The permanent cloak of invisibility

Lebanon has a very special place in my heart. Even with my rudimentary Arabic, I feel at home there. Beirut and its people have shaped my life and my career. Nearly ten years ago, when I started working on the health of refugees, it was catalysed by insight and inspiration from colleagues in Beirut and community workers I met at the Syrian-Lebanese border. I have gone to Beirut nearly every year since and I was there just a few months ago, in June 2024. Well before I went to Palestine, I went to the Palestinian camps in the centre of Beirut and met incredible teachers and doctors, shopkeepers and nurses, and elementary school kids whose smiles lit up the whole room.

Today, my Lebanese friends are hurt, angry, anxious and shocked. My friends who are Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are worried for their loved ones in Palestine, and scared for their own lives in Lebanon.

The Israeli bombing of Lebanon has displaced as many as a million people in the last one week alone. This forced displacement comes during a continued period of deep economic anxiety in the country. Large sections of the population had been suffering from unimaginable inflation, power cuts and unemployment, and now they have lost their shelter as well.

Within the displaced persons, there are some who are even more vulnerable than others. Among these are the Syrian refugees who left Syria in the last decade because they faced the wrath of the regime. Over a million found shelter in neighbouring Lebanon. Today, countless Syrians are displaced within Lebanon, and as the temporary shelters get cramped, they are low down on the list. Some have decided to go back to a country where they are still viewed as enemy, or traitors, by the regime. Their old homes are no longer standing, and the entire neighborhoods where they grew up have been wiped out. Others are sleeping in the streets in Beirut - debating the risk between becoming a target of Israeli bombardment in Lebanon or being on the wrong side of the unforgiving regime in Syria. The German broadcaster DW, in a recent report on Lebanon, quoted a young Syrian pondering this question and wondering "where can I dig my grave?"

The most recent displacement of people in Lebanon spiked during the UNGA week. Every year, meetings on the sidelines of UNGA discuss important issues from climate change to AI regulation to antimicrobial resistance. No doubt these issues are important, timely and need to be understood, reflected and acted upon, but they cannot be discussed by forcing a cloak of invisibility on people who are being bombed around the clock. This is not simply an issue of Lebanon or Palestine. Hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, in other parts of the world such as Sudan and Yemen are impacted and displaced - sometimes by deliberate actions and support of our own "brotherly nations". Discussions on tackling antimicrobial resistance at UNGA's side events can either be theoretical, or these deliberations can confront the reality that drug resistance is going to thrive when there are life-threatening injuries due to conflict, in countries where infrastructure is deliberately destroyed, and people are forced to flee. Measuring progress against various SDGs can either be a fun little quantitative exercise costing millions of dollars, or an actual effort to ask whether the goals of poverty reduction, health for all, clean water or peace and justice have any meaning left for people in Lebanon, Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen and many other places that remain permanently behind the firewall of our concern.

Violent death of any person, of any age and in any land, should be unacceptable. Forced displacement of an individual or a community, in borderlands or deep within a country, should trouble us deeply. But for us to be troubled enough to act, we have to remove our polarised lens, a selective blindfold, of which community matters and whose life is worth protecting. Real sustainable development means a world where no one is forced to ponder where they should dig their grave.