In addition to Jeremy Chaabane, Antoine Sehnaoui assumed a frenetic role in Lebanese-Israeli normalization.
1-The Sihanoui clan
The Sihanoui dynasty is a Greek-Catholic Melkite family, native to the village of Sishnaya, in the nearby suburbs of Damascus, where the surname was forged.
Nantis, the Sishnawis provided Syria with a deputy (Georges, elected four times from 1922), a deputy and minister (Hunayn, 1903-1975, from 1941) and several high-flying financiers.
Ancestor Mîkhâïl (18??-1930) left a large family for posterity, including seven sons: Mitri (whose daughter Layla married deputy Kamîl Ziyâda), Hunayn, Antoun, Nicolas 1er, Tawfîq, Albert and Khalil (Joseph’s father).
Wadih, patron and founding member of the Syrian red crescent (1942).
In 1929, Mitri and Antoun migrated to Beirut to engage in commercial and banking activities, and incidentally to politics.
Their younger brother, Hunayn, remained in Damascus and distinguished himself among the major players in politics and finance, before joining the clan in Beirut.
Three members of the family took political responsibilities in Lebanon — deputies and ministers — after being naturalized: Antoun, Mikhail (1899-1989), Simon Ilyas (1919-1998) and Maurice (1943-20..), son of Nicolas 1er.
With their Lebanese naturalization, the Sishnawi became Sehnaoui.
Succession is ensured by the arrival in the political arena of the third generation in the person of financier Nicolas II (1967)-20.., son of Mauritius, unfortunate candidate in the 2009 general election, but a failure compensated by the portfolio of the Ministry of Telecommunications, in 2011.
Finally, Antoine, son of Nabil, born in 1972. International banker and film producer, a sulphurous character who pays for the political-judicial chronicle.
Don’t forget a cousin of Antoine, named Khalîl (born 1975), an international specialist in computer science and computer piracy worldwide. A very topical activity.
The Sehnaoui entered into marriage alliances with the great Damascene and Beyruthin patrician families, proving, if necessary, that the two countries, carried on the baptismal fonts by the French general manchot Henri Gouraud, are true twin brothers.
2- Nabil, Antoine’s father, the forerunner.
The family relationship of Antoine Sehnaoui with Israel is ancient. It dates back to 1983, under the presidency of the phalangist Amine Gemayel, the party initiating the relationship with the Hebrew state of the time of the inter-Lebanese civil war.
In the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the name Nabil Sehnaoui, the father of Antoine, is mentioned in a correspondence from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. 40 years later, the son’s name emerges within a network that pursues the same objectives.
On 8 July 1983, the Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs met at the home of Nabil, some 40 Lebanese personalities. Mauritius and Nabil Sehnaoui were among the main guests, alongside bankers and lawyers.
The meeting took place in Beirut even less than a year after the massacre of the Palestinian camps in Sabra Chatila. During this meeting, the Lebanese express the hope that these contacts will continue and strengthen.
On 18 July 1983, a message from David Kimhi, Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, mentioned that during the interview, the Israelis had made a request to establish a permanent headquarters in Beirut for an Israeli mission.
A somewhat surreal demand, which reflects the determination of this clan to normalize its relations with Israel at all costs, despite the fact that the Hebrew state occupies large parts of southern Lebanon.
At the end of 1983, after tedious research, Israel chose to set up a permanent mission in Dbayeh, following a break between Baabda and Yarze, the residential areas of the Christian sector.
3- Daniel Glaser, former senior official of the US Treasury, N°1 adviser to the President of Antoine Sehnaoui
Thirty years after the Beirut conciliabula, Lebanese-Israeli contacts moved to Washington, D.C., the headquarters of AIPAC, the leading pro-Israeli lobbying organization.
Is it pure coincidence or coincidence? Daniel Glaser, a former senior US Treasury official, is co-opted as a member of the Board of Directors of the Financial Integrity Institution, a Lebanese body responsible for verifying the conformity of banking operations. It is thought to be a dream: an agency responsible for verifying integrity in a country governed by a politico-bank mafiocracy.
On this subject, see these links:
- https://www.madaniya.info/2023/10/02/riad-salame-le-mozart-libanese-de-la-finance-un-bernard-madoff-bas-de-gamme-1-2/
- https://www.madaniya.info/2022/04/22/liban-les-revelations-nausea-on-class-political-lebanese-1-2/
The choice is not trivial. Daniel Glaser spent 20 years in the Treasury Administration, the body responsible for punishing institutions and people hostile to American interests in the world.
In 2017, Antoine Sehnaoui, in his capacity as CEO of the Société Générale – Banque Liban (SGBL), appointed Daniel Glaser, adviser to the CEO of the SGBL, i.e. his own advisor.
Pure chance or coincidence here too? Daniel Glaser’s appointment to the position of First Adviser to the CEO of the SGBL comes at a time when the Lebanese Hezbollah, the black beast of Antoine Sehnaoui, of the United States and Israel, is subject to financial sanctions on the part of the United States, under the Hezbollah Accountability Act.
In other words, a discreet way of instrumentalizing a function to satisfy unavowed goals.
At the end of this panorama, it is necessary to mention, to be complete, that one of the members of the Sehnaoui family, Nada Sehnaoui, a frantic plasticist and digitalist, had a child named Abdallah of the current Lebanese Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, a man who is the best of the Saudis and Americans. A cherry on the cake, in short.
For the Arabophone readership,see this link.
4- The East Day and revelations about Antoine Sehnaoui: a late repentance.
Antoine Sehnaoui has been reporting in Lebanon for a few years with his own militia in the Christian sector of Ashrafieh, East of Beirut, supposed fief of Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces, the radical Christian formation with which he is in rivalry. This banker and man with tentacular affairs actively engaged against Hezbollah and its media relays.
The revelations of the East The Day on Antoine Sehnaoui.
The photo of the banker’s dinner with Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu in Washington, D.C., at the end of July 2026, – while the Hebrew state was destroying southern Lebanon with white phosphorus – provoked an outcry such as in Lebanon that the East Day had to stand out from this sulphurous figure, who was a long time one of the main funders of the French-speaking daily, through his numerous placards.
In publishing this dossier, the East-Le Jour, which boasted of having named Hezbollah suicide Lebanon on behalf of Iran, at the resumption of hostilities between Israel and the Shiite formation in February 2026, thus seemed to carry out an operation of ex post facto laundering of the past turpitudes of a daily that has long lived as the unofficial body of the gangrenous political-clanical establishment of Lebanon, on the pretext of condide like the intellectual reference newspaper of Lebanon and the French-speaking World of the Middle East.
A late publication – too late – for a late repentance of its too long connivance with the Lebanese banker businessman. A balance of any account in sum.
By transposing to the French plan, against the background of the French presidential pre-campaign, the revelations of the Orient on the Day could be interpreted as a torpedo by Emmanuel Macron, tutor of Rima Abdel Malak, the new director of the Orient on the Day, against the Dutch camp in order to remove any desire to the socialo-motorist to succeed the French jupiter to the French judiciary.
For memory Antoine Sehnaoui finances, via Ezekiel society, the films of Julie Gayet, the companion of the president of France, François Hollande, – the man who distinguished himself by putting on a song of love for Israel – not in the company of an Israeli pacifist – but in the kitchen of the ultra-rightful Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and as such, the fossoyeur of French socialism.
On François Hollande, see this link:
« The most sensitive issue in the East On the Day concerns Nada Hamadé Muawad, Lebanon’s ambassador to Washington and currently at the forefront of the Israeli-Lebanese negotiations under American mediation, » says François Bacha, director of the Lebanese French-speaking site Libnanews.
According to the Lebanese daily’s investigation, Antoine Sehnaoui « many behind the scenes » to support his candidacy against Nijad Fares and Paul Salem. The text also describes a very comfortable businessman at the embassy, sometimes welcoming guests alongside the ambassador at some dinners. Nada Hamadé Mouawad is also presented as close to President Joseph Aoun and as a front line in the negotiations between Lebanon and Israel, says Bacha.
This does not mean that it acts on the order of Antoun Sehnaoui. But this is enough to create a major political problem in the current context of the discussions that will continue in Rome… An ambassador engaged in such sensitive discussions must be seen as the representative of a strictly institutional line. His credibility depends as much on his official mandate as on the image of independence that she refers to Beirut, he concludes.
Antoine Sehnaoui participated in the launch of an initiative involving the Washington National Opera and the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv. He appeared with a yellow ribbon in support of Israeli hostages. His name was inscribed with Morgan Ortagus on the donor wall of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Some in Washington would even have called it « Lebanese AIPAC guy ».
The investigation of East-Le Jour also reports that Antoine Sehnaoui said that, when he returned to Beirut, it would be « from Ben Gurion Airport ».
Moreover, it is to be feared that Antoine Sehanoui’s pro-Zionist zeal would seek to mask his probable financial collapse.
In memory, the banker is also a close friend of the son of former murdered President René Moawad, Michel Moawad, who speaks in the ear of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an ultra conservative American NGO. This reticular operation could explain, without justifying it, this mac sulphuric mic.
On NGOs in Lebanon cf this link:
Ignore the new director of the daily, Rima Abdel Malak, former French Minister of Culture, – parachuted in Beirut by President Emmanuel Macron – that Lebanon is the only Arab country to have obtained the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in the year 2,000, without negotiation or peace treaty, thanks to Hezbollah, and that as such, the Shiite paramilitary formation is perceived by large fractions of the opinion of the quarter world as the watchman of Lebanese independence.
Bis repeated: Ignore, moreover, this novice, which Hezbollah fought longer and longer than the four Arab countries of the battlefield, inflicting more material and human losses on the Hebrew state than all these countries combined (Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, in addition to the PLO) during its numerous confrontations with the Hebrew state (1982-2000, 2006, 2024-25 and 2026).
That Hassan Nasrallah, even from an Israeli academic, is the first Arab leader since Nasser to have an ability to influence Israeli opinion.
That Hezbollah is the main paramilitary formation of the largest Lebanese community, numerically speaking, the Shiites (40 per cent of the population) and that, in terms of both digital democracy and patriotic democracy, its place in the Lebanese chessboard is a place of choice despite the vociferations of this conjuration of cloportes.
At the end of the Lebanese magma, Hizbullah emerged, following the rise of the Shiite community in the Lebanese political game, in the wake of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, over the rubble of the PLO, whose Lebanese sanctuary had been eradicated on that occasion with the encouragement of the United States and Saudi Arabia, the new guardians of Lebanon.
That Hezbollah, the western hood, the black beast of the Saudis and the Israelis, has been constantly subjected to a strangulation aimed at neutralizing the only Arab structure to stand up to both the United States, Israel and the Wahhabi dynasty.
Ah, the ravages of navelism… And ignorance, as it is true that ignorance is not learned (Pascal) and that the ignorant ignores its own ignorance.
5- The judgement of Mr. Abdallah Naaman, former Lebanese cultural attaché in Paris on Lebanon and the East-The Day
In the light of the above, it must be noted that there will be no salvation for the land of the Cedar, as long as the Lebanese bathe in their five unstoppable septic tanks: Confessionalism, feudalism, corruption, greed, collaboration with abroad, – finally, last and not least, tare – and internal racism.
Real cancers on which the DNA of Lebanese ad vitam aeternam is flourishing, said Abdallah Naaman, former cultural attaché at the Lebanese Embassy in Paris.
East Le Jour (OLJ) has since become, a beautiful lurette, a parish bulletin of a provincial patelin that survives only thanks to the subsidies of the Quai d’Orsay, which seeks, in vain, to maintain a French presence in a country that was carried on baptismal fonts by a general misinspired manchot » (NDLR: General Henri Gouraud), continued the Lebanese diplomat long serving in the French capital and well-informed of Franco-Lebanon affairs.
« It is well known that France has now become completely eliminated from the Levantine scene, despite the words of the last francophone Mohicans of Achrafieh, the Christian sector of Beirut, who continue to be driven by the fact that Paris is still the foster mother of Lebanon, » concluded Naaman in a statement at the sitemadaniya.info
About Hassan Nasrallah
To go further on Antoine Sehnaoui, see this link:
For the Arabic speaker, the story of Al Akhbaron this link
