Ceasefires ought to be judged not by the documents that are signed but by the reality they create on the ground. Eight months after the agreement was signed in Sharm el-Sheikh, that reality bears little resemblance to the agreement’s stated goals. Israeli military operations have continued, reconstruction has yet to begin, and civilians are still confined to a devastating day-to-day reality. Taken together, the agreement may have reduced the intensity of the fighting, but it has yet to deliver on its promises.

The agreement, brokered under the Trump administration, was designed to unfold in three phases. The first phase called for a comprehensive cessation of military operations, humanitarian relief, the restoration of essential infrastructure, and the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces from parts of Gaza.

But what happened in practice?

According to the Gaza Media Office, between the ceasefire and April 2026, Israel carried out 1,109 bombardments and shelling incidents across Gaza, killing 1,027 Palestinians and injuring 3,280 others.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claim that these strikes were carried out in response to violations by Palestinian armed factions.

The continued bombardment has had consequences beyond the immediate human toll. It has made it nearly impossible for the ceasefire to achieve its broader purpose: allowing Gaza to begin recovering from more than two years of war. Among the central commitments of the agreement’s first phase were the rehabilitation of Gaza’s water, electricity, and sewage infrastructure, alongside the restoration of hospitals, bakeries, and major roads. Eight months later, little of that work has begun.

Much of Gaza now functions without the infrastructure that makes modern civilian life possible. According to the United Nations, nearly 1.7 million people are living in displacement tents or temporary shelters, with 88 percent residing in improvised camps after Israeli military operations destroyed or damaged nearly 76.6 percent of Gaza’s housing stock.

Around 90 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. Severe restrictions on electricity and fuel have crippled water treatment and distribution systems, forcing families to ration water between drinking, cooking, and washing while many displacement camps remain surrounded by untreated sewage.

Skin diseases have become one of the most widespread public health challenges in Gaza’s displacement camps. According to UNRWA, the first four months of 2026 alone saw more than 70,000 reported cases of ectoparasitic infestations, including scabies and lice, conditions that thrive where overcrowding, poor sanitation, and limited access to clean water persist. Women, children, and elderly residents often live without adequate privacy, sanitation facilities, or basic protection from disease.

The ceasefire also envisioned the withdrawal of Israeli forces from designated areas of Gaza. Instead, the territory accessible to Palestinian civilians has steadily contracted.

At the beginning of the ceasefire, Palestinians were already confined to less than half of Gaza’s 365 square kilometers. Nearly two million people were concentrated within that limited space while much of the remainder remained under Israeli military control.

Since then, that area has become even smaller.

In May 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel controlled approximately 60 percent of Gaza and instructed the military to expand that control further.

That’s 13,699 people per square kilometer living within a confined land area of 146 square kilometers. Creating a situation of Tokyo-like density but packed into a small, almost completely destroyed area.

Residents across Gaza described waking to find that the yellow concrete blocks marking the ceasefire line had shifted overnight, leaving them inside a free-fire zone, where the Israeli military could consider any Palestinian person or vehicle a legitimate target. At least 77 Palestinians have reportedly been shot on sight after ending up on the wrong side of the yellow line or even in its vicinity.

The continued bombardment, the prevention of basic civilian rehabilitation, the denial of essential human needs, and the expansion of Israel’s territorial occupation all indicate that the government’s policy of war and collective punishment did not change; it merely slowed.

Senior members of Israel’s governing coalition, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, have repeatedly advocated permanent Israeli settlements in Gaza and what they describe as the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians. When considered alongside continued military operations, stalled reconstruction, and the expansion of Israeli-controlled territory, these statements raise difficult questions about whether the ceasefire is failing to achieve its intended goals—or whether a different political objective has increasingly come to shape events on the ground.

A ceasefire is meant to do more than reduce the intensity of war. It is supposed to create the conditions for civilians to rebuild their lives and rehabilitate from the two-year nightmare. Eight months after the agreement was signed, those conditions are still out of reach. On paper, Gaza should be taking its first steps toward recovery. On the ground, Gaza does not look like a territory healing from conflict. It looks like one in which the conflict has continued under a different set of rules.

Greeting each of the Afghanistan women’s national cricket team players in Clarence House, King Charles inquired about their journeys, training routines, families, and marveled at their command of English.

“You’re amazing, you speak such good English!” he told the women as they beamed in their bright pink sports shirts.

Later, they presented the king with a signed shirt, a bat covered in Afghan-style decorations, and a lapel pin featuring the team’s badge.

This visit to Clarence House, on The Mall in London, was a warm, symbolic encounter in which the king honored a group of extraordinary women who have refused to surrender to one of the world’s most oppressive regimes.

Yet, just days earlier and only a few hundred miles away, European officials welcomed representatives of that same regime to Brussels.

The two moments could not have sent more different messages.

The Afghan women’s cricket team is celebrated by Britain because they represent everything the Taliban seeks to erase. Forced into exile after the Taliban seized power in August 2021, they now live in Australia and compete as the Afghan Refugee Women’s Team because they are barred from representing their home country. The International Cricket Council shamefully refuses to recognize them as their country’s official women’s team, even while the Afghan men’s team continues to compete freely internationally.

Their presence on the cricket field is a rebuke to the regime that outlawed their dreams.

For Marzia Babakarkhail—a former Afghan judge who survived two Taliban assassination attempts—Europe’s decision to engage directly with Taliban officials sends an alarming message.

“I believe the EU has made the wrong decision in this case,” she told Middle East Uncovered. “Any approach that leads to deportations or strengthens cooperation with the Taliban raises serious human rights concerns.

“Afghanistan is still facing a severe crisis, particularly for women and girls. Our schools are closed, women are forced to stay at home with no jobs, no system and no protection under the law.

Returning people to such conditions cannot be justified. The EU must remain consistent with its own values and commitments. Human rights, dignity, and the protection of life and safety must always come first.”

She has lived the consequences of the regime Europe is now engaging.

Babakarkhail spent years serving as a family court judge in Afghanistan while campaigning for women’s rights and establishing schools to educate girls. Those efforts made her a target. Taliban militants first stormed her home armed with guns. When that failed, they deliberately ran her down with a car and left her for dead. After six months in hospital, she fled to Britain without speaking a word of English. Today she is a proud British citizen and works for a member of parliament in Greater Manchester.

Her story mirrors the choices now confronting thousands of Afghans.

Firooza Afghan was only months into her professional cricket career when the Taliban swept back into Kabul. She and her teammates immediately went into hiding, fearing they would be identified as athletes in a country where women would soon be banned from almost every aspect of public life. An extraordinary rescue effort led by Australian cricket figures Mel Jones, Dr Catherine Ordway, and Emma Staples eventually secured humanitarian visas for the players, coaches and their families.

Firooza was among the last to escape. Together with her mother, siblings and aunt, she crossed illegally into Pakistan, passing through eleven Taliban checkpoints before finally reaching safety. Now 21, she says every match is played for those left behind.

“We are not playing for ourselves but for all Afghan women in our country where the situation is getting worse and worse day by day,” she said in an interview with a British newspaper.

“They, too, deserve to be free and choose their own path in life, and we want to remind a world that seems to have forgotten.”

This week, officials from the European Commission and representatives of 15 member states met a Taliban delegation in Brussels in an effort to accelerate the return of Afghan migrants, particularly those convicted of serious crimes or considered security threats.

It was the first time Taliban representatives had been invited to Brussels.

The meeting reflects a growing dilemma for European governments. Afghanistan has long refused to cooperate over deportations, while domestic political pressure to increase migrant returns continues to mount across much of Europe.

According to the latest figures, more than 14,000 Afghan nationals were ordered to leave EU countries during the first nine months of last year. Yet only around 340—or two percent—were actually returned.

European officials insist practical engagement with the Taliban does not amount to formal recognition.

Johan Forssell, Sweden’s migration minister, a country that hosts one of Europe’s largest Afghan populations, defended the meeting in the local press, arguing that his government must negotiate to “protect Swedish interests.”

For a regime that has spent years seeking international legitimacy, invitations to Brussels carry enormous symbolic value.

Since returning to power, the Taliban have issued more than 160 decrees systematically dismantling the rights of women and girls. Girls are banned from secondary schools and universities. Women have been pushed out of most professions, forced to comply with increasingly oppressive dress codes, subjected to severe restrictions on movement, and excluded from public life. In many cases they are effectively denied the ability to participate in society without male permission.

Against that backdrop, many human rights advocates fear that migration policy is beginning to eclipse the very values Europe claims to defend.

Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has warned against any forced returns, arguing that people can’t legally be sent back to places where they risk torture or persecution.

Amnesty International has likewise condemned any cooperation on deportations, describing Afghanistan as fundamentally unsafe and warning that engagement with the Taliban over returns ignores Europe’s legal and moral obligations.

Babakarkhail shares those concerns.

“I am deeply concerned about any engagement with the Taliban that could be seen as normalizing their authority,” she says. “Afghanistan is still facing a severe human rights crisis, especially for women and girls, who continue to be denied their basic rights, including education, work and freedom.

“Any discussion with the Taliban must be approached with extreme caution and must not come at the cost of human rights or the dignity of the Afghan people.

“The international community, including the EU, should ensure that human rights remain at the center of any engagement and that the voices of Afghan women are not ignored.”

That is precisely the question now facing Europe.

Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle, a member of the European Parliament and Chair of the Delegation for Relations with Afghanistan, said the visit was a “betrayal of our values.” She added, “The Taliban receive the privilege of dealmaking with the entire European Union, and some seem fine with it. Yes, getting migration under control is important, but so is maintaining a minimum of decency and standards.

“Europeans died to give women and girls their rights. So no, don’t legitimize the Taliban—ever. No one disputes that governments must manage migration or negotiate difficult international realities. But there is a profound difference between pragmatic engagement and conferring legitimacy on one of the world’s most repressive regimes.”

Europe cannot applaud the courage of Afghanistan’s exiled women cricketers on the one hand while, on the other, offering the regime that drove them into exile a seat at the diplomatic table in Brussels.

If the European Union truly believes in human rights, equality, and the protection of women, those principles should not be up for negotiation whenever issues around migration become inconvenient.

For Afghan women, it is yet another example of how world leaders, once again, are choosing to look the other way while they continue to suffer.

One thousand, seven hundred and thirty-five. That is the number of days Afghan girls have been shut out of their classrooms, and it climbs every morning. The count began in September 2021, when the Taliban reopened schools for boys and left the gates locked for their sisters. A girl who was eleven that autumn has now lost the whole of her secondary education, the years that quietly decide whether a person grows into a doctor or is handed over as a bride. She will not get those years back. There is no makeup exam for a stolen childhood.

Afghanistan holds a distinction no country should want: it is the only place on earth where girls are forbidden to study past primary school. This did not happen by accident or by drift. Since 2021, the Taliban have signed more than seventy decrees peeling away the right of women and girls to learn, to work, to travel, even to be seen in public. UNICEF now estimates roughly 2.2 million teenage girls are kept out of the classroom, a figure that grows every year the policy remains in effect. What looks from a distance like a broken school system is, up close, a cage built on purpose.

Ask what this does to a child, and the answer comes back in numbers that are hard to sit with. Researchers in Herat, the city my own life is bound to, surveyed girls locked out of education and published their findings in the Journal of Public Health: close to 88 percent showed signs of depression, and almost half said they had thought about ending their lives. A separate UN Women study found that 68 percent of Afghan women described their mental health as bad or very bad, and that many knew at least one woman or girl who had attempted suicide. Afghanistan is now among the very few countries where women die by suicide more often than men. Take a girl’s future from her, and you do not simply close a school. You begin to close off her reasons to keep going.

An empty desk is rarely left empty for long. Sooner or later, it is traded for a wedding. For twenty years, schooling was the strongest barrier the country had against child marriage, and the Taliban has spent four years tearing it down. Before 2021, roughly 28 percent of Afghan women were married before they turned eighteen. The UN estimates that the education ban on its own has pushed the risk of child marriage up by a quarter, and a 2023 survey found the rate had climbed toward 39 percent.

The logic in a ruined economy is merciless: a daughter who cannot study is recast as a cost to offset and a walwar payment (bride price) to collect. In May this year, the regime made it official, issuing a decree that writes child marriage into law and treats a girl’s silence as she reaches puberty as her consent. The same men who will not let her finish the seventh grade have decided she is old enough to be married off without being asked.

The cruelty of this does not stop with one generation. It reaches into the next. In December 2024, the Taliban closed the final corridor that had stayed open to women, banning them from training as midwives and nurses. Afghanistan already loses a woman to pregnancy or childbirth roughly every two hours, one of the worst maternal death rates anywhere in the world. By emptying those training rooms, the government has cut off an estimated 36,000 future midwives and thousands of nurses from the women who will one day be in labor with no one skilled beside them. In a society where many women will not, or cannot, be treated by a male doctor, shutting women out of medicine becomes a slow death sentence for mothers and infants not yet born.

There is a financial bill too, in a country that can least afford one. UNICEF reckons the secondary-school ban drained at least half a billion dollars from the economy in a single year, and that letting just one cohort of girls finish school could have added 5.4 billion. Stretch the ban on higher education out to 2066, and the projected loss climbs to around 9.6 billion dollars. Lock away half a nation’s talent, and it cannot hope to stand on its own feet. The Taliban are not only erasing girls; they are dismantling the future every Afghan was promised.

And still the world keeps pulling out a chair for them. At the Doha talks this spring, Taliban envoys waved away the question of girls’ schooling as an “internal domestic matter.” Too many diplomats let it pass and turned back to the subject of frozen assets. So, I will say again what I have said for years: diplomacy without women is betrayal. Every negotiation that files gender apartheid under “later,” as a footnote to be revisited once the serious business is done, tells the girls of Herat and Kabul and Kandahar that their disappearance is a fair price for someone else’s quiet. That is not peace. It is patience with a crime.

The clock runs on, 1,735 days and rising. We are long past the point of not knowing; the evidence sits in plain view. The only question left is whether the world will treat it as the emergency it is. Gender apartheid should be named and written into law as a crime against humanity. There should be no recognition, no released billions, no ordinary relations with this regime until the school gates open again. Someone must pay for the underground classes and protect the women teaching in them at the risk of their freedom. And the rest of us must refuse, on every single one of these days, to glance away.

Behind each statistic in this piece is a girl at a window, doing the quiet arithmetic of the years being taken from her. She is still there. She is still waiting. And what she is owed from the rest of us is not one more day of silence.

There is an old Lebanese saying that states: “Wherever the pregnancy happens, the labor pains are felt in Lebanon.” It is crude, bitter, and repeatedly proven right. A crisis erupts in the region, and Lebanon pays the price. Tehran escalates, southern Lebanon burns. Washington and Iran negotiate; Lebanese villages are destroyed. As other countries make decisions, Lebanon absorbs the consequences, again and again.

The latest escalation replayed this pattern, casting Lebanon as a support act in the regional power struggle. As negotiations raised the possibility of peace, those who claim to serve the country’s interests moved quickly to dismantle it. For Hezbollah, this is a battle for survival. For Lebanon, it is the price of submitting to powers driven by external interests.

Meanwhile, an estimated 1.2 million people, amounting to a fifth of the country’s population, are trapped in limbo, displaced by a conflict that could easily escalate further.

So far, broader diplomatic efforts have done little to contain Hezbollah, which views the prospect of peace as an existential problem. If Lebanon can negotiate through its government, what role remains for an armed group to speak on the country’s behalf? And if Lebanon can deal directly with Israel, why would Tehran need Hezbollah as its intermediary?

Hezbollah entered the war after the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei because Iran needed it to, not because the Lebanese government authorized it, or the Lebanese citizens chose it. Hezbollah acted because Tehran needed a lever, and the group exists in Lebanon to serve precisely that purpose.

The war also served Hezbollah’s interests, retaining its role as a shield for Iran and ensuring the group’s relevance as it confronts mounting opposition at home.

In recent months, tolerance has ebbed toward Hezbollah’s stranglehold on the Lebanese state, with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam announcing a formal ban on the group’s military activities in early March. Beirut has never been effective in enforcing its authority over Hezbollah, but politically, the significance is clear. Hezbollah’s actions will no longer be presented as a national decision. They are being recognized for what they were: an armed faction pushing an unwilling country into another war.

Iran and Hezbollah understood the danger peace would pose to them immediately. They rejected Lebanon’s direct track with Israel because it threatened to remove Lebanon from Iran’s regional chessboard.

Iran does not want Lebanon to negotiate as Lebanon. It wants Lebanon to negotiate as an Iranian asset. Hezbollah does not want a ceasefire that strengthens the Lebanese state. It wants any ceasefire to pass through the axis, through Tehran.

This is why Iran’s behavior during the latest skirmish was so revealing. Southern Lebanon has been absorbing Israeli strikes for months. Villages were emptied and Shia families, the very people Hezbollah claims to protect, watched their homes collapse into dust.

Despite the devastation, Iran did not treat the Israeli onslaught as a red line. For the Iranian regime, a village can be destroyed, a farmer can be killed, and a family can be displaced without disturbing the “regional architecture”.

But Beirut’s southern suburbs, it seems, are different. When Israel struck there, Iran acted with urgency. The message is becoming clear: the south is expendable, but Hezbollah’s central infrastructure is sacred. Ordinary Shia citizens may lose their homes, but the machine must survive.

Then, on June 7, Iran opened fire on Israel with a symbolic strike, marking the first attack since the April ceasefire. Israel threatened to retaliate, but Washington stepped in to order restraint. So Israel settled for a symbolic response, and the great regional drama ended where it always ends: Iran saved face, Israel claimed deterrence, Trump preserved his protracted negotiations, and Lebanon went back to being bombed in installments.

This is the horror of Lebanon’s dilemma, a country that’s forced to play the understudy in the performance of its own destruction.

The Iranian Embassy’s recent social media post captured the contradictions at play. Lebanon appears inside the map of Iran, with a message saying that Lebanon is “the heart of Iran.” Perhaps this is meant to mean that Lebanon is beloved by Iran. In reality, it looked like a confession. Iran does not see Lebanon as an independent country. It sees Lebanon as an organ in its body politic. And when Tehran hurts, Lebanon bleeds.

Hezbollah’s defenders may say this is an exaggeration. It is not. A Lebanese party that prioritizes Iran’s position is not a resistance movement; it is a mercenary structure with Lebanese victims. Its members may be Lebanese. Its dead, may be Lebanese. Its supporters may genuinely believe they are defending their community. But strategically, Hezbollah functions as Iran’s armed franchise. Its calendar is Iranian. Its escalation is Iranian. Its veto is Iranian. Its war is Iranian. However, the funerals, naturally, are Lebanese.

This is what makes the U.S.-Iran agreement so dangerous for Lebanon. The danger is not only what the agreement says. It is what Iran and Hezbollah now claim it means: that Lebanon’s border, Lebanon’s war, and Lebanon’s dead can be folded into Tehran’s bargain with Washington.

The agreement has been signed, but in Lebanon, the clashes have not truly stopped. The underlying war remains untouched. Israel is not going to surrender land or abandon its positions while Hezbollah remains armed on its northern border. No Israeli government will sell that to its public as security. And Hezbollah will not lay down its arms peacefully, because the arms are not merely a military tool. They are the party’s state, economy, identity, and veto.

What is Lebanon supposed to celebrate? A miracle? A ceasefire? A pause between funeral announcements? The best Lebanon can realistically hope for is a time-out, unless two impossible conditions suddenly become possible: either Israel withdraws without Hezbollah’s disarmament, or Hezbollah disarms without a fight. Neither is likely.

Following the U.S.-Iran agreement, the group claimed that Iran had pledged to pursue Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in the next phase of talks with Washington. Even when it comes to its sovereign territory, Lebanon is denied the dignity of speaking for itself.

Meanwhile, Israel bristles with frustration toward Washington’s constraints. Israel does not want President Trump to reign in its military freedom while Hezbollah remains armed, so it vents where it can: on Lebanon.

In doing so, Israel is bombing a country whose citizens did not vote for this war. It is destroying villages, killing civilians, and deepening the very instability it claims to contest. Hezbollah gives Israel the pretext, Iran gives Hezbollah the order, and Lebanon buries its dead.

Iran was never going to sacrifice its agreement with Washington for Lebanese villages. It used them to raise the price. Now Hezbollah wants Lebanese citizens to believe that Tehran will recover their land in the next round of negotiations. These promises ring hollow in a country stripped of sovereignty by ‘well-wishers’ that keep it perpetually at war.

This is why the language must be clarified. Hezbollah is not protecting Lebanon, and the Lebanese state is not toothless by accident. It is enfeebled by a militia that turned sovereignty into a hostage file and called the ransom resistance.

And somewhere, in a Lebanese village that few people in Tehran can name, a bomb is dropped, and another family discovers that the pregnancy was elsewhere, but the labor pains are theirs.

Every time war erupts in the Middle East, the same debate follows. Who won? Who lost? Which side gained leverage, preserved deterrence, improved its negotiating position? Analysts map missile exchanges and flight patterns, politicians declare victory, and commentators rush to sort the players into winners and losers.

I think we are asking the wrong questions.

The one that matters is simpler: Would you invest your money in the Middle East today?

Not if you are a sanctioned oligarch hiding assets, or a connected businessman chasing government contracts, or a state moving capital for strategic reasons. I mean an ordinary investor or entrepreneur, someone who earned their money and wants to put it somewhere productive. Would they build a factory here, start a company, hire workers, or bet their future on the region?

The answer tells us more about the state of the Middle East than any war outcome. And the uncomfortable reality is that much of the region is getting the worst of both worlds, bearing the economic costs of war without the dividends of peace.

The numbers are starting to confirm it. The International Monetary Fund’s most recent outlook cut its expected growth for the Middle East and North Africa in 2026 to roughly 1 percent, down sharply from forecasts near 4 percent, with Iran and Iraq among the economies expected to bear the brunt. The World Bank has issued parallel warnings that conflict and geopolitical instability are eroding investment confidence and dragging down growth across the region.

What does this mean for the people living in the region? Lower growth means fewer jobs. Fewer jobs mean delayed marriages, delayed homes, and delayed independence. More graduates will compete for fewer job openings and more talented people will conclude that their future must lie elsewhere.

The real economic cost of instability is not the damage it causes today but the uncertainty it creates about tomorrow. Investors do not simply calculate returns, but also predictability. A manufacturer wants to know the supply chain will function next year. A tourism operator wants to know whether flights will continue to run. A founder wants to know whether skilled workers will still be in the country 18 months from now.

Conflict destroys that confidence, and the damage radiates outward. When airlines suspend routes, airports lose business. When shipping lanes get riskier, insurance premiums climb. When uncertainty rises, investors postpone, and postponed investment means fewer jobs created. The recent fighting disrupted energy production, trade, and air traffic across the Gulf, and that disruption reached far beyond the countries actually exchanging fire.

The reported U.S.–Iran framework deal captures the problem perfectly. If it holds, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will offer real relief to energy markets, shippers, insurers, and governments desperate for a break. But this does little to restore confidence or ensure predictability. The hardest questions—Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions relief, enforcement, and regional escalation—are being pushed into another round of talks. It may be a step forward, but for investors it is still uncertainty with a calendar attached.

Here the simple story breaks down, and it is worth being honest about why.

The region is not uniformly repelling capital. It is bifurcating. While the conflict zone hemorrhages confidence, the Gulf monarchies are doing the opposite. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar market themselves as the stable harbor precisely because the neighborhood is turbulent. Dubai absorbs the capital, talent, and company headquarters fleeing less predictable markets. Riyadh courts the foreign investment that Tehran and Baghdad cannot. For these states, regional instability is a competitive advantage they are actively selling.

The places that can least afford to lose their best people and their investable capital are the ones losing them, and much of what they lose flows straight to their wealthier, calmer neighbors.

This is also why Iran deserves its own line of analysis rather than being folded into a regional average.

Unlike the hollowed-out states that buckled under external pressure, the Islamic Republic defines its mere survival as victory; it can absorb economic punishment that would topple a more conventional government and call the endurance a win.

But survival does not automatically beget prosperity. A regime can outlast sanctions and war and still preside over an economy that no rational person would build a future in, and that gap between political durability and economic hopelessness is exactly where a generation gets lost.

That younger generations bear the deepest cost. Across the region, millions of educated, ambitious, globally connected young people enter the workforce every year. Ask many of them what their long-term goal is, and the answer is no longer to start a company, build a product, or buy a home. It is to leave.

And Western nations are not exactly chomping at the bit to accept more migrants or refugees.

Strategic victories mean little if a country’s most talented citizens conclude that their future lies elsewhere. Nations grow when people invest, build, and stay—not when capital and talent are searching for a way out.

So, before we debate who won the latest round of fighting or celebrate the next diplomatic breakthrough, we should ask a different question. Five years from now, will more people be building their future in the Middle East, or planning their exit from it?

That is the scoreboard that matters.

Governments can survive wars, regimes can survive sanctions, and militaries can preserve deterrence. None of those achievements guarantee that a young engineer will start a company, that an investor will build a factory, or that a talented graduate will decide to stay.

For too long, the region has measured success by what it has managed to endure rather than what it plans to build.

The real contest in the Middle East is not between rival states, armed groups, or competing alliances, but between countries that can convince people to invest their lives there and countries that cannot. The winners will not necessarily be those with the strongest militaries or the most durable regimes. They will be the ones that become places where people can confidently imagine a future for themselves and their families.

The future belongs to the places people choose to stay.

Lebanon’s latest debate over a general amnesty law is being presented as a humanitarian response to prison overcrowding, judicial delays, and unresolved legal cases. But that description captures only part of the story.

The proposed law would release or reduce the sentences of various categories of detainees and prisoners. Supporters argue that Lebanon’s prisons are overcrowded, that many cases have languished for years without resolution, and that the justice system is incapable of processing them in a reasonable timeframe.

Those problems are real. But the debate is not only about prison reform, but about how a failed state is attempting to deal with years of judicial abuse, sectarian bargaining, political paralysis, and selective enforcement of the law.

For non-Lebanese readers, the controversy began with a striking double standard. When Hezbollah crossed into Syria and committed horrible crimes to save Bashar al-Assad, the Lebanese state neither prosecuted nor seriously challenged its actions. An armed Lebanese movement crossed an international border, participated in a foreign war, and returned home without legal consequences.

At the same time, many Lebanese who opposed Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria or criticized its alliance with Assad found themselves under suspicion. Some were accused of terrorism. Others spent years in detention without conviction, and in some cases without formal charges. Whether one agrees with their views or not, the facts tell a troubling story. Hezbollah enjoyed effective immunity while many of its opponents faced the full weight of the security and judicial systems.

This does not excuse anyone who joined extremist organizations, attacked the army, killed civilians, or committed acts of terrorism. Such crimes should be prosecuted. But that is precisely the point. A state that tolerates impunity for one actor while abandoning basic legal protections for others is applying the law selectively and failing to administer justice consistently.

A functioning legal system does not hold people for years without charge, allow pretrial detention to become a substitute for a verdict, or leave suspects in prison because security agencies, judges, or political actors find it convenient. If someone spends years behind bars without conviction, that is a failure of due process and a serious abuse of state power.

This is how the general amnesty debate entered the scene. Instead of admitting that the judiciary and security agencies helped create the current crisis, Lebanon’s political class is discussing a general amnesty as if it were a clean humanitarian solution. It is not. It risks burying a judicial scandal underneath a political bargain.

The problem is not that some detainees may be released. Some should have been released years ago. The problem is that parliament is trying to place fundamentally different cases into one basket: people never charged, people never convicted, people convicted after questionable trials, terrorists, drug traffickers, fugitives, and criminals with political protection.

These distinctions matter. Where there was no charge, release them. Where there was no conviction, try them immediately or release them. Where there was a conviction reached through a corrupted or politicized process, order a retrial. Where there was a fair conviction for murder, terrorism, torture, or serious drug trafficking, there should be no pardon.

Terrorism must be condemned without hesitation. Those who carried arms against the state, killed soldiers or civilians, joined extremist groups, planted bombs, or used religion as a license for violence should be held accountable. Multiple things can be true at once. No political grievance justifies terrorism, no Sunni grievance against Hezbollah justifies jihadist violence, and no injustice committed by Hezbollah gives anyone the right to murder.

But condemning terrorism does not give the state permission to violate its own laws. A judiciary that imprisons without proof manufactures widespread resentment instead of fighting terrorism. A security system that arrests first and investigates later humiliates the society it is charged with protecting. A state that can keep a person in prison for years without conviction is operating outside its own stated legal principles.

Hezbollah’s role is central to this story because Lebanon’s judiciary and security agencies have not operated in a vacuum. They operate under the shadow of Hezbollah’s weapons, intelligence networks, political veto, and intimidation. Since the Syrian war, opposition to Hezbollah and Assad has often been treated as a security threat, while Hezbollah’s own illegal arms, cross-border war, extrajudicial assassinations, and domestic coercion are excused. This is the ugliest double standard in the republic: one side can own a private army and call it resistance; others can be destroyed by suspicion alone.

The Lebanese state was instrumental in its own failure. It allowed Hezbollah’s parallel power structure to shape the meaning of legality and facilitated a system in which the armed party enjoys immunity while its opponents face selective prosecution. That is how a state becomes a tool in the hands of a militia.

The rot is not limited to Islamist detainees. Political parties are also pushing for the amnesty to include drug-related cases, as well as the cases of Lebanese citizens who fled to Israel after Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. The proposed law has drawn predictable sectarian bargaining. Sunni leaders focus on Islamist detainees, Shiite parties on drug-related cases, and Christian forces on Lebanese who fled to Israel.

The drug file is especially pernicious. Minor users and addicts should not be treated like cartel bosses; they need rehabilitation and proportionate justice. But drug traffickers, organized dealers, and cartel figures should not be laundered through a political deal. Lebanon’s drug economy is not socially neutral. It is tied to areas where Hezbollah’s influence is dominant. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Lebanon-based figures accused of Captagon trafficking with ties to Hezbollah and the Assad regime, describing networks that generated revenue for Hezbollah, the Syrian regime, and traffickers themselves. To pardon cartel members would be a surrender to narco-politics.

The Israel exile file is also morally complex. Many Lebanese fled to Israel in 2000 because the state could not or would not protect them from Hezbollah’s revenge after Israel’s withdrawal from south Lebanon. That failure should be acknowledged. Those who killed Lebanese citizens, tortured detainees, or participated in crimes inside Israeli-run detention facilities should never be pardoned. Flight may be understandable. Murder and torture are not.

The real scandal is that Lebanon wants amnesty without accountability.

Who detained people without proper files? Who allowed investigations to rot? Who used military courts and security agencies as tools of political intimidation? Who protected drug networks? Who decided that Hezbollah’s crimes were untouchable while its opponents could be crushed?

An amnesty law that does not answer these questions is a cover-up.

Lebanon does not need another sectarian bargain or a deal in which every political faction secures relief for its preferred constituency and calls it “national reconciliation.”

It needs justice.

Release the uncharged. Try the untried. Retry the unfairly convicted. Punish the guilty.

Then ask the question parliament seems determined to avoid: who built a system in which some people could spend years in prison without conviction while others operated above the law?

Any amnesty that avoids that question is not an act of mercy, but a gross abdication of responsibility.

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu was interviewed on CBS’ 60 Minutes and said something that, a decade ago, would have sounded almost unthinkable from an Israeli prime minister: Israel should eventually stop relying on American military aid, and will start winding down to zero American aid over the next decade.

He argued Israel is a strong, wealthy, technologically advanced country—one that should be able to defend itself without permanent dependence on U.S. taxpayers.

No doubt, a rich, highly developed state should not want to be permanently subsidized by another country. Israel should be able to stand on its own two feet. Today, it has a higher GDP per capita than the UK and Germany.

Netanyahu is saying this at a moment when American support for Israel is collapsing. For the first time ever this year, more Americans claim to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. The old so-called “bipartisan consensus” on Israel is now dust in the wind. And it is not coming back any time soon. While many Republicans still broadly express support—including enthusiastic support—for Israel, the same cannot be said of most Democrats and Independents. And this is especially true among younger voters, who tend to view Israel in a negative light.

You can see the same shift in the way American media now talks about alleged Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

A few years ago, allegations of abuse or systematic mistreatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers or guards circulated mainly in Palestinian and Arab media, activist spaces, and left-wing publications already hostile to Israel.

Now, major media like The New York Times have begun to weigh in on these issues. A column by Nicholas Kristof published last week aired allegations of sexual violence, torture, and abuse against Palestinian detainees in Israeli custody. Kristof cited testimony from Palestinian men and women who said they had been raped, sexually assaulted, stripped naked, threatened with rape, attacked with dogs, beaten, starved, denied medical care, or abused in other ways.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry denounced the column as propagating a “blood libel,” and has said that it will sue The New York Times, although no lawsuit has been filed yet.

Since October 7—when Hamas jihadists broke into Israel and murdered, kidnapped, and, according to a report citing testimony from survivors, brutally raped and mutilated Israelis—Israel has carried out enormous military operations in Gaza. It has detained thousands of Palestinians, including some in the West Bank. Many were Hamas fighters. Some were militants from other factions. Others were civilians, unfortunately, caught up in the dragnet of war.

The problem for Israel, here, is that the combination of mass detention, an atmosphere of revenge, fear, and a captive population is combustible.

Such abuse has been perpetrated in many different countries before, including Western democracies. The United States had Abu Ghraib. There, Iraqi prisoners were stripped, humiliated, threatened with dogs, sexually degraded, and tortured. France had Algeria. There, electric shocks, waterboarding, rape, disappearances, and summary executions were used. Britain had Kenya, with detention camps for Kikuyu prisoners and suspected Mau Mau sympathizers where beatings, starvation, forced labor, and sexual abuse were used.

So far, a lot of the discourse in the pro-Israel sphere has focused on trying to discredit the allegations altogether. For instance, many have cited Euro-Med Monitor—whose founder Ramy Abdu has been accused by Israel and pro-Israel advocates of links to Hamas—as proof that the whole story is rotten. That may be a reason to treat some of the material Kristof cited with caution. Not every allegation is necessarily true. Indeed, Kristof has previously had to retract claims made in The New York Times after having been misled by a source.

But Kristof’s column included 14 separate Palestinian testimonies, Israeli media reporting, UN material, HaMoked figures, B’Tselem’s prison report, and the work of Amnesty International. It’s not the case that he took a single allegation and ran with it.

On one hand, there is a real danger here. Allegations like this can be weaponized in ugly ways. People who hate Jews will use stories of sexual abuse by Israeli soldiers as an excuse to demonize them as a whole group, rather than as specific allegations about particular individuals, particular institutions, and a particular war. They will fold these allegations into older antisemitic fantasies about Jewish cruelty, perversity, bloodlust, or hidden power.

That should be rejected completely by all sensible people.

But if Israeli soldiers or prison guards abused Palestinian detainees, the perpetrators themselves should be held accountable. The commanders who enabled them should bear responsibility. The politicians who created a permissive atmosphere should answer for it.

But Jews as a people are not responsible. Jewish civilians in London, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, or anywhere else are not answerable for the alleged crimes of guards in an Israeli detention facility.

On the other hand, the risk of antisemitic weaponization cannot be allowed to become a shield against a thorough investigation. Individuals who abuse Palestinians must be held accountable, and such abuse, if it has taken place, must be stopped completely and should never, ever be allowed to recur again.

This is the best first step for Israel to rehabilitate their reputation.

Netanyahu seems to understand the reputation problem, but not its cause. In the same 60 Minutes interview, he pointed to social media, TikTok, and the speed with which images now spread around the world. There is some truth there. The information environment has changed. Israel no longer speaks to Western publics through a small number of sympathetic editors, television anchors, and foreign-policy elites. A video from Gaza can travel globally before any Israeli spokesperson has drafted a line.

But social media is the medium, not the disease.

TikTok is not responsible for Palestinian suffering. Israel’s reputation is deteriorating because the effects of the unresolved conflict with the Palestinians are now visible in a way they were not before. Images of destruction in Gaza, videos of settler violence in the West Bank, and growing allegations of abuse against Palestinian detainees are shaping global opinion far more than any propaganda campaign or algorithm ever could.

Israel should hold itself to a higher standard than a terrorist organization. That means taking allegations of sexual abuse and mistreatment seriously rather than dismissing them outright as propaganda. It means investigating abuses committed by soldiers, prison guards, or settlers, and ensuring those responsible are punished.

The real solution, for both Israelis and Palestinians, is not better public relations. It is resolving the conflict itself before the violence and mutual dehumanization destroys what little legitimacy and hope for peace still remain for both peoples.

Today, Middle East Uncovered will publish two pieces examining the growing media and political controversy surrounding testimonies of sexual violence connected to October 7 and the war that followed. These accounts are graphic, painful, and difficult to engage with honestly.

We are publishing them because we believe difficult testimonies should not disappear beneath ideological battles. Too often, public discourse has centered more on defending narratives than confronting what victims describe. Our goal is not to litigate suffering selectively or protect one political camp from scrutiny, but to examine how these testimonies are being received, contested, weaponized, and, in many cases, buried beneath the broader war over narratives.

Since October 7 and the war in Gaza that followed, much of the public discourse surrounding the conflict has turned into a battle over competing narratives. More recently, the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel camps have clashed over two separate reports involving sexual violence. The New York Times (NYT) published testimony from Palestinian prisoners describing sexual abuse in Israeli jails, while The Daily Wire covered a report by The Civil Commission on October 7th Crimes by Hamas Against Women, Children and Families documenting Hamas’s sexual violence against victims of October 7.

The timing intensified the dispute: The New York Times’ piece appeared less than 24 hours before the Civil Commission released its findings.

Those who viewed the NYT report as less credible, or rejected it entirely, focused heavily on its sources. One was the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, founded and chaired by Ramy Abdu, a Palestinian figure widely perceived by the pro-Israel camp as being close to Hamas circles—a connection used to cast doubt on testimonies collected through his organization. Another was Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, an Israeli activist who shifted from outspoken pro-Israel advocacy to strongly anti-Zionist positions during the course of the war. Ben-Ephraim also amplified a claim circulated by Euro-Med Monitor alleging that Israeli forces used dogs trained to sexually assault Palestinian detainees, a claim many in the pro-Israel camp dismissed as antisemitic blood libel.

On the other side, many in the pro-Palestine camp dismissed the Civil Commission’s report outright because it came from an Israeli NGO focused specifically on documenting Hamas’s sexual crimes against victims of October 7. Others continued to deny the evidence surrounding Hamas’s sexual violence altogether, insisting that there is still not enough proof to conclude that such crimes took place.

The two reports include horrific, stomach-turning testimonies. Palestinian detainees described being sexually abused with objects such as metal batons and carrots by Israeli prison guards, while others recounted settlers in the West Bank zip-tying and violently pulling their genitals.

The Civil Commission’s report on October 7 documented multiple accounts of sexual violence committed by Hamas fighters during the attacks, including testimonies describing gang rape, mutilation, and the targeting of victims before and after death at sites such as the Nova music festival, where more than 370 people were killed. One survivor quoted in the report said he had been treated “like a sex doll” by his attackers.

Both camps have invested more time and energy in discrediting the messengers on the opposing side than in listening to the testimonies themselves.

Once that happens, the victims themselves disappear beneath the argument. This is despite the substantial evidence that Hamas used sexual violence against victims of October 7 and against hostages held in Gaza—evidence that exists regardless of which outlet covered it or who amplified it politically. The Civil Commission’s report, compiled over two and a half years from more than 10,000 photographs and videos and over 430 interviews, is not made less credible because The Daily Wire chose to report on it. A separate United Nations report likewise found “reasonable grounds” to believe that Palestinian militias committed sexual violence during the October 7 attacks.

The abuse of Palestinian prisoners is equally confirmed by a record of testimony that predates the most recent war. A leaked video from the Sde Teiman detention facility showed Israeli soldiers sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee. Five soldiers were arrested; the charges were later dropped. A survey published last year by Save the Children found that more than half of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 had witnessed or experienced sexual violence in Israeli jails.

It is, of course, reasonable to scrutinize the organizations and individuals collecting evidence. But what matters more is listening carefully to the testimonies themselves and examining whether the accounts are credible and consistent. A victim’s nationality should matter far less than the violence they endured. Suffering is not determined by ethnicity or political affiliation, yet both sets of victims are increasingly being turned into instruments in a broader political struggle by camps more invested in defending a cause than confronting the human reality of what these people experienced.

Listening to their testimonies should not be limited to publishing them in an opinion piece or an independent NGO report, though both matter. It must be followed by programs that help those victims recover from what they have been through, and hold the perpetrators accountable. The conditions of Palestinian prisoners inside Israel require a serious, independent investigation. Since Ben Gvir became Israel’s national security minister, and more so after October 7, he has openly boasted of his goal to worsen conditions for prisoners, writing on X in 2024 that it was one of the highest goals he had set for himself in office.

There are no winners in the battle for narratives. Each side will continue defending its own version of events for years to come. But every hour spent arguing over the credibility of a journalist or the politics of an NGO is an hour not spent listening to survivors describe what was done to them.

The testimonies discussed here—those of Palestinian prisoners and those of October 7 survivors and hostages—are not competing claims that cancel one another out. They are separate accounts of violence committed against human beings by specific perpetrators, and they demand serious investigation, accountability, and long-term support for those who survived them. The political camps that have turned these testimonies into ammunition would do far more for the people they claim to defend if they focused on that instead.

The question being asked about Syria today—in diaspora living rooms, opposition circles, Western policy briefings, and homes across Syria itself—is whether there is still any chance for democracy. The tone in which it is asked usually implies the answer: “Probably not.” The new leadership replicates the authoritarian reflexes of the regime it replaced. Institutions are hollowed out or captured. Minorities are marginalized. The Islamist project consolidates discreetly while the pragmatic façade holds. What exactly is there to be optimistic about?

The pessimism is not irrational. But the question itself is subtly wrong—not in its urgency, but in its premise. It treats democracy as a destination that Syria either reaches or forfeits, a binary condition measured against which the verdict is clear, and the pessimists win easily. What that framing misses is the difference between democracy as an endpoint and democratization as a process—the long, non-linear, frequently ugly accumulation of experiences, failures, negotiations, and institutional habits that eventually make democracy possible. No society that has democracy today arrived at it ready. The question worth asking about Syria is not whether it has arrived, but whether it has begun—and more precisely, how long it has actually been trying, and what that history tells us about what is happening now.

Syria’s democratic project did not begin with the fall of Assad, the 2011 revolution, or even independence in 1946. It began in 1918 with the establishment of the Arab Kingdom and the convening of the General Syrian Congress, which, in 1920, produced the first democratic constitution in the Arab world: an elected parliament, guaranteed civil liberties, and a framework for self-governance. The French mandate extinguished that experiment within months, partitioned the territory, and imposed external sovereignty. But it did not end the democratic impulse, nor did it manufacture the pathologies that would eventually destroy it. Elections continued under the mandate. Syrians governed significant aspects of their own affairs, formed governments, and negotiated within representative structures. The factionalism, regionalism, and elite dysfunction that would later produce the coup carousel were already visible in that period—not as products of French interference, but as indigenous features of Syrian political culture expressing themselves even within the constrained space the mandate allowed.

The French, for their part, attempted to manage Syria’s diversity by creating separate administrative units for Alawites, Druze, and others. Whatever the self-serving motivations behind that approach, it reflected a recognition that diversity was real and required institutional management. Syrians rejected it in favor of unity—a legitimate and courageous political choice. But unity was asserted rather than constructed. The mechanisms, culture, and institutional framework that genuine unity requires were never built. Syria was not, after all, an ancient unified nation dismembered by colonial powers. It was a modern political project, born from the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, whose borders and composition were themselves contested and contingent. Insisting on unity without doing the work of constructing it was a choice—and it was Syria’s own.

Independence brought about the most direct democratic experiment: elections, parties, a parliament, and a press. It also brought more than two dozen coups and coup attempts in two decades. Each one divided the liberal and democratic elite not along principled lines but along factional lines, based on who supported this general, opposed that faction, and whose communal network aligned with which officer corps. The parties that claimed democratic legitimacy participated in, enabled, or acquiesced to military interventions whenever those interventions served their immediate interests. Institutions were treated as instruments rather than constraints. There is a tendency in some Western academic circles to attribute this coup cycle primarily to CIA manipulation, a case built largely on Miles Copeland’s self-dramatizing and internally contradictory recollections. The State Department’s own contemporaneous assessment of the 1949 coup found “no evidence” of outside participation and attributed it to internal military grievances. Patrick Seale’s enduring account locates the drivers where the evidence actually points: domestic factionalism, weak institutions, and inter-Arab rivalry. External actors mattered, but they did not invent Syria’s instability. The coups were Syria’s own work. So was the democracy they destroyed.

What the Ba’ath replaced that democracy with was not simply authoritarianism but a specific kind of social engineering—land redistribution, nationalization, the expansion of the public sector, the elevation of previously marginalized constituencies—all pursued simultaneously with modernization and development, but with regime consolidation always as the primary concern. When development served consolidation, it was pursued. When it conflicted with it, consolidation won. Bashar Al-Assad then completed the logic: by the end of his dynasty’s rule, the regime was consuming everything—democratic possibility, development, modernization, and the country’s basic physical and human infrastructure alike. The institutions that survived were not merely weak; they had been deliberately designed to serve control rather than public function, which means rebuilding them is not a technical problem of capacity but a political problem of purpose.

That history is the context for the current moment. Syria is not beginning to democratize. It is continuing a century-long struggle to democratize, under the worst conditions that struggle has yet faced. The pathologies that destroyed the post-independence experiment are not new diagnoses. They are the same pathologies, wearing new clothes, operating through new actors, in a landscape of institutional ruin that makes their management harder than ever.

The current governance picture is, by any honest measure, deeply discouraging. Ministries are staffed by loyalists reporting through informal networks. Politburo branches operate as parallel provincial authorities with more real power than officially appointed governors. Unions and chambers of commerce have been placed under direct state control. The constitutional framework concentrates all meaningful authority in a single executive with no independent judicial check. The replacement of Alawite Ba’athist loyalists with Sunni Islamist loyalists replicates the sectarian logic of the previous system under a new ideological banner. The deep state is being rebuilt with different personnel and the same underlying architecture.

And yet the deficit is not total. Civil society is thin but stirring. Activists from the Damascus Spring era are again attempting to carve out space for cultural and political expression, aided by a new generation of conscientious youth. The Bab Touma protests, the cross-communal response to the alcohol restrictions, the meager turnout at the Islamist counter-mobilization—none of these are signs of democratic health, but rather of democratic instinct: the reflexive pushback of a population that has not entirely surrendered its sense of what it is owed, and the equally significant signal that authorities, however reluctantly, can be made to retreat. The space for genuine politics in Syria is limited, but it is not zero. The difference between limited and zero is everything.

Democratization, understood historically, is the accumulation of conditions, habits, and experiences that eventually make democratic governance sustainable. It includes the formation and dissolution of political coalitions, however imperfect, and the negotiation of communal boundaries, however painful. It requires developing the expectation that power has limits and can be contested. And the experience of failure—the learning that only comes from having tried something, watched it go wrong, and been forced to reckon with why.

By these measures, Syria is engaged in democratization not for the first time, but in a new and particularly difficult chapter of a long attempt. The alcohol controversy produced a public pushback and a government retreat. The Kurdish autonomy negotiation produced an outcome nobody wanted, and both sides had to live with—which is, in fact, what democratic accommodation almost always looks like from the inside. This is what practicing democratic governance looks like. And practice, accumulated over time, is the only known path to anything better.

Those who care about the outcome for Syria must engage with these ideas honestly—or retreat into the fantasy of reconstruction, the despair of permanent impossibility, or the comfort of watching from a distance while setting temperatures they will never have to live in.

No society that eventually developed democratic governance did so from a position of readiness. What made the difference, where it was made, was not the arrival of the right conditions but the persistence of the attempt under wrong ones. Britain, France, and the United States all arrived at their current democratic arrangements through processes that were violent, exclusionary, and non-linear, and none of them has finished the work. Rwanda built a functioning post-genocide state not by waiting for readiness but by doing specific, hard things under difficult circumstances. South Korea’s democracy emerged from military dictatorship and student massacres. Japan’s was imposed by occupation and took decades to internalize. The endpoint looks “clean” because we know where it ended. The process was anything but.

Syria has had genuine democratic beginnings. Each was interrupted, captured, or destroyed before it could come to fruition. The current moment is not a fresh start. It is the latest attempt, made by a society that carries the full weight of everything that failed before, in conditions of fragmentation and institutional ruin that make it harder than ever. That is not a reason for despair, but for clarity about what is actually being attempted, what has failed before and why, and what it actually requires to work within real constraints.

Liberty is not a goddess to be worshipped but a necessity—like water, like bread. The march toward it does not culminate in transcendence. It culminates, if it culminates at all, in the acceptance of the mundane: the daily, unglamorous work of governing a society that has chosen, imperfectly and provisionally, to govern itself. Syria is not ready for democracy, but it is engaged in democratization. Those are not the same thing, and the difference between them is not failure. It is time, and practice, and the willingness to keep working in a space that is limited but genuine, for as long as that space exists and wherever it can be found.

It was March 2012 in Baghdad, Iraq, and I was busy preparing for my final-year baccalaureate exams. Electricity came in predictable halves, twelve hours on, twelve hours off, enough to plan around, enough to study by. I remember opening Facebook and seeing a headline that felt almost unreal: the Ministry of Electricity projected that by 2013, Iraq would not only meet its own electricity needs but export surplus power. I went back to my books with a sense of direction, as if my effort and time were finally aligned.

Fourteen years later, the power still goes out at nine in the evening. Five minutes later, it is back, courtesy of Abu Karrar’s neighborhood generator, and I go back to doom-scrolling and watching mediocre TV with the family. No one is phased by the outages anymore.

Growing up in Iraq teaches you things no classroom ever will. Plan for every scenario. Trust very little. Hope for the best—and inshallah, it will work out. Or at least, will work out enough to get by.

To understand Iraq, you have to look not just at what its people lack, but at what they have built to fill the gaps.

Abu Karrar owns two power generators and is one of the neighborhood’s unofficial bosses. He is quietly resented by everyone, but openly challenged by no one. His electricity subscription runs year-round, costing $30 to $100 per household per month. In winter, when the government grid manages only 18 to 24 hours of supply, paying feels almost wasteful. But summers in Iraq are always right around the corner. When June arrives, and temperatures climb past fifty degrees Celsius, the grid buckles under millions of air conditioners running simultaneously, and supply drops to eight or twelve hours a day. The subscription that felt unnecessary in January becomes a lifeline in July.

This is just one way Iraqis hedge against a system that continues to fall short.

Consider a dull February afternoon. My salary hits the bank account, and I head out to withdraw it. The teller greets me with the expression of someone who’s been personally wronged. I smile anyway. Sometimes the withdrawal goes through after a brief interrogation—questions that have nothing to do with my account, my salary, or any discernible regulation. Other times, I leave empty-handed, told there are “extra fees” to access my own money. Transferring funds abroad—say, to pay a friend back or cover university tuition—is an entirely separate ordeal, best approached with patience, a full afternoon, and low expectations. This isn’t an exceptional experience. It’s a Tuesday.

In November 2024, nearly 90 trillion Iraqi dinars, about $69 billion, representing around 92% of Iraq’s total money supply, remained outside the banking system, according to former Central Bank of Iraq official Mahmoud Dagher. Additional unquantifiable amounts are stored in gold, worn as jewelry, or kept at home. Gold cannot be rendered inaccessible overnight, as many discovered during Lebanon’s 2019 financial crisis, when savings became effectively untouchable. The generation that lived through the UN sanctions of the 1990s, when the Iraqi dinar lost so much value that people weighed their salaries rather than counted them, does not need an economics degree to understand why. As the saying goes in Iraq, “A woman’s jewelry is not an aesthetic choice. It is her portfolio.”

The logic of holding into gold extends beyond the bedroom safe and into marriage contracts themselves. In Iraq, as across much of the Arab world, a marriage proposal traditionally includes a dowry, or muqadam, a sum paid by the groom to the bride, typically in gold. The clichéd explanation is that it honors the bride. The more honest one is that it functions as a financial guarantee in a society where guarantees are scarce.

The muqadam is a down payment against uncertainty: a formal acknowledgment that if the marriage fails, if the groom has a change of heart or walks away, the bride is not left with nothing. It is contingency planning, written into the wedding contract. Today, as gold prices rise sharply, that tradition is becoming a barrier to entry, with fewer couples able to afford to get married.

Young Iraqis who want to marry find the expected dowry amount increasingly out of reach, and engagements are delayed or abandoned. Not for lack of feeling, but for lack of liquidity. The “golden cage,” as Iraqis sometimes call marriage, has never been more expensive to enter, partly because the metal that built it keeps getting more valuable, and nobody wants to be the generation that stops the tradition.

The side hustle completes the picture of a society that operates on contingency plans. Ask a professional in Iraq what they do, and you’ll often get more than one answer: a government engineer who imports spare parts, a schoolteacher who gives private lessons, a doctor who works in a public hospital by day and represents pharmaceutical products on the side, a public official who speaks in careful, conservative terms in formal settings but, in smaller circles, reveals a far more liberal set of views.

Officially, only about 2% of Iraqis hold more than one job, according to the Iraq Labor Force Survey 2021 (ILO), but this reflects only declared, formal employment.

The gap between that figure and what any Iraqi sees every day tells a clearer story: people have quietly built a parallel economy alongside the official one, driven by the simple understanding that a single income—in a country where salaries can freeze and emergencies arrive unannounced—is not enough.

Open the door to the storage room of almost any Iraqi home, and you are likely to find a curated archive of every crisis survived and every emergency anticipated. Large aluminum pots for cooking for forty, in a household of five. Cardboard boxes from appliances purchased 15 years ago. A suitcase inside a suitcase inside another suitcase. An old stereo, cord carefully wrapped. 15 stacked mattresses. Screwdrivers of every size, some rusty. Boxes whose contents no one fully remembers, preserved by the logic that says, “If we kept it this long, there must have been a reason.” Hoarding isn’t an Iraqi phenomenon per se, yet in this context, every object is a hedge against the next disaster.

But the archive is not only made of objects. During the worst years of sectarian violence and suicide bombings, a discreet and largely undocumented practice spread across Iraqi families: sending siblings to different schools. Not for academic reasons, but for the same reason a financial advisor tells you to diversify your assets: if one fails, the other holds. If one school was bombed, the other child would survive. No study has captured this formally, no policy paper has documented it, yet ask around in Baghdad, and all over Iraq, and you will find it in nearly every circle. A cousin, neighbor, or friend whose parents made that calculation without naming it, because naming it would have meant saying out loud what everyone knows but doesn’t want to admit: “Our children are not safe here.”

The same instinct, operating at scale, occasionally backfires. In March 2025, when Iran halted gas exports to Iraq after strikes on its gas fields, Iraqis felt the ripple before the lights had flickered even once. People flooded the markets, not just for food, but also for oil lamps, relics of the 1990s sanctions era that had sat gathering dust for fifteen or twenty years. Within hours, a lamp selling for $1 was selling for $7.50. Less than two days later, Iranian gas exports resumed, the lights stayed on, and the lamps went back into the storage room—joining the forgotten mattresses and screwdrivers to collect dust for another decade. Seven and a half dollars, successfully wasted, and a missed opportunity to tell our children we once worked under lamplight—the same story our parents used whenever we needed motivation, and they needed leverage.

We survived Saddam Hussein, the civil war, and ISIS, but we may not survive our own mothers buying up all the rice, beans, and oil lamps.

The outermost layer of the Iraqi contingency is the exit plan. A growing number of families own property abroad, in Turkey, Jordan, or a flat in a mid-sized European city, not because they plan to leave, but because having it means they could do so in case the worst happens. The numbers reflect this: Iraqis rank fifth among foreign property buyers in Turkey as of November 2025, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute.

Acquiring a second passport is common, and it follows the same logic: acquired through investment or ancestry, held discreetly, renewed faithfully, and valued for what the Iraqi passport simply cannot offer. Iraq’s travel document ranks among the weakest globally, a fact that needs no elaboration for anyone who has stood in a visa queue and watched others walk through doors that remain closed to them.

Since 2005, Iraqi law has permitted dual citizenship, making it legally and practically viable to hold a second passport as a form of mobility and insurance. Since 2017, advisory firms have reported sharp increases in Iraqi applications for citizenship-by-investment programs, with interest rising during periods of instability. For those who can afford it, a second passport is another long-term hedge—a way to secure movement, access opportunities, and keep an exit option open if it’s ever needed.

In Iraq, stability is pieced together from whatever is available: a second income, a quarter kilo of gold, a safe in the closet, a phone call answered on the first ring, an oil lamp kept just in case. It isn’t assumed or inherited.

And in the corner of the storage room, behind the suitcases, there is an A3-sized family portrait from the late 1990s. The photographer instructed everyone to smile, and they did, two, perhaps three generations, lined up together, composed and present, despite everything crumbling around them. Wars, shortages, uncertainty. They lived anyway. They nurtured, planned, and adapted, and somewhere in that photograph is the origin of Iraq’s parallel economy. The need for contingency was not a burden they chose. It was an inheritance they had no choice but to pass on to the next generation.

Right next to it, there is just enough empty space where something used to be. Someone, finally, threw it out. It is a small revolution. It is a start.

The Arab League endures the way a long-abandoned structure does: still standing, still recognized, but no longer where anything important happens. Its summits continue on schedule, yet they no longer organize the region’s politics. Those have moved elsewhere—into bilateral deals, security pacts, smaller blocs, and arrangements shaped as much by outside powers as by the states themselves.

As the Arab League dies, it is time for its members to recognize the Gulf’s new regional order.

Whereas the Arab League has weak institutions and ideological ties, the Gulf, through the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has become the only successful bloc in the region, building something the average Arab can either be proud of or envy. The region needs results, and the Gulf must lead the charge.

The Arab League was born when Cairo emerged as the center of Arab political imagination. After WWII, wartime diplomacy produced the Alexandria Protocol of 1944 and, later, the founding Charter signed in Cairo on March 22, 1945. The League was built to bring the Arab nations under one roof, sharing a common cause and a sense of unity. Yet, the foundation depended on a central pillar: Egyptian convening power.

Today, that pillar no longer holds the same weight. While Egypt remains consequential, it also maintains constraints that render pan-regional leadership increasingly difficult. Economic pressure has tightened Cairo’s margin for geopolitical entrepreneurship. International Monetary Fund (IMF) reporting and international coverage show repeated stabilization cycles, reliance on external financing, and large Gulf-linked investment inflows have been critical lifelines in recent years.

Although a country managing macro and microeconomic stress may still influence the region, it cannot lead a project built on expansive regional coordination and ideological cohesion. The Arab League is missing its ideological anchor.

As Egypt’s Arabism shrinks, the Arab League collapses with it, as it never built mechanisms strong enough to function without a leader. This has become increasingly evident through state behavior, as the League’s basic maintenance has decayed. In 2017, Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit complained publicly that member states were not paying their dues: only 23% of the funding requirement had been received at that point in the year; only 44% of the budget had been covered the year before; and some members had not paid for three years.

Institutions that matter do not have to beg their members to bankroll their existence. That kind of refusal is evidence that the Arab League is on its way out.

The Arab League’s weaknesses are not episodic; rather, they arise from deep structural deficiencies.

First, the League’s early institutional instincts became its routine. Authoritarian leaders, most of whom arrived on coup tanks, learned to weaponize “Arab unity” as a shield to get the Arab League’s attention. They crafted agendas through collectivist language, got rid of accountability measures, and used the League as a stage to manufacture consensus, but never delivered its promised outcomes for the people. It became a vicious cycle: protecting regimes first, coordinating states second, and serving societies last—if ever.

In practice, the League evolved into an institution that normalized power grabs, sanctified repression through diplomatic language, and wielded “unity” as a tool to ensure regime survival. Its continuance preserved the illusion that something larger existed, even when member-states refused to act like members of anything.

The League’s voting decisions outlined in Article 7 of the Charter have effectively killed collective action. Today, unanimous Council decisions bind all member states while majority decisions bind only those states that accept them. This structure incentivizes veto-by-indifference. Any state can block a binding action simply by refusing unanimity, or can ignore majority decisions by refusing acceptance. To pass anything, the safest policy becomes the vaguest.

The Arab League also suffers from paralysis, caught in the same cycle with every crisis: internal division, carefully crafted public statements, delayed action, and outcomes shaped by actors outside the League.

The 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is one of the clearest examples of Arab collective security failing to stop catastrophe.

Kuwait explicitly appealed to the Arab League to activate its joint defense mechanisms and organize a military response, but divisions among member states blocked any unified action; even a basic condemnation was never issued, with several governments refusing to sign and others opposing the use of force altogether An emergency summit was delayed by disagreements and ultimately produced a split outcome—some states backed intervention, others rejected it, and key actors hedged or abstained.

In the absence of an effective Arab response, the crisis was quickly absorbed into the international system: the UN condemned the invasion within days, and a U.S.-led coalition of dozens of countries—not the Arab League—carried out the military campaign that expelled Iraqi forces and restored Kuwaiti sovereignty. This pattern—internal division, procedural delay, and reliance on external power—has repeated across subsequent regional conflicts, where wars spill beyond borders, rival states back opposing sides, and the League’s consensus-driven diplomacy produces statements that register concern but rarely alter outcomes.

In the latest war, a new test arrived at the Gulf’s doorstep. As Iran’s missile and drone strikes hit Gulf states, the Arab League’s response followed its familiar script: an emergency ministerial meeting, condemnations, and a call for the UN Security Council to act. The GCC, meanwhile, spoke and coordinated as a bloc, demonstrating what functioning blocs do when they are attacked. While the League agonizes over issuing statements, the Gulf actually produces policy.

The League’s fiction depends on pretending that “Arab” is a sufficient category for strategic coordination. Geography and incentive structures would disagree.

What concrete mutual benefit binds countries such as Mauritania and Bahrain tightly enough to form a meaningful security or economic bloc? One sits at the Atlantic edge of North Africa; the other sits on the Gulf’s contested waters. Their threat perceptions barely touch, and their economies do not interlock naturally. Their strategic horizons do not overlap in ways that can ever produce shared policy outcomes. This is only one of many such examples.

Arab nationalism reached its peak when it was utilized for power, most famously under the former president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who turned pan-Arabism into an instrument for geopolitical and domestic legitimacy. Despite my opposition to Nasserism on almost every level, it did offer a sense of purpose—misdirected, coercive, and often catastrophic, but purpose nonetheless.

Then came the long, slow march toward decay. Arabism diluted as its leaders lost power, promoting slogans without capacity and unity without any enforcement mechanism. A vacuum opened for another supra-national glue to unite the region, one that political Islam rushed to occupy.

In practice, political Islam was a leech on the region, feeding on collapsing economies, converting grievance into recruitment, and treating institutions as prizes to be won. It destroyed whole states, leaving behind failed governance and an exhausted, often radicalized, public.

Arabism and political Islam lost favor by mistaking identity for strategy. While identity mobilizes crowds, only shared interests, credible institutions, and binding commitments can govern states—a lesson the Arab League refuses to absorb.

By contrast, the GCC maintains coordination and strong institutions, sharing waterways, facing exposure to energy-market shocks, harboring deterrence anxieties, and experiencing economic interdependence. That coherence does not guarantee perfection, but it at least produces functionality. Research on Arab regionalism has long pointed out that smaller blocs tend to function better than the Arab League. Groups like the GCC have been able to coordinate more effectively not just because they include fewer countries, but because their members share closer political priorities and face similar security concerns—making agreement and action easier to achieve.

Voices in Gulf discourse have finally begun saying the quiet part out loud. Withdrawal, or at least a serious downgrading of the League’s relevance, is necessary for prosperity. The region must replace frameworks built on ideological unity with practical alliances. Doing so, however, would trigger outrage from capitals that treat “Arabism” as a rhetorical shield while exposing what the League has become.

In practice, institutions like this don’t disappear just because they stop delivering results. The Arab League is likely to keep holding summits and issuing statements, maintaining the appearance of a unified Arab political arena, even as actual coordination shifts elsewhere—toward smaller blocs and ad hoc coalitions built around shared interests rather than shared identity.

A declaration of death would not betray Arab identity. It would admit that identity alone cannot govern, defend, or develop. The League was born to reflect the Middle East of the 1950s, but today that world is gone—and it is time to state that plainly, rather than preserve a fiction no longer anchored in reality.

War with Iran. Proxy escalation in the Levant. Great power maneuvering from Moscow to Washington to Paris and Beijing. Sanctions, shadow fleets, drones, assassinations, and covert deals. This is not chaos. This is transition.

We are seeing what a multipolar world looks like where power is no longer in the hands of a single hegemon but distributed among a constellation of actors. This is where the idea stops being a theory and becomes the driving force behind international politics.

Islamic theology presents the idea of barzakh, which refers to a middle realm—the suspended space between death and resurrection. That is where we are today: no longer in the American-led order, not yet in a multipolar one, but caught in an unstable passage between these two states.

Here, power does not disappear. It fragments.

In a multipolar world—rather, in the barzakh leading to it—imperial logic prevails.

Not formal empires with flags and colonies, but spheres of influence, leveraged via energy chokepoints, trade wars, technological advances and geography.

In this dispersed world order, trade is the overriding currency. Security is exchanged for access, oil for weapons, votes for protection, and silence for safety. It is survival of the adaptable, where inflexible, ideologically driven regimes struggle to survive.

To flourish, you must do business. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Levant and Iran, historic gateways at the crossroads of empire. Here, survival has always depended on managing the ambitions of surrounding powers: Rome and Persia. Ottomans and Safavids. Britain and France. The United States and Russia. Now China, Turkey, the United States and the Gulf.

The rule is simple: if you cannot balance competing interests, you become battle terrain.

For all its defiance, this is exactly what the Islamic regime has done to Iran. Through its inflexibility, Iran’s rulers have transformed it from a regional contender into a battlefield, bypassing opportunities to recalibrate and adjust.

For movements built on disruption and resistance, the adjustment is harsher. In a transactional multipolar world order, there are no permanent friends, only temporary patrons. These causes become instruments as militias morph into subcontractors and their ideology becomes branding.

Over time, many such movements mutate. They survive not through popular legitimacy but through underground revenue streams, trading in smuggling, drugs, human trafficking, espionage, and protection rackets. True believers fill the ranks. Crime lords manage the finances. The rhetoric remains revolutionary but the structure resembles organized crime.

In a fragmented world order, multipolarity does not eliminate resistance. It professionalizes, and often corrupts it. So, what of democracy? The institution that has dominated Western politics for decades will come under strain, incapable of absorbing the new imperative for pure transaction.

In places where democracy has strong institutional roots, this will resemble a crisis of confidence. Voters will grow cynical and polarization will intensify as transactional geopolitics tempts leaders to sacrifice principle for advantage. In time, democratic societies will be forced to renew themselves to remain relevant, or relinquish their foothold and hollow out from within.

Where democratic roots are weak, democracy will continue to hover beyond reach. Leaders will invoke sovereignty in the name of stability and citizens will be told to wait for security, growth and order. The waiting can last generations.

The transition to multipolarity is no clean reset. It is not the birth of a just equilibrium among civilizations. It is a renegotiation of power—conducted the way power has always been secured: through war, diplomacy, coercion, cooperation, and competition.

The end result will not be less flawed than the current order. It will simply be flawed differently. Eventually, there will be room to reassert principles and to rebuild norms but that moment will not arrive automatically. It will have to be fought for, intellectually and politically, inside societies as much as between them.

For now, we are in a free-for-all transition. The question is not whether multipolarity is coming. It is whether democracies can survive this transactional age without relinquishing their principles and becoming transactional at the core.

One way this will be tested is through the use of force. During the post-Cold War era, military action was justified through imminent threats—a regime about to attack, a terrorist network preparing a strike, or weapons programs crossing a red line.

In a transitional multipolar environment, the calculus broadens. Military action is not just for immediate danger. It is summoned by long-term positioning: containing an adversary before it consolidates power, securing critical corridors and supply chains, protecting access to energy and strategic minerals, reinforcing alliance systems, or denying rivals a technological or military advantage.

These are not threats that are easily grasped by the public. They unfold slowly, across regions and decades.

The temptation for governments is to argue that strategic action cannot wait for prolonged public debate. We see this playing out in the contest over Taiwan, where supply chains, maritime corridors, semiconductor dominance, and the balance of power across the Pacific are setting the timeline for China’s next move.

And we see it in the United States, where democracy appears to have been supplanted by strategic imperatives. The current war with Iran, initiated without explicit congressional authorization, has triggered a heated debate over executive war powers and constitutional limits.

For supporters, the strategic rationale is clear: preventing Iran from reaching a tipping point in missile and nuclear capabilities and reshaping the regional balance of power justifies the actions taken. Critics respond that no imminent threat was demonstrated and reiterate the constitutional requirement for Congress to authorize war.

Both arguments reveal a deeper tension.

Democratic systems were designed for an era in which war was exceptional and clearly defined. Multipolar transitions are messier. They generate gray zones where strategic calculations collide with democratic procedures.

At the same time, the United States is entering this transition under conditions of intense polarization. Republicans and Democrats now interpret foreign policy primarily through the lens of domestic political competition. As each side mobilizes its base, narratives harden and nuance disappears. Facts are selectively deployed and strategic debate collapses into partisan signaling.

When that happens, democratic norms begin to erode—not because democracy has failed, but because it is struggling to operate under conditions it was never designed to withstand.

Yet this conversation cannot be avoided indefinitely. At some point, American political leadership will need to re-establish a minimal strategic consensus—a recognition that certain principles and procedures must remain intact even as the geopolitical environment becomes more volatile.

Without such a framework, the transition to multipolarity will not only reshape global power. It will destabilize the democratic systems meant to manage it. And so we return to the condition of barzakh, an in-between world where the old system has lost authority but the new one is not yet legitimate. The question is whether we can cross over without losing the principles that made the previous order worth defending in the first place. Because if we cannot, the world that emerges on the other side will not merely redistribute power. It will redefine our concept of legitimacy entirely.

In a 2009 interview on a Canadian-Islamic channel, Tariq Ramadan discussed his views on women’s rights in Islam. “I don’t think Islam has a problem with women—Muslims have,” he said.

Ramadan, then a professor at Oxford University, argued that Muslim societies are mostly concerned about the roles and functions of women, when “the starting point should be your relationship with God.” Muslims must “speak about women as beings,” he said, and the hijab must not be enforced. “It’s against Islam to impose on a woman to wear the headscarf, and it’s against women’s rights to impose on her to take it off,” Ramadan continued.

This was during the peak of his career. At the time, Ramadan was a star in the Muslim world, his charisma and progressive views on Islam drawing concert-sized audiences. Many women saw him as a defender of their rights, and Time magazine named him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.

That all changed in 2017, when Ramadan was accused of sexual assault. Last month, a Paris court sentenced Ramadan—in absentia—to 18 years in jail for raping three women.

He had already been convicted in Switzerland in 2024 for a separate rape case.

Ramadan’s lawyers said the 63-year-old was being treated in Geneva for multiple sclerosis and condemned the trial as a farce. To this day, he continues to claim the charges are politically motivated, citing Islamophobia.

Though a warrant has been issued for Ramadan’s arrest, Switzerland does not have an extradition treaty with its neighbor. Ramadan also faces a permanent ban from French territory.

The long-awaited conviction marks the latest fall from grace of a man who posed as a leading “moderate” figure, despite his family background. Ramadan’s maternal grandfather was Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, and his father, Said Ramadan, was one of the organization’s leading figures.

The making of his public persona can be traced to the 1990s, when, during his burgeoning interest in Islam, he undertook intensive religious studies in Egypt before returning to Switzerland. In his 2009 book, What I Believe, Ramadan describes his spiritual awakening as a desire to “build bridges” between the Western and Islamic worlds. He said that he favored an interpretive rather than a literal reading of the Qur’an.

Western liberals embraced Ramadan as a bridge between cultures. Born in Switzerland, fluent in French and English, he cut a suave, liberal figure for a Western audience while retaining a certain authority in the Muslim world.

Although he insisted that he disavowed the views of his fundamentalist grandfather, some observers noted that his dissertation on Hassan al-Banna’s work appeared sympathetic. Charles Genequand, his principal supervisor in the 1990s, said Ramadan’s thesis was “trying to place Hassan al-Banna within a reformist movement of Islam that existed in the 19th century, while camouflaging his very conservative vision.”

The Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan is “Islam is the solution,” is designated as a terrorist group and banned in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The US government has taken steps to label specific foreign branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations.

Ramadan’s association with Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent Muslim Brotherhood cleric based in Qatar, also raised some eyebrows. Egyptian-born al-Qaradawi had previously defended suicide bombings and claimed the Holocaust was a “punishment” for Jews.

Ramadan’s ambiguity was further exposed during a televised debate on secularism and Islam. Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, tried to get the scholar to condemn the Islamic punishment of stoning for adultery. Instead, Ramadan said there ought to be a “moratorium” on such practices.

It’s no wonder the French writer Caroline Fourest argued that Ramadan presented a moderate face to Western audiences while conveying different messages to the Muslim world.

Despite these emerging contradictions, Ramadan’s rise continued. In 2005, he was awarded a fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and in 2009, he was appointed to the University of Oxford chair in Contemporary Islamic Studies funded by Qatar. Ramadan seemed untouchable. Ultimately, it was sexual misconduct that would undo him, as it has so many other powerful men.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement came for him with multiple allegations of sexual assault in France and Switzerland. One of the victims was Henda Ayari, a former Salafi Muslim. She said she approached Ramadan at a time in her life when she felt “lost and weak”. Ayari was separated from her husband and had been told to remove her Islamic veil to find work.

After contacting Ramadan online for advice, the mother of three agreed to meet him in his Paris hotel room in 2012. He “kissed” her, “choked me so hard I thought I would die,” “slapped” her, cursed at her, and “humiliated” her before raping her. “He pounced on me like a wild animal,” Ayari said.

She blamed herself for meeting him alone and remained silent for many years, claiming he’d threatened her children.

Another woman—a disabled Muslim convert known as “Christelle”—alleged that she was raped and beaten by Ramadan in a hotel in Lyon in 2009. She provided investigators with messages and identified an intimate scar on Ramadan’s body.

Then others began coming forward. Several women claimed Ramadan had conducted sexual relationships with them when they were underage students in Geneva. One girl who rejected his advances was 14.

Initially, Ramadan denied having sexual relations with the woman. But following his 2018 arrest in France, an investigation revealed text messages exchanged between him and Christelle that appeared to corroborate her version of events.

“I sensed your discomfort … sorry for my ‘violence’. I liked it … Do you want more? Not disappointed?” he wrote to her the following day. A few hours later, he wrote: “You didn’t like it … I’m sorry [Christelle]. Sorry.”

Ramadan was forced to admit he’d had affairs with at least five women, but insisted they were consensual. No wonder the married father of four wanted a “moratorium” on corporal punishment—under Islamic law, the punishment for adultery is stoning to death.

As legal pressure mounted, Ramadan was in and out of the hospital with multiple sclerosis. His lawyer argued that his condition was “incompatible with detention”, and he was released on bail after 10 months.

Throughout it all, the academic has framed the charges as being politically motivated, claiming most of it was down to Islamophobia. In his 2019 book Devoir de Vérité (Duty of Truth), he compared his legal troubles to the 19th-century Dreyfus Affair, claiming he was the victim of a political witch-hunt. Just as French captain Alfred Dreyfus was wrongfully convicted of treason on account of his Jewish heritage, Ramadan was, he said, being framed in an “anti-Muslim” plot.

In some of the media coverage, Ramadan was able to claim, largely unchallenged, that he was the target of a “witch hunt” and that his enemies “worked together with the Zionists” on his downfall.

His accusers also feared they would suffer if court proceedings were open to the public. One woman alleged she was spat upon, slapped, insulted, and followed by his supporters.

Moreover, the response from institutions was far from immediate. Oxford University allowed Ramadan to continue teaching for three weeks before granting him a leave of absence. Eugene Rogan, the director of Oxford’s Middle East Center, argued that some students felt it was “another way for Europeans to gang up against a prominent Muslim intellectual.

“We must protect Muslim students who believe and trust in him, and protect that trust,” Rogan said.

This prompted concerns that Ramadan was being held to different standards on account of his religion. Then, in September 2024, a Swiss appeals court in Geneva convicted the scholar of rape and sexual coercion, overturning a previous acquittal from 2023. He was sentenced to three years in prison, with one year to be served, following an attack on a woman in a Geneva hotel in 2008. Two years on, a Paris court has found him guilty of raping three women.

As Ramadan was hospitalized in Switzerland, he was tried in absentia. Switzerland does not generally extradite its citizens, making it unlikely that he’ll actually serve his sentence. Ramadan has also announced that he will appeal.

For many years, Tariq Ramadan’s contradictions and doublespeak were glossed over by a Western audience that desperately wanted to believe in an Islam that could be compatible with European societies. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of women’s dignity—something, ironically, that this venerated Islamic scholar had been claiming to defend.

In July 2005, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was formally established with a call signed by 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, campaigning for three core demands: ending Israeli occupation of lands captured in 1967, recognition of full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees—nearly 7 million people, close to the number of Jewish citizens of Israel—as established under UN Resolution 194.

The movement markets itself as inspired by the international campaign against apartheid South Africa in the late 1950s. But unlike that campaign, which targeted racial segregation inside a single state, BDS operates in a national conflict between two peoples—one that includes issues of borders, competing claims to statehood, and one of the most complex refugee situations in modern history.

During its 21 years of work, BDS has achieved some milestones. It pressured several European pension funds into divesting from companies tied to Israeli settlement activity. In 2018, Airbnb briefly announced it would remove listings in West Bank settlements—the company later reversed that decision after legal complications—and the movement has been effective in raising awareness about Palestinian political rights on Western university campuses.

But alongside those achievements, BDS has built a habit of going after the wrong people, including its calls for boycotting the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land,” which describes the realities of the occupation in the Masafer Yatta villages, calling to boycott the civil society group “Standing Together,” and calling to boycott the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded by the Palestinian author Edward Said.”

Its calls for academic and cultural boycotts have drawn serious criticism, including from Iranian American author Arash Azizi, who argued in The Atlantic that such boycotts are both counterproductive and morally misguided. His sharpest point concerns BDS’s treatment of organizations that bring Israelis and Palestinians together. The movement sees this kind of cooperation as “normalization” and pressures supporters to reject it entirely. Practically, this means the people most likely to be boycotted are not Israeli government ministers or settlement builders — they are Israeli citizens who oppose the occupation, and Palestinians who believe engagement is more useful than isolation.

This is where BDS’s position becomes self-defeating. Normalization is a real concern when joint events are used to whitewash ongoing violations. But BDS has expanded the definition until it covers almost any sustained contact between Israelis and Palestinians who are not in conflict. That does not serve Palestinians living under occupation. It simply narrows the space for anyone trying to end it.

The most recent example makes this clear. In December 2025, the UK announced—in partnership with the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a nonpartisan coalition of nearly 170 NGOs—that it would host a fundraising conference on March 12, 2026, at Lancaster House, as part of its new Middle East Strategy. This came the same year the UK formally recognized Palestinian statehood. Recently, the British government called for an investigation into the killing of five Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the West Bank. ALLMEP’s member organizations lobby against settlement expansion and restrictions on Palestinian movement. The conference is designed to raise funds for Palestinian-Israeli dialogue work—not to normalize the occupation.

BDS rushed almost immediately, labeling the conference a “normalization event” and calling the UK government “complicit in genocide.” By February, it escalated and issued targeted action alerts against Lancaster House itself, where the crowdfunding is set to take place.

At the height of that peace process, the international community invested nearly $44 per capita annually to support civil society, dialogue, and reconciliation infrastructure. For Israelis and Palestinians, the equivalent figure is $2 per capita per year, twenty-two times less. The architecture that helped end one of Europe’s longest conflicts was built through exactly the kind of sustained, funded, people-to-people work that BDS is now campaigning to shut down.

A movement founded to end an occupation should not be in the business of targeting the spaces where Israelis and Palestinians try to build something different. It is possible for two things to be true at the same time: to oppose the military occupation of the West Bank and to call for dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. Without this dialogue, how does BDS expect this conflict to end?

On April 8, just hours after Washington and Tehran announced a two-week pause in hostilities to allow for direct negotiations, Hezbollah declared victory, as it has done previously, regardless of the facts. Minutes later, the truth exploded all over Lebanon. Israel unleashed the heaviest wave of strikes since its war with Israel began, killing at least 254 people and injuring around 1,200.

The latest wave of violence threatened the fragile ceasefire and prompted Iran to pull back on its promise to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The US and Israel have responded with claims that Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire agreement. Iran and mediator Pakistan say it is. Efforts to spin this as a “legitimate misunderstanding” fool no one. Lebanon’s exclusion from the deal was deliberate.

This is the moment the Hezbollah myth breaks in public: the organization that dragged Lebanon into the fire “for Iran” has discovered that Iran can protect its interests while Lebanon burns.

It is possible that Hezbollah was never included in the deal in the first place. In this case, the group was used as an auxiliary front, activated when Iran needed leverage, then sidelined once it secured a pause. Or, Hezbollah was included in theory, only to be carved out of the agreement in practice.

The second option explains the public contradiction. If Lebanon was discussed, it was discussed as an external file—a separate arena that Israel could continue to “sanitize” while Iran enjoys the benefits of a truce. That is what a carve-out looks like: the ceasefire protects the signatories, and the non-signatory becomes fair game.

Either way, Hezbollah’s strategic problem is exposed: once you choose to be a proxy, you are never guaranteed proxy protection.

The foundations of Hezbollah’s predicament were laid long ago, when the group’s founding doctrine pledged obedience to the Iranian jurist-leader and cemented its status as a mercenary group. In today’s politics, the relationship is described even more bluntly. A recent analysis cited Lebanon’s prime minister as saying that the IRGC commands Hezbollah, while commentators have claimed that the group cannot disarm without Iran’s authorization.

Hezbollah’s role in the conflict that erupted following US-Israeli strikes on Iran reflects this dynamic. Its entry into the war was not a Lebanese sovereign decision. It did it because it was ordered to do so, after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader on February 28. That is the definition of a mercenary dynamic: a Lebanese organization initiating a Lebanese front in response to an Iranian trigger.

With that comes the consequences—the moment you learn your employer can stop the war and still watch your people bleed.

The strikes that followed the ceasefire on April 8 unleashed a wave of destruction across Lebanon, with central Beirut neighborhoods hit, hundreds killed nationwide, hospitals damaged, ambulances struck, and whole families erased in minutes. The UN described casualty reports as “appalling,” with the human rights chief calling the destruction “horrific.”

They are all to blame. Israel, for using civilian pain to squeeze political outcomes in what can only be described as a criminal act. Hezbollah for embedding within civilian communities and forcing ordinary people to become the canvas on which military messages are written. And the Lebanese authorities, for presiding over prolonged political paralysis. A state that cannot prevent war, cannot contain escalation, and cannot even establish a unified negotiating posture is less like a sovereign state and more like an emergency NGO issuing appeals over rubble.

The Lebanese government announced a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities last month after the group opened fire on Israel, but it was never backed by any action. The ban was another theatrical performance, nothing more.

The army, too, is caught in a crisis, reluctant to enforce the state’s monopoly over arms and confront Hezbollah. This undermines efforts to pull Lebanon out of war and separate the state from Hezbollah.

As officials scrambled to clarify whether Lebanon was included in the truce, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam insisted that no one negotiates for Lebanon except the state. This is the contradiction that kills countries like Lebanon, where everyone declares sovereignty but nobody wields it.

Clearly, the ceasefire has not ended the war in Lebanon, but it has clarified the status of a key political player. From now on, Hezbollah can no longer claim to be Lebanon’s shield; it is Iran’s instrument—manipulated by Iranian priorities and abandoned when they shift. The fatal weakness of mercenary politics has been exposed: the proxy is excluded from political processes and then left to count the dead. Beirut learned that lesson yesterday, and it will live with the consequences for years to come.

I was genuinely surprised.

Not by a statement from Riyadh or Abu Dhabi, but by an interview aired by Al Jazeera. Jasem Mohamed Al Budaiwi, Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council said:

“This is one of the most dangerous and sensitive phases the GCC has faced since its founding… comparable to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990… What Iran has done is unjustified aggression and unprovoked attacks against the countries of the region.”

For years, much of the Arab media ecosystem, including Al Jazeera, maintained a calibrated tone when it came to Iran. Critical at times, but often cautious, especially when Iran positioned itself within the broader narrative of resistance against Israel or the United States.

This interview was different. It reflected a level of clarity and frustration I haven’t seen before.

To understand why this matters, it is worth recalling how quickly the Arab position on Iran has evolved over the past decade.

There was a time not long ago when Saudi Arabia’s leadership described Iran’s supreme leader in existential terms. Mohammed bin Salman once warned that Ayatollah Khamenei was “the new Hitler of the Middle East,” capturing the depth of the perceived threat at the time.

But that phase did not last.

By 2023, the region had moved in a very different direction. Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by China. The agreement was widely seen as a significant step toward de-escalation after years of proxy conflict, with the potential to stabilize key states like Yemen and reduce regional tensions more broadly.

This shift was part of a broader strategic calculation across the Gulf. The priority became stability. Economic transformation agendas, particularly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, required a more predictable regional environment. Engagement with Iran was about risk management, not trust.

And for a brief moment, it seemed to work.

The region experienced a relative cooling of tensions. Communication channels reopened, and the prospect of a managed coexistence, however tenuous, appeared possible.

That moment is now over.

The current conflict has exposed the limits of that approach. Iran is no longer perceived primarily through the lens of ideological rivalry or distant proxy conflicts. It is now seen as a direct and immediate security threat.

The targeting of Gulf infrastructure, airports, and energy assets has had a profound effect on policy thinking. These are countries that, until recently, were actively pursuing de-escalation. They engaged diplomatically, avoided confrontation, and in some cases positioned themselves as intermediaries.

And yet, they were still targeted.

From a policy perspective, the assumption that engagement could meaningfully reduce exposure to Iranian ire is now being reassessed. What was previously seen as a strategy to lower risk is increasingly viewed as insufficient in the face of direct threats.

The language coming out of the Gulf reflects this recalibration. The tone is more direct, less hedged, and increasingly aligned across capitals that historically approached Iran differently.

The Gulf has never been a fully unified strategic bloc. Qatar’s mediation role, Oman’s neutrality, Saudi Arabia’s leadership ambitions, and the UAE’s strategic pragmatism have often led to policy divergence.

What is developing now is a more unified assessment of Iran as a shared security concern.

This does not necessarily mean escalation is imminent. Gulf states are deeply invested in avoiding a wider regional war. But it does suggest that the fundamental baseline has moved. Engagement may continue, but it will be pursued with fewer illusions and under stricter assumptions about risk.

For policymakers in Washington and European capitals, this moment should be read carefully.

The Arab position is adaptive and shaped more by events than by ideology. Over the past decade, it has moved from confrontation to cautious engagement, and now back toward a more skeptical and security-driven posture.

What is different this time is the speed and clarity of the shift.

And that is why the interview on Al Jazeera matters. It signaled that the way Iran is being framed, not just by governments but in broader Arab discourse, is changing again.

The region has seen these cycles before. But each time, the stakes get higher. The Arabs have changed their minds about Iran. Again. And whatever happens next will determine whether the Gulf’s reassessment of Iran leads to lasting change or another temporary adjustment.

A missile strike lands near Tehran. Within minutes, the footage is translated and shared across diaspora networks from London to Los Angeles. At the same time, families tied to Beirut refresh their phones as evacuation warnings spread and neighborhoods are reduced to rubble.

This is no longer a distant war. For millions of Iranians and Lebanese abroad, it is a daily reality, experienced in real time, shaped from afar, and argued over across borders.

But proximity has not engendered unity. It has exposed deeper disagreements about what the future should look like and who gets to define it.

As war and economic recession continue in Lebanon, the diaspora has become indispensable. Remittances are sustaining families, funding evacuations, and replacing basic state functions.

Alongside this economic role, a more controversial idea has resurfaced among segments of the Lebanese Christian diaspora: the possibility of an autonomous, or even independent, Christian-majority entity centered in Mount Lebanon.

This reflects a growing sense that the Lebanese state, in its current form, is no longer viable. Hezbollah’s military dominance, repeated cycles of conflict, and prolonged institutional breakdown have led some to revisit older visions of decentralization or partition.

Support for such proposals is limited and difficult to quantify. Among a smaller but increasingly organized current within the Lebanese Christian diaspora, the Christian Lebanon Initiative has articulated a structured proposal for the creation of a sovereign Christian state in Mount Lebanon. The movement presents its project as a lawful, phased strategy grounded in constitutional and international frameworks, outlining steps that include building transnational community structures, developing coordinated civic and economic networks, and preparing legal arguments for potential self-determination.

While these ideas remain contested and do not represent the majority of Lebanese Christians, their growing visibility reinforces how diaspora spaces can become arenas where competing, and at times controversial, visions of national futures are articulated and debated.

Within some segments of the diaspora, particularly among communities historically aligned with Hezbollah’s political base, there are voices that continue to view Hezbollah as a legitimate actor within Lebanon’s political system and as part of the broader Axis of Resistance. Supporters argue that its role functions as a deterrent in a volatile regional environment and represents a constituency that cannot be excluded from Lebanon’s power-sharing structure. From this perspective, calls for external pressure, disarmament, or structural exclusion risk destabilizing the country further.

At the same time, other voices within the Lebanese diaspora argue that Hezbollah should be disarmed fully and without delay, framing their position as consistent with Lebanon’s official commitment to place all weapons under state authority. They point to the government’s approval in September of the Lebanese army’s plan, presented by General Rodolphe Haykal, to bring all arms, particularly Hezbollah’s, under state control. For supporters of immediate disarmament, this decision represents an institutional mandate to strengthen the state’s monopoly over force and implement existing security commitments.

Their argument is shaped not only by frustration with prolonged conflict, but also by concerns about continued Iranian involvement in Lebanese affairs, which reinforces parallel military structures and complicates full sovereignty. From this perspective, completing the army’s plan is a necessary step toward restoring state authority, stabilizing the country, and creating conditions for long-term peace.

These positions, partition, reform-within-unity, and continued resistance alignment, reflect not a single diaspora narrative, but a divided political landscape that mirrors Lebanon’s internal divisions.

The Iranian diaspora is similarly divided about who should govern Iran.

One of the most visible tensions is between those who support a return to monarchy, often associated with the legacy of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and those calling for a democratic system that rejects both the current regime and Iran’s monarchical past. Among monarchist-leaning segments of the diaspora, his son, Reza Pahlavi, is increasingly seen as a legitimate successor or, at minimum, a unifying transitional figure. This support is visible in diaspora protests and echoed inside Iran, where slogans such as “Javid Shah” (“Long live the Shah”) have re-emerged, alongside chants calling for the return of the Pahlavi dynasty . These expressions reflect not only nostalgia for the monarchy, but also a search for recognizable leadership in the absence of a clear alternative.

At the same time, this vision is heavily contested. Some Iranians, continue to associate the monarchy with authoritarian rule, arguing that calls to restore it overlook the repression and inequalities that contributed to the Iranian Revolution. Critics within the diaspora often emphasize that replacing one centralized authority with another risks repeating patterns of exclusion and political repression. Instead, they advocate for pluralistic and democratic frameworks that prioritize institutional accountability over individual leadership. This divide is not only ideological but generational, reflecting different lived experiences of Iran’s past and different expectations for its future.

These divisions shape how diaspora communities engage with the outside world, what kind of change they advocate for, and how they frame Iran’s future to international audiences.

In both cases, distance does not remove people from political life, but reshapes how they participate in it. Calls for partition in Lebanon or restoration in Iran may gain traction abroad partly because the immediate consequences are less visible. The risks—renewed conflict, instability, unintended outcomes—fall primarily on those on the ground.

This does not make diaspora voices irrelevant. But it does mean they operate under different conditions, with different constraints. Despite their divisions, both diasporas play a real role in current events.

Lebanese abroad are sustaining an economy in free fall. Iranians abroad are shaping how protests, repression, and war are seen globally, through media, advocacy, and political lobbying.

They influence narratives, fund survival, and keep attention on crises that might otherwise fade from the news cycle. But they do so without consensus, and often in competition with one another.

Many in the diaspora live between two realities: physically in one country, but emotionally and politically tied to another. War, protest, and collapse don’t seem so far away—they show up daily, on screens, in conversations, and in the impossible choices people have to make.

This creates a form of engagement that is immediate but uneven. Close enough to care deeply, far enough to be removed from the full consequences of every decision.

The role of the diaspora in Iran and Lebanon is complicated. It is neither detached nor decisive, neither purely constructive nor inherently harmful.

The question is how to understand their influence without overstating it, or dismissing it. Because in both Iran and Lebanon, the future is no longer being imagined only within national borders. It is being debated, contested, and partially shaped far beyond them.

And that reality is becoming harder to ignore.

A government does not need to ban something outright to make its intentions clear. Sometimes it only needs to regulate it so tightly, so selectively, and so ideologically that the message becomes unmistakable. That is what happened in Damascus last week.

The controversy began when the Damascus governorate issued Decision No. 311, barring the serving of alcohol in restaurants and nightclubs across the capital, requiring bars and clubs to convert their licenses into café permits, and restricting the sale of sealed bottles to a few predominantly Christian neighborhoods, including Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa. The decree also imposed location rules that require outlets to be at least 75 meters from schools and places of worship and 20 meters from security facilities, with businesses given three months to comply. Reuters described it as one of the clearest signs yet of the Islamist-led authorities’ turn toward conservative social enforcement.

After the backlash exploded, Damascus officials tried to walk it back without really withdrawing it. In a late clarification carried by state media, the governorate insisted the measure was merely “organizational,” not new in principle, and rooted in older regulations dating back to 1952 and later administrative decisions. It also said five-star hotels were exempt, apologized to residents of Bab Touma, Bab Sharqi, and al-Qassaa for the “misunderstanding,” and promised to review the designation of the three neighborhoods during the three-month implementation period.

But by then, the public had already understood the deeper meaning of the move. On Sunday, March 22, hundreds of Syrians gathered in Bab Touma to protest, carrying signs defending personal freedom and rejecting the sectarian sorting of Damascus neighborhoods. One AP photo from the protest captured the sentiment perfectly: “No to dividing Damascus neighborhoods along sectarian lines.” Protesters from different sectarian backgrounds chanted, “Syrians are united.”

And that is why the official defense of the decree has fallen flat. Its supporters have tried every familiar line. They say this is just regulation, not prohibition. They point to old Syrian laws, Ottoman precedents, and even the American Prohibition era, as though historical analogy could somehow neutralize the political meaning of a decision taken here and now. They say every state regulates vice. They dismiss critics as people who only care about drinking, nightlife, or have loose morals. But that argument has backfired because almost nobody protesting this decision is really protesting on behalf of alcohol alone.

If a regulation is designed so restrictively that it effectively bans most of the population, and if the authorities designing and enforcing it belong to a political current that already favors prohibition on ideological grounds, then this is not neutral governance. It is ideological social engineering disguised as public administration. The wording of the governorate’s own clarification gives the game away: the stated aims include “public morals,” “civil peace,” and neighborhood “specificity.” Those are the kinds of elastic formulas by which personal freedoms are gradually narrowed, selectively applied, and then normalized.

This decision did not emerge in a vacuum. It follows a widening pattern. In January, authorities in Latakia barred female public employees from wearing makeup during working hours, prompting immediate criticism before officials retreated into the usual language of “professional appearance” and “balance.” Earlier, the Tourism Ministry issued beach and pool guidelines requiring women on public beaches and in public pools to wear more modest swimwear, such as burkinis or body-covering suits, while allowing more relaxed standards in luxury hotels and private venues. That move, too, was defended as culturally sensitive regulation rather than coercion, before officials scrambled to soften its interpretation amid public outrage.

Seen together, these measures do not look incidental. They look cumulative. Makeup at work. Modest swimwear on public beaches. During Ramadan, tighter restrictions were imposed on those seen eating or drinking publicly. And now, the near-elimination of alcohol service in Damascus, except in a few Christian districts that are implicitly marked as socially distinct. Each measure is small enough, in isolation, for its defenders to ask, “Why all this fuss?” But politics is often revealed less by dramatic decrees than by patterns of administrative pressure. A state telegraphs what it aims to become through the habits it tries to impose.

This is why many Syrians reacted more strongly to the alcohol decree than authorities seem to have expected. The outcry was not limited to Christians, nor to secular elites. Damascus is full of Muslims who drink, Muslims who do not drink but still reject moral policing, and Syrians of all backgrounds who understand perfectly well what is at stake when the state begins sorting rights and restrictions by communal geography. AP reported that even some protesters who do not drink joined in because they saw the issue as one of personal liberty rather than consumption.

The constitutional dimension is impossible to ignore. Syria’s March 2025 Constitutional Declaration states in Article 12 that the state shall protect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and that rights guaranteed by the international human rights treaties ratified by Syria are an integral part of the declaration. Article 13 guarantees freedom of opinion and expression and protects private life. Critics of the Damascus decree, including the Bab Touma committee and legal advocates cited in recent reporting, have argued that the measure violates both the spirit and the text of those guarantees.

There is also a sectarian danger here that should be obvious to anyone exercising even minimal political judgment. By confining alcohol sales to Christian-majority districts, authorities are not “respecting diversity.” They are drawing a target on specific neighborhoods and implicitly assigning them responsibility for supposed violations of “public morals.” This is stigmatization by regulation. It invites resentment, fuels suspicion, and imposes symbolic burdens on communities already anxious about their place in the new Syria. Reuters, AP, DW, and regional outlets all captured this point in different ways: the backlash was driven not only by concerns over freedom, but by fears that the decision was recasting Christians as a tolerated exception and Damascus itself as a city to be managed through sectarian compartments.

This is where the defenders of the decision are most disingenuous. They invoke old laws as though reviving or enforcing neglected restrictions were somehow politically neutral. But laws that sat on the books for decades without shaping daily life are not the same as laws deliberately activated by a new political class seeking to redefine the public sphere. Historical continuity in text does not equal continuity in intent. The real question is not whether some old decree once existed. The real question is why this government, at this moment, chose to make this an administrative priority.

And that question leads to a larger one: what kind of state is Syria trying to become?

Syria is not entering a period of calm consolidation in which symbolic culture-war gestures can be treated as marginal. It is emerging from state collapse, civil war, sanctions, economic devastation, and deep social trauma. The European Union moved in 2025 to lift economic sanctions, and the United States formally terminated its Syria sanctions program effective July 1, 2025, while keeping measures on Assad-linked actors, rights abusers, jihadist groups, and Iran-linked networks. The EU has also pledged fresh recovery support. But none of this means reconstruction has suddenly arrived in any practical, transformative sense. Syria still faces enormous institutional weakness, political uncertainty, and the kind of administrative drag that makes actual recovery painfully slow.

In that context, decisions about alcohol, makeup, and dress are not distractions from “real” issues. They are among the real issues because they reveal the governing ethos of the people who make them. They show whether power understands itself as limited by citizenship or entitled to mold society in its own image. They show whether the state sees itself as an administrator of pluralism or as a guardian of virtue.

Syrian rulers, present and future, need to understand something simple: Muslims, as citizens, have the same right as everyone else to buy, sell, and consume alcohol if they choose. The state is not the custodian of their piety. Nor is it the custodian of women’s faces, clothing, or bodies. A government may regulate commerce, licensing, noise, nuisance, and genuine public disorder. But once it starts using these tools to impose a moral vision aligned with a particular ideological current, it leaves the terrain of neutral regulation and enters the terrain of coercive social transformation.

And that terrain is far more dangerous than some officials appear to realize.

There is a wider lesson here for Syria’s rulers. When governments push too far in an ideological direction, they not only provoke their own citizens; they also unsettle neighbors, alienate investors, and raise doubts among the very states and institutions whose support they need. At a time when Gulf states are trying to make their own societies more attractive to investors, tourists, and global capital by removing religious strictures, and when Iran’s model of religiously driven rule is under growing regional and international pressure, few will be eager to bankroll a Syrian order that appears to be drifting toward moral authoritarianism under an Islamic banner.

This does not mean that the world will require Syria to adopt secularism in the French sense, but it will expect pluralism to be real, rights to be meaningful, and ideology not to be smuggled into public life through municipal decrees and administrative circulars. The leaders of the United States, France, and Germany, among others, have made that clear. Syria’s priorities should be securing the country, restoring order, and creating an environment that feels safe, open, and predictable—not engaging in social engineering.

This is why the Damascus controversy struck such a nerve. For though the country witnessed over the last two years several horrific episodes of inter-communal violence, many Syrians still interpret it through the language of insecurity, militias, revenge, and state weakness. This issue felt different. It was unmistakably about power reaching into everyday life and telling citizens that their rights, habits, and neighborhoods would now be rearranged according to a moral hierarchy they had not chosen.

Syrians were not really taking to the streets for a cup full of arak. (A traditional, clear, anise-flavored spirit from the Middle East, known for its licorice-like taste and milky-white appearance when mixed with water.) They were taking to the streets for something larger and far more precious: the right not to be ruled as minors or categorized by sect, and to insist that citizenship in Syria must mean equal dignity, equal liberty, and real limits on state power.

Ali Larijani spent most of his career helping build and maintain the Islamic Republic.

He was a regime loyalist who seemed to surface at every center of power. Born into a powerful clerical family, he served in the Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq War, went on to run state broadcasting and propaganda networks, became secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, later served as speaker of parliament, and remained close to the system’s core as an adviser to the supreme leader and a senior security official. In his final period, he was also reported to have been central to the January 2026 crackdown, in which tens of thousands of Iranian protesters were killed.

Larijani was killed last week in an Israeli airstrike near Tehran, along with his son and bodyguards. By then, the war had already torn through the upper ranks of the Iranian state. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was also assassinated in a strike on his compound in February, followed in subsequent weeks by a series of senior political and military figures, including intelligence minister Esmail Khatib, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, armed forces chief Abdolrahim Mousavi, and Basij commander Gholamreza Soleimani.

Multiple sources, including the Associated Press and the Jerusalem Post, reported that Larijani had effectively been running Iran after the earlier decapitation of its leadership. The new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei—the son of Ali Khamenei—remains hospitalized and reportedly in a coma following an Israeli strike on the first day of the war.

As of this morning, Israel is reporting Alireza Tangsiri, a chief naval officer charged with overseeing the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, has been killed. Iran has not commented on the claim.

The effect of these killings has been significant.

The Islamic Republic was built to survive shocks. It is, of course, a revolutionary movement designed for conflict against the West, including America. Power is dispersed across the Supreme Leader’s office, the Revolutionary Guards, the clerical establishment, the intelligence services, parliament, and a maze of councils.

On the military side, this overlaps with what the Iranian leadership calls the “mosaic defense” doctrine. The basic idea is simple: do not build a system that depends too heavily on one headquarters or chain of command. Instead, spread power, weapons, command structures, and local units across the country. If the center is hit, the rest of the system can keep fighting. The Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) developed this doctrine in the early 2000s to make Iran harder to defeat through airstrikes, decapitation attacks, or a conventional invasion. It relies on decentralization, redundancy, provincial commands, and the ability of local forces, especially the Basij and IRGC militias, to keep operating even if senior leaders are killed or communications are disrupted.

But as a consequence of losing so many leaders in a short span of time, the system is withering. The Israeli and American strategy is to decapitate the regime, and then to knock it back down if it tries to rebuild.

Ultimately, the United States and Israel are not likely to settle for less than regime change in Iran. The risks of a radicalized jihadist regime gaining a nuclear weapon are existential. Not only to Israel, but to the entire region and world. The Iranian regime—by indiscriminately attacking their neighbors, including Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan at the start of the war—illustrated that they are a rabid force, striking at anyone and everyone. Muslim or not. Zionist or not. American or not.

So far, Washington and Jerusalem have heavily degraded Iran’s navy and air force, destroyed large amounts of military infrastructure, and killed many of the men who coordinated the system from the top. Missile and drone launches by the regime have dramatically fallen since the start of the war.

The question now is whether the United States and Israel will spearhead a ground invasion of Iran or whether they will continue with air attrition and purported negotiations while waiting in hope for an internal coup or revolution.

A ground invasion was always going to be difficult. Iran is a massive and mountainous country. Any force entering Iran would have to deal with mountain ranges, long supply lines, and potential attacks from those who are still loyal to the regime. Or even those who are just anti-American.

But the prospect for an internal coup or revolution also remains uncertain. The regime has been badly damaged. But a state like this can lose ministers, commanders, and even a Supreme Leader and still keep functioning. At the end of the day, the IRGC has a lot of weapons, and the anti-regime protestors do not have any real military capacity.

One prospect is a targeted invasion at the coast to free the Strait of Hormuz and reduce any further threat to international shipping. And with Alireza Tangsiri reportedly out of the picture, this seems all the more likely.

That kind of operation would be easier to imagine—at least for now—than an imminent march on Tehran. The aim would be to seize or neutralize the parts of Iran’s military geography that give the IRGC leverage over the Gulf: islands, missile sites, drone bases, coastal batteries, naval facilities, and command nodes tied to the strait.

Such an operation would still be dangerous, of course. Iran has lost much of its conventional naval strength, but it still has mines, drones, anti-ship missiles, fast boats, coastal batteries, and dispersed IRGC units.

A regional coalition would make such an operation far more thinkable. If Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Kuwait, Jordan, and perhaps Saudi Arabia concluded that Iran had already crossed the line from a hostile power to an immediate threat, then the political and logistical burden would no longer fall solely on Washington and Jerusalem.

The military path forward is uncertain, whether through limited operations or continued attrition. But the outcome will not be decided by geography alone. It will depend on how much strain the system can absorb internally.

The Islamic Republic was built to withstand the loss of individuals. But that capacity depends on depth—on enough experienced figures to connect institutions, manage crises, and keep the system coherent under pressure. Larijani was one of those figures. His death, alongside so many others, raises the pressing question of how many more losses it can absorb before that durability begins to give way.

Spend enough time in human rights conferences or policy discussions on the Middle East, and you hear the same assumption again and again: if enough people are angry at a government, it will eventually fall. It sounds reasonable, and it is politically convenient, but it does not hold up in practice or in history.

Across multiple cases from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and now the Islamic Republic of Iran, this expectation has persisted despite contrary evidence. Public anger, even when deep and widespread, does not by itself beget into regime failure. The more consistent predictor of regime change is not popular sentiment but the cohesion, incentives, and beliefs of those within the system who control the use of force.

This distinction is central to understanding both the durability of regimes and the limits of external influence.

Syria is often cited as proof that extreme violence can bring down a system, but the process is usually misunderstood. Large-scale defections from the Syrian army did not come from organized opposition or outside coordination. It began with individual decisions, made in specific moments, when soldiers refused to carry out orders.

Early in the uprising, there were accounts of soldiers being ordered to fire on crowds and hesitating when they recognized people in front of them. One former conscript described seeing his own neighborhood among the protesters. Another recalled lowering his weapon and walking away—not because he had joined the opposition, but because he could no longer carry out the order. These were individual decisions made under pressure, and together they began to weaken the system from within.

The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was a loose alliance of armed opposition groups formed in 2011 during the Syrian Civil War by defectors from the Syrian military. It sought to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s government, acting as a moderate, decentralized insurgent force supported by Western and regional powers. It emerged as a structure to organize men who had already crossed a personal threshold.

Defections are rarely ideological at the outset. They are typically driven by a combination of lines individuals won’t cross, perceived risk, and expectations about the regime’s future viability.

Iran, by contrast, has been deliberately structured to prevent such moments from cascading into systemic breakdown. The Islamic Republic has developed a layered security architecture in which responsibilities for repression are concentrated within ideologically committed units, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. As Afshon Ostovar, Assistant Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, put it, “The IRGC… is tasked with both the defense of Iran and the much more amorphous safeguarding of Iran’s theocratic system.” This mandate goes beyond conventional military functions and is rooted in political and ideological objectives.

The implications are significant. A force designed to defend a system rather than merely a state is structurally more resistant to break down. Its durability is further reinforced by the IRGC’s expansive role beyond the military sphere. It is, as Ostovar describes, “a security service, an intelligence organization, a social and cultural force, and a complex industrial and economic conglomerate.” In effect, it embeds the regime across multiple layers of society, aligning political loyalty with economic interest and institutional belonging.

The regime’s approach to dissent reflects a similar degree of institutional learning. Following the protests of 2009, Iranian security forces refined their methods of control, developing a calibrated response that combines selective repression with managed tolerance. Large-scale protests are met with organized and often forceful responses, yet the system also demonstrates the capacity to shape and channel mobilization in ways that reinforce its authority. In some instances, actors affiliated with regime institutions themselves participate in demonstrations, blurring the line between opposition and state-sanctioned expression. This capacity to manage dissent stands in contrast to the early Syrian response, where indiscriminate violence accelerated divisions within the security apparatus.

The historical case of Iraq under Saddam Hussein provides a complementary but distinct model. There, regime sustainability was achieved primarily through coercion and fear, reinforced by overlapping security institutions and collective punishment mechanisms, including reprisals against family members, the destruction of homes, and the use of detention or execution to deter dissent within entire communities.

For years, this system held not because people believed in it, but because they feared the consequences of stepping outside it. To defect was not just to risk one’s life, but to endanger one’s family. That calculation kept the system intact far longer than many expected.

And then, in 2003, it crumbled all at once.

Soldiers abandoned positions, not because they had coordinated a defection, but because the system they feared no longer appeared unflappable. I was there. I remember entire units removing their uniforms and returning home within hours, as if the entire structure had been held together by belief in its inevitability. Once that belief disappeared, so did the system.

Systems built solely on fear may suppress defection, but they are vulnerable to sudden failure once the credibility of that fear is eroded. Systems that combine coercion with ideology, institutional integration, and material incentives, as in Iran, tend to be more resilient.

Robert Ames, a senior CIA officer whose career focused on the Middle East, approached the region with a disciplined curiousity that is often missing from policy debates. He understood that influence required engagement with the actual holders of power, not idealized versions of the opposition.

Ames spent years building relationships with figures many in Washington viewed only as adversaries. He believed that understanding how they saw the world was essential to predicting their behavior. Those who worked with him recall that he listened far more than he spoke, and that he treated even his adversaries as rational actors operating within constraints.

That approach came at a cost. Ames was killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, a reminder that understanding a system does not make it less dangerous. But his work powerfully illustrates that misreading how power operates in the region can be far more dangerous than engaging with it.

This lens is particularly relevant when assessing contemporary Iran. While public dissatisfaction is well documented, the critical variables, elite cohesion, control over coercive institutions, and the absence of a credible alternative center of power, remain largely intact. The IRGC and its associated networks continue to function as both a security apparatus and a socio-economic system, embedding the regime within key sectors of society.

It is also important to recognize that the emergence of an armed opposition is not solely a function of popular sentiment. The Syrian case demonstrates that such formations arise from defections within the security apparatus, not from external sponsorship or political leadership in isolation. Without armed defectors, territorial separation, and accessible supply networks, the conditions necessary for a sustained insurgency do not materialize.

In Iran, these preconditions are currently absent.

Strategies predicated on the assumption that economic pressure, public dissatisfaction, or external signaling will directly lead to regime change are unlikely to achieve the intended outcomes. While such factors may contribute to long-term stress on the system, they do not by themselves generate the internal fissures required to overthrow the regime.

A more realistic framework focuses on monitoring indicators of elite fragmentation, shifts in the behavior of security institutions, and changes in insiders’ perceptions of the regime’s durability. These variables, rather than public opinion alone, are more reliable predictors of systemic change.

The central analytical takeaway is therefore straightforward but often overlooked: regimes do not fall when they lose popularity; they fall when they lose their internal cohesion.

Until that threshold is crossed, even deeply unpopular systems can persist for extended periods, adapting to pressure while maintaining control. When it is reached, however, change tends to occur rapidly and unpredictably, often appearing inevitable only in retrospect.

Understanding this distinction is not just an academic exercise. It shapes how governments, analysts, and activists approach real-world crises. Misreading how power operates—assuming that anger in the streets will translate into change at the top—leads to flawed strategies, misplaced expectations, and, in some cases, prolonged instability and increased violence.

If change is to come, it will begin when those inside the system no longer believe it can endure.