An Eye on the Event

President Trump reacted with unexpected speed after the Revolutionary Guards once again announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. This time, he turned his anger against his ally Netanyahu, imposing a ceasefire in South Lebanon in order to safeguard the progress of the negotiations underway in their Swiss phase. Yet this new day of closure did not prevent fifty five supertankers from reaching global markets under American protection, according to data from the Central Command, as well as statements made by President Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance. At this point, there is little value in questioning the sincerity of either side, nor is there any need to search for the truth behind every detail, since the “Memorandum of Understanding” allows both parties to present it in whatever way best serves their respective needs. Still, Tehran’s mere announcement of another closure of the strait, even without carrying it out, has become a political event in itself, one significant enough to prompt the American administration into action, even at the expense of the Israeli army, the crown jewel of the American military industry in the Middle East. President Trump may have somewhat exaggerated when he announced the destruction of Iran’s air force and navy, without realizing that he had failed to destroy Tehran’s most powerful weapon, its negotiating capability, and that he had no desire to acknowledge this, precisely at a moment when the Iranians were demonstrating negotiating skills wholly disproportionate to their current situation and far exceeding existing power balances. Mojtaba The new Supreme Leader continues to speak from behind a veil, while his audience still waits to see him appear. His inner circle, meanwhile, understands the state of the Republic better than he does after the extensive destruction inflicted upon its infrastructure, military capabilities and arsenals. They also understand their pressing need for respite, money and time, precisely what the “Memorandum of Understanding” has provided them with, turning into a gateway toward reconciliation with the “Great Satan”. Yet they also know that such reconciliation may trigger internal upheavals, especially since Washington’s policies have failed to convince them, as has Israel, which opposes the “Memorandum of Understanding” despite the fact that it remains their only guarantee. If the Supreme Leader approves it, the regime loses part of its room for manoeuvre; if he rejects it, the losses will only grow. In either case, the choice is a bitter one. This explains why he reduced his instructions to his followers and his people to two words expressing acceptance without conviction. Yesterday, at the Swiss negotiating venue, after Pakistan’s success made possible by decisive Qatari involvement, the first direct meeting between the two delegations produced a positive message. Only statements from hardliners in Tehran, compounded by President Trump’s hasty reactions, disrupted this momentum, reminding everyone how fragile the political process remains and how vulnerable it is to another collapse. Indeed, Iranian political thinking remains captive to the theory of “immaculate conception”, especially when the marriage in question involves an administration led by a real estate developer whose language is both abrasive and provocative. The Limits of the Game Whatever objections critics may raise regarding the text of the “Memorandum of Understanding”, many of them legitimate, its essential function lies not in its visible content but in the secret annexes accompanying it, whether written or verbal. Their true purpose is to bring Iran into the black room of direct bilateral negotiations, face to face with the Americans. Once the mediators have succeeded in establishing this framework for direct bilateral negotiations, no one will remember the shortcomings and loopholes of the “Memorandum of Understanding”, because once the Iranian American negotiating process begins and takes root, it will become nothing more than a direct translation of actual power balances rather than tactical manoeuvres or political cunning. In that context, the theory of “immaculate conception” will no longer have any place. Iran’s leaders understand this perfectly well. Their overriding concern is to preserve the regime and secure guarantees against future attacks that could once again threaten their survival and authority. This does not mean that Iran's leadership will not do everything in its power to secure an agreement that serves its interests. Rather, it means that the rules of the game are evolving, moving from confrontation, hostility and rivalry toward a phase of temporary understandings that may ultimately lead to reconciliation. It is in this light that Egypt’s reconciliation with the United States through the Camp David Accords with Israel should be revisited, alongside the Palestinian experience embodied by the Oslo Accords, in order to grasp the considerable gap between the outcomes of the Egyptian and Palestinian cases whenever the logic of real rather than imaginary power balances prevails. Today, Iran faces its own experience, carrying both the legacy of the Islamic Republic and, behind it, the enduring legacy of the imperial Persian state, not to mention the inheritance of uninterrupted wars since Imam Khomeini came to power, whether wars against the peoples of Iran or against Arab and Muslim peoples, from Afghanistan to Yemen. The latest war with Israel and the United States may be among the shortest, yet it has become the most dangerous for both the regime and the state. Because of this, the game has reached its breaking point. Little remains of the Iranian state today except a people struggling with hunger and disease, an army that still possesses missiles, and leaders who show little concern for either their own population or their neighbours. A New Dynamic As the Swiss phase begins, the two month countdown established by the “Memorandum of Understanding” has started. The real issues at stake go far beyond the officially declared files, whether nuclear matters, sanctions, frozen assets or similar questions. They concern, above all, the foundations of Iranian American bilateral relations, first on the security level, then on the economic level, ultimately leading toward political reconciliation. These three dimensions, security, economics and politics, encompass all disputed issues and require a new negotiating dynamic entirely different from the one that produced the “Memorandum of Understanding”. They also follow a hierarchy designed to produce a sustainable political reconciliation, beginning with the development of deep security policies capable of reassuring the Iranian regime while satisfying the United States, which still views Iran as a major security vulnerability within the area of operations of the US Central Command in the broader Middle East. This also extends to the regional security of the Gulf and Arab countries, as well as that of Central Asian states within the broader Eurasian axis. This also requires settling the question of Iran’s economy, the region’s second largest economy after Saudi Arabia. It is worth recalling that, according to President Trump’s own statements, his decision to withdraw from the nuclear agreement was motivated first by economic considerations and only then by security concerns. Time remains relatively short to address these fundamental issues if negotiations continue to swing back and forth like a pendulum. Yet it remains sufficient if the Trump administration is willing to learn a few negotiating lessons from its fiercest adversary, which, in politics, is hardly a sign of weakness. American responsibility here appears far greater than Iranian responsibility. Otherwise, the United States would have to acknowledge that its status has declined to that of a regional power rather than the great power it claims and acts to be. It is also worth highlighting the role of the four mediating countries, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, whose actions reflect the political weight generated by both Arab and Islamic summits and their ability to exert meaningful influence from Beijing to Moscow, across Western Europe and into Latin America. That influence has even reached the United States, as President Trump himself openly acknowledged. It is therefore impossible to disregard objective realities that have already demonstrated their effectiveness. In the period ahead, these mediating states will be capable of becoming influential players in regional and global equations, and they are openly saying so. The clear and convergent statements issued by the foreign ministers of the four countries during their latest meeting in Cairo cannot be reduced to a mere diplomatic exercise or an abstract belief in mediation. Islamabad, Riyadh, Ankara and Cairo do not act lightly after decades of political, security and diplomatic engagement across multiple fronts and issues. Today, the future of the region itself is at stake, and these states lie both at its core and at the heart of the struggle surrounding it. Brazil as a Model Brazil is one of the emerging powers on the global stage through both the G20 and the BRICS. With its vast population and its multi trillion dollar economy, it possesses the means, as a major Latin American power, to fulfil the aspirations of its diverse population and become a pole in an increasingly multipolar world. This ambition is reflected in the brief statement issued by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 19 June, welcoming the signing of the “Memorandum of Understanding” as a means of ending the conflict, urging all parties to fully comply with its provisions, and explicitly calling for a complete cessation of hostilities on all fronts, including Lebanon, as well as the continuation of negotiations aimed at reaching a comprehensive peace agreement . Brazil also reaffirmed its commitment to lasting stability and security in the Middle East, particularly in the State of Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank . Through these clear, simple and carefully chosen words, Brazil expressed a position that no Lebanese or Palestinian citizen could reject. A genuinely state centred approach to the “Memorandum of Understanding” thus emerged, at a time when local media were saturated with contradictory interpretations from across the political spectrum, interpretations that went far beyond the memorandum’s temporary function. These readings chiefly revealed a form of political agitation among those whose ambitions, desires, illusions or despair in the face of a complex reality do not align with the contents of the memorandum, even as an opportunity now presents itself for Lebanon’s legitimate institutions to demonstrate their capabilities and for the Palestinian people to uphold their political rights and their independent state. Brazil supported South Africa before the International Court of Justice against Israel and provided financial assistance to UNRWA, while the Iran of the Revolutionary Guards has never recognized the State of Palestine and has offered our peoples nothing but death and destruction.

The title is a slogan placed by the Iranian leadership on a giant billboard in the heart of Enqelab Square in Tehran, depicting the Strait of Hormuz above the mouth of Donald Trump, president of the state of the "Great Satan" that must be defeated, just as the state of the "Little Satan" — Israel — must be destroyed. Yet the facts tell us this week that an agreement is taking shape, precisely "at the breaking point," with both Satans, the Great and the Little, an agreement that may be signed next Friday. It has not occurred to the Iranian media machine that breaking points can strike its own leaders too, and not only its enemies, even as the Iranian leadership believes it has achieved an unprecedented divine victory at this breaking point — whether in the strait or in South Lebanon. If American and Iranian intentions prove sincere and the American-Iranian "memorandum of understanding" or "framework agreement" aimed at halting hostilities and lifting the blockade on the closed strait comes to be signed, we will find ourselves facing a situation in which Tehran will have succeeded in seizing by the throat to wrest the desired victory through total suffocation of the world's economies, while Washington will have succeeded in grabbing the nose and mouth to force the Iranian head under water through naval blockade and comprehensive paralysis of port traffic. Thus the time factor turned against the one who holds only the throat, as the billboard says and shows. While we await the signature expected in the course of this week, there are observations worth making that bear directly on this agreement. First observation: the announced memorandum of understanding cannot be taken at face value alone, insofar as the mediators have succeeded in building a solid lining conducive to the agreement's success by providing undeclared solutions of considerable political, security, and economic weight, solutions that accord with the mediators' vision grounded in a strategic reading different from that of either party to the conflict. This deserves to be credited to the mediation actors, even if it displeases the partisans of the hard line and the perpetuation of war, for the weight of the mediating countries and the states that support them in this battle can no longer be measured by their current role alone, nor by the immediate results we will draw from it: this weight has become one of the pillars of the geopolitical equation, one that can no longer be bypassed at the international strategic level or in the regional power struggle of the new Middle East. This opens a space of civilizational and prospective competition, in place of militia-based warfare with all the filth, destruction, and slaughter of peoples it has carried in its wake. Second observation: this "memorandum of understanding" or "framework agreement" has laid bare the atrophy of Iranian power, which refuses to acknowledge its defeat and summons the arsenal of ideology, its last weapon for preserving the cohesion of the regime's core and the hard nucleus that composes it, made up of Revolutionary Guards and doctrinal militias capable of arresting and eliminating anyone who holds a dissenting opinion. For refusing to acknowledge defeat is fundamental to the plan of remaining in power, a plan itself built on a particular understanding of American policies and their internal contradictions within the deep state, an understanding in which the Iranian leadership has known how to exploit American containment policies to the fullest, whereas the Trump administration has failed in its reading and assimilation of the Persian mentality, the true crown jewel of the Velayet-e Faqih system. The crudest example of this failure lies in the way Netanyahu convinced Trump to launch the initial attack at zero hour, the one that was to bring down the regime, which allowed Netanyahu to pride himself for a long time on the title of godfather of this war whose every request Trump granted without question. Yet as the war unfolded across time and the scope of its repercussions on the nations of the world grew, a new equation took shape, one that brought Netanyahu back to his true stature: that of an irresponsible political gambler, indifferent even to the potential fall of the White House itself. The spectacle of master and servant plays out daily before our eyes: when Trump is vexed by the damage Netanyahu causes, he scolds him like an ungrateful son, and when he needs him, he heaps praise on his achievements, to the point that the relationship of the Trump-Netanyahu duo irresistibly evokes Bertolt Brecht's satirical play, Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti , where the master, in his hours of intoxication, displays an overflowing magnanimity, and where, upon his lucid awakening dictated by his interests, he reverts to brutality and domination. It would have been wiser for Netanyahu, before proclaiming himself master, to revisit the remark made by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan upon reading the terms of the first agreement with America after the June war, titled the "Growing Security Partnership" : "Israel is a small state signing an agreement with a great power; this means we have become a client state." And at the signing of the first strategic partnership in 1981 with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, American Secretary of State Alexander Haig declared that "Israel is an American aircraft carrier that cannot be sunk." In an irony of reality, Netanyahu himself now demands of his government that it work to produce its own munitions, so that its decisions may once again become autonomous. Third observation: the provisional "framework agreement" rests on the Iranian regime's inability to achieve a clear and convincing victory, following the considerable destruction inflicted on its military, security, and economic apparatus. All that remains to it is its missile arsenal and its paramilitary instruments, harmful certainly, but without any real power to alter the equation. The United States, for their part, massed the bulk of their military power in the hope that the mere deployment of arms and the threat of their use would suffice before resorting to them, a relatively failed wager that brought them back each time to direct participation in the fighting; for the surplus of power and its costs are no less damaging than the battles themselves. When the profound inability to produce a solution began to manifest its effects in Congress, among MAGA supporters, and at gas stations, the sleights of hand on stock markets and shareholdings were no longer sufficient to mask a deficit whose cost the people pay from their own pockets. After these observations, as we move toward a "preliminary agreement," an "agreement of principles" whose inner workings remain opaque and whose surface resolves no fundamental question beyond the ceasefire and the consecration of negotiation as the sole means of resolving conflicts, while neutralizing the practices of Iranian paramilitary racketeering and the mechanisms of absolute American domination and hegemony, are we not faced with a balance of power between the Islamic Republic and the United States comparable to the balance of power that once prevailed between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had nothing but the "Intifada of Stones" as its sole means of neutralizing the army of occupation and forcing the Rabin government to abandon its bone-breaking policy and negotiate a withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip? Was not the preliminary agreement of principles known as the "Oslo Accord" produced according to the same political philosophy that today presides over the making of this provisional "framework agreement"? When the PLO signed its agreement with Israel, the "Little Satan," it was forbidden, and its leaders were accused of treason. When the Iranian leadership signs its agreement with America, the "Great Satan," it becomes permissible, and some will celebrate its victory. But one can say, without much hesitation, that this agreement is the Iranian Oslo.

The debate over whether to link or separate the various files and tracks is in full swing. Reality shows that political dossiers are by nature interconnected, reflecting the complexity of economic and political life, yet their respective weights differ and their mutual influences are far from equal. Treating any one dossier in isolation is a matter of choice, governed by priorities, the gravity of the stakes, and their sensitivity. In this respect, Barack Obama held that the strength of American foreign policy lay in the art of ordering priorities — an art that allows one to manage how quickly solutions advance in the most complex affairs, with the ability to revise that ordering daily in light of desired outcomes. Having failed to secure the funds needed to sell the agreement with Washington domestically, the Iranian leadership fell back on its familiar refrain: linking the Lebanese dossier to the ongoing negotiations, and firing missiles towards northern Israel to signal its resolve in imposing the unity of tracks against the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations. Tehran had meanwhile understood that the White House was managing, with relative equanimity, the coexistence of a continuing truce, a maintained calm, and a sustained naval blockade — an equation that drains the Iranian economy for as long as the relative quiet holds and the blockade endures. This is the deeper reason behind the belated solicitude Tehran displayed for Hezbollah and its constituency, at the very moment when it had obtained no tangible result from its aggression against Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Emirates — having failed to compel those states to revise their containment policies or relinquish their rights, including the right to retaliate and seek compensation. The situation can be summarized as follows: the fundamental demands — the nuclear file and the rest — are not the heart of the dispute; the disagreement bears on the declared financial claims, and it is this disagreement that provoked the escalation and the return to coupling the Lebanese dossier with the comprehensive agreement, without this necessarily presaging any capitulation on Washington's part. It is also worth noting that the White House's continued restraint of the Israeli response reflects its desire to prolong the truce and the blockade until the Iranian leadership yields to American financial conditions. As for the Israeli reaction, if it begins by sealing off the Gaza Strip under a declaration of a state of war — as Netanyahu has done today, while negotiations between Hamas and its affiliated factions intensify in Cairo — this Palestinian dossier is unlikely to trouble Washington, provided the Israeli Prime Minister maintains discipline on the Lebanese front, which seems the most plausible scenario for the days ahead. A War Fought for Nothing Yahya Sinwar launched the October 7 operation without a declared political objective, beyond what the name of the operation itself — "Al-Aqsa Flood" — suggests of religious zeal for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He waited long days for Tehran to mobilize in support against the "lesser Satan," just as he awaited the backing of the axis operations room in Damascus — the Assad regime and Beirut's southern suburb — along with the Iraqi Hachd al-Shaabi and the Houthis in Yemen. When the support war for the "Flood" got underway according to the Revolutionary Guards' criteria, the military effort deployed did not convince the leaders and cadres of Hamas and the Qassam Brigades in the thick of the fiercest fighting — it was plain that this effort fell short of what had been agreed. The declarations of the Qassam commanders were thus not free of formulas and appeals that supported this assessment, until disillusionment with the axis reached the point where it could no longer be left unspoken. Once the American-Israeli command had finished annihilating Gaza and its population, we witnessed the disastrous and lightning-swift effects of the Israeli offensive on Hezbollah's fighting capabilities in Lebanon, striking the movement at its Achilles' heel — its offensive as well as its defensive power. And since the declared support war had assigned itself no political objective beyond backing the "Al-Aqsa Flood," the military effort of Hamas and Hezbollah found itself swallowed by a political vacuum, while Israel proclaimed its successive objectives, articulated to multiple agendas — local, regional, and international — not to mention the personal agenda of Netanyahu and his government allies. Thus the confrontation between the resistance and moumanaa (rejectionist) axis on one side, and Israel on the other, laid bare a twofold deficiency: political first, operational second, from the moment each party was isolated and neutralised separately. Anyone familiar with the nature of relations between states and the organizations allied to them understands that the equation runs in one direction only: the vocation of vassals does not extend beyond serving the centre, whatever indulgence the centre displays and however carefully it tends the narrative of the alliance. There is therefore no justification for framing a war waged to avenge the death of Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei as a defence of Lebanese sovereignty or resistance to aggression against the lands and people of South Lebanon. The massive human losses and destruction suffered in Lebanon and Palestine alike cannot be linked to any political objective bearing on the interests of either people. The fighting of extremists deserves no other name than a war fought for nothing. The First Litani Operation Tel Aviv awoke on March 11, 1978, to fighting in its streets for control of a bus in which a group of fedayeen — led by the young Dalal Mughrabi — and several Israeli civilians had become trapped. The fighting continued until all the occupants were eliminated, in accordance with orders issued to General Ehud Barak. This event was the direct cause of the invasion of South Lebanon up to the Litani River. At the same time, President Elias Sarkis succeeded in internationalizing the question of South Lebanon, and Lebanese diplomacy wrested Resolutions 425 and 426 from the UN Security Council, intended to guarantee the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and enable the establishment of UNIFIL. But one must look beyond the immediate event to read the impasse in the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and their stalling, after the conclusion of the first and second disengagements, and the refusal of Menahem Begin's government to meet President Anwar Sadat's demands — despite his peace initiatives, his speech before the Knesset, and his proclamation of the fall of the psychological barrier. The Israeli military leadership wanted to test Egyptian behaviour in the event of a confrontation with the Syrian army and with PLO forces in Lebanon. Buoyed by the success of this trial by fire following the first Litani Operation, American President Jimmy Carter was able to bring the Camp David negotiations to a successful conclusion, six months after the Lebanese event. Those negotiations led to the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979. Within the span of a single year, the politico-military dynamic in Lebanon had been transformed by the direct results of this test, with South Lebanon now established as an international cause in its own right. The Israeli military "rehearsal" thus provided the operational reference that would guide the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, aimed at finishing off the PLO forces and clipping then controlling the Syrian political, military, and security role in Lebanon. Israel had become a direct actor, through its own forces and through the South Lebanon Army it had created, alongside the Hafez el-Assad regime as a second actor, and the local actors positioned on the fault line between the Lebanese National Movement and its ally the PLO on one side, and the Lebanese Front with its ties to the West and Israel on the other. It was in this soil that something new began to germinate in the depths of Lebanon, carrying within it an organic bond with the Islamic Revolution in Tehran — and which would take shape after the Israeli invasion. Prova d'orchestra In those days, more than half a century ago, the Clemenceau cinema in West Beirut was showing a film hard to forget, by the Italian director Federico Fellini: Orchestra Rehearsal or Prova d'orchestra — at the time of the Italian left's rise and the proliferation of armed groups of every stripe, when gunshots were a daily and familiar sound in Rome and across Italy's cities. The film laid bare the relationship between the maestro and his musicians, building to the moment when a heavy steel wrecking ball appeared on screen to strike the building and threaten it with collapse. In those days, the conversation turned around a single question: where was Lebanon heading? What were the prospects? What hammer would rouse the bearers of the competing projects? In those days I was waiting for the fall of imperialism and the destruction of the State of Israel, and my answer was ready: it was the Vietnamese hammer, not the Russian or the Chinese, that would accomplish the tasks of national liberation and bring about historical determinism. It never crossed my mind that President Elias Sarkis was right. Yet there he was, confined to his gilded cell in the Baabda Palace, awaiting the day he would leave it with great serenity and dignity. Fellini had known how to pose his discomfiting questions in this Prova that continues to this day, to the rhythm of the steel ball's blows levelling men and stone across the expanse of Lebanon and Palestine, spilling over to the far reaches of the Greater Middle East. Yesterday, for the first time in the history of contemporary Lebanon, the legitimate authorities took the helm, broke through the prevailing consciousness and through years of waiting and irresolution, to carry forward a rescue initiative for Lebanon and its people — an initiative capable of stopping the steel ball in its furious course and preventing the collapse of the Lebanese edifice in all that it holds of the human, the political, the cultural, and the historical. The missions that call for such commitment in the service of rescue do not require decisions designed to please everyone, nor do they need the blessing of those who are enamored of death, destruction, and self-immolation. Their one and only condition is the courage to defend, against all odds, the wellbeing and interests of the people.

The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa composed his cinematic epic Kagemusha — The Warrior's Shadow at the turn of the 1980s, to immortalise the story of a courageous warlord who had defied the feudal powers of the sixteenth century. He fell in battle, even though his soldiers had not spared their bodies in protecting him from the enemy's arrows. Yet the command chose to conceal his death and find a double to carry the war forward, and the paradox lay in the fact that this perfect replica was drawn from the dregs of society, a common thief. After the fashion of great filmmakers, whose dazzling spectacle raises questions and dilemmas of unsettling depth, Kurosawa lays bare the fragility of the military edifice, for all its mass and violence, since it suffices that the death of the exceptional commander — the one whose eye does not blink in the face of death — be announced for the whole structure to collapse. He also strips naked the system of political illusion that governs the masses and the soldiery, and perhaps even the most senior officers and the closest members of the inner circle. The tragedy tinged with irony came when the thief-double so completely inhabited the original's skin that he led the army from one loss to the next. At the time of the film's release, a year had passed since the arrival of Imam Khomeini at the helm of power in Iran, and the country had ceased to be an empire ruled by a shah and become a republic placed under the authority of the Supreme Leader. Now that the filmmaker has departed this world, he does not know that the death of the second Supreme Leader, Imam Khamenei, was announced without delay, nor that the Iranian leadership immediately proclaimed the designation of his son, the ailing Mojtaba, as heir to the position. What the two situations share is that the reasons which presided over the choice of the ailing son are precisely those that Kurosawa had addressed in his film, namely the importance of the solidity and cohesion of command and the necessity of ensuring its continuity. Without which collapse might be inevitable. To this is added the very principle of the wilayat al-faqih and the necessity that a standard-bearer always be present, which serves to prevent political collapse while feeding the great illusion that drives millions of followers to continue fighting. Except that the new Guide is, reportedly, injured and unable to address his public by voice and image in order to reassure his devotees. In the time of the director of The Warrior's Shadow, generative artificial intelligence did not yet exist, which might have allowed for the reproduction of an entire persona capable of speaking and moving, rendering the figure of the double superfluous. But the partisans of the new Guide need to see him among them, to hear him harangue them, to shake his hand, to receive his sermons and directives, rather than having to deal only with the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, who conduct this game solely for the purpose of preserving military cohesion and the survival of the regime. And so people, awaiting the one they hold dear, give everything they have. With Trump The American president has managed to impose his unusual style in the handling of great and small affairs alike, with a disconcerting evenhandedness: he directs his attacks at his Venezuelan, Cuban or Iranian adversary, and in the same breath does not forget to humiliate his aged predecessor Biden, or to threaten a friendly country of the stature of France or the Sultanate of Oman. Trump is today striving to finalise the document of proposals regarding a truce, consolidating the part that can be sold both domestically and abroad, and turning against any clause that would be difficult for him to exploit or defend, should it prove less convincing than what Barack Obama had achieved a decade earlier. One thus witnesses a game of ping-pong between Washington and Tehran over proposals and amendments, a game that serves to prolong the duration of the negotiations and open new avenues for both parties. After his visit to Beijing, which overwhelmed him with ceremony and magnificence, Trump was able to feel the components of Chinese soft power and gauge the limits of American hard power. The impact of the visit on him therefore extends far beyond what was concretely accomplished, which remains modest measured against his ambitions for great and spectacular deals. He perceives now the negative consequences of his relationship with President Putin, particularly on European allies, as well as the combined role played by Moscow and Beijing in preventing the Iranian regime from being defeated or compelled to capitulate easily before the will of the White House. This joint military, security and informational support has provided the Iranian leadership with the means to deploy its accumulated expertise in the art of complex and interlocking negotiations, as was observed last month during the elaboration of the memorandum of understanding and the reordering of priorities, where the weaker negotiator scored important points against the stronger one. Vice President JD Vance failed in his mission and returned to the White House with the conviction that the Iranian was no easy prey, despite his weaknesses and heavy losses. As for the flexibility that Vance had attempted in Pakistan, it could not be defended domestically. Successive initiatives aimed at reformulating a preliminary roadmap had nonetheless convinced Trump to regard it as a new point of departure, capable of being refined and implemented. But the haste with which he committed, combined with the emergence of firm opposition from some Republicans and a majority of Democrats, led Trump to back away from his initial commitments, to turn against the mediators as well, and to unleash a storm of anger against anyone who stood in the way of his pressing desires or failed to respond with the speed he demands. With Trump, it is impossible to trust either the validity of a stated position or its sincerity, and it is precisely this reality that the Iranian leadership internalised in entering the negotiations with a permanent readiness to face reversals at any moment and for any reason. The commanders of the Revolutionary Guards kept in reserve the use of whatever weaponry remains to them for military provocations against American fleets, provocations calibrated to cause no real damage, yet allowing them to claim a posture of courage, while serious retaliation against Gulf countries, so as to inflict genuine harm, is carried out without the slightest hesitation. This reveals the poverty of Iranian military power, and more so still the political illusion that accompanies it, the moment the American target is replaced by the Gulf target. In this Iranian posture, the baseness and cowardice of the Revolutionary Guards become transparent, with none of the courage one might associate with a warrior in the samurai mould. The horizon nonetheless remains open for the elaboration of a new memorandum that might pave the way for an acceptable settlement, with the certainty that the next failure will not lead Trump back to war, a fact from which the Revolutionary Guards intend to profit for as long as possible, since they care little for losses and their only genuine desire is to ensure the regime's continuity and prevent its collapse. Who is the Victor? The narrative of each camp aims to demonstrate its own victory according to differing and carefully tailored criteria, forging new definitions for worn-out words: truce, ceasefire, steadfastness, achievement, survival, losses, manoeuvre. And if the strong party fails to reach the objectives for which it went to war, the weak party sees in that failure a victory of its own, so that resistance in the strait becomes the compensation for every loss, even if substantial concessions are made that genuinely realise one of the strong party's war aims. This is what we witnessed over the past two weeks between Washington and Tehran, and it is liable to continue in various forms with new justifications, until the scene is reduced to a single element: the Revolutionary Guards' control of the strait. The decisive factor of power here lies in the American position and in a military conduct that refrains from the adventure of opening the strait by force, for reasons rooted in the Pentagon's calculations before any other consideration. It is precisely this that supplies the Iranian narrative with the arguments for its claim to power, rather than the drones or missiles it still possesses. The Iranian leadership has also drawn benefit from the convergence of Sino-Russian interests in support of the survival of a regime that serves their interests within the Eurasian axis: Moscow reaps what the Middle East's turbulences bring its way, while Beijing can afford to endure some losses of its own for a while, so long as the maintenance of the regime matters more to it at the heart of Central Asia. As for the third factor of power from which Iran benefits, it resides in the rational and considered strategy of the Arab Gulf states. These have practised a policy of active defence and deployed their political weight, both regionally and internationally, to produce a comprehensive diplomatic solution to the most dangerous international and regional crisis of our time. One may therefore say plainly that the factors of power from which the commanders of the Revolutionary Guards profit are neither theirs by right nor of their making, just as one may say that Washington's strategy and President Trump's mode of leadership have not yet produced what might validate the narrative of the long-awaited American victory. Equally, Israel's strategy, which floats its policies on a sea of blood in the region, particularly in Palestine and Lebanon, has produced nothing but massacres, destruction and annihilation. And there is Netanyahu with his generals, at the height of their fury at Trump, unleashing everything the Israeli army possesses in destructive power in pursuit of a victory, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon. It is for this reason that one may affirm, with calm and confidence, and on the basis of a concrete political observation of the course of the negotiations, that the strategy of the Gulf Cooperation Council states and its convergence with the strategies of Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan, as well as their shared capacity to interact directly and effectively with American, Chinese, Russian and European international strategies, have demonstrated their ability to produce an effective mediation that has opened a new course of events and a peaceful horizon toward a solution. They have also succeeded in reducing escalation, in containing Iranian folly and extremism, and in altering the course of policies at the very moment when the triangle of extremism, American-Israeli-Iranian, had reached the outermost limits of violence most hostile to human nature. To re-read the scene from the moment of the first and then the second American-Israeli strikes, and to take the measure of the catastrophes this war has visited upon humanity, beginning with the Iranian, Arab and Muslim peoples, is to understand that the frantic quest for victory will not be found on the side of the murderous triangle of extremism, but on the side of those who raised the banner of opposition to war, endured Iranian treachery, American impulsiveness and Israeli derangement, and persevered tirelessly in their effort to produce a political and diplomatic solution along the path of moderation and principled firmness.

In this same day of the year 1948 there came to pass what we have given the name of Nakba… then elapsed a time when Palestine was no more than a worn record spinning on repeat in the Arab pavement cafés… then came a time when Palestine became once more the intonation of a people that had recovered its voice and felt its muscles reawaken… then came a time when the Palestinian cause became a spreading oil slick upon the waters and a gaping well drained of its substance, around which all the buckets jostled in an endless tumult… then came a moment when fear arose for the Palestinian body of a new wandering, more terrifying still than the first, for the Palestinian mother had become like a cat bearing her kittens from one place to nowhere… The ages succeeded one another and dissolved into each other… until Palestine finally appeared upon its own land as an epic composition…… but a solo played upon living flesh!! It is in these singular formulations that Mohammad Hussein Chamseddine summarised his definition and approach to the commemoration of Nakba Day, at a conference held in Beirut under the title "From the Nakba to the State," in 2003, at the very hour when the Intifada was opening onto contradictory perspectives, torn between the advocates of peaceful struggle and the partisans of a return to the violence of arms. The alternative imposed itself between the strategy of a historical settlement with the State of Israel and the triumph of projects of violence and integral liberation, from the sea to the river, with the abolition of the Oslo Accords as its standard, a rallying cry so dear to the heart of the axis of resistance and its vanguard, the Hamas movement. More than two decades have elapsed for the commemoration of their independence and our Nakba to return, once more, while the world witnesses a madness without equivalent enveloping the Palestinian body in its own homeland and in several of the diaspora camps, in Syria and Lebanon. And the opacity of the international and regional moment, open to prospects that are perhaps not commensurate with what the Palestinian people aspires to in having its Nakba transform itself into a day of independence, continues to thicken. The Madness of the Dance The madness of the dance that wells from the seed of love places you before that Zorba of bereavement and tenderness, while the madness of the dance that bursts from the seed of hatred reveals itself with Ben Gvir and his ilk within the current Israeli government. In the time of Foreign Minister Abba Eban, a journalist had asked how they could boast of being a modern, democratic Zionist state when the Knesset received rabbis from an age long past. Abba Eban had smiled and replied that they deposited their cloaks on the threshold of the Knesset before going in to debate the policies of the State. But today, with Netanyahu and his so-called "secular" accomplices, it is the religious cloak they don to enter it. The madness of the dance that Ben Gvir practises with the "hilltop youth" inside the Al-Aqsa mosque, and over the heads of those abducted by the Israeli navy off the coast of Cyprus, has not yet reached its term, for what is being pursued far exceeds what has been accomplished since the October 7 operation and the war of extermination. The madness of the dance upon the seed of hatred is the gestural expression of a delusion of grandeur that invariably accompanies all those who claim to be invested by "God," the "Lord," or "Yahweh" with the mission of leading peoples across the land, upon the seas, and through the heavens. When Finance Minister Smotrich makes a show of his accomplishments by declaring that during his tenure he has silently led the revolution of radical change in the West Bank and that they have there erected a hundred colonies… in the cradle of their eternal biblical homeland (according to correspondent Hagit Rozinam for the Ba'shevaa site, press of 21/5), the cooperation between Smotrich and Colonies Minister Orit Strock has formed what she names a "pincer movement," whose ambition is to destroy the "Palestinian Authority" through economic strangulation, to extend the perimeter of direct colonial domination… to deny workers access to the Israeli labour market and to build a geographic continuity of settlements between Jerusalem and Hebron . This type of extremist government takes little heed of the reports that international institutions raise to document, with irrefutable figures, that the Israeli army has killed thousands of children , testimony retained by the International Court of Justice and upon which have been founded the rulings that visit infamy upon this criminal gang. Nor did they attend to the counsel that Henry Kissinger had lavished upon Rabin during the stone Intifada, while Rabin was crushing the bones of Palestinian youth: do what you will with the Palestinians, but behind the cameras, not before them . The delusion of grandeur of these ministers has reached such a pitch that they arrogate to themselves the right to dance upon the bodies of the living and the dead, on the public squares, in what resembles a blood-steeped and tenebrous ritual performed in the very face of the sun. Thus has Israeli Independence Day, the fifteenth of May each year, transformed itself into an occasion to give the repressed free rein without the slightest restraint, from the moment the destructive power of the State of Israel has reached a summit permitting it to efface the Palestinian Other and to proclaim without circumlocution the programme designed to achieve this end. This year, however, this festive ritual knew how to innovate, the settlers of the "hilltop youth" having taken for targets the children's schools, once the repertoire of "Bedouin" and "peasant" objectives had been exhausted. Perhaps they imagine themselves capable of occupying the future of children and forbidding its advent. It is one and the same day shared with those we call our cousins, the fifteenth of May each year, that is for them Independence Day and for us the day of the Nakba. It is there, perhaps, that reside the secret of the delusion of grandeur, the secret of the violent dance, and the secret of hatred, for the Other struck down by the Nakba continues to live! This fact lays bare a formidable equation between the strong and the weak, one that operates from the moment the weak persists in living under the sign of the Nakba and reminds the strong that his independence remains unfinished, a secret equation whose existence only the strong capable of healing himself can venture to confess. Our Nakba will thus continue to undermine their independence and to transform the celebration into a palliative designed to conceal the consciousness of a lack and an incompleteness, corrupting the festival to its very foundations, for no way out is conceivable without transcending the excess of power and resolving upon the historical reconciliation between two peoples inhabiting one land, endowed with equal rights. Two Walls This is not a matter here of the separation wall that encircled the West Bank, isolated the colonies, and swallowed 10% of its area, some 560 kilometres of the finest agricultural lands, with their water sources and their axes of global strategic control. Nor does it concern the wall known as the "Jerusalem Envelope," which isolates villages and towns from the neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem and penetrates, in the literal sense of the word, farms, houses, and private properties, stretching over some 180 kilometres, for these two walls belong henceforth to the past and have been the subject of an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice concluding that their construction infringes international law. The two walls in question here are those the Israeli government intends to raise by seizing the zone known as E1 (East 1), to the east of the Arab city of Jerusalem, a historical territory of Bedouin tribes spanning 12 square kilometres, home to communities established on Mount Baba and separating the Adumim colony from the city of Jerusalem. This zone, the consuls of European states accompanied by their American counterpart have ceaselessly visited in order to prevent Israel from seizing it, not out of love for the Bedouin tribes, but because it would definitively sever the north of the West Bank from its south, and East Jerusalem from the Jordan Valley, that is to say from the Palestinian-Jordanian border, thus transforming the West Bank into isolated cantons, should the first colonial wall come to be built from Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley over some 35 kilometres, by linking the settlement blocs and sealing every gap between them, making of the city of Jerusalem a city that reaches the frontiers of Jordan. As for the second wall, it is the one that would link Jerusalem through colonies to the city of Hebron, some 40 kilometres to the south, where anyone who travels by Palestinian bus observes that access to the highway reserved for settlers is forbidden to the indigenous populations, who are compelled to take old, winding roads reaching up to 70 kilometres, so as to guarantee the comfort of the Hebron settlers and the swiftness of their access to the capital. This zone E1 constitutes the pivot that assures the continuity of the first colonial wall toward the Jordan Valley and of the second toward the city of Hebron, and it is precisely this of which Smotrich boasts under what he has called the plan of radical change, elaborated in concert with Netanyahu. Until now, however, this zone remains silent and the bulldozers have not yet been set in motion; the efforts deployed by the National Authority with Washington and the states that exercise an influence over the Israeli government delay their mobilisation, as do the dissensions that have arisen within the government, leading to the prospect of new early parliamentary elections, thereby opening a propitious interval for preventing the execution of this project. It remains that for Israeli governments, suspending execution means only awaiting a more propitious moment, nothing more. That is how matters proceed there. The Forgotten The Special Envoy of the Peace Council, Nikolai Mladenov, has summoned the Hamas movement to surrender its weapons in order to be able to proceed with the application of the second clause of the Trump plan, but the Hamas leadership rejected this injunction on the grounds that the crux of the matter lay not in the arms, but in the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the entirety of the Gaza Strip. For its part, the Netanyahu government held fast to Mladenov's demand, pursuing its blockade policy and forbidding access of trucks to Gaza, while also blocking entry authorisations for members of the administrative commission into the Strip. Caught between the intransigence of Israel and the obstruction of Hamas, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk recorded in his new report, published by the press on the 19th of this month, that the acts carried out by Israel since the outbreak of war on 7 October constitute a flagrant violation of international law and are comparable to war crimes and crimes against humanity . Türk has further enjoined Israel to ensure that its soldiers commit no act of genocide, and that it take all the measures that impose themselves to prevent any incitement to genocide and to guarantee its punishment . Enough to plunge the Trump plan into paralysis over the question of arms, which blocks the entirety of the other avenues, only 80 trucks being admitted out of the 500 scheduled. In this scene, while the inhabitants are in their death throes there from a slow famine and clinical death, Mladenov did not address to President Trump the question that imposed itself, he who allowed Hamas to dig in with its weapons and concluded with its leaders, through the intermediary of his mediators and security services, arrangements authorising the movement to continue governing the western part of the Strip until further notice, in connection with the questions of constitution and financing of an international force. Thus does the forgotten people pay, with its very flesh, the price of unavowed bargaining, whose sole public expression remains that indirect formula from President Trump suggesting he is in no hurry to disarm Hamas. It would have better befitted Mr. Nikolai Mladenov to tell the truth to the forgotten.

In his opening address to the eighth Fatah congress, President Mahmoud Abbas laid out the official vision of Palestinian legitimacy as it stands today and as it must take shape in the near future, sounding the alarm over the dangers wrought by the continuing war on Gaza, the unprecedented pace of settlement expansion in the West Bank, the relentless Judaization of East Jerusalem, and the Israeli government’s unswerving pursuit of the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own land — a confluence of threats he described as posing existential risks of an altogether exceptional gravity. He called on the international community, on friends and allies, on all who champion the Palestinian cause, to work toward enabling the National Authority to assume its full responsibilities in the Gaza Strip in the name of the State of Palestine, through its official institutions and in cooperation with UN bodies and the administrative committee mandated to operate in the sector according to the outcomes of the “World Peace Council,” while firmly rejecting any arrangement that would entrench the separation of Gaza from the West Bank or give institutional form to a duality serving neither the political solution nor the building of a Palestinian state. The congress convenes on the days of the Nakba commemoration, the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May. The president also underscored the pioneering role of Fatah as standard-bearer of the national project, and paid particular attention to the role of women and youth in the run-up to legislative and presidential elections expected before year’s end, making 2026 the year of restoring the Palestinian political order and reinvigorating its legitimacy by constitutional standards, the year, in short, of a renewed Palestinian democracy. This is the framework within which Fatah’s political mission in the days ahead can be summarized, and from which the contours of the next phase can be drawn, together with the strategies and action plans needed to lift the cause out of its present weakness, meeting its challenges in a way that serves both the people and the homeland and restores the cycle of political life. By Acclamation One who looks at the congress platform will notice twenty-five portraits dominating the scene, at the centre of which presides the emblematic figure of Yasser Arafat, and beside him the martyrs of the movement’s Central Committee, barely a third of whom died in their beds, having survived both the battles and the assassins. The shadow of the historic leadership stretches long, to the point where it cannot be stepped around without discernment and foresight. At the Tunis congress convened after the departure from Lebanon, President Arafat had opted not to have the votes cast for him counted, knowing that after 1982 no challenge to his authority could aspire to rival his stature. Just as the departure from Lebanon had been an exceptional moment, so too was the schism it produced, sustained by the Assad regime and financed by the defunct Libyan one. At the height of the battle for legitimacy, Arafat was elected by acclamation to a standing ovation, before the Central Committee had even been chosen. This tradition carried over into subsequent congresses, as was witnessed again in Ramallah, where all present could see that President Abbas had borne the legacy of his predecessors with patience and authority, embodying each stage of Fatah’s evolution in its struggle for survival and continuity and preserving the movement’s historic place in the Palestinian collective consciousness and public life, at a time when the break with Hamas had reached its most acute point and the dangers had reached the degree that allowed enemies to unleash their war of annihilation, displacement, and erasure. Those following the congress proceedings observe that the founding generation is still present, alongside the generation of the stone Intifada and that of the second, while the generation of the current struggle for survival adds something genuinely new to the picture. All of this belongs to three successive political orientations: the first, from the beginning, with liberation, armed struggle, and historical right as its rallying cries; then the shift toward political rights, the Authority, and the State; and now, in the wake of the war of annihilation that followed October 7, the slogan “Baqoun” — “We Remain” — captures the whole tableau of Fatah’s eighth congress: we remain so that there may be a state for the next generation. Rescue The image of the Gazan woman sifting through the rubble of her destroyed home for any trace of what it once was, even a broken plate at the back of her kitchen, resembles the shepherd driven from his land or the farmer who will not let go of the tree his father left him. It is for all of them that one hears the voice of President Abbas working, together with the American administration, to salvage what can still be salvaged from the Oslo Accords, while Talmudic members of the Knesset press to legislate their annulment and open the door to colonizing Palestinian cities after seizing control of “Area B,” currently under Palestinian self-rule. This backdrop reduces the immediate tasks of Palestinian day-to-day politics to nothing other than rescue operations, pure and simple. The work program of the newly elected Central Committee can no more escape this reality than transcend it. Given the composition and diversity of congress delegates, it is clear that the new Central Committee, with half of its nine veteran members carrying the inheritance of the founding, the armed struggle, and the stone Intifada, sees its other half constituted by a generation formed in the second Intifada, where mass mobilization and armed violence, which we subsequently renounced, were intertwined. Some among them also carry the vision of the modern state and of what Palestinian statehood must look like in any foreseeable future. Yet these energies, seasoned, intermediate, and new, can only bear fruit if their holders work as a genuinely unified team, steering Fatah first toward political cohesion with President Abbas’s platform, then opening new channels to amplify Palestinian presence in the American arena, with the goal of stopping the open Israeli war being waged against us across all territories occupied in 1967. Without achieving this, talk of success in defending our legitimate political rights, recognized by the overwhelming majority of states in the world, will ring hollow. The political realism that defines President Abbas is not a personal disposition; it is the product of a long sedimentation of struggle within the Fatah experience and its successive transformations, from the broad slogans that answered the aspirations of the people since the Nakba of 1948 to the acute attentiveness to people’s urgent needs after a war of annihilation. Should the National Authority succeed this year in organizing legislative and presidential elections, one could then say that the slogan “Baqoun” has been made real through the highest possible voter participation, and that what we stand to gain in the wake of those elections will make it possible to affirm that passage to a new phase is within reach, with clear-eyed awareness of the formidable challenges that stand before the Palestinian people.

In a remote conversation with an activist who had taken part in the local and municipal elections of the city of Deir al-Balah, he disclosed the personal reasons that had led him to vote for the first time: he wanted to experience the feeling of equality with the Jewish voter, whose opinion is canvassed every week across all domains of Israeli life. He also expressed a desire to feel some measure of human equilibrium as an original inhabitant of the land, in order to bridge the gap opened by Israel's overwhelming superiority, sustained by its modern army and the Iron Dome that shields it, while the sons of this land possess nothing but the capacity to survive, however great the scale of torment, brutality and humiliation. This reality in Gaza has its counterpart in the West Bank, compounded there by the annexation and Judaization of land and the unrelenting construction of settlements. The second difficult question concerns the approach to the yellow line dividing the east of the territory from the west, an approach that leads to death “by artificial intelligence.” This danger stems from the permanent shifting of that line’s contours to suit the daily needs of the occupation army, needs always defined as existential, in the face of which the sanctity of life counts for nothing. The third question relates to the entry of food and medical aid, which Israeli oversight calculates according to the number of calories entering the territory. This is not an exaggeration: it is a reality officially declared so that the Israeli government cannot be held responsible for any famine it causes among a population already mired in the most severe deprivation. Solidarity The scandalous spectacle of a policy of systematic starvation served as a powerful catalyst for the launch of the “Global Steadfastness Fleet” last April, carrying with it a constellation of international activists, a little food, and a great deal of compassion. Its ships left the ports of Spain and France with a resounding cry to break the hermetic siege imposed on Gaza. But the US State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott deemed what was happening an unacceptable transgression, stating in the newspapers of 5 May that “in accordance with the law, ports are considered internal waters over which states exercise their sovereignty.” This was a criticism of the conduct of the French and Spanish governments and their laxity on what he called a “sovereign” matter, ignoring the fact that the port of Gaza is not Israeli, just as he failed to observe that the one hundred and seventy-five activists were fully entitled to express their views, with not a single one among them sought by justice on terrorism charges. The Israeli Prime Minister, for his part, did not hesitate for a moment to launch a naval and aerial operation against twenty peaceful vessels in international waters off the island of Crete, then staging a display of pride, boasting of having “succeeded in preventing the fleet from reaching its destination” and that they should “watch Gaza on YouTube,” according to his declarations of 20 April. In their accounts of the arrests, the solidarity campaign activists described the methods employed by the Israeli commandos, including the use of the “electric stun baton” to neutralize any physical resistance. One of them nonetheless let out a cry demanding that the Israeli government build a “moral dome” to protect them, in lieu of the Iron Dome. Destiny The major military operations in the Gaza Strip officially ended on 10 October of last year with the announcement of President Trump’s twenty-point plan. Seven months have passed and we remain on the implementation of the first point. More than seven thousand people have been killed during this period, while approximately eighty-five percent of the population, some one million nine hundred thousand displaced persons, continue to live in makeshift shelters, lacking new tents whose delivery into the territory Israeli authorities forbid, while also blocking all heavy equipment needed to clear the rubble, in addition to restricting the number of food trucks permitted to enter. During the latest Cairo negotiations, Israel made the disarmament of Hamas a precondition for moving to the second point of the Trump plan, which Hamas rejected, demanding in turn that an Israeli withdrawal come first. The population of the territory thus watches the negotiations unfold without anyone deigning to answer the fundamental question that haunts them, a question that concerns their own destiny and not that of the weapons. The Hamas leadership, meanwhile, appears confident in its position despite the assassination last week of its local commander Azzam al-Hayya, son of the movement’s senior official. Most of the inhabitants of Gaza are unaware that the current Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, obtained an agreement from the White House, Qatar and Turkey allowing Hamas’s police and governmental apparatuses to exercise authority in the western part of the territory until the arrival of “peacekeeping forces,” which are themselves mired in deadlock, unable to fulfill their assigned mission due to divergences among the member states of the “Peace Council” over the definition of their mandate, the deliberately prohibitive Israeli conditions, and the procrastination in meeting the obligations of the first phase. The Israeli army has meanwhile succeeded in imposing facts on the ground regarding the question of Gaza’s armament by supplying and arming groups of marginalized individuals and professional criminals to whom it also provides protection, while families and clans have resorted to individual armament and some other factions continue to acquire sufficient light weapons to exercise a measure of local influence. This territory now holds the full weight of Israeli weaponry, what remains of Hamas’s arms and its security apparatuses, the weapons of the collaborationist groups, and finally those of families, clans and other factions. It is precisely this that lends the debate over the priority of disarmament a well-defined function, that of perpetuating the armed state in the Gaza Strip as a pretext for maintaining the status quo, to the benefit of the Netanyahu government, which can thus exploit politically the weapons of Hamas and others to perpetuate the occupation for an indefinite period, during which operations of control and annexation of the eastern part of Gaza continue apace. And it is this that gives the question of the destiny of Gaza’s inhabitants a truly central dimension today. Where is the Authority? Since the bloody Hamas coup against the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip in 2007, the movement has built its own parallel governmental and police apparatuses. The National Authority in Ramallah, for its part, has continued to pay the salaries of approximately thirty-seven thousand civil and military employees, who nonetheless remain outside of active service in the territory. Given that the question of opening the crossings on the Palestinian-Egyptian border is governed by a formal agreement between Israel and the Authority under American-European mediation, the Authority’s return to its role in managing the Rafah crossing, combined with the preparation of some ten thousand newly trained police personnel in Egypt and Jordan awaiting entry into the territory with the international peacekeeping force, would enable it to contribute to the construction of a solution. Furthermore, its political presence is closely tied to its ability to execute its plan to hold legislative and presidential elections before the end of this year, which remains within the realm of possibility if circumstances allow and if the American administration agrees to prevent Israeli obstruction. Trump’s peace plan envisages the “Gaza Administration Committee” playing the role of a provisional local government, but that committee has itself not yet managed to enter the territory due to Israeli obstruction and the persistent failure to constitute the international peacekeeping force. The questions multiplying among Gazans now concern what their destiny is bound up with: the outcome of the conflict with Iran, what is happening in Lebanon, or the intentions openly declared by the pillars of the Netanyahu government not to withdraw from the territory and indeed to annex a part of it as a buffer zone. These are questions to which the inhabitants of Gaza find no convincing answer, for as long as the war has not laid down its arms.

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. This is what we witnessed in the local and municipal elections held recently in the West Bank and in one city in the Gaza Strip: Deir al-Balah. Deir al-Balah, the Survivor It was toward this city that human waves converged from Gaza in the north and from Rafah and Khan Yunis in the south, following the campaigns of systematic destruction. The city was transformed into a dense human mass of survivors pressed together, and despite the bombing and destruction visited upon it, the sheer weight of its people triumphed over the war of extermination. The city takes its name from the monastery founded by Saint Hilarion, who died in 372 AD — the first Christian monastery in the Gaza territory, surrounded by a forest of palm trees. After its Canaanite name, “al-Daroum” or “al-Daron,” it became Deir al-Balah, and has never ceased to appear, living, on the map of humanity since the fourteenth century BC, as its cultural remains, its fortress and the tombs of those who founded, inhabited and built it so compellingly attest. The National Authority’s insistence on holding to the geographical unity of Palestine made organizing elections in this city the only option it was possible to wrest from the president of the “Peace Council,” Donald Trump, in order to demonstrate that the two-state solution process remained alive. This partial victory secured by the slogan “Baqun” on our soil now forms the foundation upon which the electoral processes aimed at regenerating Palestinian legitimacy this year are being built. A Constitutional Dilemma The internal debate has swelled without subsiding around the presidential decree amending “Law 23” of 2025 on elections, the substance of which is the following provision: [candidates on a list must acknowledge their acceptance of the local elections within that list and their commitment to the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, to its national political program, and to the relevant decisions of international legitimacy]. On this basis, the factions of political Islam and the nationalist left — Hamas and the Popular Front once led by Dr. George Habash — united in refusing to participate in the elections, while certain Palestinian elites continued to challenge their legitimacy and to dismiss their significance. This debate is not new, however, and the amendment amounts to nothing more than the correction of a previous strategic mistake made by the National Authority, which had allowed, in general elections since the nineteen-nineties, the participation of extremist forces that had declared war on the Oslo Accords and worked toward the overthrow of the Authority itself, whose actions they never ceased to brand as treasonous — a goal they continue to pursue today, on the strength of their absolute rejection of the national program proclaimed in 1988 and of the “Palestinian Declaration of Independence.” Since the Palestinian political situation has not yet reached the maturity required to proclaim a constitution — which would constitute the primary reference for the legitimacy of any elected authority — it is the reference of the “Declaration of Independence” and the recognition by the majority of the world’s states of the PLO as the sole legitimate representative that remain the legal and constitutional foundation, until such time as a constitution for the State of Palestine can be adopted. The Results With party and faction lists absent from the municipal elections, the weight and role of families and clans grew substantially, as the active frameworks of Palestinian society, their capacity for influence strengthened in parallel with the weakening of the Authority and its security apparatus during this period. This did not, however, conceal the affiliation of the electoral lists with one or the other of the two poles, Fatah or Hamas, against a backdrop of retreat and erosion among the independent forces outside this vertical divide. And while the results in Deir al-Balah and the West Bank went in favor of Fatah, the measure here is less the winner than the turnout rate, which reached 56% in the West Bank compared with 53.7% in 2017, meaning that the boycott call did not reduce participation despite the extreme weakness from which the National Authority suffers under Israeli occupation and its repressive and humiliating measures alike. Another reading suggests that Fatah — which suffers from a decline in its organizational performance and in the performance of its cadres within the Authority’s apparatuses and ministries — was not so much the driving force as the popular Fatahi current itself, which predates the organization as the movement’s genuine base. This current remains powerfully present in all configurations of the Palestinian scene, whatever the gravity of the organizational difficulties afflicting the Fatah movement and the failings of its apparatus. The most important question is not Fatah’s victory, but the capacity of the National Authority, under the most intense pressures, to make good on its slogan “Baqun” — a slogan that keeps the most extremist government Israel has ever known awake at night and demonstrates its failure in the project of ethnic cleansing and displacement it had openly proclaimed. As for the elections in Deir al-Balah — which represents the link between the West Bank and Gaza, and stands as the living model of the survivors of the genocide, of the “Baqun” of the Gaza Strip — the contest was for fifteen seats on the municipal council, with four electoral lists taking part. The “Nahdat Deir al-Balah” list, close to Fatah, won six seats; the “Mustaqbal Deir al-Balah” list took five; the independent “Peace and Construction” list secured two seats, as did the “Deir al-Balah Tajma’una” list, close to Hamas. The importance of reviving the electoral process, whatever its gaps and shortcomings, lies in the fact that it remains the only path to reactivating the Palestinian political system and enabling the citizen to exercise the right to vote as an integral part of the right to self-determination — all the more so since this year is also expected to see, before its end, the elections of the National Council and the Legislative Council, as well as presidential elections. If the National Authority succeeds in completing the most dangerous and complex phase of the electoral process, the ship of Palestine may yet find its berth in the port of Gaza.

Nazi Germany was indeed defeated, but the victory of the Allied armies does not correspond to the victory of their states, with the sole exception of the United States. This is what the experience of the Suez War demonstrated, which ended with a single statement by the American president, to cite but one example among many. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was perhaps realistic in accepting the American nuclear security umbrella and the arrangements that came with it, while General Charles de Gaulle chose to bear the burden of an independent course for French policy, a course that reflected the suffering he had endured at the hands of the Allies during the war, namely the marginalisation to which he was subjected despite his exceptional politico-military role. Washington, for its part, offered no resistance to the French ambition and simply regarded it as a state wishing to exercise self-governance in the nuclear domain, nothing more. In our part of the world, we construct the narrative of political independence on an amplified account of the role played by our struggling peoples in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, detached from the American perspective on the new world order and its crown jewel, the United Nations. In Europe, by contrast, the transformations were more visible: the decline of the empires that had once dominated the Mediterranean shores manifested with considerable clarity, as those same powers became Atlantic nations rebuilding their economies within the framework of the American Marshall Plan. The European Union The shared defeat, hunger and poverty of the continent's peoples made the period of mourning and enmity relatively brief. After West Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands took the initiative of founding the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, a declaration that transcended the economic dimension and carried on its wing a mechanism of reconciliation grounded in shared economic interests, this foundation contributed to the success of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 through a long democratic process, paving the way for the European Union as we know it today: a union that developed its charters, internal treaties and relations with the world's states on a solid foundation of humanist thought rooted in international law, and equipped itself with the finest products of contemporary thinking across many fields, including the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Agreement pertaining to our region. Yet this renewed 'Mediterraneanism' does not correspond in absolute terms to what prevailed before the Second World War, all the more so as President de Gaulle had established a position opposing the Israeli aggression against Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the war of 5 June 1967, thereby opening wide the doors of France to the Arab world, overcoming the 'Suez moment' and bringing an end to the French colonisation of Algeria. The Gaullist French stance in support of the rights of the Palestinian people produced a deep positive effect, helping Europe to return to a Mediterranean presence in the region within a framework of new and balanced criteria that did not negate Palestinian rights, while ensuring the protection of a State of Israel capable of defeating the Arab armies collectively when necessary. The European Union was subsequently able to reformulate its collective and bilateral relations with the Arab states according to a modernist model and a vision of shared interests satisfactory to both parties, to the point where 'Mediterraneanism' appeared as a choice no less important than 'Atlanticism' or the options bound up with international groupings such as the G7, the G20, and so on. This dynamic is further reinforced today by the war unfolding between Iran, the United States and Israel on one side, and the fierce Iranian aggression against the Arab states, particularly those of the Gulf, on the other. What is currently taking place in the Middle East, and its profound impact on the lives of the European peoples, is no less significant than that of the Balkan War before it or the still-raging war in Ukraine. Indeed, the widely acknowledged inability of the European Union to produce an independent solution to the Balkan crisis (Kosovo-Serbia) appeared with even greater force and clarity in its inability to independently manage the Ukraine-Russia crisis before it reached the catastrophic scene of today. It can be said that Atlantic Europe is no longer able to persist under the sole bilateral equation of 'Europe-United States,' and that the peace the continent has enjoyed under the American umbrella cannot be considered firmly established, following a review of the outcomes of three wars: in the Balkans, in Ukraine and in the Middle East. It is essential to undertake the reconstruction of Euro-Mediterranean relations on new foundations, foundations that incorporate a degree of European humility and a willingness to transcend short-term utilitarian policies, so as to build a balanced, participatory Mediterranean strategy that respects the interests of all peoples according to criteria free from double standards, given that a truncated peace is, at its core, no peace at all. This is precisely what the old continent has obtained, what it now complains of, and what it is attempting to remedy through its relations with the states of the Middle East. If Europe wishes to preserve its role as the guardian of Western civilisation and culture, it must construct a new equation for world civilisation, not merely Western civilisation, and for a globalised culture open to the Mediterranean cultures that have harboured the foundations and origins of Western civilisation since first the Sumerian and Egyptian civilisations, rather than clinging to the unscientific belief in the Greek miracle. Continental Protests Under the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Agreement and the duties and commitments it contains, the question of human rights, fundamental freedoms, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary occupies the foremost position and acts as a gateway among the agreement's clauses with any country seeking to build a partnership. Yet in political practice, one observes disparities that range between rigour and strictness in the application of these clauses and a leniency or flexibility that, in the Israeli case, reaches the level of outright indifference. And if Arab protests may appear to lack credibility, the European protests emanating from certain states or from the popular level across the continent can hardly be dismissed on the same grounds, especially when accredited European and United Nations bodies have recorded in their reports published through the United Nations Human Rights Council widespread Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, forced displacement operations against Palestinians and Lebanese, systematic violations of human rights.. Along with the expansion of settlement, annexation and Judaisation of the occupied territories in the West Bank, the disregard for the ruling of the International Court of Justice in its characterisation of the 'genocide war' against the people of Gaza, and what is unfolding today in the visual landscape of the West Bank, whose streets and villages are being covered with Israeli flags and symbols so that Judea and Samaria, as they appear in the Torah, may seem as though Palestine does not exist . Confronted with these shortcomings, and with the accumulating images of repression, death and bloodshed, a petition recently signed by more than one million Europeans explained how the Israeli government contravenes the core provisions of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Agreement. And yet the European Union has taken no meaningful action in this regard, since condemnations and declarations fail to reach the ears of Israel's rulers, who openly vie with one another in killings, ethnic cleansing, displacement, annexation of territories and the use of disproportionate force, while employing water, food and medicine as weapons of war against the Palestinians of Gaza to this very moment. The messages of more than 350 former diplomats, the objections of artistic and academic elites, and the memorandum of the 'seventy civil society organisations' have unanimously demanded that the European Union commit to a European foreign policy grounded in respect for international law, while warning against the continued maintenance of the Union's current relations with Israel despite these violations, which they characterise as complicity and a breach of its legal and moral obligations . Given that the demand to suspend the Partnership Agreement between the European Union and Israel, and the demand for legal and economic measures such as a ban on trade with settlements, a review of military and scientific cooperation, the guarantee of international accountability for crimes committed and the protection of Palestinian civilians, have all become the demands of several European states, major recognised organisations and European elites in general, the European decision-maker is bound to review his calculations with precision, because the Mediterranean partnership that the continent urgently needs, more than ever and in the midst of the war raging in the Arab Gulf, must be a just Mediterranean partnership, built on the principles and criteria enshrined in the agreement itself. Only then can it be said that Europe's Mediterranean policy will genuinely contribute to extricating Atlantic Europe from its impasse. Once again, the Mashreq welcomes Mediterranean Europe on these foundations and according to these criteria, and it is then that we will acknowledge it as the guardian of human civilisation and culture .

Approaching the negotiation process that concluded in the capital Islamabad as one component of the conflict the two sides wage against each other in multiple forms spares us from evaluating it through the binary of success or failure. The event can instead be illuminated from the angle of the first direct meeting between the Islamic Republic and the “Great Satan,” after nearly half a century of a rigidity that was calculated, and not merely ideological. Whatever the case, the most significant achievement for both sides was the smooth descent from the top of the tree, and the ending of a war that has been devastating for Iran and costly for America. Lifting the Mourning That was the title of an article by the brilliant Samir Kassir, taken from us too soon, written at the moment of “liberation,” in which he called on Hezbollah to shed its black, but it was they who ended up casting the mantle of mourning over his loved ones, his friends, and the country itself. Had Samir Kassir been among us today, he might have written that it is Ghalibaf who has lifted the mourning, opening the negotiating platform to a serious possibility of understanding with his American counterpart, especially given that Iran’s generous offer of “initiatives for the future” implies that the Iranian economy might shift into the American orbit. But Trump does not buy a fish still in the sea; he wants to hold the coveted goods in his own hands, namely the nuclear file, the master key to all other files. Hence Ghalibaf’s declaration that “America has failed to gain Iran’s trust,” a statement that reflects Iranian arrogance, but if one turns the proposition around, that “Iran has failed to gain America’s trust,” one would be considerably closer to the truth. In any event, what transpired in Pakistan drew the political lines of the negotiation with clarity. That is an achievement in itself, and another achievement lies in the revelation of American priorities, which differ markedly from Iranian ones, a matter that will require further adjustment of political, economic, and military balances. This is what we see today, and what we will continue to see until the next round of negotiations, even if it has not yet been announced. Common Ground Any observer of the open conflict between Washington and Tehran cannot fail to notice certain similarities of mentality and behavior, such as a language whose vocabulary and meanings are symmetrically overbearing, a posture of hauteur, an invocation of a past that the current balance of power renders untranslatable into concrete gains, at least on the Iranian side, and something comparable is to be found in the White House, with however a vastly superior capacity for mobilization. There is also another trait common to both, namely the pursuit of an accumulation of power in the region, even at the expense of other states or of the very groups affiliated with them, in an attempt to compel the countries of the region to accept Tehran’s demands or to live alongside them. This is also what Washington does through its Israeli vassal, its parallel language and its concrete conduct. It is equally worth noting that both parties exhaust legal and diplomatic channels before jointly bypassing them, at the expense of international bodies and the states of the region and the world at large, however repugnant the means employed to achieve their declared objectives, as we have witnessed and continue to witness, around the clock. In short, we are faced with a trio of extremism (America, Israel, Iran) that nothing seems to deter from advancing toward its immediate and distant goals, whatever the human and economic costs, which the Arab countries in general, and Palestine and Lebanon in particular, are left to pay. Separating Interests The initiative of President Joseph Aoun and the decisions of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s government together constituted a historic turning point in the trajectory of correcting the political and sovereign role of Lebanese authority, and in its mission to protect the homeland, the people and the state. An initiative that severed the Lebanese national interest from any external attachment, and reactivated the logic of Lebanese interest according to what the overwhelming majority of the people, their representatives and their parties consent to, as well as the custodians of the spiritual families that constitute Lebanon’s particular character, such that any party’s departure from this consensus or opposition to this order of national interest calls for a response commensurate with the noble objective sought, without permitting any obstruction whatsoever of this historic initiative’s course. And if this moment recalls a painful hour that marked the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war, what the Prime Minister articulated regarding the references adopted for the preservation of civil peace remains the criterion that guides all toward the keys to the solution, and not any other approach belonging to the language of war and arms, rejected by the great majority of the Lebanese people and alongside them by the refugee communities, Palestinian, Syrian and others, and the evidence is abundant, without any need to recall it here. In this context, the White House’s policy, through its pressure on the Netanyahu government, appears to have grasped the importance of the presidential initiative and the necessity of addressing the Lebanese file separately from the ongoing negotiations with Iran. The presidential initiative has moreover enabled Saudi Arabia, Egypt, France and Lebanon’s many friends, from Britain to Australia, to move in the same direction, which gives reason to believe that the coming negotiating battle with Israel will not find Lebanon bereft of the capacities to protect its national interests. Israeli military superiority is not the decisive factor in everything, and the occupation of the lands of the South does not give the Israeli government all that it covets, and its generals articulate a great deal of coveting, for Lebanon’s political space and the sophistication of its management are infinitely richer and vaster than the extremist Israeli mind, which measures all things solely by the scale of force and excessive force. Protecting Civil Peace In these arduous and difficult days, Lebanon needs its great figures, women and men of all communities, to step forward to the front ranks, in order to save both the people and the homeland. I presume that the remarkable man who left us recently, Mohammed Hussein Shamseddine, now joined by his spiritual twin, the “Red Bey” Samir Frangieh, would say today in one voice that a comprehensive national conference is imperative to protect the people and the homeland, on the basis of achieving justice and rejecting violence. And that all must be invited as equals, in their capacity as citizens of this homeland who share its destiny and forge the future of their children, to put an end to the open war so that Lebanon may remain an Arab, Middle Eastern and universal beacon. Indeed: this is Lebanon’s chance… for those who dare.