The Maronite Cause

Generally, I don’t engage in direct replies to specific articles or posts for many reasons, but the Phoenician-Maronite exchange of late here on X has been interesting to say the least, so I thought I’d weigh in with my 2 cents.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s kind of an old-new rivalry between those who want to focus on Christian identity and survival and those who look up to a more inclusive Phoenician one and adopt the standard Lebanese coexistence stance.

The first article by @north_maronite can be read here: Beyond the Phoenician Myth: Why Syriac-Maronite Identity Demands a Christian Homeland. The reply to that article by the Purple club by @LebanesePug can be read here: Beyond the False Choice: A Debate Lebanon Needs to Have.

Some Ground Rules

Now, before we start, I want to clear a few things: I don’t use AI tools to write, so my writing does not round the edges and might seem too direct for some, but any criticism of ideas here is not an attack on any person. Needless to say, I respect everyone who’s trying to make this country better, even when we disagree. That includes everyone who advocates for a Phoenician identity.

Second necessary clarification: I use the term Phoenicianism to designate a political project that leans on Phoenician culture, to differentiate it from the usual love we share for our Phoenician heritage. Phoenicianism is not about being proud in our roots, but it’s about using the Phoenician identity to make a political point.

One final disclaimer here is that although I support the Project of Mount Lebanon, I’m not a member of it for my own reasons, so I’m always and only speaking as a separatist and just on my personal behalf.

Now let’s get into it.

Feel Good, Go Nowhere

Phoenician culture is part of who we are, and we should be proud of our heritage. This truth is pretty simple. However, being proud of a past civilization is one thing, and imagining it to be a political solution or a unifying identity for a nation in crisis is another.

As a political ideology, Phoenicianism is a plan to “feel good and go nowhere”. It’s a time-waster for people who don’t even want to do politics. It’s exactly what our zoomer generation would call “larpers”. It’s the kind of useless distractions that kept Lebanese Christians sleepwalking toward extinction for decades.

Does the purple approach have a perspective on whether the system should be federal or central? Not really, I never saw a clear stance from this current on it. Does it have a plan to fight corruption, for example, apart from saying that corruption is a problem? Not really. Does it offer solutions to any of the existential threats that surround christians today? Not really either. We should not treat Phoenicianism as a serious political proposal because it’s not. Whenever Phoenicianism engages in a political discusses it only offers meaningless platitudes.

Per wikipedia: a platitude is a statement that is seen as trite, meaningless, or prosaic, aimed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease.

In other words, a platitude is generally a very popular and overused statement that looks deep and meaningful but is really meaningless, useless, or outright false if examined.

Let’s look at the article we’re deconstructing, there’s at least one platitude every other paragraph:

• “Successful nations are often built by creating common ground among populations that maintain distinct traditions.”
• “Political Realities Are Not Permanent Civilizational Truths.”
• “History is not static. It evolves.”
• “The Failure of the Lebanese State Is Not Proof That Coexistence Failed.”
• “[we] seek renewal through a broader and more inclusive understanding of our shared inheritance.”

Nice phrases, but they offer zero insight or solutions. What Phoenicianism offers is a fuzzy feeling for seculars who, for a reason or another, are not comfortable with their own community’s identity. If all the Christians in Lebanon today adopted Phoenicianism as an identity or political project, what problem would that solve? Would it protect them from Islamism? Would it shield them from the majoritarian, corrupt political system? Would it liberate them from the militias of the mullahs? Would it deal with demographic decline and economic hardship? Would it save us from the failed state? What use does a political idea have if it solves nothing?

The Maronite community doesn’t need another lecture on “layered identities” while our numbers collapse, our institutions rot, and Hezbollah runs the country like an Iranian backyard. What use do I have for a layered identity if the dominant political system of this country is stacked against me just because it happens that my name is Tony or Charbel or Elias? Do we really need to teach you the basics that your enemy designates you, regardless of how you identify yourself? Does the Lebanese system care if I prefer Hannibal Barca or Yuhanna Maroun when it’s impoverishing me because I happen to be Christian on paper, when it’s throwing my kids abroad, then excluding them from the political process?

If all Christians identified as Phoenician today, do you think the behavior of our opponents will change one bit? Or are you willing to bet the future of an entire nation on the hope that maybe, just maybe, in 200 years from now, when our community is already decimated, more than 7 Muslims will identify as Phoenician and counteract the 5 million who see themselves part of the Islamic Ummah?

A Lesson in Coexistence

You say a failed state is not evidence that coexistence failed; well how about 100 years of wars and failure? When do we draw the line until and say this experiment failed? Should we wait until the last Christian family emigrates from this land?

I wrote a book detailing this failed experiment but you don’t need a book to know it. Look at the history of the Republic and tell me with a straight face that its failure is temporary.

Besides, partition does not mean the end of coexistence! Everyone would still live in Mount Lebanon as they did before, and different nations would still live side by side, just without one imposing its will on the others. Ironically, every time an anti-partitionist brings up the argument of coexistence, they reveal their deep-seated belief in its impossibility: they believe that Muslims prefer to fight us in a bloody war instead of accepting a live-and-let-live arrangement.

Who is the extremist in this case? The separatist who still thinks other sects can be rational and reach peaceful coexistence in a separate or confederated/federated arrangement, or the Phoenicianist who thinks Muslims will explode in a fit of rage the moment we move towards self-determination? Ironic, isn’t it?

Identity Cannot Be Improvised

Given that many Phoenicianists are cultured and academic, the amount of non-academic beliefs prevalent in the movement is surprising. “Layered identity” does not mean that individuals can pick and choose pieces of identity like in an open buffet and then voila all the nation has adopted a new id.

Identities evolve and mutate over millennia through social forces much larger than individual identification. I’m not gonna do a full lesson here but treating identity as a cake that one can pick and choose from is extremely naive. It’s also reckless in a region where people get killed because of their name.

Our identity is not something one wakes up one day and chooses to be. It’s something that was compressed and transmitted implicitly and explicitly over 1,400 years of history, of defiance, of wars, of joy and love and hope and despair. It’s not my problem that much of this history for our people happened after the Phoenician era, but ignoring that it happened doesn’t change its consequences and realities.

Maronites didn’t survive as “Phoenician-Muslims-Christians” through wishful thinking and imagined ideologies. We survived by preserving our identity, by retreating to the Mountain, by building fortresses of faith and autonomy, and fighting when the dark tide came for us.

Your “A person can be Muslim and Phoenician” line is cute until the next time a mob screams “Allahu Akbar” and burns another church. The Phoenician narrative was always a polite, secular fig leaf for coexistence that the other side never bought into. We tried it. It failed.

Political Realities are Real

It feels stupid to write this title, but Political realities exist in… reality. One can ignore them, one can say they’re not permanent to rationalize why they want to ignore them, but that doesn’t change that they exist and affect our lives today.

“Political realities aren’t permanent”, sure, tell that to the ghosts of every fallen Christian community in the Middle East. Does their erasure feel permanent? Go say that stupid phrase to Iraqi and Syrian Christians. Go tell that to the 2000,000+ Christians who left Lebanon since 1990. Go tell that to the young men in my neighborhood who are all preparing to leave their homeland once they finish school or university.

The Levant didn’t peacefully transition into Arab-Islamic dominance and is not currently living some temporary out-of-the-ordinary crisis. It’s always been like this. It was conquered, colonized, and converted by force. This “non-permanent” political reality has been going on for centuries.

Today’s “alignments” aren’t some temporary fad you can ignore; they’re the result of relentless cultural, political, and demographic pressure over decades, still being funded with Saudi/Turkish/Qatari/Iranian money, and still being propped by a confessional system that rewards the side with the higher birthrate and the most guns.

Pretending the clock can be rewound because “none proved permanent” is historical malpractice and shows an extreme level of naivety. The bottom line of Phoenicianism is dangerous: it’s calling on Maronites to “evolve” and “modernize” themselves out of existence. But we fought for every fucking inch. So no thank you.

Why Do we Have a Failed State?

The Lebanese state didn’t “fail” because of generic corruption or “foreign intervention.” It failed because the foundational bargain, Christians as equal partners in a pluralistic state, was rejected the moment Muslim majorities felt strong enough to rewrite the rules.

This happened in 1958, 1967, 1973 and then in the civil war in 1975. This system was cemented with the Taif betrayal in 1990 and the Hezbollah rule since 2008. In between these never-ending crises the system suffered economic collapse, service failure, emigration hemorrhage, and more. These aren’t bugs, they’re features of trying to share a state with groups whose culture, identity, and socio-political dynamics clash.

The distinction between “failed state” and “failed society” is a useless semantic sleight-of-hand. When one community arms itself to the teeth, controls the ports and borders, and treats the other as a second-class decorative minority, this is not a “non-permanent” reality that we can ignore.

The real “forgotten lesson of Phoenicia” isn’t some romantic openness-and-trade. It’s that the ancient Phoenicians thrived as independent city-states that were not even under one political entity, even as they shared one culture. They also thrived as their own states, not as dhimmis in someone else’s caliphate. It’s baffling that someone who reveres ancient city states like Sidon, Tyre, and Byblos, doesn’t see the merit of having a similar arrangement of separate states today.

The experiment of the Republic that you’re desperately defending has delivered collapse, betrayal, and a Christian population reduced to a shrinking, terrified remnant. This isn’t “fear” or “withdrawal.” It’s basic self-defense.

A Comforting Mythology or a Discomforting Truth?

There’s freedom in honesty, but getting there can be uncomfortable and heartbreaking. My biggest problem with Phoenicianism is that it’s a cultural endeavor masked as a political movement. As a cultural endeavor, it’s harmless, everyone should learn about our heritage, but when it presents itself as a serious political proposal, it’s naive at best and dangerous at worst.

At a time when all the native populations of the Near East are reclaiming their heritage, it’s disingenuous for some to focus their efforts on fighting their own heritage in favor of some reimagined identity that only exists in history books.

Your “broader and more inclusive understanding” is just another version of “stay in the burning house, it’s coexistence.” It’s madness.

So no, we’re not gonna let go of the instinct that kept the Maronites alive when every other Eastern Christian community in the region was wiped out or reduced to folklore. I’m not gonna apologize for my existence or redefine my identity to make it more palatable for those who want me gone.

The choice is between survival with dignity and polite suicide under the guise of “coexistence”.

In the end, I agree with the article that the choice isn’t between Phoenicia and Mount Lebanon. Phoenicia is our heritage and will always be so, and Mount Lebanon is our homeland and will always be so. But because we carry the heritage of Phoenicia, and because our Maronite priests still wear the purple robe of our Phoenician ancestors, we want to survive and continue living freely and with dignity in this land as our forefathers did for millennia. The time is for work, and not for intellectual distractions.