I left Beirut in the summer of 1984. I was thirty-one years old, newly married, carrying two suitcases and the absolute certainty — the kind only a fool or a young man can possess — that I would return within the year.
Forty years have passed.
I have not returned. Not in the way I meant. I have visited, yes — a few cautious pilgrimages to a country that keeps changing its face, like a patient always recovering from a surgery I did not authorize. But returning as someone coming home, to a place that still belongs to him? No. Because the Lebanon I left does not entirely exist anymore, and the one that replaced it was built, in no small part, by hands that were never Lebanese.
I want to say something plainly, something Lebanese people — especially those of us in the diaspora — have long said in private but hesitated to say aloud. I say it now because I am sixty-eight years old and have run out of patience for diplomatic silence.
Iran: give me my country back.
I grew up in a Beirut where my Greek Orthodox neighbors argued theology with my Sunni classmates over backgammon, where a Shia grocer named Abu Hassan gave my mother credit when my father’s business struggled and never made her feel ashamed. Lebanon was not paradise — no honest Lebanese will tell you it was. But its dysfunctions were ours to argue about, to endure, to reform. It was ours.
The Islamic Republic of Iran made a strategic decision to build a state within the Lebanese state. Not to support a community, but to construct an armed organization — Hezbollah — powerful enough that no Lebanese government could ever truly govern against it. Hassan Nasrallah was never coy about where his loyalty lay. He said plainly that he was a soldier of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Not of Lebanon. Of Iran.
What does it mean for a country when its armed power answers to a foreign theocrat? It means Lebanon cannot have a foreign policy. It means years of governmental paralysis whenever Tehran is displeased. It means Lebanese soil becomes a theater for Iranian-Israeli confrontation, and Lebanese civilians become the casualties. It means that the port of Beirut can store ammonium nitrate — a choice made not by the Lebanese state but by an organization operating as a sovereign unto itself — until one August morning in 2020 it killed more than two hundred people and erased entire neighborhoods of a city that had already been erased so many times.
My cousin Elias lived three kilometers from the port. He lost hearing in one ear. His daughter needed eye surgery. He is still in Beirut because he cannot afford to leave.
I have heard the counterarguments and I want to be fair to them. Lebanese state corruption is real and profound. The political class has looted the country with a thoroughness that should be studied as a case study in civilizational failure. If Hezbollah provided services the state refused to provide, that says something about the state’s abdication. Israeli invasions of Lebanese territory were real, and the resistance narrative did not emerge from nothing. American and Saudi interference has also shaped Lebanon’s misery.
I grant all of this. And then I ask: does any of it justify what Iran has done? Does Lebanese corruption justify building a parallel state answerable to Tehran? Does Israeli aggression justify giving a foreign theocracy control over Lebanese military decisions?
Lebanon is not an eye in anyone’s eye-for-an-eye. Lebanon is a country of five million people who did not consent to become a front line in someone else’s civilizational war.
The Lebanon I grew up in was chaotic, fractious, beautiful, and stubbornly itself. The best food in the world, made by women who never wrote down a recipe. Mountains holding snow in the morning while you could swim in the sea by afternoon. Fairuz’s voice from every window on Sunday, making even atheists feel something like God.
That soul is not gone. The Lebanese people carry it everywhere — my children, born in Lyon, who say yalla without thinking, who eat their grandmother’s kibbeh and understand without being told that this matters. But the political entity, the functioning republic, has been slowly and deliberately suffocated. Not by its own people alone. By a foreign power that decided Lebanon was too useful a card to let the Lebanese play freely.
The young people who filled the streets in October 2019, chanting “all of them means all of them,” understood something clearly: Lebanon’s crisis was not Christian versus Muslim, not Sunni versus Shia, but the Lebanese people versus a system that had captured their country. That system has a center of gravity. And that center is not in Beirut.
My mother died in 1998, in the house where she was born. I was not there in time. She used to say Lebanon was like a stubborn old cedar — it bends in every storm, loses branches, people say it cannot survive — but it always stands.
I want to believe that still. I want to believe this country can one day be returned to itself — not to some imagined golden past, but to the simple condition of being answerable to its own people. Of having a government that governs. Of being permitted to determine its own fate.
For that to happen, Iran must release its grip.
I say it for my mother. I say it for Elias and his daughter with the injured eye. I say it for the young woman I saw in a video from Beirut in 2019, standing on a car in the rain, laughing and crying at the same time, holding a sign that read simply: I want my country.
I want it too.
Iran, we are not your cause. We are not your buffer zone, your deterrent, your resistance front. We are Lebanese. We are a small, ancient, impossible, necessary people, and we have a country that belongs to us.
Give it back.
Ramzi Khalil Nassar was born in Beirut in 1953 and has lived in Lyon, France since 1984. He is a retired architect.