Hazem Saghieh

Those calling for Hezbollah's disarmament, and for peace that ends the wars with Israel, rest their position on premises that are difficult to ignore. At the most basic level, the wars have exhausted Lebanon, taken a toll on its already frail national fabric, and played a crucial role in the…

A few days ago, Asharq Al-Awsat published a dispatch from Baghdad titled National Day Stirs Debate Over Independence in Iraq. "The independence debate" seems, at first glance, a strange phrase. The norm, especially in our societies, is for independence and its anniversary to be collective…

Like the famous Syrian "player," Libya's master of the "Jamahiriya" sowed the seeds of collapse during his phase of claimed greatness. Today Libya is geographically and institutionally divided. Its promised elections were never held, the UN-sponsored agreement among its parties has to be put to…

Going over the key milestones of modern Sudanese history, one finds an abundance of insights into its present tragedy. Unique layers of fragmentation combine with an exceptionally limited capacity to narrow this fragmentation through a state that would turn Sudanese society, however gradually, into…

The Houthi phenomenon manifests, in distilled form, the essence of Arabs’ defeats in building the modern state. The republic born of a military coup in 1962 was followed by a civil and regional war that lasted eight years and produced a regime whose hallmarks were corruption, patronage networks,…

When a rupture strikes a family and divorce becomes inevitable, a bitter husband and wife curse the “cursed” day of their marriage. As in that family, many Lebanese today openly declare, in various expressions, ruing the day. For estrangement, when it turns into a rupture, prompts a radical…

The way in which Israel dealt with the children's kites in Gaza points to a state of paranoia, one that takes a persecutory form and heightens the readiness for a nervous breakdown. To treat those toys as hostile drones resembles seeing a threat in every movement, a plot in every whispered word…

The ideas in circulation in Lebanon focus on the pressing present moment- the "now" - in a manner untouched by the slightest concern for "tomorrow," or for the effect that dealing with the "now" is bound to leave on tomorrow’s challenges. And because the immediacy of the "now" resembles the…

In treating the rounds of military confrontation in the region, one notices that the positions of the countries involved automatically bring their domestic conditions to the fore. Those internal conditions play a large role — if not a decisive one — in determining where states stand on the war and…

Some Lebanese are inclined to reject any peace with Israel - now, tomorrow, and the day after - regardless of who is in power. Others lean toward full peace and normalization with it, "now, now, not tomorrow," regardless of who is in power. Both faces of this impulse, rendering turn people into…