History has repeatedly confirmed this pattern. Empires have risen with confidence in their permanence only to dissolve into memory. Assyria disappeared from the map of power. Babylon collapsed. Persia yielded to new orders. Rome declined into fragmentation. The Ottoman Empire dissolved. Colonial mandates ended. Armies entered Lebanon and eventually withdrew from it. Yet Lebanon remained — not as a symbol of stability, but as a symbol of endurance through instability, a country repeatedly fractured yet never fully erased.

Lebanon has never existed outside the imagination of empires and kings. It has always been named, used, and contested by rulers who understood its strategic and symbolic significance. In the biblical tradition, King Solomon imported the famed cedars of Lebanon through his alliance with Hiram, king of Tyre, using its timber to build the First Temple in Jerusalem. In this memory, Lebanon is already more than geography — it is material permanence, sacred construction, and the substance of continuity itself.

And yet, across all these epochs, one paradox remains constant: Lebanon was never reduced to simplicity. It remained complex where empires demanded uniformity, plural where they demanded absorption, and fragmented where they demanded control. It has always been too significant to ignore and too intricate to dominate. That paradox continues to define the present.

In a recent interview, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Christian villages in southern Lebanon had requested annexation by Israel in exchange for protection from Hezbollah. The claim was immediately rejected by Lebanese local authorities, and firmly denied in a joint statement issued by fifteen Christian villages that reaffirmed their commitment to Lebanon’s sovereignty, identity, and unity.

But the real importance of the episode does not lie in the claim itself. It lies in the condition that allows such a claim to enter public imagination at all: the erosion of confidence in the state as the guarantor of security and belonging.

When citizens begin to contemplate protection outside their own state, it is never the beginning of a political project — it is the symptom of a political vacuum. When the state ceases to guarantee security equally to all its citizens, communities gradually shift from the language of belonging to the language of survival. Once survival becomes the dominant logic, even ideas that were previously unthinkable begin to enter public discourse. These are not ideological transformations in the classical sense; they are survival responses to the absence of a functioning state.

It is here that Father Michel Hayek offers one of the most penetrating readings of Lebanon’s very idea. Writing in 1979, in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War, Hayek argued that for a Maronite Christian, coexistence was not simply a political preference but a theological and historical obligation.

The distinction is essential. Constitutions may change. Political arrangements may be revised. Institutions may be rebuilt. But the Covenant cannot be abandoned, because it represents the very reason Lebanon exists as a nation.

From this perspective, Hayek argued that the constitutional Formula established in 1943 was never sacred. It was an attempt shaped by its historical moment — and experience revealed its shortcomings. Its deeper flaw was not merely political but philosophical: it failed to define clearly the fundamental principles upon which coexistence rested. In doing so, it contradicted the very logic that makes plural societies possible: “Distinguish in order to unite.” Instead of recognizing difference as the foundation of a shared civic life, it gradually transformed differences into hardened sectarian categories.

Lebanon’s Christians have historically been among the strongest defenders of this Covenant precisely because they understood that their presence in the region was inseparable from the preservation of a shared national space in which difference is protected rather than erased. The Maronite experience was shaped not by rejection of others but by encounters with others — and the many communities with whom they shared the mountains, villages, and cities of Lebanon.

Yet today, that confidence is under strain. Many Lebanese increasingly feel that the state which is meant to embody this Covenant has retreated from its most fundamental obligation: ensuring equal protection for all its citizens. When that obligation weakens, trust begins to fracture — not only between citizens and the state, but between communities and the very idea of the state itself.

The responsibility, therefore, rests not on communities themselves but on the state: to ensure that no group ever feels compelled to choose between survival and coexistence.

Yet Lebanon has been declared finished too many times to be taken seriously as a case of disappearance. It has survived civil war, invasion, occupation, economic collapse, political paralysis, and repeated regional upheavals that should have overwhelmed it. Each time, it has re-emerged — altered but intact. Habakkuk’s warning still echoes through this history: violence against Lebanon never concludes its story.

Lebanon is not merely a republic. It is a Covenant. Its political system may one day be reimagined, and its constitutional arrangements may be rewritten. But Lebanon itself endures. The Formula may change. The Covenant cannot.

This country has absorbed every attempt to simplify it, divide it, or absorb it into someone else’s logic. It has never been finished. And it will not be finished now.

So too will its Christians remain — not as remnants of a fading past, but as a living and inseparable part of Lebanon’s identity, memory, and future. Their belonging is not conditional upon political convenience, nor dependent upon the protection of another power. Their story is written into the history of Lebanon itself.