Syria's economic collapse isn't discussed enough as a factor in the regime's unraveling.

Society faced a silent death sentence: endemic poverty, ever-worsening and untold.

In recent months, I was working on the challenge of representing such misery tactfully. A short visual 🧵 With my colleague @ShanawaniMalak, who is also a brilliant photographer and filmmaker, we explored the theme of "tantalizing" poverty.

In Syria, everything was available. Yet, for the majority, virtually none of it was affordable. Take the example of the simplest of meals...

I once had a surprisingly frank chat with a member of Assad's guard. He would stand sentry around his home, and was occasionally part of his retinue when traveling within Syria.

It was a surreal conversation. It summed up for me the regime's dependence on "an army of slaves" 🧵 Before this chance encounter, I'd never had much interaction with these types, although I drove and walked past them routinely in Damascus.

They were dressed in white shirts and crummy black suits, in the heat, the cold, and the rain. They looked poor and proud and powerful.

The time has come to share excerpts from a memo I wrote in 2012 for Kofi Annan, on Assad’s personality and leadership style, in preparation for their first meeting.

It helps explain how the regime could rot over the years, from the inside, starting at the center 🧵 Assad is “a product of the regime’s inner core; he nonetheless has several outer layers of varnish that impress his Western interlocutors in private meetings. He does not espouse his father’s legacy; he loathes the comparison, and strives to distinguish himself from him.”

France's foreign policy has never been this shallow, reflexive and incoherent, detached from any national interest, slave to the news cycle.

I've witnessed this evolution over 25 years, during my own career. It carries lessons about diplomacy more broadly 🧵 The most obvious shift is: presidentialization. Policy used to take shape within the ministry (the Quai d'Orsay), home to solid intellectual traditions, a robust corps of civil servants, and strong leadership figures.

Gradually, it moved to the presidential palace (the Elysee).

In Lebanon, Israel's war is giving us a taste of what it's like to live in Palestine. The parallels only go so far, but the general trends are disturbingly clear.

And in many ways, that is precisely the point 🧵 We now look to the sky, not least in search of surveillance drones.

Technically, these could be as silent as they are invisible, but they make a racket for the sake of it, as a statement of their ability to penetrate everything, our daily routines and our minds.

In a war zone, an unexpectedly big part of the challenge is to reassure anguished friends and relatives abroad. It can be excruciating to watch from afar. But the ensuing anxiety can also make things more difficult for those on the ground. 🧵 A few rules of thumb may help if you're watching and worrying right now, especially if you haven't experienced war yourselves:

The booby-trap attacks in Lebanon have given rise to a fascination and celebration that is important to analyze. Yes, it's a mind-boggling intelligence feat in a merciless war. But there are disturbing undertones to the glee. 🧵 Secretive, high-tech, ruthless yet "targeted" and efficient violence is an old and widespread fantasy, captured for instance in Obama's predilection for drone-powered extraterritorial assassinations, not to mention the myth of "surgical strikes" that developed in the 90s.

The risk of an all-out war in Lebanon is tricky to analyze. On the face of it, no one has an interest in another crazy gamble, another ruinous showdown.

Yet the problem lies elsewhere, in that we still don’t have in place the de-escalation mechanism to avoid one 🧵 Israel and Hizbollah have locked themselves into a “mutually assured destruction” setup vaguely reminiscent of the cold war.

They are constantly threatening their opponent with annihilation. And indeed they both have enormous destructive power in store. But…

We’re beginning to see plausible outcomes from the war on Gaza.

Of course, this analysis is speculative. But it’s important to think ahead, because short-sighted policy-making has been the greatest enabler of this conflict’s worst outcomes. 🧵 Within Gaza, Israel looks poised to adopt some aspects of the style of control it has honed in the West Bank: no real Palestinian partner for security or governance, extreme territorial fragmentation, and endless raids in response to a decentralized insurgency.

Given our recent work on the mental health crisis in Syria, combined with the distress we can all feel in and around Gaza, I wanted to share some very practical observations on the psychological effects of conflict, through the lens of "trauma". 🧵 It’s important, in this context, to understand the difference between two types of trauma. A single traumatic event can break the continuum of one’s life journey: Because we can’t process it, we stay stuck in a loop.

That’s what is treated, effectively, as PTSD.

If you don't follow closely events on Israel's northern border, it's easy to believe a regional war is unlikely, that things have already played out.

Seen from Lebanon, things look different: months of slow escalation, calculated but unrelenting and plausibly unstoppable 🧵 Spectacular attacks aside, this escalation is mostly based on "subtle" changes, across multiple variables: choice of targets, weapons employed, number of strikes, expected casualties, and so on.

Both sides are not just attacking each other but negotiating as they do.

Behind the destruction of the cities of Gaza lies another form of violence, ever so intimate and ominous: the destruction of home.

This is important to unpack, as a key to understanding the emotional shockwaves this war is causing across the region. 🧵 Gaza's fabric, even more so than other cities in the region, was largely built by its inhabitants, in ad hoc fashion. That makes for a punishing urban space: cramped, chaotic, weak on public infrastructure.

Thus the crucial importance of private fallbacks. Especially, the home.

In Gaza, this man-made tragedy not only never ends, but gets ever worse, which makes it hard to analyse the war underway. That in itself makes the war all the more dangerous.

I'll therefore try to distance myself from the suffering to formulate four broad analytic hypotheses. 🧵 The real battlefield.

The West Bank, arguably, is where it is happening. Israel is pushing consistently to dramatically change the rules of the game: no PA, more settlements supported by troops fighting a chaotic insurgency. In other words, Israel is set to absorb the West Bank.

I've been trying to think about this deepening, dangerous split we are witnessing between Europe and the Arab world. In over 25 years living and working in the latter, I've never seen anything like it.

Why is it deeper and more dangerous than our other, age-old disputes? 🧵 What worries me most in that respect is the complete breakdown in communication. In the past, our narratives would often conflict, but within a framework that was mostly shared.

Today, Gaza creates a situation where differences are not only profound, but incommunicable.

Genocide is a useful, frightening, and tricky word. Israelis have used it to define 7 October. Many others have described subsequent retaliations as such. Some experts concur, others disagree. It all depends on what one means by genocide. 🧵 As a legal term, its current usage is restrictive. Prosecuting a genocide requires, for instance, solid proof that orders were given specifically to eradicate a well-delineated group. That is why the massacre of some 8000 people in Srebrenica qualified.

A defining feature of the Gaza war is the volume of videos in which fighters film themselves committing war crimes.

This has important implications for the future. 🧵 Hamas equipped fighters with go-pros, although part of the atrocities they recorded could only fall into the hands of the enemy.

Since, Israeli soldiers have posted numerous videos of themselves looting, maltreating prisoners, and destroying civilian buildings they had secured.

In my career, I have never seen such a gulf between Western countries and the Arab world. The alienation is more structural than our many past breakups, over Palestine, or Iraq, or Iran.

This estrangement has many facets. Counterintuitively, aid & development programs are one 🧵 Historically, Western states have sought to offset the effects of politics and business with humanitarian and social programs, to reduce suffering and conflict, show people to people solidarity, broaden ties beyond officials and corporations, promote shared values, and so on.

Seen from the Middle East, Europe may appear like a continent drifting away: rejecting its Arab neighborhood, abandoning any belief in common human rights, and doing so out of reflexive racism.

That perception deserves nuancing. 🧵 First of all, not all European governments are embracing, aping or run by the far-right. Take Norway, Ireland, and Spain. Europe's supposed leaders, eg France or Germany, traditionally take them for granted.

Today is a good time to pay more attention to them.

Like many people across the Middle East, I've sadly been privy to other horrific conflicts. This one I find particularly difficult and disturbing in ways that go beyond the obvious. (By obvious, I mean the levels of violence, falsehoods, and double standards) 🧵 1. First is the focus on babies and children. They count among those slaughtered or taken hostage by Hamas. Israel turned incubators into propaganda, before leaving premature babies to die. And this war has birthed the haunting acronym WCNSF: wounded child no surviving family.

In Europe and the US, many well-meaning officials simply don't get why Gaza is an outrage. For them, Hamas' attack was abominable; Israel is its usual self; Western support isn't new; and many wars and regimes do worse, yet don't stir such emotions.

So why the anger? 🧵 What they miss is that never before did the West abandon all pretence of supporting human rights and international humanitarian law. Indeed, Palestinians are de facto denied any rights whatsoever... when even the more obvious violations aren't called out.

In Gaza, as on many urgent questions, we are watching a cohort of Western leaders do things that don’t seem to serve any purpose, besides voicing their own shallow instincts.

They are not cynical or unconscionable as much as they are grotesque, which is harder to explain. 🧵 The US, for example, has adopted a radical line that could cost Biden many votes, while doing little to help Israel, absent achievable goals.

Meanwhile, Germany, the UK, or France, are bizarrely tearing at their social cohesion in ways that can only profit the far-right.