For the Love of the Country

The skyscrapers, the luxurious cars, the gigantic malls, the artificial landscapes, the man-made weather, the veiled, the nude and the multi-language speaking streets: Welcome to Dubai. The minute you step out the airport doors, you instantly feel like you’ve landed on a new planet. It’s metropolitan… it’s cosmopolitan……..it’s drastic! While sitting with family members in one of Dubai’s synthetic atmospheres (i.e. mall), I was asked about my “plan B” if a war erupts in Lebanon. My clear intentions of not leaving the country were followed by a long debate on whether war is the only solution left to solve all conflicts in this region. In other words, it is obviously believed by many that war would be the clear cut determinant of the strongest party/side and hence the authority that should rule the area of conflict. At one point, my sister stated that “We (the Arabs) do not love our countries anymore. If we did, internal conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon would not be happening and hence we would not be so vulnerable.” With that, I couldn’t help but wonder: Have we grown out of “loving” or getting attached to certain territory because it’s a small world after all and we belong everywhere? Do we belong anywhere? And, if this is a small world, then why does a new Holocaust in Gaza not trigger any kind of response from cities just a few hours away?!

Normally, societies blame politicians and stakeholders for not “loving” the country and holding individual interests or hidden agendas instead, hence spinning around in a conflict impasse. However, expression of an abstract term like “love” should be defined first, especially when it’s directed towards a certain place. Therefore, the blame could also be shared by the people, since the expression of love, or hatred in this case, can go down to the smallest details like littering the streets or vandalizing the properties of the country.

Nowadays, people would argue that the place that guarantees one a good life deserves all the love one would hold. So, many would dismiss their Palestinian roots and settle for the new identity, granted to them by a little blue book called a passport, because Palestine has not given them anything while the new place granted them a life. Similarly, many Arabs would deny their Middle Eastern roots for the new American, Canadian or European identities because in those countries human beings are respected, rights are secured and accountability is held by strict laws. Accordingly, we should redefine “love for the country” and whether such feelings are directly related to the adoption of a certain identity, since it is apparent that most of us living in this part of the world suffer from an identity crisis.

On the other hand, some might argue that we still hold so much love for our countries. Nevertheless, the expression of love has changed from one generation to the other as we are moving to becoming more individualistic societies. Nowadays, one is usually putting oneself in advance before the nation, while our ancestors concentrated on the nation as a whole and hence they fought to stay on a particular piece of land rather than leaving it for another life somewhere else. Another stated argument is that we get attached to a certain place because of the people in it. Thus, we grow to love a specific place as a result of the experiences and relations we make in it rather than what that territory has to offer in terms of materialistic possessions. Consequently, our expression of love should stem out of respect to that place in the sense that we should try our best to stay there and create a respectful life rather than wait to be granted one.

The problem with us (the Arabs) is that we are still linking identity to certain piece of land. Alternatively, a new stream of thinking is emerging where people around the world are relating identity to the whole world. Therefore, it is a small world after all and we do belong everywhere. In other words, we belong to a whole system and we are all related to one another. This mode of thought is the main force that urged the French people in Paris to walk the streets in protest shortly after the Holocaust in Gaza. Unfortunately, reactions from the Arab world were concentrated in areas that share the Palestinian enemy, like Lebanon for example. Conversely, the deluxe Gulf countries are experiencing the biggest economic boom in their history and have no direct threats; hence they tend to smoothly dismiss such violent events.

In reality, this is a long argument with multiple dimensions. For the love of the country, we should learn to contemplate the changes that we can make and accumulate the courage to make them. The initiative to change should come from each individual for the good of an entire nation. For the love of the country, we should appreciate the land that holds us all together and work for its development rather than its destruction