A wake-up call or Lebanon’s free fall

Since I was very young, my father has told me that Lebanon will never change — that it is doomed by its history and its geography, that we are nothing more than a constellation of tribes tearing each other apart from one crisis to the next, and that one must either accept the country as it is or leave before it drives you mad.

Since I’ve begun to better understand what happens here, I’ve realized that I don’t agree with any of these arguments, which, unsurprisingly, makes for some rather heated debates between us.

I know that no country — and Lebanon perhaps less than any other — can entirely escape its history and geography; how difficult it is to have Syria (especially under the Assads) and Israel as neighbors; that managing diversity is an immense challenge, particularly for a country built around 18 communities; that we live in a failing region and Lebanon is not an isolated case; and that the weight of religion and tradition further limits the possibilities for change.

All these factors are structural, and it would be dishonest to ignore them when taking stock of Lebanon. But I still vehemently reject this deterministic reading that would have us believe we are where we are for reasons beyond our control.

After years of reading, listening, asking questions, informing myself and writing about Lebanon, I reached the same conclusion as my father about the Lebanese anomaly, but for completely different reasons.

We have so deeply internalized the idea that we bear no responsibility, that every war fought on our soil is someone else’s, that it is always Israel’s fault, or Syria’s, or Iran’s, or some foreign conspiracy — convinced, here too, that we are the center of the world — that we are collectively incapable of acknowledging our own failure without immediately assigning blame to someone else.

Whether that “Other” is also Lebanese or not makes no difference in this logic, since anything that is not us — in its narrowest definition — automatically becomes the “Other.”

Not only have we accepted abnormality at every level — and Hezbollah is the clearest example — but we also have a remarkable talent, it must be said, for crafting alternative narratives to justify these anomalies, even convincing the rest of the world that it should accept them too in the name of Lebanon’s supposed uniqueness.

Israeli invasions and the crimes that accompany them are real, just as the Syrian occupation was, just as the organic link between Hezbollah and Iran is real, and just as many countries view Lebanon merely as an arena to settle their scores.

But instead of trying to change this reality, we systematically use it as an excuse to do nothing.

We vie for expressing outrage at Israeli crimes — rightly so — but we also use that outrage as a pretext to avoid telling the truth. To avoid saying that since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, we have endured three devastating wars, each time initiated from Lebanese territory. To avoid saying that part of us wants to wage war against Israel yet is outraged when Israel wages it back — as it always does, without restraint.

To avoid saying that we allowed a cancer — Hezbollah — to consume the Shiite community, then the state, and to launch wars whose consequences we all must bear.

We continue to accept as normal the coexistence with this party-militia, even within the government, even as its leaders openly threaten to assassinate the prime minister — which wouldn’t be a first — and the president.

We also accept that the army remains passive while the country burns, in the name of preserving “civil peace” — but what civil peace are we talking about?

History has already shown us that such inertia is the surest path to civil war.

It is probably unfair to lump everyone together on this issue, given how the fiercest opponents of Hezbollah have made it the central focus of their political actions. But while Hezbollah may be Lebanon’s main problem, it is only the tip of the iceberg. As much as it — along with its allies — has devastated the state like no other political party before it, the conditions that enabled it to do so predate it and will most likely outlast it.

The deeper issue is not Hezbollah’s existence per-se, but the fact that we have allowed — through passivity or complicity — mafias to embed themselves in both society and the state, to the point where it is increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. This applies to Hezbollah, as it does to the generator mafias, the banking sector, and large parts of the administration and the army.

We may have the most qualified individuals in government — and this one in particular is not lacking in talent — but they will be unable to achieve anything as long as the state remains riddled with such levels of incompetence, complacency, corruption and sectarian allegiance.

More importantly, they will be unable to do anything as long as we, as Lebanese, fail to understand that our collective mediocrity — masked by many individual talents — is the primary source of all our problems; and as long as, instead of confronting it at every turn, we continue to justify it through the philosophy of maalesh (“it’s not a big deal”) and hayda lebnen (“this is Lebanon”) or through conspiracy theories that cast us as perpetual victims of forces beyond our control.

Undoubtedly, dozens upon dozens of countries around the world are just as dysfunctional, and perhaps our mistake lies in believing that because Lebanon is home to so many exceptional individuals, and because it has so many assets on paper, that alone should be enough to set it apart. Lebanon is a young nation, and it took some European countries we often hold up as models several centuries to build a state worthy of the name.

We cannot forget either that people fought for things to be different — and that most of them were assassinated or ultimately fled in despair. Nor can we ignore what decades of civil war, the regional context, political assassinations and occupations have done to people’s minds to bring us to this point.

But even after acknowledging all of this, how can one not still feel that Lebanon is a tremendous waste?

And so here we are. The state is in ruins. Society in pieces. Southern Lebanon is occupied and bombarded by Israel. Hezbollah is threatening to point its weapons at fellow Lebanese. And yet there are still journalists, politicians, experts and ordinary citizens who claim with certainty that everything will be resolved in a matter of weeks. That Donald Trump is so eager to add Lebanon to his trophy cabinet that he will force Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw and Beirut to sign a peace agreement with Israel. That Saudi Arabia will negotiate with Iran the handover of Hezbollah’s weapons because its “role is over.” That the “grand regional deal” we have been hearing about for at least a decade is finally about to materialize.

I would like to believe it, but I can’t. For all of Trump’s determination, the best we can hope for is an agreement between Israel and Lebanon that, in any case, neither side will truly respect.

The Iranian regime, for its part, would rather collapse than abandon Hezbollah, which it sees as part of itself rather than just a bargaining chip. In reality, no one is going to save us, and this very mindset — the belief that someone should — is precisely why we are sinking.

Short of the fall of the Iranian regime — which does not appear imminent — no external factor will fundamentally alter our trajectory.

So what do we do? Wither and give up? Leave the country, for those who can? Or fight, with the means at our disposal, to try to change course?

If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had listened to the experts and foreign capitals, he would be in exile in Washington while Russian troops deployed in Kyiv.

If we had accepted the Syrian occupation as a fait accompli — if there had been no student protests, no Qornet Chehwan gathering, and of course no March 14 movement — the Syrian army would never have left Lebanon, regardless of the calculations of the great powers.

If we do not mobilize massively starting tomorrow to demand both Hezbollah’s disarmament and the withdrawal of the Israeli army, we will endure this war and its consequences for many years to come, regardless of any agreements reached in Islamabad or Washington.

We must show the world that we exist — that Lebanon can be a free and sovereign country, united in its suffering but resolute in its determination never to relive this.

We must pressure our president and our government to deploy the army in all areas where Hezbollah holds sway, beginning with the southern suburbs — not to confront its fighters or arrest its members, but to show all Lebanese that the state is present and unafraid to assert itself in the face of the militia.

We must also push for an open debate on negotiations with Israel — moving away from treating them either as a miracle solution or as something to be demonized, and instead approaching them as a strategy to recover our full territory and stabilize our southern border.

We need a project that brings us together and that allows us to dream. We need a state capable of carrying it out. And that requires, above all else, reclaiming our sovereignty.

We need to build an iron curtain between the state and the mafias. Above all, we need a collective wake-up call, to stop watching our own demise as mere spectators.

That wake-up call will not come from the political class, which, to varying degrees, bears the greatest responsibility for what is happening to us. It will not come from tired rhetoric, petty calculations or sectarian reflexes.

It can only come from us.

So what are we still waiting for to finally break out of our lethargy?

This editorial was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour and was translated by Sahar Ghoussoub.