prominently during President Donald Trump’s visit to China later this week, as Beijing maintains close ties with the Islamic Republic. Speaking on the matter Tuesday, the White House chief said he had no intention of acting “rashly” regarding Iran, stressing the importance of the naval blockade imposed on Iranian ports. At the same time, however, the American president made clear that he is under no illusion about what he described as Tehran’s delaying tactics. The remark echoed previous statements by Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly argued that the time has come to put an end to what he describes as the Islamic Republic’s long record of deadly and destabilizing aggression against Western nations and Middle Eastern states alike. Iran, the president said earlier this week, has been “leading us on for 47 years.”