Articles

“I am but a small cloud drifting across the sky, knowing neither where it goes nor whence it came.” Some souls defy every border and elude every label. Gibran Khalil Gibran was one of them. At once celebrated and strangely insufficiently known, he remains among the most compelling figures of the twentieth century. Born in Lebanon, he came of age amid the restless energy of Boston and New York City. Through his work, Gibran quietly disproved Rudyard Kipling’s famous assertion that “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In his life and writing, he embodied both the spiritual depth of the East and the rational modernity of the West.

On 10 May 2000, Raymond Eddé passed away, at the end of an exile of more than two decades in Paris. Eddé was, in the Lebanese political landscape, a wholly atypical figure. A certain reading of history retains of him today the image of an idealist and stubborn man, cut off from reality – since he refused all political compromises that sought to plug temporary gaps in the dyke by reflex of immediate survival, at the expense of the fundamental values of the Republic and the elementary foundations of the State, from the Cairo Agreement to the Taif Agreement. Unbending, the Amid? And yet, paradox of anachronism, it was the opposite that his own community reproached him for: his refusal to be swept along by currents of identitarian testosterone, and his rejection of the sweet songs of the sirens and the machine guns, unlike the popular parties and armed organizations of the era.

We keep talking about “globalization” as though the word still had a shared meaning. It no longer does. Or rather: all that remains of it is its economic shell—globalization as such: capital flows, supply chains, digital platforms—while its soul has vanished. Globalization as openness, as the promise of a world made more habitable for all, as the search for a shared language among cultures, is in the process of dying. And yet that form of globalization was never merely a material reality; it was a moral horizon. It rested on a simple, almost naïve idea: that repeated contact among peoples, cultures, imaginaries would eventually disarm the temptation of war. Distances reduced by technology, by transportation, by the abolition of customs borders… People would meet at universities, festivals, NGOs, international institutions; they would build compromises, treaties, exchange programs. They would learn to live together, for lack of a better option.

An unprecedented Lebanese initiative practically stole the spotlight locally on Wednesday from two major events: the resumption of Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Washington and the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing. On the eve of these two crucial meetings due to their impact on the regional conflict, Beirut submitted a memorandum to the UN in which it challenges claims made by Tehran to protest to the UN Security Council against the Israeli strike that killed four of its diplomats at the Ramada Hotel in Raouché last March. In this memorandum, Lebanese diplomacy criticizes the Islamic Republic, accusing it of violating the Geneva Convention on diplomatic relations and interfering in Lebanese internal affairs, according to Independent Arabia, which reported on it.

In the first chapter of this series of texts on the grand sweep of History and that of my son, Raphaël — "The Time of the South, the Time of the North" — the subject was the difference between the countries of the South, where History is still on the march, and those of the North which, according to Fukuyama, are living through "the end of History." But in its conclusion, the text returned to an intuition of the poet Etel Adnan, according to whom Lebanon — where the past resurfaces permanently in the present — is becoming "the prototype" of the world of tomorrow. Of course, this relationship to time may seem counter-intuitive to defenders of the historiographical tradition according to which History has a direction. A tradition that finds its origin in the biblical history of David, as related in the Books of Samuel, and which has since been taken up by the many philosophies of History that proliferated in the nineteenth century.

As political circles await clearer indications of President Donald Trump’s true intentions regarding the trajectory of the standoff with the Islamic Republic – following Washington’s outright rejection of Tehran’s response to the latest American “peace” proposals (though what kind of “peace” is actually being discussed remains an open question) – attention on Tuesday, May 12, turned to reports of an Israeli incursion north of the Litani River, the first such move in the current context. Since the disastrous war launched by Hezbollah in July 2006 – for what many viewed as purely Iranian considerations – every international and regional initiative, negotiation and security arrangement had focused on stabilizing the area south of the Litani. United Nations Resolution 1701, as well as the ceasefire brokered in November 2024 following yet another self-destructive war initiated by Hezbollah, centered on ending all militia presence within that clearly delineated southern zone.