After over a year of political deadlock, Beirut earlier this month announced the formation of a new government. On its surface, it seems as if the decision resulted from Sunni Muslim and Maronite Christian factions reaching an accommodation. Tony Badran explains, however, that the compromise was brokered by the Iran-backed Shiite militia Hizballah, which is the sole group that has come out ahead:

The prolonged paralysis only highlighted both sides’ insignificance, in contrast to Hizballah’s position as ultimate arbiter. Hizballah not only controls the new government, as it did Lebanon’s previous governments, but it and its immediate allies also hold two-thirds of the governing portfolios.

The French president Emmanuel Macron launched an initiative last year to push for a new Lebanese government. But Macron always viewed Hizballah as his primary interlocutor in Lebanon. . . . Macron has apparently resolved that, because Hizballah and, behind it, Iran are the dominant players in Lebanon, partnership with them is a prerequisite for advancing French interests—both geopolitical and commercial. In addition to its existing investment in offshore gas exploration in Lebanon, France has also been eyeing other ventures.

French policy in the Levant is hardly at odds with U.S. policy. In fact, in July, in a highly unusual move, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and her French counterpart jointly visited Saudi Arabia to urge the kingdom to reinvest in the Hizballah-dominated order in Beirut. Similarly, the U.S. secretary of state and his French counterpart have tried to press the Saudis on the matter.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”