The Lebanese Manifesto

By Rabie Soubra

For so many long years, we have been "stuck in second gear", and we haven't learned to get out of it. This is because we are not asking the right questions and because we are blinded by so many assumptions and false ideologies.
Our beautiful country is turning to a dump, hopefully it isn't too late to save it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rabie Soubra
• Release date: Oct 28, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301891627

Rabie Soubra

Born in 1964, in Beirut, Lebanon, married and father of two boys. A marketing and communication specialist. I love literature, especially Russian. Favorite authors include Hemingway, Joyce, Orwell, and many others. I read everything.

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The Lebanese Manifesto

Rabie Soubra

Copyright 2015

Smashwords Edition

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Quote from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.

Lebanon is a very perplexing country.

On the one hand it is a beautiful country, enormously endowed with a very wide range of natural landscape variations.

Lebanon has two mountain chains, a maritime frontier that runs the entire length of the country, and a huge fertile plateau that once fed the Roman Empire,

It has more than 30 rivers, arid desert like areas, caves, grottos and other rock formations, sandy beaches, rocky beaches, pebble beaches.

If you are into geological or topographical variety, Lebanon is the place for you.

All 10,452 square kilometers of it.

You name it, we got it.

The scenic snow capped mountains, the beautiful sea, lazy and idle in summer, raging with fury in winter, deep blue in March and mirror calm in October.  

It is the archetypical Mediterranean landscape, the rock formation, the shade of green you find in southern France and Italy, the pine trees, the water, the flora, the welcoming people and the distinct presence of the four seasons.

It is also endowed with an amazingly rich cultural and diverse heritage.

In Lebanon you can find archeological ruins almost everywhere and from every era in recorded history.

There are Roman ruins in Faqra, at the altitude of 1550 meters above sea level.

What were the Romans doing in our Faqra, which is snow clad around four months of the year?

You can find vestiges and ruins from various historic periods dating as far as 5000 years ago.

Phoenician, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, Turkish

You name it, we got it.

On the other hand Lebanon has been plagued since its existence with a plethora of problems and seemingly unsolvable issues that continue to magnify in their acuteness and, most importantly, divide the Lebanese with varying perspectives about who is to blame and who is responsible, and about the very definition of those problems.

most importantly, and most dangerously, it divides the Lebanese about their expectations of the future of the country.

The 1975 civil war was the most recent and most scathing manifestation of those problems, and it accelerated my urge and drive to understand and comprehend how my country works, or why it doesn’t.

I was eleven years old when the war of 1975 broke out. And I went through my teens and early adulthood learning various survival techniques on a very basic level.

How to find and stock water, bread, and food. How to dodge the shells, how to judge where a shell was going to impact, an art form claimed to be perfected by many Lebanese who witnessed the war and came out alive.

I was also learning how to find shelter, and how to use the physical features of the place we were hiding in. How to take advantage of thick walls and how to tolerate the burden of being in a dark underground space with people who, like me, were also trying to survive.

Each with their war theories and solution theories and blame theories.

I also watched how various people reacted to fear in the shelter. Muslims praying to Allah to protect them, Christians praying for Jesus and the Virgin Mary and the saints to protect them, but the shells and bullets were Godless, merciless, brutal and final.

The shells were stronger than prayers. And when that shell hit that shelter, both Muslims and Christians died just the same, with the same meaninglessness and with the same ugliness.

I was also watching, and trying to understand, who was fighting whom. Because the war started on one premise and ended on a totally different one, passing through many strange and unfathomable premises in between.

The war ended officially in 1990, but the conflict didn’t.

Growing up, and delving deep into the history of Lebanon I discovered that the war of 1975, while the fiercest, was not the only one, and I secretly concluded that it would not be the last one.

There were at least a dozen civil conflicts in the past two centuries. Always between same factions but for different reasons, and each time ending in a compromise without a real solution or victory, except for the certainty that many people lost their lives as a result and the country never had the chance to place itself on a solid road for future prosperity.

And this fact, that Lebanon has had those civil conflicts in the past, is surprisingly hidden in our collective memory and we do not refer to it as often as we should, nor do we extract any lessons from it.

I find this very strange.

And I started analyzing in order to understand why such a small and beautiful country with what seemed to me a huge potential for prosperity, was not able to prosper and flourish.

The easiest answer you hear is:

They would not let us, or

They are afraid of a united Lebanon, or

The regional powers control us, and so on. Various excuses and delegation of the problem to the unknown.

However there are certain observations and  conclusions that are right in front of us and are too clear to miss.

First, the idea of Lebanon is not clear, or not homogeneous to all Lebanese. Each Lebanese has an idea of Lebanon; but most Lebanese have no idea at all. And it does not seem important to them to have an idea.

And this worries me the most, that the majority of Lebanese have no idea at all about the idea of Lebanon.

This is a huge problem but one that can be solved easily with a change in attitude.

Let us find the common area that we already have between us, stand on it and aim to enlarge it for the future.

Maybe it is not necessary for us to agree consciously on the idea of Lebanon now. Maybe this idea needs some more time to be polished.

But we can easily say about ourselves that we are Lebanese, before mentioning our affiliations, religions and sects.

Let us start by calling ourselves convincingly that we are Lebanese.

Sounds simple but we are not doing it.

We can easily agree that we have a beautiful country that is being ravaged by all sorts of calamities and that we, as individuals and each on his own, will develop a feeling of attachment to this country in spite of all those calamities and the difference of opinion regarding the idea of Lebanon.

Second, we are poor at communicating.  

We have very poor communication skills among each other. This is probably a derivative of the first conclusion.

We don’t know how to talk to each other, we don’t know how to empower our ideas to become convincing.

We fail to convince because we don’t know how to communicate.

We know how to shout and how to dominate and how to yell and be obscene.

Each one of us thinks that his or her idea is the best, and that the other’s idea is rubbish. We expect the other to accept our ideas just because we have them,. Listen to any political debate in Lebanon and you will know what I mean.

And when this doesn’t happen, we go to war. And