In the summer of 2022, long early-morning lines formed outside bakeries across Lebanon for limited supplies of subsidised Arabic bread. At some shops in Hazmieh, customers were separated by nationality under the instruction “Lebanese on the left, Syrians on the right.”
The economic crisis that began in 2019, the collapse of the currency and shortages of wheat and flour made an everyday staple uncertain. Tensions over position in bread lines sometimes escalated into violence.
Dividing one bread queue into two did not increase supply. It redirected the explanation for scarcity toward a difference in nationality among people needing the same food. The wait records the point at which an economic crisis became a mechanism of exclusion at a bakery door.