A day after the Beirut port blast shattered the city in August 2020, Emmanuel Macron arrived in Lebanon as a self-proclaimed saviour. Like JFK in West Berlin, or Fidel Castro in post-revolutionary Havana, the French President toured the streets. Thronged …
Can Lebanon survive without Hezbollah?
Over the last fortnight, everything has changed in Lebanon. Hezbollah, which had dominated the country’s politics for more than 20 years, has seen its leadership decapitated, its arsenal diminished, its anti-Zionist credentials tarnished. All the while, its civilian base, huddled …
Why Lebanon can’t be saved
In 2018, Henry Kissinger observed that Donald Trump was one of those historical characters who “appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The same could …
What will replace Hezbollah?
In the summer of 2019, I took one of Beirut’s vintage Mercedes taxis to the city’s southern suburbs. I was in Dahieh to meet Lokman Slim, a prominent Lebanese researcher and fierce critic of Hezbollah. Slim, together with his German-born …
Hezbollah has made a fatal mistake
The Lebanese border with Israel shimmers with shades of yellow and green. The scene is Levantine pastoral: if Monet were Middle Eastern, this is what he would have painted. It was late October, just weeks after Hamas’s atrocities, when I …
Who will win a post-heroic war?
Neither the West not its enemies are prepared to fightSome 30 years ago, I coined the phrase “post-heroic warfare” to acknowledge a new phenomenon: the very sharp reduction in the tolerance of war casualties. My starting point was President Clinton’s …
Israel is braced for a second war
The loud “baa” of a curious sheep feels ridiculously, laughably incongruous; the only other sounds are the bone-shaking booms of the IDF and Hezbollah exchanging artillery in the near distance. Before you join the road to Kibbutz Metzuba, just over …
Israel is turning into Lebanon
Beirut, in the mid-20th century, was a synonym for Middle Eastern glamour, its Rue de la Phénicie a nocturnal haunt for Hollywood movie stars and Arab oil barons. In the early Fifties, when the city was in the Western press, …
Israel’s war is about to escalate
As I look out over Lebanon from high up on Israel’s northern border, I see undulating hills dappled with hedgerows and green brush that glows golden in the winter sun. But this is far from an idyll. Lebanese Hezbollah have …
Hamas is playing for time
Hamas leaders know that once the Israeli counter-offensive starts, they will lose their greatest asset: their inter-connected tunnels. This vast warren conceals the vital operations for the manufacture, storage and launch of their rockets, and shieldsheadquarters and rest areas from …