A Thousand Plateaus

Contrary to popular belief, the Palestinian question is not trapped in a stalemate by historical inevitability, nor by an irreconcilable, atavistic hatred. It is methodically neutralized by a convergence of interests between extremes who, while clashing in bloodshed, share a common obsession: preventing the emergence of a political solution based on mutual recognition and equal rights. On one side, an Israeli power captive to an absolute security logic, transformed over the years into a governing ideology. On the other, Islamist movements that thrive on the collapse of politics, the sacralization of violence, and the hijacking of the Palestinian cause for the benefit of regional agendas. Caught in the middle, a population held hostage, and a prospect of peace deliberately sabotaged.

The meaning of Christmas challenges us more than ever, in a world that is increasingly fragmented, increasingly “nihilistic” — in the existential sense. Beyond its commercial and festive character, or even its spiritual and religious dimension, Christmas is, in principle, a hand extended toward humanity in all its flaws, its inequities, its imperfections. Without distinction. This is not about engaging in supermarket morality, nor in secularized spiritualism, but about sincerely questioning what this moment signifies, beyond immediate experience — beyond that delightful synesthesia of lights, songs, and flavors, or the joy of gifts reflected in the innocent eyes of young children.

The history of Lebanese Shiism is too often told backwards, or worse, flattened by a teleological reading that presents Hezbollah as the natural culmination of a long religious and political continuum. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scholarly work on the ulama of Jabal Amel, on the contrary, allows us to reconstruct a very different genealogy—one rooted in doctrinal pluralism, a conscious relationship to the state, and a non-theocratic conception of religious authority. It is precisely this tradition that has been broken. Historically, Ameli Shiism developed within the framework of wilayat al-umma : a community of believers endowed with moral and spiritual autonomy, but not with a project of political domination. The choice of marja‘iyya was free and plural, often oriented toward Najaf, within a deliberately distanced relationship between clerical authority and political power. This tradition acknowledged the diversity of religious authorities, rejected doctrinal centralization, and, above all, did not seek to govern society in the name of the sacred.

The Iranian party, Hezbollah, has never been a territorial resistance. It has been a militia of spatial expansion, using territory as an argument for legitimacy. It is time to acknowledge this, once and for all. Since its inception, Hezbollah has lived with a fundamental division: it is simultaneously the armed wing of an imperial project—that of the Iranian Wilayat al-Faqih as defined by Imam Khomeini—and an actor that claims to embody the “resistance” to liberate a national territory. “Space” first: that of the Shiite ummah, from Qom to Beirut, structured around a Supreme Leader whose decisions, in matters of war and peace, are binding. Then there is the “territory”: that of South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the disputed borders, where the party presents itself as a bulwark against Israel and the guardian of a national cause. This dichotomy is not new. Upon its establishment in 1984, under the guise of “resistance to the Israeli occupation,” Hezbollah began by eliminating a significant portion of the national resistance movement stemming from the Lebanese left—Mahdi Amel and his associates. It established itself on the margins: the Bekaa Valley, South Lebanon, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. There, it built a sprawling social infrastructure financed by Iran, and later supported by Assad’s Syria within the framework of the “alliance of minorities.”

Holy Father, at the moment when you are about to set foot on the soil of Lebanon and Turkey, on the threshold of this wounded Levant that was once one of the cradles of believing humanity, we dare to write to you. The aim is not to add one more voice to the concert of protocol speeches. That would be of absolutely no interest. Empty formulas, glittering but soulless, you will hear in abundance during your visit. This letter asks of you something at once simple and vertiginous: to take up the torch. The torch of Francis. That of an integral humanism which strove, against all odds, to grasp the Gospel in its most naked form: the dignity of every human being, fraternity as the only possible horizon of politics, religion freed from identitarian idols.

One year to the day, Bashar al-Assad collapsed, dragging down with him half a century of dynastic tyranny, disguised as modernist “secularism” and as a bulwark against chaos. Good riddance. Good riddance to a regime that turned Syrians into the raw material of an industry of terror, in the name of a pseudo-Arabism grafted onto the so-called “alliance of minorities,” alternately handed over to Iran and Russia, and, ultimately, so convenient for Israel. Good riddance to a power that transformed the Alawite community into both a human shield and a commercial asset, and that survived only by incarcerating “God Himself” in the underground hell of Saydnaya. Good riddance, too, to the comforting fiction according to which barbarism was the price to pay to avoid something far worse: chaos, Islamism, a war of all against all. Syria paid the highest price to prove that the worst option was him.

No — the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine cannot be dismissed as a peripheral disturbance or reduced to a mere dispute over territory, whatever the assorted Putinists would have us believe. The Russian aggression exposes a deeper fracture: a clash between two visions of the world. On one side, freedom and the rule of law; on the other, the nostalgia for an imperial order, resurrected under the guise of a mythologized “golden age,” built upon domination and terror. What unfolds today upon Ukrainian soil is nothing less than the deliberate attempt to resurrect the imperial logic of Russia and to impose it as the political paradigm of this century. The battle for the Donbas is not a local skirmish. It is a test for the whole of Europe — for its courage, its memory, and its very future. Nothing less. The regime of Vladimir Putin does not merely seek to annex land. Putin aims to restore an imperial architecture with explicit historical referents: Peter the Great, Catherine II, and the idea of a “civilizational space” sanctified by the myth of the “Russian world,” wherein peoples are not political subjects but ethnic matter to be absorbed, reshaped, or erased.