In an effort to bring the Lebanese people into a common understanding of a bright future, some colleagues and I decided to tackle the issue of reconciliation in Lebanon. We came across many thought-provoking ideas and questions.
One of the first questions that arose was: who, exactly, are we trying to reconcile?
The Civil War began as a political conflict, evolved into a sectarian war, and eventually devolved into intra-sectarian fighting. Various factions fought against each other, often switching alliances. At first, we considered asking all political parties to sign a joint statement acknowledging their responsibilities or offering an apology. Our thinking was that while a broad amnesty law was enacted in Lebanon in 1991 to pardon all political crimes committed prior to its enactment, that legal closure did not amount to a moral or historical reckoning. The rationale behind our proposal to seek acknowledgment or apology was not to reopen wounds for the sake of blame, but rather to confront the past honestly as a necessary step toward healing. Amnesty did not absolve society of the responsibility to remember—or to reconcile. A society cannot reconcile with what it refuses to name.
A precedent exists: in January 2008, as part of I‘lan Filastin fi Lubnan (“The Announcement of Palestine in Lebanon”), Palestinian Ambassador Abbas Zaki—then a member of the Fatah Central Committee—issued a public apology “for any damage caused by the Palestinians to their beloved Lebanon” during the war.
Some Lebanese figures have already offered courageous apologies. Walid Jumblatt, Asad Chaftari, and Mohsen Ibrahim gave clear, public acknowledgments of responsibility. Others, such as Samy Gemayel (who did not personally participate in the war but spoke on behalf of the Kataeb Party) and Samir Geagea, offered more vague acknowledgements that stopped short of formal apologies. Meanwhile, Nabih Berri and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) have not issued apologies. Michel Aoun, notably, has refused to acknowledge any involvement in the war, even while demanding that others apologize.
This raises the question: who should be apologizing, and to whom? Should former militia leaders apologize to the communities they harmed, to the families of victims, or to the Lebanese public as a whole? In the case of Hezbollah, for example, whose military engagement during the civil war was primarily intra-sectarian, would any apology be directed inward, within their own community? And beyond the civil war period of 1975 to 1990, Hezbollah’s more recent military actions have raised additional questions about accountability. Can meaningful reconciliation take place without acknowledging not only the legacies of the civil war, but also the consequences of more recent wars fought in Lebanon’s name or from its territory?
Furthermore, given the deeper uncertainty surrounding a war of many wars, how does reconciliation function in a country where the lines of battle shifted constantly? When responsibility is scattered across dozens of battles, factions, and massacres, who, exactly, is meant to reconcile with whom? Should each massacre, siege, or political assassination be addressed individually, each with its own victims, perpetrators, and contested narratives? Or is there a path toward a more collective reckoning? Without clarity on the actors involved and the intended audience of reconciliation, such efforts risk becoming symbolic at best.
After much debate, we chose to narrow the focus to the Lebanese Civil War period from 1975 to 1990, in the hope of reducing the scope of our work. However, true reconciliation would also require engaging with Palestinian factions and the Syrian government, both of which played significant roles in that conflict.
Still, limiting the scope of reconciliation to end in 1990 did not feel right. After all, one could argue that the civil war extended until 2000, with the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, which involved Lebanese men in the South Lebanon Army, and the ongoing skirmishes with the mainly Hezbollah fighters. Do we attempt to reconcile with those Lebanese of the South Lebanon Army? Shall we avoid reopening that chapter for fear of unleashing yet another Pandora’s box? And what about the period after 2000? Should we forget the over 20 political assassinations that extinguished the hopes of being led by figures capable of uniting the fractured landscape into a larger national cause?
Should we go further and confront the root causes of the war? Are we ready to construct a unified national narrative? In South Africa, it is uncontroversial to say that Black South Africans lived under apartheid. In the United States, there is broad consensus that slavery and Jim Crow were historical facts. Does Lebanon have such shared truths? Or are we resigned to a fragmented, multi-narrative memory of the past?
A genuine reconciliation process may require confronting hard truths. For example, Lebanese society long scapegoated the Assad regime for the disappearance of over 17,000 Lebanese.
Yet when the brutal regime collapsed in 2024, no evidence of those missing persons was found. The more uncomfortable possibility is that many of those individuals were kidnapped or “disappeared” by Lebanese militias themselves, given the numerous mass graves that remain scattered and unaccounted for across Lebanon.
Given the dangerous times the Middle East is going through, with dramatic changes, ongoing wars, and rhetoric about carving up the Levant, I have found myself questioning whether this is the right moment to raise the issue of national reconciliation. On the one hand, and as Lebanon approaches the 50th anniversary of the start of the civil war, the conflict has become a distant chapter for many in my generation: neither directly experienced nor widely discussed, and often missing from formal education or public discourse. On the other hand, the fact that so many young people do not remember the war is not a reason to forget it; it is a reason to remember it, to examine it, and to learn from it.
Reconciliation is not about dwelling on the past. Rather, it is about making peace with it so that it does not continue to shape our future in unseen and corrosive ways. If we are to build a Lebanon that is resilient, inclusive, and capable of weathering disagreement without collapse, then we must begin by facing the truth of what happened, and by finding, however imperfectly, a shared language to name it. Perhaps that is where hope begins – not in certainty, but in the collective willingness to confront what has long gone unspoken.
Mahmoud Ramadan is a patent law clerk based in the U.S.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
