Goodbye, Lebanon
December 30, 2020
It’s cold yet sunny on this Christmas morning. Standing outside, I’m surrounded by a squadron of winged insects. Dots of light, they hover and meander in air tirelessly. Like drunk pinballs, they jerk…
Lebanon
Who is Destroying Lebanon and Why?
December 27, 2020
Within a few months, Lebanon, often misrepresented as "the only Arab democratic state" or even as the "Switzerland of the Middle East," has collapsed. Successively, popular demonstrations against the …
The US Plan for Weakening Hezbollah: a Civil War and the Exodus of the Christians
November 14, 2020
The Christian political and religious leaders of Lebanon are theologically distant from Twelver Shia; they have political and ideological objectives that fundamentally differ from those of Hezbollah. …
Lebanon Crisis: The Long Arm of French Neocolonialism Is Back
October 6, 2020
Lebanese politicians are scrambling at home and security chiefs are conferring abroad to form a new government in line with French-set deadlines. The new government is expected to embody a new politic…
The Comparisons Between Lebanon’s Civil War and America’s Situation Now Are a Step Too Far
October 6, 2020
Time was in the 1990s, even after 2000, that any country in danger of political chaos or “implosion” – a word I still instinctively loath, along with “epicentre” – was in danger of being “Lebanised”. …
President Macron’s Bad Play in Lebanon
October 4, 2020
Reacting to the explosion of the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, the Lebanese people and the international press saw it as an accident due to the corruption of the port authorities. For our part, af…
The Lebanese Knot
September 30, 2020
A month and a half after detonating several tons of ammonium nitrate into the port of Beirut, which caused crushing economic and human losses for the country, the situation in Lebanon is only getting …
How the Arab League Helped Dissolve the Palestinian Question
September 19, 2020
As one Gulf state after another embraces formal ties with Israel, some have looked to the Arab League to condemn normalisation. Yet to understand why the league will do nothing of the sort, one has to…