Rami Rayess

Rather than becoming an occasion to open a serious debate on the foundations of the judicial system, justice, and punishment in Lebanon, the political and legal discussion around the proposed general amnesty law has turned into a sectarian and confessional contest, entirely removed from the basic principles underpinning the anticipated legislation, namely achieving justice, redressing the wrongs suffered by detainees who have been denied for years their natural right to timely trials, and addressing, of course, the issue of prison overcrowding, which violates the bare minimum of human rights even in the case of a prisoner or a pre-trial detainee, thereby contradicting the very reformative idea of detention and converting prisons into spaces that entrench criminality and abuse.

To commemorate the Palestinian Nakba as an annual ritual in which the memory of that land's dispossession from its original inhabitants, and its colonisation by the Israeli entity, is revisited does not truly convey that the Nakba is still ongoing — when in fact it is. As though this people had not suffered enough from displacement, destruction and defeat, the facts themselves are now transmuted into questions that appear legitimate in the eyes of public opinion while being, at their core, far removed from reality. Among these questions, widely in circulation across Western media — and in which any guest daring to defend the Palestinian cause finds themselves ensnared — is the following: “Do you recognise Israel’s right to exist?” The UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, was perhaps the one who addressed this matter most shrewdly, when she replied: “Nobody asks Italy or Spain, or any other state in the world, to justify its right to exist!”

Lebanese-Syrian relations have reached a new turning point following the important visit paid by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to Damascus, at the head of a ministerial delegation, with the aim of strengthening bilateral ties between the two countries and carrying them forward toward a new era, one capable of dissolving the sediment left by a bygone period in which mutual grievances accumulated and trust evaporated, as a result of the damaging role played by Syrian tutelage over Lebanon for more than thirty years. The transition from the hardships of fraternity to the open spaces of cooperation appears to have genuinely begun, though it demands perseverance, resolve, and steadiness from both leaderships. The journey toward rebuilding Lebanese-Syrian relations is long, but far from impossible, it remains achievable, provided it rests on the constants of both countries, steering clear of the two extremes of total rupture (the 1950 experience) and total tutelage (1976–2005). One thing is certain: both parties have a genuine stake in following this inevitable path.

As the rhetoric of hatred and rancour deepens among Lebanese, questions multiply as to what can realistically be done to heal the political and media fracture that is taking root through social networks, now within everyone’s reach and allowing each citizen to voice an opinion (which is, in principle, a good thing) without exercising the minimum of self-censorship, with the result that communal and sectarian fanaticisms pour out freely, beyond any moral or political restraint. This social rift mirrors the vertical divide running through the country, a dangerous divide bound up with the major strategic choices that will define Lebanon’s identity and its regional role going forward, and that centres on such pivotal questions as how to confront Israel and its ongoing aggressions against Lebanon, and the issue of confining arms to the exclusive authority of the State, as prescribed by the Ta’if Agreement, under which all Lebanese militias had surrendered their weapons in the early 1990s, with the sole exception of Hezbollah, under the banner of the “Resistance.”

Lebanon and the Lebanese cannot confront the challenges facing the country while divided to this degree over the great strategic choices, especially the question of how to deal with the Israeli occupation and resolve the issue of confining weapons to the state, a legitimate, self-evident demand recognized in every country in the world, for there is no state that accepts the existence of an armed faction beyond its control, capable of igniting a major war not merely without its consent but without so much as consulting it. The lines of vertical fracture in Lebanon keep widening, and the rift among the Lebanese deepens by the day, until Lebanese political discourse finds itself confined between two poles: one racing toward a peace whose conditions have not yet ripened, and another retreating into the field without reading the exceptional transformations the region has witnessed over the past three years, from uncontested Israeli supremacy to the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria to the American-Israeli-Iranian war.

The political and electoral promises of President Donald Trump have evaporated, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, and the glittering headlines about ending wars have come to nothing — he who boasted, upon his election, of bringing “eight wars” to a close — while in return he has ignited two new ones, in Venezuela and Iran, and is now seriously threatening to make Cuba his third. The arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did unfold without triggering any notable domestic reaction, as the regime abandoned its own leader and adapted with considerable pragmatism to American pressure, but the situation with Iran is an altogether different matter.

What will the situation of Lebanon and the region look like in the aftermath of the American-Israeli war against Iran? And what will become of the Lebanese-Lebanese rift, which has deepened to unprecedented levels under the combined weight of this conflict, of Hezbollah's engagement in it, and of the Israeli aggressions that continue to spread across Lebanese territory, as the death toll surpasses a thousand and climbs further with each passing hour? On the Iranian side, the regime's survival roughly a month after hostilities broke out constitutes an achievement in itself, and it is precisely what the partisans of what once styled itself the "axis of resistance" would readily describe as a "victory." The term, of course, remains relative, since what counts as a victory by the standards of that axis amounts to a resounding failure when measured against the actual course of the war. A regime that clings to power over ruins cannot genuinely lay claim to victory, and Iran will need many decades to recover from the collapse into which this devastating conflict has plunged it.

In times of war and crisis, the Lebanese scene divides between those who drag every division and grievance back to the surface in order to inflame and worsen them, and those who work to build a climate of national unity capable of carrying the country through the difficult period, waiting for calmer days in which the great national questions might at last be addressed. It is certain that this is not the moment to plunge into questions as deep and fraught as the validity of the Taif Agreement, the nature of the political system, or the abolition of political confessionalism. This is a phase for ending the war, for tending the wounds, for finding a way out of the impasse into which the country has sunk — an impasse that nothing, for now, suggests will be easy to escape in the near term.

It is no easy task to compress, within a few lines and paragraphs, the trajectory of a great historian who lived nearly a century and who remained, until his final days, immersed in research, writing, and reflection — his mind never ceasing to follow what unfolded in his homeland. His cause was always singular: Palestine. Walid Khalidi, who left us just days ago, gathered throughout his long life many remarkable qualities, the most defining of which — attested repeatedly by those who knew him and borne out by his research and books — was that he served as the guardian of the Nakba's narrative and the very man who dismantled the Zionist account of Palestine.

With the eruption of the second Israeli-American-Iranian war, questions and observations crowd around this great conflict that will, beyond any doubt, reshape the face of the region and the world, leaving in its wake profound consequences for the future of the Middle East and the nature of its political relations. The following are perhaps the most significant observations: — It is clear that this war was not well prepared. Despite the elimination of the Supreme Leader, Iran's Defense Minister, and the supreme command in the very first hours, Iran's command-and-control architecture is equally clearly decentralized — as evidenced by the uninterrupted volleys of missiles fired in every direction. The inability of the United States and Israel to strike Iran's Second Strike Capability confirms this impression. The wager on a wave of protests sweeping across Iran has likewise failed and cannot be relied upon. Nor can one overlook the fact that the Iranian fighter operates from a religious doctrine in which martyrdom is not feared but sought as both goal and gain.