Resilient? Lebanese? I Doubt!

A confession about the most overused word in Lebanese public discourse.

Congratulations. You survived another year in Lebanon. The international community would like to call this resilience. We would like to call it Thursday.

Every year, after every war, explosion, currency collapse, bank failure, and government paralysis, the same sentence appears: "But the Lebanese are resilient." Foreign correspondents write it. Diaspora fundraisers invoke it. Politicians claim it. TED talks have been built around it.

I believed it for years. I repeated it myself. I was wrong.

Resilience is a choice. What Lebanon has is something different. What Lebanon has is a population that pushes forward because the alternative is worse, and we decided to call that resilience because the truth was too uncomfortable to say out loud.

Let me show you what I mean.

The merchant who can't face his balance sheet

There is a Lebanese merchant I know. He has been losing money for seven years. His debt has compounded. His suppliers are waiting. His bank account tells a story he refuses to read.

Every morning he opens his shop. Every evening he locks it. He tells anyone who asks that he is staying because he loves what he built, because he believes in Lebanon, because he is resilient.

The truth is simpler. Closing the shop means facing the numbers. Facing the numbers means admitting he cannot pay what he owes. Admitting he cannot pay means losing assets he has spent a lifetime building. So he opens the shop. Every morning. Not out of love. Out of the inability to face what closing it would cost him.

We look at him and say: what a resilient man.

He is not resilient. He is cornered. The difference matters.

The person who will stay and rebuild

After every Lebanese crisis, a specific type of post appears on social media. A photo of someone standing in rubble, or sitting in a damaged apartment, or holding a Lebanese flag. The caption is always a variation of the same sentence: "We will stay. We will rebuild. Lebanon is in our blood."

I respect the emotion behind it. I do not respect the mythology we have built around it.

Most of the people who say they will stay and rebuild are not making a choice. They are describing a reality. They do not have a foreign passport. They do not have savings in a stable currency. They do not have a relative abroad who can sponsor them. They do not have a skill set that transfers easily to another country's labor market.

They are staying because leaving is not actually an option available to them. The Schengen visa alone filters out most of the population. The cost of relocating a family filters out most of the rest.

This is not resilience. This is geography dressed as patriotism. This is the absence of an exit presented as a declaration of love.

And we built an entire national identity around it.

The wealthy Lebanese who stays for the view

Now the uncomfortable one.

There is a specific type of wealthy Lebanese who will tell you, with genuine emotion, that he stays because he loves this country. That he could leave but chooses not to. That Lebanon needs people like him to stay and fight for it. That he is resilient.

He is not wrong that he could leave. He is not wrong that he stays. He is wrong about why.

The money that makes him ordinary in Geneva or Dubai or Paris makes him exceptional in Beirut. His apartment in Downtown, his table at the restaurant, his access to the minister, his name that opens doors, his ability to move through Lebanese society as someone who matters: none of this travels. In any serious city in the world, he is one more person with money. In Beirut, he is someone.

He stays because Beirut needs him less than he needs Beirut. Because the status his money buys here is not available anywhere else at the same price. Because leaving would mean starting over in a place where nobody knows his name.

We call this love of country. We call this resilience.

It is neither. It is a rational calculation made by someone who has correctly identified where his assets produce the highest return.

If this is landing close to home, you are not alone. I write about Lebanon honestly every week at karimchebaklo.com. It is free to subscribe.

The word we use instead of the truth

Resilience is a beautiful word. It implies agency. It implies a choice made under pressure. It implies that someone looked at a difficult situation and decided, consciously, to push through it.

What I have described above is not that. What I have described is three different varieties of having no real alternative, dressed in the language of heroism because the honest version is too painful to say in public.

The poor Lebanese is trapped by lack of options and we call it resilience.

The middle class Lebanese is trapped by lack of mobility and we call it patriotism.

The wealthy Lebanese is trapped by the unique return his assets generate here and we call it love of country.

Nobody is naming the trap. Everyone is celebrating the trapped.

The cruelest part is that the myth serves the political class perfectly. A population that believes it is resilient is a population that has normalized endurance as a virtue. A population that has normalized endurance does not demand solutions. It demands nothing. It absorbs. It survives. It opens the shop every morning and calls it strength.

The political class did not create the resilience myth. But they have been its greatest beneficiaries for thirty years.

What category do I fall into?

I have been writing this piece for weeks in my head, and I kept arriving at the same uncomfortable question: which of these three people am I?

I am not the merchant in denial. I do not have debt forcing me to stay.

I am not the person with no exit. I have a Canadian passport. My two sons are studying abroad. I could leave tomorrow and have somewhere to go.

I am not the wealthy Lebanese optimizing his status. I know too well what that calculation looks like from the inside to pretend it is something nobler.

So why am I still here?

I ran for parliament in 2022 because I believed the system could change. I sit on the board of the Port of Beirut because I believe institutions can be reformed from within. I write weekly analysis that almost nobody reads yet because I believe the conversation Lebanon needs to have is not happening and someone has to start it.

I stay because I still believe something can change here.

What I can tell you is that it is not resilience. Resilience means choosing to absorb difficulty and push through when you could walk away. Most Lebanese cannot walk away. You cannot be resilient about a situation you have no power to leave. That is not resilience. That is just Tuesday.

Maybe that is the only honest version of loving a country: not the performance of patriotism, not the mythology of endurance, not the calculation of status, but the deliberate choice to stay and fight for something that keeps giving you reasons to leave.

Lebanon does not need more resilience.

It needs more people who choose it with their eyes open.