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The ongoing negotiations shepherded by the US and Saudi Arabia offer a suitable platform to tackle the equivocations of a deliberately mounted conflict and its self defeating premises. This conflict is intractable by definition and was initially conceived to prevent the possibility of diplomatic intermediation. The offer of a 40-day truce and the progressive liberation of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners approved by the Israeli government have not yet been echoed on the Hamas side and don’t seem to be.
The deceptive maneuvering of Yahya Sinwar, far from being a tactical posture, reflects his unwillingness to work on a negotiated solution, the intentional obstructionism of his Iranian handler, and the jockeying of the Qatari intermediary. The failure of this ultimate mediation is a bad omen and leaves us with dire prospects. What’s left is the war option and the need to upend the strategic equation and finish off with its actors and political platforms.
Hamas is still blocking diplomatic venues and playing the hazardous card of protracted conflicts, despite their deleterious consequences. The UN Security Council proposal relayed by the US-Saudi active mediation was readily waived by Hamas, which opted, unambiguously, for the Iranian stonewalling, the dismissal of inter-Palestinian reconciliation, and military escalation. There are no chances, manifestly, for a negotiated de-escalation that furthers a broader diplomatic process. The US eagerness to break the cycles of violence and to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process under common auspices with Saudi Arabia is checkmated by Hamas and its operators. The filibustering is no coincidence; it’s the expression of an outright rejection of any normalization scenario and of the emerging fault lines set by the new Cold War scenarios and their shifting tectonics.
The same scenario seems to prevail in Lebanon, whereby Hezbollah pursues similar delaying tactics that betray one’s intentions insofar as the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty and the adherence to international resolutions that are meant to enforce peacekeeping mandates, safeguard civil concord, and enhance the country’s immunities towards interlocking conflict dynamics. The Hezbollah pirouetting is quite symptomatic of its disinclination towards the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty and the adherence to international resolutions (Armistice Accord 1949, UNSC Resolutions 1701, 1559, and 1680).
Nonetheless, Hezbollah has lost its momentum with the foundering of Hamas, the containment of Iran, the unraveling of the hypothetical canopy of the new Cold War coalition, and the persistent opposition of an increasing inter-communal platform. We must emphasize the critical role of internal oppositions within Iran and the stalemated prospects of Iranian politics of subversion to understand the course of the incoming political and military dynamics and their self-destructive nature. The October 7th, 2023, episode displays the inconsistencies of the Iranian power projections and portends their impending demise.
The movement spreading in Western universities is of a kaleidoscopic nature which unveils the incipient political fractures partially elicited by the unregulated mass migration and imported Islamic militancy. The political consensus is at stake when the overarching political narrative which defines the commonwealth and its normative safeguards is questioned.The downgraded academic credentials which have corroded the axiological and political neutrality of the university, transform it into an ideological battleground between warring political factions who end up importing political contestants and controversial issues from all over the global geopolitical spectrum.
There is a climate of intellectual and political censorship imposed by active political minorities, some of them piloted by neo-leftist and Islamist political agendas structured around wokeism as an ersatz to the decline of the conventional Marxist doxa. Otherwise, the new Cold War powermongers are trying to take advantage of intellectual and political freedoms to undermine civil peace and question the rationale of the liberal democratic order. Alain Besançon’s pungent observation, “The left is a permanent civil war,” is more pertinent than ever.
