Why Do We Keep Rebuilding? A Deep Reflection on the Meaning of Our Work in the Middle East
Why do you always rebuild?
What is the point of doing it, if someone comes to destroy it every time?" This is a question we are often asked during meetings where we share our work. It is a fair question, as it forces us to strip away any rhetoric. It demands an explanation of what it truly means, today, to remain in the Middle East and still speak of reconstruction.
The Middle East: A Crisis Lasting Years
Lebanon is perhaps the place where this question carries the most weight. In Lebanon, the current war did not arrive overnight; it is grafted onto a crisis that has lasted for years. Just a few months ago, the World Bank spoke of a cautious recovery, with growth returning to positive in 2025, yet fragile and tied to unstable political and regional conditions. It was a fragile recovery. Today, that fragility has shattered once again.
In the past week, the country has experienced another wave of mass displacement: over 667,000 people forced to leave their homes, more than 120,000 sheltered in collective centers, and others in cars, on the streets, or in schools and public buildings adapted for the emergency.
Beirut has been hit again, even outside the areas that until recently seemed relatively protected. For many families, this means a simple and harsh reality: becoming refugees once more.
Furthermore, this time Lebanon is not just facing a local crisis. It is caught within a wider regional crisis. The tension between the United States and Iran has expanded the conflict and made its borders more unstable. The near-blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the fear of further escalation, and the pressure on prices and trade show that we are facing dramatic uncertainties. When conflict expands, it is not strategic balances that pay the price first, but societies that are already exhausted.
Hope as a Responsibility
Faced with images of gutted buildings, of refugees once again on the move seeking shelter, and in the face of the failure of international law and an increasingly uncertain future, the question returns: Why do you rebuild?
We rebuild because we hope. And hope must not be confused with optimism. It is not thinking that everything will be fine. It is not even imagining that a single project, a donation, or a reopened school can, by itself, change the destiny of the Middle East. Hope, as we see it, is the belief that good can be born anywhere, even in the worst situations. And this generates a responsibility.
Destruction in Middle East: Not the Only Language
This is why rebuilding does not only mean raising walls. It means preventing destruction from becoming the only possible language. It means protecting people when everything around them pushes us to consider them only as numbers: displaced persons, the wounded, refugees, the poor. It means keeping a school open, running a clinic, helping a family return home, and accompanying those who have lost everything without adding any calculation to their pain.
In the Middle East, rebuilding is not the final gesture that comes after the war. Often, it is a gesture performed during the war, or between one war and the next. It is an incomplete, exposed, and fragile work. Yet, it is necessary. Because if we stop rebuilding, we accept the logic of destruction. We accept that those who strike have more power than those who heal, that those who uproot have more of a future than those who remain, and that fear is more realistic than trust.
Why We Will Not Stop Rebuilding in Middle East
We do not expect to solve all the problems of the Middle East. That would be a naive claim. However, we believe that every time a person returns to live in a home, every time a child returns to school, every time a family feels they have not been left alone, something very concrete happens: evil loses a part of its ground.
This is why we continue to rebuild. Not because we ignore the risk that everything might be hit again, but because we know the alternative is worse: letting force, fear, and revenge be the only things that decide the meaning of life. And that is something we cannot allow.
