As a truce in Lebanon takes hold, Palestinian refugees are enduring yet another episode in the never-ending experience of exile that began over 50 years ago. In 1948, the establishment of the Israeli state also forced close to a million Palestinians off their land and into squalid refugee camps throughout the Middle East or the more general condition of exile.
Lebanon’s refugee camps are among the worst in the region, second only to the camps in Israeli-Occupied Palestine. Palestinians in Lebanon have endured social, economic, and political marginalization since their arrival. Without citizenship, they cannot travel freely to access migrant work opportunities in other countries nor do they enjoy the rights and protections afforded by the Lebanese population at large. Without political representation, they remain barred from accessing the only arena through which rights and services can be asserted: the government. And, without access to the economy, Palestinians in Lebanon remain poor and dependent upon the UN and informal employment networks thus leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and a meager income.
With the recent battle between the Lebanese army and fatah al-Islam, a Palestinian organization of Salafi-branded Islam, Palestinians are once again experiencing displacement. Fleeing the camps from the battle, Palestinians are not only escaping a battle, rather, they are enacting the drama of exile that began in 1948.
Lebanon is a fragile country with a war-torn history and an intense political arena. It has behaved as one of the worst host states for Palestinians (compare to Syria and
Jordan) but cannot be blamed for the plight of its Palestinian refugees.
Who is to blame?
Israel.
The battle in Lebanon highlights a persistent problem that Israel and the West prefer to ignore: the Palestinian refugees. Casting the conflict in terms of a process for peace, the refugees—and their displacement from their homeland—have been swept under the political rug. Preferring to focus on the violence between Israelis and Palestinians, the so-called brokers of peace have largely abandoned the root of the conflict: displacement.
What the violence in Lebanon reveals is that the refugees are in desperate need of a solution. They cannot be absorbed, as the Israelis would like to put it, by their Arab brother and sister nations. Nations like Lebanon have too many internal problems to settle such a large population and, more importantly, it wasn’t Lebanon’s fault for the Palestinians’ arrival.
Palestinian camps are slums with high levels of poverty and desperation. Whether or not the fatah al-Islam group is linked to al-Qaeda or not, the fact remains that radicalization doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens in situations where people have no hope for a better future.
For years, Israel’s unwillingness to even entertatin the idea of return or compensation has left millions of Palestinian refugees in the abyss of desperation. While the PLO and Israel negotiate the occupation—a process hardly making any progress—the refugees remain the pink elephant in the region both neglected and exploited. In Lebanon, the situation is exacerbated by years of civil war and a general feeling that Palestinians are to blame for the ongoing disunity of the nation. The net effect has been a poor, marginalized, and desperate refugee population struggling for a solution of any kind. Part of that is Lebanon’s fault but the true culprit in this crime of Palestinian exile is Israel and it’s about time they live up to their responsibility, both politically and morally, to solve the Palestinian refugee crisis by letting them return.
Here are some highlights from the battle:
Scores of residents of the camp, home to some 40,000, made a dash for their lives in beaten up cars along the Mediterranean seaside road, making the most of a truce to escape in case fighting resumed.
Palestinian refugees gathered round the bodies of two boys killed by Lebanese army shelling in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Their mood was pure rage.
“The army bombed everywhere. It targeted everything. Even the Israelis would have been more merciful,” said Rami Mahmoud, a resident of Damoun — a district in the run-down camp where Lebanese troops had been fighting militants since Sunday.
Named after the area in Galilee once home to the refugees who fled when Israel was created in 1948, Damoun was largely destroyed during three days of shelling of the camp — the base for militant Islamist group Fatah al-Islam.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon denounced on Tuesday “criminal attacks” against Lebanese troops fighting Islamist militants in a Palestinian refugee camp and urged immediate access for aid to civilians.
“These actions constitute an assault onLebanon’s stability and sovereignty, and have seriously endangered civilians. They must halt immediately.”Ban and U.N. aid chief John Holmes deplored that attack, which Holmes termed “outrageous and completely unacceptable”, and called for safe corridors to be set up for supplies and medical staff.
“We are clearly in the face now of a serious humanitarian problem for the people trapped inside the camp,” Holmes told reporters.
“I would appeal to all those engaged in this to respect the fact that this is a civilian camp and that they have an obligation to respect international humanitarian law by protecting civilian lives and not using heavy weapons indiscriminately.”
