1) At the JCFA, Dr Jacques Neriah asks Is Hizbullah Preparing a Takeover in Lebanon?.
“Hizbullah Secretary-General Naim Qassem’s televised address on May 24, 2026, delivered on “Resistance and Liberation Day,” marked a sharp and aggressive escalation in his rhetoric. He delivered the remarks during a speech commemorating May 25, 2000, the day Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon after 18 years of occupation. Facing intense internal pressure within Lebanon and an ongoing military conflict with Israel, Qassem focused his speech on domestic threats, an absolute refusal to disarm, and his ideological narrative regarding Israel’s future.”
2) The Alma Center reports on The Penetration of the Pro-Iranian Axis into Lebanese Institutions.
“On May 21, the U.S. Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on nine individuals from Hezbollah and the Amal Movement, a senior officer in the Lebanese Army, a senior official in the General Directorate of General Security (GSGD), and an Iranian diplomat.
According to the U.S. Treasury statement, these individuals operate from within state institutions — including parliament, the army, and the security apparatuses — and assist Hezbollah in maintaining its status as an independent military and political force backed by Iran. In doing so, they undermine Lebanese sovereignty and the state’s ability to exercise full control over its institutions.”
3) At the Hoover Institution, Makram Rabah discusses Hezbollah, the War That Made It, and the Stages of Its Unraveling.
“It is here that the insight of Lokman Slim, one of Hezbollah’s harshest critics gunned down by the group in 2021 becomes indispensable, because Slim refused the comforting falsehood that Hezbollah could be understood primarily as the child of resistance. He insisted, with the clarity that so often made his interventions both devastating and difficult to ignore, that Hezbollah was not the child of resistance but the child of civil war. That formulation is not a slogan. It is a methodological correction. It reorients the entire story away from the mythology Hezbollah later built around itself and back toward the conditions that made its rise possible. It asks us to look not first at Israel, nor even at Iran, but at the internal collapse of Lebanon’s political order, at the long process by which sovereignty thinned out while the shell of the state remained standing. Civil war in this reading did not merely create chaos. It created a political environment in which the state survived as a façade while authority was redistributed among militias, foreign armies, intelligence services, parties, sectarian bosses, and revolutionary intermediaries. In such an environment, actors like Hezbollah do not appear as exceptions. They appear as logical products.”
4) At the FDD, Bonnie Glick argues that The Humanitarian Aid Machine Cannot Be Bamboozled by Gaza.
“Some, like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), UNICEF, and multiple NGOs, operated programs and provided material support to programs in hospitals used by Hamas for terror operations, as reported as early as 2014 in outlets like the Washington Post. Not only did they never once do their duty to humanitarian principles by raising objections and immediately ending programs until neutrality was restored, but they also willingly allowed their humanitarian reputations and logos to be used as cover for terrorist activity, paving the way to the mass atrocities on October 7th.”
5) At the IDI, Mohamed Saad Khiralla discusses The Duality of the Egyptian Regime.
“The Egyptian regime is not pro-West. The Egyptian regime is pro-survival, and survival, in its calculation, requires both the cooperation with Israel that brings gas, security partnership, and Western military aid, and the public performance of hostility toward Israel that placates the religious-nationalist consensus of Egyptian public opinion. Both are necessary. Neither is in contradiction with the other. The peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979 is policy. The chants are politics. The two operate on different layers of the regime’s relationship with its own population and with the international order.”
6) At the INSS, Batsheva Neuer asks Are We Asking the Wrong Questions about Antisemitism?.
“After antisemitic incidents — harassment at synagogues, threats against Jewish institutions, intimidation of Jewish students, exclusion of Israeli speakers, or attacks on visibly Jewish spaces — the response is often reframed as a debate over “criticism of Israel.” Contemporary anti-Zionist Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), are then invoked as a moral alibi: evidence that anti-Zionism cannot be antisemitic because some Jews themselves endorse it.
This approach does not answer the central problem. The existence of Jewish anti-Zionists does not explain why synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher restaurants, Jewish students, Israeli academics, Israeli artists, or Jewish cultural institutions are targeted for events in the Middle East. Nor does it explain why Jewish belonging in the Diaspora is increasingly made conditional on political disavowal of Israel. Instead, the invocation of groups like JVP often shifts attention away from the discriminatory act and toward an abstract debate over ideology.”
