إنذارات لم تسمع في حينها

Warnings Unheard in Their Time

الناقد

1960s poems whose reading was deferred until after the siege. The warnings were there. No one listened.

مائة يوم هزت أوروبا الشرقية: الإرادوية ــ المرض الصبياني للاشتراكية

One Hundred Days That Shook Eastern Europe: Voluntarism — Socialism's Infantile Disorder

زوايا

A hundred days toppled Eastern Europe's regimes. The real question isn't how they fell — it's how we stayed silent so long.

قضية سلمان رشدي: اللعبة الشيطانية

The Salman Rushdie Affair: A Satanic Game

زوايا

Khomeini's fatwa is politics before faith. The West inflates Rushdie's blood to forget Palestinian blood.

البيرسترويكا عربياً: مقدمات

Perestroika in Arabic: Preliminaries

زوايا

Perestroika is not a renewed revolution, nor a bankruptcy — it is the attempted exit from Stalinist voluntarism.

١٤ تموز: الثورة عيد

14 July: The Revolution as Festival

زوايا

The Bastille fell to the armed people, not to the legislators. That is why the people's day is the Revolution's day.

١٤ تموز: الديمقراطية ثورة

14 July: Democracy as Revolution

زوايا

Democracy was taken, not given — wrested from the bourgeoisie, not bestowed by it.

أزمة مواصلات (من مشاهدات الفوانجيسي في العالم السفلي الباريسي)

A Transport Crisis: The Funjissi's Observations in the Parisian Underworld

الكرمل

A new Fariyaq in the Paris Métro: eyes trained never to meet, discipline manufactured by modernity.

Beirut-Guernica: A City and a Painting 

Middle East Report (MERIP)

Parallel to Guernica, Beirut shows how besieged cities transform into concentrated laboratories of modern political crisis, where the contradictions and catastrophes of Arab history are condensed into a single image.

ما تيسّر من سورة الحجر

What Has Been Vouchsafed of the Sura of the Stone

الكرمل

The boy threw a stone at the soldier. The myth flipped, and the code of the occupation was broken.

غيرنيكا- بيكاسو : قراءة عربية

Picasso's Guernica: An Arab Reading

كلمات

A Lebanese before a Spanish audience draws Guernica near Beirut: a city that came to resemble the canvas.

(غيرنيكا) بيكاسو

Picasso's Guernica

الكرمل

Guernica is not Christian crucifixion, nor universal tragedy. A first reading of the century's painting.

Ahmad uz-Za’tar – A poem by Mahmoud Darwish

Translation: "Let the siege be—my body is the fortress—for I am besieging you"—Darwish's Ahmad uz-Za'tar, translated by Traboulsi.

عن أمل لا شفاء منه

Of a Hope With No Cure

الكرمل

"The Palestinians are a plague" — an Israeli officer agrees he sounds like Hitler. The siege notebooks keep writing.

شعر الثورة ثورة في الشعر

The Poetry of Revolution, a Revolution in Poetry

الكرمل

Éluard the lover cannot be pried from Éluard the communist. Even the French right had to concede the point.

الوطن باقٍ والاحتلال إلى زوال

The Homeland Endures, the Occupation Will Pass

بيروت المساء

The homeland endures. Beirut contains it. The occupation, however long it lingers, will vanish.

بيروت ٢٨ – نون والقلم

Beirut 28 - Nun wal-Qalam

A translation of Etel Adnan's poem on the siege of Beirut 1982: "Name your children Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila so we do not forget"—and poets are called to change the world or stay home.

هرطقات الطبقات الدنيا – اول ثورة ديمقراطية

Heresies of the Lower Classes - The First Democratic Revolution

The English Revolution was the first democratic revolution, unleashing the "heresies of the lower classes" that demanded collective land ownership and equality, before being suppressed in favor of the merchant class.

Mao, encens et lune

Mao, Incense and Moon

A chapter from Portrait of the Young Man in Red: a journey to revolutionary Dhofar where snakes are "paper tigers" and frankincense trees are ghosts in the moonlight—and the Front that banned the critique of tribalism returned after defeat to discuss nothing else.

Zionism and Imperialism in the Middle East

New Left Review

A foundational 1969 paper: the fundamental contradiction combines Zionist colonialism and Western imperialism in one confrontation—and the national and class contradictions condense into one.

Palestine In The “Fatal Triangle”

Chiha reduced Palestine from a "project of planetary domination" to "difficulties"—and for the first and last time, he defended industry.

رشدي العامل

Rushdi al-Amil

The gardens are blooming, my friend — violets, roses, lilac... but they are walled. Is that enough? The permit expired before the visa. The wall collapsed on its violets.