It’s Time for Lebanon to Grow Up
Lebanon has overdosed on shock. Let’s try thinking for a change

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“When I saw the two flags, the Lebanese and the Israeli, next to each other, I couldn’t help but feel nauseous.” So wrote N., a young Lebanese Christian, on X.

“I can’t wait to party in Tel Aviv’s nightclubs!” wrote D., a young Lebanese Muslim, on the same platform.

I read these two posts on the morning of April 15, 2026, the day after the precedent-breaking, face-to-face meeting in Washington between the Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors, hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio as part of a new American attempt to launch direct talks between the two states. The meeting itself was exceptional: the first direct diplomatic encounter of this kind in decades, presented by Washington as the beginning of a process rather than a breakthrough. Lebanon, for its part, publicly stressed ceasefire and relief. Israel stressed Hezbollah’s disarmament. They were unable to find common ground.

The two social media posts, both reactions to the same event, were equally cringe-inducing, yes. But they were not equal in what they revealed.

One was embarrassing because it reduced an entire historical and political abyss to a bodily shudder, as though nausea were a sufficient political position, as though morality could be condensed into a spasm of revulsion. The other was embarrassing because it performed liberation in the language of nightlife, as though history were a nightclub and justice a DJ set, as though one could dance one’s way out of bloodshed.

And yet both, in their own embarrassing way, struck me as symptoms of the same deeper illness: a Lebanese inability, or refusal, to think beyond our old reflexes. We have become a country of spasms. Knee-jerk patriotism. Knee-jerk anti-patriotism. Knee-jerk sanctimony. Knee-jerk provocation. We do not think. We flinch. We do not examine. We posture. We do not build moral complexity. We brandish identity like a weapon, or strip it off like an alibi.

The Mildew on Our Walls

I mention the religion of the two authors not because I believe, even for one second, that they represent their communities. They do not. Lebanon is not a collection of neat sectarian samples. No Christian says what he says because he is Christian. No Muslim says what she says because she is Muslim. People say what they say because of biography, class, vanity, fear, resentment, fantasy, trauma, ignorance, opportunism, national exhibitionism, and the thousand invisible fractures that compose a self. I mention their affiliations because Lebanon mentions them even when it pretends not to. Because sect is still the mildew on our walls. Because even when we believe we are speaking as individuals, the country still speaks through us in its old ventriloquist voice.

What struck me was not simply that the two reactions were opposite to what one would expect from each. It was that both were shallow. One clung to clichéd disgust as if it were a moral achievement. The other rushed toward clichéd transgression as if it were courage.

That said, I would be lying if I claimed that the first post did not strike me in a particular way, precisely because it came from a Christian. Not because I assume Christians are naturally in favor of normalization (that is, establishing formal diplomatic relations with Israel), and certainly not because I think of Lebanese Christians as a single political or emotional bloc. But given the well-known history of collaboration between segments of the Lebanese Christian right and Israel, especially around the 1982 invasion, one might have expected at least a lesser emotional investment in the theology of permanent enmity. Yet there it was: the same exalted revulsion one might expect from Lebanese Shiites whose lives and communities have been directly scarred by repeated Israeli assaults. That, too, was revealing.

What struck me was not simply that the two reactions were opposite to what one would expect from each. It was that both were shallow. One clung to clichéd disgust as if it were a moral achievement. The other rushed toward clichéd transgression as if it were courage. One said no with the vocabulary of taboo. The other said yes with the vocabulary of spectacle. Neither seemed interested in the hard, exhausting, adult labor of asking: What exactly are we seeing? What is being negotiated, by whom, under whose bombs, over whose bodies, and at what cost?

For that is the real obscenity here. Not the sight of the two flags side by side. Not the fantasy of partying in Tel Aviv. The real obscenity is that this discussion is happening while Israeli violence against Lebanon remains ongoing, while displacement, death, humiliation, and terror still define the lived reality of so many Lebanese.

Normalization without Peace is a Contradiction in Terms

So let us begin there, with a minimum of honesty. Nobody serious should be salivating over normalization while the smell of rubble is still in the air. And nobody serious should imagine that putting two ambassadors in a room erases injustice, asymmetry, impunity, massacres, or the long architecture of domination in this region. Diplomacy is not innocence. A meeting is not redemption. A handshake is not justice. Flags placed side by side for a photograph do not become, by some magical secular sacrament, two equal narratives finally reconciled. Power is never absent from the image. It choreographs the image.

But honesty also demands something else from us. It demands that we stop treating the word “peace” as either pornography or blasphemy.

For decades, we in Lebanon have been held hostage by two primitive camps. One camp has fetishized enmity, feeding on the idea of eternal refusal, eternal mobilization, eternal siege, as if war were not a catastrophe but a moral perfume. The other, less clamorous, fetishizes normalization as if proximity to the powerful automatically ennobles the weak, as if saying “let us move on” were evidence of sophistication rather than of moral illiteracy. Between these two vulgarities, thought suffocates.

I am against an armed militia inside the state. Entirely. Unequivocally. It hollows out citizenship. It infantilizes institutions. It turns parliament into décor, government into fiction, sovereignty into a seasonal rumor. No country can survive with two heads, two armies, two logics, two monopolies of truth, one official and one untouchable.

In this suffocation, I find myself closer to the clarity of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam’s stance: the insistence on the authority of the state, the refusal that Lebanon remain an open stage for other people’s wars, the insistence that diplomacy, sovereignty, and decision making belong to institutions rather than to militias, messiahs, or regional ventriloquists. This is not a minor detail. It is the detail. For what is a country if not the place where legitimate force is supposed to belong to the state alone? What is a republic if armed groups can at any moment overrule it, blackmail it, drag it into catastrophe, then ask its citizens to wrap their grief in the vocabulary of resistance and heroism?

Let me be even clearer, since clarity is so often sacrificed in Lebanon on the altar of euphemism. I am against an armed militia inside the state. Entirely. Unequivocally. It hollows out citizenship. It infantilizes institutions. It turns parliament into décor, government into fiction, sovereignty into a seasonal rumor. No country can survive with two heads, two armies, two logics, two monopolies of truth, one official and one untouchable.

And yes, I am equally against the Machiavellian manipulations through which Iran has instrumentalized a large part of Lebanon’s Shiite community, converting pain into leverage, faith into strategy, martyrdom into a geopolitical bargaining chip. To say this is not to accuse the Shiites of Lebanon, who are as plural, as wounded, as intelligent, as trapped, and as entitled to dignity as anyone else. It is precisely the opposite. It is to refuse that an entire community continue to be used as cannon fodder, emotional capital, and sacred shield in battles that exceed it and consume it. It is to refuse that the sons of the South and the Bekaa remain eternally available for burial under banners designed elsewhere. It is to refuse that the language of protection continue to conceal a machinery of exploitation.

Enough of the Usual Accusations

I know this is the point where the usual accusations begin. Betrayal. Elitism. Zionism. Westernization. Sectarian bias. The whole tired karaoke of intimidation. But there comes a moment when one must choose between being fair and being obedient. I choose fairness. And fairness demands that we say two things at once: Israel’s violence against Lebanon is outrageous, and the Iranian appropriation of Lebanese lives through armed proxies is also outrageous. The fact that one violence comes from an enemy state and the other through ideological capture does not make either of them less devastating to the flesh, to memory, or to the future.

I am tired of both camps. Tired of those who turn resistance into a permanent exemption from criticism. Tired of those who turn peace into a lifestyle accessory. Tired of the sentimental idiots and the cynical ones. Tired of those who invoke dignity to justify endless devastation, and of those who invoke pragmatism to deodorize injustice. Tired, above all, of the Lebanese addiction to shortcuts. We want capsules. One slogan, one emoji, one taboo, one provocation, one tweet, and there, supposedly, is our position.

But no. History does not fit into a tweet. Nor does shame. Nor complicity. Nor memory.

I am interested in a Lebanon that does not have to choose between being bombed from outside and held hostage from within. A Lebanon that does not confuse survival with salvation, or exhaustion with wisdom.

What do N. and D. really say, beneath the cringe? N. seems to be saying: I will be more royalist than the king. As though being Christian automatically made her suspect, she hurries to prove the opposite by taking the stand least expected of her, that is, alongside Hezbollah. D. says: I want out. Out of inherited slogans, out of suffocation, out of provincial martyrdom, out of wars. Both responses are understandable at the level of symptom. Both are impoverished at the level of thought.

And this is where the matter becomes painful. Lebanon today is a factory of impoverished thought. We have been brutalized for so long that many of us no longer know the difference between discernment and reaction. We are either too wounded to think, or too eager to display how differently we think from the wounded. Our discourse is a theatre of damaged nerves. Some cling to old certainties because uncertainty feels like betrayal. Others sprint toward sacrilege because sacrilege feels like oxygen. But neither camp asks the essential question: what kind of peace, and on whose terms?

I am not interested in sacred no’s. I am equally uninterested in fashionable yeses. I am interested in justice. In sovereignty. In freedom from blackmail, all blackmail. Freedom from Israeli military violence, obviously. Freedom also and equally from the internal confiscation of the state by an armed militia, by Iran, by factions that feed on perpetual exception. I am interested in a Lebanon that does not have to choose between being bombed from outside and held hostage from within. A Lebanon that does not confuse survival with salvation, or exhaustion with wisdom.

Because that too must be said. Some Lebanese, especially younger ones, do not dream of normalization because they have studied history and reached a mature political conclusion. They dream of it because they are tired. Tired in their bones. Tired of war, of slogans, of borders, of militia masculinity, of funeral culture, of being told that sacrifice is their highest horizon. Tired of being born into a country where every future is either mortgaged or militarized. Their desire is not always ideological. Sometimes it is simply the desire of prisoners who have been denied air for so long that any crack in the wall begins to look like salvation.

The Unapproachable Grave

Yesterday, while all this noise was unfolding online and in diplomatic salons, I found myself thinking of something indecently simple: my father’s grave in his hometown, Yaroun. I found myself wondering not about negotiations, nor flags, nor American choreography, but about when I would be able to go there again without fear, without calculation, without this grotesque need to consult war before consulting grief. For Yaroun now lies in that southern strip of my country that Israel has now declared off-limits to Lebanese, turning my father’s hometown into one of many villages emptied, shelled, and rendered effectively unreachable since the latest escalation. When does a daughter get to visit her father’s grave in peace? What kind of country submits mourning to a military timetable?

This, too, is what those glib posts fail to understand. Behind every grand discourse on war, resistance, peace, normalization, or strategy, there is also this: a woman unable to visit her father’s grave in Yaroun. A child’s memories confiscated by frontlines. A home forever lost. And countless corpses left behind under the rubble. I do not speak of this in order to sentimentalize politics, but to restore politics to the human beings it crushes. For what is sovereignty if not also the right to bury our dead, revisit them, remember without permission, and inherit places without having to negotiate with rockets, militias, or foreign powers?

We do not need more shock. Lebanon has overdosed on shock. We need thought. Cold, brave, unglamorous thought. We need a generation capable of resisting both intoxications: the intoxication of refusal for refusal’s sake, and the intoxication of normalization for normalization’s sake.

So where do we go from here? Certainly not toward the childishness of social media, where every complex wound is reduced to a performance. Certainly not toward sectarian decoding, where every opinion is instantly placed in a communal drawer. Certainly not toward romanticized war, nor toward cosmetic peace.

We go, if we are still capable of it, toward the difficult middle terrain that everyone despises because it offers no instant applause. The terrain of saying several true things at once.

Yes, direct talks between enemy states are historically significant. Yes, talking is preferable to killing. Yes, no serious country can afford to build its future on permanent war. Yes, Lebanese people have the right to dream of an ordinary life, a boring life even, with no missiles, no frontlines, no speeches about destiny and resilience.

And yes, any conversation about peace that ignores the reality of ongoing Israeli violence, regional supremacy, and the abyssal imbalance of power is not peace but coercion with better public relations.

And yes again, any internal Lebanese discourse that treats criticism of armed nonstate power as treason has also helped drag us here.

This is what I wish our young people would dare to say instead of tweeting nausea or nightclub lust. I wish they would distrust both their inherited taboos and their inherited rebellions. I wish they would understand that true emancipation is not the reversal of a slogan. It is the refusal to be ruled by slogans at all.

We do not need more shock. Lebanon has overdosed on shock. We need thought. Cold, brave, unglamorous thought. We need a generation capable of resisting both intoxications: the intoxication of refusal for refusal’s sake, and the intoxication of normalization for normalization’s sake. We need people able to look at that photograph of the two flags and ask neither “how disgusting” nor “where is the nearest nightclub?” but rather: Who arranged this image, who benefits from it, what realities does it conceal, and what future, if any, could make such proximity mean something other than humiliation?

Time for Adulthood

This is why my support for the logic represented by Nawaf Salam is not the support one grants a savior, still less a saint. I do not believe in saints in politics. Lebanon has paid too heavily for that weakness. It is support for a principle: that the state must return to being the state. That decisions of war and peace must return to constitutional legitimacy. That no sect should be held hostage by its self-appointed guardians. That no community should be flattered while being sacrificed. That Lebanon must stop being a letter in other countries’ alphabets.

Because that is the real question – and not whether the flags can stand beside each other for a camera. The real question is whether the human beings beneath those flags can ever live in a world not built on domination, denial, siege, and blood. Whether peace in this part of the world can one day mean more than the silence imposed by the stronger upon the weaker. Whether Lebanon can become a state before it becomes a symbol. Whether we can become citizens before we become hashtags.

Until then, forgive me, but I have no patience for nausea as argument, nor for Tel Aviv fantasies as philosophy.

One is an adolescent gag reflex. The other is an adolescent orgasm. And Lebanon deserves, at the very least, adulthood by now.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.