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The suspense of the day on Monday, June 1st, centered this time on the fate of the southern suburbs, which had experienced the past twenty-four hours under the threat of imminent Israeli bombardments. Late in the evening, President Donald Trump announced the conclusion of an agreement providing for a halt to Hezbollah fire against Israel in exchange for a suspension of Israeli bombing of the southern suburbs, which was about to be carried out. The White House chief made this announcement on his social network Truth Social, indicating that he had held a "very productive" conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an allusion to the raid that appeared imminent against the southern suburbs, he indicated that "no troops will go to Beirut, and the forces that were on their way have turned back."

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa composed his cinematic epic Kagemusha — The Warrior's Shadow at the turn of the 1980s, to immortalise the story of a courageous warlord who had defied the feudal powers of the sixteenth century. He fell in battle, even though his soldiers had not spared their bodies in protecting him from the enemy's arrows. Yet the command chose to conceal his death and find a double to carry the war forward, and the paradox lay in the fact that this perfect replica was drawn from the dregs of society, a common thief. After the fashion of great filmmakers, whose dazzling spectacle raises questions and dilemmas of unsettling depth, Kurosawa lays bare the fragility of the military edifice, for all its mass and violence, since it suffices that the death of the exceptional commander — the one whose eye does not blink in the face of death — be announced for the whole structure to collapse. He also strips naked the system of political illusion that governs the masses and the soldiery, and perhaps even the most senior officers and the closest members of the inner circle.

Every year, when the second of June comes around, Samir Kassir rises back into memory as though he had never truly left. The years go by, faces change, circumstances and events follow one upon another, yet there are certain people the passing of time cannot reduce to mere remembrance. They remain present in the details of our lives, in the words we write, in the ideas we defend, in the dreams that never had time to be fulfilled. Twenty-one years have passed since the assassination of Samir Kassir, and I still have the feeling that that ill-fated morning has not really ended. Samir was not, for me, a journalist or a writer or a thinker whose articles and ideas I followed from a distance. He was a friend, an exceptional human being who possessed that rare ability to reconcile profound culture with human simplicity, intellectual boldness with personal warmth.

We all see it: the world is becoming increasingly brutal, as if devoid of faith or law. Even if the wars in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Syria, Sudan, and Iran are not fundamentally more violent than those of the 20th century, what strikes the observer is the complete lack of inhibition among protagonists in their use of force. None of the actors involved seeks to burden themselves with moral or legal justifications beyond mere formality. This absence of pretense illustrates the predatory logic that now prevails everywhere. It seems that the only question that matters is: how to gain advantage or avoid losing too much with these new rules of the game? As Donald Trump claims with his talent for sensing the zeitgeist: "No more mister nice guy."

The image of Israeli flags fluttering over Beaufort Castle is painfully striking. It is as painful as those of villages completely or partially destroyed, or families decimated. It is as violent as videos of desperate Southerners trying to salvage what they can before the next merciless volley of missiles, who risk death to feed herds and pets abandoned by their owners, who cry out their anger, frustration, and despair at a war that nothing could justify. The banners on Beaufort and the unbearable Israeli triumphalism that followed the seizure of this strategic archaeological site hit like a punch. Because they recalled the machinery of pointless wars in which Lebanon has been trapped for decades, caught in a time loop of a bad movie.

The publication of two appeals launched by activists in Tyre and Nabatiyeh, addressed to the Lebanese State calling for the protection of these two ancient cities from the Israeli threat to erase them, for the deployment of the army and security forces within them, and for their designation as open, demilitarised cities, constituted the first public and organised act of resistance from within the Shia milieu. A milieu whose voices calling for the overcoming of fear and the raising of dissent have multiplied in recent times, against those who have confiscated its history, its present, and its future in vengeance for Khamenei. These activists were subjected to a campaign of threats, denunciation, and character assassination that led some to withdraw.