Feature image by Ahmed akacha
HOF — After 14 years of war in Syria, here’s the hardest lesson I’ve learned:
The real war isn’t between you and your enemy. It’s inside you—between the part that wants to fight and the part that wants to compromise. Victory only comes when the will to compromise leads even the will to fight. Because only then can you reach the same part in your opponent.
Feature image by cottonbro studio
Note on “Greater Israel”: The term means different things to different people — from Chomsky’s use (Jordan to the Mediterranean), to the conspiracy version common in the region (Nile to Euphrates), which most Israelis reject. Here I use it simply to mean the future borders Israel may seek as Turkey and Iran press closer.
HOF — Debates about Israel’s war after October 7, 2023, often fall into binaries: is this about fighting terrorism, or about realizing the dream of a “Greater Israel”? Critics use the phrase as an accusation; defenders reject it as slander. Yet across the Middle East, rival powers are also reaching for “greater” versions of themselves. Iran promotes its Shiite crescent. Turkey nurtures neo-Ottoman ambitions. In the twentieth century, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq pursued Arab nationalism across the region. Why should Israel alone be denied the question: what would a Greater Israel look like—and could it succeed?
Continue reading “When the Middle East Leaves Israel No Alternative but Greater Israel”
Hof — The fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 didn’t just end a brutal era in Syria’s history.
It ended the Syrian Arab Republic itself.
The last thread holding the country together — the Syrian Arab Army — unraveled. Or was pulled apart. Assad didn’t go out in flames or defiance. He slipped quietly into Moscow’s shadow, carrying nothing but the weight of a broken nation.
Continue reading “When God Plays Dice with the Universe”
Cover photo courtesy of Sami Raad
Hof — It’s hard to know what kind of loss war leaves behind until it touches the shape of your city. Not just its people, or its streets, or the silence that follows after shelling—but the things that gave it meaning.
Its face.
Its posture.
Its language of stone and steel.
This is a personal story for those born into the spaces between worlds. These are the children of intermarriages—the outsiders who never belonged to any tribe. To those who’ve felt like mistakes, like intrusions, enduring the weight of invisible exclusion and the quiet violence of not fitting in.
Continue reading “The Thread That Holds Us in the Power of Love”
Roumani Line 