The country that refuses to die by Halima Duffy

There was a time when Lebanon was spoken of with admiration rather than pity. Beirut was called the Paris of the Middle East, not as a cheap tourism slogan but because it genuinely represented something rare in the region: sophistication without surrendering identity, commerce without losing culture, modernity without erasing memory. Lebanon exported poets, bankers, journalists, musicians and educators while much of the Arab world struggled under dictatorships or endless ideological wars. It was chaotic, yes, but alive. Intensely alive.

Today, Lebanon survives rather than lives. The tragedy is not simply that the country collapsed economically or politically. Countries recover from corruption. Nations rebuild after civil wars. The deeper tragedy is that Lebanon has become a permanent battlefield for everyone except the Lebanese themselves. Regional powers treat it like rented property. Militias use it as a launchpad. Foreign governments use it as leverage. And Israel, whenever tensions escalate, turns large parts of the country into a message written in smoke and concrete dust.

The pattern has become painfully familiar. A flare-up at the border. Threats exchanged. Airstrikes. Civilians displaced yet again. Apartment blocks reduced to debris. Western governments issuing statements about “restraint” while Lebanese families calculate whether their homes will still exist tomorrow morning. The language of geopolitics always sounds clinical from afar. On the ground, it sounds like ambulances.

Israel insists its actions are defensive, and no serious observer can ignore the security fears Israelis carry after decades of conflict and trauma. But there is also a brutal imbalance in how force is exercised. Lebanon is not confronting Israel as an equal state with equal institutions, equal military power or equal stability. One side possesses one of the most advanced military machines in the world. The other can barely keep electricity flowing for its own citizens.

And yet Lebanon keeps paying the highest price. What makes the situation especially cruel is that ordinary Lebanese citizens are trapped between forces they cannot control. They are hostages to a political elite so spectacularly corrupt that it transformed one of the Middle East’s most educated populations into a nation waiting in fuel lines. They are trapped between armed factions that claim to defend Lebanon while simultaneously ensuring it never escapes perpetual confrontation. And they are trapped under the shadow of Israeli retaliation that often treats the distinction between militants and national infrastructure as increasingly irrelevant.

The outside world watches Lebanon the way people watch a historic building slowly burn: with sadness, fascination and ultimately resignation.

But Lebanon is not a ruin. Not yet. Walk through Beirut and you still find restaurants full despite economic collapse. You still hear arguments about literature, politics and philosophy in crowded cafés. Lebanese families abroad still send money home because they refuse to abandon the country emotionally even after abandoning it physically. There remains, somehow, an insistence on dignity. That may be Lebanon’s greatest act of resistance.

What has disappeared is the illusion that anyone is coming to save it. The Arab world is distracted by its own recalculations. Europe offers sympathy without strategy. The United States approaches Lebanon almost exclusively through the lens of regional security. Meanwhile, Israel continues operating according to a doctrine that overwhelming force creates deterrence, even as every new wave of destruction deepens generational rage across the border.

Lebanon today resembles a man kept alive on life support while everyone debates who unplugged the machine first.

And still, against all logic, it survives. That survival should not be romanticized. Endurance is not the same thing as justice. A nation should not earn admiration merely because it has become skilled at suffering. Lebanon deserves more than survival between wars, survival between blackouts, survival between funerals.

It deserves the chance to become a country again instead of a battlefield others endlessly redraw with missiles and ideology.