On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, soon to be the first prime minister of Israel, gave the first public reading of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. With an eye toward wooing the powerful United States, the first draft had liberally cribbed from the American declaration, directly invoking “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Revisions, arguments, and more revisions ensued; but Ben-Gurion’s words retained a strongly international flavor, and—strikingly—appealed repeatedly to the then-new United Nations.

Israel’s birth 75 years ago this month followed a long and violent struggle over land and sovereignty. There were cheers in the streets but also, the New York Times reported, the “rumbling of guns” as fighting flared around the region. For Zionists, who gained a state, it was a long-awaited day of celebration. For Arabs, who bitterly opposed the prospect of a Jewish state in their midst, it was the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.

The events took place in the Middle East, but it was a story, mainly, of European colonialism. Tel Aviv, where Ben-Gurion shared the declaration, had been ruled by Britain since 1920. British control of the former Ottoman territory of Palestine stemmed from a post-World War I decision by the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, to hand the colonies of vanquished states to the victors via a system known as the “mandates.”

It took World War II to force Britain to give up control of the Palestine mandate. And it took the brand-new United Nations, in turn, to create the state of Israel. The story of that process—and its chief architect, the Black American diplomat and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche—is now largely forgotten, but can help us understand the persistence and intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today.

Bunche’s involvement in what he called “the problem of Palestine” grew out of a lifelong commitment to anticolonialism and racial justice. He strongly believed in the right of all peoples to self-determination. But in Palestine, he faced a vexing problem—that of two peoples, both claiming the same land—that challenged his undying belief in the power of reason and cooperation to create peace.

Born in Detroit in 1904, and raised mostly in Los Angeles, Bunche was a very successful student at Thomas Jefferson High School, just south of downtown L.A. After studying at UCLA, where he also played basketball, and then at Harvard, where he earned a PhD in political science, Bunche, barely 25, became a professor at Howard University.

His scholarly specialty was African colonialism—and unlike most of his peers, he studied it on the ground. His dissertation compared how two French West African territories moved toward independence. He found that the mandate system the League had devised rarely made any difference.

Bunche had been teaching at Howard for over a decade when, in 1941, with war raging around the globe, the Roosevelt administration asked him to join what became the Office of Strategic Services (and later the Central Intelligence Agency). Bunche’s task was to help prepare for conflict in an Africa the colonial powers—mainly the Allies—had spent the past half century brutally carving up.

The Africa front swiftly faded in importance, however, and he moved to the State Department, where he helped design what became the United Nations. At first the phrase simply referred to the Allies. But it soon became shorthand for the postwar peace organization the U.S. was proposing, which would recast the international order by creating a novel system of collective security—one much more effective, FDR hoped, than that of the League.

As a staunch opponent of empire, Bunche fought hard to make sure the new U.N. Charter would facilitate independence for the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa still under foreign domination. Despite his criticism of the mandates, he helped design the U.N. system of “trusteeship,” which updated and improved the League’s system.

At the end of the war, Bunche joined the staff of the new U.N. Shortly after his arrival Britain, exhausted by years of conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, proposed to hand the problem to the U.N. Here was a chance for the new organization to help a colony achieve self-governance. The only question was how. Trygve Lie, the secretary-general of the U.N., viewed Bunche, who had expertise in colonial rule and was a fast learner with political acumen and legendary negotiating prowess, as the best person to address the challenge.

His first task was to lead a “Special Committee on Palestine” in the summer of 1947 to recommend a solution. U.N. leadership stocked the committee with a motley assortment of diplomats drawn from a dozen states. Some were openly anti-Semitic—and even saw the prospect of a Jewish state as a chance to send their own Jewish citizens to Palestine. The U.N. diplomats tried to make sense of the complex situation but often bumbled. One literally fell into the Tomb of Nicodemus. In a letter home to his wife, Ruth, Bunche called them “just about the worst crew I have ever had to deal with.”

The U.N. team toured the region, interviewing leaders and common farmers alike, some of whom were actually Jewish spies in disguise. Jerusalem, full of barbed wire and barricades, was tense and hot. There was intermittent fighting between Arabs and Jews. The only thing the two sides could agree on, Bunche later said, was that “the British must go.”

The U.N. committee’s final report, largely drafted by Bunche, offered two options. The majority of committee members proposed to divide Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish; the minority to create a single, binational state. In November 1947, the U.N. approved the majority recommendation, partitioning Palestine into “independent Arab and Jewish States” which would come into existence two months after British forces departed, “but in any case not later than 1 October 1948.”

Fighting flared anew in the wake of the momentous decision. Arab states, viewing the U.N. resolution as illegitimate, refused to implement it. Many around the world questioned how—or whether—the land could ever be peacefully divided. But Bunche and his colleagues had cast the die. When Jewish leaders gathered to proclaim Israel’s independence in May of 1948, they repeatedly invoked the U.N.’s core role. “Recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable,” they declared. Diplomatic recognitions soon rolled in, with the U.S. first out of the gate. Everyone was “startled” by Harry Truman’s rapid recognition of Israel, Bunche noted in his diary—even many American diplomats.

Ralph Bunche’s work for the U.N. was decisive for Israel’s birth; it was decisive for its survival, too. When, a few months later, the chief U.N. mediator in the region was gunned down in broad daylight by Jewish extremists, Bunche—having narrowly missed being assassinated himself—took the reins of the negotiation process between Arab and Jews.

Over months in a shuttered hotel on the Mediterranean island of Rhodes he met with the warring sides. He used charm, deft-maneuvering, and arm-twisting, as well as many games at the billiards table, to help forge a series of armistices that quelled the fighting. Bunche was often frustrated—to Ruth he wrote, “I talk, argue, and threaten these stubborn people day and night in an effort to reach agreement”—but his hard work paid off. Indeed, the following year it netted him the Nobel Peace Prize. From a ticker tape parade down Broadway to meeting Harry Truman to presenting the Best Picture Award onstage at the 1951 Oscars, Bunche was now a rare and revered Black diplomatic celebrity. 

Ralph Bunche was a self-proclaimed “professional optimist.” Were he alive today, he would likely be deeply troubled by the conflict that still besets the Middle East. Early on he recognized that a just resolution to what he called “the refugee problem”—the Palestinians displaced from their lands—was essential to any lasting peace. The two-state solution of his original U.N. proposal has, of course, never been realized, despite the widespread recognition of the state of Palestine in recent years. The occupation and settlement of the West Bank continues. Israeli democracy itself is under threat today, increasingly riven by intense internal struggle and violence.

But even 75 years after Israel’s birth, Bunche would surely not give up on the prospects for peace. “Peace,” like war, he said at UCLA in 1969, “can only be won by bold and courageous initiatives”— and by taking “some deliberate risks.”

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She has visited the country six times since 2016, reporting on the war there between its internationally recognized government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.

Recently, Waguih went back again.

She wound her way through both Sunni-dominated government-controlled territories and Shiite-aligned Houthi controlled areas. She arrived in Seiyun, in Yemen’s government-controlled eastern region, on February 25. From Seiyun, she travelled 30 hours by road to Sanaa, Yemen’s traditional capital in the Houthi-controlled north, then to Mocha, where she visited a large camp for internally displaced people, and finally another day’s drive to the government’s entrepot capital, Aden.

Along the way she passed clusters of settlements across Yemen’s mountainous arid terrain, each distinguished by an array of hillside towers, archways, rainbow-colored windows, and earthen walls. Yemen is a landscape of small towns, villages, and a few larger cities, mainly along its coast. Roads across its desert expanses are often unpaved and remote. Waguih travelled in crowded, unreliable mini-buses.

Throughout her journey, she saw the impact of war and the fractured movement of civilians and goods. In much of the country, life carries on—fishermen cast their lines, bookstores sell their tomes, devotees go to mosque. But everything is under threat, anything that still works is fragile. And there are pockets of immense suffering.

Yemen is facing a humanitarian disaster. More than 377,000 deaths are attributed to the conflict, including 150,000 people who died as a direct result of military actions. Yemen’s people are starving. The United Nations is seeking $4.3 billion to stave off hunger and disease for an estimated 23 million people—nearly three-quarters of the population, including 2.2 million acutely malnourished children. Yemen imports nearly all its provisions; Ukraine and Russia supply 40 percent of its wheat. Food prices have risen approximately 150 percent since the invasion of Ukraine, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Despite the staggering scale of the seven-year catastrophe, Western news media describes the conflict (when it describes it at all) as a “forgotten” or an “invisible war,” tropes used to justify Western neglect of complex intrastate or proxy conflicts, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

So deep are divisions between the warring parties that each runs its own fiscal and administrative systems. Waguih had to carry two sets of Yemeni banknotes, or rials. Older and newer bills have different values, exacerbating runaway inflation.

In Yemen, women are rarely seen in public without a full abaya or burqa. The fact that Waguih is a journalist and an outsider afforded her more freedom than most Yemeni women enjoy. Even still, her movements were always negotiated. In Houthi areas evening trips to convenience stores and restaurants were accompanied by a Houthi agent.

Waguih visited Sanaa’s largest orphanage and hospital, a fuel station, a bank, and other businesses and institutions in the city’s UNESCO World Heritage-listed old city to gauge the war’s impact.

“Yemen is a place where it is very difficult to see actual conflict but impossible not to see its effects everywhere,” she said. “You will see, for example, a building that has been destroyed, and you don’t know how long it has been that way. Maybe it was recently. Maybe it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

There was no difference, she said, between the destruction she saw in government-controlled areas and that in Houthi areas. During her previous trips, she said, violence seemed to be localized around particular areas. Now, due to an estimated 25,000 air raids, Yemen’s ruined infrastructure is highly distributed.

And everywhere, Waguih said, from the streets in Sanaa to Yemen’s squalid camps for the internally displaced, she gazed upon the gaunt face of hunger.

There are some developments toward peace. The internationally-recognized government and the Houthis announced a two-month ceasefire in April, to coincide with the holy month of Ramadan. Many hope the truce will allow all sides to consider proposals for a permanent end to the war.

Nations at war are also nations at work, at school, at play, at rest—at all the places that make up daily life. War often occurs in places with vitality enough to sustain many years of degradation. Waguih’s photos show everyday reality in a nation experiencing one of the world’s longest running wars. The conflict may not be visible in every frame but it infuses all of the images.

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“War and Peace,” by the artist Anton Refregier, is a reminder of what might have been had the U.S.—and the world—learned enough from two catastrophic wars and the rise of fascism between them to have chosen a different path. When Refregier painted it 75 years ago at one end of the Rincon Annex post office building in downtown San Francisco, the mural expressed the then-widespread hope for a future that didn’t happen.

In 1940, Refregier, a resident of Woodstock, New York, won a prestigious juried competition to paint 27 murals for the post office lobby. His award was one of the largest commissions sponsored by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts, a New Deal initiative to embellish federal buildings with work by leading American artists. It also was one of its most provocative commissions, because the mural cycle Refregier envisioned would represent the full, messy history of San Francisco, including its racial and class divisions—subjects rarely, if ever, seen on post office walls.

World War II postponed the project, and in 1943, Congress terminated the Treasury Section and transferred his commission to the new Public Buildings Administration. Refregier mourned the loss for himself and for the nation; he said that the Treasury Section’s commissions “would have eventually developed into a monumental art of world significance,” like Mexico’s murals, had it not been killed.

In spring 1945, Fortune magazine sent Refregier to San Francisco to make drawings of the United Nations Conference on International Organizations. The gathering was designed to abort another world war, or worse.

Just two weeks before the meeting’s opening, a cerebral hemorrhage felled the man who’d conceived the United Nations. The conference delegates mourned Franklin Roosevelt’s absence at the opening, and a month later, they met in an ancient grove of redwoods at Muir Woods National Monument to dedicate a plaque that named him “the chief architect of the United Nations and Apostle of Lasting Peace for All Mankind.”

Roosevelt’s death and the political jockeying Refregier witnessed at the U.N. conference inspired him to create “a magnificent climax” to a mural cycle showing a city largely built on conflict. While keeping most of his original plan for the mural, he scrapped his design for the final piece (a panoramic painting of the San Francisco world’s fair of 1939) and replaced it with a triptych—a three-paneled picture—depicting the healing of old wounds through international cooperation and the price of not doing so.

In the left panel, an immense armored hand rises from a pile of burning books, a swastika flag, and concentration camp prisoners to confront the massed guns of the Allies. In the right panel, people of all races gather round a circular table covered with the flags of many nations, the sun of a new day rising behind them.

Refregier sought to bridge the two antithetical pictures with a portrait of Roosevelt in the center. He was inspired by a photo of the ailing president on his return from a hazardous wartime trip to meet Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. Roosevelt’s face, the artist said, was that of a “tired, sensitive, and completely beautiful” man who “lives in the heart and the minds of the people” and thus “belongs to the history of this city.” He would dedicate the entire cycle to the memory of the late president.

Refregier returned to San Francisco in June, 1946 to paint the lobby, but he quickly fell afoul of unsympathetic bureaucrats in the Public Buildings Administration. His new superiors in Washington ordered him to remove Roosevelt, telling him that the image of a recently deceased president was inappropriate for a federal building. With the support of intellectuals, unions, and other artists, Refregier resisted for seven months, but he ultimately capitulated to what he saw as the forces that were even then launching the Cold War.

“It was necessary,” he said, “to erase the image of Roosevelt and his plans for coexistence, peace, and hope of friendship with the Soviet Union in order to see the American people on to the Cold War.”

Courtesy of The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The artist replaced Roosevelt’s face with a multiracial group looking to the United Nations for a fulfillment of the “four freedoms” that the president had named in his 1941 State of the Union address. In addition to the freedoms of speech and religion, Roosevelt had insisted that two more freedoms—from fear and from want—should become global human rights. Four golden pillars stood on the Opera House stage during the U.N. conference to represent those freedoms.

But the world was not to be freed of fear or want. As Refregier foresaw, the Cold War erased the hopes Roosevelt had inspired for peace and economic freedom, while the McCarthy era brought purges against those who shared Roosevelt’s vision. Led by nationalist organizations and the Hearst press, efforts to censor or destroy Refregier’s murals began even as he was painting them. In 1949, Representative Richard Nixon responded to a concerned American Legionnaire, “I believe a committee should make a thorough investigation of this type of art in government buildings with the view to obtaining the removal of all that is found to be inconsistent with American ideals and principles.” Three years later and just a few months into Nixon’s vice presidency, the House Committee on Public Works met in Washington to consider the destruction of Refregier’s murals.

With strong support from the San Francisco Establishment and beyond, the murals survived but the post office did not. In 1979, the building was redeveloped as a multi-use complex. Its current owners maintain the extant lobby as a public space listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today, just steps from where the nations of the world once met to sign the U.N. Charter, a growing legion of the homeless, hungry, and sick shuffle city streets below opulent towers. They testify to how very far San Francisco, the nation, and the world have veered from Roosevelt’s freedom from want and freedom from fear.

At a time when collective global action is needed to address climate chaos, pandemic disease, nuclear weapons, and resurgent fascism, few today look to the U.N. as the congress of nations Roosevelt and Refregier hoped it would become.

Like Roosevelt’s face, the purpose for which it was created has been erased.

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Neutrality might be the answer.

I was born and raised in one neutral country, Switzerland. As an adult, I moved to and became a citizen of another neutral country, Sweden. I have experienced what it means to live in societies developed on peaceful and stable ground.

In 2017 my first home country, Switzerland, celebrated the 500th anniversary of its last military action abroad. In Sweden, more than 200 years have passed since the Swedish army was engaged in foreign war (at that time, an occupation of neighboring Norway).

In both my home countries, neutrality has thus stood the test of time and reinforced the democratic nature of the governments. Which is why neutrality deserves more attention, especially in small and vulnerable democracies around the world.

The planet is already moving in that direction. The primary international tactic for most countries is no longer archaic military violence, but engagement in smart public diplomacy based on international law.

A more diplomatic and law-based world fits the notion of neutrality, which means that a country does not join any military alliance or engage with other countries as a belligerent.

Historically there have been as many forms of neutrality as there have been countries to declare it. And yes, there have been some cases, as in Austria after World War II, when a country was obliged by foreign powers to become a neutral state.

In the Swiss case, the concept of neutrality goes back to the Second Peace Treaty of Paris in 1815, which allowed Switzerland to become a self-governing territory. But at that time, Switzerland was just a loose network of independent states. It took another 33 years—and, in fact, a civil war between the various states of the country—to establish the current federal, democratic state by referendum in 1848.

That state was explicitly neutral. And this direct engagement of Swiss citizens in state affairs—via votes in referendums and citizen’s initiatives— has served to enforce neutrality. When people get to make decisions, they often choose peace, stability—and neutrality.

The Swiss have, however, retained an army. Indeed, for many decades, it was said that Switzerland was an army. This reflected a triumphant megalomania in the country after it had kept itself out of two disastrous world wars that consumed its neighbors. But later in the 20th century, Switzerland reduced what had been one of the biggest and most expensive armies—a “protection force for neutrality”—in the world.

Neutrality is not static. It requires constant development and fine-tuning. The Swiss have long debated and changed exactly how their neutrality works. But the debate is always open; the Swiss consensus is that neutrality is a security issue, and security issues should not be left to a small circle within government or parliament, at least in a democracy.

One very long debate involved Swiss membership in the United Nations. Supporters of neutrality for decades argued that such a membership, which could imply participation in military operations abroad, would not be compatible with being a neutral country. In 1986, two-thirds of Swiss voters said no to UN membership. But voters narrowly approved the same measure in 2002, making Switzerland the first country to join the global organization by referendum.

My other home country has made a similar connection between democracy and neutrality. Sweden has debated whether to join NATO—as some politicians from national right-wing parties are demanding—but that would require a popular vote.

Sweden’s neutrality dates back to the Napoleonic wars, when the Nordic kingdom lost more than one-third of its territory. Since 1812, Sweden has not initiated any armed combats and has declared itself a non-aligned and neutral country. In contrast to Switzerland, this policy has never been enshrined in international treaties and Sweden has always understood its neutrality to be proactive, which has allowed it to be involved in peacekeeping efforts around the world. It also has joined the European Union and forged agreements (though not membership) with NATO.

The Swiss and Swedish examples show the different options and limits of neutrality. The stricter Swiss neutrality limits the international options of the country, but its stand is more credible than Sweden’s more pragmatic approach. At the same time, Sweden can react more flexibly to changing security challenges.

Taking these risks and benefits into consideration, when I think about the links between peace, stability, democracy and neutrality, I wonder about the power that neutrality might hold for a place under threat, like Taiwan.

Taiwan is a country of 23 million, adjacent to a larger nation of 1.3 billion, which maintains the right to invade its smaller neighbor whenever it chooses. What kind of protection does such a place need?

Taiwan has built up its military forces and weaponry, and it has made alliances with the United States and as many other countries as it can. The goal has been to counter the threat with defense.

But the Chinese threats continue—indeed, they have recently increased. So the more important piece of security might involve the example Taiwan presents to the world.

Taiwan democratized three decades ago, and it has sought to make its democracy more participatory over the years. I have visited some 15 times to observe elections and referendums, and work to enhance the country’s system of direct democracy, which is now considered a global model.

Using that democracy to embrace neutrality formally has been discussed, and the idea has a couple of virtues. First, it would reinforce Taiwan’s democracy by setting a policy in line with the views of its people, and making it clear that no government could simply go to war.

It also might provide real security, and broadcast to the world that Taiwan is devoted to peace. Again, Switzerland and Sweden are good illustrations of how such a proactive policy of democracy and non-aggression can deter invasion (Switzerland’s ability to stay out of the world wars being the prime example), while also creating a globally recognized brand for the country. If China invaded an officially neutral Taiwan, it would be threatening and attacking an open, democratic, and peaceful country—a difficult position for its autocratic government to defend.

Of course, there is no single or simple solution for the complicated security situation in East Asia. But a Taiwanese move to neutrality would project self-confidence, and a message that should impress the world. It also would allow Taiwan to focus more on its internal development, including making greater advances in its democracy. The country’s cities, in particular, are seeking more sovereignty and control from a national government that has long centralized power, in part by arguing that a strong national authority is needed for security reasons.

Neutrality, in combination with democracy, is not a guarantee of a country’s eternal life. But history suggests it is better insurance than the most sophisticated weapons systems.

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Basel had owned a bakery in the heart of Old Damascus, and he rarely charged me for my morning maamouls in another life, when I was an Arabic student in Syria. We’d chat through my very limited vocabulary while I waited for orange juice from the next stall. Now here he was on Sky News, standing in mud in what was once my country.

In Bosnia, we’ve been reliving our nightmare watching the Syrian war unfold. We’ve noted many similarities: mass displacement, loss, U.N. shortcomings, a recalcitrance to take refugees, a Russia-backed tyrant, a quiet international community. For me, following the recent crisis has been profoundly personal. Not only because I found a second home living in Damascus, but because what’s happening to the Syrian refugees is so disturbingly familiar.

We recently observed the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Accords. The agreement may have ended the Bosnian War, but it left us in a political limbo. Bosnia inherited a messy power-sharing agreement that institutionalized ethnic divisions and a countryside sown with signs reading, “Warning! Mines!” It is all a relentless reminder of our past, and a foreshadowing of Syria’s future.

In early spring of 1992, war crept quickly into our delightfully ordinary lives in Sarajevo. I first noticed that fewer and fewer of my classmates were coming to school. One day the teacher separated the few of us left by ethnicity: Bosniak and Croat kids were shoved to the back, and Serbs were to sit up front. Being of split parentage, I didn’t know where to sit. That was the last day I went to school. The shootings came closer every night in our suburban neighborhood, and we started sleeping in the bathroom, away from the windows. One shooting even happened in our building. It took days to wash all the blood off the walls and stairwell.

I remember some months into the violence when a parade of pristine white vehicles with their blue-helmeted passengers drove into Sarajevo. They honked, and we cheered in relief. My father knelt down so he was at my eye level, and pointed at them. “Look, Dragana,” he said to me, “That’s the United Nations. They’re here to stop the shootings. We’re safe now.”

On a particularly warm spring day, soon after the U.N. convoy arrived, I snuck out onto our balcony to play with my neighbor Zinka. I don’t know which she heard first, the shots or the glass shattering behind us, but she screamed “Sniper!” and sprinted across the long balcony back into the apartment. Instead of following, I froze. Even as everyone inside shouted at me to get up and run into the house, I couldn’t move. I was petrified. My father finally ran out and grabbed me.

Once we were inside, he shook me and yelled at me for going out. Others reasoned with him that I was in shock, and so was he. When you’re living under siege, it’s easy to forget that war is abnormal. People dying in barrel bomb attacks, and children washing up ashore are abnormal. Shooting at six-year-old girls is abnormal.

Not long after the balcony shooting, my mother, brother, and I escaped the siege. My parents put together all the money we had for the three of us to be smuggled out of Sarajevo on a cargo plane. My father stayed behind. I clung to him tightly at the airport and sobbed so hard that my whole face was wet. They lied to me, and to each other, that we would only be gone for a few weeks, just until the U.N. stopped the fighting.

We hung tightly onto each other as the cargo plane took off. We slid and screamed, and there was a loud explosion behind us once we were in the air. It was my first time on a plane, and I cried the whole time; everyone cried. Once we landed, we saw that the plane had been hit in the tail section by Serb forces during takeoff, and realized how close we had come to dying.

When our cargo plane landed, it was at a military base outside of Belgrade, much to my mother’s horror. No one knew where to go. A uniformed officer came out and walked sharply towards us carrying something in his hand, and a gun was visible in his holster. My mother held her breath and squeezed my hand tightly. My family is mixed—my father Bosnian Serb and my mother Bosnian Muslim. My name is a common name in Serbia, but my brother’s isn’t. We were too young to understand the significance of this.

“You just flew in from Sarajevo, didn’t you? I was informed a cargo plane was rerouted here,” he said in a way that made it sound like we were on holiday. He left out the part where his army nearly shot us down from the sky.

There is simply no way of lying when one is carrying two small children in pajamas, and a plastic bag full of documents, passports, diapers, and underwear. We could have passed for a homeless family if it weren’t for mom’s manicure and Ferragamos. Life, after all, was still somewhat normal until that afternoon, when we became refugees.

“Yes,” my mother said hesitantly.

The Serbian officer knelt down next to my brother and studied us. Which child would he talk to, and ask for our name? If we said too much, even if my brother just said his name or my mom’s name, we could be detained or attacked on the spot.

“I’m Dragana,” I volunteered, before he even asked. My mother audibly sighed and squeezed my hand twice in appreciation, a code not discussed but understood. The officer pinched my cheek and gave me the box of sweets he was carrying before walking away.

Like Basel from Damascus, even after fleeing the terror of war, we still were not safe. I remember the danger we faced as I see scenes of refugees like Basel desperately making their way across Europe. We had to deal with the legions of those eager to take advantage of our vulnerability—the smugglers, the criminals, the traffickers, and the violent xenophobes. Countries like Hungary also closed their borders to us, as they are doing now to Syrians. Others humiliated us to deter more refugees from coming. One of my cousins fled to Denmark, where she was denied freedom of movement and kept in a barracks for a year. Another two were held in long quarantine after they arrived in the Czech Republic, as if they might contaminate the population with their sense of loss. Even those who welcomed us did so only to a point. When the refugee population swelled, when we overstayed our welcome, we were blamed for everything from overcrowded schools to currency inflation.

At some point, refugees must make a definitive choice regarding their identity. Some adopt an Anglicized nickname, a new persona, a new history to be proud of, a new flag to pledge allegiance to, a new city to love. Others, like myself, continued to identify as a Sarajevan and a refugee, clinging to memories. I had to remember where I sat in my classroom, the name of the boy I liked, the lady at the newspaper stand downstairs. If I forgot, that meant giving up hope that we would go back one day. I would have given anything on this earth to wake up at home in Sarajevo on a dull day, watch my parents rush around getting ready for work, and run downstairs to get the paper and a pack of Walter Wolf cigarettes for my mother. Just one more time.

The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbors, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world.

Basel, and all Syrian refugees, must master living with whatever is left of a person after everything is stripped away. Once he arrives where he’s going and sets his bags down, that’s when Basel will have to process everything, when he will count everything he’s had to leave behind. He will reflect on the past four years and wonder how the world watched and did nothing.

In 2014, I went back to Damascus as part of a UNICEF mission. Crossing the Lebanese border into Syria, in a sea of women carrying children and bags of clothes, I saw my mother everywhere. It was profoundly disturbing to put on a blue helmet every day before going out, and I struggled greatly to reconcile my U.N., refugee and survivor identities.

One morning in April 2014, I put on that blue helmet to tour the schools with a colleague in Damascus. We were about 30 meters from the school entrance when the mortar hit in front of us, and I fell to the ground. A guard shouted at me to get up and run inside before the next one hit, but I was too scared to move. That’s when I remembered Zinka and the balcony shooting. There is a low, soft whistle that is heard before a mortar hits very close. It happens just a fraction of a second before it hits, and somewhere deep inside, I had buried that sound and that memory.

The most difficult part of my journey as a refugee is the coming to terms with the fact that I can’t prevent this from happening to someone else. In Damascus, I often found myself telling displaced children whom I worked with that “schools and houses can be rebuilt when the war is over.” Perhaps I should have said something more pragmatic, told them they would never go home again, at least not to the place where they left their toys and friends, where they felt safe and loved. But instead, I said things like, “You’ll go back home when the war is over.” It’s obvious now that I not only lied to them, but also to myself. I only stopped identifying as a refugee when I stopped fighting, and I acknowledged that nothing will ever put my family and my life back together the way it was.

Despite these dark recollections, it’s generally not war that refugees choose to remember, but the people who help you. My mother’s colleague who snuck us out of Serbia, French volunteers who took refugee kids camping, and those who came to welcome us at the airport when we were resettled in Ohio; those are the people I think of daily. I hope Basel finds such people on his path too.

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The ensuing strain on these countries is hard to overstate. In Lebanon, for instance, one in four people is now a refugee, a proportion which would translate into 80 million refugees if we were talking about the United States.

Conflict and turmoil continue to drive people from their homes all over the world. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that today there are more than 18 million refugees worldwide, and over 38 million internally displaced persons, people who have fled their homes like refugees but who haven’t crossed international borders.

Syria is the urgent crisis of the moment, but there are a number of other countries and situations continuing to create a steady flow of refugees, including civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and South Sudan; the terrorist activities of Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria; the long-running collapse of a functioning state in Somalia; and gross human rights abuses in Eritrea.

The international community is finding it hard to keep up with the need for humanitarian assistance. For the countries around Syria, the United Nations has requested more than $7 billion to respond to the crisis this year; so far it has only received 40 percent ($3 billion) of that total. This has meant that the World Food Program has cut rations to refugees, can give the most vulnerable refugees in Lebanon just $13 per month for food, and may need to cut all assistance to refugees in Jordan.

The outlook will hopefully improve, with new pledges coming in from the European Union and Japan. But there is still an immense unmet need, which pushes refugees to move onwards to seek assistance.

How should the international community rethink its response to these movements? The 1951 Refugee Convention remains the cornerstone of refugee protection, offering legal protections to anyone who flees their country owing to a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

This convention is primarily designed to protect people facing individualized persecution by their own state. It does not necessarily protect people who are fleeing persecution by non-state actors like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or those fleeing situations of generalized violence, common in the context of a civil war.

It is up to individual states to determine how to interpret and apply the convention’s persecution test to scenarios of generalized violence. One country might decide that anyone fleeing a given conflict in a neighboring country is a de facto refugee, while a third country might not agree that everyone leaving that conflict is individually targeted. In addition, countries have widely varying interpretations of more newly recognized forms of persecution, such as persecution for reasons of sexual orientation and from gender-based violence that clearly fall within the “social group” category. And UNHCR has also done what’s called “prima facie” recognition, recognizing groups as having refugee status without going through an individual status determination. But, once again, it is up to individual states to decide if they will follow it.

Fortunately, the Refugee Convention is not the only protection available to forced migrants. Regional law provides wider definitions for refugee status, such as the 1969 Organization for African Unity Convention’s Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which includes all “events seriously disturbing public order” or the non-binding 1984 Central American Cartagena Declaration on Refugees which includes “generalized violence.”

The United Nations has also created a set of Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement to provide protections for refugees in their own states based on applicable international law. These also define those in need of protection more broadly than the Refugee Convention, such as people who have been forced or obliged to flee their homes due to “armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.” But these principles are not binding on states, though they have been introduced into regional law in Africa through the African Union’s Kampala Convention.

One of the recurring shortcomings of all the various protections international and humanitarian law offer refugees is the fact that refugees must usually make it to their protective haven—say, a European Union member state—before they can ask for this protection. That has been the major problem with a lot of the proposals to help the Syrian refugees. The European Union has committed to two emergency schemes to resettle 160,000 people; but these are refugees already within the EU. To qualify, then, people need to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean, a trip that has already killed 3,100 people this year.

In principle, amending the Refugee Convention to better reflect today’s new forms of displacement would help ensure that all refugees, not just those covered by the convention, receive full rights. But there is little political support for amending the Convention. Worse, opening it up to negotiations might lead to a more restrictive, rather than a better, convention.

What we need instead is a better policy response, one that improves the global, coordinated response to refugee emergencies in three ways. First, those countries directly hosting refugees clearly need more humanitarian assistance. Such aid has risen to a new record—$24.5 billion in 2014—but that is insufficient to meet the need. Second, refugees should have access to safe regional screening and processing centers when such crises erupt. UNHCR has noted that such centers could be established under international law if they clearly reflect the international legal standards—including the U.N. Refugee Convention and the right of refugees to not be returned to a country where they would face persecution, termed non-refoulement– and have formal authorization from host nations. Such regional processing centers would have two benefits: Processing refugee claims could be centrally coordinated through an organization like UNHCR, and the process would deter refugees from having to undertake dangerous voyages, such as crossing the Mediterranean, in order to make their asylum claims.

But such a shift would only work with clear commitments for a new global resettlement scheme for refugees, and provisions for safe returns for those denied claims. Processing centers can only work if there is a clear onward route for those deemed to be legitimate refugees. Pledges have already been made by a number of countries, including the United States, to take 130,000 Syrian refugees.

There are historic precedents worth emulating. The Comprehensive Plan of Action, negotiated in 1989 in response to the Indochinese Boat People, successfully resettled more than 500,000 refugees over six years. UNHCR also negotiated a successful scheme following the Kosovo War in 1999, which resettled almost 100,000 refugees.

Sadly, we need to accept that the numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons is not unlikely to go down anytime soon. Supplementing the fragmented legal framework for refugee protection with a clear and improved global policy is necessary. The refugee problem will remain acute for years to come. With courageous political leadership we can ensure that those who need protection will receive it—no matter whose door they initially knock on.

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