The world around us is changing through rapid qualitative shifts whose impact is inescapable, while our Arab world is changing along with it—stumbling and confused—after October 7, 2023, gave the green light to accelerate the major transformations in our region.
Our children in Lebanon, the Arab world, and the wider world are asking: Is it conceivable that our Arab region, at the end of the third decade of the twenty-first century, is the only region in the world still living in an age of tutelage, occupation, and civil wars?
Today, a number of issues and questions occupy the center of our attention and that of our children. The first is our region's entry into a transitional phase whose features we are still trying to discern in horoscopes and the cups of bitter Arabic coffee.
Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and the Gulf are in a transitional phase that the Italian thinker Gramsci summed up at the beginning of the last century: “The old has ended, and the new is something whose horizons we have yet to discern.”
The second of these issues is globalization, which has imposed its burdens on us—in our way of life, administration, economy, finance, the environment, medicine, and beyond—and has created a new world order. Either we enter this cycle competently and on our own terms, or we will join it later, compelled to do so and on its terms.
The third issue is a revolution in information, communications, artificial intelligence, and social media that has entered our homes and become tools in our children's hands, behind our backs and those of our states. Do we reach an understanding with our children in their own language, or do we confiscate what is in their hands?
The fourth issue is the resurgence in our countries of a political Islam that resorts to violence and excommunicates anyone who is not in its camp, while at the same time its two sectarian wings fight one another or form alliances when necessary.
The fifth of these issues is that, for the first time in contemporary European history, we are witnessing Muslim communities becoming a significant electoral force in their societies. This has fueled a wave of Islamophobia ridden by Western extremism and its bigoted fascist parties, while extremists in our countries unleash a counter-wave targeting Christians, with suicide bombers wearing explosive belts heading toward the West riding that wave. At the same time, our countries receive invading tanks and aircraft blessed with “holy water.” Do we return to a clash of civilizations and religions, or do we incline toward peace and human fraternity?
Do the Christians of Lebanon and the Arab world—and the writer of this article is one of them—have the right to withdraw from the political scene at a historic turning point in which the features of the region are being redrawn? And do we, who have paid the price of experiences of violence in all its forms, have the right not to help our children escape those experiences, while we repeat before them in our daily prayers the plea that we not be led into temptation?
The solution is for us to jointly call for a search for the future of our region and our culture under a globalization sweeping the world, at a time when non-Arab regional powers are rushing to carve up our skin, just as international powers once rushed to divide the legacy of “the Sick Man” in the region.
If we contribute to building a new Arab order in which Arabism moves away from its religious and political character and is distilled into a cultural Arabism—whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab—we will survive. If we sever ourselves from our surroundings on the pretext of difference, we will fail; there is no room in the region for a second or third Israel.
We do not claim to invent solutions; rather, we hope to achieve shared goals. We, the Christians of the Arab world, are bound to its Muslims by a shared past, present, and future. We have fought one another, just as we have built together shared interests, a shared culture, and a shared world.
We refused, and we refuse, to be part of an alliance of religious minorities against the Sunni majority. We refused, and we refuse, protection—whether internal, through authoritarian regimes and state-affiliated militias, or external, through their arriving armies and resident arms. We have learned that everyone who claimed to protect us was in fact protecting his own interests, and that we were his sandbags.
All the living forces and those with a stake in Lebanon must move beyond the past and declare a genuine ceasefire among political parties and personalities, in order to search for a path to deliverance in which the interests of Muslims, Christians, and all those of good faith in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, and the Gulf converge.
Is “the Pope's peace” confined to Arab-Israeli peace? Or does it transcend politics and its complications to encompass peace in culture, peace with the different other, peace for women in a modern society, peace among peoples, democracy and modernity, and peace between the two shores of the Mediterranean?
We hold fast to the Lebanese experience enshrined by the Taif Agreement and the constitution that emerged from it, whose preamble states: “There is no legitimacy for any authority that contradicts the pact of coexistence.” This is the path to deliverance.
