Hazem Saghieh

Every now and then, a public figure gets up to reconsider his previous positions on the Lebanese Civil War that erupted in 1975 and did not end until 1989. In saying that his generation had burdened Lebanon with more than it could bear, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam became the newest member of this…

Many hyperbolic and false claims, in both directions, have been made about the New York mayoral race and Zohran Mamdani’s victory. Contrary to the campaign that smacks of McCarthyism launched by his opponents, he is not a communist nor a jihadist, nor is he a threat to Americans. And contrary to…

The Levant, in the broader sense that includes Egypt, is currently moving in several contradictory directions. From the moment that the cessation of hostilities went into effect in Gaza, "corpses" have dominated the headlines. Counting, returning, and examining corpses, verifying the identities…

Is Iran changing? We might be on the eve of something of the sort. Since the murder of Mahsa Amini in the summer of 2022, overt defiance of the compulsory veil has been increasing. After the recent war, several clips of women challenging this law have gone viral on social media; some of them are…

Since the early-mid nineteenth century, with the reforms of Egypt’s Ibrahim Pasha and the Ottomans’ Tanzimat, two broad historical narratives have been wrestling over history and, by extension, reality. However, these two grand narratives have branched off into many sub-narratives, with new…

The question of arms and disarmament has, in the cases of Hamas and Hezbollah, taken a trajectory that does not align with the population’s suffering, nor the ethical obligations dictated by the population’s living conditions and the need to end that suffering. From the very beginning, the…

The great modern-era defeats of the Levant have never raised the issue of these countries’ territorial integrity or questioned it. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. As these recently established countries had been basking in their nascency and independence, military coups brought to…

Is there a Palestinian, or Arab, conception of Israel that we can look to for guidance in the future? Could such a notion keep pace with the diplomatic efforts currently underway? Two theories currently seem to dominate the discourse, especially in Lebanon: the first revolves around Israel as …

While the next phases of the Gaza agreement and its implementation are shrouded in ambiguity, the broad trajectory of the Levant, as we can gather from this agreement and others, is not obscure. The un-regrettable demise of an entire ecosystem of forces and ideas, after it had tasked itself with…

Only a few dispersed and reluctant voices were raised in opposition to the “Trump Plan” for ending the Gaza war. It is not that the voices believe in the plan, nor that its flawlessness exonerates it from rebuke. If the plan is indeed susceptible to being challenged, and it is, then far less…