-Analysis-
BEIRUT — How can we describe our situation, people of this ominous region? How has this situation changed as we start the year 2025?
It feels to some of us as if a curse had been removed from this part of the world.
The year started without the tyrant of Damascus, who had ruled for so long with iron and fire. Lebanon elected a president who has been setting a new set of priorities for this troubled nation, and a prime minister with international credibility.
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All of this revived Lebanese hope for a better future.
In Palestine, there was a ceasefire that halted the fighting in Gaza, giving people of the coastal enclave a pause to heal their wounds.
So how can we step back to try to understand how these sudden changes have occurred and what they mean?
How can the Lebanese, who were left to their fate, dead, wounded, displaced and homeless during the war, believe that all this will not happen again? How can those who lost their life savings in banks regain their trust in the banking system?
How can the Syrians who lived in fear that the walls would betray their secrets, speak out and express themselves? How can children who were born in Assad’s prisons imagine a butterfly, a toy or a city?
How can the people of Gaza rejoice while their wounds have not yet healed? How can they dream of security and safety while they are prisoners of rubble and destruction?
I ask these questions without any judgment. I am just trying to understand our situation and express it.
Intersecting changes
Our situation today is familiar but strange. Joy scares us, as if we’re sure that pain and suffering will return. We fear hope and dreams. We fear imagining a different reality, a more beautiful world.
We shut our mouths before they are able to express this world we want. We are terrified of losing it even before we build it.
We should learn from history how real change occurs, so we can rationalize our feelings today. How did revolutions triumph, regimes fall, countries rebuild?
If we observe these changes, we see that the current circumstances intersect.
How Assad fell
Circumstances in Syria converged locally, regionally and internationally.
The force of the regime of Bashar al-Assad had eroded from within, and so at the moment of the assault of the opposition, its army did not rise to fight. Regionally, Hezbollah was exhausted after its war with Israel and was unable to save Assad as it did before. Further afield, Russia, preoccupied with the Ukraine war, met with Turkey and Iran to extract itself from the quagmire of the Syrian war with minimal losses.
The most important factor that we often forget is our will.
These intersecting factors converged to produce a different reality for Syria and the Syrians. But the most important factor that we often forget is our will, as ordinary people, and our ability to change the course of events. If hundreds of thousands of Syrians had not taken to the streets of Syria chanting “There is no forever” (a reference to the Assad family rule) in 2011 and the following years, forever would not have fallen today.
Finally a ceasefire in Gaza
As for the ceasefire in Gaza, there is no doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump has different geopolitical considerations related to American foreign policy and its redistribution of diplomatic and military resources between Ukraine, China, and elsewhere in the world.
However, these considerations and interests are also intertwined with the anti-war momentum, whether within American civil society and on college campuses, or globally with lawsuits against Israel at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and the outrage over Israel’s grave violations of human rights.
A window has opened at the end of this dark tunnel.
Still, what ultimately matters most is the determination of the people of Gaza, from reporters who documented Israel’s crimes to healthcare workers who continued to do their join and treat the wounded despite Israel’s destruction of hospitals and health centers.
This is the example we have all seen from the people of Gaza. They are free to rejoice, to suffer, to express themselves.
At the beginning of this year, a window opened at the end of this dark tunnel. We, whose eyes have become accustomed to the darkness, fear that light coming from this window will blind us, so we bow our heads and stay in our place.
But we have walked a long road. We have to learn from our hardships. It may soon be time to get to know the feelings of joy and hope.
Lebanon turns the page
In Lebanon, geopolitical factors often dominate our reading and analysis of events. However, we need to think about our role as citizens, and initiative as the people of this country who want to change our political and social reality.
It is true that change was also largely spurred from abroad, but we must build on our own progress at home. Despite the reported external pressure that led to the election of President Joseph Aoun, he represents a fundamental will of the Lebanese people.
His inauguration speech was a firm response to the sectarian, militia-based, quota-based system that has ruled Lebanon for too long.
This alternative discourse has developed over the years since 2005 with the expulsion of the Assad regime from Lebanon, then the civil movement in 2011, and the pro-democracy protests of Oct. 17, 2019 focused on building the state institutions, civil rights, freedoms and the fight against corruption. These priorities now stand firmly at the center of Lebanese politics.
