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In seeking to understand what is happening to us, to understand myself and to recover some equilibrium in the face of what we are living through, I turn to books and novels about peoples who have known the ravages of war as we know them. Japan, with what it endured during the Second World War and in the aftermath of the atomic bombings, offers in this regard a model that may help us locate our own pain. Let us note, in passing, that the quantity of weapons poured onto Lebanon over the years now amounts to more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Two works stand out here, Urashimasō and The Silent Cry . The first was written from within the event itself; its author witnessed the ruins with his own eyes, bearing testimony and describing the tragedies, the mutilations and the wandering he observed. The second was written after Japan’s defeat, and bears witness to the inner devastation of the human being. Comparing what they describe with what we live through, I found that the Lebanese situation brings together both sufferings simultaneously, with no separation between them and no temporal interval of any kind. These two books help to dismantle violence, to understand it, and not merely to survive it psychologically. This kind of writing does not diminish the pain, but it gives it shape and offers it a language, drawing it out of chaos toward something that can be grasped. In wartime especially, this capacity constitutes almost an act of resistance. For war reduces the human being to a reaction, to a body that survives, suffers or flees; whereas writing — and the reading of this kind of literature — restores us to our place as conscious subjects, rather than mere victims of circumstance. In short, some peoples have known wars, others have known defeat, and others still have emerged from the rubble to rebuild themselves. But what Lebanon is living through resembles neither a war in the traditional sense, nor a defeat one could date, nor even a catastrophe one could contain within a defined timeframe. It is something else entirely. In the Japanese experience, as reflected in works like Urashimasō and The Silent Cry , there existed a trajectory, however painful. Shock first, then silence, then awareness, then reconstruction. Even in the most terrible moments, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, the catastrophe had in some sense a finality. The strike had ended, and it was from there that a history was born. In Lebanon, nothing ends. ` There exists here no moment one could say marks “the after.” Everything happens at once: a permanent trauma that cannot be absorbed, a forced reckoning that never reaches its conclusion, contradictory narratives that settle nothing, and a daily life that resumes above the rubble as though denying its very existence. Lebanon does not live the aftermath of war. It lives inside the war, inside its interpretation and inside its own denial, all at once. Elsewhere in the world, catastrophe produces memory, memory produces consciousness, and consciousness produces, even after a long delay, change. Here, the chain is broken: a catastrophe, then cries, then divisions, then partial forgetting, then a new catastrophe. No memory is completed, no consciousness accumulates, no change comes. In Urashimasō , the human being is broken, but honestly so. In The Silent Cry , he tries to understand, or to conceal himself behind narratives. In Lebanon, the situation is harsher still: a broken being, deprived of the right to express his brokenness, compelled to choose a narrative under the pressure of fear, of belonging or of accusation. It is here that the particularity of the Lebanese condition resides, and perhaps its unprecedented character: not merely a plurality of opinions, but a plurality of reality itself. Each community lives a different war, tells a different story and builds a different memory. There exists, consequently, no unifying “national event,” only parallel events that converge solely in pain. What makes the Lebanese situation without precedent, particularly within the framework of the modern nation-state, is that the state itself no longer fulfills its role as the ultimate reference of meaning or of decision. In most countries, the state declares war or ends it, holds the monopoly on violence and forges the official narrative. In Lebanon, the war unfolds both within the state and outside it, violence is dispersed throughout, and the narrative is contested to the point of existential rupture. Thus, the Lebanese do not live merely a political crisis, but a deep referential void. It is this void that causes the catastrophe to repeat itself without ever becoming a turning point. Every strike, every explosion, every tragedy is added to a long chain, without ever closing its circle or laying the ground for what might come after. Graver still is what one might call the normalization of the absurd: death becomes a number and an image on a wall, blood a news item, catastrophe a part of daily routine. Not because people no longer feel anything, but because they have been so thoroughly exhausted that they can no longer convert feeling into action. Lebanon today resembles neither postwar Japan nor any country that has emerged from any conflict, because it has not even been granted the chance to emerge from one. It is a country where the war has not ended, where peace has not begun, where nothing has been resolved, yet where everything replays itself, again and again. Perhaps this is why the pain in Lebanon seems different: not only because it runs deep, but because it unfolds without horizon. Not because it comes unexpectedly, but because it returns. And not because it remains incomprehensible, but because it is fully understood, without anyone possessing the power to change it. This is not simply the tragedy of a nation. It is a complex human condition, rare and perhaps without precedent: a state living within its recognized borders, yet deprived of the natural time of states, that time made of beginnings, endings and transformations. Lebanon is not merely a country in crisis. It is a country removed from all sequential logic. And this, perhaps, is the most cruel form of catastrophe: that it does not end… and that it does not begin again.

Caught between two rogue states, Lebanon has no choice but to appease the one closest to it geographically, the one on its border. It is the art of peace, as dictated by common sense. One need not be Sun Tzu to understand this, nor to understand that Lebanon belongs to the Arab world, not the Islamic world, and that, in this respect, it can rely on an Arab solidarity that has no equivalent in Iran’s militant Islamism. The Palestinian cause is, of course, sacred, and the dispossession of Palestine will remain a stain on the Arab world’s conscience. But this is no reason to sacrifice another sacred cause: that of Lebanon itself – this magnificent geographical and cultural jewel, this promise of religious freedom offered by history to the Maronite Church and, through it, to all Lebanese communities, the loss of which would be a sacrilege or, in the words of John Paul II, “one of the world’s regrets.” Lebanon is “larger than itself,” Emmanuel Macron said last March at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Indeed, Lebanon is a stroke of historical genius, having become the crucible of a way of life based on coexistence between two major religious traditions that are, in many respects, antagonistic, but whose rapprochement – as it ultimately took shape in Lebanon – has managed to serve as “a model of freedom and pluralism for East and West,” in the words of John Paul II. Part of the Francosphere Lebanon’s major remaining asset is that it belongs to the Francosphere and, through it, to a wider sphere open to France and the West, while remaining deeply religious, deeply peaceful, and deeply rooted in the East. How, given its small territory, could it be otherwise? It is therefore necessary to ensure that, once we emerge from the heavy trials we are currently going through, the Greater Lebanon prevails over the “smaller Lebanons” that still seek to define themselves “in thought or in words”; and in particular over the Khomeinist utopia whose objective is to extend Tehran’s authority over Lebanon, to allow Iran to reach Israel’s borders and the shores of the Mediterranean, and to destroy Israel in a venture where the religious directly merges into the eschatological and the end of times, in other words into irrationality. Such ambitions could not but trigger, among Lebanon’s other communities, reflexes of self-defense. One of the reasons Lebanon will remain resistant to this ideological colonization of the Shiite community is that Shiite ‘asabiyya is met by another ‘asabiyya , this time Maronite, fiercely attached to its autonomy of thought and action, as well as to the portion of land that came to it after centuries of gestation and suffering. A portion of land for which it has paid the price in blood throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and which it continues to pay for today in the border villages. The Lesson of Greater Lebanon We say this while being convinced that the Maronites have, at great cost over the past century, intelligently absorbed the main lesson of Greater Lebanon as established in 1920: no longer to aspire to a Lebanon in which they would finally be autonomous and free, but rather to place themselves in its service once it had been achieved. In moving from a nascent nation to Greater Lebanon, the Maronites have indeed moved – not without hardship, setbacks, hesitation, and serious mistakes – from adolescence to maturity, from a community aspiring to become a nation to a nation assuming its responsibilities toward all its communities, which came to be integrated into its project. In order to remain true to itself, the Maronite ‘asabiyya , whose stirrings can be felt at present, must remember that it exists solely in the service of the great Lebanese civilization, of coexistence, of a believing modernity, of a positive secularism, of religious fraternity, of the rejection of any instrumentalization of religion, of geopolitical vision, of freedom and pluralism, and that it stands at the opposite end of isolationism. In support of what has just been said, we may cite the following passage from an address delivered in February 2011 by the late Michel Eddé, then president of the Maronite Foundation in the World, during the unveiling ceremony of the statue of Saint Maron in the outer grounds of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican: “This Lebanon (…) was first shaped by the Maronites into a homeland, and then into a modern state. They did not seek to make it a Maronite or Christian nation, nor a state for Maronites or Christians, although this was within reach at the time. They conceived it as a home for coexistence between Muslims and Christians, a home founded on the recognition of the right to difference, on respect for the other, and on acceptance of that difference. In other words, on freedom and democracy.” Affinities That said, and in support of the option in favor of a peaceful accommodation with the state on our borders, it should be noted that Christian Lebanon is not without cultural and religious affinities with religious Israel. The Church and the Synagogue pray and plead within the same Book of Psalms and draw nourishment from certain great narratives of the Bible. The Maronite Eastern Church also has the wisdom to recognize that, while the universal Church contributed to antisemitism in the course of its historical separation from the Synagogue, it is not itself bound by the errors of the past. It can therefore freely adhere, without ulterior motives, to the provisions of the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate , which states: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.” It also does not fail to look also “with esteem, the Muslims who adore the one God, living and subsisting, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men.” In this respect, it could even amount to overstatement, Lebanon being par excellence the place of Islamic–Christian dialogue of life. Lebanon’s Mission Finally, if the Synagogue is its historical elder, the Church must not forget that God has made it the guardian of the hope that one day “all peoples shall call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord” (Zephaniah 3:9), and that it must know how to lead them through history, by the “gentle promptings” of the Holy Spirit, toward the fullness of the revelation it has itself received. At no point must Lebanon, heir to the high values transmitted by its communities, lose sight of the grandeur of its mission. It therefore has a moral duty, in the particular case of Palestine, to wield the weapons of the Spirit and to warn its southern neighbor that, however traumatized it may be by the events of 7 October 2023 and their trail of atrocities, it risks losing its soul by exercising the genocidal violence that has been witnessed against the Palestinians. By dehumanizing the Palestinians and extinguishing in their hearts any empathy for this people, Israelis risk dehumanizing themselves, according to some of their own historians. Can Israel be saved by war? No, only by giving the Palestinians a future can it live in peace. For an imposed peace that rests not on justice but on force can be overturned overnight. True peace is that which rests on the inalienable rights of every person and every human collectivity, as developed over two millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization; and toward which all nations that claim to be just in the eyes of God must strive – which both actors in the Holy Land drama claim as their aspiration. There is yet another, perhaps more circumstantial, reason to accommodate a peace with Israel: the opening of borders to the holy sites that it would allow. Of course, in Saida and Tyre, Lebanon possesses precious relics of Christ’s passage through its land. Of course, it also has, on its mountains and deep within its valleys, important sacred sites toward which it turns its gaze. But these are not sufficient reasons to forget the stones of Jerusalem, or to turn one’s eyes away from Bethlehem and Nazareth, which remain for all Christians irreplaceable witnesses to the life of Jesus. No Decentralization That Leads to Isolation A final warning before concluding: whatever the price to be paid for peace with Israel, all forms of decentralized structures that would isolate Lebanon’s communities from one another must be avoided. Deep Lebanon has a duty to remain open and close to all those who built it or continue to build it, faithful to sharing with all the joys and sorrows, the mourning and the celebrations. Finally, economic prosperity in Lebanon must not come at the expense of its spiritual mission. Before being a casino, a hospital, a ski resort, or a tourist destination – all of these are merely livelihoods – Lebanon must remain the intellectual heart of the Middle East, a space of freedom, creativity, and pluralism, a laboratory of the “civilization of love” envisioned by Pope Paul VI. To this end, its universities and higher education institutions have a leading role to play. The search for meaning must become one of Lebanon’s “specialties,” alongside mezze .

The moment is, without a doubt, historic in more ways than one: symbolically, first; and in terms of the political impact and strategic dimension of the event, secondly. The symbolic aspect, first, is of particular importance in the local and regional context that no one ignores: Lebanon's Ambassador to Washington, Nada Hamadé Moawad, meeting face-to-face at the State Department in Washington with Israel's Ambassador, Yechiel Leiter, under the auspices of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with the Lebanese, Israeli, and American flags side by side in the background… The image would have been political fiction just a few months ago. Ambassador Nada Hamadé Moawad followed by Israel's Ambassador Yechiel Leiter upon their arrival at the meeting room. But it is the geopolitical dimension that above all takes on a historical and vital character for Lebanon. The Lebanese-Israeli bilateral meeting indeed enshrines a fundamental orientation taken by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salam government, namely the total dissociation between Lebanon's foreign policy and strategic choices, on the one hand, and the political options of the Islamic Republic of Iran, on the other. This orientation defined by President Joseph Aoun and the Salam cabinet has a corollary: the need to put an end to the political (and militia-related…) excesses of the outlaw mini-state of Hezbollah, which for more than two decades has been implementing a strategy of deconstructing the Lebanese state and its institutions. A two-hour meeting This geopolitical guideline was thus discussed during the two-hour meeting held at 11 a.m. Washington time (6 p.m. Beirut time) under the chairmanship of the Secretary of State. The head of American diplomacy welcomed this as a “historic opportunity” for Lebanon and Israel to make peace. “This is about definitively ending 20 or 30 years of Hezbollah's influence in this part of the world,” he declared. “This goes beyond a single day, it will take time.” “We will no longer allow Iran to exert its influence on Lebanon's political choices,” said Mr. Rubio. Hezbollah, it is noted in this regard, called the direct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon a “capitulation” and marked its disapproval by launching rockets against 13 Israeli border towns at the very moment the meeting began at the State Department. Little information has filtered regarding the content of the discussions. Lebanon's ambassador called for a ceasefire in South Lebanon; her Israeli counterpart reportedly replied that his government would study the Lebanese request. A decision was also reportedly made to initiate bilateral negotiations to discuss the issues at the heart of the dispute between the two countries. The venue and date for the start of these talks will be set shortly. « Excellent exchange » At the end of the meeting, the Israeli ambassador addressed journalists and hailed an “excellent exchange” during the discussions, noting that Israel and Lebanon were now “on the same side.” “We discovered today that we are on the same side” between Lebanon and Israel, he affirmed, as he left the State Department. “This is the most positive thing we could take away from this meeting. We are both united in our desire to free Lebanon from an occupation, from a power dominated by Iran and called Hezbollah,” he said, before adding that “Naim Kassem and Hezbollah are now a thing of the past.” In the early evening, the State Department was expected to release a joint statement emphasizing that the United States hopes the talks will go “beyond the 2024 agreement to achieve comprehensive peace.” “The United States supports the Lebanese government's efforts to re-establish the monopoly on legitimate violence and end Iran's influence,” the statement stressed, adding that the United States supports Israel's right to “defend itself against Hezbollah's attacks.” And the statement underscored that “any agreement aimed at ending hostilities should be discussed between the two governments, under the aegis of the United States, and not through any other channel” (an allusion to Iran's desire to link the ceasefire in Lebanon to the Iranian aspect of talks with Washington). Aoun: The beginning of the end Regarding reactions, President Joseph Aoun said he hoped the negotiations would mark “the beginning of the end of the suffering of the Lebanese people.” But “stability will not be restored in the south if Israel continues to occupy territories there,” he added. For his part, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar stated: “We want to achieve peace and normalization with the Lebanese state. There are no major disputes between Israel and Lebanon. The problem is Hezbollah.” Operations in the South Meanwhile in the South, fighting continues to rage on the main front, that of the strategic city of Bint Jbeil, even as Israeli bombardments continue across all southern regions, as do village destructions. The Israeli army claims to have captured Bint Jbeil. In this context, the IDF announced on Tuesday the capture of three Hezbollah militants, one of whom was seriously injured and two more lightly. They were taken to Israel. Previously, the Israeli army had indicated since Monday that it was besieging Bint Jbeil, where dozens of militants were reportedly holed up. However, the fighting remains fierce as the Israeli side acknowledged that ten of its soldiers have been wounded in the South in recent hours, and one has died. The Strait of Hormuz It should be noted that on the Iranian front, several ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday, but they were not vessels heading for any of the Iranian ports subject to the American blockade. Of note in this regard is the virulent Chinese reaction concerning this blockade, which China described as “dangerous and irresponsible.” The other important development this Tuesday, concerning the strait, was the announcement of a conference on Friday, chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, with the participation of “non-belligerent” countries willing to contribute to a multilateral and “purely defensive” mission. An operation aimed at “liberating” the Strait of Hormuz and ensuring free passage. A change of course among European countries, until now hostile to any intervention in the American-Israeli war against the Iranian regime?

In Lebanon, education is meant to liberate minds, but Iran’s proxies weaponize it. Lebanon has long prided itself on something rare in this region: a belief that education is not a privilege, but a pathway. A country where, despite war, collapse, and political decay, parents still scrape together what little they have to send their children to school. A country where classrooms have historically produced doctors, engineers, writers, and thinkers, not martyrs for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The numbers tell part of that story. Lebanon boasts one of the highest literacy rates in the region, hovering near 98 percent. For years, it ranked among the top countries globally in the perceived quality of education. Mathematics and science are not taught as luxuries but as necessities, often delivered in English or French from an early age. Education here is not simply about acquiring knowledge; it is about mobility, dignity, and escape, from sectarianism, from violence, from the suffocating limits of geography. And yet, today, that very idea is under attack. The recent threats and actions by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against American institutions in Lebanon and across the region are not just another episode in a long cycle of escalation. They reveal something deeper and more troubling: a deliberate attempt to redefine what education means in places like Lebanon. Because for Hezbollah, the IRGC’s most entrenched arm in the country, education is not a tool of liberation. It is a tool of control. Where Lebanese families see schools as gateways to the world, Hezbollah sees them as factories of loyalty. Where parents hope their children will learn algebra to build futures, the party envisions geometry as a means to calculate trajectories. Physics is no longer about understanding the natural world; it becomes a way to refine the arc of a rocket or the stability of a drone. Chemistry is stripped of curiosity and repurposed into lethality. This is not metaphor. It is doctrine. Hezbollah’s educational ecosystem, its schools, scouts, youth programs, and cultural institutions, has long functioned as a parallel system. One that mirrors the state in form but subverts it in purpose. Children are not only taught to read and write; they are taught to obey, to revere, and ultimately to fight. The language of resistance is introduced early, wrapped in the symbols of martyrdom and sacrifice, until it becomes indistinguishable from identity itself. In that sense, the recent targeting, whether rhetorical or operational, of American institutions is entirely consistent. Universities like the American University of Beirut are not just buildings. They represent an idea that stands in direct opposition to what Hezbollah and the IRGC seek to impose. They represent doubt instead of dogma. Inquiry instead of indoctrination. A space where a student can question authority rather than surrender to it. And that is precisely why they are seen as threats. Perhaps the most devastating consequence of all is not even the weaponization of education itself, but the quiet destruction of the ecosystem that once made Lebanese education exceptional. Hezbollah, along with a political establishment that chose to normalize, accommodate, and ultimately legitimize its parallel order, has steadily eroded the very diversity that sustained Lebanon’s intellectual life. This country’s educational model was never just about curricula or rankings; it was about plurality. Classrooms where languages intersected, where histories were contested, where identities coexisted rather than collapsed into one another. That fragile but vital ecosystem was the engine of creativity, producing generations capable of thinking beyond the confines of sect, ideology, and fear. Today, that space is shrinking. Not through formal decree, but through pressure, intimidation, and the slow suffocation of dissent. What is being lost is not only institutional autonomy, but the very condition that made learning in Lebanon meaningful: the freedom to be different. It is no coincidence that regimes and militias built on ideological rigidity fear campuses more than they fear armies. Armies can be deterred, negotiated with, or even defeated. But ideas, once unleashed, are far harder to contain. A student exposed to critical thinking is infinitely more dangerous to an authoritarian project than any external adversary. Lebanon today sits at the intersection of these two visions. On one side is a fragile but persistent belief in education as a means of survival and transcendence. On the other is a disciplined and well-funded effort to hollow that belief out, to replace it with a militarized worldview where knowledge serves only the battlefield. The tragedy is not just that these two systems coexist. It is that one is steadily encroaching on the other. When a child learns mathematics to solve equations, they are being prepared to build something, an economy, a career, a life. When that same knowledge is redirected toward “zeroing” a cannon or programming a drone, it becomes something else entirely: a weapon masquerading as education. And in Lebanon, that transformation is happening in plain sight. The attack on educational institutions, whether through threats, intimidation, or worse, is therefore not incidental. It is strategic. It is an attempt to sever Lebanon from one of the few remaining pillars that still connect it to the world and to itself. Because a Lebanon that continues to educate freely is a Lebanon that cannot be fully controlled. And that, ultimately, is what this is about. Not missiles. Not drones. Not even geopolitics in its narrowest sense. But the far more consequential battle over what the next generation of Lebanese will learn, and what they will become.

This is the first direct consequence of the failure of the Islamabad negotiations last weekend between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. On Monday, at 5 p.m. (Beirut time), the naval forces of the American army implemented a total blockade of all Iranian ports and the Strait of Hormuz. Several warships have been deployed to enforce this blockade, which applies to all ships expected to use Iranian ports, whether departing or arriving. Only ships carrying humanitarian aid will be allowed to dock in ports, but after being thoroughly searched. As for vessels not involved in maritime traffic with Iran, they will be able to cross the Strait of Hormuz unhindered. This maritime siege holds fundamental strategic importance on two levels. If rigorously applied, it will largely disrupt the aid in arms and ammunition that the mullahs' regime provides to its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen, among others. The warning from the Iranian president But more importantly, the blockade will undoubtedly deal a particularly harsh (fatal?) (new) blow to the Iranian economy, already severely shaken by the 'maximum sanctions' policy imposed by President Trump. The massive aerial bombardments that marked military operations since February 28 have indeed destroyed the petrochemical and steel industries of the Islamic Republic, which until now had relied on its oil exports, primarily benefiting China. By imposing this maritime blockade, President Trump practically deprives the Iranian regime of its last oil revenues, without having to launch a ground offensive to take control, for example, of the strategic (heavily fortified) Kharg Island, through which 90 percent of Iranian oil exports pass. By paralyzing all economic activity on this island using the 'soft method,' without resorting to military force, President Trump is concretely working to dangerously strangle the Iranian economy in the short term. According to various information sources in Iran, the Iranian president had moreover warned the Revolutionary Guards against a risk of collapse of the Iranian economy within three weeks, at most, if no way out of the crisis is found in the short term. The siege of Bint Jbeil On the Lebanese front, the Israeli army affirmed on Monday afternoon that it had completed its siege of the strategic city of Bint Jbeil, where several dozen Hezbollah militants are entrenched. Simultaneously, the pro-Iranian party reported, in the late afternoon, 'close combat' in Bint Jbeil with IDF units, implicitly indicating that Israeli forces had made breakthroughs in certain sectors of the locality. In fact, the Hebrew state specified at the end of the day that the assault on the city had begun. This escalation comes on the eve of the launch, on Tuesday, April 14, of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel in Washington, at the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with the participation of the ambassadors of Lebanon and Israel in the federal capital. Joseph Aoun and Joe Raggi remind… The true scope of this diplomatic meeting, which should kick off a series of working sessions between the two countries, was highlighted on Saturday by the head of Lebanese diplomacy, Joe Raggi, who emphasized, as a reminder (to anyone willing to listen…), that the direct negotiation between Lebanon and Israel effectively consecrates the dissociation between the Lebanese issue and the Iranian aspect of the current conflict – a dissociation that evidently holds high strategic and symbolic importance for Lebanon. President Joseph Aoun insisted on recalling in this context that 'negotiations with Israel are the sole responsibility of the Lebanese state, and no other party, because this is a sovereign matter that concerns only Lebanon.' And the head of state noted that the Lebanese authorities have adopted 'a series of security measures to prevent arms smuggling or the illegal entry of funds into the country.' In any event, on the ground, the Israeli army reportedly received instructions to consolidate and develop its advances in the South, particularly in Bint Jbeil, before Tuesday's bilateral meeting, given that Beirut could insistently demand, as Mr. Raggi indicated on Monday, the entry into force of a ceasefire – such an achievement, according to several observers, could allow the Lebanese government to legitimize and consolidate direct dialogue with Tel Aviv. Naïm Kassem returned… In this context, it should be noted that after a long eclipse from the audiovisual media scene, Hezbollah Secretary-General, Sheikh Naïm Kassem, reappeared yesterday evening to stigmatize, in a televised speech, those who criticize Hezbollah for having dragged the country into a new war (!). He implicitly acknowledged in this regard that his pro-Iranian party used Lebanon to serve exclusively foreign interests, stating that 'the war in Lebanon aims to reduce pressure on other fronts' (!). And he called 'traitors' all those who oppose the war triggered by the Iranian party. Sheikh Kassem obviously condemned the direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, asking the state to cancel these bilateral talks. Addressing President Joseph Aoun, he launched: 'Let's build Lebanon together'! However, he did not specify how such a joint recovery undertaking could be possible when the pro-Iranian party perceives the Lebanese entity as a mere instrument of maneuver in the hands of a regional power with largely destabilizing and belligerent hegemonic aims.

Hundreds of images, every day. Grey as the dominant tone, at times interrupted by a flash of orange, a coloring book, a doll. At other times, images reach us stained with memories, those of strangers we do not know, who do not know us, and who may no longer recognize their own. Memories held in suspension. Fleeting flashes across phone screens. Fragments scrolling on television beneath a red ticker hastily composed, saturated with approximations, where a place name is thrown in as a token of precision. Or brief sequences designed to sustain the continuity of an endlessly renewed flow. Within this flow, the image ceases to emerge as an event. It becomes inscribed within a continuous visual regime, profoundly reconfiguring our relationship to war and to what we perceive of it. With technological shifts, instant capture, immediate publication, and limitless circulation, the place of the image has shifted. That of the viewer as well. The image forms at the very heart of the event and reaches us in the same movement. It circulates even as the event persists. And we, recipients adrift in a sea of visual strikes, find ourselves questioning pain, what reaches us of it, what recedes, what settles, what escapes. Perhaps also the very legitimacy of looking. Within this accelerated visual regime, catastrophe settles into a continuous presence, depositing in memory an incomplete trace. If it leaves a trace at all. In the aftermath of the July 2006 war, I undertook a research project centered on the press photographer as a nodal point. The aim was to examine his position, the decisions he makes, and those that precede the image. Many of those I met insisted on this: the image is never the product of a pure instant, but a construction, an arrangement of angle, temporality, and selection. One of them spoke of the weight of a constant responsibility: determining the conditions under which war becomes visible, deciding what enters the frame and what is excluded. Two decades ago, the image was something one looked at, something one kept. It had its own time. Its duration. Its imprint. Today, it accumulates to the point of exceeding any possibility of narrative containment. This accumulation does not become memory; it produces dispersion. In Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag interrogates the relationship between image and suffering, and the limits of what images can convey. “Images do not explain; they attest that something has happened.” They fix the occurrence without providing the means to understand it. As their circulation accelerates, images lose their capacity to carry stable meaning and become units within a visual flow. The dulling Sontag describes is tied to the density of images, to their speed of circulation, but also to the very conditions of looking and to the place assigned to the viewer within this apparatus. Here, the question of meaning begins to slip. “The understanding of suffering is not given; it must be constructed.” Seeing is not enough to grasp catastrophe. Meaning takes shape within a context, from a position, that of the one who looks, and that of the one who receives. Hence her warning: “We should not assume the existence of a single ‘we’ when the subject is looking at the suffering of others.” Much has been written about the “silence of the world” in the face of the devastation of Gaza. How do “others” remain silent before the bodies of naked children? And we, in Lebanon today, write similar things about our own reactions to a town that has been erased. Do we relate to this place in the same way? Do we rely on projection to generate empathy? Does indifference, for some, take shape as a defensive strategy? Looking is not a shared experience. It is shaped by distance, by the possibility of exposure, by one’s relation to danger. Contemporary studies of violent imagery, which initially asked what these images do to us, now turn toward the act of looking itself: how do we look, when, and under what conditions? In Lebanon, this visual reconfiguration has intensified over the past decade. The image has shifted from the register of testimony to that of immediate experience. Those who film are often already caught within the event. The phone has become an extension of the body: trembling, sonic saturation, shock—everything now inscribes itself within the frame. In this moment, the position of looking fractures. The viewer inhabits the image as much as they observe it. We, if such a “we” can still be sustained, are no longer those who look at catastrophe from a distance. We have become those who are looked at. This shift exceeds the event itself. It reappears with each crisis, each escalation, each “new catastrophe.” But since the war in Gaza, and through the two most recent wars in Lebanon (which we are still living through), an additional layer has imposed itself upon this visual regime. Images no longer belong solely to the domain of testimony. They now include falsified images, generated by artificial intelligence, or stripped from other contexts. They circulate at the same speed, producing real affects despite the absence of the events they claim to document. This is not merely a failure of representation, but a destabilization of the image’s status as evidence. In many cases, its truth becomes undecidable. “The image is not a substitute for reality,” Sontag writes. From the index, it has become a milieu , a site of circulation, transformation, and the reconfiguration of perception. Within this space, the position of looking shifts once more: it anchors itself in continuous exposure, at the expense of coherent understanding. The image becomes a presence without a point of focus. … For memory to take shape, it requires thresholds, a beginning, and an end. Within the flow we now inhabit, what remains is a diffuse, unbounded trace. Sontag writes that “compassion is an unstable emotion; it needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Within the flow of images, empathy dissolves into the next one. Some persist without mediation. Others fade despite their intensity. What remains does not follow a logic of importance, but a logic of persistence within the flow. Faced with this saturation, the mind sometimes resorts to displacement or partial erasure. In both cases, it is not a lack of importance that is at stake, but an excess of exposure. The image does not disappear. But neither does it take hold. Hence, the emergence of another position: the refusal to look. Some images, through repetition, exhaust their own meaning or reproduce the violence they carry. Yet this refusal offers no clear way out: to withhold images from view does not negate their existence, nor does it halt their effects. What are we to do with this accumulation of collapsing buildings? With these mutilated animals? With these villages, sometimes familiar, that now appear as the remnants of a post-apocalyptic landscape? For some, looking is a class privilege: those who look can do so because they are alive, because they are safe. Those buried beneath the rubble have become the image. Others believe that we now live inside an image, reproduced without us. Still others argue that looking is itself a political act: that we, as living witnesses, participate in the making of catastrophe, its extension, its archiving. And yet, nothing endures. We feel very little. Because we have grown accustomed to looking. Perhaps the catastrophe, the only real one, resides precisely there: in our growing accustomedness to the visible.