The Syrian incidents have touched the heart of the minorities' problem in the Arab East. The Syrians thus asked themselves and their neighbors among the Lebanese, Iraqis and Jordanians the most difficult and complicated question of all: How to exit the maze of the relations between the minorities and majorities with the authority? The positions of the forces representing the sectarian minorities in Lebanon for example, reveal – without the shadow of a doubt – the state of panic prevailing in their ranks due to the developments and turns adopted by the Arab revolutions. And ever since the opposition movements in Bahrain were eliminated by force, it seems that the revolutions' momentum, slogans and calls for democracy disappeared, and were replaced with fear over their transformation into a series of civil wars between the components of the Arab countries after the Libyan model revived the previous Iraqi one. Instead of opening up to the democratic demands as an exit from the identity crisis and the recurring disputes in our countries, some of the leaders of the Lebanese sects chose reclusion with their weapons, far away from the new Arab ray of light carried by these revolutions. They even found it easier to attribute the revolutions to American-Israeli conspiracies concocted and imagined by informants and fifth degree journalists. Consequently, the handling of these detailed domestic affairs by some, became neurotic and emotional reactions as it was seen at the level of the formation of a government whose prime minister they chose themselves, in circumstances that are still vivid in our memories. If we were to line up the positions of the leaders of the Lebanese sects during the last few days one next to the other, we would detect the perfusion of arrogance, superiority and hounding in a textbook embodiment of pathological denial. This stringency and the refusal to listen to the other logic reveal what extends beyond concerns over the presence, and constitute a setback into a vicious circle of fear and mistrust. And despite the seriousness of the missed opportunity to join the current times and become liberated from the burden of small and micro identities, there is a lethal historical blindness that is not only threatening the chances of the armed and panicked identities to participate in the drafting of the future of the region from a position similar to that of the minorities in the Arab renaissance stage, but is also opening the door before civil wars whose first victim will be the principle of democracy and the ability to practice it in the country. It is no longer useful to hide behind the cover of rejectionism, resistance and the hostility toward Israel to justify the minorities' fear and the search for the areas of strength of the other minorities, or to hide behind the arms and their logic to elude toward greater causes in light of the inability to resolve the smaller ones. What the Arab revolutions offer in terms of promises to establish new power balances in the region, allow the building of hopes over a less unfair future for the Palestinians, better than what they have endured in the brotherly detention camps and the war of the camps in Lebanon and elsewhere. One does not need a fertile imagination to see that the exit from the deadlock in which some Lebanese sects have placed themselves, might be by fleeing forward and giving Israel the necessary pretexts to launch war on Lebanon. This is due to the fact that what is happening in Syria will generate transformations that will exceed our imagination. And transformations of such magnitude can only be stopped with desperate acts of the same magnitude. Yet, this will not be the first time that powers and regimes in crisis resort to domestic and external war instead of confronting the predicaments. The Middle East is almost a laboratory for these bankrupt policies, while the biggest problem at this level is that the Arab minorities and majorities might have missed an opportunity that will not be repeated in the near future, to move from the stage of groups to that of populations.
