by Hummam Sheikh Ali
DAMASCUS, May 7 (Xinhua) -- In the Middle East, refuge is rarely temporary. It stretches across years, sometimes generations. In some families, it becomes an inheritance, like a name, or a memory you never lived but must carry.
I know this not from theory, but from my blood.
I was born in Damascus. My parents were born in Damascus. Yet on every official document I possess, one single line defines my origin: "Date of refuge to Syria: 1948."
That date is not mine. It belongs to my grandparents.
They fled Palestine as Israel was being established, leaving behind the city of Safad. My grandfather, Abu Ziad, did not wait for the violence to peak. In the final months of 1947, he moved quietly to Damascus, secured a modest home, and opened a small shop. It was not yet an escape, but a preparation -- deliberate and, in the end, life-saving.
He returned to Safad one last time, gathered his family, and left before the roads became roads of no return.
They believed their stay in Damascus would last months. It has lasted generations.
I grew up in a city that is entirely mine, yet officially, I am still tied to a moment of flight I never experienced. I inherited a refugee status without ever having fled. I used to think that was the nature of displacement in this land: a single, irreversible wound from the past.
I was wrong.
When the Syrian war began in 2011, I watched my generation leave. Friends I had known all my life scattered to Europe, to neighboring countries, to any safe harbor that would take them. I felt their pain, but also a quiet, grim relief: I had not become a refugee twice. My family's journey, I thought, was a closed book.
I did not yet understand that displacement can also be a circle.
Years later, I am watching that circle close. A new war in March, this time in Lebanon, has sent the pendulum swinging back. Many of the Syrians who had fled there during our own conflict are now fleeing again. But this time, they are heading back -- back to the country they once escaped, back along the same worn roads.
Osama al-Obeid, 39, left his village in Hasakah's countryside in 2011 for Lebanon as drought and war strangled life at home. He found work in construction and spent years trying to build a future.
Then war followed him.
When Israeli airstrikes intensified in southern Lebanon, his neighborhood shook. "One moment we were working, the next, shelling was everywhere," al-Obeid told me. He fled again, leaving behind his tools, his rented home, and the life he had assembled piece by piece.
For him, the journey felt eerily familiar.
"It felt like time had taken me back," he said, comparing it to his flight over a decade ago.
Yet crossing the border this time stirred a different feeling. "There was longing and a sense of belonging," he said. "Even though I know there are no jobs, the country still needs years to rebuild, the feeling of entering again ... it's indescribable."
But reality is a fast anchor. "There is nothing encouraging people to stay," he admitted, listing unemployment, drought, and impossible costs. His return is a pause, not a full stop. If Lebanon stabilizes, he said, he may go back.
Khader al-Daham, 41, a coffee vendor, traced a similar loop. He left Syria in 2014, built a humble life in Beirut, then found himself running again as violence escalated there.
His journey back was even more perilous. He took smuggling routes through rough terrain and mine-risk areas along the border. "It was one of the hardest journeys," he said.
Still, he called Lebanon a "second home," a place that gave him work when his own country could not. Yet fear for his family ultimately forced him to leave.
Returning to Syria brought mixed emotions. "Security is better now," he said, "but economically, things are very difficult."
The lesson of exile, for him, is simple: safety alone is not enough. "Economic stability is the real form of security," he said. "Without work, people will not stay."
Like al-Obeid, al-Daham's return is conditional.
Listening to them, I felt a complicated reckoning. Their displacement has lasted more than a decade. Mine has lasted a lifetime, passed down quietly, through documents, family stories, and a journey I never took.
Yet in their exhaustion, I sensed something unfamiliar: a thread of hope.
Their exile, however brutal, is a line still being drawn. Theirs still holds the power to close a circle, however shattered its center may be.
In places like Aleppo's old markets, that fragile power takes form. Amid the devastation, a stubborn reassembly is underway. I watched a mason, his face pale with stone dust, carefully resetting a blackened arch.
"Someone ordered this," he said. "So someone is coming back."
Perhaps this is what ultimately defines our region: not the act of leaving, but the stubborn persistence of return, even when the road home is the same road once taken in flight.
For someone like me, who inherited the idea of refuge and may one day pass it on, there is a quiet wish behind all these stories:
That one day, returning will no longer be a reaction to a war elsewhere.
That Syrians, like so many before them, will finally cross their borders not out of desperate necessity, but with dignity.
And stay. ■
