The explosion of 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut on August 4, which killed 154 people and injured over 5,000, left the city in devastation. Read more...

Lebanon, like Iraq, Sudan and Algeria, is experiencing its own version of the Arab Spring with mass demonstrations, occupations and street blockades. Read more...

THE SURPRISE resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, announced from the Saudi capital Riyadh on 4 November, threatens to engulf yet another state in a vicious struggle for regional suprema Read more...

On one side stood Hezbollah, the Shia based resistance movement that ejected the Israeli occupation in 2000 and defeated Israel's invasion in 2006. On the other side in Lebanon's near-civil war stood Sunni Muslim and Druze militias backing leading pro-government billionaire Sa'ad Hariri, son of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, whose assassination forced the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon in 2005. Read more...

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese - maybe over a million according to Al Jazeera- flowed through the streets of Beirut to protest against the attempt by the United States, backed by France and Israel, to force the withdrawal of Syrian troops and install a regime subservient to their interests. Read more...

In mid-November, 400 delegates from every continent met in Beirut to demonstrate their solidarity with resistance against US imperialism and Israel and to discuss future perspectives for the anti-imperialist struggle.
Michael Proebsting reports.\n\nLebanese politics has always been a complicated affair, based as it is on a sectarian distribution of seats to religious groupings, none of which has an absolute majority. The state itself was cut out of Syria at the end of the First World War by French imperialism, which received it in a League of Nations Mandate. Their purpose was to provide a substantial social basis for holding on to this mercantile and banking centre of the eastern Mediterranean. For this purpose they gave the Maronite Christians (eastern rite Catholics) a politically privileged position in terms of numbers of seats in the parliament, and the key positions in the government, despite the fact that they are a minority of the population. Read more...

The conference attracted activists not only from the Middle East and Europe but also from the Philippines, South Korea, Australia, Congo, Canada. Among the many political currents, in addition to Hisbollah, were the Lebanese Communist Party, the Lebanese Democratic People’s Party, the National Committee for Unification of Communists in Syria, the PFLP and the DFLP. Read more...

The People’s Right to Resistance

In order to transform the historic victory achieved by the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli aggression which targeted the Lebanese population on the 12th of July 2006, into an incentive for reinvigorating the struggle for comprehensive Arab liberation and to direct it against the Zionist and Imperialist project and to consolidate global solidarity with the resistance of the Arab people in addition to their national resistance in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq within the framework of supporting the people’s right to resistance, the “International Conference in Support of the Resistance” was held in Beirut from the 16th-19th of November 2006, in response to an invitation from: Hizbullah, the Lebanese Communist Party, The People’s Movement, The National Unity Forum, and al-Leeqa’. Approximately 400 representatives from all over the world participated on behalf of tens of political, trade-unionist, civil, anti-globalization, anti-war and anti-imperialist movements that support the people’s right to freedom and progress. Read more...