Refugee Mahmoud Quotes

They only see us when we do something they don't want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be - in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp - people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn't want them to do - when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries - that's when people couldn't ignore them any longer. Mahmoud's first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.

You ask: What is the meaning of "homeland"? They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky. You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?

The boy went back to his family there, in the distance, in a distance he did not find there in the distance. My grandfather died counting sunsets, seasons, and heartbeats on the fingers of his withered hands. He dropped like a fruit forbidden a branch to lean its age against. They destroyed his heart. He wearied of waiting here, in Damur. He said goodbye to friends, water pipe, and children and took me and went back to find what was no longer his to find there. Here the number of aliens increased, and refugee camps got bigger. A war went by, then two, three, and four. The homeland got farther and farther away, and the children got farther and farther from mother's milk after they had tasted the milk of UNRWA. So they bought guns to get closer to a homeland flying out of their reach. They brought their identity back into being, re-created the homeland, and followed their path, only to have it blocked by the guardians of civil wars. They defended their steps, but then path parted from path, the orphan lived in the skin of the orphan, and one refugee camp went into another.

What kind of mortuary is this, anyway? It hasn't even got electricity. This sort of town needs more and more of it, what with all the migrants, refugees, and war wounded, not to mention all the executions that are taking place, and all those young comrades on the run...

As we drove from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Greenblatt reminded me, “Don’t say that we’re for a ‘two-state solution,’ because it means different things to different people.” It was good advice, and I decided to avoid the term until we had defined what it meant to be a state. When we arrived, we were ushered through a maze of stairways into a small room that had regal chairs arranged for a diplomatic meeting. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas entered, proceeded to the front of the room, and shook our hands. He was staffed by his top negotiators: Major General Majed Faraj, a trustworthy and insightful member of Abbas’s inner circle and head of the Palestinian Security Forces; and Saeb Erekat, a loquacious and always aggrieved diplomat who had been the lead negotiator for twenty-five years but had little to show for his efforts. As they served us tea, I glanced in the direction of the Palestinian leader. Abbas sat hunched over in his seat, looking every bit of his eighty-plus years. He smoked constantly, so every few minutes he would pull a cigarette from the table, put it in his mouth, and wait for an attendant to light it. I thought that Abbas seemed more like a king than the representative of an historically downtrodden refugee population.