When I was a child, other people always seemed to be making decisions: We are leaving. We are staying. We are changing schools. We will spend the night somewhere else. The “we” allegedly included me, even though the decision-making had not. Like all children, I had to live according to the consequences of decisions made by adults. For years, I believed this lack of choice was one of the main ailments that adulthood would cure: I would finally be able to make all the decisions that would impact me – or I would, at least, have a say in them.
It did not take me long to realize that, for a Lebanese, this is wishful thinking. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether I ever grew up at all. So many decisions affecting me and my country still reach us already made. Both Lebanon and I seem to be stuck in an endless childhood.
There is, of course, an essential difference. My parents loved me, were responsible for protecting me, and endured the consequences of their decisions alongside me. I cannot say the same of the powers that keep deciding what Lebanon and the Lebanese need, what they must accept, and how much more they can survive.
The American vote demonstrated something we Lebanese painfully lack and utterly need: A government can be held accountable for its policies and made to pay the price. American citizens could judge the conflict with Iran through its effects on their security, their soldiers, their household expenses.
Watching the American and Israeli elections with feverish scrutiny these past two weeks, I found myself feeling like a child again. The adults were in another room, discussing something I would have to live with. A change in congressional control, a coalition negotiation, a politician refusing an alliance – in those countries, these are things that belong to the ordinary struggle over government. Here, in the satellites orbiting them, we examine, analyze, or evaluate the changes before opening a business, signing a lease, deciding whether to stay, whether to rebuild a house, or daring to put our savings into something that requires a future. I can’t help but resent how much we need to know about international politicians who need to know so little about us.
The American vote demonstrated something we Lebanese painfully lack and utterly need: A government can be held accountable for its policies and made to pay the price. American citizens could judge the conflict with Iran through its effects on their security, their soldiers, their household expenses.
Good for them. I envy them their ability to make those in power answer for their decisions. Not because their democracy is flawless, but because my vote still cannot reach the people who decide the most consequential parts of my life. In Lebanon, we are still arguing about whether our elected institutions may govern at all. But my admiration comes with a question: Who answers to us, the mere collateral constituents affected by American decisions outside America?
Israel’s election invites a similar reflection on how a foreign vote can affect our daily lives and our futures. Netanyahu’s weakened position does not tell us when the occupation will end; nor does Eisenkot’s opportunity tell us what he would do with power. Whoever emerges with the authority to govern Israel will also acquire considerable power over lives in Lebanon. Yet we will not be among the citizens to whom he must answer. Our future falls within his reach, but outside his accountability.
What unsettles me is that someone else’s government can change course, but those beyond its borders who were harmed by its previous decisions cannot undo the consequences. A successor to the leader in that other country can announce a new approach. Meanwhile, someone here will still be living with what that earlier policy destroyed.
What do you call a democracy that exports the mortal consequences of its choices to people who had no voice in making them? Must accountability stop where citizenship ends?
I do not imagine a world in which small countries are untouched by the decisions of powerful ones. Lebanon cannot insulate itself from geography, alliances, or someone else’s election. But there is a difference between having to reckon with another country’s power and having to arrange your entire life around its moods. Somewhere, that influence must encounter a Lebanese decision, an institution capable of negotiating, refusing, protecting something we have chosen for ourselves. We should be able to feel our own government’s presence in our lives as something other than the bearer of news from elsewhere.
In Lebanon, outside power meets too little resistance, and inside authority offers too little protection. We are left trying to build a future in the space between what others want and what our state will not do.
Nor does foreign power always need to act from outside. Iran has Hezbollah to enforce its decisions from within. Hezbollah has Lebanese members, Lebanese voters, and Lebanese politicians. But its Lebanese identity does not make its allegiance to Tehran any less real. It is a tentacle of Iranian power embedded in our country, able to present another state’s strategic interests as obligations the Lebanese owe themselves.
Hezbollah’s participation in Lebanese politics makes this foreign allegiance even more offensive. The militia accepts the usefulness of institutions while refusing their authority over the decisions that matter most. Its representatives negotiate legislation and ministerial appointments in a state whose government cannot prevent it from opening a front. Then comes the familiar account of what “we” have chosen and what “we” must endure. I would like someone to identify the moment when the Lebanese agreed to let Iran’s regional confrontation determine what they could do with their lives. You can see its effects when a family flees its village, certainly. But what about the woman abandoning a business she spent years preparing, the employee who lost his job, the parents watching another child leave? Not everyone loses the same thing. But everybody loses.
The Lebanese state must negotiate Israeli withdrawal, challenge Israeli attacks, protect its citizens, and deny Hezbollah the power to expose them to another war.
The Lebanese state owes us more than sympathy and speeches. Receiving the displaced and appealing for assistance are necessary duties. But a state cannot confine itself to managing the aftermath while businesses close and young people leave. It must have authority over the decisions that expose its citizens to such emergencies. War and peace belong to constitutional institutions answerable to the Lebanese.
I want a state I can contradict without being accused of treason, one whose failures I am allowed to name without first feeling grateful for its mere existence. We have become so accustomed to demanding the bare possibility of government that we risk forgetting what should follow: the right to be dissatisfied with it, and to make that dissatisfaction count.
The Lebanese state must negotiate Israeli withdrawal, challenge Israeli attacks, protect its citizens, and deny Hezbollah the power to expose them to another war. But it cannot, in order to do so, wait for a friendlier government in Israel or a more accommodating administration in Washington, or for permission from Tehran. The country of Lebanon is not a minor. However, it is a country still treated like someone underage, and our own authorities are passive spectators of that condition.
I no longer expect adulthood to spare me the consequences of other people’s choices. What I do expect are institutions that enable me to contest, with my vote, decisions made in my name, and to remove those responsible when they fail me.
I have grown too old to keep asking others for permission to grow up. And so has Lebanon.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
