Who are we as Lebanese people? Are we Phoenicians, Arabs, or something else entirely? This question isn’t academic or innocent—it is embedded in everything about how Lebanon functions. Our political system depends on this question remaining unresolved, because identity in Lebanon has never been about history alone. It has always been about power.
The modern Lebanese identity debate was engineered to justify division. Maronite elites promoted Phoenicianism to legitimize a Christian-dominated, separate state, while Greek Orthodox intellectuals—also Christians—were among the founders of Arab nationalism. From the start, identity narratives weren’t competing truths; they were competing political projects.
The Phoenician claim itself is deeply misunderstood. It was largely manufactured under French mandate in the early 20th century to justify carving Lebanon out of Greater Syria. “Phoenician” wasn’t even a self-described identity—it was a Greek term used to describe a collection of coastal city-states. These people never called themselves Phoenicians. If anything, they were Canaanites.
And this is where the irony begins. Modern Palestinians are Canaanites. Western Syrians are Canaanites. Jordanians are Canaanites. The very identity constructed to prove Lebanon’s distinctiveness ends up proving the opposite: we are fundamentally the same people. Genetic studies consistently show that Lebanese people—Christian and Muslim alike—share over 90% ancestry with ancient Canaanites. Religiously different, yes. Genetically? Nearly identical.
The “Arab” claim presents a different but equally flawed problem. It treats “Arab” as if it were a single, coherent ethnic category. It isn’t. Jordanians are genetically Canaanite but identify as Arab. Many Syrians from Aleppo have strong Armenian ancestry yet also identify as Arab. Even within the Arabian Peninsula, populations differ significantly—western coastal regions carry substantial Ethiopian DNA. So when we say “we are Arab,” which Arab are we talking about? Jeddah? Riyadh? Dubai?
Arabness is cultural and linguistic, not genetic.
This matters because it dismantles another myth: that Arab invasions displaced local populations. They didn’t. The people stayed. Religions changed. In coastal cities like Beirut, Tripoli, and Saida, conversion made practical sense—lower taxes, better access to state power, and economic mobility. In the remote mountains, beyond easy state control, communities like the Maronites and Druze retained their faiths. Geography shaped religion, not bloodlines.
What this tells us is uncomfortable but liberating: we are the same people who made different religious decisions based on circumstance. The real division isn’t ancient—it’s institutional.
Lebanon’s political system requires identity confusion to survive. Take the Nufous system, which ties citizens to ancestral villages based on the 1932 census. You don’t vote where you live. You vote where your grandparents lived. Beirut, a city of nearly three million people, votes as if it had a fraction of that population. This is gerrymandering in its purest form, designed to preserve sectarian balance rather than democratic reality.
Change this one thing, and the entire system collapses.
That’s why the identity debate never ends. It’s a distraction. Asking “who we really are” assumes there is some primordial truth waiting to be uncovered through archaeology or DNA tests. But identity isn’t discovered—it’s constructed.
When Italy unified in 1861, a politician famously said, “We have created Italy. Now we must create Italians.” Nations are not ancient facts; they are modern agreements. If Lebanon had functioning institutions for thirty uninterrupted years, the next generation wouldn’t debate whether they were Phoenician or Arab. They would simply be Lebanese—because their shared experience would be Lebanese.
The Taif system effectively ended in 2019. The sectarian model has failed. We’ve hit rock bottom. So the real question isn’t who we were—it’s who we choose to become.
We are whatever we decide to build.
Reform Taif, and we become Lebanese. Preserve sectarianism, and we remain tribes. The future isn’t written in our DNA or carved into ancient ruins. It will be built through institutions that make this question irrelevant.
This article was inspired by an instagram post by Karim Salam @lebaneseacademic
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