O Wounded Lebanon...

The Woman's Word

What eye has not been worn raw with weeping... what heart has not broken with sorrow, over your sweet face, stained with tears and blood?

What wife... what mother has not trembled in dread for the peaceful Lebanese family, lest rupture strike it and death come calling?

Yesterday, O Lebanon, calamities came upon you one after another — floods and earthquakes — all of them from nature's treachery, from God's hand they came; you had no power to repel them or ward off their harm... And you stood fast before them and dressed your wounds with the might of the patient believer — a true brotherhood whose members spent themselves for one another in absolute love and sacrifice.

But our calamity today — none is more terrible, none more painful! And the most painful thing in it is that we ourselves plotted it against ourselves. With one hand we slapped our own cheek and scratched it, and with the other hand we set about warding off the slap and wiping away its traces... What folly is this?

And the greatest disgrace in these grave circumstances is our collective descent into battle — Arab brothers — one against another, while our one true enemy lies in wait for us, guffawing in mockery at our stupidity and our straying, as though our killing one another were his dearest wish.

We are busy with sedition and riot: we plant bombs, we disturb order, we strangle security — while Israel convenes conferences with the world's most famous scientists to uncover the secrets of the atom and harness it to their purposes — all their purposes. Oh, our shame before history, before its wakeful eye, recording events naked, without mercy or favor... And what a disgraceful shame this is!

Or is it not the farce of farces that between night and morning we should become enemies to one another? That we fire our bullets into our brothers' breasts, gouge out their eye-sockets with our fingernails, and sow mines in their path, without an eyelid of ours fluttering or a conscience of ours flinching? Is it the lust for power, as they have said, that has kindled its raging fire to burn this beautiful country? Or is it the lust for evil, out of which black intentions have erupted from where we know not? And since when has this gentle homeland harbored all this hatred and ferocity? And where have they melted away, the tolerant human values that have stamped Lebanon since the dawn of its history, down through the ages?

Lebanon, my wounded homeland! Let red seditions be for others. Let revolt and crime and the shedding of innocent blood and the life of anarchic, irresponsible terror be for others... May your hills return, as we have always known them, to being the home of pure brotherhood and peaceful coexistence, and may your world remain forever the land of freedom, love, and safety.

And O our Lebanese and Arab brothers: let us come back to our senses and destroy the ravening beast in our consciences — and may God pardon our folly and enfold in mercy the souls of our innocent victims.

Editor-in-chief