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By Bishop Jules Boutros
Lebanon’s Bishop
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More than half a century ago, Pope Paul VI wrote in Populorum Progressio that “development is the new name for peace.” Those words have a particular meaning for Lebanon today.
I write as a Catholic bishop whose perspective is rooted in my pastoral experience. During the war, I visited displaced families almost every day, traveling to Christian villages in southern Lebanon. I listen to families who have lost homes and livelihoods, who are afraid to return, or who wonder whether their children still have a future there. Those experiences have strengthened my belief that decisions of war and peace must belong to the Lebanese state, and that all Lebanese should look to the same institutions for their security. But they have also made me ask: Is the course we are on creating the conditions for lasting security or planting the seeds of the next conflict?
This week I am traveling to Washington to speak with U.S. policymakers. From D.C., the war in Lebanon can appear to be primarily a confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, centered on Lebanon’s Shi’a community. From southern Lebanon, it looks different. The South is home to Lebanon’s Shi’a, Christians, Druze, and others whose villages, livelihoods and futures have been intertwined for generations. Since the start of this war, Christians, too, have been displaced and our communities have been shrinking for decades as successive crises push young Lebanese to emigrate. While a house may eventually be rebuilt, a community is harder to reconstruct.
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When people repeatedly lose their homes, livelihoods, relatives and sense of security, they begin to ask a very basic question: Who will protect us? But protection is not only about weapons. A young person also needs the prospect of building a future. When the state cannot provide it, others step into the vacuum. Hezbollah has, accordingly, built its influence through schools, health care, salaries, social assistance, as well as arms and ideology.
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If we want young Lebanese to choose the state, we have to give them something meaningful to choose. This means investing in the places from which conflict draws its recruits: schools, universities, local businesses, infrastructure and jobs. A young person should not have to depend on an armed organization for basic security or survival.
If people believe that the Lebanese state cannot protect them from external attack or provide them with a viable future, the argument that they need another protector becomes easier to accept. But if they see the Lebanese army securing their villages, the state enabling them to return home, institutions helping them rebuild their lives and an economy offering their children a future, that argument begins to lose its power. The future of Hezbollah’s weapons therefore cannot be separated from the future credibility of the Lebanese state.
An ideology cannot be defeated by a missile, but by a more compelling idea. For Lebanon, this idea should be citizenship: that a Christian, Shi’a, Sunni, or Druze can belong first to a common state, and that our country’s future should not be determined by wars and causes beyond its borders.
This is why education matters. Through our Leadership Academy for Peace, we train young Lebanese, including Christians, to understand leadership as service to the whole country. Lebanon needs political leaders who can challenge corruption, rebuild institutions, and persuade young Lebanese that their future can be made at home.
As a bishop, I also see how military force may eliminate an immediate threat but will also produce fear, humiliation and resentment that create the foundations for another cycle of conflict. Christians have a particular stake here because our future cannot be secured by a permanently militarized Lebanon or by the alienation of another community. Lebanon survives because its Christians, Shi’a, Sunnis, and Druze have chosen, however imperfectly, to share one country and place their future in it. When any community concludes that the state neither represents nor protects it, the entire national compact is weakened.
Lebanon does not have to accept Hezbollah's weapons or live under indefinite military pressure. There is another path: a sovereign Lebanese state capable of protecting its territory and citizens, controlling weapons and decisions of war and peace, and giving every Lebanese community a reason to place its confidence in national institutions rather than armed movements or foreign patrons.
Getting there requires more than disarmament—the state must deliver on security, safety, and economic recovery. As such, Israeli withdrawal and an end to continuing military operations should not be understood as concessions to Hezbollah, but as part of creating a Lebanon in which people can look to the state for protection.
Pope Paul VI understood that peace cannot simply be the absence of war. People need the conditions that allow them to live with dignity and imagine a future. Development is peace because it gives people something to build rather than something to fight for. That work may seem frustratingly slow but can only happen piecemeal: a family returning home, a young person finding work, a child receiving an education, a village rebuilt.
When Washington considers the next decision on Lebanon, look beyond the next military operation and ask what kind of country that decision is helping create five or 10 years from now. Will it be a Lebanon in which frightened and frustrated communities continue to seek security, livelihoods, and belonging outside the state? Or one in which Christians, Shi’a, Sunnis and Druze increasingly believe that their security and their future lie in the same Lebanese state? For me, that is the real measure of whether we are moving toward peace.
Bishop Jules Boutros is a Curial Bishop of the Syriac Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch and titular bishop of Amida.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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