Articles

In the aftermath of the October 7 operation, which the Hamas movement named the “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the Israeli response expanded to encompass collective retribution against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, ultimately becoming a war of displacement and extermination. The National Authority in Ramallah adopted the demand for international protection and raised a one-word slogan — “Baqun,” We Remain — to break the Israeli savagery backed by certain Western states and to resist the ethnic cleansing aimed at driving the population toward the Sinai desert. Had Egypt and Jordan not taken a firm stand in support of the National Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas behind this slogan — which remains in force across all political and international forums and gives shape to the Palestinians’ daily life — events might have taken an entirely different turn.

The past week can be characterized by procrastination in the US-Iran negotiations, where no major breakthrough was observed despite two Iranian proposals that the Pakistani mediator forwarded to the United States. Until then, many analysts argued that Iran was playing the time card, through the de facto closure of the Strait of Hormuz, against a Donald Trump who would be in a hurry to end the war, before having to answer to Congress after 60 days of war, as required by the US Constitution. But since then, there has been a turnaround: it is the American blockade on Iranian ports that is putting pressure on Tehran. The consequences are visible in the very significant devaluation of its national currency and an economic collapse that the Iranian authorities can hardly hide, despite their triumphant rhetoric.

“The memory is in danger. Your books, and ours, are in imminent peril.” It is with these words that Rasha El-Ameer, Lebanese writer and publisher, responded to a Facebook image of the library of Azza Baydoun, a researcher whose work engages questions of women and gender, in Bint Jbeil, Southern Lebanon. There is no confirmed news of the house. None of the library’s fate. There is only a dense, circulating unease, passing from one person to another, and questions that find no answer: who holds certainty? What remains? What has already disappeared? It is within this unease that loss first takes shape, in that suspended moment where certainty fails. Waiting hangs between blurred satellite images and a memory that anticipates catastrophe. Disappearance does not require confirmation to become psychologically real; loss is lived before it is proven. It multiplies into a thousand possible forms, a thousand imagined scenarios, each more unbearable than the last.

The main news this Saturday is not about the conflict between Tehran and Washington, but one of its consequences, namely the emerging crisis between Europe and the United States, which is considering significantly reducing its military presence in Germany. Washington indeed plans to withdraw about 15% of the 36,000 troops stationed in Germany, or nearly 5,000 soldiers, a withdrawal that the Pentagon estimates can be completed in the "next six to twelve months," according to its spokesperson, Sean Parnell. This plan, announced by the Pentagon, would thus be the first consequence of the showdown between the American president, Donald Trump, and the NATO countries, whom the latter has repeatedly criticized for their passivity in the war that has pitted him against Iran since February 28.

The constitutional law enacted on 21 September 1990 enriched the preamble of the Lebanese Constitution with fundamental provisions stipulating that Lebanon is a free and independent homeland, the definitive homeland of all its sons, united within its internationally recognised borders in its land, its people and its institutions, and that its identity and belonging are Arab. Paragraph (c) further provides that Lebanon is a democratic parliamentary republic. It is from this precise point that one must illuminate the effectiveness of the parliamentary regime established after the Taif Agreement, a regime that has nonetheless demonstrated its inability to build the State and its institutions, and whose faithfulness to the people that elected it on several occasions is legitimately open to question. This domain is acquiring growing importance and is now imposing itself as a vital, intensive and long-term mission, in the wake of a succession of tragic developments made up of wars and political crises confirmed on many occasions. The concept of parliamentarism has never been deemed incompatible with diplomacy, which is by nature a sovereign function devoted to addressing political, economic and social crises without the Lebanese situation improving in the process.

There were trials in Nuremberg (1945–46) and in Tokyo (1946–48), and even in Istanbul, gallows were erected in July 1919 to execute Young Turks responsible for the Armenian genocide. That said, one could legitimately wonder why the authorities of Ahmed al-Chareh had been so slow to set the judicial machinery in motion. Was he hesitant to punish the abuses committed against an entire people by the Al-Assad dynasty of tyrants and their inner circles? The question was all the more pressing given that more than twenty officials—both top figures and lesser ones, if you’ll pardon the expression—had been arrested and were languishing in prison awaiting trial.