Eyad Abu Shakra

It would be fair to say that Israel’s current government is the most extreme since the country’s founding in 1948. I believe that this is indeed the case, though I was not a witness to the founding event itself.

French voters made their voices heard in the mid-March municipal elections, whose insights into the trajectory of the far-right National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen and her protege Jordan Bardella, were closely followed.

Last week, my esteemed colleague Hiba Nasr, an Asharq News correspondent in Washington, wrote a post on X that reflected palpable anguish about the receding shadow of the Lebanese state in her village in southern Lebanon after the army’s withdrawal in the face of a new Israeli assault.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket has long been a fundamental maxim of common political wisdom. Recent global and regional developments — all the ambiguity, ad hoc deals and the conflation of strategy and tactics — are showing us why.

A new episode in this season of the American-Iranian “series” ended in recent days in the Omani capital, Muscat. Both sides struck a note that it was a “positive” start amid a torrent of speculation and divergent projections.

It is difficult for an analyst to come away with an accurate picture of the deliberations of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. With such events, it is very useful to understand the atmosphere, body language, implicit messages and positional “test signals.”

A year into the term of Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, the debate rages on amid a political environment that can hardly agree on a vision or an approach and a population that harsh experiences have not taught the importance of reaching a bare minimum consensus.

What does it feel like to constantly wake up to news that makes you feel like you belong to a bygone era and that the principles you had lived by and believed in for decades have become obsolete?

Lebanese citizens start and end their days with questions of what the future will bring amid political paralysis and economic hardship … and with justified anxiety about the future.