Analyze

The battle of Ali al-Taher was not merely a military confrontation over a strategic hill in southern Lebanon. Despite its limited size, the site became a point where military, political, and regional calculations converged, exposing one of the core issues at the heart of Lebanon’s ongoing conflict: who controls the territory, who holds the weapons, and who decides on war and peace? What is most striking is not only Israel’s entry into the site, but Hezbollah’s insistence on refusing to hand it over to the Lebanese Army, even though the Army is the only legitimate institution supposed to assume responsibility for Lebanese territory, particularly in border areas directly tied to the country’s security and sovereignty.

Lebanon is taking an important step toward safeguarding the individual right to life by abolishing the death penalty, at a time when the region lives to the rhythm of news of war, death and destruction, in a reality that at times resembles the collective execution of human beings. The abolition of the death penalty is not merely a legal amendment or a legislative measure. It is a human-rights act that places the right to life above the state’s right to punish and sides with the individual against the power to inflict death. From this perspective, Lebanon’s decision to embark on this path carries significance beyond the legal text itself by strengthening the protection of the individual. Abolishing the death penalty thus amounts to recognizing that the state should not kill in the name of the law, even as wars, conflicts and political and social collapse turn death into a daily practice both within and outside the law.

I was deeply moved while watching the Netflix series Antarctica , and I found myself wondering whether we in Lebanon could achieve something similar to what happened in Japan in 1950, or whether our situation is simply hopeless. The series revolves around the model embodied by the Japanese expedition to Antarctica in the 1950s, illustrating how a scientific and technical project can become a vehicle for rebuilding national sentiment in the aftermath of occupation and defeat. Emerging from the Second World War, Japan did not confine itself to rebuilding its physical infrastructure. It also sought to reconstruct its collective narrative and its image in the world by shifting the basis of legitimacy from the military sphere to the scientific and civil sphere. The expedition played a symbolic role in this transformation, as it was presented as evidence of the Japanese nation’s ability to rise again and reintegrate into the international community through peaceful means.

The escalating tensions in Lebanon, Gaza, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Hormuz are fueling fears of a scenario that Iran and its allies have already employed before: a series of military provocations that would gradually intensify to counter the American economic D-Day. The Israeli military says it is preparing for a possible "multi-front flare-up," on the eve of a series of Jewish holidays beginning on September 11. While Iran is careful not to provoke Israel directly—to avoid a retaliation that would cost it dearly—it would not hesitate to encourage its allies to act as troublemakers, should the American economic vice tighten further around it.

Superman is known as the Man of Steel, dressed in a tight-fitting suit and a red and blue cape, a figure who takes things seriously and bears on his shoulders, like a policeman, the responsibility of saving the world. This is the man embodied by David Corenswet in his modern Hollywood incarnation: he stops villains and intervenes to save lives threatened by wars, fires, or drowning. This American film also gives rise to another figure of Superman: a character who constantly intervenes in world affairs without stopping to consider the consequences of intervening in other countries’ conflicts. Such a geopolitical approach may seem ill-suited to the values of superheroes. Yet this is what U.S. President Donald Trump appears to suggest through his spectacular moves to reshape the world, in a metaphorical evocation of the villainous figure alluded to by the film’s director in the “MAGA,” without naming it, through the businessman character or others such as Lex Luthor. It is, in other words, a new version of America in an evil world ruled by predatory capitalism, an image of arrogant businessmen reminiscent of Gordon Gekko in the film “Wall Street.”

During one of my visits to Canada, I stopped, as I usually do, at Volume bookstore, which carries valuable intellectual works that are no longer in print. There, I came across a small book by a Canadian author, Michel Poulin: Vivre et laisser vivre . I picked it up immediately because it deals with how people live together, what we in Lebanon call “coexistence.” The book’s central idea appears simple: my freedom ends where another person’s freedom begins. But the real question is: who determines those boundaries? The book rejects two extreme ideas: absolute freedom, which leads to chaos, and total control, which leads to repression. In place of these two, it proposes another form of freedom: “responsible freedom.”

The saying “All roads lead to Rome” is one of the most famous expressions in political history and the history of civilizations. It was not merely a literary metaphor, but a description of the reality of the Roman Empire, which built an extensive road network that made Rome its political, military and economic center, with all the major roads leading to the capital. From the Middle Ages onward, the phrase became a proverb meaning that a variety of means does not necessarily alter the final outcome, and that different paths may lead to the same destination. Lebanon today may offer a contemporary political illustration of that saying. Since the end of the latest war, speeches and slogans have multiplied, as have the options being proposed. Yet one question remains: does Lebanon truly have several strategic choices, or do they all, one way or another, ultimately lead to the negotiating table?

The Middle East is no longer merely undergoing a realignment of alliances. It appears to be entering a period in which the very concept of regional security is being redefined. After decades in which the Arab system functioned, however tenuously, within common frameworks such as the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council, new security and economic arrangements are now beginning to emerge. They transcend the boundaries of the Arab world, bringing Arab and Muslim states together with regional and international powers on the basis of strategic interests rather than identity alone. It is in this context that what has become known as the “Mecca Agreement,” signed by Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan on August 7, 2026, has emerged. It is based on the principle that an attack on any one of the three states is considered an attack on all of them. In its wording, this principle echoes the collective-defense principle enshrined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, although it is still far too early to describe it as a fully fledged “Islamic NATO.”

Anthropologists were hardly pleased to see their discipline portrayed as a hotbed of “bad political groupthink,” or to read that “scientific neutrality” is, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a political dictate. They reacted angrily to the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences , commissioned by Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis and prepared by a group of ten scholars. Recently released, the report presents anthropology as an example of a discipline experiencing a widespread decline in scientific standards, accompanied by a corrosive intellectual climate in which reasonable disagreement on politically controversial subjects is suppressed and punished.

Since the Ain al-Rummaneh bus incident in 1975, which served as the symbolic spark of the war, the Lebanese people have been caught in an unbroken cycle of organized fear, rather than occasional fear. This falls within what some thinkers call the “economy of fear” or the “politics of fear,” in which fear becomes something that is manufactured and managed, rather than merely a spontaneous emotion. Fear performs three dangerous functions here: First, it paralyzes collective action. When a society lives under the permanent threat of war, civil strife, collapse, or an external or internal enemy, its primary concern becomes individual survival rather than collective action. The possibility of organized resistance to any form of domination or occupation consequently begins to disintegrate.