Why Did Three Ordinary People Become Bank Robbers?

It can be tempting to think of economic collapses as being on the softer end of the crisis scale. Compared to the concrete misery of wars and natural disasters, they can seem a bit abstract, more of a spreadsheet disaster. When Lebanon’s economy fell apart in 2019 there was nothing abstract about it. I was living here (insulated from the worst by my foreign currency and passport) and every day I would hear heartbreaking stories. People who couldn’t pay for their kids’ cancer treatment. People who couldn’t eat. People who had broken their bodies working for decades, only to lose everything they had saved at the moment they retired. The worst of it was that it was an entirely human-made disaster, and the people responsible lost nothing.

So, when people across Lebanon started robbing banks to steal back their own money, it was no wonder that these bank robbers became folk heroes in Lebanon. They embodied everybody’s frustration and vicariously eased the sense of impotence. When I met Abda…