Aoun: Negotiations a unanimous Lebanese choice
President Joseph Aoun announced Tuesday that negotiations with Israel are a “unanimous Lebanese choice.”
“The choice of negotiations I have called for to end the Israeli occupation in the South and its repercussions is a unanimous Lebanese choice, but Israel has not declared its stance yet and is continuing its attacks,” Aoun said in a meeting with Hamish Falconer, the British Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Middle East.
The president added that “the international community must press Israel to withdraw from the territory it occupies, in order to fully extend Lebanese security over it and begin the reconstruction process.”
Earlier in the day, Aoun had told the Netherlands’ visiting Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans that “Lebanon’s stability serves Europe’s interest.”
He also stressed the need for Israel to “abide by what was agreed on in November 2024, especially that Lebanon has fulfilled all its obligations and is still committed to them despite the continuous Israeli attacks.”
Aoun also met with David Hale, the former U.S. under secretary of state for political affairs and a former ambassador to Lebanon, discussing with him the domestic situations, the developments in the South and the regional transformations.
04 November 2025, 14:50
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cereal box intellectual ↴
Letter to the editor: Gaining civil rights for Shias should be top priority
Posted February 5, 2015
Noam Chomsky says that Shias are the majority of Lebanon’s population, such that, if free elections were held and if Shias threw all their support to Hezbollah, it could form the government entirely on its own. Yet Article 24 of the Lebanese Constitution reserves half of parliamentary seats for Christians, who number, by my own guess, around a quarter of the population.
Here, in a nutshell, you have the Shia sense of grievance that makes Hezbollah so dynamic a force in politics, and yet also the solution to two problems.
Hezbollah militancy and Lebanese political instability would both be ameliorated if Hezbollah put its main effort into gaining civil rights and political representation for Lebanon’s Shias – and the U.S. could be on the right side of history by aiding that cause.
So go ahead and tell me why not, please.
Christopher C. Rushlau
