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Newsletter 150
August 15, 2026
UNDER THE HEAT DOME
S.O.S. ISRAEL / LEBANON (3)
S.O.S. PALESTINE (3)
Dedicated to Torsten Wiesel, Elias Corey, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, the Dalai Lama, Roald Hoffmann, Mario Capecchi
& to the loving memory of Desmond Tutu, Ilya Prigogine, Joseph Rotblat, Maurice Wilkins, Christian de Duve, Jack Steinberger, François Jacob,
of Martin Luther King & Thich Nhat Hanh
1- Under the Heat Dome
« For the fifth time this summer, Europe is sweating under an intense heat wave. The signs of a persistently hot and exceptionally dry summer are everywhere. Brown, dusty patches have replaced verdant lawns in London’s parks. Major rivers like the Danube and the Rhine have retreated, exposing sandbars. The conditions have created a tinderbox for wildfires. Forests in Germany and in Bosnia and Herzegovina were ablaze on Friday, while firefighters were battling to save thousands of acres and hundreds of homes in Britain, France, Greece and Spain. »
Heat is Hammering Europe Again, The New York Times, August 14, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/14/world/europe/europe-heat-wave-photos.html
4 a.m. in the cool of the night, somewhere in Europe. The earth is parched and scorched, all former green spaces are withered, yellowish, dusty. Under the lime tree you walk on a dry, crispy carpet of dead bracts, dead Tilia fruit, the likes of which you had never seen in a lifetime. You can feel the suffering of trees. It has not really rained for weeks on end. Not even thinking of the thousands of them which were engulfed in forest fires.
As for the feeding function of fields, we know that wheat harvests are going down.
Sixteen thousand people died from the heat during one peak week of June in Europe.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/15/world/europe/europe-heat-wave-deaths-june-2026.html
Hundreds of thousands have since been in slow, silent agony. You should take the subway in London or Paris to check out on faces. We know it isn’t any better in New York with temperatures close to 90°F, Memphis or Dallas (over 100°F in the afternoon). 95°F in Hanoi, 88°F in Saigon and Gaza.
Some cities are blessed with temperatures in their seventies, depending on the waters next to them, the altitude. The Question of the Place and Climate. Die Frage nach Ort und Klima, more than ever. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (1888).
This is a whole brand new world out here. Much more serious than the covid pandemy. We’re actually suffocating, sweating and frying, gasping for breath. Forget what Miller called The air-conditioned nightmare (1940-1945). Breathe. Consciously. Deep consciousness, and cognition. On the way to conscientious objection.
Conscience and consciousness, two faces of the same coin.
A Call to Conscience. Martin Luther King (December 5, 1955-April 3, 1968)
First, breathe. Deliberately inspire.
One of the lessons learnt in Middle Bosnia, during their civil war : if you want to survive, you got to think fast, act slowly. Slowly : deliberately, in full mindfulness.
You might as well resort to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman (2011).
Or, shorter, simpler yet, on the threshold of the oven, of the furnace, or one step into it, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh (1975). Wisdom from Vietnam. 1975, the year the U.S. mighty army had to finally go home, with all their B52 bombers, Huey helicopters, Patton tanks, after they had lost 47,434 lives in combat, and killed three million Vietnamese out of forty million then, during the twelve years of their full military involvement. Have we forgotten the many lessons of Vietnam and its Fog of War ?
Now there are over a hundred million human beings in Vietnam. With a fertility rate slightly under 1,9, whereas it has fallen to 1,6 in the US, Australia, New-Zealand (and France). [Underneath 1,5 for Russia, Germany, Cuba, Switzerland, the Netherlands, for that matter ; underneath 1,4 for Canada, Austria, Greece ; underneath 1,3 in Spain, Japan, Italy…].
So, that is where we are now, in insidiously dying peoples, caught within persistent heat domes, with Millennials and the Z generation that seem to have lost the lust to live and transmit.
By the way, if you care to wonder, the vitality rate is of 4,3 in Yemen, 3,13 in Iraq and Palestine, 2,7 in Israel and Egypt, 2,6 in Syria, 2,5 in Jordan, 2,2 in Lebanon (but 1,66 in Iran). In Israel proper, among the religious Jews, you count close to 7 children per family, as opposed to around 2 among secular couples. Go figure.
2- S.O.S. ISRAEL/GAZA
Why should we start this Letter with the richest party, aware that the Gross Domestic Product per capita / Purchasing Power Parity in Israel is close to $ 70,000 (IMF source for 2026) whereas in Gaza it fell down to $161 a year at the end of 2023. Did you know ?
A ratio Gaza/Israel of 1,6 to 700 : of 0,22 to 100.
The average monthly wages in Gaza today are around $100. 85 €.
Whereas the Tel Aviv beaches are filled with suntanned scantily clad crowds, the Gaza beaches are covered with refugees’ shabby tents, displaced families who’ve been surviving in tents for three years. Barely some forty miles away in straight-line. Not to speak of the Ashkelon beaches, a dozen miles North of Gaza City.
Again, how do you fancy this, surviving with $100 per month– if you get lucky. about 85 €.
Just facts and figures. No a priori, no bias. Facts speak louder than speeches.
Granted that some remain stuck in the distant past, were the Germans forced to survive with under two hundred euros a year until 1948 ? Or the Hiroshima people, for that matter ?
Check it out. Look around. The poorest people on Earth, in Yemen, forty million Muslims live with about $ 300 per month – is this why they feel such instant solidarity with the Gaza people ? In South Sudan, thirteen million people have to survive with $ 130 per month. By the way, South Sudan was created ex nihilo, carved out of Sudan, in 2011, fifteen years ago.
Comparatively, Palestine has been vying for statehood since 1988, close to forty years now, and who knows where the files of its statehood have been spirited away ?
So, again, why should little Israel take provisory precedence (S.O.S. Israel) over its Palestinian counterpart at this stage ?
Now the heat is rising here, in this tiny office (two square meters). 77°F. No ventilator. Still, we have running water and electricity. What would it be under a thin layer of material under the sun, in a refugees’ tent, reaching 90 to 100°F ?
You need to know something : the Gaza people are very ordinary people. Among them you find employees, students, architects, shopkeepers, waiters, nurses, teachers, masons, surgeons, the whole usual range. I can testify about it, after working there in education for six years. You did meet ideologues and dogmatic civil servants, leaders – whose sin was to blindedly believe in the armed struggle, without ever weighing the schematics of interactions, the whole gamut of consequences / but who really does that anyway ?
The vast majority of the people were peaceful, busy with making ends meet, studying, passing exams. I stayed there long enough, walked the walk, observed all of them in daily life. I can testify.
As can be seen, I took this picture at the end of July 2011, on a beach in the North of Gaza, during the day-long gathering of thousands of kids, brought in buses by UNRWA young monitors, in an attempt to beat the Guinness record of the most kites flown simultaneously, until then held by Chinese kids, with some 11,000 kites, if my memory serves me well.
And guess what, on that last Thursday of July 2011, these beautiful, innocent kids of Gaza, gathered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency teams at al-Waha Beach, did win, with 12,350 kites flown simultaneously ! Guess what too, the wind from the South was blowing towards Israel. Al-Waha Beach is less than one mile from the border with Israel.
Check with United Nations News, Palestinian Children Break World Record for Kite Flying :
https://media.un.org/photo/en/asset/oun7/oun7367902
or with ABC News :
https://abcnews.com/International/gaza-kids-shatter-kite-flying-world-record/story?id=14184345
Fifteen thousand kids guided by the UNRWA teams. This was Gaza to me. Of these fifteen thousand kids of 2011, how many of them were killed, or maimed, in the last three years ?
How did the media North of the border report the event ? Could you find one reference ?
So, yes, pity the Northern neighbours, who were not told, not informed, who could not see any picture of these 12,350 flying messages of peace and joyful hope. S.O.S. Israel too.
The underground war machine in Gaza was something else, a secret forbidden kingdom in its own right, that nobody was allowed to penetrate, that nobody would talk about, that was just surmised. You had two distinct worlds in Gaza : the surface life, and the underground. A few hundred men, at most, knew, and would go back and forth between the two. The rest of the population prefered not to know, not to inquire.
How many times, in all these years, did I ask leaders, insisting to visit a smuggling tunnel to Egypt? Again and again, I was denied any possibility of access. Speaking of the Westward tunnels, not the taboo ones to Israel.
3- S.O.S. June-July-August 2026 / S.O.S. LEBANON
In June 2026 we sent three S.O.S. messages worldwide, to Nobel laureates (standing for common sense and unstoppable human progress). S.O.S. ISRAEL / S.O.S. LEBANON / S.O.S. PALESTINE. In the background, you could read S.O.S. IRAN. Refering to the people, not the state-nations as such. Their explicit end was to express conscientious objection to warfare in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Iran, in the West Bank – and in Israel, as a tidal effect.
We were sinking fast then. In Lebanon, twelve children were killed and maimed daily, even after the Hezbollah-Israel truce was agreed, in the wake of a U.S.-Iran deal reached on June 15, including ‘Immediate Termination’ of any fighting in Lebanon.
Two months later, August 15, what do we find ?
11 killed in Israeli strikes on Ansar and Deir Zahrani, highest toll since cease-fire
L’Orient Today, August 15, 2026
Lebanon: UN peacekeepers count hundreds of Israeli strikes and incursions in a single weekend
UN News, August 10, 2026
Israel Captured 230 Square Miles of Lebanon, Razed Villages and Built New Bases
Yarden Michaeli, Bar Peleg,Yaniv Kubovich, Liza Rozovsky, Haaretz, August 5, 2026
UN says Israeli demolitions in Lebanon ‘deeply concerning’
Al Arabiya, August 1, 2026
Was July different ? Mansouri, the village divided by Israel’s ‘yellow line’
Yaea Sarkis, L’Orient Today, July 25, 2026
L’Orient Today, July 19, 2026
In infographics: How 4 months of Israeli attacks and war devastated Lebanon
Enzo Quenescourt, L’Orient Today, July 17, 2026
Elisha Ben Kimon, YNet News, July 12, 2026
As Its Deal With Israel Stalls, Lebanon Fears Being Stuck in Same Limbo as Gaza
Haaretz, July 8, 2026
Israel rules out withdrawal from Lebanon, Syria and Gaza
Mai Anati, The Jordan Times, July 4, 2026
4- A matter of method : Open the Doors of Info
You noticed that half our sources are from Lebanon, L’Orient Today, We started following them in March 2026, as they offer insight from inside, less state-controlled than the media in Egypt or Jordan. This is part of the approach here : if you want to get a less biased view of what is going on, you have to leave the fast highway of comfort zone media, and cross borders. You have to listen to what the others concerned have to say, the Lebanese, the Egyptians, the Saudi Arabs, the Jordanians, the Syrians, the Turks, the Iranians, the United Nations people…
You do not escape wild fires and dangers through blinders and cervical rigidity.
Now, seemingly, the United Nations has lost much of its weight and influence, to be supplanted and replaced by the United States. Not quite the same vision of Unity or Union. Judge by the results, What does this brave new world order look like ?
Before the summer of 2026, who could put names on the fifteen key Middle East countries ?
Before April 2026, who knew where the Hormuz Strait lies ?
Before July 2026, who on Earth knew where the Bab el Mandeb Strait is, and what countries border it ?
Before March 2026, who knew what the neighbours of Iran are ? Or even how many people live in Iran, for that matter ?
Americans are known to be wholly ignorant of world geography. Are Europeans any better ?
Who has any idea, anyway, of how many US military bases there are in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, up to Turkey and Cyprus ?
https://cdn.britannica.com/25/285425-050-5CDA2C52/2026-iran-war-map-Israel-US-strait-of-hormuz.jpg
The following selection of articles from nine sources (3 American, 4 Israeli, 1 Lebanese, 1 British) may read like a descriptive chronology for July 2026 :
CENTCOM considers relocating US bases from Gulf States to Negev after painful Iran strikes – report
The Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2026
‘Israel is destroying my country’: Tucker Carlson to start third party after GOP break
YNet News, July 2, 2026
Global Economy, Hit by Iran War and Inflation, Faces Sharp Slowdown
Alan Rappeport, The New York Times, July 8, 2026
Inside Trump’s Oval Office Decision to Ditch the Iran Ceasefire
Vera Bergengruen, Alexander Ward, The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2026
Our Never-Ending Race to the Bottom
David French, The New York Times, July 12, 2026
How Trump Failed to Secure the Strait of Hormuz in His Iran Deal
Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, July 12, 2026
The war with Iran weakens Trump ahead of midterm elections
Joe Macaron, L’Orient Today, July 19, 2026
The Dead End to Trump’s ‘Perfect’ War
Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, July 25, 2026
All about the POTUS in the media (President Of The US) – to be continued :
Trump holds off major Iran escalation after Pentagon warns of interceptor shortage
YNet News, July 26, 2026
Trump Seems Trapped by Iran War, Even as He Wields the World’s Biggest Hammer
David E. Sanger, The New York Times, July 26, 2026
Trump decides not to escalate Iran conflict as Middle East interceptor stockpile decreases – report
Tzvi Jasper, The Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2026
More than 600 US military service members injured since Iran War began in February
Brandon Drenon, BBC, July 27, 2026
It’s the Missile Interceptors, Stupid: Trump Discovers the Price of His War
Oded Yaron, Haaretz, July 27, 2026
Full text: The Board of Peace roadmap for the implementation of Trump’s Gaza peace plan
The Jerusalem Post, July 31, 2026
US tells citizens to prepare to leave Mideast
Lior Ben Ari, Itamar Eichner, YNet News, August 1, 2026
US has used ‘virtually all’ of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say
The Jerusalem Post, August 4, 2026
The Whiplash War [with chronological graphs]
Adina Renner, The New York Times, August 6, 2026
Trump’s top general seeks Iran war ‘off-ramp’ as US military options narrow
YNet News, August 8, 2026
Pentagon said to ask US arms firms to speed up output as Iran war exhausts supply
The Times of Israel, August 9, 2026
Netanyahu Rejects Trump’s Plan to Disarm Hamas
Aaron Boxerman, The New York Times, August 9, 2026
The one approach to the Iran war that is guaranteed to fail
Max Boot, The Washington Post, August 10, 2026
Huckabee condemns ‘horrific terror’ against Palestinians in West Bank, says embassy ‘very involved’
Shir Perets, Goldie Katz, The Jerusalem Post, August 13, 2026
US fuming at Israel for allowing ‘anarchy,’ rampant settler violence in West Bank
The Times of Israel, August 13, 2026
Frustration with Trump grows among U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies, officials say
Susannah George, The Washington Post, August 15, 2026
Paradoxically, this fourth part which was labeled S.O.S. Lebanon to start with, ends up practically defined as S.O.S. USA.
5- To Conclude for Now – as of mid-August 2026
As far as we can see from what precedes, this thing, the March 1 Attack, is not working.
The March 1 Attack : the massive aerial assault on Iran by the Israeli-American alliance.
It is not working, from a technical, objective point-of-view.
A complex equation, indeed, with fifteen players involved (the Gazan, the Israeli, the American / the Lebanese, the Iranian, the Omani / the Yemeni, the Saudi, the Egyptian / the Jordanian, the Syrian, the Iraqi / the Pakistanese, the Chinese, the Russian). All revolving around the historical hinge : Gaza.
A simple obvious truth : we have burning issues to deal with, all of us. The Water warming problem and the Droughts, as existential priorities. The recurring oppressive Heat waves. Did you know that four days ago, on August 11, both in 2025 and 2026, tons of jellyfish clogged the cooling system, impaired the functioning of the largest nuclear plant in Europe ? The connection : warming seas favor the reproduction of jellyfish.
Other than from invasions of jellyfish, « France has seen nuclear power production disrupted by multiple heatwaves and droughts this year, with EDF shutting down several reactors in June and July because of extreme heat. » Le Monde, August 11, 2026
In this glaring light, the Middle East is far from pressing concerns for North America and Europe.
Take another look at the maps : the days of MM. Sykes and Picot’s agreement to share the land from Kirkuk to Beirut according to British and French interests (1916), the days of Colonel Lawrence, have long been gone. And history has taught us that the Americans, when they step in, don’t do any better than the British and the French – from Vietnam (1963-1975) to Iraq (1990-2003).
« Do they know history ? »
Facing growing emergency situations provoked by excessive heat, and the rising numbers of climate refugees ; since this thing of an endless war – from Ukraine to Iran and Israel/Lebanon/Palestine – is not working, we have to ask whose interest these protracted wars really serve, apart from the main beneficiaries among arms-producing companies.
Do we have to ask, or is it that we’d rather not investigate (among the Nobel laureates in Economic Sciences, who has been researching the field ?) ? The list of war profiteers yet is no state secret, it’s out there, in the open, for all to find out :
https://www.sipri.org/visualizations/2026/sipri-top-100-ranking-2024
Some of these companies draw over 90% of their total revenues from arms revenues. To name but eight of them : Transeuropean KNDS (100%) and MBDA (99%) ; the French Naval Group (98%) ; the Israeli Rafael group (98%) ; the British BAE Systems (95.4%) ; the American Northrop Grumman Corporation, the Israeli Elbit Systems (92%) ; the American Lockheed Martin Corporation (91%).
Forget the big notions for a moment.
Remember the Vietnam veteran who turned from a fighter to a preacher when he came back home , his pledge more than fifty years later : « I’m sick of the war. I’ve been in combat and seen the destructive nature that people assume the longer they are in war. »
We’re all sick of these wars. It’s all too much, much more than we can live with normally. What war does to you, even if you are not in a combat zone, and too old or too young to carry a gun : they waste your everyday life, they waste your precious time on earth. Filling your saturated mind with false news, angst and worries – how will it all end ? will it ever end ?
It is our job, one and all, to tend to the first victims of war, truth and trust.
Restore them, redeem them.
Opening the doors in the heart of the night, to let the cool in.
Learning to live a new way of life, step by step.
No need to panic. No need to repress or suppress.
No time to waste. Three affirmative Nos.
The good news is in the news, once you get the broad picture, in depth.
Sapere Aude. Dare to Know. Knowledge leads to courage – and vice versa.
The risk was to drown into toxic disgust, of voluntary servitude and ignorance.
Rushed into recurrent emergency modes, to escape this spiral of a distorted sense of time, we should celebrate the present instant of acknowledgment. Reassess priorities, pivotal shifts.
Redefine shelter and shadow, refuge and fortress, shield and rampart…
Not willing to close mind and ears out of confusion, but rather to reopen them slowly, deliberately. Stronger, more focused, as we seize and strengthen every instant of awareness.
To heal the destructive nature that we all assume the longer we live through unwanted wars, re-energize with strong multiplier effects of the instant.
Redeem the moment, to stop the self-defeating sprees.
Redeem the news, and pass it on to higher levels.
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