If we are to believe the press reports and opinion polls, we should expect a dark day for Europe; that day is today. The continent’s elections, according to these reports and polls, could grant the far right more power than the centrist forces, whether on the right or left. This is not good news…

What Iraq and Lebanon have in common today is that both are the target of a combined assault: on the one hand, the lynching of the nation-state and the burial of its corpse deep beneath the ground to avert resurrection; on the other hand, the erosion or distortion of national history and culture,…

Today, Iraq seems to be both an identity searching for a location and a location searching for an identity. These two perplexed searches suggest two things: that the country is undergoing a foundational phase- in the sense that it seeks to align the location and the identity, and to link them to a…

When a child grows up and is sent to school, he becomes in need of a good teacher, not the good nurse who had assisted in his birth. That is the analogy Arthur Schopenhauer drew to argue that Europe had outgrown Christianity and the need for it. The problem with the Iranian regime, and similar…

After 1948, the Arab conflict with Israel was waged with an Arab nationalist outlook and sensibility. Satii al-Husari gave a famous response to those who said Israel had defeated seven Arab armies that year. The late nationalist intellectual believed that the reason for the defeat was precisely the…

"Apocalyptic" refers to that which describes the end of the world; however, in a broader and more comprehensive sense, it describes occurrences that do not normally take place and the non-occurrence of normally occurring occurrences that reason does not accept. Thus, by force of the apocalyptic,…

As it was gearing up for and then celebrating its anniversary, the State of Israel received blows that could provide new opportunities for the establishment of a Palestinian state. This comes at a time when the conviction that such a state is an indispensable requisite for regional stability is…

Many of those opposed to the student protests in the United States (and Western Europe) are awaiting the summer break, expecting it to end these protests. Some of those counting on the summer break argue that reduced military operations in Gaza and fewer images of death and destruction on social…

Let us remember what happened in Beirut in 2002 for a moment. Despite over two decades having gone by, recalling this juncture remains useful for understanding the present. Not only has the past not truly passed, it has become more present and painful with time, and its meanings have become more…

While colonialism, including the settler variant, is obviously an acute and vicious problem in Palestine and for Palestinians, this does not mean that decolonization is a universal issue that all of humanity must contend with. In fact, this assumption goes against the popular claim that…