country.
Around 180,000 entered Syria and were frequently welcomed by hospitable local families, even in the poorest areas of the country. These refugees were lucky since most were eventually able to return home.
Before that, during Lebanon’s 15 years of civil war from 1975 to 1990, Lebanese were routinely forced to take refuge with their kith and kin in the heartland of their sect-tribe. Many of them, too, would finally be able to return to their homes.
But the earliest refugee crisis was that of Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. Even before the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel in May 1948, much dispossession of Palestinians had already been carried out by the Zionist militias that would become the Israeli army.
Some of these refugees still live under Israeli occupation for the purposes of international law, such as the 70 percent of the population of Gaza who were driven into the enclave by Israeli forces. Although some of them live virtually in sight of their ancestral homes, they have little prospect of return.
Other Palestinians have made new lives abroad, but many have been unable to do so. With the exception of Jordan, Arab countries have been unwilling to give them full citizenship.
Their despair at their abandonment by the international community caused some to turn to armed resistance, something which led to the bloody crushing of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Jordan during ‘Black September’ in 1970, the eventual destabilisation of Lebanon in the 1970s, the Israeli invasion of 1982, in which thousands of civilians were killed, and, more recently, the suicide bombings and untargeted rockets fired at Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Islamist resistance groups.
When the father of Aylan al Kurdi, the three-year-old who drowned in the surf near Bodrum, rebuked wealthy Arab states for not offering hospitality to Syrian refugees, many will have heard an echo of the plea of the Palestinians for justice.
With the future of Syria so uncertain, will many Syrians, too, now find themselves deprived of the right to return to their homes? If so, the long-term consequences on the stability of the area are unbearable to think about.
This article has been excerpted from: ‘The roots of Syria’s tragedy’.
Courtesy: Aljazeera.com