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by Daniel Pipes
May 19, 2003
updated Mar 3, 2009
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The 400,000 stateless Palestinians living in Lebanon live with many restrictions, not being allowed to attend public school, own property, or even improve their housing stock - regulations that exist so remind Palestinians that they are refugees and should one day return whence they came. In 1994, under Syrian influence, the Lebanese government relented a bit and distributed citizenship to tens of thousands of Palestinians.
Now comes news, "Lebanon Reviews Status of Palestinians," that the government plans to revoke citizenship to many of those Palestinians. (May 19, 2003)
June 28, 2005 update: In a reversal from two years ago, and perhaps related to the reduction in Syrian influence in Lebanon, the new government is making plans to permit Palestinians to obtain work permits, writes Rym Ghazal in the Daily Star.
The Lebanese government announced it will finally allow Palestinian refugees born in Lebanon to legally work at manual and clerical jobs in the country, ending 20 years of discrimination. In an official statement, Lebanon's outgoing Labor Minister Tarrad Hamadeh said: "From now on Palestinians born on Lebanese land and registered officially with the Lebanese Interior Ministry will be allowed to work in the jobs previously unavailable to them." The move brings Lebanon more in line with other Arab countries who long ago granted Palestinian refugees the right to work, and have in some cases offered them citizenship.
But despite the measure, the Lebanese government insisted a ban on Palestinians seeking professional employment will remain in place, meaning Palestinian workers will be restricted to manual and clerical work. There are around 400,000 registered Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, 90 percent of whom were born in Lebanon and will be eligible to work. Anyone aged 57 and below will benefit from the work permit.
July 16, 2005 update: According to the Syrian Arab News Agency, a ranking figure in Hizbullah, Hussein Mosawi, reiterated his party's rejection of any talk about settling the Palestinians in Lebanon, saying that this "serves Israel" by "liquidating" the Palestinian question and particularly the right of return.
May 6, 2007 update: Bad as conditions are for the bulk of the roughly 400,000 Palestinians residing in Lebanon, there's a yet worse-off category, that of the document-less or "invisible" Palestinians, estimated to number between 3,000 and 5,000, as Nada Bakri explains in "Invisible Palestinians Exist in Legal Limbo in Lebanon." She tells the story of the Hamdallah family, starting with Moetaz Hamdallah, 65, born in Jerusalem, who arrived in Lebanon in 1970 from Jordan after the "Black September" uprising. Expelled from Jordan, Hamdallah reached Lebanon at a moment when the Palestine Liberation Organization ran southern Lebanon, so he did not bother legalizing his status with the Lebanese state. "The revolution was strong, I was strong. I never thought about identification papers or what would happen to me and to my children without them."
But when the P.L.O. was driven out of Lebanon in 1982, "I started pitying myself," he said as he sat on a plastic chair outside his concrete-block house in the Rashidieh refugee camp in southern Lebanon. Inside, flies buzzed under a zinc roof and unpainted walls. Mr. Hamdallah did not flee when Israel was formed over the former Palestine in 1948, and so he and his family did not meet the United Nations definition of Palestinian refugees. In Lebanon, the P.L.O. was blamed for igniting civil war, and so Mr. Hamdallah, like others with his background, were not welcomed. …
Three generations of the Hamdallah family have lived in Lebanon. And for three generations not a single member of the family has been allowed to graduate from school, legally marry, or hold a job, or even set foot outside of the rundown camps that have been home to generations of Palestinians. … they cannot get identification cards, the currency of all life transactions in this region. Marriage, travel, work all are impossible without a national identification document. "They are not persons in front of the law," said Stéphane Jacquemet, regional representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lebanon. "They live in camps, don't have access to services, schools, hospitals, and strictly speaking a person with no documents can be arrested. They absolutely have no future, and they are giving their no future to their children." …
When Mr. Hamdallah's oldest son, Mohannad, 34, was a child, he asked his father why he did not have an identification paper like his fellow classmates. He was told that he would get papers when they returned home meaning Jerusalem, he said. Recently, when Mohannad Hamdallah was asked how he would respond if his 7-year old daughter, the oldest of a third generation of refugees in his family without identification, someday asks him why she cannot graduate from school, he thought for a moment before answering. "I would tell her they were burned during the war," he said.
Oct. 17, 2007 update: In a twelve-thousand-word study, "Lebanon: Exiled and suffering: Palestinian refugees in Lebanon," Amnesty International comprehensively reviews the circumstances of Palestinians living in Lebanon, whom it says are living under "appalling social and economic conditions." Here are some excerpts from the introduction:
Today, some 300,000 Palestinian refugees reside in Lebanon and constitute nearly a tenth of the country's population.… They also remain subject to various restrictions in the host country, Lebanon, which places them in a situation akin to that of second class citizens and denies them access to their full range of human rights, even though most of them were born and raised in Lebanon. … Just over half – some 53 percent - of Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanon, reside in war-torn, decaying and poverty-stricken camps. The conditions for those living outside the camps in towns, "gatherings", villages and rural areas, are also poor.
The report finds they suffer "systematic discrimination" and states that
The life is being choked out of their communities, forcing the young and healthy to seek jobs abroad and condemning the rest to a daily struggle for survival. Most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have had little choice but to live in overcrowded and deteriorating camps and informal gatherings that lack basic infrastructure. The amount of land allocated to official refugee camps has barely changed since 1948, despite a fourfold increase in the registered refugee population. The residents have been forbidden by law from bringing building materials into some camps, preventing the repair, expansion or improvement of homes. Those who have defied the law have faced fines and imprisonment as well as demolition of the new structures. In camps where additional rooms or floors have been added to existing buildings, the alleyways have become even narrower and darker, the majority of homes receive no direct sunlight and, despite the best efforts of the inhabitants, the pervasive smells of rubbish and sewage are at times overwhelming. …
The ghettoization of Palestinians is intensified by the constant military presence around the camps in southern Lebanon. Each time refugees want to leave or return to their homes, they have to pass an army checkpoint and show their documents, reinforcing a perception that they are outsiders and a potential threat, rather than refugees in need of protection. The discrimination and marginalization they suffer is compounded by the restrictions they face in the labour market, which contribute to high levels of unemployment, low wages and poor working conditions. Until 2005, more than 70 jobs were barred to Palestinians - around 20 still are. The resultant poverty is exacerbated by restrictions placed on their access to state education and social services.
Apr. 23, 2008 update: In a statement seemingly out of nowhere, Mahmoud Abbas told reporters as he traveled to Washington that Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are dealing with the issue of Palestinian refugees and, "If a deal is signed between Israel and the PA, no Palestinian refugee will be left in Lebanon."
Comment: Given that the Olmert government certainly is not about to allow 300,000 Palestinians from Lebanon into Israel, Abbas seems to be implying that he expects to reach an agreement with Israel that permits them to settle in the West Bank and Gaza. If so, that is news because until now, the PA has insisted that refugees must be settled into Israel, not the territories.
Feb. 25, 2009 update: Politicians make pronouncements but on the ground things remain unchanged. Indeed, as Time magazine puts it, "For most of the 220,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, time has stopped." Its article today focuses on Abdullah Sulhani, 85, and his family. Reporter Andrew Lee Butters portrays them as
caught between a past they can't escape and a future they struggle to shape, renting out the top floors of their building — which technically they don't even own. Like the rest of the 400,000-odd Palestinians in Lebanon, they cannot legally buy a house or apartment and remain barred from some 70 professions. Lebanon's fragile sectarian political system, balanced between Christians and Muslims, has been unable or unwilling to absorb so many Muslim refugees. So neither Sulhani, nor his children, nor his grandchildren, nor his great-grandchildren have Lebanese citizenship, despite the fact that all but the family patriarch were born on Lebanese soil. "My life in this country has been one heartbreak after another," says daughter Ahlam. "I have no good memories."
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