The Lebanese attitude

A good person would never take sides in his neighbor’s domestic disputes. He may try to extinguish a fiery argument by trying to get the parties to reconcile, but he would never take sides in the hope of deriving some personal benefit, that would be too obscene. Well, clearly Lebanon is not a good neighbor; and as a result, our involvement in Syria on one side of the dispute or the other, has cost us our own peace of mind. Maybe next time (if there is a next time) we will learn to mind our own business and pray to God that our deep political rifts do not erupt into full blown civil war too.

The Lebanese have a very wild imagination and they perceive reality in their own special way. They see their country as a cross between the Wild West, some American western territory in the mid to late 1800s where the law has a patchy presence at best, and the Monte Carlo of the James Bond movies. In reality, we are a cross between Mos Eisley (Star Wars reference) and an amalgam of every third-world mess of an urban sprawl that ever lived under a cloud of beige chemical soup from South America to Asia.

When I refer to Lebanon it must be clear that I refer to the Lebanon I know, or have recently become acquainted with (seven years going on eight now). I talk of course about the deluded urbanities that still believe in the lies sold to them by bankers and realtors, those who live along the coastal strip from Beirut to Jounieh and in the hills overlooking the sea. These people would like nothing more that to get on with business as usual and when it comes to fixing the root causes of deep seated problems, they balk and take a step back or stick their heads in the sand and pretend the problems don’t exist, or maybe they think that if they close their eyes and wish hard enough their problems will go away when they open them again. Whatever their excuse, fear of facing an unpalatable reality motivates the vast majority.

The Lebanese are obsessed with foreigners. They welcome the white skinned blue-eyed European or the wealthy ‘Khaleeji’, often referred to as ‘3arab’ by locals who wish to emphasis that while Gulf nationals are Arabs we the Lebanese are most certainly not Arabs. The Lebanese are also deeply suspicious of foreigners who they feel have no business coming to Lebanon, i.e. Asian or African domestic or menial workers and refugees, these hapless traumatized people who were unlucky enough to head to the wrong border and land in Lebanon without money. ‘How dare they be refugees in our country,’ the Lebanese think, ‘they must be hear to steal my job, my land, or my money.’ Thus develops this deeply ingrained paranoia of refugees. This anti-refugee attitude has been around for a while; it is learned from experience, specifically Lebanon’s experience with Palestinian refugees and the armed Palestinian revolution that lived among the refugees.

Above all, the Lebanese are children who desperately wish they do not have to grow up and actually find a workable formula for coexistence. They cling to the familiar, the feudal and religious edifices of the past, for comfort and reassurance. But there is no more reassurances to be given, our problems have grown too heavy and too large to ignore and we either face the reality that the old formula of coexistence no longer works and start working towards a new one, or we continue to languish in limbo until some external force gives us some momentum to change, or change happens without our approval, without our input, and we find ourselves suddenly at the mercy or a raging sea.