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.”
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