I live around there. I remember thinking: what is this really about? Is the government finally trying to crack down on the generator mafia? Is this a statement? Why him and not others? Could there be something legitimate in the file that everyone is now sweeping under the rug because the street moved faster than the paperwork?
That is the part that made the story feel so Lebanese. It was not an abstract case study about "clientelism" or "weak institutions." It was the sound of the Lebanese state discovering that even a generator bill has a sectarian border around it. One man was called in over electricity, and suddenly the whole question became: who has the right to enter this neighborhood, touch this operator, and call it law?
This is the kind of Lebanese story that looks absurd until you realize it is the country explaining itself.
Abu Ali was not a minister. He was not an MP. He did not command an official militia. But he controlled something more immediate than most ministries: electricity. In a country where the public grid is unreliable, the generator owner is not simply a businessman. He is the man who keeps the elevator moving, the fridge cold, the shop open, the street half-lit. He is hated, needed, resented, negotiated with, cursed at, defended. That mixture is Lebanon.
The state looked at him and saw an illegal operator. His supporters looked at him and saw a local provider. His political defenders looked at him and saw a Sunni neighborhood figure being targeted. His lawyer, Majed Damashqiyeh, spoke of extensions, documents, and "settling violations," as if the law were not a line but a bargaining table. Everyone was speaking honestly, in their own way. That was the problem.
Because the question was never only whether Abu Ali broke the law. He probably did, in the ordinary Lebanese sense in which half the country survives by breaking laws that are enforced only when someone decides enforcement is useful. The real question was why him, why now, and why only him.
Lebanon has tens of thousands of private generators. The sector is not a few men with engines in alleyways. It is a national shadow utility. It runs on diesel, meters, neighborhood understandings, political protection, municipal tolerance, and the permanent failure of Electricite du Liban. For years, governments have promised regulation. Meters, tariffs, licensing, crackdowns. The file returns every few years like a bad joke.
But serious enforcement would not be a reform. It would be a war.
If the state really went after the generator economy, it would have to go everywhere at once: Dahieh, Ashrafieh, Sakiet el-Janzeer, Aley, Tripoli, Metn, the villages, the suburbs, the buildings with two generators and three subscription rates. It would have to confront fuel importers, local bosses, municipalities, party men, security services, and the ordinary households that hate the generator owner but still need him tonight.
That is the trap. A selective crackdown looks like justice on paper and sectarian targeting on the street. The state cannot act like a state in one neighborhood while negotiating with everyone else. In Lebanon, that is not law. That is a message.
And people know how to read messages.
This is where the usual language fails. Calling Lebanon "corrupt" is too lazy. It makes the country sound like a normal system infected by bad behavior. But what if the behavior is the system? What if the brokenness is not an interruption, but the way money, power, favors, survival, and humiliation are distributed?
That is the question I keep returning to. Not "why do Lebanese people break rules?" That is too easy. The better question is: what kind of country makes the rule-abiding person look like the idiot?
You see it in electricity first because electricity is physical. Darkness arrives in your house. The state disappears from the wall socket. Then someone else arrives with a wire, a meter, and a monthly price. At first he is the substitute. Then he becomes the infrastructure. Then he becomes politically protected because too many people earn, bargain, and survive through the substitute.
Fixing electricity would not only turn the lights on. It would turn off an economy.
That is why Lebanon is so hard to reform. Every failure has employees. Every delay has a broker. Every missing public service has a private replacement. Every private replacement eventually gets a political guardian. The state fails, someone profits from the failure, and then that person or network gains an interest in making sure the state never fully returns.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is just the incentive structure, visible in public.
The same logic appears in smaller, uglier ways all over daily life. Streetlights do not work, so buildings light the pavement directly in front of them. A new tower repaves its own sidewalk while the next stretch remains cracked. Public beaches are privatized into beach clubs. Public parks barely exist, so leisure becomes an entry fee. Even public space begins to feel like something you access through a bill, a reservation, a membership, or a connection.
Lebanon is often described as a failed state. In some ways it is closer to a privatized state. Not privatized in the clean ideological sense of free markets and competition, but in the dirtier sense: every public absence becomes someone's little kingdom.
You do not get a country. You get subscriptions.
Electricity subscription. Water delivery. Private school. Private hospital. Generator amperes. A beach club instead of a beach. A political contact instead of an office that works. A foreign passport if you are lucky. A relative abroad sending dollars if you are luckier. The citizen is not served by the state; he assembles a private state around himself, one monthly payment at a time.
And then we call him individualistic.
But Lebanese individualism is not simple. It is not the Western fantasy of the sovereign person standing alone. No Lebanese person is really alone. He is wrapped in family, sect, neighborhood, school networks, village origin, religious court, cemetery, diaspora, WhatsApp groups, old favors, old shame, old obligation. The Lebanese person is intensely communal at the intimate level and almost completely unprotected at the civic level.
That is the contradiction.
He may do anything for his family, but he does not trust the public. He may mobilize instantly for a funeral, a wedding, a hospital bill, a cousin's tuition, but he will not treat the traffic lane, the sidewalk, the tax system, or the ministry counter as a shared moral space. The circle of obligation is real. It just stops before it reaches the citizen.
This is why the word mehtail matters. It is not just "scammer." That translation is too crude. The mehtail is the person who knows the gap between the written rule and the actual rule. He knows when the office closes, who can still answer, which document matters, which document is theater, which person needs respect, which person needs pressure, which sentence turns a refusal into a possibility. He is not outside the system. He is fluent in the system.
And Lebanon rewards fluency in the unofficial.
That is the uncomfortable part. The mehtail is not only a moral failure. He is evidence of an environment. In a functioning country, some of that same intelligence might become entrepreneurship, law, logistics, management, politics, institution-building. In Lebanon, too much of it becomes evasion. People learn how to get around the thing because going through the thing often makes them fools.
The banking collapse made this national. The system did not collapse because Lebanese people lacked intelligence. It collapsed partly because intelligence was everywhere. Financial engineering, political cover, banking sophistication, legal ambiguity, dollar games, circular schemes, elite exits before the door closed. It was not stupid. It was brilliant in the clinical sense, and morally empty.
That is what hurts. Lebanon does not waste talent by failing to produce it. It wastes talent by routing it into escape.
The same people who can build businesses in Lagos, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Montreal, Abidjan, and Sydney spend their lives in Lebanon solving problems that should not exist. How do I get electricity? How do I protect my savings? How do I get paperwork done? How do I keep my money outside the country? How do I make sure my children can leave if they need to? How do I survive the next devaluation, the next war, the next capital control, the next official lie?
At that point, leaving does not feel like betrayal. It feels like competent planning.
This is the deepest damage. The country trains its best people to treat the future as something to evacuate from. Money leaves before it can be trapped. Children are educated toward departure. Families measure success by the quality of the exit route. The diaspora then sends money back, and the system survives on the very people it pushed out.
Again, this is not simply failure. It is a working arrangement.
Remittances keep households alive. Tourism becomes a national prayer. The airport road gets cleaned because that is where the visitor enters. Posters come down, asphalt appears, the facade is polished. The tourist, the Gulf visitor, the expat with dollars: everyone waits for them with the desperate dignity of a country that has forgotten how to produce and learned how to receive.
Meanwhile, the deeper system remains untouched. New faces can enter government. Better CVs can appear. Technocrats can speak well. But each ministry is still a prize, each appointment still passes through sectarian arithmetic, each service still carries leverage. The cake is smaller after 2019, but the knife is the same.
This is why I do not believe the story of Lebanon as mere incompetence. Incompetence cannot be this durable. A bad system that survives this long is doing something for someone.
Abu Ali Itani is useful because he makes the abstraction visible. A generator owner becomes a neighborhood figure because the state left a space open. The state then tries to step back into that space and discovers it is no longer empty. It has been occupied by money, service, loyalty, fear, sect, and habit. The people may resent the man. They may know the bill is unfair. They may know the whole arrangement is rotten. But when the state arrives late, selectively, and with the smell of someone else's agenda, resentment turns into defense.
That is Lebanon's political tragedy in miniature: people defending the very substitutes that prove how badly they have been abandoned.
So the reform question cannot be asked innocently. You cannot just say "fix electricity" without asking who loses the darkness. You cannot say "enforce the law" without asking why the law sleeps in one district and wakes up in another. You cannot say "end corruption" as if corruption were a stain on the surface rather than a method of distribution.
The real reform would be much more boring and much more radical: make the official route work.
Not inspirational speeches. Not one heroic minister. Not another donor conference. Offices that process paperwork without humiliation. Electricity that does not require a neighborhood baron. Public schools that are not treated as surrender. Hospitals where access does not depend on sectarian proximity. Courts where the file is not a negotiation. Streets lit because they are public, not because a building nearby paid for light.
This sounds basic because it is. But in Lebanon, the basic is revolutionary.
The opposite of the mehtail republic is not a country of saints. It is a country where ordinary honesty is not punished, where waiting your turn does not make you a sucker, where the public thing works often enough that the private workaround loses its glamour.
Until then, Lebanon will keep producing people who are excellent at surviving the country and exhausted by the effort. People who can solve everything except the arrangement that made their cleverness necessary.
And somewhere in Sakiet el-Janzeer, or any other neighborhood with its own small sovereign, the meters will keep spinning.
