I have always wanted to do this: get in my car, call my friends, pick them up, and hit the road. “Where do you wanna go?” I want to ask, “Haifa” perhaps they’d say, “oh but that’s too far from Damascus, can’t we go to Beirut first?”

I can come up with dozens of replies from my imaginary friends in an imaginary world. But why is it imaginary? Let’s say I live in Paris, I can hop in a car, I can call my friends, I can pick them up, and we can hit the road to Rome maybe? Athens? Valencia? I’d love to go to a random Mediterranean village on the borders between Italy and Southern France, simply because I want to know what language they would speak. However if I were to go to a random village between Lebanon and Syria, I wouldn’t need to ask that question. Yet I still can’t. It is impossible to pass between the thousands of small villages scattered across borders made by men who lived decades ago and whose countries today live in a luxury we do not have; the freedom of movement. I would have to stand in line on the Syrian borders, then the Lebanese borders, to deal with a bunch of moody & underpaid officers, simply to get into a country that speaks not only my language, but my dialect too, that has the same history, the same culture, and the same food. What if I want to go to Jerusalem? Yafa? Byblos or perhaps Tyre! In your dreams! How dare you dream so big?

We have been listening, since childhood, to empty promises and slogans of a free Palestine or “a union of Arab nations”, but what I’m asking here is not for an unrealistic union of the entire Arabic-speaking world, I simply wish to see at least the Levant free of borders. Yet here we are, worse than we had been only 70 years ago. It seems like the world moves forward, and we, crushed, have nothing but to romanticize the glorious past as always.