Articles

Faced with the impatience of US President Donald Trump, eager to make progress on negotiations with Iran before his visit to China next week, Tehran is playing a carefully calculated game of detachment. As of Thursday, the Islamic Republic had still not responded to the American proposal, announced Tuesday by President Trump, for a lasting end to the war launched on February 28. According to CNN, the response is expected within the next few hours. Two explanations can be given for the apparent nonchalance displayed by the Islamic Republic. The first lies in the fact that Tehran still believes it can maneuver and play on the element of time, hoping to minimize the concessions it has to make to the Americans or, at the very least, to get them to lower their demands.

Traditional analyses of Lebanon consistently utilize the "sectarian paradigm," viewing the state as a delicate equilibrium of religious factions. However, this lens fails to account for the current systemic disintegration that transcends communal boundaries. By applying Émile Durkheim’s paradigm of Anomie, this document argues that the Lebanese crisis is characterized not by sectarian friction, but by a profound state of "normlessness" and the deregulation of social life. In this view, sectarianism is not the primary cause of collapse, but a residual survival mechanism appearing in the vacuum left by a shattered social contract.

A thick cord binds together all the Lebanese errors whose price will inevitably be paid in 2026 — those errors that ultimately led to the return of the Israeli occupation. What we are witnessing today is the natural consequence of an accumulation that began even before the Cairo Agreement of November 1969, that ill-fated pact concluded between Lebanon and the Palestine Liberation Organization. The agreement consecrated the collapse of the Lebanese state by leading it to abdicate its sovereignty over a portion of its territory. Whoever abandons part of his land abandons, in practice, sovereignty over the whole of it. No Lebanese politician spoke at the time about the catastrophe that the Cairo Agreement represented, with the sole exception of the Amid Raymond Eddé, who grasped the danger of the event and its full implications.

On the Iranian-American front, May 6 unfolded as a day of sustained rhetoric escalation and conflicting statements. These developments followed the surprise announcement by US President Donald Trump declaring the end of the offensive phase of the conflict – an operation dubbed “Project Liberty” – in the Strait of Hormuz, while maintaining a blockade on Iranian ports. A report widely cited across the media, published earlier in the day by Axios, pointed to the possibility of an imminent agreement between Tehran and Washington. It highlighted what it described as a highly consequential 48-hour window for reaching a peace deal.

At the Grand Palais, a rare exhibition of exceptional scope, bringing together more than three hundred works from international collections, explores until 26 July the final thirteen years of Henri Matisse. Far from an epilogue, it reveals a moment of intensity in which, constrained by illness, the artist entirely reinvents his language. Paintings, drawings, books, textiles, stained glass and cut gouaches compose a journey conceived as a living studio: that of a man who, at the edge of the end, chooses to open himself still further. There are exhibitions that open like doors, and then there are those that impose themselves more slowly, almost quietly, until they displace something older than the gaze itself: a manner of holding time, a dense and profound way of standing upright before it, in its slowness as in its light.

Nabil Nahas, a leading figure in Lebanese-American contemporary art, is currently at the center of the international art scene. He has been officially selected to represent Lebanon at the upcoming Venice Biennale, which will take place from May 9 to November 22, 2026. Nabil Nahas occupies a singular position within the contemporary art landscape. He is one of the few artists to have achieved a distinctive synthesis between radical American abstraction and an Eastern sensibility deeply rooted in nature and spirituality. The exhibition, titled Don’t Get Me Wrong , is curated by Nada Ghandour, curator and commissioner, in collaboration with the Lebanese Visual Art Association (LVAA). It will take place at the Arsenale (Sala d’Armi), one of the most prestigious venues of the Venice Biennale.