Dear executioners of the war imposed on the Lebanese,
You are free to choose your destiny. Free to believe in martyrdom. Free to consider that death for a cause exceeds life itself. This is your conscience, your faith, your worldview. But there is an absolute limit that no man, no party, no militia, no ideology has the right to cross: you are not free to impose this choice on other Lebanese.
The Lebanese people were not born to serve as cannon flesh for permanent wars, regional strategies, confrontations that go beyond their own national interests. Lebanese people have the right to live. The right to work. The right to raise their children without ever hearing the noise of war hovering over their heads. The right to sleep without fear that a decision taken in the shadow will turn their house into a tomb.
Life does not belong to you, to a party, or to an armed ideology. Life is a sacred loan from God. And the freedom to preserve this life is just as sacred. No man can come and demand from another that he dies for a political vision that he does not share. No man can confiscate the fate of an entire people in the name of a logic of permanent sacrifice.
Lebanon is not a field of experimentation for one another’s revolutionary dreams or geopolitical ambitions. Lebanon is an exhausted nation, bled, ruined by fifty years of wars, militia, interference and logic where death was too often glorified while life was humiliated.
There is a fundamental difference between those who freely agree to die for their beliefs and those who, despite them, lead millions of human beings to the risk of destruction. The first commits its own existence. The second commits the others without their consent. And this is neither heroic nor sacred: it becomes a confiscation of collective freedom.
No Lebanese community has the right to take all Lebanon hostage. No political or military leader has the right to decide alone the fate of every Christian, Sunni, Shiite, Druze or lay family living on this earth. Lebanon belongs to all Lebanese, not to a logic of perpetual war.
True courage today is perhaps no longer in the glorification of martyrdom. It may be in the acceptance at last of a simple truth: a people also has the right to live. To rebuild. To breathe. To choose peace without being accused of treason. To refuse to die without being accused of weakness.
And remember one essential thing: no people can forever live under the weight of fear, of the imposed sacrifice and of permanent war without eventually breaking from within. Nations not only die under bombs; They also die when human life ceases to be sacred and the right to live freely becomes secondary to armed ideologies.
Lebanon does not need new martyrs. He needs children growing up, universities teaching, businesses reborn, families staying on their land instead of fleeing exile or cemeteries. He needs a state that protects life instead of trivializing death.
History will judge severely those who will have transformed a nation of culture, commerce, intelligence and light into a land of constant confrontation. But it will also honour those who have had the courage to say no to the fatality of the war.
For there is a truth greater than all weapons and ideologies: a free people is born not in the cult of death, but in the intransigent defense of life.
Bernard Raymond Jabre
