Articles

In an era when crises and challenges are multiplying, we read each day articles, studies and analyses focused primarily on describing the current reality and examining its political, economic and social dimensions. Yet, despite the importance of understanding the present, excessive focus on diagnosing the situation has locked us into circular thinking: we turn endlessly around the same observations and the same deadlocks, without genuinely advancing towards serious reflection on the future of Lebanon, on that of its citizens, and consequently on that of society and the State. Launching national reflection circles… with positivity

Three months to the day after it began, the war in Iran appears to be in suspension, and in the calculations of Washington and Tehran, the opposing side will eventually give in with the factor of 'time'. Although all signs suggest that Iran should capitulate after its military disaster and integrated economic losses estimated between 1,000 and 1,450 billion US dollars, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is not backing down. It has no accountability to its people, prevents them from expressing themselves, has massacred at least thirty thousand of them, and imprisoned fifty thousand more as of last January.

A Lebanese Pop-Up Store is being organized on May 30 and 31 in Paris at the Aalamuna gallery by the company ELFAN to promote Lebanese artists. This new ELFAN initiative is part of a broader global movement aimed at supporting Lebanese artists by developing Lebanese cultural presence in France and Europe. Before outlining the context of this new Lebanese Pop-Up, a brief overview of the ongoing global dynamics, in which Culture Minister Ghassan Salamé is participating, seems useful in several respects. For several years, particularly since the events of 2019 and the explosion at Beirut port in August 2020, Lebanese culture has been experiencing growing momentum abroad. Clearly, Lebanese cultural initiatives outside Lebanon are not new: the diaspora has always played an essential role in promoting and showcasing Lebanese cultural identity. But today, this phenomenon appears to be taking on a new scale.

Lebanese citizens, and the peoples of the Levant region more broadly, apparently must resign themselves to being regularly subjected to a rollercoaster of developments regarding the Iranian conflict. On Thursday afternoon, reports from the American website Axios indicated that a framework agreement had been concluded between US and Iranian negotiators. The same sources claimed that a copy of this memorandum of understanding had been transmitted to the White House and that President Donald Trump had requested "a few days of reflection" before endorsing the text. A few hours later, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards appeared eager to "facilitate" the task for the American president by emphasizing, through the Tasnim agency which reflects their viewpoint, that no agreement has yet been reached between Americans and Iranians.

In an interview broadcast on one of Lebanon’s satellite channels, following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and amid what had afflicted some with a certain “national indigestion”, former Lebanese Defence Minister Albert Mansour took aim at the inhabitants of the occupied Syrian Golan, who numbered at the time no more than twenty thousand souls and had chosen the path of peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation, asking with derision: “Why don’t these people resist the Israeli occupation?” Many of Hezbollah’s mouthpieces and loyalists did the same, sparing the Golan’s inhabitants none of their repeated barbs over what they called a deviation from the principle “where there is occupation, there is resistance”, as though resistance could only manifest itself through rockets and projectiles, oblivious to the fact that the highest form of patriotism and resistance lies in clinging to the land, in refusing to surrender it as easy prey to the occupiers, and in preserving a heritage, a culture and an identity. This is precisely what the Golanis accomplished, within the limits of their modest and limited means, and in the most exemplary fashion. It was this state of affairs that compelled the author of these lines to publish, in January 2001, two detailed consecutive studies in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir under the title “And They Ask You: When Will You Fight Israel?”, then to follow them with another article in “Qadaya An-Nahar” on 29 November 2005, entitled “A Letter to Hezbollah from the Occupied Golan”, in which he invited the organisation unreservedly to neutralise Lebanon and relieve its front from the burden of the conflict with Israel, now that the Lebanese had paid their share of the price.

In a moment of acute regional sensitivity, where Lebanon’s security dossiers intersect with the trajectory of regional and international negotiations, three closely intertwined themes impose themselves on the domestic landscape: the threats of Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem, the controversy surrounding attempts to reposition the “Lebanese card” in the regional bargaining game, and the dossier of displaced persons and their encampments within the capital, particularly in densely populated neighborhoods such as Bechara al-Khoury. These themes, despite their apparent divergence, point in their depths to one and the same question: to what extent does Lebanon remain a state capable of asserting control over its own decision-making and controlling its security and social boundaries?