The year 1939 was a peculiar one. It brought the world together in Flushing Meadows, New York, for the World’s Fair, where more than 60 countries gathered to present the best of what they had to offer. It was also, sadly, the year the Second World War began.
In the midst of that uneasy convergence, a young Lebanese woman, Blanche Daoud Ammoun (1912–2011), presented her vision for her country and for the wider world through a series of four murals titled The Phoenician Treaties, of which only two are known to survive today.
In one of them, Le Roi de Tyr et les Envoyes de Salomon Paraphent un Traite D’amitie et de Bon Voisinage (The King of Tyre and Solomon’s Envoys Sign a Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness), Ammoun depicts a seated monarch, likely Hiram I, who ruled between 969 BC and 947 BC, receiving diplomatic emissaries from King Solomon’s court. Through his policies, Hiram is remembered as a ruler who pursued peace with neighbouring civilisations, expanded trade and oversaw Tyre’s rise as a major Mediterranean commercial hub.
The background is dense with cross-cultural references. At the far left, a woman supports a baby, likely Baal-Eser I, Hiram’s son. Nearby stand two deer, symbols of fertility and connection to the natural world in Phoenician culture. One is being fed, the other sleeps – a quiet reflection of peace and serenity.
A woman dances while another plays the flute, and two men, likely merchants, stand to one side, suggesting Hiram’s outward-looking trade policies. Behind the king rises a structure, or cella, identified by Lebanese historian Charles H Al-Hayek as the maabed – a temple at the Phoenician site of Amrit, in present-day Tartus, Syria. Within it sits a deity, right hand raised in blessing.
Ammoun, an illustrator and writer, was deeply rooted in the history of the Levant. She studied law at L’universite Saint-Joseph in Beirut and later adopted the hyphenated surname Loheac-Ammoun following her marriage to a French officer in 1944.
Hiram and Solomon’s realms were bound by proximity. There were tensions over frontiers, but none escalated into conflict. Peace, as Ammoun’s mural suggests, requires leadership that privileges diplomacy over impulse. Trade can reinforce it. France and Germany, after all, went to war three times in less than a century; today, through their interdependence within the European Union, they enjoy one of the longest periods of shared prosperity in their history.
History offers other examples of such leadership. Konrad Adenauer, assuming power in the aftermath of the Second World War, set Germany on a new course, rejecting the bunker mentality that had led it to ruin.
Others faced starker choices. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito asked his people to “bear the unbearable” to secure “a grand peace for all generations”. He commanded immense loyalty; had he urged continued resistance, many would have followed. But he chose peace.
Peace after conflict, however, is rarely easy or equitable. It demands compromise, often of the kind many are reluctant to make. This is where leadership matters most – not only to decide, but also to persuade, to bring a nation towards difficult concessions in the name of a longer horizon.
The new Iranian supreme leader is today in a position not dissimilar to Hirohito. Here is a lifelong leader whose country just endured conflict and who commands a great deal of authority due to his role embodying the nation’s ideology. In the face of all this and of personal loss, he has a choice to make. Embrace peace with neighbours, like Hiram and Hirohito did, ushering a prosperous future for his nation, or adopt a bunker mentality that history has shown will likely lead to uncertain consequences. Which path will he choose?
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