Opinion: Lebanon, Mother of Civilization

From Alon Mizrahi on Substack.

Lebanon, Mother of Civilization 

 

Trump's quintessential crude colonial idiot Tom Barrack may have entered a unique and very exclusive club yesterday, made up of people who shaped history with just one word

 

ALON MIZRAHI Aug 27 2025

 

Some 10 years ago, I was contacted by a theater director friend who was tasked with producing an evening of bold new interpretations of Zionism, hosted by a Tel Aviv Hertzel Center. Armed with full creative freedom, I laid out my view of the reductionist nature of Zionism, using its treatment of Canaan, the ancient Levant, as an example. Barrack’s choice of words brought back the memory of that evening

Virtually every Lebanese account on any social media platform shared messages of grief and sadness exactly one month ago, when Ziad Rahbani passed away. Ziad was a much-loved Lebanese composer, playwright, and political commentator, and the son of perhaps the greatest living Arab cultural icon, Fayruz, and her late former husband, Assi Rahbani, a legendary composer who was central to the Arab music renaissance of the 1950s, 60s, and 1970s.

Fairuz, 1974

They grew up in contempt for everything that’s not fast food, advanced weaponry, and luxurious vacuity. They don’t read and don’t watch movies, and don’t listen to music. They are barbarians in expensive yet tasteless suits, and so it was no wonder they had no time for the animalistic (read: human) behavior of the Lebanese press, whose country has been at the center of colonial obsession, meddling, and murder for over a century. 

A country Israel has been trying to occupy for 50 years. 

They don’t even know if they are in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, or Ukraine. It’s all the same to them: they come to deliver terms of surrender, and to devour every source of energy and life, just like the alien species American movies have been telling us about, pretending like it’s science fiction and not political reality.

They have no idea that Lebanon’s Baalbeck has been a cultural center for over 10,000 years, a time sequence so vast that it makes a mockery of the Hebrews’ Jerusalem, which they pretend to adore so much. Think about that: When the (never corroborated by archeological findings) King David supposedly ruled Jerusalem, according to the Hebraic timeline, Baalbeck already had 8,000 years of history at least. Similarly, Palestine’s Jericho had been inhabited for more than 10,000 years back then. 

Do you understand how idiotic the Jewish claim for unparalleled antiquity is in the context of the Middle East? I do. It is utterly, laughably moronic. Nevertheless, for colonizer Americans who hardly have any history at all, and even less than that history they’re willing to discuss, ancient Israel - the mostly made-up entity - has become the sole example of really old things. 

They know nothing, the Barracks, Trumps, and Grahms. They have the historical and cultural depth of a toddler’s pool with no water in it. So they come to Lebanon, one of the richest, most fascinating, and awe-inspiringly ancient cultures on planet earth, and purport to represent civilization. 

Lebanon has food, music, and language traditions that stretch so far back into the past that it is hard to even trace their origin. Chickpeas and sesame seeds, from which hummus is made, have been cultivated in the Middle East for many thousands of years. The same goes for olive trees. These are not just foods or dishes: these are ancient cultural symbols with an incomperable cultural significance. They have a near-religious importance and meaning. 

English-speaking cultures cannot even comprehend such chronological depth. They don’t have an equivalent: they are too young and artificial. The linguistic-psychological infrastructure required to truly understand something like 10,00 years of history doesn’t even exist for them. So they call others animalistic. 

The Western colonizer mind cannot grasp people sitting on their land and tending to their crops for thousands of years, their very blood and tears mixing with the soil and the climate to create a unity that cannot be explained or recreated. They can’t conceptualize a city like Lebanon’s Byblos, which has been inhabited for 8,000 years, played a role in creating the first human alphabet, and also gave the Bible its name (Byblos standing for ‘papyrus‘ in Greek, which is a nice trivia detail to remember). 

America’s mind doesn’t know what to make of people growing dates around Jericho for over 12,000 years already. In Ain Mallaha, close to the Lebanon/occupied-Palestine border, musical instruments have been found that are anywhere between 12,000-14,000 years old. Now, can you see the bitter irony of Barrak’s animalistic moment?

In 2016, when I spoke to a crowd of drowsy liberal-Zionists that evening, I told them about how isolating and misleading Zionism’s historical focus was. I specifically used the example of Canaan, which, for Hebrew speakers and Zionists in general, overlaps perfectly with the promised land. 

But the Canaanites didn’t just live in today’s occupied Palestine: their civilization stretched into today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, and their close relatives, the Phoenicians, pushed even further south and north, all the way to Turkey and Egypt. And they were seagoing people, exchanging goods and ideas with cultures around the Mediterranean. The civilization the Hebrews were part of was not isolated from its environment: it was very much part of it, and to be normal, I claimed, the new Hebrews (and calling them that was a generous stretch, I know) need to stop obsessing over images of ethnic, historic, and religious exceptionalism, and a mostly made-up past, leading to a paranoid and troubled present.

Let’s actually be part of the Levant and accept our Semitic roots. 

It was (to no one’s surprise) an exercise in futility. I came across as mostly weird and clearly not a liberal (white and polite) Zionist. 

I just found out today that the theater director, a zealous Zionist and European Jew, deleted me as a friend on one social media platform I stopped using almost two years ago. I guess I am also a little too animalistic.

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