Last week, Hezbollah secretary general Naim Qassem issued a statement in which he said his group would not disarm while Israel pursued its occupation of Lebanon and its attacks. He also described the Lebanese-Israeli framework agreement of last June as “devoid of legitimacy”, adding that it was the memorandum of understanding agreed by the U.S. and Iran, also signed in June, that represented a source of strength for Lebanon.

Mr Qassem went on to declare that Iran placed “ending Israeli aggression in Lebanon at the forefront of its priorities”. His remarks underlined how Hezbollah is operating on a different plane than the Lebanese authorities. While the latter have sought to contain Israel’s military actions by engaging in negotiations backed by the administration of US President Donald Trump, Hezbollah has hitched its wagon to Iran, and to an Iranian agreement with the Americans.

That’s not surprising, as Hezbollah today effectively appears to be run by Tehran. Since the group’s political and military cadre were devastated by Israel in 2024, and Mr Qassem took over from the assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, all the signs are that the group has been led directly by members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Since March 2, when Hezbollah entered the war between the U.S. and Israel on the one side and Iran on the other, it has suffered significant setbacks. The Israelis have occupied a large area in southern Lebanon’s border region up to the Litani River, and in some places beyond it, before systematically razing all Shiite-majority villages in that area.

In light of this, Hezbollah is facing rising, if understated, anger from within its Shiite community for the calamity that has befallen it. Given such circumstances, the only path open to the group is to remain close to Iran, which has imposed a headlock on the Americans in the Strait of Hormuz, in the hope that any future agreement will encompass Lebanon. Moreover, some Iranian funds have reportedly been released to help the Shiite community cope with its dire situation, so Hezbollah’s sole option is to navigate close to Tehran.

Iran is wagering on several things to revive Hezbollah’s fortunes. The first is the failure of the Lebanon-Israel framework agreement because of Lebanese inaction and Israeli intransigence. The group isn’t wrong. The Israelis have made only token concessions on the “pilot zones” dimension of the agreement. Israel is supposed to hand over certain occupied areas to the Lebanese army so that the latter can impose state authority there and replace that of Hezbollah.

Despite its claims to the contrary, Israel does not trust the Lebanese authorities to disarm Hezbollah, but prefers to unilaterally impose its own security order on neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon and Syria. In light of this, Iran and Hezbollah hope to revive the Lebanese resistance, which would give them a new pressure point against the Israelis.

A second wager derives from an Iranian understanding that countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but also Egypt and Jordan, seek to counterbalance Israeli dominance in the region. Amid the rise of regional middle powers and the probable military disengagement of the U.S. from the Middle East, a classic balance of power game is taking shape, whereby countries are seeking to prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon, such as Israel.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

The elections in Israel, whose outcome remains unclear, elicited much interest in Lebanon, where Israeli forces occupy a large swath of territory in the south of the country. However, for the Lebanese, the results are highly unlikely to change much when it comes to Israeli behavior, only confirming that Israel’s relations with its northern neighbor are defined by a ruthless security doctrine over which there appears to be a wide consensus in Israel.

In light of this, it’s worth recalling that months ago there were people still talking about a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel. However, from the first moment that voices in Washington began addressing this question—not least U.S. officials involved in Lebanese affairs such as Morgan Ortagus and Thomas Barrack—it was possible to smell a rat. The odor was all the harsher in that those warning of the potential risks were met with a blanket accusation that they were “opposed to peace.”

Yet two things were immediately obvious about the discussion of a peace agreement. First, that it was a talking point that had only really gained traction in Washington, while in Beirut there was little appeal among political actors, or even within society, to advance on this front. It was given prominence in some Lebanese media outlets, thanks to the myrmidons of the Washington-based Lebanese banker Antoun Sehnaoui, whose operatives in the U.S. capital, employing a classic information loop, pointed to such manifestations to justify their peddling of a peace agenda in their appearances before U.S. politicians.

Second, it was equally evident early on that the regional situation would not allow Lebanon to move ahead with peace talks. In October 2025, Syria’s president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, was in Saudi Arabia to meet with the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. At the meeting, a person familiar with what happened later revealed, the prince told Mr. Sharaa that while Saudi Arabia did not object to discussions over security guarantees between Syria and Israel, the Syrians should not negotiate a peace agreement. As a former senior Arab official interpreted it, Mohammed bin Salman probably did not want Syria to undermine the Saudi position on a peace agreement with Israel, embodied in the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which conditioned such an agreement on a “just solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem per UN General Assembly Resolution 194, and acceptance of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.

In light of this revelation, it was evident that what applied to Syria would apply equally to Lebanon, which would not be able to advance in peace talks without support from major states in the region. But there was also a broader issue to consider, namely that Israel’s war in Gaza had created regional dynamics that cast Israel in a different light than previously. Not only had the Israelis perpetrated a genocide in Gaza, provoking deep hostility among populations in the Arab world, Turkey, and Iran, but their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had spoken of a new Middle East shaped by Israel, behind which stood a cowed United States. The Israelis had also shown their indifference to U.S. regional alliances when they bombed a Hamas office in Doha in September 2025, even as Qatar was mediating in talks to reach a ceasefire in Gaza.

In a context of shifting regional power relations, a number of leading countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, but also Egypt and Jordan—sought to counterbalance Israeli military power, and hubris. This balancing game was not one in which Lebanon could have pressed forward with a peace project. Given the power discrepancy between the sides, any agreement would have de facto placed Lebanon in the Israeli camp. I had written about this extensively and one day last December received a call from an adviser to a senior Lebanese official. Initially, I misunderstood the purpose of the call, until it later became clear to me that I was being asked to describe my thinking to that official.

When we met, to my surprise I sensed that this individual had not factored the regional dimension into his thinking, or at least had not given it major consideration. That said, he did restate the official Lebanese position that the aim of talks with Israel was not peace, but to reach agreements on security guarantees and border demarcation. Yet I sensed that, behind his remarks, the official was quite willing to go much further than that. When I mentioned that negotiations would lead to Israeli hegemony in Lebanon, he stated, as a matter of fact, that Lebanon was already under Israeli hegemony. It was not reassuring to hear this, even if the phrase was correct.

Cut to several weeks later, after the United States and Israel had launched their attack on Iran, leading the Iranians, through Hezbollah, to fire several rockets into northern Israel on March 2. The same day and on March 3, Israel responded by ordering the evacuation of over 100 villages and towns south of the Litani River and in the Beqaa Valley, which they followed a few days later, on March 5, with an order that all inhabitants of Beirut’s southern suburbs leave their homes, creating a major humanitarian crisis. Faced with this deteriorating situation, on March 9 President Joseph Aoun called for direct negotiations with Israel to end Israeli bombings, a step endorsed by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.

Mr. Aoun’s and Mr. Salam’s initiative was understandable, as the Lebanese state had no cards to play, caught as it was in an Iranian-Israeli regional struggle for power. Ironically, the Lebanese and Israelis agreed on one thing, namely that a ceasefire in Lebanon should not be a part of any U.S.-Iranian agreement. For the Lebanese, this was a way of asserting their country’s independence and sovereignty vis-à-vis Iran. However, the outcome Beirut feared was precisely what came about on June 17, when the first clause in the memorandum of understanding agreed between Washington and Tehran stated that the sides undertook “to declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon …”

While the Lebanese president’s and government’s rationale made sense, it didn’t seem to occur to them that it was the United States that had (initially) approved of the memorandum of understanding, therefore the country Mr. Aoun and Mr. Salam expected to mediate in any negotiations with Israel. If this was not proof that the Trump administration was unconcerned about Lebanese sovereignty, then what was?

Such indifference would soon be reaffirmed when Lebanon and Israel signed a framework agreement on June 26. The agreement, which the United States sponsored and signed, imposed conditions solely on Lebanon—primarily the disarmament of Hezbollah—without demanding anything from the Israelis in terms of a withdrawal, other than a vague statement that Israel “declares that it has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon.” In other words, Lebanon’s sovereignty is conditional with regard to Israel: The Lebanese cannot secure an Israeli pullout unless and until they completely disarm Hezbollah, Israel approves this, and the two sides agree “additional security arrangements,” a sentence so imprecise that one can drive a Merkava tank through it.

Since that time, the Lebanese have sought to progress on the principal innovation in the framework agreement, namely the establishment of so-called pilot zones from which the Israelis will engage in “phased and verified redeployments,” allowing the Lebanese army to take the areas over and expand government control there. However, since June, the Israelis have largely limited implementing its conditions. Only in Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh did they pull back, and then only to the edge of the village, while the Israelis had never even been deployed in Srifa and Froun, the two other villages included in the pilot zone scheme.

Subsequently, the Lebanese sought to rely on U.S. pressure to expand the number of pilot zones, but to no avail. It is becoming increasingly evident that the Israelis are not interested in reaching an agreement with the Lebanese, and that the cycle of negotiations to which they agreed was primarily a bone tossed at the Americans to neutralize them. From the Israeli perspective, the distinct preference is for the unilateral imposition of a security order on Lebanon and Israel’s other neighboring countries or territories, such as Syria and Gaza. This requires no concessions, avoids the constraints imposed by formal agreements, and allows for perpetual war.

If there were any doubts about this, they were dispelled by Tamir Hayman, a former chief of the Israeli military’s Intelligence Directorate, writing for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, for which he serves as executive director. In an article, he reached several conclusions on Israel’s new security concept, five of which stand out.

The first is that Israel views peace as a means rather than an end, and that “any arrangement with Arab actors is temporary and deceptive.” The second is that Arab states are not genuine nation states, but “collections of ethnic groups lacking a shared history and a foundational national vision.” In light of this, “undermining their stability is viewed as a natural process.” Third, for Israel, “war is essential to national security, and cannot be replaced by a state of peace …” Fourth, Israel must no longer be dependent on the United States, which is a “declining power,” whose political and social shifts will ultimately lead it to abandon the Israelis. And a fifth conclusion is that Israel must adopt a forward defense strategy by enforcing “defense zones” that “enable Israel to move the war into enemy territory as quickly as possible.”

If Mr. Hayman is correct, then, there is not much the Lebanese can achieve through negotiations. Nor does he tie this security concept to one Israeli political party or alignment in particular, which means that regardless of who wins Israel’s elections, it is unlikely to alter very much how Israel addresses its security challenges. Paradoxically, this suits Iran just fine, as the Iranians have a similar concept of their security presence in the region—one based on exploiting divisions within Arab societies to advance their interests, that views conflict with Israel as open-ended, that prepares for a post-American order in the Middle East, and, until its failure in 2023–2024, that adopted a forward strategy of using allied forces in Arab countries as Iran’s first line of defense.

Israel has entered a period of uncertainty in the weeks, and even months, ahead. This leaves Mr. Aoun and Mr. Salam in limbo. The president’s big mistake was to trust the Americans and believe they could help him free his land from the Israelis. Neither President Donald Trump nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio will seek a showdown with Israel over Lebanon, certainly not after the Lebanese accepted a one-sided agreement committing them to disarming Hezbollah before Israel is required to do anything. Lebanon is stuck. The idea of breaking free from Iran’s hegemony, no matter how laudable, changes nothing about the fact that the country is now, instead, a prisoner of Israel’s hegemony.

In my latest article for The National (below), I address whether Israel actually seeks a peace agreement with Lebanon. I have believed for some time that the Israelis actually care little about one, instead preferring to put in place a system of hegemony that ultimately may compel the Lebanese themselves to push for peace, on Israel’s conditions. Coming to the rescue, is former IDF Intelligence Directorate chief Tamir Hayman, who has just published a paper on Israel’s new security approach for the Institute for National Security Studies. He basically confirms the arguments that I and others have made on this point.

This week, Lebanese and Israeli military representatives are meeting in Tampa, Florida, to discuss implementation of the so-called “pilot zones” plan to advance the Lebanese army’s disarmament of Hezbollah. It’s improbable that there will be any breakthroughs, but more significantly, it’s unlikely Israel actually seeks one.

Reportedly, the meeting is being held to discuss, among other things, the technical dimensions of the pilot zones, including a verification mechanism to report on the disarmament process. Also on the table may be discussions of the Lebanese refusal to conduct searches in private homes, where Hezbollah has allegedly stored large quantities of weapons, because this would represent a violation of the law. Article 14 of the Constitution, for instance, affirms “the citizen’s place of residence is inviolable”.

These technical matters notwithstanding, the reason the pilot zones scheme has not advanced significantly since the signing of June 26 Tripartite Framework Agreement between Lebanon, Israel and the US has to be sought elsewhere. It is mainly a consequence of Israel’s refusal to cede any territory to allow the Lebanese army to advance in the plan. This is largely tied to an Israeli desire to pursue a security doctrine in Lebanon that is independent of any of the constraints that an agreement would impose.

Israel appears to have accepted negotiations with Lebanon for two primary reasons: to placate the administration of US President Donald Trump, which pushed for such a process; and to have on paper an agreement with Lebanon that would justify Israel’s continued presence in Lebanon if Beirut failed to fulfil the central condition of disarming Hezbollah.

The Israelis have succeeded on both counts. The US administration is on board with Israel, putting no pressure on it to withdraw its forces from Lebanese land. At the same time, the June agreement imposed all conditions on the Lebanese side, above all Hezbollah’s disarmament, without requiring Israel to fulfil any of its own. Indeed, the term “withdrawal” is not even in the document, and there is no timetable for what the text describes as a progressive [Israeli] redeployment out of Lebanese territory.

The agreement makes vague promises on Israeli actions that can only be implemented in the case of prior Lebanese actions, without recognising Lebanon’s sovereign rights over its own territory. Its sovereignty over Israeli-occupied parts of the south is qualified. Israel doesn’t expect Lebanon’s government to disarm Hezbollah by force, so it now has a formal excuse to remain in the south indefinitely.

What we have, therefore, is a structurally flawed agreement that, by failing to gain traction, will give the Israelis wide latitude to pursue their own security agenda in southern Lebanon. Already, the Israelis have razed dozens of mainly Shiite villages, burned large swathes of agricultural fields and olive groves and bombed land using white phosphorous, thereby making it impossible to grow fruits and vegetables.

The objective here is similar to the one employed in Gaza, namely to make the southern border region uninhabitable, in what could very well be an open-ended occupation. This comes at a time when Israel’s security doctrine has changed radically, and differs significantly from what it was in the past.

In a much-discussed article for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, for which he serves as executive director, Tamir Hayman, a former chief of the Israeli military’s Intelligence Directorate, outlined what he saw as a new Israeli approach to security. This will have a fundamental impact on how Israel deals with Lebanon.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

Something immediately jolts you. Is it the eyes that are misaligned, or the left ear whose elephantine proportions suggest a boxing injury? Was the image generated by an artificial intelligence, or did the Department of State, dispenser of frugal brown bag lunches intercontinentally, really contract with an artist to sketch America’s 72^nd secretary of state with the Parthenon in the background, hoping to lend Marco Rubio Periclean gravitas?

The illustration in question can be found on the State Department’s Substack, above the text of a recent speech Mr. Rubio gave in Athens, Greece, titled “In Defense of Western Civilization.” The secretary was in the Greek capital to wrestle with Big Ideas, only to be greeted by an embarrassingly tactile ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has since been fired for allegedly asking a Republican donor to pay her $100,000 credit card bill in exchange for access.

Mr. Rubio’s speech was remarkable for its manipulations and elisions. However, what was more objectionable was the secretary’s refusal to acknowledge an alternative interpretation of the global context in which he spoke, which went to the heart of why he felt an urge to defend the West in the first place. But more on that shortly.

Manipulations first. In recounting the fall of Athens to the Persians under Xerxes in 480 BC, Mr. Rubio borrowed from events that are ongoing to imply that the Persians were barbarians, who “plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground …” The successors of the Persians are found in present-day Iran, a country “whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.” The secretary’s unsubtle point was that just as the Greeks of yore fought Xerxes to defend their civilization (from which he draws a direct line to the “empire of Christendom”), so too must their descendants today do the same in a war against Xerxes’ descendants.

Forgery of the past to justify current political agendas is an old trick of governments. Yet as Mr. Rubio enthused (quite legitimately) about the cultural heritage of the Greeks, he failed to mention the role of the Arabs in transmitting much Greek thought down through the ages. Indeed, in his famous critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, the British writer Robert Irwin observed that Western scholarship of the Orient, far from being merely an instrument for domination of the East as in Said’s telling, was frequently a way of providing access to certain Greek texts through their Arabic translations. Mr. Rubio missed that detail entirely, because it would not have played well alongside the Manichean cultural worldview whose small wars he and his boss, Donald Trump, have been fostering.

There was much unease running through Mr. Rubio’s speech, and it’s not hard to see why. In affirming the splendor of Western civilization, the secretary was hardly breaking new ground. Western civilization is indeed splendid, even if most other civilizations are as well. Mr. Irwin, who has really read more on the topic than Mr. Rubio, makes the point in his book that “Herodotus repeatedly acknowledged Greece’s various debts to other cultures, particularly those of Egypt and Phoenicia. Indeed, he believed that Greece had been originally colonized from the East and that the Spartans were the descendants of the Egyptians. Certainly the Persians were far less alien in his eyes than the Scythians,” by which Mr. Irwin meant the ethnic group of nomadic warriors from the steppes of Central Asia.

Drawing lines of separation between cultures or civilizations is the kind of fool’s errand in which modern-day politicians love to engage when trying to push back against their national insecurities, while also exploiting the fears of their populations for political ends. We are living in an era that has generated a lack of confidence in the West, in a moment of affirmation by non-Western countries that the centuries of Western domination of the international order are nearing an end. The new peer competitor of the United States is an Asian country, China, which just over a century ago was humiliated by Western powers after what was known as the Boxer Rebellion. The United States would soon bar all Chinese immigrants through the Immigration Act of 1924, whose racist underpinnings were described by Daniel Ockrent in his unsettling The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America.

Western anxiety is now back to vindicating the targeting of immigrants, legal and illegal, to the United States and much of Europe, yet it is also anchored in a sense of ambient decline. The enemy is said to be at the gates, but the reality is more prosaic: to a significant extent, many of the problems Western countries face are generated at home, above all because of the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege in their societies. The capitalist system as it exists today, by widening inequalities, is in profound crisis. However, Mr. Rubio found it useful to defend the West as a place of “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention,” while lamenting that Western societies today “design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.” No clearer statement has been uttered by a member of the Western ruling elites to justify inegalitarian principles on which to base societies.

But if Western elites like Mr. Rubio have now elevated inequality to a cultural creed, the absence of egalitarianism internationally is now generating dynamics that may lead to payback. Which brings us to Gaza, and the astonishing inability of those elites to understand that the continuing slaughter in the territory has represented a fundamental rupture in international relations. When Mr. Rubio defends Western civilization; when Benjamin Netanyahu describes Israel as a “protective wall” for Western civilization, a country “standing up to the barbarians who threaten our common civilization”; when such divisive words are heard, in much of the world (and quite a few places within the West itself), the reaction is one of revulsion.

Gaza has highlighted the inherent hypocrisy at the heart of the Western liberal self-image—one supposedly built on a superstructure of human rights, humanitarian values, and freedom. What most people around the world saw, however, was a systematic process of mass murder, one whose aims were declared beforehand and whose carnage was rationalized afterward. That the vast majority of Western governments (with notable and commendable exceptions) either contributed to the bloodshed or did nothing to stop it has greatly discredited the West globally. So broad a brushstroke may seem unreasonable, unfair, but Gaza also unleashed entrenched resentments that had long been disregarded in a Western-dominated world.

Only now are detailed accounts being published on the way Western governments indirectly participated in the killings in Gaza. In his recent book, Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Oborne wrote a stinging denunciation of how the United Kingdom continued to supply weapons to Israel, even as it massacred Palestinian civilians. Akbar Shahid Ahmed has done the same on the Biden administration in Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza. For Ahmed, the administration’s policy “was dominated by timidity, ambition, callousness, and staggering hubris.”

To watch Mr. Rubio marinating in Western self-congratulation on the back of what many in the world regard as a crime for the ages underlines the extent to which the secretary was uninterested in engaging with the mood outside his borders. That’s not surprising for someone who has so radically purged his department of expertise. And the arrogance crosses party lines. In Mr. Ahmed’s book, the author recounts how Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security advisor, was told that the U.S. position on Gaza was alienating influential countries such as South Africa, to which Sullivan purportedly replied, “Fuck South Africa,” referring to Pretoria’s opposition to the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2012. Similar invective must have been employed when the South Africans took Israel to the International Court of Justice over Gaza. Evidently, for certain U.S. officials there are states who are there to be seen but not heard.

Gaza and the horrified reactions the killing provoked internationally are why some Western officials are so keen to defend their civilization these days. They protest too much. In two years’ time, Mr. Rubio may make a new bid for the presidency. He cannot escape the stigma of Gaza and knows it, just as Biden’s people cannot do so either. The dead will haunt these soulless, unprincipled Washington organisms for a long time. The secretary’s way out of this dilemma is to portray himself as a handmaiden of Western civilizational continuity and rally to his side those who fear a world in which the United States finds itself increasingly vulnerable to “shithole countries” fed up with a global political arrangement in which they have little say.

But after Gaza, how can anyone who shared in that terrible crime claim credibility for speaking about civilization—Western civilization no less? That Mr. Rubio could not grasp this in Athens was hardly surprising, but it was revealing. That’s why his speech will have convinced no one outside an echo chamber of ideological partisans who also view themselves as defenders of the West, but in reality are hastening its demise.

Rozina Ali is a journalist and contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and a fellow at Type Media Center. She is a past fellow at New America and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She was previously a senior editor at the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. She is author of the recently published Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia (Penguin Random House, 2026), which was longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award. Diwan interviewed Ali in early October to discuss her new book.

Michael Young: How widespread is Islamophobia in the United States? You conclude your book by writing, “The truth is that it is here,” before adding that it is one story of America. However, you also say there is another story. Can you elaborate?

Rozina Ali: First, I should explain that I wrote this book in part to prove that anti-Muslim discrimination exists in the United States—many Americans do not recognize it to be the case or they believe it to be a fabricated charge. The fact of anti-Muslim prejudice is necessary to establish alongside explaining how and why it has grown worse over the past decades, which is why I concluded with the line “the truth is that it is here.” It’s also true that Islamophobia isworse than in the past. The vitriol directed against Muslims and Islam by senior policymakers (including from the president) and commentators is at a level I’ve never witnessed before.

That said, the United States is a vast place, physically and politically. In New York, for example, the anti-Muslim messaging that was lobbed against Zohran Mamdani failed to scare voters. Though such bigotry continues, he maintains impressive levels of popularity. In Michigan, too, we are seeing that similar anti-Muslim rhetoric has not captured the attention of a wide base of American voters as it did in the past. This is not just because of a Mamdani effect, but a result of an amalgam of shifts over the past several decades: Muslims rising in political and public spheres; growing disillusionment among the American public with their policymakers; and a willingness among Americans to be critical, and hear criticism, of U.S. foreign policy. As I argue in my book, widespread Islamophobia has mutated and is a result of decisions we’ve made along the way. This also means it does not have to be a perennial problem in American society.

MY: How do your personal experiences as a Muslim American feed into your book?

RA: A reader of my book may notice that I hardly show up in the narrative—I make an appearance only a few times through its pages, because I tried to approach the reporting of this book as an investigative journalist. But I also would have done a disservice to my readers by ignoring my background. It was important to establish at the beginning that being Muslim American has informed my political understanding of the United States and my place in it, and why I ultimately embarked on this project. Still, the entire book is shaped by my knowledge that Muslim Americans have different ways of practicing religion, and also that faith informs their political interpretation of the world in wildly varying ways. This fluency allowed me to challenge American assumptions about Muslims as I interrogated the U.S. counterterrorism surveillance apparatus, the ways in which terrorism cases were litigated in the courtroom, or how policymakers and the public discussed Islam.

MY: You open the book with a discussion of Abdeen Jabara, one of the early representatives of the Arab American community, and his surveillance by the government. Do you make a distinction between Islamophobia and what we can call Arabophobia? In other words, did official suspicion morph over time from one directed against Arabs, largely for political reasons, into suspicion of Muslims, because of a conviction, no matter how fallacious, that it is the Muslim religion itself that made them a risk?

RA: There’s a tendency in the United States to categorize discrimination into groups, which is probably reinforced by how we collect and measure hate crime data. The reality is more complex. Islamophobia and Arabophobia can be distinct, but they also intersect, and certainly do so in the minds of people who see Arabs and Muslims as related. Most Americans, I garner, still do not know that many Arabs are not Muslims; and that most Muslims are not Arabs. That was true of many in law enforcement as well.

That said, the through-line between official discrimination against Arabs and that against Muslims is that both groups were viewed as a national security threat, with ties to foreign militant groups. Official suspicion expanded from a targeted monitoring of Arabs in the 1970s and 1980s, to Muslims more broadly in the 1990s, for various reasons, including that more non-Arab Muslims were moving to the United States, political Islam was on the rise in parts of the world, and the U.S. government began to view Islamic terrorism as its prime enemy after the fall of the Soviet Union. By September 2001, suspicion and monitoring of Muslim communities in the United States had already been underway for years.

Full interview at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

On September 30, the official White House rapid response account on X reproduced research from the libertarian Cato Institute showing that legal immigration from majority-Muslim nations was cut by 96 per cent after U.S. President Donald Trump took office. Nineteen of the countries included Arab countries, countries in the broader Middle East and North Africa, and Arab League member states in East Africa, such as Somalia, Sudan and Djibouti.

By highlighting this information, the Trump administration clearly regarded such a figure as a sign of success – an effort to implement Mr Trump’s failed “Muslim ban” of 2017, but this time directed against legal immigrants, not all Muslim travellers to the U.S.

That the administration could take pride in keeping Muslims out of the country, most of them citizens of states with which the U.S. has close political relations, was revealing. It showed that Mr Trump still regards Muslims as legitimate and popular targets for what increasingly appears to be his brand of ethno-nationalism, at a time when the American public remains highly polarised on the issue of Muslims and Muslim immigration.

According to a Pew Research Centre poll conducted in spring this year, 43 per cent of U.S. adults said Muslims were less patriotic than other Americans, against only four per cent who said they were more patriotic; 42 per cent said Muslim Americans were having a negative impact on the country, against only 17 per cent who said they were having a positive impact.

Recently, the journalist Rozina Ali published a highly regarded book on Islamophobia in the U.S., in which she examined it through the lens of four families. While she was caustic about the extent of discrimination that Muslims have faced, especially since the 9/11 attacks, she closed her book on a fair-minded conclusion. While Islamophobia endured in America, she wrote, “it is also true that it is met with a refusal to accept it”.

Indeed, the White House’s tweet received rapid pushback. David Biers of Cato, whose research led to the figures mentioned by the White House, responded by saying: “Thanks for citing my work. You are violating the law and harming Americans while making the country less safe, less free and less prosperous.” Mr Biers went on to point out that “Immigrants from majority-Muslim countries are more highly educated, work in higher-skilled occupations, and have reduced federal, state and local deficits by $1.1 trillion over the last 30 years”.

Such attitudes raise questions about a matter that may seem distinct from Islamophobia in the U.S., namely the durability and strength of the U.S.-dominated geopolitical order in the Middle East. The notion that American attitudes towards Muslims at home should affect whether Pax Americana in the region can endure is not evident. U.S. security connections are about interests; immigration is about perceived social compatibility. The two need not be linked.

They need not be linked, but usually are. The great strength of the Nato alliance was that the U.S. anchored it in shared values with the countries of Western Europe. These endured even after the alliance lost much of its impetus and was declared “brain dead” by French President Emmanuel Macron. Similarly, the EU has been built around common principles, as has the Aukus security partnership of the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

Ian Lustick holds the Bess W. Heyman chair emeritus in the Political Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches Middle Eastern politics, comparative politics, and computer modeling. He is a recipient of awards from the Carnegie Corporation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Sciences Research Council. Eli Clifton is an investigative journalist who focuses on money in politics and U.S. foreign policy. He is a cofounder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he serves as senior adviser. Together, the two recently authored Israel’s Lobby: America in the Grip of a Foreign Power (One Signal Publishers, 2026), examining the Israel Lobby in the United States and its influence on political life, civil liberties, and U.S. foreign policy. Diwan interviewed the authors in late September in order to discuss their book.

Michael Young: In your book, you make two central points about the Israel Lobby that I found very interesting. First, you situate it in the shadow of George Washington’s comments on factionalism in the United States and his warnings about avoiding foreign entanglements. Second, you examine the lobby in the context of the change in election financing laws since the Citizens United Decision of 2010. Ian, can you address the first part of the question, on George Washington, and outline what you argue in your book? Eli, can you address the matter of election financing and its impact on the lobby?

Ian Lustick: In his farewell address, our first president offered a profound analysis of American politics and issued a prescient warning. He noted that at the heart of our constitutional system was the expectation that factional interest could not be tamed by exhortations to think only about what was good for the country as a whole. Only by allowing every faction to mobilize and fight for its narrow self-interest could each narrow self-interest be checked by the mobilization of the countervailing power of those of opposing interests. Government policies would evolve as a resolution of forces, producing imperfect but good-enough outcomes.

However, Washington warned, this would not work in foreign affairs. Americans would not and, he thought, should not, care much about the affairs of other countries. So, if there arose a faction or a group within the United States that had a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country it would exert an influence on American policies that would not be naturally checked by any opposing faction. That would result in the unnecessary and disastrous involvement of the nation in foreign disputes and radically distort the use of its resources. He therefore argued that, because of the structure of American democracy, politics should stop at the water’s edge: foreign policy, he argued, should not be a subject of domestic political dispute. He had in mind Jeffersonian Democrats who had a particular love for the French Revolution, but his analysis and warning were much more general than that and he anticipated, rather impressively, how distorted U.S. foreign policy would be whenever there arose a domestic faction with a passionate attachment to a foreign country—whether that country be Israel or Cuba.

Eli Clifton: The Citizens United and SpeechNow decisions in 2010 opened the floodgates to our campaign finance system. For Israel’s Lobby, this provided an opportunity to directly coerce, intimidate, incentivize and punish elected officials. Public support for Israel was diminishing as of the early 2000s, but the court decisions gave the lobby a means of pushing back against increasing calls for a recalibration of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Just nine plutocrats who prioritized status quo policies supporting Israel (as evidenced through their public statements and/or philanthropy) contributed over $1.7 billion to campaigns between 2012 and 2024. These individuals, many of whom regularly topped the lists of top donors in each election cycle, effectively backfilled the loss in grassroots support for Israel, replacing it with enormous campaign spending.

MY: When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their book on the Israel Lobby in 2007, the topic was widely regarded as taboo, and in the case of Walt likely had damaging consequences for his career. Is it easier to write about the subject today, and what has been the backlash to your book from the lobby and its allies?

IL: A couple of pieces have been published accusing us of antisemitism, but so far, in general, the Israel Lobby has kept quiet about the book. Now that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and the Israel Lobby are real issues in the public mind, the calculations that the lobby must make are different than they were in 2007 when the Mearsheimer and Walt book was published. At the time, the various arms and mouthpieces of the Israel Lobby could flood the space with smears of the authors and the book as antisemitic, thereby ignoring the actual argument of the book or its evidence and discouraging people from engaging or even, really, reading the book. Now the lobby fears the increased attention to our argument and evidence that would result from attacks on us, in part because we both are Jewish, but mostly because the public is now convinced that there is much they need to know about the Israel Lobby that they do not.

MY: What is it about the Gaza war in particular that appears to have changed the entire discussion of Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States?

IL: Since World War II, the Holocaust, and the slogan of “Never Again for Anyone,” have become deeply held and emotionally powerful elements in the American public consciousness. Anything that looks like genocide, such as the systematic destruction of a society or the slaughter of thousands of men, women, and children, triggers thoughts of the Holocaust and the moral imperative to stop genocidal projects and punish the perpetrators. No action Israel has ever taken comes close to what I call “October 8,” or what Israel did after the October 7 attacks against Israeli communities located near Gaza—the three years of slaughter inflicted on Gaza’s Palestinians. Despite severe self-censorship in the U.S. media, the scale of this campaign was so large and its intent to inflict punishment so obvious, that large segments of the American public felt real horror toward Israeli actions and real sympathy for the Palestinian victims.

MY: One of your main arguments is that the lobby has changed tactics, from a previous focus on persuasion to one of repressing and blacklisting anyone critical of Israel, in that way reshaping American laws on freedom of expression. Can you explain what you mean?

IL: The Mearsheimer and Walt book, 20 years ago, focused on the serious compromises of U.S. national interests abroad consequent to the political clout of the Israel Lobby. Our book makes the same argument. We also link costly failures of American foreign policy in the Middle East—including a series of humiliating diplomatic failures to coax Israel toward some kind of compromise with the Palestinians and, most recently, a disastrous war against Iran—to the influence of Israeli governments and Israel’s Lobby.

However, what is new is the lobby’s attack on American liberties and, indeed, on American civil society. In the last two decades Israel’s policies became so extreme that even the lobby came to realize it could not win arguments before the American public by defending them. The objective thus shifted to preventing public debate on issues, first by attacking the arguments of critics as antisemitic (the infamous “three D’s”—marking the “sins” of delegitimizing, demonizing, or using a double-standards when referencing Israel); then by using a hoax, the so-called “International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism,” to label people who make those arguments as antisemites; and most recently by attacking institutions that produce people who make those arguments as antisemitic—especially colleges and universities. As Israel has become crazier and crazier, the blunt use of intimidation, blacklisting, Orwellian manipulation of language and data, and the ruthless use of state power to prevent public protest and discussion have become more apparent, more brutally contradictory to American norms, and more reminiscent of the McCarthy era than anything we’ve seen since in American politics.

MY: following on from the previous question, you take a very critical view of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. What is it in the definition that leads you to describe it as a “hoax”? And even assuming you are right, hasn’t it been effective in chilling criticism of Israel, or has it?

IL: Yes, it is a hoax, and yes it has been effective. It is an effective hoax. Its effectiveness has been due, not to its analytic or descriptive utility, but entirely to the political power of Israel’s Lobby and its enormous investment in this device for preventing, punishing, and even criminalizing speech about Israel that it does not like. There are three reasons we call it a hoax. First, it fronts itself as a “working definition” of antisemitism, but it is in reality not a definition of anything. The definition of any definition is that a line is drawn around a category so you know, by applying that definition, what counts as within the category and what does not. A triangle is, for example, a “three-sided polygon within a two-dimensional space.” The IHRA formula begins by saying that “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as …” By saying “may be,” the formulation contradicts itself. It can’t be a definition of anything. One simply cannot define a triangle as a polygon which “may have” three sides! That would mean that four or five or six sided polygons, or even ham sandwiches, might be triangles!

Second, it’s a hoax because it did not originate with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance at all. It was drafted in New York by a group of Israel advocates and theorists who treat Israel as the “collective Jew.” The lead drafter was Kenneth Stern, who worked for the American Jewish Committee. He has lately written an entire book repudiating the formulationhe worked so hard to produce because of how widely it has been used to smother debate by using false accusations of antisemitism.

Third, it is a hoax because it is self-contradictory. It insists that describing Israel as racist is antisemitic, while allowing other countries to be called racist. In other words, it insists that a double standard must be used when it comes to Israel to avoid the charge of antisemitism, but then also says that using a double standard when referring to Israel is itself antisemitic!

Full interview at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

When Lebanese President Joseph Aoun visited the White House in July, he told U.S. President Donald Trump of the “urgent need for a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory”, describing it as “an essential step to consolidate stability and enable the Lebanese state to extend its full sovereignty exclusively through its own forces”.

Mr Aoun’s remarks affirmed the extent to which he was relying on U.S. pressure to persuade the Israelis to make concessions in Lebanon, and ultimately leave the country. He underlined to Mr Trump that such an outcome “will be your legacy”.

Perhaps the Lebanese President didn’t have a choice other than to appeal to the Americans, since only Washington has leverage over Israel. However, it’s probably also true that little will come of this, since the Trump administration played a central role in mediating a Lebanon-Israel framework agreement last June that placed all conditions of implementation on Beirut, with no Israeli commitment to pull out of Lebanon.

The situation in Lebanon has entered what appears to be a long stalemate, or worse. Mr Trump is the prisoner of a war with Iran that he is not winning, and his margin of manoeuvre is limited. Recently, he reportedly rebuffed the Saudis who had asked for assistance against Yemen’s Houthis rebels – yet another moment when Washington has failed to come to the Saudis’ assistance after the attack against the Abqaiq-Khurais oil facility in 2019.

Moreover, this is a key political moment in the U.S., with Mr Trump facing tricky midterm elections in the House of Representatives and Senate in November. Therefore, he will not anger major donors who support Israel by putting pressure on the Israelis to be more accommodating in Lebanon, especially when the deal his administration helped negotiate was so favourable to Israel. The Israelis could simply cite the accord to push back against any U.S. requests.

Mr Aoun not only overestimated Mr Trump’s desire and latitude to secure a deal in Lebanon, but he also appears not to have grasped that the U.S. has no Lebanon policy. The Americans do have a desire to see Hezbollah disarmed and its areas taken over by the Lebanese army, but that represents a wish list more than a policy. There is no serious thinking about mechanisms to bring this about or how to preserve internal stability. Nor is there much thought about engaging with Iran, or about Lebanese reforms that may give more power to the Shiite community in exchange for Hezbollah’s disarmament.

Interestingly, two U.S. envoys to Lebanon – the ambassador in Beirut, Michel Issa, and the ambassador in Turkey, Tom Barrack – are on record as saying that a solution in Lebanon either has to involve Iran or is tied to regional dynamics, including talks between Washington and Tehran. Both men were criticised for such statements, particularly by Israel’s supporters in the U.S., but they weren’t wrong.

However, neither Mr Issa nor Mr Barrack is a major mover in Washington, even less so when their recommendations hit up against Israeli preferences. While they are both friends of Mr Trump, and of Lebanese origin, there is no way that they will be able to turn Lebanon into a priority for the President if he senses this will place him on a collision course with powerful political funders close to Israel.

Sensing that Lebanon’s negotiations with Israel are stalled – negotiations on which he has staked much of his reputation – Mr Aoun has sought alternative ways to generate momentum. Last week, at a meeting in Paris, the Lebanese President urged donors to accelerate their efforts to hold an international conference to help the Lebanese army and internal security forces, allowing for the establishment of a strong state in Lebanon “for the first time”. He added: “The opportunity may not repeat itself.”

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

The article below is based on a recent presentation of mine at a conference on the Middle East organized by the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament.

As the United States flounders in its conflict with Iran, as the master illusionist Donald Trump pursues his efforts to convince the American public (and others) that his shipwreck of a military operation conceals ultimate victory, the good news is that all this is accelerating movement away from Pax Americana in the Middle East.

The U.S. order in the region has been built on a foundation of purported security arrangements, reinforced after the end of the Cold War by U.S. unilateralism and regional hegemony. Yet this order is collapsing before our very eyes, and the situation has reached this point because of three major ruptures visible since the beginning of the conflict in Gaza and the U.S. and Israeli focus on bringing about regime-change in Iran.

The first rupture is a moral one. Israeli’s continuing slaughter of the population in Gaza, which has been armed and abetted by the United States and several of its allies, has led many people in the Middle East to conclude, rightfully, that the U.S. order is built mainly on Israeli scaffolding, in which the wellbeing of those in the region, Palestinians in particular, is secondary. It was the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra who described the horror of Gaza as a “final rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945”; and it was Mishra, too, who recalled that George Orwell had written that Palestine was a “color issue.”

To many Arabs, Gaza remains a color issue. It is clear to many people that Palestinians do not appear to have the right skin color to enjoy the universal human rights afforded to others whom Western countries, or rather their elites, identify as worthy—whether Israelis on October 7 or Ukrainians in their war with Russia. Israel’s intention to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population of Gaza is reiterated daily by Israeli officials, with the defense minister, Israel Katz (himself a verbal depository of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity), stating again earlier this month that his government was “organized and prepared to get [the Palestinians] out—by sea, by air, by every way possible.”

On what basis can the United States establish a durable security order in the Middle East if it provides no security, as the ongoing war with Iran has proven, while at the same time showing utter disinterest in the people of the region and their aspirations? That is why there is and always was an inherent fragility in Pax Americana.

Saudi Arabia sensed this in September 2019, when Iran bombed the Abqaiq-Khurais Aramco oil facility, and the United States did nothing in response. This led to a realization among the Saudis that they had to fend for themselves—a message the latest war with Iran has only hardened, as Tehran continues to bomb countries throughout the Gulf. One outcome of this insight came in March 2023, when Saudi Arabia and Iran signed the Beijing Agreement, seeking détente in their relationship. In doing so, the Saudis did not reject the United States, but showed they would no longer place all their chips on a U.S. security umbrella.

The Beijing agreement also represented implicit recognition by the Saudis that a policy to isolate and overthrow the Iranian regime was not feasible, despite the fact that the United States had spent decades trying to do so. Therefore, the moral rupture mentioned earlier was now accompanied by what we might call a strategic rupture, albeit a somewhat ambiguous one initially, because the Saudis still tried to secure a more solid U.S. commitment to their security. However, in recent months, Iran’s destruction of the large network of military bases upon which the U.S. military presence had depended has doubtless confirmed Saudi doubts.

After Beijing, the Saudis did not immediately give up hope that the Americans could provide them with security guarantees. Two main items on the Saudi list of conditions for signing a peace agreement with Israel was that Washington and Riyadh conclude a mutual defense pact, as well as U.S. assistance on a civilian Saudi nuclear program. Israel’s pitiless bombing of Gaza put the whole process on hold as the Saudis sensed they could not easily contain the domestic discontent of agreeing to peace with an Israel that many Arabs regard as genocidal.

It was evident early on what the United States sought to achieve by bringing the Saudis into the so-called Abraham Accords. While several Arab countries had signed peace agreements with Israel, with the Saudis on board, the project would have taken an altogether more consequential turn. For Washington, Arab-Israeli reconciliation served as the political spine of an imagined post-American order in the Middle East, which was to be anchored in an Israeli military spine. This new dispensation would allow the United States to disengage its armed forces from the region while simultaneously maintaining significant regional influence—to counter China.

With the Gaza war and Benjamin Netanyahu’s hubristic comments on the emergence of a new Middle East shaped by Israel, many countries in the region that understood the import of the Abraham Accords, suddenly didn’t like what they saw. The Israelis reoccupied Gaza and now want to expel its population. In 2025, they sought to marginalize Qatar by striking a Hamas office in Doha. They occupy parts of southern Syria and have pushed for the country’s fragmentation. They recognized Somaliland to build a strategic presence at the mouth of the Red Sea, one of Saudi Arabia’s vital maritime passageways. They invaded Lebanon and are now trying to impose a permanent Israeli presence in the country, an advantageous peace deal, civil conflict, or all the above. They pushed the United States into a war with Iran, hoping they could be rid of the current regime, only to see their plans thwarted.

The major countries in the Middle East have zero interest in becoming secondary actors in a movie written by the United States and Israel, nor do they want to place their security in Israeli hands. This constitutes the third rupture with the American order, namely with a notion prevailing since the end of the Cold War that desirable outcomes in the region have to pass through frameworks imposed by the United States—frameworks that are ultimately aimed at upholding U.S. power.

Full article at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

On September 4, Israel announced that it had gained effective control of Ali Al Taher ridge, which overlooks the southern Lebanese town of Nabatiyeh. This came as a surprise, since many observers had expected a major battle for control of the heights, which housed an extensive tunnel network and allegedly an operational command centre for Hezbollah.

According to officials cited by Reuters, Iran had warned the US that if the Israelis tried to seize control of Ali Al Taher, it would respond forcefully. That is what made the sudden Israel announcement odder, accompanied by the absence of denials from Hezbollah. It led to speculation that some sort of deal had been worked out to allow the Israelis to take over the facility. The news in Beirut last week was that Ali Al Taher was surrendered in exchange for allowing Iranian advisers trapped in its tunnels to evacuate with combatants.

The fall of Ali Al Taher generated much discussion in Beirut, because the state had asked Hezbollah to hand over the facility to the Lebanese army instead of allowing Israel to occupy it. Hezbollah refused. This led one journalist to write: “To avoid giving a symbolic victory to the Lebanese Army, [Hezbollah] gave a genuine victory to Benjamin Netanyahu. To save … its weapons, it sacrificed the land these weapons were supposed to save.”

The journalist’s point was that, at a time when the Lebanese authorities seek to impose a monopoly over weapons, and Hezbollah refuses to comply, the group would have created an unwelcome precedent (for itself) by handing over Ali Al Taher to the army. Such a step would have legitimised similar handovers in other parts of Lebanon not occupied by Israel. The problem is that this reasoning allowed Israel to take the ridge, not the Lebanese government, which did further damage to Iranian and Hezbollah’s credibility in Lebanon.

One can’t help but underline the bankruptcy of Hezbollah’s position. The group is directly controlled by Iran, and its principal preoccupation is to push back against the Lebanese government and its legitimate demand to be the only party taking decisions on war and peace in the country. The Iranians fear that if this happens, it will leave Tehran with no military leverage over Israel.

However, this reasoning has isolated Hezbollah inside Lebanon, even if many in the Shiite community continue to sympathise with the group, and would see attacks directed against it as targeting the community as a whole. Yet that doesn’t mean Shiites are not aware of the terrible price of Hezbollah’s having opened a front against Israel last March 2.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

The fiasco that is the U.S. war against Iran has resuscitated a question that was first raised a decade and a half ago: Would it be a good thing for the United States to accelerate its disengagement from the Middle East, where it has dominated since the end of the Cold War?

There are at least three reasons for why the answer from the region itself should be yes. The first is that the prevailing U.S. model for dealing with the Middle East—based on security dominance—has failed. The conflict with Iran has shattered the belief that the United States can provide a credible protective umbrella for the Gulf countries. The U.S. basing system has been wrecked by Iranian missiles, forcing American forces to withdraw to Jordan and Israel. Without such a network of bases in place, and given that Tehran has shown its effectiveness by neutralizing them, Washington’s ability to persuade the Gulf states to revive these facilities to contain Iran has been greatly weakened.

This security-focused model was momentarily replaced during the invasion of Iraq by an equally short-sighted approach that could effectively be described as neo-imperial. It is remarkable how American thinking in the broader Middle East has been shaped by two types of behavior deeply resented in the region—an Israeli and a British one. From the Israelis, the Americans borrowed a taste for using violence to reshape political realities—a belief that if you just put enough military pressure on the region’s countries, they will fold like a cheap suit. However, Iran, itself a neo-imperial power in many regards, showed what it could achieve by coming to the fight prepared, and using its advantages in well-calculated ways to push the Americans and Israelis onto the back foot.

As for Britain, the aroma of imperial nostalgia overcame decisionmakers in Washington for a time after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when the Bush administration appointed L. Paul Bremer as effective high commissioner in Baghdad. The plan to allow Iraqis themselves to fill the void left by the Baath regime and manage their own affairs, the so-called Future of Iraq Project, was discarded while officials in Washington tried to replicate a bastardized form of British rule after World War I. Similarly, the Americans have often supported political structures in the region that, under the guise of change, actually reinforce systems of control that they seek to preserve, as in the West Bank and Gaza.

There is a second reason to say yes to a quicker U.S. exit, namely Washington’s commitment to Israel, which has warped how Americans view the region. While every president since George W. Bush has understood the need for the United States to disengage from the Middle East, there has been little consensus among decisionmakers on what should fill the vacuum. Obama saw a balance of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran as the cornerstone of a stabilized region, as he made clear in his long interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic in April 2016.

Not surprisingly, this vision alarmed Israel and its supporters in the United States, who believed that Obama’s signing of a nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, represented recognition of Iran’s regional role—an idea they found abhorrent. However, in pushing hard for Trump to exit from the JCPOA—an agreement further formalized through passage of UN Security Council Resolution 2231—what they really wanted was for the United States to deploy military force and destroy Iran’s nuclear program, hoping this would escalate into a campaign for regime change.

Today, we can contemplate the marvelous success of that endeavor. But Trump later did even more: He offered a model for a post-American Middle East through the Abraham Accords, which aimed to do three things: The accords would disregard the Palestinians and their cause, undermining any notion of establishing a Palestinian state; they would place the Israelis at the heart of a regional grand bargain, in which Israel would emerge as the security spine of a new regional order built on the political spine of Arab-Israeli reconciliation; and Israel’s paramount military role would allow the United States to draw down its forces, leaving Israel in place as the security guarantor for U.S. partners.

Israeli mass murder in Gaza put an end to that illusion. As Israel engaged in horrific crimes in the territory, as it sought to create new facts on the ground in the West Bank, as it occupied large swathes of southern Syria and later southern Lebanon, as it tried to kill Hamas officials in Doha, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to transform the Middle East, most of the pro-American states in the region realized they had more to worry about than Iran. Here was the prospect of a new regional bully, this one backed by the United States, and they had every reason to oppose it.

What made this situation possible is the United States, which has looked the other way on Israel’s actions as it has strived to ethnically cleanse Gaza, the West Bank, and south Lebanon. The Americans also entered into the war with Iran because of Netanyahu’s promise of victory. Most incomprehensively, the U.S. has put no pressure on the Israelis to curb their belligerence directed at U.S. allies Türkiye and Qatar, making it evident that the Americans are enabling, consciously or unconsciously, Israeli aggression and hubris. Israel feels it can do anything it wants because the United States invariably has its back. In light of this situation, a speedy U.S. exit from the region is hardly regrettable.

Full article at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

Last week, Israeli aircraft bombed the Abu Al Duhur air base in Syria. The Israelis initially failed to admit responsibility for the attack, but to a number of observers it was very reminiscent of the attacks in April last year against the Hama and T4 air bases. At the time, these were interpreted as an Israeli effort to prevent the Turkish military from using the bases, amid the rising regional rivalry between Israel and Turkey.

Sure enough, two days after the bombing of Abu Al Duhur, the US envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, tweeted that Israel had been responsible, and Israeli sources later told Axios that the operation had indeed been directed against a Turkish military build-up in Syria. The Turks denied that they had a military presence at Abu Al Duhur, and accused Israel of “inventing pretexts to bomb neighbouring countries and destabilise the region”.

In early June, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan defined what he described as Turkey’s security sphere of interest when he declared, “Turkey’s security does not begin in Hatay, but rather in Aleppo, Damascus and Beirut. We will not allow a fait accompli in our brotherly countries, and we will not turn a blind eye to any attacks targeting them.”

Lebanon should watch very carefully what is taking place, because it is in the eye of the storm as regional antagonisms escalate and new alignments form in the Levant and the Gulf. The recent Makkah Joint Defence Agreement signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan was another manifestation of efforts by regional countries to create structures to counterbalance the emergence of any hegemonic power in the region – above all Israel or Iran.

For the Lebanese, the situation is worrisome. The country’s leadership is engaged in negotiations with Israel to bring about an Israeli withdrawal from the south of the country and to establish pilot zones in the south in which the Lebanese army can disarm and replace Hezbollah. The problem is that Israel does not actually appear to favour such an outcome.

The Israelis have refused to leave more pilot zones and have indicated that they intend to maintain a buffer zone in Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed. Yet they have continued to raze villages in the border area, even as their forces have set alight expanses of land and bombed agricultural areas with white phosphorus, making them unfit for cultivation.

In other words, what the Israelis are doing is ensuring that the border area remains unsuited for human habitation for an extended period of time, perhaps decades. This suggests that even if Israel eventually pulls its soldiers out of Lebanon, it will seek to impose a security order in the south that effectively leaves it in de facto control of a mostly unpopulated area.

In parallel to this, the Israelis have created a situation in which hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Shiite citizens who lived in the border area have been displaced to areas in which the majority of the population is from other communities. If such a situation persists indefinitely, this may heighten sectarian tensions, as the displaced Shiite begin establishing businesses, buying property and building up a political presence in non-Shiite areas.

There are observers in Beirut, both Lebanese and foreign diplomatic representatives, who believe that such tensions are precisely what the Israelis want, because ultimately their objective is to provoke sectarian fragmentation and destabilise the country. Israel would welcome a situation that entangles Hezbollah in domestic hostilities, in such a way that the group will no longer have the same capacity to focus on Israel.

Fragmentation was certainly what Israel sought to facilitate in Syria when it endorsed a federal Syria and supported Druze and Kurdish aspirations for autonomy. The plan suffered a setback when the government in Damascus came to an agreement with the Kurds, but the situation with the Druze is at a deadlock. There is little doubt Israel would welcome being surrounded by weak Arab states broken up into small sectarian entities.

Most regional powers strongly oppose such an outcome, but the country that does so more than any other is Turkey, which fears that religious-ethnic fragmentation in Syria and Lebanon could facilitate the fragmentation of Turkey itself, with its large Kurdish minority. That is why Mr Erdogan has been keen to back moves in Syria that could avert a breakdown of the state, and in this he has had valuable support from the administration of US President Donald Trump.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

Jason Burke is the international security correspondent of the Guardian in London. He has been a foreign correspondent for 30 years, reporting from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and South Asia. He is the author of five books, most recently The Revolutionists, a wide-ranging and captivating account of revolutionary groups during the 1970s and 1980s, both from the political left and religious right. I conducted the interview in early August for Diwan to discuss his latest book, and reproduce part of it here in the event readers missed it. The whole interview can be read by following the link at the bottom.

Michael Young: What motivated you to write The Revolutionists, and take it in the rather original direction of placing both purported Marxists and Islamists in the same category? What did you want readers to take away with them?

Jason Burke: Original or not, I think it’s quite unavoidable if you’re going to be writing about extremist violence in the 1970s and early 1980s in the Middle East to write about both the left and Islamists. For a start, both are revolutionary projects seeking to wholly transform society, politics, economics, and culture too. In their most extreme forms, both originate in the mid to late 1960s and both share some targets, notably the United States and Israel.

The left was quite obviously an enormous influence on the Islamists. How could this be otherwise given the environment in which even the most radical religious activists were operating and formulating their ideas? The Islamists borrowed significant concepts and much vocabulary as well as tactics from the left. There were many former leftists who became radical Islamists, particularly in Lebanon and particularly in the later years of the period that I look at when the left had beenrepressedand had fragmented and Islamism appeared to offer a new and potentially successful way of radically changing the world in which these individuals lived. In a sense, the revolution that was sought became “Islamized”—but that it was still a revolutionary project seems to be without doubt.

I think this is important for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is the obvious conclusion that if grievances that lead people to violence and protest are not addressed in some way, shape, or form, and the individuals or organizations who are seeking change are destroyed or repressed, then other individuals and organizations will take their place. These may not use the same language or even tactics and may appeal to different sections of the population, but they will still in many cases bring violence in their turn.

MY: In the 1980s, the writer Christopher Hitchens wrote a famous essay titled “Wanton Acts of Usage,” in which he shot down all definitions of the word “terrorism,” describing the word as a “pseudoscientific propaganda word,” one that was often tautological or circular. Your thoughts on this, and did it shape your thinking while writing? Were you trying to say something by identifying the subjects of your book as revolutionists and not terrorists?

JB: Absolutely, these are all legitimate questions and debate about the definition of terrorists and terrorism is a useful and important one. Successive regimes everywhere in the Middle East region and well beyond have used the word “terrorists” to describe those they don’t like. The French used it in Algeria, the Americans used it in Vietnam, the Israelis use it to describe Palestinian armed groups, and so on. Then of course there’s the whole question of state terrorism, which is to some extent beyond the scope of my book but is also an important and justified focus of study and discussion. This is all dealt with to an extent in the book itself, particularly when I describe the bitter debates at the United Nations in the early 1970s about the nature and definition of terrorism and really the argument over that classic aphorism that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

So, I don’t ever use the noun terrorist in my book or my reporting. I don’t think it is helpful to reduce individuals, with all their complex motivations, identities, and experiences, to a single descriptor as a noun. But then, with all the caveats, I still think it is useful to be able to use the word “terrorist” as an adjective to describe what is a particular set of tactics which aim to use violence, or the threat of violence, to inspire fear among civilians with the aim of influencing governments or communities, or otherwise bringing about change according to a particular recognizable agenda.

So, to answer your specific question about the title of the book, yes it is a way of avoiding using “terrorists” as a noun, but also using “revolutionaries,” which was another way people described these actors at the time, clearly in a much more sympathetic way. It’s a compromise between the two and therefore has all the disadvantages of any compromise, but it has advantages too.

MY: One of the main characters in your book is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as “Carlos.” His path, in many regards, indicates the direction that some of these movements took, in that he began as an alleged Marxist revolutionary, before establishing a gun-for-hire organization, one with no real ideological agenda, which acted on behalf of states wanting to eliminate their enemies. How would you interpret his choice and what does it tell us about this period?

JB: There’s a lot to say about Ramirez Sanchez—I use his real name in the book because I don’t see why he should be exceptionally allowed an alias whereas others aren’t. That’s all part of the really unsavory and glamorized myth about a man whose activities were in fact sordid and narcissistic and pretty much devoid of any real ideological motivation whatsoever. I’m not sure he’s representative of the broader Marxist revolutionary movement. He’s certainly very very different from the West Germans or the Japanese or the Italians during that period. He’s really interesting for two main reasons. One is that he’s the world’s first real “celebrity terrorist,” as some have called him, and this says a lot about the media in this period of the 1970s as well as other really interesting issues to do with violence and the consumer society.

The other related reason is that he was the product of a new type of globalization—the word was actually coined by the New York Times in 1974 when Ramirez Sanchez was approaching the height of his notoriety. It created the transport infrastructure that not only allowed him to move around with such ease, but also offered the targets that he and others exploited so easily.

I suppose a third important reason would be that Ramirez Sanchez was allowed to do what he did because of the Cold War and how the dynamics of the superpower conflict played out on the ground, but also how states were really quite weak during this period. They simply didn’t have the capabilities in terms of surveillance or coercion or incarceration that they developed in the decades that followed and that they have now.

Full interview at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun was recently welcomed by U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, in what was interpreted as an effort by Mr Aoun to seek U.S. backing in Lebanon’s negotiations with Israel. Upon his return to Beirut, the President travelled to Turkey, amid reports he would soon visit Saudi Arabia.

In other words, Mr Aoun appeared to be diversifying his regional contacts, at a time when his critics had warned him to not put all his eggs in the Trump administration basket. This situation highlighted a disconnect in how the Lebanese state and senior officials – Mr Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri– are conducting foreign policy, and the role of regional dynamics in their calculations.

Not long before Mr Aoun’s visit to Turkey, Mr Salam had also visited the country, shortly after Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Mitri had done so in June for a meeting with Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz and intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin. Mr Berri, in turn, remains a perennial contact for foreign officials, who view him as a major interlocutor with Hezbollah.

Whatever one can say about the benefits for Lebanon to develop a heterogeneous foreign policy, so segmented an approach can seem odd. Part of the explanation lies in Mr Aoun’s determination to be the main driver of Lebanon’s foreign policy. The President has completely marginalised Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji, who himself has made little effort to fashion a role for himself on this front.

While the cumbersome system only highlights that Lebanon is a house of many mansions in its foreign contacts, it does allow for a more balanced, pluralistic approach to regional and international actors that is necessary in the increasingly complex regional environment that is forming. Balance is precisely what the country needs at a time when power blocs are emerging in the region, with the aim of preventing any one country, or group of countries, from imposing their hegemony on all.

This classic balance-of-power situation was best demonstrated last week by the signing of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. While touted as a mutual defence agreement, the real objective was political: to create the cornerstone of a coalition of countries that could act as a counterweight to both Iranian and Israeli ambitions to impose their dominance in the region, in light of the increasingly probable U.S. disengagement, and assert, in the words of Saudi analyst Hesham Al-Ghannam, that “the security of the region is first and foremost an Arab and Muslim responsibility”.

Lebanon’s leaders once had different understandings of the impact of this regional situation on the country’s future. Mr Berri has always been sensitive to regional dynamics, while Mr Salam, a Sunni, realises the importance of maintaining strong relations with the region’s major Arab countries. It took him more time to deal with Turkey, and he initially turned down several invitations to the country, feeling the time was not right.

Yet Mr Salam has the advantage of being well advised. Both Mr Mitri and Minister of Culture Ghassan Salameh have played important diplomatic roles with the UN, know the region well and are willing to take risks on regional matters. Both are also less wedded to the centrality of Lebanon’s ties with Washington, even if they are not hostile to the U.S., which means they are more apt to thinking outside the box.

Mr Aoun, in turn, came into office appearing less attuned to the transformations in the region and their impact on Lebanon, perhaps believing, like many Lebanese politicians, that the country’s safety raft was the U.S. This was not surprising given that the institution he once headed, the armed forces, relied so heavily on American assistance and training.

A repercussion of this was that the President took more time than Mr Salam to engage with one of Lebanon’s most important foreign policy challenges, namely ties with Syria. The armed forces had fought Syrian extremist groups in August 2017, including the one once led by Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara, so it was perhaps natural that Mr Aoun would move slowly in this regard.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

In his meeting last week with President Donald Trump, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun went out of his way to defend Lebanon’s speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri. Mr Aoun underlined that “Berri is a man of state” from southern Lebanon, and he understood the magnitude of the destruction there. He wanted an end to the war, Mr Aoun continued, but acknowledged the “sensitivity of his position and ties to Hezbollah”.

It was noticeable that prominent supporters of Israel in Washington did not take kindly to this, nor to Mr Trump’s description of Mr Berri as “a good guy”. For example, Rob Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, described the remark as a “miscue”, adding that the speaker was “Hezbollah’s ally and enabler”, so that anyone “feeding this line to the president is not a friend of peace”.

It’s not surprising that Israel and its US allies have sought to tar Mr Berri. The reason is that the speaker, the most prominent Shiite official in Beirut today, is the only interlocutor the Lebanese government or anyone else has with Hezbollah. His silencing would give the Israelis latitude to impose their will in Lebanon by force rather than through negotiations, which demand compromises.

There is no doubt the speaker is one of the paramount representatives of Lebanon’s predatory political class that plundered the country and brought on the collapse of its financial system in 2019–2020. However, without a credible Shiite partner, Mr Aoun and the Lebanese government could face insurmountable obstacles in implementing their plan to disarm Hezbollah and extend state control throughout the country.

This was made clear by Mr Aoun, whose defence of the speaker in the Oval Office was designed to secure US endorsement of his role, but also protection against Mr Berri’s detractors in Washington and Israel. The president remembers that when the Israelis bombed Lebanon on April 8, killing at least 357 people, one of their targets in Beirut was the neighbourhood where Mr Berri’s private residence is located. The message to the speaker was clear: We will assassinate you if you don’t turn against Hezbollah.

Mr Berri was a key figure in negotiations during 2024 to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon, when he was the main counterpart of US envoy Amos Hochstein. The speaker, a skilled political operator, had to walk a tightrope between Hezbollah and the Americans, and later faced criticism for accepting an arrangement that effectively consecrated Hezbollah’s defeat, even though the party had signed off on it.

Today, his position is even more delicate. Mr Berri is well aware that Israel views him as an obstacle. But he can also see the widespread, systematic devastation Israel has caused in southern Lebanon, the Shiites’ historical heartland, knowing his community may not soon recover. This could have a major impact on Shiite power in the country.

Mr Berri understands that this situation requires an urgent end to hostilities and negotiations for an Israeli withdrawal. But he also has to calculate that for as long as Iran uses Hezbollah as a proxy force in its conflict with the US and Israel, the Iranians will be suspicious of whatever he does. So, officially, he opposed the recent framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel, even while quietly accepting it is the only game in town.

There is also much self-interest in the speaker’s position. His own power is tied to the strength of his community, as well as to the continuation of negotiations with Hezbollah, which only he can mediate. That’s why demands that Mr Berri break with Hezbollah are unrealistic, even unrealisable. The speaker will never provoke a rift in his community, as this would accelerate Shiite marginalisation. Nor can he be expected to undermine his own political utility by severing ties with Hezbollah.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

Last week, Lebanese and Israeli representatives met in Rome to discuss implementation of an important dimension of their recent agreement signed in Washington. The sides examined so-called pilot zones – areas in which the Lebanese army would be posted after an Israeli withdrawal. For now, they remain apart on matters from the scope and timing of an Israeli withdrawal to the ultimate outcome of their negotiations. However, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun was scheduled to meetUS President Donald Trump at the White House yesterday, with the Lebanese hoping US pressure might increase Israeli flexibility.

The Lebanese want Israel to pull out of significant areas they occupy as soon as possible, to show that their controversial decision to engage with Israel can lead to the liberation of territory and the return of villagers. Israeli officials, in turn, have stressed they are keen to maintain “security zones” in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, showing their commitment to a full withdrawal is not guaranteed.

This Israeli position was reaffirmed after Mr Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israeli forces must leave Syria and Lebanon: “They don’t want you there. You should redeploy,” the US President allegedly said, according to an Axios report.

The Lebanese authorities have come under legitimate criticism for agreeing to a framework agreement last month that placed the onus on Lebanon to meet Israeli conditions, with no guarantees Israel would withdraw its forces. The most Lebanon got out of the agreement was a vague statement “that [Israel] has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon”.

The text was so one-sided that the head of the Lebanese delegation, Simon Karam, reportedly left a negotiating session before being persuaded to return. That said, now that Lebanon has signed the framework agreement, it has two options. It can move forward with the agreement, as bad as it is, and try to take advantage of US backing to obtain Israeli concessions. Or, it can renounce the agreement and declare its support for armed resistance against Israel.

However, the latter choice would lose Lebanon all US support, open the country up to a devastating Israeli response and provoke more destruction of the south, with little likelihood Lebanon would liberate occupied land. Moreover, such a step would concede a major role to Iran in Lebanon, which is precisely what Lebanese officials want to avoid.

It is clear Beirut prefers to go with the first option, hoping to use all peaceful instruments available to push the Israelis out. They would be right in doing so, but a key prerequisite for this would be to reach a consensual decision on what Lebanon seeks to achieve. While the Israelis and their supporters in the US are focusing on concluding a peace agreement, it is becoming evident Lebanon could not sustain such an option domestically or regionally.

A consensus can be built around making Israeli withdrawals a priority and trying to obtain more affirmative statements from Israel on such withdrawals, possibly with timelines. This is where the pilot zones come in. The Lebanese army must post its best units in these zones to ensure they are solidly under state control and that Hezbollah cannot fire at Israel from these zones. This will lead to accusations that Lebanon is defending an enemy and its occupying forces, but there are ways to push back against this.

First, the Lebanese must insist that without an immediate return of the inhabitants, the pilot zones are meaningless. Here, US intervention with Israel would be essential, since the purpose of the pilot zone scheme is to lend credibility to the state and show that negotiations with Israel can produce actual results, which include bringing the displaced home.

Second, the army would be responsible only for neutralising their zones of control, which effectively means that outside these zones, Hezbollah could pursue its actions against Israeli forces in Lebanon. This could serve as leverage to compel the Israelis to widen the areas of Lebanese control, since it is unlikely Hezbollah would seek a confrontation with the Lebanese army in areas evacuated by Israel into which Shiite villagers are returning.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

Yesterday in Paris, I had the pleasure of seeing Adam Shatz, someone whom I’ve known for many years. In thinking back on our encounter this morning, I recalled that Adam and I had become friendly despite initial differences over a critical article that Adam had written about Fouad Ajami, titled “The Native Informant,” in the April 28, 2003, issue of The Nation. Ajami had been my professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and I had disagreed with Adam’s article, and at the time wrote a rebuttal. Which brings me to Ajami’s last book, a memoir of his youth in Lebanon, published posthumously in 2022. It occurred to me that Adam, invariably thoughtful in his writings, would enjoy reading the book, if he hasn’t already, and might consider a more nuanced portrayal of Ajami.

The book, titled When Magic Failed: A Memoir of a Lebanese Childhood, Caught Between East and West, is a valuable and highly moving account of Fouad’s early years. It also shows the extent to which typecasting Ajami as a promoter of American power leaves many essential dimensions of this enigmatic, complex man unresolved. Of particular interest, and importance, is that he always remained very much a product of Lebanon’s Shiite world, a son of Arnoun (which has been a frontline in Israel’s ongoing occupation of Lebanese territory), but also of the community’s migration to Beirut and its slums. Until the end, Fouad was obsessed with the travails of the Shia, whether in Lebanon or Iraq.

I can take pride in one thing: It became fairly obvious to me early on, when I arrived in Washington from Beirut to pursue a Master’s degree in 1985, that Ajami had never really broken with Lebanon, despite the facade he put up of a man who had firmly slammed the door on the old country and integrated fully in the United States. The extremity of the rupture always struck me as too harsh by half, betraying hidden vulnerabilities. Without doubting his embrace of America, I sensed that Fouad harbored a furtive, unrelenting attraction to his country of origin, one that apparently proved so powerful later on that he felt a need to write about his years in Lebanon at a time when he knew he was terminally ill. His wife, Michelle, reminds us that he requested that the word “Arnoun” be placed on his gravestone.

Since this Substack is also a compendium of my present and past articles, I reproduce my review of his book here, written for Diwan in May 2022. It can also be accessed at this link.

The recent publication of Fouad Ajami’s memoir of his youth in Lebanon comes as the eight anniversary of his death nears on June 22. The memoir is a highly moving account that describes a period of Ajami’s life about which he often spoke little, as he always maintained an ambiguous relationship with his country of origin. Most revealingly, we learn that when he wrote about the Shia Lebanese experience, he was describing what he had lived through himself, intimately and intensely.

For a long time Ajami was a controversial figure in Middle Eastern academia in the United States. His detractors saw someone who had become an intellectual handmaiden of American power, as when he defended and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq. To them, Ajami had also shifted position on one of the great Arab causes, abandoning his concern for the Palestinians to side with their enemy Israel. Most objectionably, Ajami distanced himself from his Arab origins, preferring to refer to himself as an American and rejecting a hyphenated identity of the kind that has prevailed in the increasingly polarized culture of the United States.

As time passes, however, that sectarian debate retains little interest. Which is why Ajami’s memoir is the right context for drawing attention away from it. When Magic Failed: A Memoir of a Lebanese Childhood, Caught Between East and West was an unedited manuscript when Ajami passed away. His wife, Michelle, readied it for publication with assistance from her husband’s friend Leon Wieseltier and an editor, Benjamin Kravitz. The result is an impressionistic memoir (the word “magic” in the title seems to refer to the “magical realism” identified mainly with Latin American authors, in which reality is blended in with fantasy).

However, what is particularly striking is the extent to which Ajami experienced firsthand the cycles of Shia integration into the Lebanese state after independence in 1943. Born in Arnoun in 1945, his early years were spent in his village, situated in the shadow of Beaufort Castle. He later moved to the poor quarter of Burj Hammoud, part of Beirut’s eastern suburbs that would also become landing points for other Shia making their way to the capital—including Sayyid Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah and the family of a young Hassan Nasrallah. Those were years when Ajami and his brother lived with their mother, who had been abandoned by their father after he had met another woman. While the boys went to their father’s school in the neighborhood, theirs was an unstable existence, that of “[stepchildren] without means, without great claims …”

One paradox here is the matter of social mobility. A central theme of the book is that in Lebanon one tends to remain a prisoner of one’s social stratum. But in fact Ajami tells a different story. As a young boy living with his mother, he was quite simply poor, living among the rural migrants and Armenian refugees of Burj Hammoud. His mother sewed clothes to make ends meet, ensured that her boys maintained an acceptable standard of living, and insisted “on her distinction and ours.” Throughout the book, one senses Ajami’s resentment for what his father did to his mother. Many years later, he would tell a class that Arab culture could be cruel to discarded wives and their children, even if his own fate qualifies that.

When Ajami’s father returned several years later from working successfully in Saudi Arabia, Fouad and his brother suddenly found themselves elevated to the urban middle class. They moved into a building their father had bought in western Beirut thanks to his earnings, and Fouad was placed in the prestigious International College. While this trajectory was not especially unusual, it did two things: It gave Ajami an American education, which would prepare him for his departure for the United States in the early 1960s, leaving behind a country he found increasingly suffocating; and it allowed him to break with his rural origins, despite his love of Arnoun, so that he came to absorb the ambitions of an urban upstart, a budding Rastignac. This only alienated him more from a society that thwarted all ambition.

However, it would be a mistake to read Ajami’s memoir as a settling of scores with Lebanon. On the contrary, what is so poignant in his book is the extent to which it shows that even decades later he was unable to shake off the old country. In her acknowledgments, his wife recalled that he insisted that the word “Arnoun” be placed on his headstone. Throughout his career, Ajami was strangely attracted and repulsed by Lebanon, a love-hate relationship whose interplay would not wane.

Certainly, his research reflected this preoccupation. The first time I met Ajami, in September 1985, he spent a good 20 minutes discussing the Shia revival in Lebanon, before handing me his latest article from Foreign Affairs, “Lebanon and its Inheritors.” He was then preparing his book The Vanished Imam, Musa al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon, and only in reading his memoir can we understand how Ajami later came to see his otherwise anonymous life as one with a broader, inexorable Shia current. That many other Shia felt they were part of something bigger explains why Musa al-Sadr was able to rally the community around a quest for affirmation.

Ajami’s major books are all of a theme, each following on from the other. The Arab Predicament told the story of the collapse of Arab nationalism in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. From there, it was a natural step for him to focus on Musa al-Sadr and Shia mobilization, since Shia identity was one of the byproducts of the failure of the Arab state and a larger Arab identity. His masterpiece, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey, carries this tale of woe further, showing how a generation of Arabs, the generation of optimists that had emerged from the years of Arab revolutions and liberation, which sought to advance dreams of “secular nationalism and modernity,” ultimately was crushed by Arab regimes that devoured their own children. The Foreigner’s Gift, which praised the United States for removing a tyrannical regime in Iraq, sought out a narrow filament of hope in the region. However, by the end, Ajami could see that this was an all-too-brief interregnum, one that most Americans considered a terrible mistake. His book on Syria, The Syrian Rebellion, illustrates how the United States moved away from advancing any kind of emancipatory project in the Middle East. As Syrians were slaughtered, the Obama administration stood by doing nothing.

The release of his memoir somehow brings Ajami’s intellectual path full circle, home. When he died, many of his American friends remarked on how fundamentally American he was. It was as if his repeated use of the word “we” in describing America, as if the long period of time spent far away from Lebanon without visiting, entitled him to the compliment of being “one of us.” Such an interpretation suffers from overstatement.

America is ecumenical in its embraces and can be munificent in its generosity. However, Ajami’s book reminds us why a part of him never left home. His longing for emancipation, as he knew too well, was in him an Arab impulse, even a Lebanese one, toward which a vast majority of Americans remained indifferent. Ajami writes that the love he felt for his birthplace was really only “fidelity to childhood—to those fragments of our lives that we yearn for and fear.” But was it only that? I closed his book convinced that Ajami must have remained all too conscious of how unlike Americans he was, and his memoir provides insights into how Lebanese he remained. Nothing else can explain the fear he describes of his country that wouldn’t let go. We dread most that which is ingrained in us.

Lebanese officials have recently gone to great lengths to insist that Iran should have no say in their country’s affairs. In principle, this assertion of sovereignty is perfectly defensible, particularly as the United States and Iran prepare for a long period of negotiations in the weeks ahead. However, on the matter of Hezbollah’s weapons, Lebanon is highly unlikely to disarm the party without Iranian approval and a degree of regional involvement, which is why principle may represent more of an obstacle today than anything else.

During the forthcoming period, the Americans and Iranians are supposed to negotiate resolutions to outstanding issues, in particular Iran’s nuclear program. It’s unclear whether Lebanon will be an item on their agenda. However, the fact that Iran has tied a ceasefire in Lebanon to its ceasefire with Washington, and now says an agreement with the United States necessitates an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, has potentially opened the door to a breakthrough between the two countries on the Lebanese front. It makes sense for Lebanon’s president and prime minister to embrace this possibility and momentarily abandon their insistence that Iran should have no say in whatever affects Lebanon.

In linking the Iranian and Lebanese tracks in their demand for a ceasefire, the Iranians did something they had carefully avoided doing previously: they widened the scope of negotiations with the United States. In the past, whenever the Americans and Israelis sought to expand talks over Iran’s nuclear program to include Iran’s ballistic missiles and regional alliances, the Iranians refused to do so. However, today, by tying their own negotiating position to what happens in Lebanon, they may have indirectly allowed the Lebanese question to be brought into their discussions with the Americans, which gives Washington an opening to secure concessions on Hezbollah and its weapons.

Iran still formally refuses to discuss its regional alliances, if one reads paragraph 13 of the framework agreement reached with the United States correctly. However, the negotiating agenda has yet to be finalized, and the agreement’s mention of “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon” may create a wedge to raise the topic. The Americans can also reply that, if Lebanon is off the agenda, they have no incentive to put pressure on Israel to respect the ceasefire in Lebanon. And if the Israelis continue violating the ceasefire, this would effectively grant them veto power over the success of the U.S.-Iran negotiations, which is not something Tehran wants to concede to them. Wouldn’t it be better, the Americans could add, to agree to a comprehensive agreement with Iran that encompasses a full cessation of hostilities in Lebanon and an Israeli withdrawal, while facilitating a far-reaching deal between Washington and Tehran? While nothing guarantees the Iranians would go along with this, they have their own interests to consider, and a settlement with the United States would be to their advantage.

Assuming Iran were to then agree to discuss Lebanon, the Lebanese authorities would be in an ideal position to present a possible solution to Hezbollah’s weapons. This could come in the form of a document currently circulating that seeks to stabilize Lebanon and create a framework for strengthening the country’s sovereignty and disarming Hezbollah. The document, titled “Framework for a Phased Settlement to Strengthen Lebanese State Sovereignty and Implement the Taif Agreement,” was initiated by Egypt, but has since received input from Saudi Arabia, particularly on the implementation of the Taif Agreement.

This comes at a time when Egypt and Saudi Arabia are part of a wider coalition of nations that also includes Türkiye, Qatar, and Pakistan, which played an important role in helping negotiate the ceasefire between the United States and Iran. This coalition has also sought to push back against Israel’s drive for hegemony in the region, and in this context it has been active in trying to avert a deterioration of the situation in Lebanon, particularly sectarian conflict. That is why the countries of the coalition appear reluctant to see the Lebanese Army forcibly disarm Hezbollah, which they realize could have catastrophic consequences.

The document appears to still be in the process of finalization, and has been passed on to Hezbollah and Israel for their observations. On Hezbollah’s disarmament, it outlines a three-phased process of an “‘organized gradual transition’ rather than forced disarmament.” In a first phase, it proposes “[f]reezing the development of heavy missile capacities” and “halting any cross-border military activity,” while in phase two it calls for something more controversial, namely “integrating selected Hezbollah cadres into the Lebanese Army and security agencies.” This would be accompanied by incorporation of “Hezbollah’s social and service institutions into state programs,” and the establishment of “a transitional coordination body under Lebanese state supervision,” before, in phase three, a “full transfer of defense responsibilities to the Lebanese Army” and the “transformation of Hezbollah into a fully political and civilian entity within the Lebanese system.”

In parallel, the document outlines a political process that involves full implementation of the Taif Agreement and political and administrative reforms. This would include the “establishment of the National Commission for the Abolition of Political Sectarianism, the creation of a senate, the adoption of expanded administrative and fiscal decentralization [and] reform of the electoral system.” The aim is to introduce a system that would, de facto, give Shiites more representation, while also fulfilling a longstanding Christian demand, namely allowing Christians to run Christian-majority areas with significant administrative and fiscal autonomy—the latter point going beyond what Taif had originally outlined.

The document also offers guarantees to the Shiite community, built around the principle of “full commitment to national partnership.” This includes “strengthening representation in state institutions in accordance with the Constitution, protection of Shiite-populated areas through reconstruction programs, ensuring that the community’s social base is not politically or security-wise targeted, and preserving the community’s role within Lebanon’s national political framework.”

Skeptics would point out that Iran is unlikely to make concessions on Hezbollah’s arms, even less so after having prevailed in the conflict with the United States and Israel. They may well be correct, and the windfall of released funds the Iranians may receive from the peace deal could encourage them to bolster Hezbollah and pay compensation to its supporters. Moreover, if Israeli forces remain in Lebanon, Hezbollah would be able to revive its resistance identity. Why would Iran agree to disarm Hezbollah in that case?

The question is a good one, but there are several things to consider. First, if the U.S. is prepared to remove sanctions on Iran and release frozen funds, this would give it leverage to make demands of the Iranians on major issues, not least Hezbollah. Furthermore, the regional order is changing rapidly, and the recent war has brought about a realignment in the Middle East, and new conditions. Iran has shown through its ballistic missile program and ability to close the Strait of Hormuz that it has a significant deterrence capability of its own, therefore that its forward defense strategy against Israel through Hezbollah is no longer as vital to its security as it once was. Indeed, the suffering of Lebanon’s Shiites has also underlined the limitations of placing the burden of Iran’s defense on them; while it may have succeeded this time, it offers diminishing returns.

The U.S. fiasco in this war may also lead to Washington’s disengagement from the region, as people within the administration see an opportunity to reassert that Middle Eastern wars are a waste of energy and dollars when the focus should be on China. U.S. bases have proven to be ineffective in defending American allies, and indeed have served to invite attacks against these countries. In light of this, one of Iran’s main objectives—reducing U.S. power and presence in the Middle East—could be at hand, which would mean that Israel’s latitude to attack Iran would decrease. This alone could mandate a change of strategy on Iran’s part, one that seeks the containment of Israel in cooperation with other regional powers that oppose Israeli hegemony, rather than relying on a Hezbollah that is regionally divisive. Moreover, if the Iranians agree to suspend their nuclear program in talks with the Americans, Israel may be less likely to attack them, which was a major factor in propping up the Hezbollah deterrent.

Both Hezbollah and Iran will also have to soon address the ruin faced by Lebanon’s Shiite community. Israel will continue to occupy all of the border region, and will continue to intervene militarily in the area between the Litani River and Sidon, which means that Hezbollah’s revival will come at a high cost for inhabitants of south Lebanon. Iran will be forced to support Lebanon’s Shiites for many years in this context, creating a dependency that, while it may be sustainable, will draw funds away from Iran’s own reconstruction.

Full article at Diwan, which you can read by clicking here.

Cartoon generated by AI.

Last Wednesday, a day before the arrival in Beirut of a Saudi envoy, Yazid bin Farhan, Saudi Arabia announced it would lift all restrictions on Lebanese exports to the kingdom. The move was widely interpreted as Riyadh’s support for the Lebanese state, in particular President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.

The measure provided a much-needed economic boost for a country currently facing major destruction by Israel and that finds itself in the midst of a proxy war between Israel and Iran. In recent months, the Saudis have been working with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and Pakistan to contain Israeli power in the region while also striving to reduce tensions inside Lebanon and avoid any kind of domestic conflict.

In trying to contain Israel, the five countries are not acting out of any ideological rationale. Rather, they are adopting classical “balance of power” reasoning, looking to curtail the ambitions of any single state that seeks to dominate the region in light of the anticipated void that would be left by US disengagement. These states are just as keen to prevent Iranian hegemony as they are Israeli.

With respect to the situation in Lebanon, the Saudis and their partners have sought to soften American and Israel efforts to push the Lebanese government to use force to disarm Hezbollah, fearing where this might lead. Weeks ago, Riyadh hosted Ali Hassan Al Khalil, an envoy of Lebanese Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri, who is a major interlocutor with Hezbollah, to tell him that they did not want sectarian violence in the country.

In line with this aim, the Egyptians last year formulated a plan for the “containment” of Hezbollah’s weapons – as opposed to its forcible disarmament, which could lead to armed conflict between the group and the Lebanese army. A document outlining this plan is currently circulating and, according to those familiar with it, had Saudi input, albeit focused on full implementation of the Taif Agreement, the Saudi-backed plan that served as the basis to amend the Constitution in 1990, but was only partly applied.

The inclusion of Taif in the effort suggests that the Saudis view Hezbollah’s surrendering of its weapons – in a process described in the document as an “‘organised gradual transition’ rather than forced disarmament” – to be part of a broader effort to give the Shiite community a greater role in the state in exchange for the group’s weapons. Hezbollah presented its observations on the document, but these indicate that more negotiations are needed.

In light of this, it is interesting that Lebanon’s armed forces commander, Gen Rodolphe Haykal, was recently invited to Pakistan. It isn’t clear what was discussed, but some observers couldn’t help but tie it to Islamabad’s role as a mediator between the US and Iran. It is conceivable that the Pakistanis are helping to define a role for the army in the south that would avoid a clash with Hezbollah, one that could obtain Iranian endorsement.

The key takeaway from the initiative, however, is that Lebanon is better off relying on a regional approach to the Hezbollah problem than on a scheme designed to precipitate its armed forces into a devastating confrontation with the group. At the same time, the present ceasefire between the US and Iran creates an opening to place the Lebanese crisis on the negotiating table between Washington and Tehran, something Iran has long resisted. If this happens, the coalition’s plan could potentially represent a road map to address Hezbollah’s weapons.

That regional dynamics are coming to the fore was evident in remarks last week by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He declared that Israeli attacks in Syria and Lebanon threatened Turkey, effectively and explicitly expanding his definition of Turkish security. This shows how countries are beginning to define zones of influence and red lines in ways we have not seen previously under Pax Americana.

Full article at The National, which you can read by clicking here.

It is independent journalists like Aaron who show the importance of alternative media, which have brought perspectives that many mainstream outlets refuse to air. Aaron does make a point to underline that I have a different view of Hezbollah than he and most of his podcast’s guests, but adds, that it is important to feature different opinions on the show. The Makdisi Street podcast recently introduced me in a similar fashion, and while there is a side of me that wonders why the hosts seem to feel such a need to justify their invitation of me, I also recognize that they went ahead and did so anyway, and welcome the opportunity they gave me to express my views to their audiences—views that are relatively widespread in Lebanon, I might add.