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At this hour in Lebanon's life, the debate is no longer about technical matters — will negotiations with Israel be direct or indirect? Will they precede a ceasefire or follow one? These are secondary questions beside the real one, which imposes itself with irresistible force: why negotiate at all, and what does it mean for a state to refuse to do so? In its most elementary definition, negotiation in international relations is neither a sign of weakness nor a surrender. It is the natural instrument states use to manage conflicts when the cost of war exceeds their capacity to bear it. This is how rational states operate. Wars themselves always end in negotiation — after the bloodshed, after the destruction, after the warring parties discover that force alone neither solves problems nor produces lasting stability. This is why states that have waged devastating wars have nonetheless negotiated. The United States negotiated with Vietnam after a long conflict; Egypt negotiated with Israel after two major wars; European powers, after centuries of confrontation, eventually built a new political order across their continent. Negotiation is not an exception in political history — it is the rule. This is precisely why the refusal to negotiate, in a devastated country where hundreds of thousands of citizens have been displaced, constitutes a morally unacceptable and scarcely explicable position. In such moments, refusing to negotiate is not a heroic stance — it is one of the following: ignorance of the nature of international relations, evasion of responsibility, contempt for human lives and for the country's fate — or else, the one blocking negotiations is unable to consent to them without the approval of his guardian authority, Iran, and it is he who embodies the true Vichy government, not the Lebanese government, thus turning against himself the very accusation that Mahmoud Qomati — a member of parliament, incidentally — had levelled against the state. Lebanon is living today through one of its most perilous hours since the end of the civil war. More than eight hundred thousand Lebanese have fled their homes in the South and in other regions, and nothing indicates clearly whether — or when — they will be able to return. Entire villages have become ghost towns. An economy that was barely breathing before the war now stands at the edge of total collapse. And yet, the debate in the country continues as though the matter were merely a theoretical disagreement about the form of negotiations. But the truth — simple, bitter, unflinching — is this: this war was not decided by the Lebanese Republic. It was not declared by the Council of Ministers, ratified by parliament, or demanded by the people. The one who chose to open this front is Hezbollah — a military force that has for years operated outside the state, dominating it from within, strategically bound to Iran and absorbed into its regional conflicts. This is where the fundamental knot lies. For the Party, the war is not a war against Israel nor a defence of Lebanon — it is a fragment of Iran's regional battle. This is why its leaders call it an "existential battle." But in reality, it is existential for the Party itself and for its regional role, not for the Lebanese people nor for the Lebanese state, which pays the price in destruction, displacement, and economic collapse. Faced with this logic, Israel approaches the war from a radically different perspective. For Israel, what is unfolding is perhaps an opportunity that may not come again — the chance to liquidate the military threat Hezbollah represents on its northern border. It is therefore unrealistic to believe that Israel will easily halt its operations, or that it will settle for a temporary ceasefire that restores the previous situation. Israeli military and political logic holds that this may be the last opportunity to alter the equation in Lebanon. Between these two logics, Lebanon — the state — finds itself in a condition of near-helplessness. A state that did not decide the war but pays its price. A state asked to negotiate when the decision to fight does not belong to it. This is why the head of state advances the idea of negotiation. Not because negotiation is a comfortable choice, nor because the circumstances are ideal, but because the continuation of the war means simply pushing Lebanon toward total ruin. To negotiate, in this context, is not a political luxury — it is a national necessity to protect what remains of society and of the state. But the problem does not lie in the principle of negotiation itself — it lies in the political context that surrounds it. In a country where the state holds neither the monopoly on arms nor that on military decision-making, negotiation becomes a near-impossible task. How can a state negotiate an end to a war when an internal party continues waging it, retains the capacity to reignite it at will, and does so according to regional calculations bearing no relation to the direct Lebanese interest? This is precisely where the gravest danger emerges. Lebanon could find itself in the worst of possible scenarios: a protracted war it cannot resolve, and a humiliating settlement imposed from outside after far greater destruction. This is not a theoretical hypothesis. Lebanon's contemporary history is marked by situations that were endured, accepted when it proved unable to decide for itself. The real debate Lebanese people must engage in today is not about the form of negotiations, but about the state's recovery of its decision-making power over war and peace. A state that does not hold this power cannot protect its people, nor even negotiate on their behalf. In the end, no state in the world can live indefinitely under conditions of open-ended war, and no society can endure the displacement of hundreds of thousands of its people without any horizon of return. This is why negotiating is not a moral or ideological choice — it is a political and ethical duty toward citizens. As for transforming the refusal to negotiate into a heroic banner, while the people pay the price of war with their lives, their homes, their livelihoods, and the future of their children — that is not heroism. It is, at best, a dangerous political illusion; at worst, a contempt for the fate of an entire country and a betrayal of those who had placed their trust in them for protection. The question that will determine Lebanon's future is no longer: do we negotiate or not? The real question has become simpler, and more urgent: What is Lebanon's fate?

Between the lessons of history and the pressures of war, the same question recurs: can an exhausted state defer its ultimate defeat through a difficult settlement, or does an agreement concluded under an imbalanced power dynamic end up weighing on sovereignty and stability for years to come? When states enter the hour of existential peril, the question is no longer how to win, but how to prevent total collapse. In this sense, the Lebanese debate currently unfolding around the initiative launched by President Joseph Aoun to open a path toward direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel under international sponsorship goes far beyond the boundaries of ordinary political controversy, and raises a deeper question concerning the limits of what realism can achieve when the state itself is threatened in its cohesion and its capacity to survive. The initiative has generated a visible rupture between those who see in it a realistic attempt to halt the collapse and prevent the expansion of the conflict, and those who believe that any negotiation conducted under the pressure of arms and in a context of unequal power relations risks becoming a harsh settlement imposed on Lebanon, with lasting effects on its sovereignty and political future. In such moments, history returns to offer its precedents: that of states or political regimes that found themselves before a choice of extreme difficulty — that of accepting a painful agreement in order to avert total collapse. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution’s triumph in 1917, the new Russian leadership found itself confronted with a brutal reality: an exhausted state, a disintegrating army, an economy on the verge of collapse after years of world war. At that moment, Vladimir Lenin understood that the continuation of the war against Germany risked precipitating the fall of the new power before it had managed to lay its foundations; he therefore charged Leon Trotsky with negotiating an end to the conflict. The decision, however, did not impose itself easily. The Bolshevik leadership was divided over the nature of the stance to adopt. Lenin argued for accepting peace, however harsh and humiliating, holding that the priority was to save the revolution and buy the time necessary to rebuild the state. Trotsky, for his part, attempted to chart a middle course, one that would halt the fighting without requiring the signing of a dishonorable treaty, while a faction within the party, led by Nikolai Bukharin, rejected any settlement with Germany and called for continuing what it termed the “revolutionary war.” Military realities settled the debate swiftly. The German army resumed its offensive and advanced into Russian territory without encountering any significant resistance, compelling the Bolshevik leadership to accept the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. The treaty was severe: it forced Russia to cede vast stretches of territory and to sustain significant economic losses, so much so that it was described at the time as a shameful peace. Yet Lenin considered this step, constrained and provisional as it was, to be meant to protect the larger political enterprise: the survival of the revolution itself. And indeed, less than a year later, Germany was defeated and the treaty collapsed of its own accord, while the Bolshevik power succeeded in consolidating itself, waging the civil war, and emerging victorious. Since then, this episode has become a classic example in political history: that of accepting a hard agreement to save a project or a state threatened with collapse. This example is today frequently invoked in Lebanese political debates, particularly in the context of the open war with Israel and the catastrophic repercussions that have befallen the country. Lebanon is traversing a situation of extreme fragility: a ruined economy, a fractured social fabric, millions of citizens threatened with displacement or destitution since their cities, villages, and homes were destroyed — pressures of immense weight bearing down on the social fabric and threatening the unity and cohesion of the country. In such a context, some put forward the idea that political realism may sometimes require accepting difficult or unequal arrangements in order to end the war and prevent the collapse of the state and society. Others, conversely, reject this view and hold that any unbalanced agreement risks becoming a permanent diktat, entrenching the imbalance of power and durably undermining the sovereignty of the state. This debate is further sustained by a reading of Lebanon’s previous experiences with Israel, where successive stages of negotiation and understanding show that Lebanon’s margin of maneuver has narrowed progressively as the imbalance of power intensified and the state’s capacity to fully control the components of its strength deteriorated. From the May 17 Agreement, which carried broad political and security dimensions but collapsed before it could be implemented, to the April Understanding, which organized the rules of engagement without addressing the root of the conflict, through UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and the series of understandings and security arrangements that followed it in an effort to contain hostilities — the realities of the field and the political landscape pushed gradually toward conditions ever more restrictive of Lebanese room for maneuver. From this vantage point, some observers hold that the question concerns not only the nature of any possible agreement today, but also whether current conditions — harsh as they are — might remain less costly than those that could be imposed tomorrow should the military and political deterioration continue and the imbalance of power deepen further still. The Lebanese dilemma is bound not only to the conditions of a possible settlement, but also to the persistence of a political discourse that continues to refuse to acknowledge the limits of power and to conflate realism with surrender — even as the perpetuation of this logic risks dragging both society and state toward a deepening of collapse, and rendering the cost of any subsequent arrangement more severe for Lebanon, politically, economically, and in terms of its sovereignty. The difference between the era of Brest-Litovsk and our own lies, however, also in the nature of the international system. In 1918, no global institutional framework existed capable of sponsoring agreements or guaranteeing their implementation. Today, despite all the flaws and dysfunctions that afflict the international order, the existence of the United Nations and a network of diplomatic and legal mechanisms can provide a minimum of guarantees. In Lebanon’s case, international sponsorship, combined with Arab stewardship, could constitute a safety net for any eventual agreement, contributing to ensuring the parties’ commitment and reducing the risk of such an agreement collapsing or degenerating into a mere temporary truce. Yet any serious discussion of a possible settlement in Lebanon runs directly into the question of arms outside the framework of the state — the knot bearing the heaviest consequences in defining Lebanon’s negotiating position and the limits of its capacity to honor any future agreement. The presence of Hezbollah as a military force holding an operational decision-making authority that exceeds the institutional framework of the state renders any negotiation inherently twofold: a negotiation between the Lebanese state and Israel on one hand, and an unresolved internal debate over who holds the final word on matters of war and peace on the other. Without this contradiction being addressed, any arrangement risks remaining precarious, for the success of an agreement depends not on texts alone, but on the existence of a single authority capable of monopolizing sovereign decision-making and fulfilling the commitments that flow from it. It is for this reason that the question before the Lebanese today is not only whether a settlement is necessary or possible, but how to frame it within an international architecture that guarantees its durability and shields Lebanon from once again becoming the theater of an open conflict. For in the end, the problem is not that an agreement be hard, but that its rejection today should open the way to still harder conditions tomorrow. States are measured not only by their capacity to endure, but also by their ability to recognize the moment when saving what can still be saved becomes the very condition of their survival.

The elimination by Israel of Ali Larijani – head of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council and one of the Islamic Republic’s key power brokers – along with the commander of the Basij militia, the formidable Iranian police force, Gholamreza Soleimani, will undoubtedly mark a turning point in the war between Iran and the Israel-US axis. Both men were killed in targeted Israeli strikes on the Iranian capital overnight on Monday, Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, officially announced early Tuesday morning. As of late afternoon, however, Tehran had neither confirmed nor denied the reports. Iranian media merely announced an “imminent televised address” by Ali Larijani – echoing the scenario that preceded Tehran’s official confirmation of the death of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was also killed in Israeli strikes on 28 February 2026 – before broadcasting a handwritten message attributed to Larijani. This was accompanied by a statement from the new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, pledging to “continue the war until the defeat of the United States and Israel.” Those are the facts. In practice, Israel has dealt another major blow to Iran, the effects of which, however, extend well beyond the structure of the Islamic Republic’s military and police apparatus. Following the killing of Ali Khamenei, Iranian leaders had indeed indicated that a four-tier succession chain had been put in place within this structure – a message intended as much for Tel Aviv and Washington as for the Iranian public, who are desperately seeking an end to the criminal dictatorship of the Mullahs. On the military front, the assassination of Larijani highlights, once again, the supremacy of the Israeli–US axis, which thus appears to be steadily moving closer to its war objectives: to eliminate – or at least significantly weaken – the current regime in Tehran, and to prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring or developing ballistic or nuclear weapons in the future. In this war, Tel Aviv and Washington retain the strategic initiative, as illustrated in particular by targeted assassinations and military operations. In doing so, they maintain steadily increasing pressure on Tehran, which remains locked in a largely defensive posture, following an approach that – unlike that of its two adversaries – does not appear to follow a well-defined strategy. Eighteen days after the outbreak of the military conflict, the Islamic Republic continues its routine aerial attacks on US bases, as well as on civilian targets in Gulf countries, while also targeting Israel, simultaneously with Hezbollah operating from Lebanon. According to AFP, the US embassy was targeted twice, just a few hours apart, on Monday and Tuesday. A projectile also struck a hotel located in Baghdad’s ultra-protected Green Zone. Late in the evening, Iranian drones targeted one of the southern Iraq’s main oil fields – currently out of operation and already hit last Friday – also according to AFP. Yet even by disrupting the navigation of oil tankers and cargo ships in the Strait of Hormuz, much to Washington’s frustration, as it struggles to rally its European partners to secure this strategic point for international trade – Tehran still appears unable to generate any meaningful inflection point capable of altering the course of the ongoing war or, at the very least, of bringing the United States to the negotiating table. Furthermore, considering the latter point, the assassination of Ali Larijani also carries particular political significance – insofar as it appears to confirm what President Trump has reiterated on several occasions in recent days: that talks with Tehran are not, for now, a priority, with precedence instead given to achieving the war’s stated objectives. Although part of Iran’s hardline establishment, Ali Larijani – a trusted confidant of Ali Khamenei – played a central role in the talks Iran conducted over its nuclear program and its relations with Gulf countries. His death deprives Teheran of a key interlocutor with the international community and could potentially weaken its negotiating capacity – should the regime endure – in any future dialogue within the framework of the “new Middle East” now taking shape. “We are shaping a new Middle East, forged through power,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Tuesday, according to Israeli media. The assassination of the Basij commander – the militia responsible for bloodily suppressing popular protests against the Mullahs’ regime in Iran – also aligns with the objectives the Israeli–US axis is seeking to achieve: effecting change in Iran. The loss of its leader, while his successor, whoever that may be, remains in the Israeli crosshairs, could provide Iranians with a renewed opportunity to reignite their protest movements. The big question, however, remains how Iran will respond to this latest blow. Will it close the Strait of Hormuz in an attempt to increase pressure on the United States? Will it push its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, to step up attacks against Israel? So far, the latter has shown that – aside from prompting Israel to strike more aggressively in areas where it is based – it is incapable of helping its Iranian patron change the course of events. On the contrary, an escalation of Hezbollah’s military operations against Israel would only increase the risk of a large-scale Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon – an option Tel Aviv has been openly discussing for some time and for which, according to Israeli media, it has reportedly mobilized nearly 450,000 reservists. In this logic of suicidal escalation, Hezbollah thus risks dragging Lebanon further into a deadly spiral of violence, serving solely the interest of its Iranian patron.

The Church in Lebanon is currently caught in the turmoil of three “holy wars”: two distinct forms of Islamic fundamentalism (Shia and Sunni), a Judaic fundamentalism, and an eschatological religious shift – “Christian Zionism.” These competing spiritual visions share a common focal point: Jerusalem, the ultimate city of peace. During his visit to Lebanon, Pope Leo XIV addressed the Lebanese people with the same message he has delivered to the world since his election – particularly to young Eastern Christians: “Be the architects of your own peace; be powerful levers for a peace between religions.” These words are intended for the men and women of a country that is an integral part of the Holy Land, and which, consequently, carries a mission of unity and communion. Lebanon is regarded as a beacon and a safeguard for all Christians in the Middle East, as it remains the only country in the region where historical Christianity is still deeply and extensively rooted in society. Pope John Paul II saw the nation as “a message of freedom and an example of pluralism for both East and West.” Having been linked to the Vatican for centuries while remaining profoundly Eastern, Lebanon’s Maronites and their schools have transformed the country into an extraordinary bridge between East and West. Conversely, in certain American religious perspectives – particularly those associated with “Christian Zionism” – the Middle East, including Lebanon, is perceived as a prophetic theater centered on the existence and security of the State of Israel. From this viewpoint, regional conflicts are not merely political: they are part of an eschatological reading of history, linked to the End Times. The Church has a duty to address them with a language of both truth and charity. Prudence and Discernment Certainly, the Church also believes in the End Times, but it does so with the prudence and discernment acquired over two millennia – and after many of its own failings. Indeed, without the grace of God, such lapses can still occur. However, the Church has a few things to say on the matter, particularly regarding the instrumentalization of religion to legitimate violence. For the Church, the only “legitimate” violence is that which is exercised against “what makes a person unclean,” that which “comes out of the heart: evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander” (Matthew 15). This violence is directed first and foremost against oneself. It may also be exercised externally, within the limits of self-defense. Yet even this concept – though present in the Catechism of the Catholic Church – must be used with the necessary caution. Indeed, it is currently undergoing doctrinal revision, particularly when invoked collectively under the label of a “just war.” Wilayat al-Faqih In Iran, the Islamic doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih stipulates that during the occultation of the 12th Imam – known as the “Imam of the Age” (10th century) – the government falls under the responsibility of a faqih (a jurist-theologian). This theory, primarily developed by Ayatollah Khomeini, is the foundation of a theocracy that grants Shia clerics primacy over political power. The faqih is regarded as the Supreme Leader, governing the Muslim community ( Ummah ) with veto power across all domains – legislative, judicial, and military alike. He is chosen to conduct a policy as close as possible to what the Mahdi himself would have done. Incorporated into the Iranian Constitution of the Islamic Republic, the implementation of this doctrine in Lebanon by Hezbollah raises the serious issue of its incompatibility with sectarian pluralism. Consequently, in 1995, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah proclaimed himself a marja al-taqlid (source of emulation) – an act that amounted to an open challenge to the principle of Wilayat al-Faqih , in the name of a “pluralistic and non-hierarchical tradition” within Shia Islam. “The Signs of the Hour” In an article published in issue 422 of the journal L’Histoire (April 2016), the historian Jean-Pierre Filiu raised the issue of “End Times Jihad.” Several figures within the Iranian theocracy – from former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah – have publicly linked the theocracy established in Iran, along with its ideological and military proselytism, to the dawn of the “End of Days.” According to Jean-Pierre Filiu, “in both Sunnism and Shiism, the end of days will be heralded by a series of clues, known as ‘the signs of the hour.’” Alongside relatively conventional signs – the rise of paganism, a contempt for religion and family ties, corruption, and immorality – other indicators are more specific: the seasons will become deceptive, time will contract, deserts will be developed and built upon, a mountain of gold will emerge from the Euphrates, and the Roums (Christians) will attack the cities of Aamaq and Dabiq in Syria. The Islamic State group has frequently invoked these signs, even naming its magazine Dabiq . In his article, Filiu revisits two historical examples of “apocalyptic opportunism” – occurring in Sudan in 1883 and in Mecca in 1979 – both of which were crushed. The seizure of the Grand Mosque, it should be recalled, involved the taking of hostages at al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, by Islamist fundamentalists and opponents of the Saudi royal family. The event took place on 20 November 1979, during the Hajj pilgrimage. Leading the siege was a retired corporal from the Saudi National Guard, whose primary goal was the recognition of his brother-in-law, who was among the group, as the Mahdi. He justified his actions by claiming that the House of Saud had lost its legitimacy through corruption, a life of luxury, and the destruction of Saudi culture via its policy of opening up to the West. Jean-Pierre Filiu illustrates the apocalyptic illuminism of the Islamic Republic of Iran through the figure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – President from 2005 to 2013 – who was convinced of the imminent return of the Hidden Imam and claimed to have been “shrouded in the light of the Mahdi during his speech at the UN.” “The Lebanese militia Hezbollah also claimed a ‘divine victory’ after a month of clashes with Israel in the summer of 2006. Its propaganda invoked an intervention by the Mahdi alongside Shia fighters,” the historian notes. What about Israel? What about Israel? We all know how the small “national home” of the Balfour Declaration (1918) has become the “roaring lion” of the Tehran bombings (2026). Lebanon has also closely witnessed the war in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government responded to the atrocities of October 7 with a genocide. To reveal Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist messianism, one need only cite his televised address on the Israeli national channel i24 on Wednesday, 26 October 2023: “We are the people of light, they are the people of darkness, and light shall triumph over darkness. Our war against Hamas is a test for all of humanity; it is a struggle between the Iranian axis of evil – involving Hezbollah and Hamas – and the axis of freedom and progress. The time has come to unite for a single purpose: to move forward and achieve victory through joint forces and a profound belief in justice, a profound belief in the eternity of the Jewish people. We shall fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah.” Hamas and the “Hadith” The eschatological dimension of Hamas – a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood – is clearly visible in its charter, adopted on 18 August 1988. Its fundamental objectives include the establishment of a Palestinian state, the liberation of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the elimination of Israel. However, one of the most significant passages in the Hamas charter is the eschatological hadith (an oral tradition of the Prophet Muhammad) cited in Article 7: “The Hour will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, and these will cry out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!’” “Christian Zionism” and the Second Coming There is no need to recount here the history of Zionism, which led to the creation of the State of Israel. For our purposes, let us simply say that the belief in the State of Israel’s place within the history of salvation is present in a very specific way among certain American evangelical circles, who view Israel as the fulfilment of biblical prophecies. For many of its supporters, events in the Middle East are interpreted through an eschatological reading of history. These circles believe that Israel’s return to its land (“from the Nile to the Euphrates”) will hasten the Second Coming of Christ. Through its literal biblical understanding of the subject, this belief distinguishes itself from nationalist Zionism. Evangelicals believe that the very existence of the State of Israel will bring Jesus back to Earth and ensure God’s triumph over the forces of evil, while Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved. “Christian Zionism” was denounced once again very recently by the Churches of the Holy Land. In a declaration dated 17 January 2026, the Greek and Armenian Orthodox Patriarchs classified it as a “harmful ideology.” These ideologies, the statement asserts, “mislead the public, sow confusion, and damage the unity of the flock.” The signatories warn against “a possible political instrumentalization that could harm the Christian presence in the Holy Land and throughout the Middle East.” The warning is clear. Beyond missiles, alliances, and geopolitical rivalries, the true battle for Lebanon – and for its Church – lies in proving that a Middle Eastern country can preserve its religious diversity, build a just state, and resist the political manipulation of the sacred. This may seem utopian, but if, amidst all the turbulence, Lebanon succeeds in meeting this challenge in a region marked by the blindest religious arbitrariness, it could become not a regional battlefield, but a beacon and a spiritual pivot for the entire Middle East.

The war in Iran has entered its third week and, at the current stage, the two opposing camps, the American-Israeli coalition, on the one hand, and the Iranian Islamic Republic, on the other hand, are engaged in a military-political escalation that seems to be going crescendo. President Donald Trump thus raised the tone with his Western allies to overcome their reluctance concerning the establishment of a vast coalition that would take charge of the security of the maritime route of the Strait of Hormuz. The White House chief went so far as to emphasize that if the United States' allies maintain their refusal to send a military naval force to secure the Strait of Hormuz, the consequences for NATO could be unfortunate. On Monday afternoon, President Trump reminded public opinion of the real stakes of the current war launched against the mullahs' regime. He notably pointed out in this regard, for the attention of those who have not grasped the true scope of this conflict: «What is happening now is minor compared to the years of terrorism exercised by the Iranian regime». And the White House chief added that «the Iranian regime has been annihilated». If, on the military front, some Western countries are, for the moment, reluctant to engage directly in the armed conflict, on the political level, however, the time is for verbal escalation. President Emmanuel Macron thus contacted his Iranian counterpart, Massoud Pezechkian, to whom he expressed his strong grievances regarding the Iranian aggressions perpetrated against France and Iran's neighboring countries. For his part, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Johann Wadephul, emphasized Germany's «total support» for the United States and Israel in the ongoing conflict, stating that «it is clear that the Iranian regime constitutes a danger for its neighbors, for the entire region, for freedom of navigation and for global economic development». «This danger must not continue to exist», noted the German minister. The British government, for its part, reiterated its criticism of the Iranian regime, specifying that it is undertaking contacts with European countries to guarantee the security of the Strait of Hormuz. Diplomatic contacts would indeed be underway between Western chancelleries to ensure the security of maritime navigation and guarantee oil exports without hindrance. This issue seems all the more vital as the blocking of the strait has had the predictable consequence of a surge in the price of oil on the international market, approaching the $110 per barrel mark. In this context, it should be noted that some social networks reported on Monday morning information indicating the commissioning by Saudi Arabia of a pipeline built in the Saudi desert and opening onto the Red Sea. This pipeline, the aforementioned sources affirm, was built many years ago to constitute an alternative route to the Strait of Hormuz in case of conflict. The military escalation At the level of military operations, the night of Sunday March 15 and the day of Monday March 16 saw a clear escalation on all «fronts». Israeli aviation thus launched intensive raids against the Iranian regime's infrastructure in Tehran. At the same time, the southern suburbs of Beirut and several sectors of the southern region were the target of very violent aerial bombardments. The Israeli air force raids seemed to provide cover for a new deployment of IDF armored units in certain southern areas where clashes with Hezbollah militiamen were also reported. It should be noted in this context that the Israeli Minister of Defense announced on Monday, making it clear that the IDF has begun a large-scale operation in South Lebanon aimed at destroying all Hezbollah infrastructure in the southern area of Lebanon. He added that the inhabitants of the villages south of the Litani will only return home when the security of the population of northern Israel is guaranteed. At the same time, missile fire and drone attacks intensified against the Gulf countries. Saudi Arabia indicated on Monday, in the early afternoon, that it had intercepted no less than 60 drones on Sunday night and Monday morning. The United Arab Emirates were not spared and air traffic at Dubai International Airport was temporarily interrupted due to a fire caused nearby by a missile strike. The vicinity of Baghdad airport was also targeted by Iranian drones and missiles. Finally, it should be noted that the mullahs' regime sent «to the Muslims of the world and to all Muslim countries» a message in which it urged them to take a clear stand on the current conflict. The Iranian power also threatened to target «American companies» in the Middle East.

When we speak of literature in wartime, the questions that tend to crowd our minds concern the capacity of writers to produce, or the ways in which they might transmute battles, death, and destruction into novels, poems, and testimonies. But these questions, for all their importance, conceal a deeper one. War furnishes literature with a new subject, while simultaneously shaking the very conditions that make literature possible. It touches language, memory, the inner rhythm of time, and the capacity to transform experience into a coherent narrative — one that first fulfills a function before it arrives at meaning. This is because war is not an event that takes place outside the body: it takes place within it. Its effect on writing thus manifests in the texts composed about it, but also in those that are delayed, that falter, or that emerge in fragmentary and unfinished form. Hence the questions: what does war do to language itself? Can language bear the weight of violence? And when does it choose silence over production? Violence and the Limits of Language In The Body in Pain , the American scholar Elaine Scarry illuminates the profound relationship between pain and language. Physical pain — an experience that most often waits to be expressed — also reveals the limits of expression itself. Violence, when it reaches a certain threshold, can cause language to withdraw. In this sense, it constitutes an assault on the body no less than on the capacity to speak. Literature in wartime thus ceases to be a mere writing about violence. If war is an experience dense with pain, fear, and collapse, it is only natural that the language supposed to express it should itself waver. Trauma studies add another dimension to this discussion. The scholar Cathy Caruth holds that traumatic events cannot be fully grasped at the moment of their occurrence; this is why they return later in the form of fragmented memories, opaque nightmares, strange pains that seize the body. "Trauma is not simply a disorder of a wounded psyche; it is the story of a wound that cries out." What Caruth proposes is that trauma rests on a kind of latency between the event and its perception. Violent experience does not convert directly into narrative: it requires an indeterminate, unquantified time before it can become words, spoken or written. Writing, therefore, does not always come in the midst of the event: literature moves often in the interval between what happened and what has become possible to understand — so that it may be given form. Just as war alters the human being's relation to language, it transforms the relation to time and space as well. It is here that Edward Said offers a precise analysis in his reflections on exile. In his essay Reflections on Exile , he writes: "Exiles feel an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives." Exile is first a geographical displacement, but it is above all a rupture in the continuity that lends life its meaning. The exile inhabits a fractured time: a past that is no longer present, a provisional present, a future without contours. If literary writing requires, even partially, a sense of continuity, war and exile strike at this fundamental condition. Where Scarry, Caruth, and Said account for the difficulties of writing in psychological and cognitive terms, Adorno raises a question of a different order — an ethical one. After the Second World War, he wrote his celebrated dictum: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." Many read in this a call to silence before the horror of human atrocity, as if anything that could be said amounted to futility or moral collapse. Yet the phrase points to a deeper impasse: culture, after catastrophe, cannot simply continue as though nothing had occurred. Literature can no longer be written in innocence. Maurice Blanchot goes further than Adorno, speaking of a form of writing traversed by the very logic of catastrophe: "When there is no longer any difference between writing and not writing, writing changes; it becomes the writing of the disaster." Writing is generally understood as a coherent act that tends toward completion; but in times of catastrophe it becomes fragments, scattered notes, unfinished attempts — deficient in form and in coherence, crumbling like the wall of a collapsing building, now silent, now voluble, stumbling. Lebanese Literature and the Civil War: The Time of Writing, Between War and Silence The experience of Lebanese literature bound to the civil war (1975–1990) shows that the fundamental question concerns not only how to write war, but the very time of writing: at what moment does it become possible to transmute violent experience into a text? And when is the writer incapable of doing so? If one examines the novels that have engaged with the Lebanese civil war, one finds that they were written at distinct moments, revealing a complex relationship between violence and language. In Elias Khoury's Little Mountain (1977), published in the early years of the war, experience is written while the event is still open. The novel advances through short fragments, scattered memories, and intertwined voices, the characters recounting what they are living from within the immediate experience — with all its confusion, its gaps, its incompleteness. In this sense, the novel resembles a testimony written at the very heart of the event, where reality still eludes total comprehension. Certain writers, however, wrote the war from a geographical distance, making remoteness a fortress and a refuge. In Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra (1980), a novel written in London exile, the war appears through the experience of a woman living in a city that gradually transforms into a space of violence. The writing comes from a position of painful observation situated outside the event, where geographical distance allows a degree of reflection on the experience — and perhaps some balm, some measure of objectivity. Other texts, by contrast, appeared only after the war had ended. In the works of Hoda Barakat — Disciples of Passion (1993) and The Tiller of Waters (1998) among them — the writing arrives after the most violent years have passed. The war is no longer an immediate event; the elapsed time has allowed it to become a deep psychological imprint within the characters. War appears here in the form of solitude, rupture, and the erosion of human bonds. In Iman Humaydan's B as in Beirut (2006), the city itself becomes an archive of deferred memory. Individual stories interweave with collective history, and the war appears as a layer of memory that continues to reverberate within the city. These examples reveal that the Lebanese civil war was not written in a single moment. Some texts were composed during the war itself, while others did not appear until many years after its end. Trauma research shows that violent events frequently disturb the capacity to transform experience into coherent narrative. This is why trauma manifests in fragmented memories, plural voices, and non-linear narrative structures. Jabbour Douaihy, for his part, returned in several novels to the years of the civil war long after they had receded. In June Rain (2006), The American Neighborhood (2014), and Chased Away (2012), the war surfaces as a memory rising to the surface through family stories and the histories of villages and small towns. Douaihy writes the war from a position of retrospection, in a novelistic time that follows the fighting, in which memory begins to reorder what was. Douaihy's novels seem to belong to a later phase of war writing, in which the ambition of writing shifts from the mere recording of events to an examination of their imprint on the social fabric and on the relations between individuals and communities. In this sense, much of Lebanese civil war fiction can be read as so many distinct forms of writing collective trauma. Formally, narrative fragmentation, polyphony, and the absence of a central narrator may reflect an aesthetic choice — but they also reflect a troubled time of writing itself. Another form of the relationship between war and writing emerged in the experience of Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh. He left Lebanon toward the end of the war years to settle in Australia, where he wrote most of his poetic work. Saadeh's language is quiet and spare, yet saturated with a sense of loss and uprooting. Saadeh writes the war from a double distance, temporal and geographical at once. The poem does not restore the battles or the details of violence; it restores instead the deep feeling of severance that the war deposited in the life of the individual, so that exile becomes the place where the traces of an experience — which could not be expressed at the moment it was lived — gradually reveal themselves. The experience of Wadih Saadeh offers a clear example of deferred war writing. The silence that precedes the text is one of its phases, because all this tragic violence requires time before it can become words capable of being formed. War does not change the subject of literature: it changes the time of the text. What appears as stumbling before the rhythm of rapid production may be the moment in which reality outpaces the capacity of language to catch up with it. In that moment, literature does not disappear: it waits. It waits for language to be able to move through the rubble. Let us close on a question that places the cultural and economic system at the centre of the literary equation — the system that determines when war becomes a publishable and distributable matter. In a world governed by the logic of rapid cultural production, great tragedies become subjects around which books, articles, and testimonies multiply in record time. In recent years, hundreds of texts on Gaza have appeared in the shadow of the ongoing genocide, a phenomenon that reveals how a tragedy can rapidly transform into a vast field of cultural production. Which opens another question in the context of the current war on Lebanon: will today's war also become a consumable commodity, while the trauma remains wide open, and the horizon stays dark, without sun?