EXTERNAL CONFRONTATION IS FIRST AND FOREMOST INTERNAL IN BOTH ITS OBJECTIVES AND ITS MEANS, LET US ESTABLISH A STATE TODAY.

One hundred years ago, Lebanon was established as a state, much like any other, born from the aftermath of a world war and through negotiations among those then in power. Fifty years ago, on this very date, the country was plunged into an unfortunate war fueled by narrow, shortsighted wagers. The state disintegrated, and Lebanon lost its standing, until a semblance of authority was restored through a makeshift external arrangement under regional guardianship. Twenty years ago, that fragile order began to collapse amidst global storms, rising violence, and the erosion of international law and institutions. Our region has become the primary theater of this confrontation, while our country is completely powerless and vanishing before our eyes.

What has been unfolding for several years and continues to this day: bankruptcy, migrations, and regional recomposition, was predictable, and we warned of it. Those warnings went unheard. Now that the damage is done, our main concern is neither the analysis of causes nor blaming each other – grave as the responsibilities may be – but rather understanding where we stand and looking ahead. The threat we face now is far more dangerous. Therefore, it is imperative that our accumulated losses do not dissolve into mere grief and ruin; rather, these immense sacrifices must yield meaningful results. What is gone will not come back, but more importantly, history only ends for those who accept defeat within themselves. We are at a critical turning point where the region is being forcibly reshaped through blood and fire.

As we speak, a delegation representing the Lebanese state, in its frail form produced by the civil war system, is meeting in Washington to negotiate with Israel.

Meanwhile, the Israeli bombardment and military invasion continue, met only by the defiance of young men fighting for every inch of our dear land. The most basic conditions for negotiation are absent. The Israelis have made their intentions clear for decades, reaffirmed today by both word and deed, having mobilized the resources and manpower to execute them. In contrast, we remain fractured, wasting our own resources: our youth are our only export, and “political soliciting,” securing funds for political parties and media, has become the norm. Having spent years receiving aid and arms from both the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran in parallel, we deluded ourselves into thinking we were indispensable to the world. Today, we have no currency, no banking system, and no revenue stream beyond consumption taxes. The state administration is a hollow shell, with the exception of the Army and security forces. We do not even have an accurate record of who resides on our land. Our only achievement is the periodic formation of parliaments and governments that make purely performative decisions to appease external powers that are indifferent to us. Israel, following its systematic genocide in Gaza, is now establishing buffer zones in Syria and Lebanon. However, its true battlefield is not geography, but the people. What it seeks to invade first is not the land, but the fabric of society. The society itself. 

The evidence is undeniable. Lebanon is being partitioned into “safe” and “exposed” zones, effectively segregating “safe” sects from a “targeted” sect. Those who currently feel secure are now preoccupied with ensuring that their security – as defined by the Israelis – is not jeopardized by even a single individual whom the Israelis deem a threat. Our world has shrunk to the scale of a neighborhood or a single building; our time is measured by the passing of a single night or day, overshadowed by the question: “What happens tomorrow?” Where is the state in this? Shall we consent to treating one another exactly as the Israelis treat us? We have just passed April 13, the anniversary of a war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. It is a price we are still paying. Israel manipulated that conflict until it eventually invaded. Then, its goal was to expel Palestinian organizations, a move some Lebanese fought for and others fought against. Today, its goal is to orchestrate a Lebanese-on-Lebanese civil war between the country’s sects.

We address those holding responsibility in our country through three categories because of their differing roles and positions: those responsible for official institutions first, those responsible for the fighters second, and those responsible for sectarian bases third

To the official authorities:

To Joseph Aoun, President of the Republic; to Nawaf Salam, Prime Minister; and to Nabih Berri in his capacity as Speaker of Parliament, and therefore to Simon Karam, tasked with holding meetings to negotiate with Israel in Washington, we present the following:

• The Lebanese delegation should immediately announce, even after a dangerous delay, a prior condition for accepting any negotiation: Israel must cease all military operations in Lebanon.
• The aims and limits of negotiation should be set by establishing an armistice between Lebanon and Israel, accompanied by credible international guarantees, especially after the decision to end the mission of UNIFIL, according to fixed international borders and after the return of all prisoners.
• Negotiation must include no normalization with Israel, because it does not recognize the right of Palestinians to dignified residence on their land within a non-racist, non-religious state, and because it has not retreated from its documented positions concerning its ambitions in Lebanon.
• Regardless of the Israeli response or the American position, the President, Prime Minister, and Speaker of Parliament should announce, simultaneously with the start of meetings in Washington, and after serious and decisive discussion with Hezbollah through whomever it appoints to represent it:
  • Mandatory civil and military national service for all Lebanese men and women under a certain age.
  • Entrusting the army, supported by national service and armed with all weapons present on Lebanese territory, as well as what must be imported or manufactured, with defending all of Lebanon, its people, and its land.
  • Declaring that the Lebanese state is founded on civic legitimacy, not religious or ethnic legitimacy, and that belonging to a sect is an individual choice. The state would adopt, for its citizens, residents, and emigrants, a system of political representation on that basis: those who choose to run according to sectarian affiliation would receive fixed shares amongst themselves according to their total votes, while those who run outside sectarian affiliation would receive the remaining seats according to their total votes.

To those responsible for the combatants:

To Sheikh Naim Qassem and the leadership of Hezbollah, we say that religious faith is a free personal choice deserving respect, but founding political action upon it is a political choice.

Iran adopted religious legitimacy for state authority because, after the 1978 revolution, it was believed to be the formula most capable of uniting Iranian society, ethnically and linguistically diverse, within the state. In this, it revived a long imperial legacy. Turkey likewise mixes, in varying proportions, national legitimacy with religious legitimacy.

Our lands, however, which were once subject parts of empires, did not witness that path. They formed according to two patterns: cities protected by fortresses where authority was present, and a countryside shaped and ruled by clans and sects. Establishing state legitimacy in them was difficult, even painful. Then came the Zionist project, as a colonial settler, racist formation, aware of the surrounding conditions, and it systematically worked to undermine the already fragile legitimacies of the states of the region and fragment them. This is what happened in Lebanon and what is happening in Iraq and Syria.

The Lebanese civil war was born of clashes between rural populations displaced to the cities and an oblivious merchant class, as well as among the migrants themselves, drawing on whatever support they could secure, meaning, external gambles and dependencies. Then came the Taif Agreement, organizing a truce among sectarian leaders and their militias under layered tutelage. But it could not create a state.

Lebanon today has a vital and urgent need for a state in the face of what is sweeping the region and our country. Confrontation with the outside is internal before all else, in its aims, protecting the inside, and in its means, mobilizing its resources. The state, at this moment in our society’s history, given its conditions and the dangers threatening it, can only be civic. Otherwise, society disintegrates and the Zionist project prevails over the whole region.

The decision is also in your hands, and it is grave. Decide. Let your sacrifices be the gateway to a tomorrow we all deserve.

To the leaders of the sectarian bases:

We also address the anxious leaders: Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil, Walid and Taymour Jumblatt, Saad Hariri, Suleiman Frangieh, Amine and Sami Gemayel, Nabih Berri in his second capacity as a Shiite leader, and Samir Geagea, who hides his anxiety behind radical positions in an attempt to gather support here and there. He has personally experienced, perhaps more than others, that the wager of the weak on the strong does not have reliable outcomes. And to others as well, we say:

You have personally experienced, directly and through your relatives, blood and fire in the civil war and in moments of regional reordering, in 2005, then with the Syrian war and what followed. What is happening today is worse.

You are, to a large extent, prisoners of roles and responsibilities placed upon you and which you have accepted. In ordinary days, you safeguarded two matters: securing what each of you could provide to your sectarian supporters in material and symbolic gains, and refraining from return to a war you had experienced, despite intense competition. In the words of Rafik Hariri: “We bought civil peace with debt.”

At critical turning points however, decisions become necessary, and serious decisions are choices. They mean preferring some interests over others: interests of social classes, economic sectors, and age groups. Yet you, as leaders of sects that include rich and poor, depositors and debtors, owners and tenants, youth and elderly, residents and emigrants, cannot settle such choices. Not regarding bankruptcy, nor incoming and outgoing migration, nor relations in the region and their dangers, because such choices threaten to divide your supporters without hope of winning support beyond them.

Yet the country, before what is happening, is heading toward dissolution and disappearance, with all its society, including those who entrusted you and have become prisoners of despair and emigration. There are no spoils left to divide. Let us cooperate, close one page, and open another. You sustained the truce of the non-state for nearly forty years, but that phase has ended. Your support for a transition process would save society and resurrect the state.

What we propose for Lebanon applies to the whole region, which Netanyahu has colored black: Syria, Iraq, and, of course, Palestine, which he sought to erase. Lebanon’s only distinction is that it experienced before these states the rural exodus, education, demographic change, civil war, and the truce arrangements framing its outcomes.

Lebanon is a small country whose youth have been drained by massive emigration. The claim that one sect suffered migration more than another is a pathological short-sightedness. All sects are on the same path, even if they began at different times.

Facing these dangers, withdrawal or isolation becomes a sin. Lebanon needs a real regional dimension so that each state of the region is no longer ruled by its tragedies and social dysfunctions, but rather establishes complementary relationships which allow them to regain control over their realities. The path may be long or short, but we are compelled to begin walking it and we are capable of doing so, so that we may match the capable states around us, especially Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and confront the Zionist project that has worked and still works to fragment the region. This path culminates in a meaningful presence for Lebanon in the world, a world that itself is increasingly turning towards violence and isolation.

We conclude with an appeal to Lebanon’s youth: those who emigrated, those who stayed waiting to emigrate, and those who accept the risks of confrontation without calculation:

You have become merely an export commodity and fuel for conflict. This is not your destiny. The mistakes of your parents’ generation must become a lesson and an experience to learn from. Draw the lessons from them and overturn the image of defeat, resignation, and gratuitous sacrifice.

History does not end. The paths remain open to thought, action, and achievement.