Hazem Saghieh

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…

The funerals of politicians and leaders grow out of their immediate occasion to become political spectacle — a platform for staking out public positions, issuing pledges, and shoring up particular states of affairs. Some funerals, deny any attachment to continuity and genuinely build the…

With President Sadat's initiative in 1977, and then his negotiations with the Israelis, a minority in Egyptian and Arab cultural life, with the great Fuad Zakariya perhaps its most prominent symbol, emerged. Those who belonged to this minority did not necessarily agree with everything Sadat had…

In its defense of Israel’s founding as a state, the Zionist movement spun countless false tales: from “A land without a people for a people without a land,” to the claim that the Palestinians had sold their land and thereby left their country voluntarily in 1948. We know that the “New - Israeli -…

The difficulty of reaching an agreement on an amnesty law has been a prominent news story in Lebanon. The reason for this difficulty lies in the distribution of those prisoners among three sectarian blocs and the insistence of each major sect’s representatives that their sect’s prisoners are the…

It could be said, until further notice, that in the event of a resumption of the American-Israeli war with Iran, whatever form it takes, an American victory would be difficult and an Iranian victory would be impossible. Disregarding wishful thinking and the marketing of rosy narratives, we find…

Some reproach those who advocate for the “state” against Hezbollah and its weapons on the grounds that these advocates are not genuinely seeking a state and that what they actually want is the perpetuation of a corrupt status quo that makes building any real state impossible. Many on the receiving…

There are some Lebanese voices, not necessarily coming from the same political camps, who warn Lebanese negotiators not to go as far as they can and stress their unequivocal preference for stopping at the bare minimum. These arguments could be made on solid grounds. Nothing undermines them more…

The Dutch-American political scientist Arend Lijphart developed what he called "consociational democracy," a democratic system in which the leaders of prominent social communities share power in order to ensure that no single group dominates the others. Accordingly, consociational democracy has…