Hazem Saghieh

Going over Lebanon’s modern history, one cannot fail to notice that every watershed moment was dovetailed with lots of debate and controversy that put countless ideas up for public discussion. In 1946, three years after Lebanon’s independence, for example, Michel Asmar established the "Lebanese…

A campaign was launched against Deputy Paula Yacoubian after she criticized the "ideological indoctrination" she considers more dangerous than weapons. The keyboard warriors' smear campaign released a flood of racist and misogynistic slurs: Yacoubian’s gender and Armenian heritage, to Hezbollah’s…

The Israeli strike that killed the Houthis’ prime minister and most of his ministers affirmed what had previously been affirmed by the assassinations of Iranian military leaders and scientists, and before them, of Hezbollah and Hamas’s leaders and senior security and military cadres. These weapons,…

More and more questions, all of them pertinent, are being raised about what Hezbollah is planning in response to the government’s implementation of its plan to establish a state monopoly on arms. Other questions that are also necessary, however, are not being asked- questions regarding the…

In today’s Levant, despite the scarcity of serious debate, "identity" often rears its head in conversations of our affairs. The highly patriotic, as well as the ardent humanists, might claim that this matter is altogether trivial, primitive, or reactionary. Everything that makes us human should…

Only a few of Yasser Arafat’s ideas were sound. One example of these rare beneficial convictions is that winning over a substantial segment of the Israeli public opinion was crucial. Although the current state of affairs does not help us make it, this claim deserves to be reaffirmed once, twice,…

The positions of the Lebanese Communist Party and its leadership are not totally comprehensible. Their despair and rage are appropriate, be it due to the resumption of Lebanon's subjection to Israeli occupation or because of their solidarity with the civilian victims of the genocidal war in Gaza…

American cinema introduced us to the archetype of the vigilante, and Clint Eastwood was probably the ultimate icon of this thrilling movie genre. The vigilante takes delivering justice, for both himself and his community, into his own hands; he refuses to turn a blind eye to any wrongdoing and…

The Lebanese government's announcement that "Hafez al-Assad Avenue" will now be renamed "Ziad Rahbani Avenue" was not just the replacement of a street’s name with another; it was the replacement of one conception of the world with another. That is probably why the decision drew so much controversy…

War, both as a concept and a tangible phenomenon, raises several contradictions. The most prominent of them is that it is a human act, in the sense that it is waged by human beings, but is also an inhumane act often mistakenly attributed to monsters. This human intellect has, since the times…