On the left, you’re looking at the philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), the Amsterdam-born son of Portuguese Sephardic conversos. He was a radical secular rationalist. This soft-spoken, eloquent thinker reached for thought and life beyond religious orthodoxies and the tribe, a position for which he was expelled from the Jewish community. The exile sat well with his intellectual disposition.

On the right, you’re looking at Spinoza’s antithesis, Meir Kahane (1932-1990). He was born in Brooklyn and immigrated to Israel in 1971. A Jewish supremacist, a religious fanatic, and a terrorist, he championed a Jewish theocracy totally cleansed of Palestinians. Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, is one of his many devoted followers. Once deemed garishly extremist, his ideology has become mainstream in Israeli politics.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi.

Better a lasting peace than the eternal sword? Better one civic state than apartheid? Two states than mass expulsion? Avishai Margalit’s Decent Society than Bibi Netanyahu’s genocidal society? “A light to the nations” in the diaspora than Sparta in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Better Baruch Spinoza than Meir Kahane?

These are the tensions that illuminate Israel’s profound crisis as it approaches its seventy-ninth birthday. They have a contemporary ring, but at their core they draw on an age-old quest, at once intellectual and existential: the Jewish Question. They are also partly inspired by Philip Roth’s dueling binaries in his 1993 novel, Operation Shylock:

Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988?

In 1988, Diasporism, which posits that a thriving Jewish presence is best enriched and sustained in dispersion rather than a sovereign state, was all but expunged from Zionism’s historical narrative. Assimilationists, anxious and otherwise, who believed assimilation in the home countries was the safer and more enlightened life for Jews, were branded traitors or cowards, even by those who lived outside Israel. The general impression, and it was a correct one, was that their position was as insignificant as their numbers. Two Hebrew words beautifully captured the psychology of the act of migrating to and leaving Zion: to migrate to it was an act of ascent, Aliyah; to leave was to be a yored, one who descends.

But by 1988, the Jewish state’s own choices were animating Roth’s mischievous rooting for Berlin’s path against Sharon’s. He had rich material to work with: the entrenched occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the ever-expanding settlements; the brutal suppression of the 1987-1993 Intifada, which had first erupted in Gaza; the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and seizure of its south… These aggressions would not only belie Zionism’s claim to unimpeachable innocence and invite closer scrutiny of its legacy in Palestine, but would also, more alarmingly, begin to cast doubt on its raison d’être: that a homeland would finally offer peace, safety, and security to Judaism’s children.

The Jewish Question, therefore, was never truly settled, even as dissenters were all but written out of mainstream discourse on the Zionist project. And that Israel, in temperament and conduct, had itself aggravated, even envenomed, the very question its creation was supposed to answer is a searing indictment of political Zionism’s pretensions. In the aftermath of Hamas’s grisly October 7 attacks, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing campaigns in the West Bank, soul-searching of extraordinary reach and gravity has taken place across Jewish constituencies worldwide. The perennial question sits squarely at its heart.

But tragically, there is nothing remotely unexpected about Zionism’s epic failure. It was foreseen, most poignantly by a long line of Jewish critics, all, in Adam Shatz’s eloquent telling, prophets outcast. Such was their prophecy in the early days, when Jewish settlements were mere scatterings in Palestine; such was their dire warning in the euphoric formative years of the state; such was their lamentation when it conquered Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in 1967 and kept them; such are their progeny’s condemnations today, at the height of Israel’s might and at the nadir of its moral purchase.

People like me who live on the other side of the fence can only bear witness to this very painful, uniquely Jewish conversation. To my mind, far more than our own longstanding quarrel with this Sparta, it is the most consequential for the story of Israel-Palestine. For the story of Israel and Lebanon, Israel and Syria, and the region, and Iran, and Turkey, and the world. And inevitably, Israel and the Jewish Question.

In a recent interview with Haaretz, the aging Israeli sage Margalit expressed doubt about the durability of a society “burdened…by three tensions, any one of which could tear a country apart: Jews and Arabs, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, religious and secular.” He sounded like a Zionist “mugged by reality.” And what has the wise man always feared most?

That leaving this country will become like leaving the kibbutz. I watched people leave the kibbutz one by one, quietly at first, almost ashamed, and then openly, asking for a pickup truck to help move their stuff. The state of Israel is connected to the wider world because of a population of about 200,000 people. If that population is harmed and weakened, what happens then?

It is not clear which 200,000 Margalit has in mind. I have to assume he is referring to the Israeli elite that might still form the potential nucleus of a sane nation and a Decent Society. If my conjecture is valid, the philosopher’s hope for his country is indeed faint. Because had they the interest, let alone the wherewithal, to re-engineer Zionism’s marrow and denude it of its messianism, he would have nothing to fear.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay in the June issue of Vanity Fair, “The Next Black President,” is seminal. It is an extraordinarily sophisticated study of empire, by turns layered and straightforward, sprawling and succinct, scathing and forgiving. It spans continents and histories and peoples, but cradles the black American and Palestinian experience. Among its many thought-provoking insights is the devastating demands empire makes on the liberated descendants of its victims when they accede to power, and the inheritance they betray in yielding to them:

Perhaps it is naive to expect Harris, a candidate for the American presidency, to speak in the same register as [Fannie Lou] Hamer, who was its antagonist. But it was that very antagonist whom Harris and her party claimed as a champion. The dynamic is familiar—Barack Obama’s claim of Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly incongruent. That is because a black presidency is a contradiction—it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad.

But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy—one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries—which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism—it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire.

Magnificent, in my register!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at just two of Gaza’s many faces: the human landscape of genocide and the irrepressible pulse of life despite it.

The photo on the left is courtesy of photojournalist Fatima Shbair; the photo on right is courtesy of The Guardian, Amjad Tantesh.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi.

In March 2023, I interviewed the human rights lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh for The Markaz Review. He had recently published We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I. The book traces a son’s heartrending quest to retrieve his intellectual and emotional affinity with a long gone, towering figure. But as the memoir unfolds, so does an extraordinarily fluent history of the Palestinian struggle.

Toward the end of the interview, I asked a very pessimistic but defiant Shehadeh to paint worst- and best-case scenarios for Palestine. He could see another Nakba provoked by a desperate act, say, in Ramallah. But, in the shadow of this Nakba, he could also glimpse a west that would finally grow truly appalled by Israel’s brutalities, apply sustained international pressure, and force an end to the occupation.

I don’t know whether Shehadeh meant to enfold his kindest divination within his darkest prediction. But I recall thinking, in the moments after the interview, that there has always been something about Palestine that compelled its lovers to twine rebirth with apocalypse. The most tragic element in this twining is that these lovers are two peoples: the conquerors and the conquered, the occupiers and the occupied, the oppressors and the oppressed. We who have witnessed and endured the existential war over this precious piece of land have long understood that, in political Zionism’s lexicon, “rebirth” necessarily meant the death, in one form or another, of the other––the Palestinian native. And hence, the Palestinians’ rebirth as a free people would necessarily spell the end of Zionism itself.

Shehadeh’s greatest fear came to pass in the aftermath of October 7: an Israeli-engineered apocalypse whose fury is at its most catastrophic in Gaza but whose target is all the Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. In Gaza, genocide has continued to devolve into a revolving showcase of horrors; in the West Bank, military operations and state-driven settler pogroms and land theft have acquired a genuinely mad quality and a frenzied cadence. It’s as if Israel is rushing through the very fait accomplis designed to shield its winnings from the reckonings to come; more profoundly, to preempt the salvation Shehadeh envisioned.

In the aftermath of apocalypse, then, death eternal.

Israeli-born Omer Bartov was one of the first genocide scholars to give Gaza’s devastation its proper name. Recently, he warned that Israel may yet weather the legal and political fallout from its war crimes. In his guest essay for the New York Times, entitled “I Am a Scholar of Genocide. We Are Entering a Terrifying New Era,” he writes that genocide ends when “either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues.” Israel has not accomplished its goal, and so genocide and ethnic cleansing shall continue in what is commonly referred to as the Occupied Territories. But a military intervention will not stop Israel, and an international court’s verdict has little chance of being enforced. Israel, though morally diminished and increasingly shunned, is therefore set to evade responsibility for its crimes, clearing the way for future ones. The implications are not only dire for Palestinian emancipation, but for all the present and future victims of genocidaires who are learning from Israel’s example. President Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan is designed precisely for this escape, Bartov argues:

It is true that Israel is experiencing increasing global isolation and disapproval among Americans across the political spectrum, but that is precisely what the glossy plans for a new Gaza may attenuate or even reverse: by persuading distracted publics in a troubled world that the issue of Gaza has been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

I take Bartov’s argument very seriously. But perhaps he is anticipating an Israeli, European, and American whitewashing performance that the three seem utterly incapable of delivering in this chaotic age of lilliputian politicians, spent influence, and extreme exposures. Powerful states like Israel can certainly commit genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid: the grammar of Israeli strategy toward the Palestinians. But they cannot neatly repackage them as settlements “to everyone’s satisfaction,” because they can no longer author and control the narrative that justifies and normalizes them. Nor do Israeli leaders seem to be collectively invested in such an exercise as they simultaneously destroy and boastfully broadcast their destruction. Nor can Israel’s friends, with Western moral authority collapsing and American heft waning, be relied upon to help Israel manage an escape from accountability into a phantasmagorical Gazan Atlantic City. Worse, the lifespan of the Board of Peace is as short as President Trump’s term in office, and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a monstrous undertaking of many more years.

This is not to say that Shehadeh’s rebirth is the more obvious end in sight. The Palestinians could languish endlessly in a hellish purgatory. They can also expect Israel to deploy even more brute force in their frustrated campaigns to oust them from the territories. There is nothing to suggest that Israel’s impunity has in any meaningful way been checked in Palestine or anywhere in the surrounding neighborhood, where it has always been free to wreak havoc at will.

And yet! This century has been a graveyard of once ironclad orthodoxies, of colossal belief systems and ideas. We in the region have been witness to the demise of so many of these old grandees: omnipresent regimes, state ideologies, mass parties, colonial architectures... We have in fact become inhabitants of vacuums amid the detritus of grand politics. Since October 7, Israel has become the latest country to see its most cherished self-conceptions and articles of faith undergo the same convulsions. Unquestioned exceptionalism in the eyes of its Western creators and protectors, a once-unshakable sense of impregnability, and long-touted democratic credentials now share a common fate with the patina of respectability that has long surrounded the Zionist project: all have become loci of fierce contestation.

To restore all these touchstones of Israeli power is a herculean task, and Israel is no Hercules.

The conversation between the London Review of Books’ Thomas Jones and Peter Geoghegan, an investigative journalist and author of Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics, about Palantir Technologies is as educational as it is fascinating.

Palantir was born shortly after September 11, 2001. The timing was no coincidence. Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, two of its founders, saw an opportunity in the emerging American hyper-security environment. Palantir, whose main pitch was to centralize and integrate data across the fragmented US security apparatus, launched with the support of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm.

The company quickly developed a notorious reputation due in part to the unmistakable weirdness of Thiel and the unalloyed malice of Karp, traits that inevitably shaped the company’s products. Palantir became especially controversial among Israel’s critics because of the role it played during the Jewish state’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has yet to cease. As Karp famously put it, “Our weapons software is in every combat situation I’m aware of.”

Have a listen!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

This is only a glimpse of a much larger demonstration against the Camp David Accords, held in Washington, D.C., sometime in 1979 or 1980.

The photo is courtesy of Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images.

By the late 1970s, open leftist agitation had run aground in the Arab world. Dictatorships were maturing into full-fledged police states. The game of politics was fast narrowing into a fabricated contest between political Islam and the so-called Arab order. Very soon, these two would define the only choice made available to us. As Annia Ciezadlo succinctly put it in a 2007 piece for The Nation titled “Sect Symbols”:

Once again, Lebanon is facing the oldest, saddest choice in the modern Arab world: between undemocratic religious militants and a greedy, corrupt elite whose biggest selling point is its dubious ability to keep those militants at bay.

But in faraway America the 1980s were a time of ferment for Arab students. Every imaginable party, movement, group–small, large, mainstream, fringe, pro this regime, anti that regime–had a presence on campus. Practically every student found their voice in one of them. Palestine, of course, was the cause célèbre there, much as it was in the home country. It towered above us like a goddess–pure, sublime, noble. There could be only one sentiment that made sense, only one that was honorable, only one that was worthy of it: love. Boundless, unconditional, unyielding.

Nobody fought over this simple truth. But in the earthbound business of politics, rival custodians clashed over this mother of all causes, like mortal enemies across infernal battle lines. On their surface, the political divides seemed straightforward: for or against armed struggle; for or against two states; for or against revolution in the Arab world on the road to Palestinian liberation… But in their details lay the tangled web of Arab politics. And on that web stood countless camps. If you were a college student in the US, odds were that you belonged to one of them.

Palestine, Israel, and the colonizing West fueled practically every argument. The famous slogan from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s era–no voice rises above the call of battle, لا صوت يعلو فوق صوت المعركة–haunted every position. For one side, the fight took precedence over all other issues. To dwell on tyranny, corruption, incompetence, poverty… was to equivocate in a time of existential struggles, to misread priorities, and to locate the source of our failures outside our enemies’ sins against us. By default, those who didn’t subscribe to this battle cry were at best defeatist or useful idiots, at worst traitors. To these, in turn, the sloganeers were at best dogmatic and wooden, at worst apologists or enablers of Arab despotism.

History progressed, our troubles changed with it, but the fault lines stayed more or less the same. The 2011 Arab Uprisings are a good illustration of the continuities that sustained them. If, say, the revolt in Syria was read as an Israeli- or American-sponsored conspiracy, then it lost all agency, if not all legitimacy. Bashar Assad’s brutal suppression of it became a defeat of the very conspiracy. If the rising masses were not in on the foreign intrigue, then they were certainly dupes of it. Once the revolt devolved into a civil war between Assad and an assortment of jihadi and Islamist armies, Ciezadlo’s stark choice reimposed itself with extraordinary alacrity.

Back in the ‘80s, I belonged nowhere in this contest. Values and principles were clear guideposts; all else was contingent. Commitment to a cause like Palestine was unwavering and non-negotiable, but it didn’t automatically dictate a position on any question.

I remain a political vagabond.

I simplify with extreme recklessness an unbearably fraught, epochal discourse in the hope of adequately responding to readers and friends who have reached out about my latest column, “Assailed and Abandoned in the Levant.” In it, I depicted a dilemma shared across countries: rage against Israel’s menace and resentment against national failure. I identified Lebanon as one of several theaters in the region where the Jewish state and Iran are wrestling for primacy, with the ruling elites of this chronically infirm state enthusiastically reprising their time-honored role as facilitators. I included Hezbollah among them.

“Are you not for the disarmament of Hezbollah as a necessary step on the path to state sovereignty? Is it not the first imbalance to address on that path? Do you not agree that theocracy is a totalitarian proposition?” some asked. Others cautioned that, by identifying Hezbollah as Iran’s forward defense, I was subscribing to American terminology. Comments and counterarguments took much the same form, as if to press for a clearer stand––for or against. Because, of course, in a time of existential struggle, one has to. To refuse to belong is to indulge in a luxury that we have yet to earn in this region.

They have a point. And yet to refuse to belong is itself a quest to belong–only somewhere in prohibited political territory, in that vast space outside a debate that is as contrived today as it was in the 1980s. In pondering my readers’ questions, I was reminded of Miranda Vidak’s very funny post on the World Cup.

In this spirit, I am for state sovereignty; alas, the state itself isn’t. I am for the disarmament of Hezbollah, but never as a precondition for Israeli withdrawal from the south. I have no issue with direct negotiations with Israel, but I have a very serious issue with dangerously mindless concessions to it. I think a constructive dialogue with Iran is at least as important, if not more so. I rank Israel as an enemy–a mortal one, at that. I do not rank Iran as one. The reasons are plain enough.

I am cognizant that Hezbollah’s susceptibility to Iran is very problematic for Lebanon in the same way competing elites’ receptivity to foreign influence is. I register the party’s complicity in Lebanon’s defunct system. In my judgment, this complicity has immeasurably weakened the credibility and effectiveness of the resistance. But I know that the state and its army are utterly helpless before Israel’s occupation of the south, which leaves the movement as the only challenge to its presence. I call this one–just one–of our myriad Lebanese predicaments.

I stand with the Islamic republic against Israel and the US, and stand with the Iranian people against the republic. I think theocracy is perhaps the worst model of governance, be it Israeli or Iranian or any other variety (and yes, Israeli is deliberate). But I firmly believe apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing tell an infinitely more damning story about their practitioners. I do not wish to live at the mercy of Iran or Israel, even though I note the qualitative difference between them. Yet another stark choice I reject wholeheartedly.

So I shall wander like the vagabond that I am for the rest of my life.

In the mid-18th century, Shaykh Muhammad al-Khalili, a prominent Jerusalem notable and a great forebear of renowned historian Rashid Khalidi, purchased a large piece of land in what is now West Jerusalem and consecrated it as the Khalili waqf, an Islamic endowment permanently shielded from sale or division. In 1948, Israel took possession of that land when it conquered Palestine.

In the 1990s, the Khalidis and other Palestinian families who owned property adjacent to the waqf joined forces under Walid Khalidi, longtime senior research fellow at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and one of the most distinguished historians of Palestine, who died this year at the age of 100. Their aim was to block plans to locate the U.S. embassy on that seized land, should Washington ever relocate its mission to Jerusalem.

Now, under the Trump administration, the U.S. is finally moving forward with exactly that plan — to build the embassy on this stolen property in violation of both private property law and international law. One very ironic twist: doing so also violates the rights of American citizens, since Rashid and many other owners hold American citizenship.

+972 Magazine, an intrepid on-line investigative platform jointly run by a team of Israeli and Palestinian journalists, interviewed Rashid Khalidi to talk about his family’s decades-long legal fight.

But what Khalidi had to say about the trajectory of U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine was no less interesting. He ends by telling Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and their ilk to “wake up and smell the hummus.” If Israel couldn’t get rid of the Palestinians in one hundred years of trying, it won’t succeed now.

Have a listen!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at a vista of Israel’s wreckage in Lebanon’s south. An Israeli flag is hoisted on one of the broken walls. The message is very clear to southerners, if not to all Lebanese.

The photo is courtesy of AP/Ariel Schalit.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi

“Resentment of Hamas among ordinary Gazans is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater.”

These words preface Muhammad Shehada recent essay, “I Would Never Release Him,” in the London Review of Books. They capture an acute sense of siege, of interminable embitterment among the Palestinians of the Strip, towards an enemy that seeks to be rid of them, and a consuming grievance against a leadership that has failed them. In such sentiments, Gazans have no equal in the region. But they are not alone.

As Shehada’s observation extends beyond Gaza, the lay of the land becomes profoundly clear: peoples at once assailed and abandoned. For many, the implied equivalence between Israeli aggression and Arab failure that frames this portrait is unsettling, even offensive. As a matter of absolute principle, there can never be any such pairings lest Israel’s unique menace find refuge in the shadow of such failure.

But the very hard truth is that the two do function as a pair, one of many. It is not lost on us in this neighborhood, for example, that if we were asked to substitute the antagonists on Shehada’s tableau of discontentment, the list would become disturbingly interchangeable and jarring.

Resentment of the Palestinian Authority among ordinary West Bankers is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater.

Resentment of the Egyptian state among ordinary Egyptians is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater.

Resentment of the Syrian state among the ordinary people of Quneitra and Daraa is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater.

Resentment of Shiite militias among ordinary Iraqis is widespread, even if the rage against Iran and the US is much greater.

Resentment of the Lebanese state among ordinary Lebanese is widespread, even if the rage against Israel is much greater.

Resentment of Hezbollah among the ordinary people of southern Lebanon is widespread, even if the rage against Israel and the Lebanese state is much greater.

Resentment of the Lebanese state among Tripolitans is widespread, even if the rage against Hezbollah is much greater.

You’re welcome to switch the names around.

In Lebanon, the costs of abandonment have pervaded almost every aspect of life and politics. To foreign forces, we became a wide-open arena; between ourselves we bickered over frivolous reasons and fought over large causes. We fashioned bespoke realms, sustained by make-believe normalcy and makeshift solutions.

Over the past two weeks, we, yet again, felt the weight of our republic’s congenital weakness. Caught in an intensifying Iranian-Israeli struggle that recently left Iran ascendant, Lebanon hammered out a framework agreement with the Jewish state under US sponsorship. The government wanted to demonstrate that it was master of the country’s fate. Practically every clause confirmed the opposite, none more damning than an Israeli withdrawal from the south conditioned on the disarmament of Hezbollah. What was thus meant as an audacious bid for political authorship could more persuasively be cast as an extraordinary boon to a diminished Israel. In its defense, the government argues that it has both the legitimacy and the authority to force the movement’s demobilization. Israel and Iran know otherwise. So do many Lebanese. But now, per the agreement, responsibility for the Israeli occupation rests squarely with Hezbollah. A pass breathtaking in its recklessness to an enemy with a long list of war crimes and brazen territorial designs.

This is the state of play today in Lebanon: a government that is alarmingly reliant on an American mediator with a consistent record of bias towards Israel, and an armed resistance whose subservience to Iran’s interests and dictums has become barefaced. Slicing through this impasse is the chasm between aspiration and delusion. The state believes the path to suzerainty starts through the framework agreement. Hezbollah believes that it can still perform its dual role as Iran’s forward defense and Lebanon’s resistance. But while the government is certain to fail in implementing the framework’s onerous provisions, Hezbollah is politically depleted by the enormous human and material sacrifices wrought by the war.

Last week, into this contested space stepped Syria’s foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani. The highlight of his visit was the raucous reception he received in Tripoli. This thunderous expression of fealty stands in pronounced contrast to the city’s disenchantment with an absent Lebanese state. A disenchantment whose depth is surpassed only by Tripolitans’ fury at Hezbollah for its intervention in the Syrian civil war to shore up Bashar Assad.

Tripoli’s troubled relationship with the motherland started with the latter’s French-engineered birth in 1920. Part of Syria, it would compete with Beirut as a commercial gateway; part of Lebanon, it would yield pride of place to the capital. Its people resisted their new Lebanese identity until the early 1940s. Since then, the city, the second largest, has worn the wounds of its marginalization. No episode was more evocative of its impoverishment than the 2022 drowning of seven people — part of a larger group attempting to reach Italy by sea.

There is much to read in Tripoli’s warm embrace of Al-Shaibani. If not the Lebanese state and Hezbollah, certainly Israel and Iran are hard at work discerning its meaning.

Until recently, I was unfamiliar with the films of Nadav Lapid. The Israeli filmmaker lives in France in large part as a disavowal of his home country. This year, he had to cancel his participation in the Marseille Film Festival after twelve participants threatened to withdraw. The controversy raised the obvious question: why boycott an Israeli whose creative output is itself very critical of Israel?

Arielle Angel interviewed Lapid on On The Nose, Jewish Currents’ podcast. I found Lapid’s sympathy for those who called for his boycott one of the interview’s more interesting turns.

Have a listen!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

No introductions necessary. The former US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was famous for many predictions that never quite materialized. We in Lebanon remember her assertion during the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel that what we were beholding were the ‘‘birth pangs’’ of a new Middle East.

The column in al Quds al Arabi.

On September 27, 2024, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah. The strike that killed him came on the heels of several other coups, the most diabolical of which were the pager attacks that maimed thousands of the party’s civilian and military cadres, and scores of bystanders.

I was stuck in Dubai at the time, awaiting a seat on a flight back to Beirut. Three days after the assassination, I was having lunch with two close friends, both very keen political observers like me. The three of us were flummoxed that Tehran, even after the assassination of Nasrallah, a man whose stature in Iran was equal to his in Lebanon, reacted with inexplicable torpor. Hezbollah, for all to see, most importantly its hounded and beleaguered community, was being left to fend for itself against a ferocious assault.

The abandonment was baffling in its implications. My two friends went so far as to speculate that Iran might have sold out Hezbollah in some kind of secret deal with the Americans. I disagreed, telling them the Islamic Republic doesn’t forfeit invaluable strategic assets like the Lebanese resistance movement in an arrangement with a mortal enemy known to blithely walk away from its commitments. Ali Khamenei’s timidity demanded another explanation. The most reasonable one to me was the Supreme Leader’s extreme reluctance to enter a war that would draw in the US.

As I witnessed the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) over the past three months, withstand and turn a withering Israeli-American offensive into audacious, immensely costly, region-wide economic and military counterblows, I remembered that lunch in Dubai. In the jarring contrast between the republic’s reserve then and its boldness today, the initial contours of a new Middle East were beginning to reveal themselves. They do so in the fourteen clauses of the Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the US, the sum of which is American recognition of Iran as a bona fide regional power. They do so in the active role the major Gulf states played in crafting the MOU. They do so in the palpable tensions between the Netanyahu government and the Trump Administration, in many ways the inevitable fallout from a catastrophic, Israeli-engineered war. They do so in the sea change in American attitudes towards Israel, among the public and policymakers alike––a profound pivot making itself increasingly felt in the superpower’s policy toward its once very special friend.

For the first time in decades, Israel confronts an unexpectedly treacherous geopolitical landscape. It does so unusually diminished and isolated, laden by its genocide in Gaza and ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and Lebanon. Perhaps its biggest folly was the misbegotten conviction that, through sheer firepower, it could collapse an entire regional order and remold it into a servile or fragmented expanse. Perhaps Washington’s deeper folly was in indulging its ally’s maddest scheme yet of hammering out of utter ruin a biddable Middle East. In 2024, Bibi Netanyahu announced to the world:

A year ago I said something simple: We would change the face of the Middle East, and we are indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran.

The prime minister was too modest and woefully wrong in his predictions. In fact, not a single country in the region is the same. None! But the Middle East he envisioned is immeasurably more farfetched now than it was when he embarked on his deadliest and riskiest gamble yet.

It is understandable that the terminally hubristic Netanyahu expected the blitzkrieg against Iran in 2026 to yield the same results its onslaught on Hezbollah delivered in Lebanon. Instead the very efficient decapitation of the Islamic revolution’s first generation of leaders has accelerated with dizzying speed the ascendance of a rising class of helmsmen: sophisticated, hard-bitten, bold, brutal, but less concerned with revolutionary zeal than with the business of temporal governance. Khamenei’s doddering, obdurate theocracy, forever contained and on the defensive, finally relinquishes the future. “The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft,” Vali Nasr and Narges Bajoghli write in their seminal essay in Foreign Affairs, “Iran’s New Grand Strategy”:

At home and abroad, it neither espouses revolutionary grandiosity nor advocates revolutionary activism. The new leaders are establishment actors: pragmatic, hardened nationalists operating with a clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s capabilities and vulnerabilities.

Soon, we will know what this elite’s priorities portend for the stubbornly vibrant and forbearing Iranian people. The Islamic Republic was already long on this arduous, thorny path. By all appearances, it has finally arrived, ironically, with much gratitude to the Jewish state and the US, the midwives of our recurring upheavals.

In Lebanon, the open theater on which geostrategic trends never cease to make their mark, Iran is already showing its strong hand. It made the two countries one front in the war. Today, it is making the two one front in the negotiations. The Lebanese government is right to feel belittled by the irony of being represented by Hezbollah’s patron in talks that could determine its fate. The fault here is not only the smallness of the country, but more poignantly, the smallness of its ruling caste, which of course explains the smallness of the state. The one consolation that comes to mind is that Israel, remarkably, has joined Lebanon on the sidelines.

Tehran’s insistence on including the Lebanese dossier in the settlement, however, speaks to its own vulnerabilities. The attention it is giving the file is no less an indication of its constraints than it is a translation of its strengths. The Lebanese Shiite sect has been forced to sacrifice everything under the sun in the last three years. Towns, villages, homes, livelihoods, families have been wiped out in huge swathes of the south and the Dahiyeh, the southern suburbs. Discontent within the community is palpable; heartbreak is ubiquitous. This body of people will not be made to suffer in the service of others anymore. Hezbollah and Iran are keenly aware that this war was a watershed. A constituency long made to suffer enormously because of its proximity to a vicious enemy is spent––and done.

Wholesale destruction, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of gas- and water-rich terrains drive Israel’s strategy. Iran’s challenge is to deny the Jewish state it spoils of war and total latitude against Lebanon. At its least ambitious, Israel’s agenda is to retain its dominance in the Levant. The next few months, therefore, will be the most perilous in a decade of grinding turbulence.

It has been almost twenty years to the day that we were last promised a new Middle East. In July 2006, as the war between Israel and Hezbollah was burning through its second week, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, asserted that “what we were seeing here…are the birth pangs of a new Middle East.” In her reading, a battle royale between the US’s axis of virtue and Iran’s “axis of evil” was ablaze in the lands between the East Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The main battlegrounds were Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq. The victor’s reward would be the very soul of the region.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s adversaries, perhaps intoxicated by Rice’s confidence, were almost swooning at the prospect of the party’s demise. The mood in those circles was a mixture of glee, euphoric anticipation, and vindictiveness. Finally, salvation, courtesy of Israel. The quest for deliverance by foreign “saviors,” far or near, was an old Lebanese reflex. No force––sectarian or otherwise––in our modern history was ever innocent of it. None!

By mid-August, sandcastles lay in a heap, much like the rubble of Dahiyeh. The biggest among them was the one that Rice had built. The movement had endured a massive aerial assault and repelled the Israeli army. Rice and Netanyahu have their birth pangs at last. The new Middle East dimly visible through the debris of a calamitous war is not the one they dearly wanted, though.

And the Lebanese sandcastles that were constructed on the expectation of the Islamic Republic’s defeat and salvation, courtesy of the Jewish state, lie in a heap once again. There are many lessons in these habitual delusions that crash into letdowns. Alas, history has never been our leaders’ strongest subject.

I fell madly in love with Albert Camus at university. It all started with The Stranger. Last week, I saw François Ozon’s adaptation. Wonderful! And then I remembered Robert Harrison’s Entitled Opinions conversation with Jean-Marie Apostolidès, a distinguished scholar and playwright, on the man himself.

Very much worth a listen!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at an image from the May 29 AUB post-graduation party that went viral on Instagram. This was not the official graduation party.

The column in al Quds al Arabi

In the summer of 1980, I visited Beirut for a month. It was June; I had just finished my freshman year in college, the civil war was five years old, and Lebanon had settled into the absurd rhythms of living and dying in fragments. I was in West Beirut, a section of the capital whose marred face wore the cruelties of Lebanon’s warring children.

The first night, a friend took me to a dinner party. As we were enjoying ourselves on the balcony, gunfire erupted in the neighborhood. I panicked and prepared to rush inside, but the other guests very quickly reassured me that it was two streets up. “Nothing to do with us.” And so it was for me for the rest of that month. A stranger to the city where I was born, I followed my friends’ patterns. I stuck to my turf, sunbathed, went to dinners, danced at the Beachcomber and Mikano, navigating daytime clashes and anticipating violent nights. When I left, the thought that outlived all the fond memories was that this was a mad, mad country.

Lebanon has become famous for this heedless mindset. Some admire it as resilience, a people’s will to seduce normalcy out of a chronically abnormal life. Others understand it as the inevitable callousness of human beings long conditioned to match their empathy to the size of their universe. Still others explain it as nothing more than reflexive pragmatism on the part of perennially vulnerable human beings.

Our own leaders bear much of the blame for actively sealing us into our separate realms. Hassan Nassrallah himself, Hezbollah’s martyred secretary general, lent support to this detachment we feel from one another. In the early months of the 2023 war with Israel, he instructed those of us living outside the south to go on with the business of life while he prosecuted the conflict within it. I thought at the time, what a tragic statement it was about the terminally sacrificial role of southerners as the rest of us obliged with our usual shrug.

But a recent pricey AUB post-graduation party at the Sporting, a beach club on Beirut’s corniche, made many of us wonder whether we have finally lost all sense of connection to our fellow Lebanese. It made us wonder what life lessons our best students at elite universities draw from living in such close proximity to pain and heartbreak. It made me wonder whether, in this apparent thoughtlessness, the younger generation was actually manifesting the perverse implications of Nassrallah’s counsel.

In the midst of a ruinous war on our south and brutal assaults on our southern suburbs that have atomized whole communities, partygoers raved till the early rays of the sun. This revelry took place within striking distance of the hundreds of thousands who were displaced.

What has happened to us?

I don’t know if this beach club that night was the sum of the better part of Lebanon. The very notion that such a tiny space packed with a crowd of graduating youngsters could betray the mood of a country itself functioning in pieces is ridiculous–– or may be the point. The party became controversial because it belongs in the raging Lebanese discourse over the war. For an exhausted people that can neither appeal uniformly to their leaders nor find succor in a nurturing state, they have all the discretion they need over their obligations and commitments in times of war. Especially this war, into which many of us feel we were dragged by Hezbollah — rightly or wrongly.

I cannot attribute political agency, in the traditional sense, to the young grads’ act of partying. But it is an expression of agency all the same. It could be a total rejection of any responsibility towards anyone outside the self. It could be a declaration of fact: we expect nothing from this place and, in turn, offer it nothing.

Or we might be reading too deeply into an event that was little more than an opportunity to pretend, if only for a few hours, that all is well.

I was planning to share a piece that took the reader to a place, a topic, a world away from the Middle East. But then I came upon this article in New Lines magazine on the ordeal of the Abassi family, whose tragic story is stitched into Syria itself under the monstrous regime of Bashar al-Assad. I share it because we owe it to the six Abassi siblings, God rest their souls.

For you, The Last Traces of a Family the Assad Regime Marked for Destruction.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at sunrise in the Negev (photo Aliaksandr Mazurkevich).

There is the clean strike. A single massacre executed from above. The murdered could be few or many, depending on the target: a motorcycle, a car, an ambulance, a queue of aid seekers, a building, a field, a tent, a camp. Then there are the double and triple taps––the first strike claims the initial count, the second kills the first rescuers, and the third aims for those who have the temerity to rush in to help.

Amongst themselves, the executioners call this a windfall, no doubt.

There are the phone calls that announce a death foretold. The voice on the other side of the line issues instructions to the man who is about to take his daughter to school or the man driving somewhere with his family. Take your daughter to school and then drive away, the voice commands. It is matter-of-fact, neutral, almost mechanical. You can die with your family or alone, the voice tells the other man: your choice.

The two men comply. The first drops off his daughter, drives away, and seconds later is blown up. The second stops the car and runs into the field as fast as he can. A drone follows and guns him down.

The executioners, including the caller, pat each other on the back for the merciful killings, no doubt.

There are the homecoming parties for the troops, days of merrymaking; soaring music and big screens showing the proud soldiers and their families clips of the carnage they have wrought.

There are the nuns walking to church in Jerusalem, escorted by volunteers to protect them against hordes of Israeli settlers dancing around them and chanting hate.

There are the Gaza aid flotillas attacked in international waters, the activists arrested, taken to Israel, beaten, humiliated, all gleefully televised, a performance for the watching world.

There is the rape and torture of Palestinian detainees of every profile, an equal-opportunity war crime.

And then there are the dogs, themselves abused, trained to rape the victims.

There is the noose––in the form of pin lapels or imprinted on birthday cakes––soon for Palestinian necks. “A dream come true” for Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir. His Death Penalty for Terrorists Act passed 62 to 48 in the Knesset on March 30. It is a clever design, this noose, an inversion of the yellow ribbon worn in support of Israelis taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

On an impulse, one morning in 2024, I began recording incidents like these as diary entries. The ones I cite, you would recognize as only the latest in the daily harvest of horror.

I began recording them because, to their exhausted witnesses, they seemed like sundry details of a region at war. They came at you like a furious sandstorm, deadening emotion and distracting thought. But they were never merely of the moment. They are essential in the way the rape and murder of the Bedouin girl in Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail is essential. There is nothing random, impulsive, or unmeant about them. They are the particulars of the great tragedy itself.

An original sin in four acts. Dispossession of an entire people. Then, in the subsequent “cleansing” of the Negev of its Arab remnants, the capture of a Bedouin girl by the Israeli army unit charged with the task. Her rape by the soldiers and their commander in the hut that was her prison. Finally, the erasure of the crime the only way it could be erased: the murder of the girl and her burial in the desert sand.

But this sin never escapes into the pitch-dark night. Through the decades, it keeps unfolding in successive reenactments that mimic and innovate upon the primal evil. In the true story that inspired Shibli’s book, which Haaretz uncovered in 2003, the Israeli soldiers gathered on the evening of the capture of the Bedouin girl. Their commander gave them two choices: either assign the girl to the kitchen, or have at her. The majority chanted in unison: “We want to fuck.”

They have been chanting in unison ever since.

The effort to cover up the rape and murder was as sloppy as the burial of the girl in a shallow 30-centimeter grave. There was a secret trial, judgments, and a couple of light convictions, all of which lay silent for decades in a black box. The atrocity was neither novel nor rogue. The soldiers’ sin was Zionism’s writ small: as the larger dispossession of the Palestinians was being buried under a thousand lies, so too was the murder and rape of the Bedouin girl buried deep in Israeli archives.

The case had therefore the appearance of a minor detail. It was anything but. Neither are the entries that fill my diary.

The early generation of Israeli leaders, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir et al, understood very well that the Bedouin girl’s fate, if exposed as a pattern, would unravel a fabulous Zionist narrative being painstakingly woven from pure yarn––a narrative central to a historical deception aimed at the outside world as much as directed at the self. For Israel to survive, the unforgivable had to be covered up.

As I flipped through the pages of my journal, I was struck by the ruptures between them and their progeny; between us and our forefathers. Much as the first Israelis studiously entombed their sins, this latest crop recklessly revels in them. Much as our forefathers struggled to unearth these essential details, we struggle to keep up with them.

The truth is, time is a cruel thing. In the early years, the Jewish state could easily spin what the world dearly wanted to believe. But the Zionist project grew more brazen, its deflections more hollow, and the world grew less eager to believe. Now it seems as if Israel itself has become utterly impatient with the subterfuge. It generously furnishes much of the evidence for its war crimes, even as it reflexively condemns the rage it invites.

We hear many explanations for this total sense of abandon on the Israelis’ part. At one extreme stands the schizophrenic Zionist ethos that domination is survival. At the other, the frenzy of a messianic state to establish territorial faits accomplis. Underpinning these rationales and all others in between is the conviction that there will be no reckoning, notwithstanding the outrage.

But this outrage is the first tremor of the reckoning that comes. Only two questions remain: when and what will it look like?

Did you know that 88 percent of the land from which Palestinians were expelled in 1948 remains uninhabited? That means Israelis live on just 12 percent of the land of Israel-Palestine, mostly along the urban coastline.

Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, founder of the Palestine Land Society and himself a 1948 refugee, has spent decades retrieving for Palestinians their place on the map, village by village. The Atlas of the Return Journey, which charts 1,200 villages and compiles 50,000 place names, is his landmark cartographic achievement.

The conversation with Abu Sitta on the Makdisi podcast was an education.

Have a listen!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

Behold the old port of Jaffa. Courtesy of Xantata

This column was written for The Markaz Review's special issue on Palestine, published yesterday on May 15, 2026 — seventy-eight years since the Nakba.

This Arab Life’s substack biweekly column will resume on June 30.

I have no real memory of Jericho, only a faint imprint left in my inner eye by a tattered black-and-white photograph. In it, my sister Raghida and I are standing beside the white horses sculpted into the walls of the hotel’s garden in Jericho, where my family often went for lunch on weekends. The slow drive from Amman was less than two hours. The photo must have been taken in 1966 or early 1967, months before the Six-Day War. I rummaged everywhere for it when I began writing This Arab Life, A Generation’s Journey Into Silence.

After the war, I never saw Palestine again. And I never found the still.

I am often asked by friends foreign to these lands: what is it about Palestine that refuses to let go of the Arabs who love it so? What is it about this place that inspires a yearning that transcends generations and birthplaces, religions and sects––even politics? It is the one question that has bedeviled Israelis more than any other about us, the multitudes living across from them in a vast expanse that reaches as far as Mauritania. The one place so many of us, strangers to one another, even adversaries on so many issues, are tethered to is Palestine: the matter of Palestine, the principle and heart of it, the cause itself, far removed from ideologies and their divides, politicians and their camps, regimes and their agendas.

I have never ceased to wonder: how can this love, this yearning for that horizon, still puzzle others, especially Israelis? From Naquora in southern Lebanon, Haifa is 45 minutes by car; from the Jordan Valley, at dusk, you can see Jerusalem lit up; from the Golan Heights, Tiberias is a four-hour hike… To miss Palestine is to miss one’s lost father or mother, sister or brother.

Is it that hard to fathom?

It was not for Albert Camus, a pied-noir, whose love for his Algeria wrestled with his commitment to justice for Algerians and their struggle for independence. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother,“ he replied to an Algerian student in the press conference after the 1957 Nobel Prize ceremony. Le Monde at the time perhaps unfairly distilled it to: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” In the end, for this Algerian-born French existentialist, the son of settlers, the agonizing choice between what the heart desires and what the mind knows to be unjust was finally settled: the mother country won.

How could such love, then, not be infinitely more profound for us Levantines, when Palestine and justice mesh as one?

In fact, for many of the early Zionist settlers, even the most hard-edged among them, the Palestinians’ devotion to Palestine was a stark truth: incontrovertible, plain to the eye, stubborn, immovable. In today’s Israel, the likes of Ze’ev Jabotinsky would very likely be branded heretics or traitors by the likes of Itamar Ben Gvir. There was nothing accommodating about the vision of the father of Revisionist Zionism. Jabotinsky wanted all of Palestine and more. He wanted it as Eretz Israel, a fortress behind iron walls. He wanted the majority of its Palestinian Arabs gone, the rest subdued. He knew that blood would have to be spilled, mass expulsions committed, submission exacted, and hope snuffed out. He knew all this because he understood the strength of the Palestinians’ attachment to their land.

“They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie,” he wrote in The Iron Wall (1923). Thus, through such words, the Palestinian’s identity as the native and Jabotinsky’s as the colonial settler are unambiguously established, first and foremost in his own eyes. He continued:

Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs.

But how tired we are of quoting Jabotinsky, as our witness, to successive generations of recalcitrant Israelis, among them his most ardent followers. We kept summoning him not in the hope of refuting their claims to Palestine––history itself is damning refutation enough––but to impress upon them a very simple fact: defeat in battle may deny us the land, but it cannot extinguish our love for it. More poignantly still, such sustained dispossession only compounds the original injustice and the commitment to redress it.

Alas, only the wise few among them have seen and understood the implications of such injustice––for Israelis no less than for us. Dare I add that I consider them companions in conscience? But who in Israel today heeds the likes of Zeev Sternhel, Gideon Levy, or Omer Bartov? The struggle over Palestine endures amid ever harsher Israeli measures and campaigns, all waged to kill this abiding love. Conquest, eviction, subjugation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, pogroms, and now genocide, all intended, in essence, to sever a bond that, under siege, grows ever stronger.

Such Israeli incomprehension has come at enormous cost to the peoples of the Levant. It has driven us to the far reaches of desperation; the Israelis to the point of madness. Close to a century into this tragedy, the Palestinians suffer a harrowing assault on their very existence; most of Syria’s south lies occupied; and Lebanon’s burning southern region succumbs to ever-increasing Israeli “security” lines. And Jordan, the showcase of choice when Israel’s friends want to demonstrate the real possibilities of peace, lives in dread that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians might finally be driven from the West Bank to their side of the border.

Today, May 15, marks seventy-eight years since the Palestinians’ long journey of loss began. It has yet to end. In 1948, we Levantines were thrust into our own saga with the Jewish state. It too has yet to end. The entire face of the Levant has changed. Across it, heroes rose and fell, grand movements soared and crashed, brother fought against brother, dictator against despot, tyrant against rebel, resistance against invaders and occupiers. It must be said, Palestine was neither the sole object of our aspirations nor the only reason for our heartbreak. Equally, Israel was neither the singular source of our troubles nor the main cause of our failures.

And yet, there it still towers today, the cause through which so many solutions may find the light.

In memory of the 1948 Nakba, in memory of Gaza and all other homes that were once filled with family and love and life, only to stand empty or lie in rubble because of hearts of stone, I share this excerpt from Yehuda Amichai’s poem, Houses (Plural); Love (Singular):

We lived in many houses and left remnants of memory

In every one of them: a newspaper, a book face-down, a crumpled map

Of some faraway land, a forgotten toothbrush standing sentinel in a cup

That too is a memorial candle, an eternal light

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at a photo of Beirut’s corniche courtesy of yours truly. It was taken on Thursday April 30. The exact spot is the seafront of Ain al Mraisseh.

Early every morning and as dusk falls, Beirutis descend on the corniche. This very small stretch of the generous western coastline runs less than three miles from Ramlet al Baida to Zaitounah Bay. It is the only truly open space in a city that long ago traded its greenery for concrete. So to the corniche we go to breathe, run, walk, sit in silence, commiserating only with our Turkish coffee and the sea.

Beirut is not for its pedestrians anymore. It hasn’t been for decades. The sidewalks are uneven and often overtaken by garbage bins and their stench, cafés and their chairs, cars and their absent drivers. Then there are the major roadways and highways that slice into the meandering town, surgical lines through an urban tangle.

In the spring and fall, I normally walk on Sunday mornings. In the summer, I abandon the city to its sweat under the searing sun. When I venture down to the seafront, a hop and a skip from my home, I disappear into a moving portrait of this superbly colorful country. There are no social walls, no economic barriers to entry, no sectarian divides, no dress codes. The tiniest of Lebanons, and perhaps the most faithful reflection of the larger one. As I listen to chatter that fast-fades with my footsteps, I often find myself wondering, What do these good people want?

It’s a big question, in my mind, the kind meant for a referendum not a public opinion poll. A question about destiny, not daily grievances, about the fundamentals that make up the marrow of Lebanese life not the particularities that shape its exterior. It seems elementary that a small, chronically embattled republic would have carried out referenda at key moments of its contemporary history to settle matters of existential import. But the state never had the requisite autonomy and authority for such decisive and consequential ballots. By design, it was never meant to. Since independence in 1943, we have not managed even a single census for fear of disturbing a perpetually disturbed sectarian balance. When the French mandate conducted the 1932 census, we were a population of 861,000, 255,000 of whom were emigrants. Martyr square, with a bit of squeezing and tucking, could have fitted the lot of us. Now we are a little shy of an estimated six million in situ, and we still dare not count ourselves. It’s quite comical on the face of it––and profoundly tragic everywhere else.

Besides, Lebanon’s ruling caste has always assumed that they were the best representation of the people’s will. It may well be a reasonable assumption in this remarkably resilient confessional cartel that poses as a consociational democracy: to each leader, their sect’s fealty. But then is it not an equally reasonable assumption that what the people acquiesce to as subjects of this sectarian dominion is not necessarily what they aspire to as would-be citizens of a qualitatively different commonwealth?

These aspirations, after all, have frequently plunged us into conflict, most notably the 1975-1990 civil war. And these aspirations were the first to be derailed and then sacrificed as the struggle quickly turned into a fratricidal bloodbath. Among our history’s lessons, the speed with which supposedly sensible pursuits gave way to senseless violence is the most teachable. We have yet to learn it, let alone teach it, though.

But now that we are teetering on a cliff’s edge--again––it is opportune to pose the obvious question: What do we Lebanese want? I ask this question not entirely clueless about our deep-seated attitudes and mood. Well-established public opinion polls have regularly furnished us with much more than the usual markers of contentment: economic security, peace of mind, basic services, a clean and functional government, a state that cares and delivers…

For example, on Lebanon’s political identity and Israel, the two matters that have confounded us to the point of war since modern Lebanon’s inception, we have a somewhat clear view. We know from the latest Arab Barometer survey that a plurality of Lebanese prefer a “sectarian power-sharing system.” We also know that a comparable plurality lean toward a civil compact, while a minority favor a federation. We don’t know, though, what motivates each group’s choice; the hidden beliefs and masked fears that anchor them in one preference or another. We have no sense of the nuances that shape their convictions.

We also know from the most recent Arab Center’s poll that the overwhelming majority of Lebanese do not support the recognition of Israel––a robust national consensus that appears to elude our bickering elites. But we have no proper gauge of this majority’s position on Hezbollah and its weapons. Arab Barometer did ask a question about the disarmament of “non-state actors,” which 20% of those surveyed identified as a priority. But when it comes to such “sensitive” questions, self-censorship is a very credible concern in certain areas and with certain constituencies. Such a finding, in the absence of the rationales that deepen its meaning and highlight its significance, is little more than a tentative insight.

I offer these observations knowing full well the shortcomings of opinion surveys as guides to policy. They are notorious for being silly putty in their interpreter’s mind. Even the most well reputed ones lose their utility in polarized political arenas like ours. The results, if we don’t like them, are suspect; if we like them, are gospel.

Elections, had they not been so embarrassingly transactional and so well-tailored for the chokehold of our political barons, could have shone the light on our collective yearnings. As the old adage has it, parliament is where democracy goes to die, and ours died there a long time ago. And we as a people do not have the wherewithal today to render the vote more fair or meaningful. Those of us who do not belong to a sectarian party, belong nowhere. We are adrift, dispersed–– the wannabes, the longshots, and almost always the losers at the ballot box. We have fury in us but we lack revolutionary zeal; we may have radical ideas, but we have no radical will to act upon them. There is no serious urge for transformation that stirs our imagination and haunts our elite’s anxieties.

Can we flail forever in this life of cul-de-sacs and riddles, of minor and major wars? I don’t know about forever, but it has been 83 years now since we have elected to flail in this predicament. We can certainly continue to flounder in it, growing ever smaller, ever more marginal and impoverished.

It is sheer whimsy to call for a series of proper, independent plebiscites. But that doesn’t make it less urgent, that most vital question they are best suited to answer: What do we want?

Mothers! They are the fountains of life and the traumas and joys that transpierce it. In the same family, one child might blithely dismiss all her tirades and slaps, while another nurses the memory of them as a festering wound. Both love her dearly, but one forgives and forgets, and the other, try as they might, simply cannot.

In Mother Mary Come to Me, Arundhati Roy, who towers in this memoir of her mother as she does in all her books, writes of her raging Mary: “She was my shelter and my storm.” So is mine; so is yours perhaps.

Vivian Gornick reviews Roy’s book in the New York Review of Books. Although she defers to Roy’s prodigious talent as a writer, she finds herself disappointed that the book is more an autobiography than a memoir. I disagree with Gornick but think her argument not entirely without merit. What makes a memoir and what qualifies as an autobiography?

Here’s the link to the review. As always if you are not able to access the article, I am happy to gift it to you.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at a snapshot of the 1975–1990 Lebanese civil war. Dystopian, like the fratricide itself. One of many images that tell the same story: the utter disregard for the preciousness of life. The photo is courtesy of Dar Al Mussawir, Ramzi Haidar.

My aunt called me on a Wednesday in tears. She hadn’t left her house in weeks. It was seven days since Israel’s April 8 massacre in Lebanon. In ten minutes: 100 strikes, 1,223 injured, 357 killed. Almost immediately, it was named Black Wednesday. It is not the first to bear such a name, nor, I fear, the last.

She is so very tired of this life, my aunt told me. “I am 84 years old. Every two years, a mseebeh (catastrophe); every five, mseebtain (two catastrophes). My earliest memory is the sound of panic in the streets, and of me trying to climb onto the windowsill of our house in Ras al Nabi’ to sneak a peek. I couldn’t have been older than three. I remember the bulbs being painted indigo.”

It was 1948, I said, helpfully. “You were five, auntie.” I knew the event from its color. That’s what we did in Amman during the 1973 war, when I was a child myself: paint life in indigo. It was the old blackout method to evade detection during Israeli night raids. Jordan didn’t enter that war, but we had to do it all the same as a precautionary measure.

Israel’s name for the Wednesday operation was Eternal Darkness. The darkest shade of indigo.

My aunt didn’t ask the dreaded question. She didn’t have to. In Lebanon, the specter of civil war is the specter of a cold February drizzle turning into a torrential downpour. It is the mood of a perennially nervous country, and as with all toxic political moods, you live half-expecting it to turn deadly.

We Lebanese are forever trapped in déjà vu. We are not fated to be so. We choose to, even though the burdens of it are truly unendurable. Because, like my aunt, most of us are so very tired of this existence, and yet we seem so utterly incapable of tending to its afflictions. At a loss, we have chosen to fool ourselves into believing that we will always overcome the worst of its moments: those we suffer because of incessant familial feuds, and those we sustain because we are so welcoming of competing foreign interests. We are like a family whose ill-bred children have cowed their mother into submission, running amok in a house with no doors or windows.

Now, we confront again the mad prospect of a civil war. We do so, however, in a context noticeably different from those that brought us fratricide in 1958, 1975, and all eruptions since and in between. In The Age of the New Left, historian Fawwaz Traboulsi wrote of the 1975-1990 civil war:

Lebanese society split over the armed Palestinian presence along the same fault line that divided it over the internal conflict: support for the resistance fused with rejection of the sectarian system and demands for democratic, socio-economic transformation, while opposition to the Palestinian presence aligned with the defense of the status quo—an attachment to the sectarian order, its social underpinnings, and the free-market order.

There is no such Lebanese fault line today. The fight for social justice and democratic progress has no presence in the current argument. Politics itself, for the new generation of self-described activists, is akin to a four-letter word. What redress we pursue, we do so through a web of NGOs. Armed Palestinians are confined to their camps. And Hezbollah long ago came to appreciate the Lebanese system, exploiting its deformities as readily as any other sectarian party. In other words, the resistance stands with its sectarian sisters in “defense of the status quo.”

In fact, the ruling elites come to this latest quarrel in agreement over practically everything that matters for them: the weakness of the state; the sectarian system that draws strength from its feebleness; the oligarchic character of the political economy; its parasitic nature and endemic corruption. The one issue agitating these kindred spirits is Hezbollah’s conceit of scale beyond its place. Put simply, Hezbollah’s hegemonic reach and weapons are emasculating the other sects. The government, long suffering its own emasculation, openly joins them now. So do many Lebanese––earnest, unaligned citizens, like my aunt, who are so very tired of this existence.

We have, then, a convergence of constituencies and a divergence of reasons, the sinister among them mixing easily with the sincere. Hezbollah’s special status, in this very fragile country of a broken, exhausted people, has become intolerable. In defending its unique station and turf as an armed resistance movement, it stands alone against a predacious Israel that has fully operationalized its Gaza doctrine, and against a broad sweep of popular sentiment. Under a defenseless republic, the former lends it legitimacy; under the stark cost of war, the latter denies it latitude and cover. It is a brutal irony for both Hezbollah and the state, one in keeping with our brutal quandaries. And one over which neither has genuine control.

In this season of war and torment and fear, othering has begun. The Shiite sect is being paired with Hezbollah and jettisoned as culturally alien to this land; opponents of Hezbollah, whatever their identity, are being branded as traitors to it. Sectarian brokers are everywhere rhetorically preparing the ground. If not checked, we all know where this kind of chauvinism leads.

Toward the end of our conversation of lament and consolation, my aunt finally couldn’t resist and asked, “We have to live through another mseebeh?” I couldn’t lie. “Most likely we do, but it doesn’t have a name yet.”

Omer Bartov is a leading scholar on genocide. He is also Israeli. He writes about the genocide in Gaza with clarity, passion, and authority. He writes about Israel with the sobriety of the heretic who was once a naïve believer. Bartov’s book, Israel, What Went Wrong?, is out. It’s already on my kindle.

In a recent interview with The New Yorker, editor David Remnick asked him, “Is Zionism reformable?” His reply was as telling as it was simple: “No, Zionism is not reformable, but the state of Israel is.”

Have a listen because it is always worthwhile when the conversation is with Bartov.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at three works from “To Save What Can Be Saved” by Ali Cherri, the renowned Lebanese-French artist. Cherri recently filed suit against Israel in the Paris Judicial Court’s Specialized Unit for Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes. On November 26, 2024, the Israeli army struck the apartment of Cherri’s parents in Barbour, Beirut, apparently, mistaking it for the home of a Hezbollah official with the same last name. His parents and their housekeeper were killed in the strike, which occurred only hours before the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect.

The watercolors adorn one of the walls of my sister’s house. I chose them for my column because they capture our eternal dilemma as we move helplessly from one war to another.

The Israelis must feel very proud. By any measure, their state has amassed an extraordinary tally of destruction across a region encompassing close to 130 million people. I am thinking only of the present moment, the last three years, and of those societies that have directly borne Israel’s fury: Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. In Occupied Palestinian Territories, southern Syria, and southern Lebanon, Israel can also boast of its “defensive” conquests, or attempts thereof. I say attempts because it struggles still to capture the Lebanese south it has targeted for occupation.

Defensive conquest is my coinage. True, it is an oxymoron, but Israel has always had a unique talent for normalizing oxymorons––Jewish democracy, for example. So I simply bow to the obvious: for special countries, special exceptions, and special terms. Admittedly, this privileged status is not Israel’s handiwork alone. In fact, the West can claim much of the credit for manufacturing the international consensus that sustains it. But to the intrepid Jewish state goes the glory for strategically harnessing this acquiescence into a standing writ of violence in the name of survival.

From this vantage point, all Israel’s wars could only be defensive. How else can a state’s army defend its conquests and settlements against those conquered, occupied, or evicted, if not by further conquest and subjugation? We have heard Zionist and Israeli leaders echo it through the ages: if only the native would submit, then this endless bloodletting would not be necessary.

This is political Zionism’s rationale distilled to its doctrinal essence. It was therefore inevitable that what applied in Palestine would also apply in the Levant and beyond. Zionist ambition, left to its own imperatives, became a trap for its children, a self-fulfilling prophecy: dominion or annihilation. In this dark universe of false dichotomies, the stakes are existential–it is do or die, kill or be killed. But would that they were trapped alone. We have been ensnared in this mental cage, with roles designated and the script carved in stone on landscapes that refuse to be tamed. The civilized and the barbarian, the heroic warrior and the fanatic, the returning native and the squatter, the Jew in the lone bastion of enlightenment heroically fending off the savage Muslim hordes at the gate.

There is something so utterly twisted about this logic. But for the longest time, it struck all the right civilizational notes embedded in the Western colonial mindset–a mindset that, well into the 20th century, looked upon the Jew in Europe with the same chauvinism it reserved for us in the brown colonies. That the West found common cause with the Israeli Jew in the East even as it harbored antisemitic sentiments on the home front is no less mean an irony than Israel fashioning itself as the Western crusader in the East even as it bemoaned the West’s atavistic antisemitism on those shores.

Such vexing paradoxes, though, could easily be ignored. They were the details typically lost in epochal scripts. But as with all tightly wound constructs, Israel’s could not continue to rise to the demands of its own perfection. As Jacqueline Rose wrote in The Question of Zion, “The story of Zionism is too coherent, too seamless, too perfect to be true. Like all such narratives, it has to ward off what it cannot accommodate.” Alas, it also has to withstand time and the messy facts that will not yield.

Facts like the genocide you boastfully broadcast, the apartheid system you erect in the territories you occupy, the ethnic cleansing you carry out against their inhabitants, the pogroms your settlers commit weekly against them, the torture you gleefully inflict on their prisoners, the detainee rapes you celebrate, the capital punishment you codify only for them, the illiterate zealots you choose as ministers. When you stand proudly on this register of run-of-the-mill brutality and war crimes, it is hard to juxtapose yourself favorably against your enemies, let alone draw from so sullied a storyline a lofty war cry. In mystified disbelief, we find ourselves listening to Israeli and American leaders invoking Armageddon, end-of-time combat, the Crusades, bombing the “bastards” into the Stone Age.

As I watch, truly bemused and aghast at the absurdities that suffuse today’s untold battles, I cannot but wonder: is this how primeval sagas unspool in modern times? Are we witnessing ours finally breathing its last?

There was always something distinctly outlandish about Israel’s pretensions. Such a small country with such outsize expectations of itself and of the world that indulges it; such a wild belief in its exceptionalism and contempt for the people in whose midst it insisted on setting up house and then forever expanding. It wants its enemies’ total surrender and subservience, its tribe’s and friends’ political obedience, and all of this without regard for internal cost or external consequence.

Woe to those who have such little heed for history’s humbling lessons. Woe to us caught in their grip.

Many of us are intimately familiar with Palfest, the Palestine Festival of Literature, established in 2008 to bring together Palestinian and international writers in Palestine. Palfest has just launched The Key. Of course, I subscribed.

From it, I share Nasser Rabah’s poem “The Cage,” translated by Wiam Tamimi:

Open up this huge cage —
Open it, just a crack —
Let the children escape this trap
that life has laid —

Let them savor, for the first time,
the smell of electricity;
touch, with thin fingers,
the cinema’s shivering thrill;
ask with worried voices
what time the train will come in.

Let them meet themselves
outside these waking dreams —
step, for once in their lives, onto
a crosswalk; test their feet out
on the asphalt.

Open up this huge cage —
So that birds will understand the value of wings,
will know there are other languages to sing,
and endings more beautiful
than the ambulance.
That wayfaring is more blue
than the sea, and ports,
like love, are glittering green.

Leave this place.
Let your parents guard your absence.
Leave the roots in the darkness of the soil
so the flowers can reach up towards the sun.
Climb onto our shoulders, clamber out of the rubble
so you can see what we have never seen
and know what we have never known:
That cages are a crime,
and we are innocent.

Open up this huge cage!
Open it — blow it up —
Let the young ones out of here
To knead their dreams with the waters of astonishment;
To send their desires through the mail of experience;
To grow up away
from time’s torn limbs.

Let them scatter temptation, like candy,
in their loved ones’ palms:
tell us how they’ve dragged the ship
to the mountaintop by its horns!
We’ll let them lie, to sweeten this evening a little;
we’ll believe them, and ask about April’s fools.
They’ll be back, in any case, in a year of two —
they won’t be late, we’re sure —
nobody would miss their parents’ funeral.

In The Markaz Review, Nasser Rabah talks about his poetry in Arabic and presents two poems in the original with English translations, “Distorted Dreams” and “Meditations.”

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at one of the most iconic photos of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. It was taken in 1983 by Jay Ullal. The newlyweds chose to have their photo taken against the modern ruins of Beirut. Perhaps they wanted the jarring contrast between death and renewal. Or maybe they wanted a photo that could visually explain to their offspring the meaning of survival, even happiness, in the throes of war.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi.

When war erupted again on March 2 between Hezbollah and Israel, old routines returned. The scramble to reach relatives and colleagues in the areas targeted by Israeli raids. Morning huddles with friends in abandoned cafés. The addiction to the rush of news. The incessant calls and WhatsApp messages from the outside, hoping that we were safe.

My heart went first to my little sister, Iman, who left us a little over a year ago. We buried her on a hill on the far edge of the cemetery in Nabatiyeh, a major town in the south. Beirut’s graveyards, derelict and overflowing, had long ago lost all respect for the dead. Our family had roots in Nabatiyeh. With every new generation, they grew more frayed. But when it came to finding Iman a dignified resting place, the old town, which she never knew, was the obvious choice. A very familiar Lebanese story.

In its military offensives, Israel has been as ruthless with the departed as with the living. Hence my dread.

I wrote my column in the days after, and sent it to my editors at al-Quds al-Arabi and The Markaz Review. We were bound to let loose our festering domestic feuds. We always do. It was inevitable that rival narratives would quickly efface the nuance that permeates our contentious politics. I thought, in my column, I might knit a backcloth that retrieves for the reader the first casualty of our internecine squabbles: context. One of my editors sent me a note: “…although you write as if you are almost out of the fray, your situation in this kind of war seems precarious, and yet many Lebanese accept the inevitability of it.”

I had succeeded. And I had failed.

No one in Lebanon is ever out of the fray, not even those who are very far away from burning neighborhoods and landscapes. Not those like me, who for now live in a relatively safe space. Or those going about their day in total calm on the other side of the bloodshed; or those who hope against hope that, this time, the Israeli blitz will pulverize Hezbollah and rive its supposed hold on the state. Not even those who truly wish that Israel would just enfold us, once and for all, in its embrace. Or those who packed up their emotions and belongings a long time ago and bade this country and its troubles farewell.

It seems extraordinary that, 80 years into the modern Lebanese experiment, we have yet to learn its most tragic lesson. If we are not able to dream collectively, we’re doing little more than reprising the country’s nightmares. Between our reveries and incubi lies the very faint line between our beauty and ugliness. There we trace our true shape: how many pieces do we want to be; how small or large each; or how whole and coherent dare we finally become.

This has been our enduring existential quest, our holy grail. In times of war, almost always a near-death experience for us as a nation, it asserts itself with frightening urgency. Political divides fortify with alacrity, and we are forced to choose between them. Those who prefer their own path––and I am one of them––become the usual suspects for both sides. If you are not unequivocally with one, you are wholeheartedly with the other.

All the while, the ground is giving way. Over a million Lebanese, by the last official estimate, have been displaced. Under Israeli pounding and threats, the south is emptying fast and the southern suburbs (Dahiyeh) have been reduced to something between Dresden and a moonscape. The suffering of the uprooted and those who have lost livelihoods and loved ones is painfully palpable. But this is hardly the final count. The Israeli military offensive feels as if it has barely started.

Every war generates its own haze. There are forces at play that one cannot immediately decipher. But not every aspect of the battlefield is a mystery. In this conflagration, Lebanon is for the first time the sideshow, the second theater of the larger cataclysm between two mortal enemies. I exclude the United States, because I subscribe to Fintan O’Toole’s view that, in this conflict, it is America, a power that “…manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness,” that acts as Israel’s proxy.

This is a fight to the death now between the Jewish state and the Iranian Islamic Republic. Not the death of them as countries and peoples, but the death of so much besides, none more precious than life’s reassuring rhythms for ordinary beings caught in this vortex of hate. Lines that ought never be crossed, norms, values, guardrails that, for decades, had been under severe duress, are part of the detritus of this furious unraveling.

We all should have seen it coming. Unchecked Israeli horror in Gaza turned out to be quite empowering. But frankly, I could point to so many milestones before the mass slaughter, all easing the way to this drunken pursuit of absolute Israeli supremacy. After Gaza, the ultimate wrong, Israel understood it could actually ask for the moon––and get it. And the moon for the Jewish state has long been Iran.

It’s not surprising that, for most Western ruling elites, the Islamic Republic’s brutal system has a privileged place in the argument for attacking it. Nor is it remarkable that their acquiescence in Israel’s genocidal, apartheid regime patently renders their rationale morally repulsive.

The Levantine predicament casts its shadow now on the entire Middle East and beyond. We have morphed from the outlier to Israel’s dry run for total regional hegemony. In its arrogance, it may not know it, but it is already stumbling. And, as always, it is leaving a trail of misery in the wake of its ruinous excess. One from which it is not exempt.

The war’s wreckage belongs to all of us. No one is out of the fray.

Khirbet Khizeh is Yizhar Smilansky’s novella on the 1948 Palestinian Nakba. It fictionalizes the very real expulsion of Palestinians from the village of Khirbet al-Khisas in Askelon, Palestine (Ashkelon, in present-day Israel). You would be hard-pressed to find a copy of it today in Israeli bookstores. But as early as 1964, only 14 years after the Jewish state’s formation, the Education Ministry added it as an option to the high school curriculum.

Khirbet al-Khisas was one of 400 Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and then destroyed by Zionist forces. Smilansky contends with that legacy and his place in it as an Israeli Intelligence officer who took part in the ejection of Khirbet’s Palestinian inhabitants.

In today’s Israel, polls show a breathtaking ignorance of this fraught inheritance. Worse, they reveal Israeli youths’ illiteracy about basic contemporary facts, among them the geographic location of the Palestinian Territories colonized after the 1967 conquest. Arguably, this psychological erasure is the state’s most spectacular Orwellian accomplishment. Its results partly announce themselves in the unusually high popular support for the IDF’s savage campaigns in the Levant and wars against Iran.

Nathan Thrall’s timely tribute to Khirbet Khizeh in the New York Review of Books recovers essential sections of a history that has been all but edited out of Israel’s collective memory.

Debates about 1948 are now a thing of the past. Most Israelis rarely think of the expulsions carried out in their name, neither the ones in 1948 and 1967 nor those in the present. During the last three years, dozens of Palestinian communities have been violently driven out of their West Bank lands, dozens of Khirbet Khizehs entirely uprooted. As this process accelerates, most Israelis look away. Denial, however, is a tricky thing. It is a form of simultaneously seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing. In the early months of the Gaza genocide, the very same Israeli pundits, journalists, and political leaders who once refused to admit that any expulsions had occurred in 1948 now promised the Palestinians a new Nakba, a “Gaza Nakba,” a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948.”

If you are not a subscriber to the New York Review of Books, I am happy to gift you the article.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at Beirut’s Corniche on an early Sunday morning. In peacetime, it teems with those who want to be close to the sea. In times of war, the gentleman and I are the only visitors.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi.

Some housekeeping before I begin. Readers have emailed me to inquire about the easiest way to access the post on substack itself in order to like or comment. All you need to do is click on the like button or the title of the post that you receive in the email and it will take you to the post on substack. Looking forward to your likes and comments.

In the reckoning that followed the 2023-2024 war between Israel and Hezbollah, stories began to circulate in private settings. The raconteurs were people close to the resistance movement, among them highly respected Palestinian field commanders of the old generation. There were more of them than one might think.

One particular account I heard concerned a conversation between Hassan Nassrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and Ibrahim Aqil, the head of the elite Radwan Unit, the resistance’s “samurai.” As the story has it, Aqil urged Nassrallah to reconsider the tit-for-tat strategy against Israel. His reasoning was straightforward: the resistance movement was not built for low-grade warfare. Its military doctrine rested on two pillars: a thunderbolt invasion and capture of the Galilee and stealth ground defense.

Nassrallah had been the architect of Hezbollah’s Rolodex of identities. Under him, Hezbollah grew from a Lebanese resistance movement into a regional military force, a local political party, a non-state actor with a formidable presence within the state, and a social-services juggernaut. He thought the movement’s deterrence capabilities were strong and the risks manageable. In the end they clearly were not, and Hezbollah suffered a backbreaking defeat whose enormous costs were human, organizational, political, social, and material. Nothing gave more resonance to the devastating rout than the assassination of Nassrallah and his entire cohort of senior leaders and commanders, including Aqil and his team.

Over the past fifteen months, since the formal end of the war, the sprawling movement that Nassrallah built has struggled to cope with myriad vulnerabilities. Local politics have grown antagonistic, the regional map distinctly hostile. Once-abundant financial resources have dwindled. Assets and cadres have had to withstand almost daily Israeli assaults in clear violations of the ceasefire. Internal fractures have surfaced in awkward, often embarrassingly amateurish conduct. Entire communities across swathes of towns and cities have had neither respite nor even a semblance of normalcy since the end of 2024, most starkly in the wrecked south.

This is the backdrop against which Hezbollah decided to strike northern Israel in the early hours of March 2. It had neither military deterrence, nor political cover; neither social goodwill, nor official acquiescence. More poignant still for its people, there was neither warning, nor protection; neither insulation, nor shelter.

The timing of the attacks, which broke a year of silence, was revealing. They came only after Israel and the US had assassinated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and forced an existential war on the Islamic Republic. Hezbollah’s strikes were timid in their reach and impact, but very bold in the Israeli reaction they meant to elicit. Negligible physical damage in the Galilee, in exchange for a formidable barrage of firepower unleashed on our south, our north, and our southern suburbs. A child could have predicted this Israeli response.

Tehran had given the nod. Such is the nature of the relationship between the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, especially in the aftermath of the latest war and Nassrallah’s demise. The movement’s action, which may yet be judged a blunder, has nonetheless positioned it where it has always felt ideologically most at home. For it has long been understood that when the hour was upon it, the party would rise to its ultimate mission. That it attacked the Jewish state in support of Iran at the most precarious moment for these two allies seems, at first glance, puzzling, but it may well be the point. Such is the age-old Karbala’i ethos: martyrdom and sacrifice in the face of injustice and existential peril.

It must be said, however, that the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah were dragged into this potentially ruinous decision kicking and screaming. This was not their war of choice, but Israel and America’s. Ironically, they are the revisionist powers seeking to overturn the region’s existing accommodations — accommodations in which the republic and the resistance were consenting, even if quarrelsome, participants. And what has been unfolding in the Middle East is of a piece with what has been playing out across the international system.

Eskandar Sadegh Boroujerdi gives eloquent expression to the trends in the London Review of Books:

The certainties of the United States’ hegemonic stewardship of the “international rules-based order” have been deformed beyond recognition by the Gaza genocide, but no alternative architecture has cohered in their place. Instead there is a politics of gangster imperialism that has neither international nor domestic consent.

There are now four belligerents in this war: one superpower, two hegemons, and the region’s largest non-state actor. The stakes for each side by turns converge and diverge. So do the definitions of victory and defeat. The weakest player is Hezbollah. The risks it faces carry the highest cost, including the breakup of its military apparatus and political diminishment in Lebanon. This would likely remain the case even if the Iranian regime were to survive intact, which is very likely and would amount to a form of defeat for the United States and Israel.

The sacrifice, though, is not that of the resistance alone. The fact is, the people –– especially their own folks –– will bear the brunt of this war’s cost, even if they wanted none of it to begin with. What kind of costs depends entirely on the Mephistophelean designs Israel has for the party and for Lebanon at large. The Jewish state’s predation has always been the most persuasive argument for Hezbollah’s existence. Likewise, the meager capabilities of the Lebanese army. Where the party’s ideology and method alienate and divide, Israel’s viciousness and territorial ambitions have worked to unite. For the longest time, this was in fact Hezbollah’s most powerful proposition: in the absence of a credible Lebanese defense, the resistance is the only buffer and deterrent against a malevolent Israeli enemy.

But that’s a proposition that is now meaningless to many of us Lebanese. Once upon a time, Hezbollah could boast of an achievement that was singular in the Arab world: the modest gap between rhetoric and deed, between promise and feat. In the shadow of the 2024 defeat, it no longer can.

I do not know what awaits us. I live in Ras Beirut, near al-Wasat, the heart of the capital. As I write, hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to evacuate their homes in the south and in Dahiyeh. In an unprecedented move, Israel sent out forced evacuation orders to a large part of southern Lebanon and the entirety of the southern suburbs of Beirut. Nearly half a million people have been displaced over the course of a single week. Dahiyeh is a little more than ten minutes away by car on a quiet Sunday, and yet it feels a world away. As I write, panic continues to spread, families continue to scatter, seeking shelter in different, safer parts of the country –– meeting with welcome in some neighborhoods and hostility in others. As I write, the government has declared Hezbollah’s military wing illegal. The armed resistance is now, for all intents and purposes, rogue. As I write, Israel has begun land incursions and heliborne insertions. And Hezbollah fights back.

As I write, we are entering a new era whose contours, even in the vaguest sense, elude us and yet seem so utterly familiar.

In view of the exceptionally hazardous state of the Middle East, I thought I would share two papers and a podcast that offer lucid contextual analysis of unfolding events.

This is not the first time I share a podcast featuring Aslı Ü. Bâli, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale Law School. In the realm of international law, hers is a razor-sharp mind and a very compelling voice. Recently, she was in conversation with Peter Beinart about the topic of the moment, America’s Threat to the World, on the Jewish Currents podcast, On the Nose.

To further illuminate Bâli’s argument on the Trump administration’s doctrine, I am sharing the piece she coauthored with Aziz Rana for the Boston Review.

Finally, The New Left Review’s interview with historian Ervand Abrahamian is a studied dissection of the modern history of Iran and the Islamic Republic.

If you need access to the interview, please email me, and I will be happy to gift it to you.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at, Cairo Drops, one of Ali al-Jabri’s paintings from his Cairo years (1976-’78). It sits against the wall of my library.

The column in al-Quds al-Arabi.

Field research for About This Man Called Ali, my first book, was an upheaval. It was the interviews. Ali al-Jabri was murdered in 2002. A year later, after extensive work on his letters and diaries, I reached out to family in Amman and Aleppo, and friends from the 1960s and ‘70s in California, Bristol, London, Paris, Cairo, and Kuwait to hone the rich texture of his life. I was part of Ali’s circle in Amman, so I left us to the end.

Because I knew Ali, I suspected that the man would have enraptured those who inhabited his other worlds, much as he had done to us in Jordan. I will happily use the old cliché, because it so fits Ali: he was a tour de force. Magisterial. A master of the brush and the pen. A sophisticate and a naïf. As much of an enigma to lover as he was to distant acquaintance. Elegant and earthy, with a distinct taste for the rough soil of life. A cosmopolitan with such yearnings for anchor in identity. A hedonist with a peculiar awe for tradition and ritual. At once, a queen, a pauper, and a prince.

My suspicions were correct. Those who knew Ali decades ago remembered with the vividness of yesterday. There was still love and laughter and tears and mystification, the need to own the whole of him, when he would only gift himself in fragments.

Time, I also thought, would have done its handiwork in quieting what furies might have raged then. I would have expected his tragic death to infuse new charity into old antagonisms. I was wrong. Simple questions, unbeknownst to me, were minefields laid across still very raw emotions, difficult memories, disappointments, heartbreak. My notes became much more than the material of a memoir. They were a study in how we possessively claim the dead.

When she first read the finished manuscript, his sister Diala called me a nissra, an eagle. As she read and reread it, obsessing about this and that revelation, she denounced me as a witch. Antonia, his best friend during his Bristol and London years, thanked me for bringing him so to life. So did Diana. John, his mate from the same period, didn’t see his Ali in the book. There was much joy in the man, John wrote to me. But you wallow in the tragic. A few years later, he had a change of mind.

There are others who, I am sure, read the memoir, but never shared their thoughts. I cannot know whether there was simply too much pain in encountering him for the first time in all his fugitive magnificence, or whether the book, in the end, wasn’t strictly about him. He was a real-life character through which I depicted a history of the region. Perhaps they chafed at that.

When I shared my experience with the late Christopher Dickey, a dear friend and celebrated journalist and writer, he smiled: “Thankless, aren’t they, memoirs and biographies.” Chris’s gripping Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son was a rendition of love, betrayal, anger, estrangement, and reconciliation between him and his father, James Dickey, the acclaimed poet and author of the bestseller Deliverance. Chris spent a long time repairing the family ruptures occasioned by the book.

My novelist friend and second cousin Hanan Al-Shaykh would encounter the same family ire when she published The Locust and the Bird, a memoir of her mother, Kamelah, narrated in the voice of Kamelah herself. But if Hanan thought she would escape opprobrium by having Kamelah tell her own story with surprising candor about her sins and failings, she was mistaken. The book was published in 2009. To this very day, many in the family mutter under their breath at her and her mother.

The intimate sense of loved ones is sacred ground. Trespass and you risk more than you are willing to sacrifice. Such are the hazards of writing about real lives. It’s no different when one finds one’s own life the object of prying interest, even if (or especially) if it is rendered in fiction. Novelists are thieves of people’s stories, Philip Roth liked to say. Become friends with one and you might just find yourself on their page.

The case of Algerian author Kamel Daoud, who won the 2024 Prix Goncourt for Houris, and Saâda Arbane, the woman suing him for alleged theft of her story, is one such fraught tale. She is a survivor of a massacre by Islamist forces during Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s. She was six years old at the time. Daoud’s wife was her psychiatrist. He told Saâda twice he would like to write about her. She declined the invitations, only to see imprints of her story in Houris.

Daoud, of course, is a mighty storyteller. In The Meursault Investigation, he skillfully flips Albert Camus’s The Stranger, giving life and voice to Musa, who was slain by Meursault, Camus’s protagonist. Through the novel, he retrieves for the native his formidable presence in the discourse on colonialism and empire.

But this Algerian intellectual, who now resides in Paris, is also quite the political maverick. Islamism and the Algerian regime are, for Daoud, twin villains; identity, a straightjacket. In Algeria, he is revered less; in France, more. The trajectory of many an exiled writer. “I refuse to read novels with a passport in my head,” he told Robert Pogue Harrison in an interview in 2024. A wonderful quote. An enviable feat if he has achieved it.

I have not read Houris, but it’s not hard to see the novelist in Daoud alighting when he encountered Saâda. One can imagine he could not resist having her on his page. “Betrayed, naked,” is her response. Not hard to fathom either. “The entire world was reading something that was mine,” is the essence of her complaint. This is a story, and it is hers––at least, in her telling, on far too many pages of Houris.

Would that this were simply about literary sovereignty, though. Because this is Algeria, its brutal civil war, France, and Kamel Daoud, we end up in much wider, prickly territory. Two quotes, one by him, the other by Saâda’s first Algerian lawyer, illuminate the thorns:

“This victim of the civil war is being manipulated to achieve a goal: to kill a writer, defame his family and save the deal between this regime and these killers.”

“He built his success on Saâda’s misery. For a second time, he strangled my client’s voice. He stole her life, her story and her pain and he leaves her without any life at all.”

But for all these complexities, at the heart of this battle royale is the question: whose life is it anyway? The French courts will deliver a legal verdict, but I am not certain it will be satisfying. The essence of the debate runs far deeper than law.

Does political Zionism speak for Jews? Since 1967, Zionism has become central to Jewish life in the West. But well before the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the ascendance of a hegemonic Zionism, many Jewish movements explored the meaning of Jewishness and its aspirations. In the aftermath of the genocide in Gaza, these traditions are reviving and causing serious fractures within Western Jewish communities. The consensus on territorial Zionism is clearly eroding.

Joseph Dana, writing in The Nation, revisits that suppressed history and traces how growing dissent is reshaping Jewish support for territorial Zionism. Read the essay here.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at two photos 136 years apart. To the left, an 1890 photograph of Nablus, Bint al Sham, the Daughter of Damascus, as it was once called. To the right, settlers inaugurating yet another settlement, this time in Beit Sahour, Bethlehem. The photograph is courtesy of AP’s Ohad Zwigenberg.

For the column in al-Quds al-Arabi, click here.

I have Palestinian friends who wake each morning in tears. Others find their sleep colonized by nightmares. It is Gaza. The conversation is scarcely different with friends from Lebanon’s south, from Syria, from Sudan, from elsewhere, from the multitudes who have borne witness to destruction and slaughter.

Might justice for those so grievously wronged heal? Is human repair possible without tangible legal consequence: prison for individual perpetrators; sanctions and boycotts against the state that deliberately unleashed them? Absent such punishment, would the shame of the label itself—crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, massacre, ecocide, pedophilia, sex trafficking…—suffice to mend hearts and lives?

Does the culprits’ escape from accountability, as so often happens, lock the wounded into a permanent state of emotional siege? The guilty no less than their victims, if guilt in them ever took hold. I sat in a long silence when I first read Myrtle Meadlo’s words to Seymour Hersh, in 1969. She uttered them the moment he stepped into her house in New Goshen, Indiana. He had travelled there to talk to her son, Paul, as part of his investigation into the My Lai massacre in Vietnam:

“I sent them a good boy, and they made him a murderer.”

It’s almost always silence, isn’t it, that is the emotional register upon encountering the structure and grain of the human toll––torment’s inheritance. For me, at random: A Minor Detail by Adnia Shibli; Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels; Put It On Record, I am An Arab by Mahmoud Darwish; Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi; 3 Faces by Jaafar Panahi, Men in The Son by Ghassan Kanafani; A Map To A Place That No Longer Exists by Abdallah Hani Daher, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy… They sit well, these, and others, in the mind’s lens and the heart’s rhythms.

But is justice one of the rewards of the intimate human tale, as told through brush, camera, and pen, quite apart from the realm of law and its reach? I ask because there’s a growing fear that today’s culprits, like yesterday’s, shall yet again roam free. It was not so long ago that scores were let go even as Nuremberg put some in the dock.

Look at them now. In the shadow of genocide, killing daily in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, scorching the earth in south Lebanon, swaggering in Israel. Look at them looting the land, massacring, torturing, hounding, in Sudan. Look at them gunning down protestors by the thousands, maiming, raping, in Iran.

Too many names, too many times in history, in too many places, I know. These are merely the ones within my own line of sight. The crimes differ––by degree, by type of horror, by tally, by intent. What difference does that make for offender and victim, though, outside the law books?

Philip Sands is a leading attorney and scholar in the human rights field. He commands the page, much as he does the courtroom. It is literature, not law, that holds the better promise, for him, of offering a modicum of solace and redemption:

If I had to choose between a single judgment in an international court on some horror that has happened or a very fine work of literature addressing that issue, I would probably choose the work of literature, because it is more likely to bring peace and reconciliation.

I sense his compassion in such counsel. It is as if he is gently warning the maligned and the aggrieved that law, even when it is victorious, may disappoint. It often does. Accountability, even in the tidiest of convictions, proves elusive, and is just as often unenforceable in cases of war crimes. In the present era, it may even turn perilous for the judge courageous enough to issue it.

So, too, is the word’s power to its author. Count the condemned writers and artists crowding prisons and detention centers, languishing in exile, joining the ranks of the cancelled, the silenced, the unemployed. Ours are not the kindest of times anywhere. For the elites, they are certainly at their most glaringly debased.

Might catharsis, that essential cleansing capable of yielding collective peace and reconciliation, be achieved without the law’s ubiquitous redress? The truths it casts in stone-like verdicts, the facts it declares incontrovertible, notwithstanding humanity’s proclivity for interpretation, and the reckoning it therefore imposes.

“Fine literature,” by its nature, is the privilege of the reader. Even at its most famous, it almost always stands modestly, in fragments of prose and passages. Film, as mass theater, has the gift of reach but can it equal the law’s gavel when it falls for the victim? Can it negate it if it falls for the accused? And if the gavel fails to fall at all, might that work of fiction, this poem, that film, those images––might they earn a people recognition for their persecution and anguish? Might it earn the culprit their guilt, their mea culpa, and their shame?

And I have a confession: at times, our real-life tragedies overwhelm me to the point that I am incapable of bearing witness to them on any other stage. I know that I am not alone in such sentiments.

But perhaps Sands has a point. A persuasive one. We have known, since the earliest days of the Palestinian–Israeli struggle over Palestine, that narrative matters. We are seeing it again today, in the aftermath of October 7, as the balance of that narrative pivots and Israel fights to reclaim it, no less urgently than it seeks to keep itself and its leaders outside the jurisdiction of international law. Modern history offers no shortage of instruction: Adenauer’s postwar Germany recasting Nazism as a regime’s malaise from which the people were innocent; colonial powers rehearsing deflection instead of apology or reparation; museums raised for some victims, withheld from others––all for the sake of narrative.

I notice as I write, that this argument reads like a polemical pileup. I don’t mean it to be so. The truth is I am barely scratching the surface of an unbearably thorny moral landscape.

I am staying on subject this week to share an extraordinarily fluent essay by Peter Harling in Le Monde Diplomatique, Faire Le Vide, Gaza Signe Des Temps, on precisely the theme of this column. He writes:

“By proclaiming the end of the conflict, they appear to resolve a whole range of thorny issues—presumptions of genocide, accusations of complicity, abuses of international law—simply by consigning them to the past. The war our governments wanted to treat as a parenthesis can finally be closed.

This arbitrary closure plunges into disarray all those who saw in this conflict, on the contrary, a turning point: a monstrous, uninhibited violence, heralding a world without faith or law, governed solely by racist impulses backed by overwhelming technology. But if everything ends in contagious indifference, then what really happened? Can a war be both so grave and so quickly forgotten? How can one avoid the sense of unreality, like waking from a nightmare that was horrifyingly tangible and yet without sequel? Around what should one mobilize, when a relative de‑escalation of violence meets a growing emotional and moral exhaustion?”

If you are a subscriber to Le Monde Diplomatique, click here for the essay. If not, please email me to gift you the piece.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You are looking at a 1930s English gentleman posing for the camera at the British military airbase in Gaza. At the time, the base was used by Imperial Airways, the passenger airline that merged with British Airways in 1939 to form BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Gaza served as a stopover on routes to Karachi and Baghdad.

Click here for the column in al-Quds al-Arabi

In times of darkness, of turmoil or oppressive stagnation, of a political and personal fog so dense you cannot see beyond your next thought, you come across a small moment that betrays a much larger meaning. It could be a statement, an interview, a speech, a sight, perfectly ordinary, or even laughable, that acts as a window onto a truth of profound import.

Mr. Ali Shaath, the commissioner of the newly established Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, sat for his first interview last week. The ten-minute conversation was a telling reprise of the 1970s: the high chair, the ornamented room, the interviewer’s soft balls, and the banalities issuing from the man’s mouth in response. By minute 8:08––right after the journalist had furnished us with a profile of his guest––the 66-year-old civil servant still felt the need to stress that, indeed, “I am an engineer. I graduated from ‘Ain Shams University with high distinction.”

Like a stage set, the room, the chair, the man, the vacuous smile, the words themselves, formed a choreography of demise: in the wake of genocide, a shuddering absence of Palestinian leadership that threatens the very resilience of a cause in its most vulnerable hour.

An Israeli and American effort breathtaking in its audacity is underway. It seeks, at once, to neutralize the devastating international repercussions of Israel’s mass slaughter and to pave the way for erasure in both Gaza and the West Bank. Erasure of the crime itself, of presence, of history, of promise, and thus of a Palestinian future in Israel-Palestine. Such a project requires its architects and generals, its advocates and apologists, its cheerleaders and foot soldiers, its bureaucrats and props. To watch Mr. Shaath––no doubt, Mahmoud Abbas’ whispered choice––spew drivel and bromides was to behold an embattled, pursued, exhausted Palestinian people abandoned to their wits in the harshest of times. A familiar story for decades, perhaps, but now of potentially ruinous consequences for their cause on its sacred ground, as it finally wins much of humanity’s nod.

This is a conspiracy, with all its hideous details publicly displayed as a showcase of how the once unthinkable becomes permissible and actually attainable. I think of it as a road show of a sort; a Trumpian rollout, starting in the US itself. The obnoxious exercise of power is creed: matter of course, automatic, visceral. The supposed governing structures themselves are bizarre innovations on an old colonial construct: a self-appointed “CEO of the world” presiding over a Board of Peace, complete with a one-time billion dollar fee for lifetime membership. Beneath it sits its Founding Executive Board, which in turn oversees the Gaza Executive Board, which itself rules over the natives: Ali Shaath and his committee, whose authority is nil but whose role is to legitimize what is scandalously illegitimate.

The measure of this categoric condemnation is a very simple question: which member of these boards, including the CEO himself, would accept such a governance apparatus imposed on their people? A question for Shaath and his colleagues to answer, perhaps, with the help of his high distinction diploma from ‘Ain Shams. “But what was to be done?” they might protest. An answer that so perfectly captures the catastrophic failure of a national liberation movement.

Thankfully, the distinctly Trumpian quality of this unfolding scene saves us the trouble of clearing away the clutter of euphemisms that typically obscure imperial intentions. It also reveals itself against a backdrop of arguably irreparable ruptures in the international order. We are all at sea, a condition ill-suited to the durability of colonial ventures of a particularly unstable nature.

Admittedly, the garish grandiosity and farcical character of the entire scheme does invite comic relief, but the effect of them, when we superimpose them on the current dystopian realities in Gaza, acquires a decided register of horror.

Watch Sharif Abd al Kouddous disentangle the facts on Gaza’s ground.

On the decimated strip of a decimated people, Israel is already implanting its greater self. In the East, on the 58% of Gaza it occupies, it is rapidly building military bases, roads connecting to settlements inside Israel, and ‘invitation-only” encampments for Palestinians. Those with their ears close to the ground suggest these are reserved for its favorite gangs and their families. Iterations of this Israeli method have long been rehearsed in the West Bank, in ways Palestinians know too well but the world too easily misreads or ignores.

Against this frightening backdrop sat Mr. Shaath, all talk and trousers, regurgitating platitudes from another age. Regrettably, a very small moment with such a large meaning.

In a stunning essay in the London Review of Books, Adam Shatz writes about America, his home country. In his anguish (and if only in his eloquence) he reminded me of my own embattled Levantine self.

I am an avid reader of Shatz, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, and I have never encountered him quite this intimate on the page. He opens with James Baldwin, of course, and end with a note of hope––and shame.

The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans…

Since the 2016 election and especially over the last year, I’ve tried to love America with sorrow, as Beauvoir did. I’ve reminded myself of the emancipatory potential of its founding ideals, underscored by James. And I’ve returned again and again to the prophetic words of Baldwin and King. But what I mostly feel these days, as I look at the disaster unfolding in America and its horrifying repercussions throughout the world, is an intense sense of shame. Shame isn’t a pleasant emotion, but any honest reckoning with what my country has become has to start with it.

If you are not a subscriber to the London Review of Books, here is Shatz delivering the same reflections to a live audience. Your weekend is richer for it.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at Donald, The Liberator. I’ll have you know neither the image, nor the title are tongue-in-cheek. The AI-generated visual was used by the White House’s social media accounts. The title is all mine, of course.

The column in Al Quds al-Arabi

President Donald Trump, truth be told, has an array of fascinating peculiarities. The most intriguing, to my mind, are the affinities between his love of ornamental excess and his relish for base politics. The gilded furniture and walls are faux Louis-Quatorze; the conduct, brass-knuckled.

At first glance, one detects a mismatch, only to discover exactly the opposite. Because the man is all about flourish. He likes gold finery, a military parade, a huge crowd, a gigantic chocolate cake, a massive ballroom. And he likes a bar fight. Or more precisely, he likes to look as though he wins hard even when there is a clear path to an easy victory.

It’s not merely a penchant for spectacle, but for the spectacular within the spectacle. Whatever the individual performative act’s shape or purpose, the message is always same: I want it and I shall have it, because I can. Power, liberated, unleashed, unfettered, and ruthless, with a Trumpain twist, exercised at will, at whim, towards anyone and anything.

So what’s the problem? Empire is reflexively brutal, even when it doesn’t really need to be. We, on the receiving end of it, have always seethed at the “international niceties” behind which it hides its cruelties. In America, its own leading dissenters have long warned that the supposed protections that insulated the republic from imperium were imaginary. “We have no more a democracy than we have a republic. We have an empire,” wrote Gore Vidal in 2002, in Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace. Now comes an American president who embraces this truth and openly acts on it, and the aghast are frothing at the mouth.

Empire is also capricious and, more often than we care to admit, preposterous. In its advanced years, it can be comically cantankerous. It is only befitting that the emperor and his entourage faithfully embody its modalities and temperament. One might have expected Trump’s disdain to observe hierarchy: the lower a country’s position on the rung, the rougher the treatment; the higher, the softer the touch. Not so, to the dismay of Western allies, most with rich colonial histories of their own. That shared imperial legacy alone made them kindred spirits — members of the same club, collectively authoring a made-to-fit international order, partaking of the same privileges, indulging in the same hypocrisies, and dispensing exemptions to darling countries. Not so, apparently, for Trump.

To be fair, such are the prerogatives of great superpowers, even with their closest friends. And such, too, is Trump’s particular fancy. Whether this public display of contemptuous dismissiveness makes any sense, let alone corrodes imperial interests, is another matter––one that I suspect doesn’t really concern this American president. After all, as Scarlett O’Hara said, “Tomorrow is another day,” just before she faded into black in Gone With The Wind.

Suffice it to say, for today, that it is rather amusing to see a flummoxed Europe climb aboard the fear wagon the rest of us, in the rank and file of humanity, have been riding for what feels like an eternity. It has been particularly entertaining to watch its leading members lose their tongue over the legality of Trump’s grab-and-snatch in Venezuela, only to recover it when he turns his yearning for Greenland. One has to wonder: what exactly differentiates Venezuela from the Land of the Kalaallit?

Trump surely asked himself this question a long time ago and quickly discovered: nothing. For this equal opportunity attitude, he gets all the credit for plain honesty; for Europe’s dithering, they, alas, end up with all the sniggering.

If these Trumpian sensibilities are shocking to Europe, which itself, frankly, is shocking, the exceptions are teachable: Hungary, on the far edge of the fear spectrum. Magyarország’s Viktor Orbán was the first to publicly cast foreignness as a contaminant, tap into those raw emotions, and efficiently set the fear wagons in motion to insulate his people against “civilizational erasure.” It’s not that many of his fellow European members were offended, far from it. It is all that hemming and hawing as they sheepishly followed his example.

In fact, Europe has been embarrassingly hemming and hawing its way through crises for years now: about Gaza but not Ukraine; about Palestine but not Israel; about Putin but not Netanyahu; about freedom of expression and assembly but not for Palestine; about brown refugees but not white ones; about antisemtism but not Isalmophobia.

And Trump simply doesn’t like those who hem and haw. He doesn’t like it in America; so why should he tolerate it anywhere he deems his backyard?

“It’s a new world order,” Orbán declared approvingly at the beginning of 2026. It may well be so for his Western universe. For ours, it’s the world order as it’s always been.

In the immediate future, therefore, my eyes are fixed on Iran.

I am staying on subject this week, because it’s all so damn interesting.

Two countries now sit squarely in the eye of the storm: Venezuela and Iran. Two podcasts from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on both countries stand out.

The discussion on Venezuela brings together John Mearsheimer, Curt Mills, and Miguel Tinker Salas.

The Iran panel features Vali Nasr, Ellie Geranmayeh, and Mohammad Ali Shabani.

Both offer exceptional insight.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at a publicity montage of Sah al-Nawm, Mohammad al-Maghout’s 1970s masterpiece of social and political satire.

Two recent spectacles cheer the heart. This heart, especially. One is inevitably Lebanese; the other reassuringly American.

The first features characters who do very nicely for themselves as members of Lebanon’s elite, yet could just as easily play the dupes in Sah al Nawm (closest translation is the sardonic Hello, Look Who’s Finally Awake!), the hilarious 1970s Syrian satire of Arab society and politics. For my young Arab readers who, to their great loss, have missed out on Sah al Nawm, YouTube is your savior. For my foreign readers, the story I am about to share will give you a sense of playwright Mohammad al-Maghout’s genius in capturing how Arab regime buffooneries crochet the burlesque into everyday Arab life. Syria’s Hafez Assad was known to crack a wide smile at Maghout’s brilliant parodies, apparently untroubled that the joke was on none other than his Baathist self.

Before I proceed, the shenanigans detailed in the tale I am about to narrate are alleged. Onward and forward.

So, a few years ago, Sharia’ Court Judge Khaldoun Oraymet saw profit in the absence of Saudi Arabia from the Lebanese arena. He devised a scheme to shake down millions from various luminaries of this sorry country, duping them into believing that he had a strong connection to an “Abu Omar,” a character he concocted as a chief adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman.

Before them he dangled what obsesses their waking hours and envelops their nightly reveries: high office. The inducements ranged from a parliamentary seat, to a cabinet post, to the premiership — or, in some cases, merely a direct line to power as favored acolytes and functionaries.

Abu Omar, of course, communicated strictly by phone with these seekers of Saudi favor through the good Sheikh himself. And at the end of every call, after issuing his orders or counsels or greetings from MBS, he would ask the Lebanese supplicant to “take care of Sheikh Oraymet.” After which the cash would flow into Oraymet’s pockets.

Are you with me so far? Because the story is about to take a turn into the realm of the truly outlandish. The man Oraymet groomed for the role of Abu Omar is Mustapha al-Hassyan, a dirt poor car painter from Akkar, the Sheikh’s hometown. Al-Hassyan was perfect for the part because he happened to hail from an Arab Bedouin tribe whose vernacular closely resembles the Saudi one.

To work around the Saudi embassy in Lebanon, the Sheikh assured his prey that Lebanese affairs fell strictly under Abu Omar’s remit. His was the real influence and authority in the Saudi royal court. The embassy, a mere sideshow, was to be ignored. Something along these lines, at any rate. Targeted Lebanese politicians, whose venality would reliably cancel out their few brain cells, followed the Sheikh’s counsel, directing all their sycophancy toward him and Abu Omar.

Wouldn’t you know it! There was one such episode in Sah al Nawm, when Ghawwar al Tosheh, the star of the series, and his brother-in-arms Abu ‘Antar, invent a similar swindle to Oraymet’s. They pretend they are rulers from a fabulously rich country called Twalistan (a play on tall in Arabic), wearing beneath their overflowing garments the highest-heeled qubqab (wooden clogs) you have ever seen. For the unfamiliar, the qubqab was Ghawwar’s signature footwear in Sah al Nawm and earlier in Hammam al-Hanna.

Click on the clip above to enjoy Ghawwar and ‘Abu Antar in Sah al-Nawm as the rulers of Twalistan.

Just this month, Oraymet and al-Hassyan were finally caught in a sting operation carried out by Lebanese intelligence with the help of the Saudi embassy. As it happens, so was the sorry fate of Ghawwar and Abu ‘Antar, at the hands of Abu Kalabsha, the head shawish (policeman) of Haret Kil Min Ido Illo ( The Neighborhood of Every Man for Himself), Sah al Nawm’s universe.

Abu Omar and Oraymet were the talk of the town as Lebanon bade good riddance to 2025. Al-Hassyan, the car painter, is already in jail; the no-doubt-very-pious Sheikh so far remains free, though not at large. He spends his time holding press conferences and threatening news outlets. The mugs who fell for it are the butt of jokes––about as good a comeuppance as we hapless Lebanese could hope for in a country loath to hold its worst offenders remotely accountable.

As for Lebanon itself, yet again it has demonstrated its remarkable knack for the tragicomic: a place where crooks and chumps converge to entertain and shock. A talent not unique to us, it must be said, but one that has clearly become the world’s envy, as even so-called great states descend, one after another, into absurdist theater.

The real scandal, of course, is that Abu Omar’s tale is only the latest of countless ruses that have, generation after generation, exposed most of Lebanon’s pretend patricians as the shysters they truly are. Most scams unravel behind semi-closed doors; this one thankfully came undone for all to gape at and laugh over, much like a drunkard’s soiled trousers slipping loose as he clowns away at a party.

But this, too, is just frivolous vaudeville befitting the frivolity of the home country. The spectacle whose significance matched that of the United States itself was Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest Conference, held in December 2025. It was quite the sight watching its MAGA notables going to war over the singular issue for many of us on this side of the trench: Israel.

Tucker Carlson’s searing attack on evangelical ministries that support or justify Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza best captured the shifting ground in this now epic fight:

If a man commits a crime, do we kill his kids? I don’t care if it’s in Minneapolis or Gaza City. No, we don’t. God is not on any country’s side … [God] doesn’t have a nationality.

What makes this precise argument so pivotal is that it is not ours but entirely theirs. It will most likely be won because it is being fought on their turf, for their own sake, not ours––and most consequentially, not Israel’s. Of all the prospects announcing 2026, this one deserves all our patience and attention.

I’d like to greet 2026 with Mahmoud Darwish’s On This Land. The reasons are as clear as the sun that shines above me this morning as I write:

On this land, is what makes life worth living:
the return of April, the smell of bread
at dawn, a woman’s opinions on men, the writings of Aeschylus, love’s
beginning, moss on stone, mothers standing on the string of a flute,
and the invaders’ fear of memories.

On this land, is what makes life worth living:
the end of September, a lady leaving
her forties full of apricots, the hour of sun in prison, clouds becoming
a swarm of creatures, the chants of a nation that faces its demise
smiling, and the tyrannies’ fear of songs.

On this land, is what makes life worth living:
on this land is the lady of the land, the mother
of beginnings and endings. She was named Palestine. Still
named Palestine….

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at magnificent Yaffa (Jaffa) in 1929. The photo comes to you courtesy of Palestine Survey, Government of Palestine (British Mandate), 1929.

Click on the link, to read the column in Al Quds al-Arabi.

As the end of the year approaches, what do our eyes behold?

In Gaza, for example, my eyes behold a ceasefire unfolding to reveal a different kind of horror, perhaps intended: a much quieter misery. Much quieter to the outside world, that is. Far away witnesses assume there’s not much left of this genocidal scandal to be told. A sigh of relief on the Israeli side; dread and despair on the Palestinian.

I turn my gaze to the West Bank, laboring ever harder under the Israeli apartheid regime. Outside the cities, I behold frantic Israeli ethnic cleansing and pogroms, as if racing against the clock. They barely register in the news. There’s a lesson in that: Israel’s carte blanche stands between the river and the sea. On that much, we all agree.

Still, the much-clichéd horizon over Israel-Palestine remains befogged, difficult to decipher. For Palestinians, the near view is turbid, forbidding; the far one perceptibly sharper, finer. For Israelis, it’s the other way around. It looks like a paradox but it isn’t. Remember that movie starring Barbara Streisand and Yves Montand, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever? In Israel-Palestine, even on the clearest day, the panorama refuses to settle. Ghosts of the past mingle with vectors of the future; old crimes presage misdeeds yet to come. And you know –– you just know –– this movie is far from over. That’s why the Israeli sigh of relief has always been so premature and deceiving, and the Palestinian sense of dread so tempered by hope and defiance.

The pain of it all sharpens as yet another festive season draws near, capping yet another year of lived nightmares and squandered dreams. Then on a random afternoon, a video comes your way on Instagram, showing children somewhere in Gaza laughing as they sway on makeshift swings hung on wreckage. The evening grows slightly less anxious.

My Damascene friends tell me it’s about time I visit; Lebanese who have been concur. It’s a sight, some of them say; it’s such fun, others claim. My Aleppine friends, though, are less sanguine. So are a few journalist chums. The sentiments are anecdotal, of course, but they tend to dovetail. Syria’s prospects appear much improved, if only by the low bar set by Bashar Assad. Bashar’s legacy, after all, is his miserably low threshold. I listen and read and can’t help but recall the euphoria that accompanied Rafiq Hariri’s rise to the premiership soon after the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war. They called me the party pooper when I warned that cesspools, too, can glitter –– but only for so long.

Obviously, Syria is another country and ours is another century. These are just my trepidations when the human condition, emerging from extreme duress, justifiably yearns for relief and switches off the mind’s censors. Such is the lay of the land, needless to say, in Lebanon. The festivities here are always early. In Beirut, they come with truly unendurable traffic jams and nervous breakdowns during the day and, depending on the heart’s desire, cheer or pizzazz in the evening. Incessant questions about impending troubles are shoved to the margins of emotions, and uncertainties, on cue, subside until January 3. I need not mention that this privilege is a club to which membership is very limited.

These are the time-honored traditions of Christmastide and farewell parties to the year we survived. Every new one brings its own rhythms, as always; habits that soon enough become part of the cadence of day-to-day existence. In the south of Lebanon you look upward now, when you’re out in the fields and the streets. That’s how you pray over a loved one’s grave, as well. Or even when you’re sweeping the floor or having your morning coffee on your porch. Sometimes emm Kamel’s voice you hear up there means to prod you in your chores so that it can get on with its own; sometimes it greets you by name just to let you know that it has done its homework on you. When it is silent, it may mean that it’s just about to turn you into a corpse.

In Beirut, we have taken to flipping a discreet finger at emm Kamel, our new Israeli companion droning away in our cityscape. Emm Kamel is an old nickname for an old intruder. Unbeknownst to many Lebanese, Israeli drones were hovering over southern terrains as early as 1982. Apparently, the drone model –– Tadiran Mastiff, commonly referred to as MK –– was the inspiration for the cute sobriquet: emm Kamel, mother of Kamel. Lebanese gallows humor, as you can tell. Back then, emm Kamel was just a busybody; it had infinite curiosity but limited reach. Today, quite the lethal eavesdropper and toy soldier, it not only echoes but footnotes Orwell’s 1984.

They’re ending 2025 in conversation, the Israeli and Lebanese states, to the echoes and beats of these drones, of Israeli thunderbolts, of our own shouting matches. A crescendo punctuated by the harangues of those holding the purse to the money meant to rescue our country –– a country which, rumor has it, sits on some $18 bn in cash in a $28 bn size economy. The public rows betray very little of what is actually conceded behind closed doors by all parties. They also betray nothing of the people’s quandaries and insecurities as they await the future, the holidays notwithstanding.

And the future that looms, at least in part, is not entirely a mystery. Whatever the talks’ outcome, for the frontline villagers overlooking this side of Israel the odds of return are bleak. A colleague aptly calls the dislocation of the estimated 100,000 inhabitants a form of internal transfer. If it turns permanent, the social and political consequences are not hard to imagine and will soon turn tangible. The starkest among them is a deep south that is tantamount to a dead zone. Dead to Lebanon.

But it’s never a good day for a would-be reformist government, confronted with these existential challenges, when those atop the helm decide the moment is better suited for a crude sectarian gambit. We have today one camp which, with such reckless relish, behaves as if Hezbollah has lost everything in this latest war, and another which, with such curious dimness, pretends that Hezbollah has lost nothing. Schadenfreude and bombast, in equal measure.

Par for the course, in Lebanon. Regime recalibrations define our troubled modern history. They have been typically violent. Such is the fraught nature of the sectarian contest between those who have too much power and those who feel diminished by it. History, of course, is not necessarily prologue, and not every era replicates the one before it. But our ruling elites are notorious for ignoring its lessons. When opportunity invites them to innovate, their worst impulses rise to the occasion.

Let’s therefore hope that sobriety wins and 2026 denies all of them this opportunity.

I’ll keep it simple this week.

I am a very slow reader. The day is dedicated to my research, the evening, right before bed, to fiction. My non-fiction choices are purposeful; the novels are usually the recommendations of the voracious reader of the family, my sister Raghida. But I do grow very attached to my own favorites.

Readers have recently asked me what have I been reading. I won’t list all the books, but I will share five that I found profoundly meaningful: Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza, Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza, Claire Keegan’s Foster; Michelle de kretser’s The Life To Come, and Mohammad Hassan Alwan’s Ibn Arabi’s Small Death.

A few readers have also asked me to recommend books that illuminate the human factor in Iran. A hard task given the rich selection. But I walked away much better informed when I read two particularly insightful books: Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, and Christopher de Bellaigue’s In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs.

Until we meet again on January 3, 2026!

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X

You’re looking at Nadia Tueni in Whispers, surveying Beirut’s ravaged cityscape. The documentary was directed by Maroun Baghdadi and released in 1980.

To Maroun Baghdadi’s lens –– in Whispers, 45 years ago –– the poet Nadia Tueni ruminated about a Lebanon in the throes of life and death. So was she. In 1983, after years of struggling with bone cancer, she finally succumbed. She was 45 years old; the state of Lebanon was 37.

In the opening scene, they’re a threesome: her delicate voice, the gentle crash of the waves, and the faint echoes of her footsteps. As she walked among the war’s carnage, her words were at once brutal and beseeching: “Beirut has become ruins, and ruins, with time, acquire beauty. But I cannot become accustomed to this… We used to say, again and again, that Beirut needed to be burned down. We talked and talked, endlessly. But now the reality is of another order. Beirut is my city — and someone destroyed it.”

Did Nadia choose Maroun for her visual requiem, or did he choose her for his? There are no clues in the public records, but it hardly matters. In the end, the prose could only be hers, and the camera’s eye his. Theirs was, in essence, a meditative duet on their beloved country’s torment.

In the clip: “They say the Lebanese have a short memory. I fear we will forget.”

Technically, the documentary hasn’t aged well. But in meaning, close to 50 years after its release, it has grown extraordinarily resonant and wise, even if mistaken in the glimmers of hope it chose to convey in parts. When the businessmen, industrialists, and bankers talk about their ingenuity and resilience, the effect is that of a press release. They still talk this nonsense today. But perhaps it was passably believable then, or a necessary moral boost in dire circumstances. Likely, it was also Maroun’s concession to Rafiq Hariri’s Bank Méditerranée (BankMed), which sponsored the documentary.

Poignantly, the passage of time has been much kinder to the authenticity of the film’s other characters. When the farmer and the fisherman are given the stage, the perennial yearning for the land and the sea is all there is. When Ziad Rahbani, musician and playwright, holds sway, he imparts the ugly truth, as if fulfilling the intellectual’s enduring true calling.

These juxtapositions may have gelled well in 1980; they certainly jar and shriek today.

As cruel irony would have it, on these Levantine landscapes of cruel ironies, exactly ten years after the poet left, the filmmaker went. At 43, he was almost her age when she passed. Baghdadi’s death was, in its own way, even more tragic than Nadia’s: he fell to his death onto the inner bed of his building from high up on a dark night on a dark stairway with no balusters. They were two of the war’s lettered chroniclers. Fate would not permit either one of them to witness its true legacy in the supposed peace that followed in 1990.

I did not live the 15-year war. My family went into exile well before it erupted in 1975. Amman was my home. But I have spent my youth in the simmering Lebanese disquiet that ensued. Many have taken to calling this post-strife period a kind of peace. It has been, and remains, anything but.

For this reason, I watched Whispers for the first time last week. So it was with Tueni’s poetry. They read like an accompaniment to the documentary. Context to this moment: contemporary and not vaguely recalled or unconsciously imagined. It’s a habit of mine in times of acute unease to seek interior narratives that render vital and immediate what was once intimately familiar before the hours and the years did their worst.

And time has done its worst to us Lebanese; a gift to those who have been doing their worst to the country since its inception. We live through the present in a state of fugue, as if yesterday was lived by someone else; as if its traumas are not ours, its blunders are someone else’s. In Stopped Earth, Nadia evokes her own very personal story, but it should be ours as well had we had any sense in us:

I survive my own ashes,

And know from memory the future of my time

Towards the end of the documentary, she muses about the madness of this place:

Majnoun Lebnain,( mad, this Lebanon).

Maybe its madness is what sets it asunder… Maybe its madness might save it yet. This country that was condemned, still lives. This country that has turned half-empty, still lives. This country that has become walls and alleys, still lives.

Mad, this Lebanon, because it does not want to die, because it still knows how to laugh.

Majnoun, Lebnain! (my translation).

In 1980, the fratricide was only five years old. Israel hadn’t invaded yet. Hezbollah had not been born. The thousands who would perish during the month-long siege and bombardment of Beirut in 1982 were still alive then, and many of the city’s neighborhoods were still upright. The bloodletting between and within sects would continue for another ten years. But by 1980, Beirut, its epicenter, already had the mood, look, and feel of a wrenched realm: desolate, filthy, and ravaged in the harsh glare of the sun, gin-soaked and heedless in the kind shade of the moon; its lost youth dancing to Marcel Khalifeh’s oud in private sitting rooms and swinging to sappy love songs on AUB’s green fields.

I look at all those young faces now and recognize mine in them. This was my generation. Nadia watches them with a smile suggesting hope and faith. I recognize my face in her today as I look upon this new generation of youth, and wonder if my failure will be theirs as well.

I never met Nadia. Force of war and distance. But the close family friendship meant that I knew things: the devastation wrought from an eight-year old daughter’s loss to a sinister disease; the scars it left in those who survived her; the redemption found in the birth of a son; the unbearable delicacy and indomitable strength of this woman that, like an emotional braid, interweave.

I would have liked to say that, in so many ways, this is also Lebanon’s story. Sadly, I am not able to.

First, an excerpt from Tueni’s My Country:

My country, costumed in uniforms and mere gestures,

condemns a flower for being a flower.

My country has a look of holiness and doubt.

My country is where men die when they have time for it.

My country’s law is a toy soldier.

My country begs me, “Take me seriously,”

then turns and goes berserk as a wounded pigeon.

My country is difficult as a long poem.

My country is softer than a lover’s shoulder.

My country’s like a child’s storybook

where the theme awakens Sleeping Beauty.

Equator, a new intellectual magazine, has just launched. Pankaj Mishra is one of its leading voices. That alone was enough for me to subscribe. Another compelling reason was Hisham Matar’s Pity and Fear, a masterful essay on Titian’s seven renderings of the myth of Actaeon and Diana, and what they echo in the more recent American horrors and humiliations in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Israeli genocide in Gaza:

“Everything is closed... We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” These words, spoken in 2023 by Israel’s then minister of defence, Yoav Gallant, were meant to justify his country’s actions in Gaza, as well as explain the terms on which his troops would proceed. Like Diana and Apollo, they see cruelty as ridicule and transformation. And like the Americans in Abu Ghraib, their appetite is unquenchable. It is unquenchable because they have misunderstood their situation.

Read the full essay here.

Subscribe now

Follow me On:

Goodreads

Instagram

Facebook

X