Lebanon, Guardian of Hope

Caught between two rogue states, Lebanon has no choice but to appease the one closest to it geographically, the one on its border. It is the art of peace, as dictated by common sense. One need not be Sun Tzu to understand this, nor to understand that Lebanon belongs to the Arab world, not the Islamic world, and that, in this respect, it can rely on an Arab solidarity that has no equivalent in Iran’s militant Islamism.

The Palestinian cause is, of course, sacred, and the dispossession of Palestine will remain a stain on the Arab world’s conscience. But this is no reason to sacrifice another sacred cause: that of Lebanon itself – this magnificent geographical and cultural jewel, this promise of religious freedom offered by history to the Maronite Church and, through it, to all Lebanese communities, the loss of which would be a sacrilege or, in the words of John Paul II, “one of the world’s regrets.”

Lebanon is “larger than itself,” Emmanuel Macron said last March at the Institut du Monde Arabe. Indeed, Lebanon is a stroke of historical genius, having become the crucible of a way of life based on coexistence between two major religious traditions that are, in many respects, antagonistic, but whose rapprochement – as it ultimately took shape in Lebanon – has managed to serve as “a model of freedom and pluralism for East and West,” in the words of John Paul II.

Part of the Francosphere

Lebanon’s major remaining asset is that it belongs to the Francosphere and, through it, to a wider sphere open to France and the West, while remaining deeply religious, deeply peaceful, and deeply rooted in the East. How, given its small territory, could it be otherwise?

It is therefore necessary to ensure that, once we emerge from the heavy trials we are currently going through, the Greater Lebanon prevails over the “smaller Lebanons” that still seek to define themselves “in thought or in words”; and in particular over the Khomeinist utopia whose objective is to extend Tehran’s authority over Lebanon, to allow Iran to reach Israel’s borders and the shores of the Mediterranean, and to destroy Israel in a venture where the religious directly merges into the eschatological and the end of times, in other words into irrationality.

Such ambitions could not but trigger, among Lebanon’s other communities, reflexes of self-defense. One of the reasons Lebanon will remain resistant to this ideological colonization of the Shiite community is that Shiite ‘asabiyya is met by another ‘asabiyya, this time Maronite, fiercely attached to its autonomy of thought and action, as well as to the portion of land that came to it after centuries of gestation and suffering. A portion of land for which it has paid the price in blood throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and which it continues to pay for today in the border villages.

The Lesson of Greater Lebanon

We say this while being convinced that the Maronites have, at great cost over the past century, intelligently absorbed the main lesson of Greater Lebanon as established in 1920: no longer to aspire to a Lebanon in which they would finally be autonomous and free, but rather to place themselves in its service once it had been achieved.

In moving from a nascent nation to Greater Lebanon, the Maronites have indeed moved – not without hardship, setbacks, hesitation, and serious mistakes – from adolescence to maturity, from a community aspiring to become a nation to a nation assuming its responsibilities toward all its communities, which came to be integrated into its project.

In order to remain true to itself, the Maronite ‘asabiyya, whose stirrings can be felt at present, must remember that it exists solely in the service of the great Lebanese civilization, of coexistence, of a believing modernity, of a positive secularism, of religious fraternity, of the rejection of any instrumentalization of religion, of geopolitical vision, of freedom and pluralism, and that it stands at the opposite end of isolationism.

In support of what has just been said, we may cite the following passage from an address delivered in February 2011 by the late Michel Eddé, then president of the Maronite Foundation in the World, during the unveiling ceremony of the statue of Saint Maron in the outer grounds of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican: “This Lebanon (…) was first shaped by the Maronites into a homeland, and then into a modern state. They did not seek to make it a Maronite or Christian nation, nor a state for Maronites or Christians, although this was within reach at the time. They conceived it as a home for coexistence between Muslims and Christians, a home founded on the recognition of the right to difference, on respect for the other, and on acceptance of that difference. In other words, on freedom and democracy.”

Affinities

That said, and in support of the option in favor of a peaceful accommodation with the state on our borders, it should be noted that Christian Lebanon is not without cultural and religious affinities with religious Israel. The Church and the Synagogue pray and plead within the same Book of Psalms and draw nourishment from certain great narratives of the Bible.

The Maronite Eastern Church also has the wisdom to recognize that, while the universal Church contributed to antisemitism in the course of its historical separation from the Synagogue, it is not itself bound by the errors of the past. It can therefore freely adhere, without ulterior motives, to the provisions of the conciliar declaration Nostra Aetate, which states: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures.”

It also does not fail to look also “with esteem, the Muslims who adore the one God, living and subsisting, merciful and almighty, creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men.” In this respect, it could even amount to overstatement, Lebanon being par excellence the place of Islamic–Christian dialogue of life.

Lebanon’s Mission

Finally, if the Synagogue is its historical elder, the Church must not forget that God has made it the guardian of the hope that one day “all peoples shall call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord” (Zephaniah 3:9), and that it must know how to lead them through history, by the “gentle promptings” of the Holy Spirit, toward the fullness of the revelation it has itself received.

At no point must Lebanon, heir to the high values transmitted by its communities, lose sight of the grandeur of its mission. It therefore has a moral duty, in the particular case of Palestine, to wield the weapons of the Spirit and to warn its southern neighbor that, however traumatized it may be by the events of 7 October 2023 and their trail of atrocities, it risks losing its soul by exercising the genocidal violence that has been witnessed against the Palestinians. By dehumanizing the Palestinians and extinguishing in their hearts any empathy for this people, Israelis risk dehumanizing themselves, according to some of their own historians. Can Israel be saved by war? No, only by giving the Palestinians a future can it live in peace. For an imposed peace that rests not on justice but on force can be overturned overnight. True peace is that which rests on the inalienable rights of every person and every human collectivity, as developed over two millennia of Judeo-Christian civilization; and toward which all nations that claim to be just in the eyes of God must strive – which both actors in the Holy Land drama claim as their aspiration.

There is yet another, perhaps more circumstantial, reason to accommodate a peace with Israel: the opening of borders to the holy sites that it would allow. Of course, in Saida and Tyre, Lebanon possesses precious relics of Christ’s passage through its land. Of course, it also has, on its mountains and deep within its valleys, important sacred sites toward which it turns its gaze. But these are not sufficient reasons to forget the stones of Jerusalem, or to turn one’s eyes away from Bethlehem and Nazareth, which remain for all Christians irreplaceable witnesses to the life of Jesus.

No Decentralization That Leads to Isolation

A final warning before concluding: whatever the price to be paid for peace with Israel, all forms of decentralized structures that would isolate Lebanon’s communities from one another must be avoided. Deep Lebanon has a duty to remain open and close to all those who built it or continue to build it, faithful to sharing with all the joys and sorrows, the mourning and the celebrations.

Finally, economic prosperity in Lebanon must not come at the expense of its spiritual mission. Before being a casino, a hospital, a ski resort, or a tourist destination – all of these are merely livelihoods – Lebanon must remain the intellectual heart of the Middle East, a space of freedom, creativity, and pluralism, a laboratory of the “civilization of love” envisioned by Pope Paul VI. To this end, its universities and higher education institutions have a leading role to play. The search for meaning must become one of Lebanon’s “specialties,” alongside mezze.