By Iñaki Estívaliz
Southern Lebanon is being erased from the map. Entire villages like Zabdin and Ansar now watch as their homes are reduced to rubble by an Israeli invasion as unjustified as it is calculated — part of an ongoing genocide. The official figures since last March are chilling: more than 2,800 dead and approximately 1.2 million people forced to flee their homes in a desperate exodus. And yet, just a few hours’ drive north, in Beirut’s affluent neighborhoods, the vibrant nightlife seems entirely unaffected. The contrast is obscene: music throbs in fashionable clubs, terraces are packed, and alcohol flows freely, while just meters away, thousands of tents housing displaced families crowd precariously along the exclusive marina and the capital’s waterfront promenade.
There is a deeply entrenched international myth that romanticizes the «resilience» of the Lebanese people. Yet that supposed collective strength is a mirage that the careless traveler fails to perceive, dazzled by local hospitality. Pay even a little attention to everyday conversations with taxi drivers, hotel concierges, or neighborhood barbers, and a different reality begins to emerge. What surfaces is an almost pathological need among many Lebanese to criticize the «other,» to blame the opposing faction for their shared misery, and to draw insurmountable lines within a single territory. In Lebanon, where 17 sects are officially recognized, difference is not a meeting point but a systematic basis for contempt — a selfish disconnection in which a neighbor’s suffering is merely an annoying background noise.
«We care more about the bricks above our heads and what they cost than about the children and men who are dying,» one voice declares, dissecting reality with surgical precision. «We care more about our matcha and our cappuccinos than about defending someone who is being unjustly stripped of their home for the fifth time.»
The Gentleman of the Levant
Rami Raef Kobeissi is an extraordinary figure, possessed of a narrative and argumentative ability entirely beyond the ordinary. Rami immediately evokes the magnetic bearing, the somewhat cynical elegance, and the deep voice of a convulsive Levantine Jeremy Irons. He speaks in torrents, chaining together geopolitical and sociological reflections of overwhelming density — in either an aristocratic English or a dazzling Arabic.
Although he left formal education in tenth grade, he displays a broad and generous general culture and a deep knowledge of the region’s religions and history that leaves anyone without a counterargument. Rami is a relentless observer of the failings of his own society, and his verdict on structural sectarianism is devastating: the state does not exist as a united community but as an archipelago of self-interests.
«In Lebanon we are not one people. We are one, plus one, plus one, plus one… We are not one; we are ‘ones.’ Separate ones. As long as it isn’t happening to me, everyone else can burn.»
A Century of Wounds Stitched with Fear
This widespread indolence does not arise from nowhere; it is the sediment of a profoundly fractured history. Lebanon carries an entire century of chained calamities that have pulverized social cohesion. First came the artificial drawing of its borders under French and British colonial mandates, which sowed the foundations of confessional divisions. Then came successive invasions by various countries that have historically used its soil as a bloody foreign battleground. To this must be added chronic and corrupt misgovernance, political assassinations, and a series of suffocating economic crises that have evaporated the savings of entire generations.
All of this historical collapse was crowned by the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020, a consequence of governmental negligence. Lebanon today is an exhausted and traumatized body, accustomed to «every man for himself» as the only viable law of survival.
The «Fourth Culture Kid»
Rami’s unflinching lucidity is not incidental; it is the result of a biography marked by political and family trauma. Born in Dubai to Lebanese parents, he defines himself not as a third-culture kid but a fourth-culture kid. The subtle distinction lies in the fact that he grew up not only navigating distance from his geographical roots, but amid a violent ethical and ideological crisis within his own home: a mother devoted to strict religiosity and a father of firmly secular convictions.
That multicultural bubble of childhood in the Emirates — delightful and happy, where he intuitively coexisted with dozens of nationalities without perceiving barriers — burst at the age of 14. His parents’ turbulent divorce forced him to return to Lebanon to live with his maternal family, plunging him into the country’s raw sectarian reality. The cultural shock broke him from day one. Upon arriving at his new school in Beirut, the first thing he saw were two crossed swords above the entrance — a military symbol that caused him genuine terror. Shortly afterward, he witnessed a crowd of students in the schoolyard brutally beating a classmate for the sole reason that his name revealed he belonged to a different religious faction.
Returning home in shock, he sought refuge in his mother and innocently asked what the difference was between those religions, and whether that boy was truly the supreme enemy. The response was a savage beating.
«Never in my life had my mother hit me that hard,» Rami recalls, reliving the echo of the blows. «I would lose consciousness and come back to in the middle of a tremendous beating — slaps that were knocking the soul out of me. At 30, I understood she was hitting me because my question had triggered her trauma from the civil war. My question unleashed every single bombardment that fell on her house, every bullet that passed near them. That day, seeing that there was no logic and fearing for my life, I became an atheist. I decided that God did not exist.»
The Schools of Exclusion: Heroin and Prison Literature
Institutional and family abandonment pushed Rami into the darkest margins of Beirut. By fourteen and a half he was already addicted to heroin; at sixteen, he entered prison for the first time. His youth became a rollercoaster of extremes, colonized entirely by survival. After spending a year and a half in rehabilitation, he showed unusual executive sharpness by becoming, at just 20, the youngest assistant manager at Pizza Hut in the region.
The respite was short-lived. At that same age, he received news of his father’s suicide, triggering an immediate relapse into drugs and a return to prison at 21. He spent an entire year locked away in absolute oblivion, with no one in his circle asking after him. It was in that radical solitude that Rami decided to turn prison into his classroom. He devoured every work of literature that NGOs left in the makeshift library. Driven by a clinical, untreatable ADHD that grants him an immense capacity for cognitive retention, he absorbed knowledge at an implausible speed. In those cells he even taught himself to read and pronounce Spanish on his own.
«The only reason I can pronounce letters in Spanish, read it, and speak it — even if I don’t fully understand it — is because I read the Bible in Spanish in prison. There was nothing else. I borrowed a King James version in English and placed it beside me to understand what I was reading. There I discovered I was intelligent in a way that was different from what society and my family had said about me.»
In a society like that of the Middle East, where families sweep neurodivergences and mental health issues under the carpet of collective shame to protect the family name, Rami had been labeled a defective castoff. Prison proved to him that his mind simply needed a language of its own.
The chain of family griefs, however, had saved its most harrowing link for last. Years later, Rami returned to take on the responsibility of caring for his ailing mother, carrying the weight of that violent past yet bound by an inescapable filial duty. He was with her through her final agony — a deeply traumatic process that coincided with the days following the great port explosion of 2020. It was not only the psychological impact of the blast that ultimately extinguished her; his mother died just days later, consumed by panic and the unbearable financial strain wrought by the collapse of the Lebanese pound against the dollar, watching the value of basic necessities vanish within hours. Witnessing her die suffocated by the economic anxiety of a failed state cemented Rami’s contempt for the elites who govern the country and for the dynamics of psychological submission that pervade its society.
The Farce of the Warlords
That same lucidity is what he deploys to dismantle the political rhetoric surrounding Lebanon. Rami shows no mercy toward the impunity of the Israeli military machine, nor toward the local leaders who profit from misery. For him, the great historical swindle is that citizens have been conditioned to defend the very warlords who massacred their families in the past — accepting payment of mafia-style «protection fees» in exchange for a false sense of security against the neighbor from the opposing faction. It is a mechanism of control rooted in fear, injected intravenously from the cradle.
His analysis extends to international hypocrisy. He denounces the so-called «end-user certificates» in the international arms trade — documents that reveal how the same Arab monarchies that fill their mouths on television with talk of «Arab honor» and regional brotherhood are the ones financing and shipping weapons so that Lebanon’s various factions continue bleeding out in other people’s wars. Nor does he sidestep the responsibility behind Israel’s brutal external offensive, reducing the picture to a basic geopolitical injustice in which the systematic aggressor manipulates the narrative to always present itself as a victim acting in self-defense, while destroying lives and entire maps with impunity.
The Utopia of Human Currency
Faced with this moral and political wasteland, anyone else might have embraced pure nihilism. Rami, instead, has chosen to employ his talent to design a revolutionary model that challenges the logic of sectarianism and capital. His project involves the creation of a network of community hostels where the currency of exchange is not money so much as good deeds.
In this envisioned space, international travelers can stay for free on the condition that they earn the right to extend their nights by doing direct aid work for the local population: repairing basic infrastructure, teaching languages, or supporting disadvantaged communities. Each action is validated through a brief audiovisual record alongside the beneficiary, creating a trust archive that stimulates the internal economy through local consumption while simultaneously dismantling mutual xenophobic prejudices. It is a direct attempt to remove money from the center of human interaction and restore collective empathy to its place.
Rami knows perfectly well that he is fighting against enormous structures designed to perpetuate fear, isolation, and lack of solidarity. Yet looking into his eyes, it is clear that the boy who survived the beatings, the heroin, the prisons, and the collapse of his own home remains intact — completely armored against discouragement. His testimony is not a lament; it is an unquestionable victory against horror.
«This is not a sad story, my friend; this is a story of absolute success against all odds. The world is programmed to force people to kill the child within them and to push them to tear each other apart over stupid differences. I stood my ground. I refused to let them murder that child, and I made sure to come out of this hell with more love than a single person is capable of containing. The boy who enjoys the world through the eyes of others is still alive in me. They never managed to kill him.» ie
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