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THREAD Go Home, Refugee. A glance at the photos in @mannocchia @alessioroa piece in yesterday's @newlinesmag and it is obvious why that most powerful of words - home - recurs so often in her blistering report. 1/ https://newlinesmag.com/photo-essays/the-syrians-who-can-never-return/
Many of you will be living through winter at the moment; you will have thought how nice it is to be warm, or to have a warm home to return to. Many of you will have been struck, as I was, by the quote by one Syrian refugee 2/
But it’s the second use of “home” I want to consider, the one spat out in an alienating, divisive way: “Go home”. Some may find it surprising to hear it from the Lebanese to the Syrians, two countries closely tied by culture. If so, it is sadly not an unusual sentiment. 3/
If there’s one takeaway from my column on the US that some of you will have read, it’s that political rules apply everywhere. And one is that if you impoverish a people, if you strain their societies, they respond in predictable – sometimes ugly – ways. 4/ https://newlinesmag.com/argument/america-through-the-looking-glass/
. @Anna_Pantelia noted this when she photographed refugees in Greece. Greece is a rich country, housing some of the most desperate people on our planet, and yet there were still locals protesting against the housing of them 5/ https://newlinesmag.com/photo-essays/after-the-fire/
It’s there too when @AmalHanano tells of a Lebanese landlord kicking out refugees. The same story in Turkey. Are the Lebanese particularly inhospitable? Or the Greeks or the Turks? No. The exact opposite. There are millions of micro-acts of kindness 6/ https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/homeschooling-without-a-home/
But these countries are straining. The refugee crisis, as you may have heard me say before, is an inflection point, like the pandemic; it changes everything it touches. And just like the pandemic, it is warping societies, making them ugly in ways they were not before. 7/
If you ask a Lebanese handing out “Lebanese first” flyers or a Greek protesting on Lesbos against refugees if they would ever have imagined taking time out of their day to persuade others to turn their backs on the world’s most vulnerable, they’d say of course not. 8/
But the crisis is warping these societies, as the war has warped Syria itself. Perhaps nothing @newlinesmag better illustrates this than @faysalitani's column where he writes how “the legacy of the Syrian occupation lives on”. 9/ https://newlinesmag.com/first-person/occupational-hazards/
“I have not,” he writes, “spoken to a single Lebanese Sunni who does not either despise the refugees, want them out now, or both." As the long Syrian occupation warped Lebanon, so this refugee crisis is warping it further. No, two wrongs don’t make a right. 10/
The fact that two peoples, so closely entwined, as the Lebanese and the Syrians can turn on each other in this way tells us something about how strained societies react. Desperate people think in predictably desperate ways. 11/
