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Hezbollah, which for years made the entire country tremble with its weapons, its men and its threats, has now been reduced to smearing Maronite Patriarch Béchara Rahi through armies of anonymous accounts, false bravado and insults typed from behind a screen. Even the way they fall has become small. Why this rage? Because the Patriarch simply reminded them of something that has become unbearable: Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese. A simple sentence. A normal sentence. And yet they can no longer silence it. So they strike at thin air, like someone who feels the ground slipping beneath their feet. This is not a sign of strength. It is precisely the opposite. Movements that are sure of themselves do not need to send anonymous individuals to attack a man of the Church. When arguments are replaced by mud, it is because, deep down, one already knows that part of the battle is lost. There comes a moment in the life of organizations when they begin to understand that the fear they inspired is starting to fade. And when fear departs, very little is left. That is when the nervous reactions set in, the insults, the excesses, the pointless blows. Like a cornered scorpion that stings one last time, not because it still dominates, but because it no longer knows how to die any other way. In the history of Lebanon, when a movement begins attacking a religious authority with hysteria, it is often a sign that it has exhausted its other recourse. The political argument no longer convinces. The military argument no longer suffices. What remains, then, is the mud. But mud thrown at a patriarch does not soil the one it targets. It reveals, above all, the one who throws it. What is happening today goes far beyond a polemic against Patriarch Raï. It is the spectacle of a system that senses the times are shifting around it. And a system that senses its end often becomes aggressive, chaotic and loud. The hardest thing for them is this very precise moment when fear changes sides. A dead man does not know he is dead. But a dying one does.

In the aftermath of the October 7 operation, which the Hamas movement named the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Israeli response expanded to encompass collective retribution against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, ultimately becoming a war of displacement and extermination. The National Authority in Ramallah adopted the demand for international protection and raised a one-word slogan — “Baqun,” We Remain — to break the Israeli savagery backed by certain Western states and to resist the ethnic cleansing aimed at driving the population toward the Sinai desert. Had Egypt and Jordan not taken a firm stand in support of the National Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas behind this slogan — which remains in force across all political and international forums and gives shape to the Palestinians’ daily life — events might have taken an entirely different turn. This is what we witnessed in the local and municipal elections held recently in the West Bank and in one city in the Gaza Strip: Deir al-Balah. Deir al-Balah, the Survivor It was toward this city that human waves converged from Gaza in the north and from Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south, following the campaigns of systematic destruction. The city was transformed into a dense human mass of survivors pressed together, and despite the bombing and destruction visited upon it, the sheer weight of its people triumphed over the war of extermination. The city takes its name from the monastery founded by Saint Hilarion, who died in 372 AD — the first Christian monastery in the Gaza territory, surrounded by a forest of palm trees. After its Canaanite name, “al-Daroum” or “al-Daron,” it became Deir al-Balah, and has never ceased to appear, living, on the map of humanity since the fourteenth century BC, as its cultural remains, its fortress and the tombs of those who founded, inhabited and built it so compellingly attest. The National Authority’s insistence on holding to the geographical unity of Palestine made organizing elections in this city the only option it was possible to wrest from the president of the “Peace Council,” Donald Trump, in order to demonstrate that the two-state solution process remained alive. This partial victory secured by the slogan “Baqun” on our soil now forms the foundation upon which the electoral processes aimed at regenerating Palestinian legitimacy this year are being built. A Constitutional Dilemma The internal debate has swelled without subsiding around the presidential decree amending “Law 23” of 2025 on elections, the substance of which is the following provision: [candidates on a list must acknowledge their acceptance of the local elections within that list and their commitment to the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to its national political program, and to the relevant decisions of international legitimacy]. On this basis, the factions of political Islam and the nationalist left — Hamas and the Popular Front once led by Dr. George Habash — united in refusing to participate in the elections, while certain Palestinian elites continued to challenge their legitimacy and to dismiss their significance. This debate is not new, however, and the amendment amounts to nothing more than the correction of a previous strategic mistake made by the National Authority, which had allowed, in general elections since the nineteen-nineties, the participation of extremist forces that had declared war on the Oslo Accords and worked toward the overthrow of the Authority itself, whose actions they never ceased to brand as treasonous — a goal they continue to pursue today, on the strength of their absolute rejection of the national program proclaimed in 1988 and of the “Palestinian Declaration of Independence.” Since the Palestinian political situation has not yet reached the maturity required to proclaim a constitution — which would constitute the primary reference for the legitimacy of any elected authority — it is the reference of the “Declaration of Independence” and the recognition by the majority of the world’s states of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative that remain the legal and constitutional foundation, until such time as a constitution for the State of Palestine can be adopted. The Results With party and faction lists absent from the municipal elections, the weight and role of families and clans grew substantially, as the active frameworks of Palestinian society, their capacity for influence strengthened in parallel with the weakening of the Authority and its security apparatus during this period. This did not, however, conceal the affiliation of the electoral lists with one or the other of the two poles, Fatah or Hamas, against a backdrop of retreat and erosion among the independent forces outside this vertical divide. And while the results in Deir al-Balah and the West Bank went in favor of Fatah, the measure here is less the winner than the turnout rate, which reached 56% in the West Bank compared with 53.7% in 2017, meaning that the boycott call did not reduce participation despite the extreme weakness from which the National Authority suffers under Israeli occupation and its repressive and humiliating measures alike. Another reading suggests that Fatah — which suffers from a decline in its organizational performance and in the performance of its cadres within the Authority’s apparatuses and ministries — was not so much the driving force as the popular Fatahi current itself, which predates the organization as the movement’s genuine base. This current remains powerfully present in all configurations of the Palestinian scene, whatever the gravity of the organizational difficulties afflicting the Fatah movement and the failings of its apparatus. The most important question is not Fatah’s victory, but the capacity of the National Authority, under the most intense pressures, to make good on its slogan “Baqun” — a slogan that keeps the most extremist government Israel has ever known awake at night and demonstrates its failure in the project of ethnic cleansing and displacement it had openly proclaimed. As for the elections in Deir al-Balah — which represents the link between the West Bank and Gaza, and stands as the living model of the survivors of the genocide, of the “Baqun” of the Gaza Strip — the contest was for fifteen seats on the municipal council, with four electoral lists taking part. The “Nahdat Deir al-Balah” list, close to Fatah, won six seats; the “Mustaqbal Deir al-Balah” list took five; the independent “Peace and Construction” list secured two seats, as did the “Deir al-Balah Tajma’una” list, close to Hamas. The importance of reviving the electoral process, whatever its gaps and shortcomings, lies in the fact that it remains the only path to reactivating the Palestinian political system and enabling the citizen to exercise the right to vote as an integral part of the right to self-determination — all the more so since this year is also expected to see, before its end, the elections of the National Council and the Legislative Council, as well as presidential elections. If the National Authority succeeds in completing the most dangerous and complex phase of the electoral process, the ship of Palestine may yet find its berth in the port of Gaza.

The past week can be characterized by procrastination in the US-Iran negotiations, where no major breakthrough was observed despite two Iranian proposals that the Pakistani mediator forwarded to the United States. Until then, many analysts argued that Iran was playing the time card, through the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, against a Donald Trump who would be in a hurry to end the war, before having to answer to Congress after 60 days of war, as required by the US Constitution. But since then, there has been a turnaround: it is the American blockade on Iranian ports that is putting pressure on Tehran. The consequences are visible in the very significant devaluation of its national currency and an economic collapse that the Iranian authorities can hardly hide, despite their triumphant rhetoric. At the same time, the American president was able to bypass the obstacle of Congress this week by considering that given the ceasefire since April 7, the days of war are not counted as 60 but as 38. Is time therefore running out more for the Iranians than the Americans now? While the week had begun with an American refusal of a first Iranian proposal, Iranian negotiators sent a second one to the United States on Friday via the Pakistani mediator. The conditions put forward remain almost identical to the first: a one-month deadline to settle the main outstanding issues, a definitive cessation of hostilities on all fronts, notably in Lebanon, an adjournment of the nuclear talks, a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, compensation for war damages and a release of frozen Iranian funds… "Iran has not yet paid a high enough price" Donald Trump responded to this proposal with skepticism (even though the official American response has not yet been given). In front of reporters at the White House, he said he was not "satisfied". Then on his Truth Social network, he wrote: "Iran has not yet paid a high enough price". And even if the last few days have been marked by a wait-and-see attitude on the front of the Iran-US negotiations, the sound of boots has not completely disappeared. Thus, towards the end of the week, the Iranian army itself deemed a resumption of fighting with the Americans "probable", accusing them once again of not respecting any agreement. For its part, the American site Axios relayed information according to which the US Central Command for the Middle East had prepared a plan for short-duration and high-intensity strikes on Iran, in case it was necessary to unblock the negotiations. The Israelis, unhappy since the beginning of this truce in the fighting, are not to be outdone: on Thursday, their Defense Minister Israel Katz said that his country could act again against Iran. Exorbitant cost at all levels This week also saw the reappearance of another key player in the Middle East, who had kept a low profile until now: Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi last weekend, had a phone conversation with Donald Trump this week. The Kremlin announced that Putin had outlined to Trump the serious consequences that a new military campaign against Iran would have. In any case, this war launched on February 28 has a cost at all levels. Globally, the rise in fuel prices is forcing governments around the world to take measures to limit the damage, and is weighing on all sectors: a glaring example this week is that of an American airline that grounded its planes. For the United States, this conflict has cost $25 billion so far, according to Pentagon estimates. A cost for Iran obviously, which is beginning to show signs of running out of steam. And for China too, indirectly, which imported a large part of its oil from Iran at a preferential price. Another consequence of the war in Iran is the frantic continuation of arrests of opponents and executions. This week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced 21 executions and nearly 4,000 arrests in Iran since the start of the previous conflict. Reports on the Revolutionary Guards' fears concerning a potential new popular uprising due to economic difficulties are multiplying in the media. Also within Iran, it is worth noting a report published this week by Reuters showing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards' grip on the country from now on, with a weakened Supreme Leader. The Lebanese scene, victim of the clash of agendas Parallel to the wait-and-see attitude in the Iranian dossier, the Lebanese scene is boiling on several levels. It remains marked by tensions between the camp that remains attached to Iranian influence, and the official Lebanese authorities who are trying to extricate the country from this stranglehold, at the risk of being subjected to increasingly insistent American pressure. These tensions were illustrated this week by the failure of a scheduled meeting at the Baabda presidential palace between President of the Republic Joseph Aoun, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri (also head of Amal, a Shiite movement allied with Hezbollah) and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, to discuss the modalities of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, which began in the first week of March. The hesitation came from Berri, who had previously shown his preference for indirect negotiations, estimating in an interview with the newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat that "it is not justified to negotiate under Israeli fire". President Aoun, for his part, is facing intense American pressure for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. He continues to refuse it, however, as long as the ceasefire is not total, saying he prefers, according to Baabda sources to MTV, that the "photo" Washington is looking for eventually crowns an agreement, not precedes it. Faced with internal pressures, the president clearly stated this week that he would reject "a humiliating agreement for Lebanon". On the American side, impatience is being felt. Donald Trump mentioned, in one of his untimely statements, that an Aoun-Netanyahu meeting would take place "within two weeks". But the most insistent pressure came from a statement by the US Embassy in Beirut on Thursday, which highlights "the possibility for Lebanon to secure concrete guarantees of full sovereignty, recovery of its entire territory, security of its borders, humanitarian support, and reconstruction assistance" from the United States, if it accepts such a meeting. The text speaks of a "historic opportunity". There is no doubt that President Aoun is at the heart of all the tensions, just like Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. They are regularly the target of increasingly orchestrated and virulent smear campaigns by the "Resistance's public". This week, a report by Israeli intelligence services, relayed by Israeli media, spoke of "potential" threats to the life of the Lebanese president due to his commitment to direct negotiations with Israel. A threat "that Baabda takes seriously", according to its sources to Lebanese media, but which "will not make the president back down in his initiative to save Lebanon". "Angry Birds" and violence in the South Joseph Aoun is therefore clinging to his principles to weather the storm, which is also raging from within. Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc released a particularly virulent statement this week, denouncing the "decline" of the Lebanese authorities in their commitment to negotiations with Tel Aviv, accusing them of "submitting to American dictates". The tensions have also spilled over into the virtual realm: a parodic animated video published by the LBCI channel showing Hezbollah leaders, notably Naim Qassem, its secretary general, as "Angry Birds" characters, caused a great stir among the "Hezbollah public" and numerous insults. The latter lashed out against Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai, victim of a smear campaign that crossed all possible red lines, and which was condemned by the three branches of power. This nervousness at Hezbollah's base is explained in particular by the situation in the south of the country: the week was extremely violent, with a growing number of airstrikes, bombings, dynamiting of entire villages and deaths. Even if Israel also seems caught in a quagmire, the damage is miniscule on its side compared to that suffered by Hezbollah and the Lebanese population. On Sunday, a call for the evacuation of eleven more villages was once again launched by the Israeli army. Noteworthy this week was a request by Netanyahu, during a phone call to Trump, to expand operations in Lebanon. A request rejected by the American president who does not want to jeopardize the negotiations on the two dossiers. The latter "advised" the Israeli Prime Minister to stop destroying buildings in Lebanon because it "harms Israel's image".

“The memory is in danger. Your books, and ours, are in imminent peril.” It is with these words that Rasha El-Ameer, Lebanese writer and publisher, responded to a Facebook image of the library of Azza Baydoun, a researcher whose work engages questions of women and gender, in Bint Jbeil, Southern Lebanon. There is no confirmed news of the house. None of the library’s fate. There is only a dense, circulating unease, passing from one person to another, and questions that find no answer: who holds certainty? What remains? What has already disappeared? It is within this unease that loss first takes shape, in that suspended moment where certainty fails. Waiting hangs between blurred satellite images and a memory that anticipates catastrophe. Disappearance does not require confirmation to become psychologically real; loss is lived before it is proven. It multiplies into a thousand possible forms, a thousand imagined scenarios, each more unbearable than the last. What does it mean for a library to disappear? And more precisely, for a personal library to vanish, one assembled over long years, handled, loved, inhabited, slowly transformed into a private inheritance? Anyone who keeps a personal library—and we are many, very many, in this country—knows it is not a mere arrangement of shelves and volumes. It is accumulated time. The sediment of our readings, the dispersals of our attention, the movements of departure and return. Our books carry us as much as we carry them. They bear the imprint of our passing: a pencilled line, a marginal note, a mark left on a page to be revisited later, and often never revisited. They form a living architecture of memory; one we forget until it quietly calls us back. The library is where our slow relation to knowledge takes form. For that reason, it is intimate, precious, irreplaceable. Its loss is the loss of the only material thing that resembles the labyrinths of our inner lives. In The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa (trans. Stephen Snyder, Pantheon Books, 2019), things disappear gradually. They are erased from the world, then from memory. An authority governs this disappearance, imposes its logic, oversees its unfolding. People forget, adjust, until absence becomes part of an order in which nothing seems amiss. Things vanish, and with them the words that once named them, until even the idea that they ever existed becomes difficult to retrieve. In our context, disappearance unfolds otherwise. No single force dictates it, no time allows it to be absorbed. Things disappear because the world that held them gives way. Books vanish with houses, with rooms, with the hands that once turned their pages. It happens all at once, at a speed that exceeds comprehension and denies the distance necessary for reflection. Throughout history, the destruction of books has never been incidental. When libraries are targeted, what is struck is the knowledge, the memory, the continuity they carry. Two terms name this act: biblioclasm , the destruction of books, and libricide , the deliberate destruction of books and libraries. One might understand it as a form of killing books, a violence directed at memory itself, seeking to erase its traces and sever its transmission. To target books is not only to remove them from circulation; it is to constrict the field of what can still be thought, imagined, remembered. For this reason, books have repeatedly been made into targets across time: from vanished libraries of the ancient world to European book burnings, from the destruction of archives in modern wars to the erasure of entire collections. The same logic persists: to control knowledge is to shape the narrative to determine what may be told, what must be erased, and what remains outside the realm of the sayable. Every destroyed library diminishes the possibility of understanding what has happened, or of telling it otherwise. And yet, history offers another thread. In moments of danger, people have sought to save books by hiding manuscripts, burying texts, and carrying them elsewhere. In ancient China, when books were burned, some scholars chose concealment. Elsewhere, texts were preserved in caves, sealed within walls, only to re-emerge centuries later. At times, what survived did so in layers: one text written over another, as though memory, even under threat of erasure, sought alternate forms of persistence, detours through which to endure. Such accounts do not deny disappearance. They testify to what met it: gestures, attempts, acts of resistance. In other places, loss condensed into a single moment. When the Sarajevo library burned, it was not merely a building that vanished, but the memory of an entire city, an event that can be named, dated, and returned to. The Lebanese Civil War produced a different configuration. No single moment contains it. Libraries eroded through looting, dispersal, and displacement. As institutions collapsed, cultural holdings fragmented: books sold, stolen, abandoned in empty houses. Memory dissolved into scattered elements, without a frame to hold them, without a path through which they might be retraced. Today, this process repeats with heightened intensity. Personal libraries disappear in near-total silence. To mourn a library can seem indecent in a time when children die, and villages collapse. Books vanish without archive, without trace, sometimes without even the certainty of their disappearance, simply because the places that housed them are no longer there, or no longer accessible. Private libraries resemble reservoirs of memory, seeds of what we have been, perhaps of what we might still become. Each one carries a singular order, a sensibility, a life trajectory. The arrangement of books is never neutral; it gives form to an intimate relation to knowledge. When these libraries disappear, it is not only books that are lost, but this order, this relation, this unwritten history. In The Infinity in a Reed: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World ( trans. Charlotte Whittle, Knopf, 2022) , Irene Vallejo traces the history of books as a long chain of salvations. Texts endured because, each time, someone chose to carry them, to copy them, conceal them, rescue them from fire, neglect, oblivion. What falters today is this very chain. The fragility of books is not new. What is breaking is the gesture that once received them. When a library disappears, an entire movement of transmission is severed. The possibility of opening a book again, elsewhere, later, differently, fades with it. What is lost is what might have continued. We enter, then, into this hollowed space: a void in the narrative, a void in memory, a void in meaning that never came into being. And in that space, the voice of Rasha El-Ameer returns, not as a comment, but as an elegy: “The memory is in danger.” We mourn because we know, too precisely, what may already be gone.

The main news this Saturday is not about the conflict between Tehran and Washington, but one of its consequences, namely the emerging crisis between Europe and the United States, which is considering significantly reducing its military presence in Germany. Washington indeed plans to withdraw about 15% of the 36,000 troops stationed in Germany, or nearly 5,000 soldiers, a withdrawal that the Pentagon estimates can be completed in the "next six to twelve months," according to its spokesperson, Sean Parnell. This plan, announced by the Pentagon, would thus be the first consequence of the showdown between the American president, Donald Trump, and the NATO countries, whom the latter has repeatedly criticized for their passivity in the war that has pitted him against Iran since February 28. Donald Trump expressed his annoyance with the German chancellor this week, after a heated exchange between them regarding the war in Iran. On Friday, he also criticized Italy and Spain for the same reason. Could the withdrawal of American troops from Germany be the first step towards a total American disengagement from the Atlantic Alliance? It is still premature to answer this question. Because, while Berlin took note on Saturday of the American decision and called on Europe to strengthen its security, NATO intends for its part to talk with Washington to "better understand" it. According to the Wall Street Journal, this decision surprised several European countries, and even some American military officials who did not think the American president would carry out his threats. Germany, however, seemed to expect it, as announced by the German Defense Minister. "That United States troops would withdraw from Europe and also from Germany was expected," commented Boris Pistorius. "We Europeans must take more responsibility for our security," he added. NATO, for its part, is "working" with the United States to "better understand" Washington's decision, an alliance spokesperson said on Saturday. Donald Trump came to this announcement after Chancellor Friedrich Merz estimated on Monday that "the Americans clearly (had) no strategy" in Iran and that Tehran was "humiliating" the world's leading power. "He thinks it's OK for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. He doesn't know what he's talking about!" Donald Trump retorted on Tuesday. Without responding directly, Friedrich Merz called on Thursday for "a reliable transatlantic partnership." On Friday, Donald Trump also said he was considering a reduction in American troops stationed in Italy and Spain, considering that Rome "has been of no help" to Washington and that Madrid "has been obnoxious." He also indirectly attacked Germany and its significant automobile exports by announcing his intention to raise tariffs on vehicles imported to the United States from the European Union to 25% "next week." An American disengagement from NATO would, however, have disastrous consequences for Europe on both the defense and financial fronts. The United States is the main funder of the Alliance. Its withdrawal from it would force member countries to review their defense strategy, particularly in the nuclear field, and to release colossal sums to compensate for a possible end to the American financial windfall and defense equipment. This development came as efforts for a resumption of talks between Tehran and Washington in Islamabad remain stalled, with Donald Trump stating on Friday that he is not satisfied with the new Iranian proposals. Resumption of the war? This standstill primarily raises fears of a resumption of military conflict, deemed very likely by Mohammad Jafar Asadi, deputy inspector of the Khatam Al-Anbiya armed forces command, quoted by the Fars news agency. According to him, the Iranian armed forces are perfectly prepared for any new American attack, while the American president seems instead to favor economic pressures, through the blockade imposed on American ports. These remain less costly than the military option for the United States, but ruinous for Iran, which suffers from a high inflation rate and whose oil trade is literally blocked. Tehran, whose oil depots are already saturated, has moreover begun to reduce its oil production. Meanwhile, its supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, urged the country's companies in a written message to avoid layoffs as much as possible. Faced with the deadlock, some analysts do not rule out the possibility that the Iranians might try to break the American siege through a military operation that would disrupt Washington's plans, just as Donald Trump had reassured Congress that the war is over and that he is preparing to impose a "long" blockade on Iranian ports. "The ball is currently in the United States' court. We have presented them with a plan to permanently end the war," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi announced on Saturday. "They must choose between the path of diplomacy or the continuation of a confrontational approach. Iran, in order to guarantee its national interests and security, is prepared for both options," he added before ambassadors and heads of diplomatic missions in the Iranian capital. War of words and images in Lebanon On the Lebanese front, the abject campaign led by Hezbollah's electronic army against the head of the Maronite Church, Patriarch Bechara Rai, has somewhat overshadowed the violence of the exchanges of fire between Israel and this militia in southern Lebanon, where, according to the Ministry of Health, at least 41 people have been killed in less than 24 hours. Ali Barakat, nicknamed the "Hezbollah singer," posted humiliating images of the patriarch on his X account, supposedly in response to a caricatural video of the militia leader, Naim Qassem, published by the LBCI channel. The images, meant to illustrate the patriarch's subjugation to Israel, were quickly relayed by supporters of Hezbollah on social media, sparking fiery reactions in Lebanon. The campaign was strongly denounced by many officials, notably the Presidents of the Republic, Joseph Aoun, and of the Parliament, Nabih Berri, as well as by the Mufti of the Republic, Sheikh Abdel Latif Derian. At the same time, a caricatural portrait of President Aoun, depicting him as an Israeli rabbi, continued to be widely relayed on social media. A behavior that ultimately reflects the total bankruptcy of a group which, to mask its inability to put forward the slightest sensible argument for the suicidal adventure into which it has dragged the country, and for its rejection of the authorities' efforts to end the spiral of violence for which it bears responsibility, falls back on smear campaigns, threats, and accusations of treason.

The constitutional law enacted on 21 September 1990 enriched the preamble of the Lebanese Constitution with fundamental provisions stipulating that Lebanon is a free and independent homeland, the definitive homeland of all its sons, united within its internationally recognised borders in its land, its people and its institutions, and that its identity and belonging are Arab. Paragraph (c) further provides that Lebanon is a democratic parliamentary republic. It is from this precise point that one must illuminate the effectiveness of the parliamentary regime established after the Taif Agreement, a regime that has nonetheless demonstrated its inability to build the State and its institutions, and whose faithfulness to the people that elected it on several occasions is legitimately open to question. This domain is acquiring growing importance and is now imposing itself as a vital, intensive and long-term mission, in the wake of a succession of tragic developments made up of wars and political crises confirmed on many occasions. The concept of parliamentarism has never been deemed incompatible with diplomacy, which is by nature a sovereign function devoted to addressing political, economic and social crises without the Lebanese situation improving in the process. The role of parliamentarians is today called into question in the face of the existential crisis that Lebanon is traversing under the effects of what constitutes the fourth or fifth consecutive Israeli war since 1969, a war that invalidates the credibility of the legislative power as a factor of internal and external stability, owing to the non-observance of universally recognised constitutional principles. The Lebanese political class has for decades been entrenching itself behind the façade of a democratic climate that serves as its shelter for cultivating the confessional sharing of power, clientelism and sectarianism, counter to any other Arab or Western political society that is mindful of democratic principles and their anchoring in stable laws founded on the primacy of law and the State, as well as on the requirement of civic equality, universality and justice. The examination of parliamentary practices and behaviours since the nineteen-nineties reveals no respect whatsoever for the commonly accepted norms governing legislative production, already severely limited from one year to the next, in a context marked by the flagrant absence of implementing decrees, and where the majority of texts adopted satisfy neither the requirements of human rights nor those of the rule of law. Democratic governance can indeed only be conceived on condition that the power in question conforms to the internal and international constitutional legitimacy that frames it. Respect for internal legality is defined by a Constitution that forms the social contract freely accepted by the people in the entirety of its principles, its rules and its mechanisms, a contract which, when honoured, confers on the State solid democratic credibility and marks it with the seal of stability and prosperity. None of this has come to pass in this perpetually suspended Lebanon, owing to the inherent vices of majority tyranny, the slowness of legislative production and the absence of any parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which generally functions on a consensual and mutually accommodating basis with it, so that solutions emerge only in the form of partisan compromises or settlements of a militia-like and totalitarian character. More serious still, citizens are most of the time unaware of what is actually being plotted. The work of other deputies is often distinguished by excessive opacity, sometimes even prohibitive, or by political indigence in the examination of dossiers, according to certain minority but competent opinions within the current Parliament presided over by Nabih Berri and which remains under extension, without parliamentary initiatives being coordinated through reinforced information-sharing and mutual consultations, nor through technical expertise in drafting bills of a technical character, these experts working within the structures of the executive power, so that a number of projects submitted to the institution originate from successive governments far more than they emanate from the legislative assemblies themselves. On the legislative level, the influence of Lebanese parliamentarians remains extremely limited in the domain of domestic policy. The majority functions essentially as a rubber-stamp chamber, endorsing bills that have been subject to no prior negotiation before their signing by governments and that deputies cannot amend. Executive declarations on these matters provoke a debate, then sometimes a non-binding vote, which is itself an exercise in pure rhetorical form and modest utility, rarely filling the chambers of Parliament with any agitation whatsoever, in an institution divided into zones of influence where proposals are concerned, which are not examined with rigour and are subjected to formal votes devoid of any symbolic value likely to interest civil society. These votes do not bind the government in its policies, and the question of institutional performance and of the capacity of institutions to fulfil their role of development and reform remains entirely open. The prerogatives belonging in law to Parliament also come up against other insurmountable challenges in a country governed by confessional usages, which contradict the democratic foundations that the Lebanese people is supposed to accept, decide upon and respond to according to the logic of direct and credible popular representation. Thus the President of Parliament allows himself, in certain cases, to overstep the attributions of the legislative power, while the rules of procedure reserve for him a relatively extensive framework at the expense of the parliamentarians themselves, and while the role of parliamentary blocs remains limited as an operational reference. Elected assemblies frequently find themselves compelled to respond to the demands of pressure groups or to delegate authority to the executive, or bilaterally to the president of the assembly who acts as he sees fit, without any genuine relationship being formed between parliamentarians as representatives of the whole of the Lebanese people. The political class has thus succeeded in creating zones of influence to the detriment of the deputies' own capacity to make themselves heard, including at the time of adopting a general budget or financial reform projects that have been stalled for years, and the legislative power thereby transgresses the very principles that the Constitution specifically requires it to guarantee. As for the executive's reactions to these parliamentary initiatives, they oscillate between indifference and criticism emanating from official sources, not as added value but as a simple nuisance within a relationship of mutual facilitation intended to manage crises over the long term, which may even constitute a real obstacle in bilateral relations between the two powers. The Lebanese parliamentary regime is on the brink of the abyss. Repeated extensions give the impression of an outdated democracy, and this is precisely what one is entitled to anticipate for the coming two years in the lifespan of the current assembly, which is moreover what the politicians in power wish for in rejecting any reasonable change that would allow more flexibility for the benefit of the Lebanese. The political seat in Lebanon is perceived as a prized catch opening onto endless and hereditarily transmitted privileges, as well as onto a form of class hierarchy and arrogance in this regard, in a system where everything likewise ends up being traded in for ever more coveted ministerial posts, distributed among rival political groups competing for the portfolios with the highest budgets. This deficit in democratic maturity renders the situation all the more disheartening, as few points are gained at the electoral level, nor at the level of equality among all Lebanese before the law and of the equal and non-discriminatory right of each to benefit from its protection, whether in matters of political or other opinion, of the general interest or of the common good, as if the law were required to prohibit all propaganda in favour of war and any call to national, racial or religious hatred constituting an incitement to discrimination, to internal hostility or to violence. It is well established that the primary guarantee of democratic governance resides in the effectiveness of the legislative power itself, because it is composed of elected assemblies as stipulated by Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, expressing the will of the people, source of sovereignty, in matters of decisions of war and peace. The legislative power likewise guarantees, and must guarantee as any constitution worthy of the name, the independence of the judiciary and the oversight of the executive under pain of the appropriate legal remedies, in addition to its own independence, in the care that international law takes to protect freedom of expression without hesitation, while ensuring that the exercise of this freedom is inscribed within respect for public order, the freedom of others and the promotion of understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, to the exclusion of all racism and religious fanaticism. The legislative power constitutes the fundamental regulator of State relations in both the internal and international order. This form of parliamentarism, absent from Lebanon, does not encompass the work of parliamentary assemblies that directly represent the people, express its aspirations and conditions of existence, engage with international legality by defining the necessity of concluding normative international treaties and committing to the protection of human rights of both the individual and the people, thereby advancing forthcoming dossiers with procedures that conform to the texts in force in both orders of internal and international legitimacy, effective and democratic, to which elected representatives can usefully contribute. There is something fundamentally sound in the rules of credible conformity. It is the call of the new Lebanese Republic.