When war in the Middle East is told in the language of those who wage it

Since 7 October 2023, a significant share of French audiovisual media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza, and subsequently of the war in Lebanon, has revealed an inability to inform accurately, as well as a deeper crisis in the categories through which the Middle East is rendered intelligible.

What has prevailed across a majority of television channels is therefore not merely an editorial political bias, a compassion asymmetry, or a hierarchy of urgencies. It is a genuine reconfiguration of the gaze. The Israeli narrative of the war, together with its military terminology, was adopted and then gradually detached from history, the social sciences, and international law.

From that moment on, the societies targeted by the “Israeli operations” ceased to appear as inhabited worlds, shaped by social relations, memories, institutions, aspirations, and by individual as well as collective experiences. They became spaces of “surgical” intervention, theatres of manoeuvre, maps saturated with objectives and risks. The consequence of such a shift was decisive: by substituting a cold commentary for politics, this coverage did not merely impoverish analysis; it also helped render acceptable extreme forms of violence and criminality.

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.

The assassination of Nasrallah and Israeli impunity

 Interview with Ziad Majed[1] in Mediapart, following the Israeli attack on the southern suburbs of Beirut, which killed the Secretary General of Hezbollah and dozens of Lebanese civilians.

Interview by Ilies Ramdani.

Mediapart: What do you think about the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah?

Ziad Majed: There are no red lines for the Israelis. They can kill whoever they want and strike wherever they want. The problem goes beyond the figure of Hassan Nasrallah. There is a state that crosses all boundaries and borders to murder and bomb, often with the complicity of the Western world.

Like many Lebanese, I have always been opposed to Hezbollah for political, cultural and ideological reasons, and over the past decade for its military involvement in Syria at the request of Tehran in support of the criminal regime of Bashar El-Assad. The party has also been accused of carrying out assassinations in Lebanon.

However, it enjoys popular legitimacy within the Shia community, which has been traumatized by successive Israeli invasions of Lebanon since 1978 (five years before the party was founded) and a long history of military occupation of the south (which lasted 22 years), followed by a war in 2006. As a result, Hezbollah has had a seat in parliament since 1992, runs elected municipal councils, holds ministries and runs its own social services.

The assassination on Friday of its secretary-general, Nasrallah, carried out by Israeli officials who have themselves been accused of crimes against humanity by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and dozens of human rights organizations, is further proof of the 'exceptionalism' that places Israel above international law. All the more so as the air raid devastated an entire residential area on the outskirts of the Lebanese capital, leaving dozens of civilians trapped under the rubble. Six multi-storey buildings disappeared because of the power of the bombs.

So a large proportion of the Lebanese people are angry, like the Palestinians who have suffered decades of occupation, colonization and now a genocidal war in Gaza under the passive gaze of the 'international community'.

Gap and decadence

In Lebanon, questions are constantly asked about the reasons that allow politicians of immeasurable mediocrity and corruption to impose themselves and to remain in power in a country where the society has an extraordinary level of education, competence and dynamism.

The answers are often given in terms of the confessional issue and the divisions it implies, the clientelism that has continued to grow and to corrode all public administrations, sponsored by the leaders of war militias who have become ministers and deputies. Talks also evoked the Syrian regime’s hegemony that has "manufactured" politicians and infiltrated state institutions, assassinations, impunity, Hezbollah and its weapons that terrorize its opponents, and the electoral law and its “Gerry meandering” that favored the re-election of the same tenors and their henchmen. Finally, the repercussions of the regional crises on the Lebanese scene are regularly mentioned. They complicate the situation even more and leave the majority of the people in the frustration of impotence and the disarray of waiting for temporary solutions, often imported from the “outside”.

Nevertheless, is this enough to understand the increasingly striking gap between State and Society or between political elites and social or cultural actors in the country?

Fourty years ago: The 1982 WORLD CUP under the siege of Beirut

Time passed slowly and painfully in the early summer of 1982, the year of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the occupation of Beirut.

The smell of death hung over the city, and daily life, between funeral processions, was more like a ruse against fear, against weariness and scarcity, waiting for the unknown or for the World Cup matches.

What do the May 2022 legislative elections in Lebanon reveal?

On Sunday May 15, 2022, Lebanon witnessed the first election - in this case legislative - since the popular uprising of 2019, the economic collapse and the devastating explosion of the port of Beirut, followed by the departure of tens of thousands of young graduates from the country. Four million Lebanese were called to the polls to elect a new Parliament.

The results of this election offer several lessons on the new political power relations and the extent of the crisis that the state and society are going through.

Lebanon: How did we get here?

This is the question that many people are still asking, devastated by the economic collapse and political decadence that are engulfing Lebanon in the abyss. 

The following text is a synthetic answer to the question, built around five reasons.

Regional Rivalry in Lebanon and Hezbollah's roles

The annual conference of Carnegie Middle East, December 9, 2021: A discussion on regional rivalry in Lebanon and on Hezbollah's roles, with Kim Ghattas, Emile Hokayem, Hisham Melhem and Ziad Majed. 

The agony of the Great Lebanon

Cyclical political crises that paralyze state institutions and regularly postpone all electoral deadlines and government formation, insecurity and powerlessness in the face of interference from regional and international actors, widespread clientelism at all levels of the administration, a public debt estimated at more than 150% of GDP, banks (where 1% of depositors hold 50% of the deposits) are in dire straits, hyperinflation and falling purchasing power, half of the population is impoverished and Palestinian and Syrian refugees are living in misery. One hundred years after its birth, "Greater Lebanon" is sinking into the abyss and no longer has the means to recover.

If the political-confessional cleavages, the mediocrity and corruption of the ruling political class as well as the dilemma of Hezbollah's weapons and its organic alliance with Iran are largely responsible for the current situation, it is nevertheless clear that the Lebanese system itself, based on "consociationalism", is dying.

Iran and its four Arab fronts

Foreword

This text seeks to read the strategies adopted by Iran in the Middle East since the year 2003, especially in Arab arenas that have witnessed open political, sectarian, and military conflicts[1]. In these conflicts, Iran has old and new weighty allies that it supports or has intervened directly in order to protect and guarantee their supremacy.

The text focuses on four arenas: Iraq and Syria, where Iran has escalated its direct intervention since 2011; Lebanon, where Iran’s most powerful local ally has been employed in the Syrian conflict; and Yemen, where Iran is trapping Saudi Arabia in a war that will be very hard to win.

Bleak House

In an interview, academic and activist Ziad Majed examines the destructive dynamics across the Middle East.

Ziad Majed teaches Middle East studies and international affairs at the American University of Paris. He wrote his DEA on Syria, and his Ph.D. dissertation on the Lebanese political system. Two years ago, he published a book titled Syrie, La Révolution Orpheline, or “Syria, The Orphaned Revolution.” Majed was active in Lebanese politics as a co-founder, then vice president, of the Democratic Left Movement during the first years of the century, before moving to Paris in 2006.
To read his interview with Michael Young, For Diwan of the Carnegie Endowmnent for International Peace, please click here