The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, March 8, 2026

Notebook: The picture above by Mohammad Yassine ran on the front page of L’Orient Le Jour, the Lebanese French daily, on Friday (March 6). The caption reads: “Martyrs’ Square in Beirut, a frightened boy having fled the southern suburbs, March 5, 2026.” Martyrs Square is one of Lebanon’s most famous places in a geography where every square inch has its claim to fame in a history stretching back 6,000 years, with what seems like as many invasions and occupations along the way, along with about seven earthquakes that leveled Beirut. Martyrs Square got its name from Ottoman executions of Lebanese nationalists fighting for independence. It was also like Beirut’s Somme during the Civil War, especially in 1975 and 1976. The picture struck me of course because it felt like I was looking in a mirror. The boy could’ve been me, at times from 1975 to 1978 was me, though we never were left to a town square when escaping the bombs. We had my grandfather’s house in the mountains an hour northeast of Beirut, where the bombs reached us from time to time. We were never bombed by Israeli jets, only flown over by them daily (they loved breaking the sound barrier above us, just to humiliate us). The pcirure of the boy appears next to a front-page column by Gaby Nasr, one of the paper’s regular columnist. He lived across the street from us in beirut. His brother Georges was (is) one of my older brother’s closest friends. Gaby was older, kept to himself. He wrote Friday: “It is truly fascinating to note the ease with which communities in Lebanon fall from the coconut tree in turn, after experiencing the zenith of glory. So many crises of nesting teenagers which followed one another, sometimes over several decades for some, before their respective demigods and lickers spread out in the great widths, their tails between their legs and drunk with shame. The Bearded Party, which is being shorn for free today among its last idolaters, is not the first to have invented the stick to get its flock beaten and beaten. Long before him, the Sunnis had tried the sport of arrogance at the time when they smoked Nasser and Arafat without filter, who already promised to destroy Israel and pave the road to Jerusalem…. Still passing through Yemen for the Egyptian, and Jounieh for the Palestinian. In the end, the two troublemakers killed more Arabs than they destroyed Israelis and ended their careers, the first in a military defeat in 1967, the second on a boat while making the V for victory.” So it’s been over the decades, the Lebanese themselves never strong or civically minded enough to prevent guests and invaders from leveling the country. The reference to “the bearded party” is to Hezbollah, whose mad and maddening firing of missiles at Israel a few days ago revealed–as if Hezbollah hadn’t revealed it before–where its allegiance really is: not to Lebanon, but to Iran. Most Lebanese don;t mind seeing Hezbollah getting the shit kicked out of it. But the price is also crushing, and the picture of that boy unbearable.

The decisions adopted Monday by the Council of Ministers, meeting in Baabda, regarding Hezbollah—outlawing its military and security activities and ordering the army and other legal forces to immediately disarm this militia, including by force—represent a minor revolution when judged by the usual level of productivity and proactive approach of the Lebanese authorities. One might almost praise our executive branch for displaying such courage were it not for the fact that these measures fall far short of expectations given the situation once again created by the militia, which opened a front in support of its Iranian patron on Sunday night. What exactly does it mean to decree that henceforth, the military and security actions of the Shiite militia will be considered illegal? That they weren’t illegal before? They always were, except that a large part of the political and ruling class took pleasure—whether through ignorance or malice—in repeating a blatant lie, which they themselves ended up believing. […] The truth is that for over forty years, a culture of illegality has been allowed to flourish around Hezbollah. It’s a culture that the Lebanese state and ruling class have almost never sought to counter, or only timidly, even after the Syrian withdrawal of April 2005. At that time (2005-2006), the barbs of the Lebanese sovereignist camp, united within the March 14 Alliance, were almost all aimed at the Assad regime, while efforts were made to appease Hezbollah, despite its alleged involvement in the wave of political assassinations within that coalition. […] In the Lebanese collective consciousness, confronting Hezbollah has long been seen as a dangerous game that threatens civil peace. Doing nothing in the face of the decades-long hostage crisis is even more so today.

–From “Facing Hezbollah, Lebanon’s (too) slow awakening,” by Elie Fayad, L’Orient Le Jour, March 2, 2026.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.