Ziad Majed: Since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one region of the world

The Arab world is going through one of the darkest periods in its history. Lebanon is at war, society is fractured, and the South is threatened by a lasting Israeli occupation. The April 8 massacre — 357 dead and nearly 2,000 wounded — adds to the litany of tragic dates that have marked the country’s chronology from 1975 to the present day. The ceasefire between the United States and Iran, signed on April 8, remains particularly fragile and does not include Lebanon, at least for the time being. The opening of direct negotiations between Tel Aviv and Beirut is deeply dividing society and casting Hezbollah as more threatening than ever. At the regional level, despite the multitude of reports by international organizations and experts accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and denouncing an apartheid regime, each day seems to carry us a little further away from a just solution in Palestine. As for Syria, although the Assad era is over, the country’s future remains uncertain. While each situation follows its own logic, there nevertheless remains the sense of a “Levantine,” and more broadly Arab, destiny shared in hardship.

A Franco-Lebanese political scientist and researcher, and the author of Le Proche-Orient, Miroir du Monde (La Découverte, 2025), Ziad Majed has lived in France since 2006, where he heads the Middle East Studies Program at the American University of Paris. Together with the intellectual and journalist Samir Kassir — assassinated on June 2, 2005, in an attack widely attributed to the Assad regime — the novelist Elias Khoury, and activists from different generations, he co-founded the Democratic Left Movement in 2004 and took an active part, in 2005, in the Independence Uprising. In L’Orient-Le Jour, he analyzes the roots of the current cataclysm.

Interview by Soulayma Mardam Bey.

What are the main political factors that explain the region’s current state?

Several factors are converging. First, the failure of the so-called peace process in Palestine, as Israeli colonization continued throughout the 1990s, up to the second intifada. In Israel, part of the left reduced peace to a logic of separation: putting the Palestinians behind a wall without confronting the question of domination. The right, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, instensified the attacks on what remained of Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank. Long peripheral, the settlers became a central force in Israeli society, politics, and the army. At the same time, the rise of Hamas, the death of Yasser Arafat, and then the war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority entrenched a lasting territorial and political fragmentation. Palestine found itself trapped in a deadlock.

The second factor is the “war on terror” launched after 9/11. This category established itself in Western, Israeli, Russian, and certain Arab regimes’ discourses, profoundly reshaping the way war is waged. It became limitless, largely concentrated in the Middle East, and justified by a notion of “terrorism” that escapes the classical categories of law. Even Obama, while claiming to reduce its scope, in fact prolonged it through the massive use of drones and remote assassinations. Added to this was the US war in Iraq in 2003, the first intervention of that scale undertaken without the approval of the Security Council in order to overthrow a regime. It opened a major breach in the international order that emerged after 1945. Iraq was turned into a laboratory of violence: the failure of the transition, the dismantling of the state, Iranian intervention, the rise of sectarian cleavages, the emergence of ISIS.

The barbarity of the Syrian regime and the failure of the Arab revolutions of 2011 also played a decisive role. At a moment when a new generation was carrying hopes of freedom and change, Syria became, like Iraq, a space of destruction subjected to military overinvestment: Iranian, Russian, American, and Turkish intervention; the arrival of pro-Iranian militias, Hezbollah, and jihadist groups. This long sequence normalized death in the region, legitimized culturalist readings of violence, and simultaneously strengthened the Western far right, Islamophobia, fear of refugees, and Arab counter-revolutionary regimes. After October 7 and the genocidal war waged by Israel against Gaza, there is also the feeling that no limit whatsoever now applies in the Middle East. International law, conventions, and courts all seem to have lost any effectiveness there.

In your latest book, you write that the region is a “privileged revealer of the mutations of political modernity.” Why?

At every major contemporary rupture, something either began in this region or took on a particularly visible form here before leaving its mark on the international order. The First World War, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, clearly shows the ability of colonial powers to redraw borders and impose mandatory systems in contradiction with the right to self-determination, even though that right was proclaimed at the very moment of the creation of the League of Nations. There is also, in this region, an additional exceptionalism: there is no other comparable case in which a colonial power decided to create a nation-state — Israel — for a European community in a colonized territory. This profoundly shaped the region’s conflict-ridden history.

In another register, the Arab revolutions of 2011 also constitute a revealing moment. At a time when the world had almost ceased to think of popular revolution as a horizon, they reintroduced that possibility, even though they were crushed by the counter-revolutions.

Then came October 7 and the annihilation of Gaza, accompanied by an unprecedented fact that nevertheless risks becoming a model: the greatest world power, the United States, deciding to sanction the international judicial system when it attempts to investigate the genocide or identify those responsible for it. Not only is international law no longer respected, but those who try to make it respected are punished.

Never before, in Western democracies, had we seen such a level of dehumanization, censorship, infringements on public and individual freedoms, professional threats, demonstrations attacked or banned. And it is in relation to the Israeli question, even more than the Palestinian question, that this emerges with such intensity. The Middle East thus reveals a profound malaise within Western democracies, put to the test by what is unfolding there.

I would add one thing: since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one and the same region of the world. Gaza, South Lebanon, part of Syria, Mosul. We do not yet have enough images from Iran, nor even from Yemen, which was struck repeatedly last year. But this is indeed a politics through ruin: ruin is no longer temporary; it is meant to last. What will be rebuilt will not resemble what existed before, whether in physical terms or from the standpoint of the social fabric, the economic environment, or human relations. The aim is to destroy the past, suspend the present, and render the future unrecognizable.

Over these past fifteen years, however, we witnessed the fall of the Syrian regime on December 8, 2024. For many, it was an immense glimmer of hope. Is it still there?

The fall of the Syrian regime remains one of the most beautiful moments of my life. There was both the defeat of one of the most criminal systems imaginable and something more intimate: the feeling of a victory after all the work that had been done, and the sense of having avenged Samir Kassir and Syrian and Palestinian friends who were assassinated, of having kept a promise.

But that joy was affected by the massacres against the Alawites, and then against the Druze. Something then broke, both within Syrian society and within the diaspora. Hatred rose another notch. Some withdrew into a sectarian logic. Others sought to relativize these killings.

I nevertheless never had any illusions about the post-Assad period. Syria is going to remain, for a time, a mixture of several things, much like the new authorities themselves and their relationship to the world: a dose of conservatism, a dose of economic liberalism, investments, other forms of corruption, a great fragility in the national consensus, a very difficult management of the communal reality and the Kurdish question, not to mention a regional context that does not permit stability — with the Israelis occupying more territory, the war in Lebanon, Turkey intent on maintaining its influence, and Iraq itself in a state of instability. In short, it will be neither total collapse nor rapid transition and the implementation of a healthy political process.

You were born in Beirut in 1970. You have therefore lived through other very difficult periods. How does the present period differ?

There has been no period worse than this one, but two memories remain foundational. First, the siege of Beirut in 1982, which revealed the terrifying experience of Israeli aerial bombardment and absolute powerlessness in the face of death falling from the sky. Then, the massacre of Qana in 1996, which I experienced while working for the Red Cross, when around a hundred Lebanese civilians were burned alive in a UNIFIL camp without any responsibility ever being sanctioned. Beirut 1982 and Qana 1996 now appear as precedents that have become a modus operandi for Israel.

But the current period is even graver. First, because the war is taking place against the backdrop of Lebanon’s economic collapse, which makes reconstruction — and even a return to the pre-war situation — almost unthinkable. In the past, despite everything, there still remained the idea of a possible new beginning.

Then, internal cleavages have changed in nature. The “Shiite question” is now central, which was not the case in 1978, in 1982, or even quite so in 2006. At the time, despite tensions around Hezbollah and Iran, there was still a relative unity in the face of the scale of Israeli violence. In 2023–2024, many could tolerate limited support for Gaza so long as the cost for Lebanon remained contained. But with the intensification of the war, we entered another configuration: the fracture around “political Shiism” and the fact that it militarily dictates strategic choices is much deeper. Above all, today there is no red line imposed on Israel and no genuine international political horizon.

Are Israeli objectives in South Lebanon above all security-related, or should they be placed within the logic of “Greater Israel”?

There is no major difference between the security objectives put forward today and what was already being heard in 1978 and in 1982. This time, however, the Israelis no longer want a simple occupation supported by a collaborating militia tasked with controlling the area, but a zone that is completely razed and emptied of its population. The occupation may be ensured either directly by the army or by a sophisticated technological apparatus. If, behind the total destruction and the prevention of return, there loom the fantasies of the Israeli far right about colonization and annexation, then the risk becomes very alarming.

Faced with such fears, should one move toward military confrontation when no balance of power exists? This is where Hezbollah’s responsibility becomes clearer. With its attack of March 2, it accelerated, altered, or opened catastrophic possibilities — without, however, reducing the entire situation to the few missiles it fired. In Lebanon, as long as the geography of Israeli bombardments is confined to the South, many do not consider that this amounts to a war. That is the whole difficulty: to say this risks minimizing Hezbollah’s responsibility, whereas it is indeed responsible. But to leave matters at the level of those few missiles remains politically and ethically insufficient.

While all Lebanese today are wounded, the Shiite community is no doubt the one facing the deepest crisis: it is the community primarily subjected to bombardment and forced displacement. Many feel they are facing a triple threat: Israel, Syria, and the Lebanese state...

One must first take seriously the historical trauma of a large part of the Lebanese Shiites, linked to their geographical situation. They live mainly in the South, on the Israeli border, and in the Bekaa, close to Syria. They are therefore the first to be affected by external threats.

Many Lebanese do not realize to what extent proximity to Israel has shaped an imaginary of permanent insecurity. Since the 1960s, there have been repeated Israeli incursions and invasions, linked to the activism of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon — deprived of their right of return, although that right is enshrined in UN Resolution 194 — and to that of the Lebanese left. Even after the official end of the civil war in 1990, the South remained under occupation until 2000. Then came Hezbollah’s responsibility, as it refused to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state and made choices with grave repercussions.

This permanent condition of war is sometimes expressed less in words than as a state of mind. A whole life is organized around the idea that everything may once again collapse. This is visible even in urban planning: in the southern suburbs, in Ouzai, in Jnah, people often build as though everything remained temporary, while waiting for a return to the South or to the Bekaa, or simply for a more stable future that never arrives.

Hezbollah succeeded in transforming this provisional condition into a political project of hegemony. It did so through its institutions, its networks, its fighters, but also through an imaginary founded on power, sacrifice, revenge, and glory. It imposed a political temporality: it promised to give meaning to waiting, to convert fear into strength. It also drew on a political and religious mythology — Karbala, martyrdom, Hussein — but also on the fear of annihilation. To this fear was added a form of defensive arrogance: the idea that one will defeat Israel, defeat the Syrians, crush internal opponents, and regard all those who do not follow as traitors or collaborators.

The other communities never really knew how to respond to this dynamic, because they too operate according to sectarian and clientelist mechanisms. Many political leaders in the other camps are themselves products of the civil war, of its crimes and its logics. Hezbollah is therefore part of a local context that does not weaken it, because no credible alternative to its hegemony has been built.

It must also be borne in mind that, for the first time, there is a real fear of a Shiite Nakba, and that many displaced people, especially among the elderly, fear they may never again be able to return home. It is a feeling that is both new and extremely violent. If it is badly managed later, Hezbollah will be able to instrumentalize it, and internal hatreds will worsen.

Is it still possible to renegotiate the Lebanese social contract and work toward the full integration of the Shiite community into the political sphere in exchange for disarmament?

I do not think it is lost. Today, it is no doubt inconceivable that Hezbollah would surrender its weapons of its own accord, because it sees itself as engaged in a struggle for survival and is also waiting to see how the Iranian file evolves.

But the problem is more structural. Since independence, Lebanon has never truly resolved the question of power-sharing. Already in 1958, during the mini-civil war between the supporters of the Baghdad Pact and the Nasserists, the regional question was intertwined with that of the domestic political system. Muslims were no longer satisfied with the 1943 formula. The Taif Accords, which readjusted the distribution of power in favor of the Sunnis relative to the Maronites, did not really give the Shiites a place commensurate with their demographic and political weight. Certainly, they obtained more through the presidency of Parliament for four years instead of one. But this remains a position designed to block or negotiate, rather than to govern in any real sense.

If a regional solution were ever to compel Hezbollah to disarm, it would have to comply. But in that case, the Shiite question would immediately return: one would not be able to continue with the same political formula. It is likely that the Shiite community would demand greater institutional guarantees, or stronger access to certain key ministries.

Certainly, in the current context, it is very difficult to imagine those ministries being entrusted to figures close to the Shiite tandem, especially if Lebanon has to negotiate with the Americans, the Europeans, the World Bank, the IMF, or the Gulf countries for its reconstruction. This is therefore a deferred question, but it will not disappear.

Moreover, even if it is not on the agenda today, it is fundamental that supporters of change maintain a discourse in favor of a gradual overcoming of political sectarianism. This may take the form of concrete guarantees: the establishment of a Senate, an independent judicial system, more autonomous municipalities, genuine administrative decentralization, and a central state refocused on its sovereign functions. This horizon must be preserved, not as an immediate promise, but as a serious alternative in the medium and long term.

Faced with all the cataclysms Lebanon has endured, some have long advocated the establishment of a policy of neutrality in order to extract the country from regional conflicts. What do you think of that?

In my view, one cannot be neutral in this region. Nor do I think one should be. Lebanon, however, has neither the material resources nor the national consensus required to remain engaged in an armed struggle. Recent experience has shown that such engagement neither stopped the genocide in Gaza nor decisively weakened the Israeli army. It above all produced a new Lebanese disaster.

Lebanon has already given too much. Several generations have been sacrificed. Our regional engagement in favor of Palestine must therefore take another form: through culture, diplomacy, the media, the struggle for international law, lobbying, and the development of more varied alliances. We need to move beyond classic diplomatic reflexes and also think of countries such as Brazil, South Africa, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Turkey, or certain actors in the Arab world and the Global South. There is a far broader space for action there than one tends to imagine. Sovereignty is neither isolation nor abstract neutrality. It is the capacity to make decisions and negotiate without submitting to the orders of foreign capitals, whether Tehran, Washington, Riyadh, or elsewhere.