The critics who found fault in some liberals rushing to mourn nationalism and pronouncing it dead were not mistaken. If we were to borrow from Plato’s allegory, with some alterations, life in the nineties looked more like shadows and blurred lines of real things, not real things themselves. …

After many Lebanese officials voiced similar positions, Prime Minister Najib Mikati took things further than his colleagues and seemed less embarrassed about his embarrassing position. Besides implicitly acknowledging that Hezbollah is the actual negotiator at the table in which the situation in…

In the mid-19th century, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard published his famous book “Either/or,” in which he argues that individuals must choose between an aesthetic life and a religious and spiritual life. “Either/or” consists of two volumes: one about the first life, or the first…

A few days ago, Riad Al-Turk (Syrian) and Karim Mroueh (Lebanese) passed away. The two men, who died a few days apart, were born in the same year, 1930. They were communists for decades and then became leading communist figures, before they walked back, each in his own way, from their commitment to…

If its link with the West is among the most robust sources of Israel’s power, it could potentially become among the weakest. In the face of the West’s intense military, political, and financial support, there is a Western paradigm that the Jewish state favors and gravitates towards. What is this…

After the October 7 operation, Zionism became the subject of two readings and projections: Either Zionism’s failure as a remedy for the Jewish question is concluded, a remedy that was claimed to be the only way to guarantee the Jews a homeland and state that safeguard their security, thereby…

Boosting the slim odds of a "two-state solution" is not an easy task. At the very least, we must consider the heavy encumbrance created by the presence of armed settlers in the occupied territories, as well as the Palestinians’ lack of a popular and dynamic political instrument. Of course, we also…

In politics, preferring intentions over outcomes, and action - any kind of action - over thinking, and choosing the noisy and tumultuous over the calm or measured, are among the defining characteristics of a romantic mindset. We thus see, for instance, that the call for establishing a …

The theory of an absolute "anti" that corresponds to an absolute "pro" is based on a way of seeing things that sums up the problems of the universe by attributing them to a single cause. However, this theory, which is founded on the view that one side is totally innocent and the other is totally…

There resides, in this war on Gaza, a far higher dose of magic than we are used to seeing in wars. Magic, here, refers to the attempt to convince us of things that our conscience and reason could never allow us to accept. It is, in this sense, not like “lying” that falsifies a piece of information…