This is the last post of the year, and the last one before Christmas. It feels dishonest and irresponsible to end it with a gesture of closure, resolution, or uplift. The year itself has resisted all three with remarkable consistency. As the famous Turkish football coach Fatih Terim puts it, in his inimitable Turkish-English: “What can I do, sometimes?”
A Global Condition, Not a Regional Pathology
Gaza, in particular, has functioned over the past year or so as a site of moral exposure, revealing not only the limits but the exhaustion of international law as a meaningful constraint on state violence.
Elsewhere in the region, crises persist in quieter but no less consequential forms: the long-stalled question of Hezbollah’s integration into the Lebanese army continues to hollow out the Lebanese state from within; in Egypt,…
