Not Lebanese Enough to Be Lebanese
Let me tell you what it feels like to be Lebanese in this world.
I was born in 1984 in West Beirut — Beirut el Gharbieh — under Israeli missiles, inside a civil war that had 18 sects fighting each other in 10,452 km². A country smaller than some cities, tearing itself apart with impressive dedication.
I was one of the lucky ones. We lived inside the American University of Beirut. Bunkers to play in, American “protection,” no school. The bar for luck was low — lucky meant being somewhat shielded from bullets while explosions happened just outside the gate. That was the gold standard. Congratulations to me.
As I grew up, the sectarian government was assembled — a carefully engineered temporary peace between people who fundamentally couldn’t stand each other. I started going to school in a half-destroyed city. The destruction wasn’t shocking. It was just scenery. An identity. A daily reminder that you don’t deserve more than survival. We lived in scarcity until scarcity became a mindset — until we stopped noticing it was even there.
War planes in the sky were background noise. Bombs every now and then were practically a playlist. If a whole day passed without incident, we got nervous. Peace was suspicious. Silence was just a different kind of loud.
Fast forward a few years. Lebanon got dissected into a sectarian chess board and we moved from West to East Beirut. An upgrade, some people said — from a Sunni Muslim area to a Christian Maronite one. La bonheur. Like moving from Detroit to Paris, except I was Druze, belonged to neither side, and spoke more like West Beirut — English — while everyone in the East was proudly Francophone.
So. Technically Lebanese. Belonging nowhere in Lebanon. Which means technically not Lebanese at all. And that’s exactly how I grew up.
I even lived briefly in the southern suburbs — where, honestly, I felt most at home. Still not enough though. Nothing was ever enough. I kept thinking I needed approval. A sense of belonging. That I had to choose a side just to function, just to be happy. As if one enemy wasn’t already plenty. Instead of uniting against the outsiders, we spent our free time fighting each other — because Lebanese people are genuinely addicted to conflict. They can’t survive without it. Thriving, for them, requires being in permanent disorder. A nervous system on override isn’t a problem — it’s an achievement.
I never excelled. I couldn’t. No matter what I brought home — diplomas, trophies, results — for one side of my family I was always a failure. Not good enough. Cheap. Off the honour list.
Being Lebanese is bloody exhausting.
So I danced, drank, and rebelled my way through it. Every time I got close to something that actually made my heart move — love, career, a real dream — something arrived to kill it. Either me being Druze, or a bomb dropped, or the country simply ran out of basic financial and emotional infrastructure. Classic Lebanon.
Here’s the thing about Lebanon — it’s the greatest cult in the world. It has both the Epsteins and the Mother Theresas living in one tiny, dissected culture. And I mean the unhinged version of Mother Theresa. The one who’d smile at you while the building behind her was on fire.
From the outside it’s beautiful. They sell you the dream — the food, the nightlife, the resilience, the joie de vivre. And yes, fine — we have the most beautiful man made women and gays in the world, an impressive number of religions somehow living “peacefully” under one sky, legendary nightclubs, mountains, sea, and nature that absolutely nobody protects. We produce more university graduates per capita than makes any logical sense for a country that functions the way we do. Highest degrees. Third world reality.
Why? Because we are vain. Deeply, proudly, catastrophically vain. We believe we are Phoenicians — the joke — we refuse to be Arabs, we refuse to acknowledge that historically Lebanon was part of Syria, and we absolutely refuse to accept that France and England deliberately carved us up to keep themselves powerful in the Middle East and handed us to Israel on a plate shortly after. Vain, self-deceiving people with expensive degrees are a dangerous combination. A self-destruction machine with good lighting and a great restaurant scene.
We built a country that exists mostly in songs and poems. Beautiful poems, I give Rahbani’s and co that. That’s genuinely it.
I had good years there. Real ones. But I never belonged. The moment I left, the place descended further into hell — maybe I felt it coming, maybe I manifested it, I don’t know. But where Lebanon is now is probably where it was always headed. I say that with genuine sadness and zero surprise. What has been done to that country, what its own people continue to do to each other and to themselves, is nothing short of satanic.
Would I go back? Never … Maybe... The dark truth is that suffering is addictive. At least there, I’m a survivor. I’m resilient. I have a title.
Here? I’m just a person. And I’m still figuring out if that’s enough.