Hazem Saghieh

If wars and disasters shake ideas and convictions, how has no proposal that goes beyond immediate policy been put forward as this war rages on? The Levant is disintegrating, to say nothing about the exceptional suffering the Israelis are inflicting upon the Palestinians, or its humiliation of Syria…

To say that our history moves slowly is not a great discovery. We have seen, and continue to see, generation after generation living on "causes" that revert back to square one every time a solution that ends the struggle seems possible. This is particularly true of the Palestinian cause and the …

A few days ago, on the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Lebanese war, the culture of shirking responsibility for this conflict beamed once again. Several writers and observers have pointed to some manifestations of this culture whose prevalence has not been hindered by its corruption. The…

We often read two histories in history books, though one could, for a brief time, eclipse the other. One is the history of wars, which is studded with events like the conquests of Hannibal and Alexander, the Babylonian captivity, the Hundred Years' War, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Civil War,…

A combination of two intertwined tendencies is driving the behavior of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel: absolute exceptionalism and pre-emptive-ness that feeds on assumptions of the worst intentions. Exceptionalism, in this sense, amounts to suspending the ordinary, with its laws and norms, and…

In the writing genre that falls into the “What if?” category, the author presumes the occurrence of hypothetical past events that never happened, and then infers the implications. This is not a futile literary exercise. These texts point to what had, to this or that degree, once been real…

Some Lebanese take pleasure in concocting a narrative that presents the pursuit of disarmament that establishes a state monopoly on arms and the fight against corruption in public life as contradictory objectives. Mind you, there is plenty of glaring evidence that impunity for one sustains the…

A Turkish lady recently reproached her “Syrian friends,” in a Facebook post, because she had not received “a single message of solidarity” amid the turbulence in Türkiye. She concluded her post by saying that “expressing solidarity is not shameful” but rather “an ethical and political choice.” …

During and after the crimes on the Syrian coast, two voices were raised. One was the voice of the people (yes, the people- without quotation marks), and it broke into several sharp sectarian voices, each defaming the other. The second, the voice that concerns us here, was that of the elite, some of…

There is no longer a need for analysis to prove that, in the eyes of the Israelis, the war has not ended: neither in Gaza, where death and savagery have returned with full force, nor in Lebanon, where withdrawal is not on the table, nor in Syria, where territory is being chipped away and the skies…