There are a lot of things I'm ashamed of as a Lebanese man. None of them is as frustrating and depressing as robbing Lebanese women of the right to pass down the Lebanese citizenship to their children, none.

The Reason Why Many Think It's Ok

Palestinian refugees. It's one of those rare occasions in which politicians and former warlords aren't shy to state the real motives behind the evil they enforce. Usually, they try to sugarcoat it with empty titles like "preserving the peace" and "preserving the unity of Lebanon's sects". But in this case, it's clear: they're deathly terrified of Palestinian refugees of more than 7 decades becoming Lebanese citizens by marrying Lebanese women.

Christian conservatives pop up as the main obstacle to rectifying this unacceptable injustice. Christian conservatives often blame the Palestinian refugees for most of Lebanon's woes, and perhaps that is true to some degree. It is no secret that after 1948, PLO and other Palestinian militants used Lebanon as a base of operations against Israeli forces. It is also no secret that this created tensions that sparked the 15-year civil war that left more than 150,000 people, mostly civilians, dead. It also dethroned the Christians from their unfairly favorable position in governing the country, d instead of focusing on proper governance, executive power was handed to the Muslim Sunni prime minister instead of the Christian Maronite president. A president that is largely ceremonial, as the past year without one has proven.

And today, more than 40 years after the war began, people are still as paranoid of the Palestinian refugee presence.

Why That's Fucked Up

First

There are 16,800 Lebanese women who are married to Palestinian men. Let's assume the average is two children per marriage, that's roughly 34,000 people. Assuming all of the Palestinian men are Sunni, that's 34,000 extra Sunnis. I don't know about you, but I doubt that number (or double that even) would severely off-set the already absurd obsession of keeping a balance between the sects that has not reflect the actual state of Lebanon's demographics for decades...

Second

You are punishing half the Lebanese population for a scenario that is both completely divorced from reality and no longer valid like it might have been at the hight of the Lebanese civil war (which supposedly ended a quarter of a century ago). Perhaps the problem is that the key players are still the same, a group of ageing warlords that granted amnesty to themselves after a decade and a half of some of the most horrifying barbaric acts the world has ever seen in its modern history. Stuff that would make ISIS barbarism today look commonplace.

Third

And this is the most obvious one for me personally, is that the Lebanese government should have absolutely no right to decide if half the population is allowed to have kids with full status as Lebanese citizens instead of "stateless" individuals in permanent limbo (we have about 200,000 stateless folks in Lebanon, for several absurd reasons).

This is a common theme in a lot of issues in our country and region: the patriarchal society we live in feels that it can decide to rob human beings of their natural rights (who to love, how to get married, what you can believe or not believe in, etc.). No government should decide who can get married or not. No government has the right to punish a baby boy or baby girl for political childishness former (and probably future) warlords use to rile up their conservative base. How that seems logical or fair to anyone, is beyond me.

Khallas, Enough

We've been fed the bullshit about preserving the delicate balance of sects for far too long. We often seem to forget that all of Lebanon's sects were once refugees. The absence of a modern history book seems to have helped most of us forget that our ancestors ran away from somewhere far worse, and sought refuge and built their new lives in Lebanon's rugged mountains and impenetrable valleys.

If you think that's ancient history, let's take the Armenian community as an example. Did the Armenians who sought refuge in Lebanon after the Armenian Genocide in 1915 cause Lebanon to crumble and the system to completely fail? Nope, they didn't. They became a part of the Lebanese community, just like everyone else, with the same rights, amazing accomplishments and fulfilling their duties to their new home, without forgetting their ancestors heritage, suffering and cause. Apart from some sectarian assholes raising the Turkish flag to spite Lebanese-Armenians in April, the month where the world remembers the Ottoman crimes against humanity. But, the integration has been otherwise seamless.

How would the son or daughter of a Palestinian dad and Lebanese mom be disastrous? Is it because they're probably going to be Sunni Muslim? Are probably-Christian refugees ok to naturalize, while Muslim ones aren't because Christian numbers are dwindling? Is it like some perverse scale that someone thinks they can alter the way they see fit to go along with their political aspirations? How is a kid with a Lebanese mom, who grows up in Lebanon, with Lebanese friends and who will probably fall in love and marry a Lebanese person, a threat to Lebanon? Will they all be secret PLO agents waiting to eject Lebanon's Christians from their own country?

A Few Notes

Shiite conservatives today, in light of the so-called Sunni-Shiite conflict in the region, will probably be as paranoid as their Christian counterparts, even though less loud-mouthed than their Christian ones on the issue.

Also, it's not like giving them the Lebanese citizenship is such a fantastic perk, that one needs to "filter" who gets it. We don't get to go anywhere without pre-approved visas. It's absurdly expensive. It holds no real value, because its holder's government couldn't care less about him or her. So, why are we being so stingy with something that the rest of us are trying our best to supplement with an actual one? How can we be hypocrites to that degree, doing anything possible to get a foreign passport, while denying others the right to get the one most of us wouldn't mind getting rid of?

Finally, all this outright fascist rhetoric has gotten old. We shouldn't have to argue against such a invalid points. Lebanese women should have the right to let their kids live a normal life. Do we really want the 60,000+ Lebanese women married to foreign, non-Palestinian men pay for this massively xenophobic "law of the land"? Do we actually think a Lebanese mom having to do a "residency" every few months for her own kids in her own country as justified? Why? Because Aoun and Geagea and their devotees don't like Palestinians? How is that the problem of the rest of us? How is that the mothers' fault? How is that the children's fault? And how is it ok for a Lebanese dad to marry a Palestinian mom, and their kids are Lebanese, but the same doesn't apply to women? How can we be equally so xenophobic AND sexist in one go for such a pathetically stupid argument?

Khallas ba2a. Think about Lebanese women, put aside your hatred for Palestinian and Syrian refugees, and ask yourself, who the fuck are you to deny a Lebanese woman the right to make her children Lebanese?