Eighteen reasons why you shouldn’t be Lebanese

The Lebanese identity is a paradox characterized by hospitality, culinary delights, rich history, enduring traditions, intricate politics, and even the world’s largest bowl of hummus. Lebanon has witnessed a multitude of civilizations throughout its history. From the Canaanites and Phoenicians to the Romans, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans, and French, each era left its mark.

The arrival of a new empire frequently ignited religious tensions, disrupting the fragile balance between the sects. Lebanese history is no stranger to such conflicts: the Druze and Maronite Christians during the Crusades and the 1860s, the Shia and Sunni Muslims during the Ottoman Empire, and the 1975-1990 Civil War as the worst one of all. Today, what distinguishes Lebanese politics is the sectarian and confessional system based on power distribution among eighteen religious sects. Amidst this diversity, threads of unity weave through the divides.

Whether you are Muslim, Christian, Druze, or Jew, you traditionally pass down your first-born son’s name from his grandfather, honoring a cherished family legacy. You clap during the airplane landing, celebrating the pilot’s success on your way back to Beirut while welcoming the sun's warmth on the Raouche rocks from your window seat.

As Lebanese, we are known to have a united front made up of a plethora of segregated groups, but what we fail to see is the extent of the similarities in our mindsets.

Whether you are Muslim, Christian, Druze, or Jew, you seek partners of the same confession due to parental apprehensions about interfaith weddings, because “where would you get married? In front of a priest? Or a sheikh? How would you raise the children?”

You vote the people into power believing they are doing the right thing because of their religion, ignoring their policies, because “we can’t lose our spots in the parliament!”

You perceive yourself as a victim of a civil war, viewing other sects as a threat. You hold tightly to the narrative of your sect’s acts of “self-defense," not looking past your own stories, erasing the meaning of citizenship, and replacing it with sect on our National ID cards.

You are a checkpoint, a “Ma3bar.” You perpetuate discriminatory practices segregating people into the categories you grew up hearing about, believing “Enta Men Wein?” would give you all the information you need about a person. You become who you once feared, the militia that determined fates based on ID cards while passing between Mathaf and Barbir.

Lebanese people are ruled by the same militia today because they fail to question what they were told as children – a story of “villains and heroes” for a war that no one won – and a state-powered amnesia. The Holiday Inn, a symbol of the Civil War, peeking through the modern infrastructure of luxury Beirut, is synonymous with our unresolved issues: a war that echoes in our politics, a taboo topic that we shush out of fear of initiating it again, but that still haunts us until we face it as part of our past.

You are entangled in a sectarian web excluding more than 20% of the Lebanese population and territory as you speak of national unity with every bomb that falls on the South. You adorn balconies with political symbols solidifying the elites’ seats in the government and yet, feel powerless to effect change. You allow external influences to exploit sectarian tensions to advance their geopolitical agendas. By supporting your sect over your neighbor’s, they further entrench these divides, just like the empires that ruled the ground centuries ago.

Because these sects are part of our heritage, it is what we make of them that defines politics. By writing our oral history, one that transcends self-defense and victimhood, we can end this cycle of repeating history and demand a government that serves all, not just a privileged few.

You are Lebanese, you are a paradox, a victim and a contributor to the confessional system that keeps criminals in power, your bills high, your electricity off, your Lebanese neighbor your enemy, and your “resilience” your only attribute. Because “La Samah Allah,” if you were to identify with your Lebanese citizenship before your sect, where would we bury you?