Lebanon and the Palestinians: Myths and reality

Ain El Hilweh camp, Sidon, Lebanon

Lebanon and the Palestinians: Myths and reality

The late Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon, Ashraf Dabbour, once responded to a question about the Lebanese civil war years and the responsibility of different Lebanese factions in massacres against the Palestinians by saying that the Palestinians want the war behind them and want to keep friends with all Lebanese.

Civil wars carry painful memories. The Lebanese Civil War is not exceptional in that sense. Last January, I was driving from Kentucky to a conference in New Orleans. On the way I saw a sign that read “Shilo, Six Miles.” I did not know much about the American Civil War at the time but I have heard of Shilo. So I decided to take a detour and visit the famous Civil War battlefield site. That visit, and the controversy over Confederate monuments, created an interest in learning about the Civil War and its aftermath. It is not possible to overestimate the importance of the Civil War on American history since. I have since listened to hours and hours of lectures on the war and have read a few books. There is so much written about the American civil war and we know a lot and scholars continue to enrich the understanding of that war. The same cannot be said about the Lebanese civil war, government policy was enforced amnesia.

A Lebanese movie dealing with the theme of the civil war, The Insult, made it to the Oscars and as such received international attention. The movie deals with the issue of Palestinian refugees and Lebanon. Fadia Elia, a Christian Palestinian-Lebanese woman called it an insult to Palestinians because in The Insult “Lebanese are depicted as ever-benevolent while the Palestinians remain ingrate” and the Damour massacre, the bloody shirt of the Lebanese Christian right, is presented without contextualizing it.

There is no benevolence and the Palestinian refugees are the victims of Lebanese state policy that is designed to marginalize them. Simon Haddad, a professor at Notre Dame University in Lebanon, in The Palestinian Predicament in Lebanon quotes University of Louisville anthropologist Julie Peteet analogizing the situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon today to that of American immigrants during one of the anti-immigrant chapters of the past: “Palestinian refugees have been pathologized in a manner reminiscent of turn-of-the century American hyperbole that immigrants carried tuberculosis. Segregating Palestinians would facilitate normalization of post-war Lebanon with national health restored through the isolation of an infectious presence. Palestinian refugees have been pathologized in a manner reminiscent of turn- of- the- century American hyperbole that immigrants carried tuberculosis. Segregating Palestinians would facilitate normalization of post-war Lebanon with national health restored through the isolation of an infectious presence.”

          When the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990, a Syrian-dominated order emerged [and ended when the Syrian army withdrew in 2005]. President Elias Hrawi declared Afa Allah Amma Mada, means let bygones be bygones. There was no Truth and Reconciliation Commission- no accountability for the missing and the crimes committed. All nations are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson put it, and myth is an important part of the making of nations. There was a need for a founding myth for the Taif Republic. That myth was that the civil war is all the Palestinians’ fault. And that myth, in turn, was used as a pretext for harsh policies against the Palestinians in Lebanon. Harsh policies that continue until today. All the Palestinians were held responsible for the war, not just the PLO or Arafat. One anecdote that illustrates this- In the 1990s the government dealt harshly with Aounists, supporters of the then- exiled General Michel Aoun. After a police beating, one of the young Christian- Aounist men protested the beating and mistreatment by exclaiming: “they beat us as if we were Palestinian!” Palestinians, as a group, in the mind of that Lebanese young man were all deserving of state violence and abuse.

Official Lebanon never welcomed the Palestinian refugees. About 90,000 of the Palestinians who were expelled or forced to flee Palestine in 1948 sought refuge in Lebanon. They were given no rights- political, social or economic. The Lebanese secret police, the Deuxieme Bureau, imposed a reign of harsh rules and terror on the camps. The refugees could not even move from one camp to another without official permission. The country was the “Switzerland of the Middle East” for those with money but was a bad place to be poor and a terrible place to be a Palestinian refugee. A great book to learn more about that period is Rosemary Sayegh’s, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries.

The situation of the Palestinian refugees improved substantially with the Cairo Agreement of 1969. This was an agreement brokered by President Nasser of Egypt between the PLO’s Arafat and the Lebanese government. It gave the Palestinians the right to attack Israel from Lebanon. It also removed the oppressive police presence from the Palestinian camps. The Agreement was annulled by the Lebanese parliament in 1987. The law that annulled it was drafted by a Lebanese Shiite, Speaker of the Parliament Hussein el Husseini, a former leader of the Lebanese Shiite Amal Movement and signed into law by Prime Minister Salim El Hoss, a Sunni Lebanese and a self-proclaimed supporter of the Palestinians and their “sacred cause.”

The annulment of the Cairo Agreement has been a disaster to the Palestinians. Again they found themselves stuck in limbo- again to the status of the oppressive years of the 50s and much of the 60s.  The government though decided not to assert its authority in the camps. More importantly, often excluded from the discussion of the annulled Cairo Agreement is that it was not only about the right to fight Israel and to end the oppressive control of the camps. Article I of the agreement affirmed “[T]he right to work, residence, and movement for Palestinians currently residing in Lebanon.” With the annulment of the Cairo Agreement, the Palestinians lost the right to work and returned to the marginalized status that they had rebelled against. The late Prime Minister Rafic Hariri articulated the government policy: “Lebanon will never, ever integrate the Palestinians. They will not receive civic or economic rights or even work permits. Integration would take the Palestinians off the shoulders of the international agency that has supported them since 1948.”