Shirine Abdallah

لبنان مصنف كأفضل ثامن مناخ في العالم، الشيء الوحيد الذي عجزت المافيوقراطية عن تدميره.

Lebanon: The Country the West Abandoned to Revolutionary Ideologies Lebanon did not collapse in a single day. First came Arab nationalist leftism, carried by the Nasserist wave of the 1950s and 1960s. The crisis of 1958 was an early warning. President Camille Chamoun was not only facing internal opposition; he was facing a regional ideological machine empowered by Nasserism and encouraged by the hesitations of Western policy. Eisenhower’s America wanted stability, but not necessarily the survival of Lebanon’s delicate balance at any price. Then came the Cairo Agreement of 1969, one of the most catastrophic turning points in modern Lebanese history. By allowing armed Palestinian organizations to operate from Lebanese territory, the Lebanese state surrendered part of its sovereignty. From that moment, Lebanon ceased to be a state in the full meaning of the word. It became an arena. The explosion of 1975 was therefore not an accident. It was the result of years of ideological penetration, demographic pressure, armed parallel authorities, and the collapse of the state’s monopoly over violence. The Lebanese war was not simply a civil war between communities. It was also a regional war fought on Lebanese soil, in which Soviet expansionism, Arab nationalism, Palestinian militarization, Syrian ambition, Israeli reaction, and later Iranian revolutionary expansion all converged. The Israeli invasion of 1982, despite its declared objective of removing the PLO military infrastructure, became another disaster for Lebanon. Israeli policy was rarely strategic in the full historical sense. It was mostly reactive: responding to attacks, correcting previous errors, and then creating larger ones. The invasion helped accelerate the collapse of Christian presence in large parts of Beirut, its suburbs, southern Mount Lebanon, the Chouf, Sidon, and eventually much of South Lebanon. What was presented as a military operation against armed organizations ended by deepening the dislocation of Lebanon’s Christians and destroying what remained of the old Lebanese equilibrium. Then came the Syrian phase. Lebanon was handed over, in practice, to Hafez al-Assad. The West accepted Syrian tutelage as the price of regional order. After the Syrian era came the Iranian era. The leftist Arab nationalist project was replaced by the Khomeinist revolutionary project. The vocabulary changed, but the mechanism remained the same: armed ideology above the state, regional loyalty above national sovereignty, and permanent war above economic life. Europe did not extend a real hand to Lebanon because European policy remained trapped between two complexes: the left-wing sympathy for “resistance” movements and the post-colonial guilt that prevented it from defending endangered pluralism when the threat came under anti-Western slogans. For decades, European discourse celebrated Lebanon as a “message,” while refusing to confront the forces that were erasing that message on the ground. The United States, for its part, never built a coherent Lebanon policy. The result was strategic abandonment disguised as pragmatism. The tragedy of Lebanon is that it was not destroyed only by its enemies. It was also destroyed by the indifference of its supposed friends. Today, what remains is not a romantic laboratory of coexistence, but a human tragedy: the decline of a thousand-year-old civilization, the disappearance of historic communities from their natural spaces, and the transformation of a once-open Mediterranean society into a battlefield for asian imported ideologies. Lebanon was successively consumed by Nasserist leftism, Baathist authoritarianism, and Khomeinist militancy. Each came with a different flag. Each claimed to speak in the name of liberation. Each weakened the state, militarized society, and reduced Lebanon to a platform for other people’s wars. The West still calls Lebanon a message. But a message that no one protects becomes a farewell letter.

في لبنان شعوبٌ مهزومة… لا تُهزم في معركة، بل تُهزم في المرآة كلّ صباح. شعوبٌ باعت سيادتها في ١٩٥٨ للبكداشي عبد الناصر، ثم سلّمت مفاتيحها في ١٩٦٩ للقاهري محمد عبد الرؤوف الحسيني، قبل أن تتوارثها وصايات الأسد، ويختم عليها الخزي الثوري الإيراني بخاتم الذلّ والارتهان. في لبنان شعوبٌ مهزومة… لها وطنٌ على الورق، وحدودٌ في الخرائط، ونشيدٌ في المدارس، لكن قلوبها معلّقة بجوازٍ ثانٍ، ومستقبلٍ في بلدٍ ثانٍ، وكرامةٍ مؤجّلة إلى حين الرحيل. في لبنان شعوبٌ مهزومة… تتغنّى بالعزّة وهي في ذيل الأمم، ترفع شعارات الكرامة وقد صارت عنوان الإهانة، وتبكي على مجدٍ ضاع يوم استبدلت نور التنوير بظلام التخوين، وحكمة الحياة بعبادة الموت، وعنفوان الحرية بتقديس الذلّ. في لبنان شعوبٌ مهزومة… ترى الأسود أبيض إن قيل لها، وتكفّر من يشهد بالحقيقة، وتخون من يجرؤ على تسمية الأشياء بأسمائها. في لبنان شعوبٌ مهزومة… عقولها مكتوبة، وإرادتها مسلوبة، وإدراكها مصلوب على خشبة الوهم… فلا هي انتصرت، ولا هي اعترفت بالهزيمة.