Hazem Saghieh

Over the broad era of the past century and a half, the world witnessed four major developments that we have come to recognize as major setbacks. In 1914, the First World War broke out and "crowned" Europe’s "belle epoque" in a manner no one had anticipated. Indeed, since the Franco-Prussian War…

Contrary to the American political tradition, where "federalism" is a concept with positive connotations, the French experience offered a different meaning. The term may have been used as a slur for the first time following the French Revolution of 1789, when cities across France witnessed…

Two phrases often repeated by international organizations today compete whenever Sudan is mentioned: "It is the world’s biggest humanitarian tragedy" and "It is one of the world’s biggest humanitarian tragedies." Over three months ago, when the horrific figures had not been as high as they are now,…

The results of the European elections are yet another indication of the difficulties of tying the global solidarity movement with Gaza to mainstream European societies. If Donald Trump becomes president in a few months, his victory would only reinforce those difficulties. Even the term “youths,”…

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,…