BEIRUT — This week President Donald Trump threatened to cut U.S. funding to the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees, and to the Palestinian Authority. On Twitter he chastised the Palestinian Authority for taking U.S. aid while showing no “appreciation or respect” and threatened to cut off funding. In December, his announcement to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel set off protests around the Arab world, and galvanized Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
Trump’s Jerusalem declaration triggered a rare moment of unity between different sects and factions in Lebanon’s fractured social fabric. In massive street protests in Beirut’s southern suburbs organized by the Shia militia and political party Hezbollah; at the lighting of the Christmas trees in downtown Beirut, at the government palace; and at the seat of the Maronite Catholic Church; and in political speeches by Sunni Prime Minister Saad al Hariri, political leaders rallied around the slogan: “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
But there is less clarity in the political narrative when it comes to the future of the approximately 174,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon.
Most of the “refugees,” in fact, are born and raised in Lebanon, or have arrived as children and have memories of Palestine only through the stories their parents tell them. Raised largely in enclaves, the young people keep the Palestinians’ accent and speak wistfully of returning to their parents’ or grandparents’ villages.
The sense of a separate identity is reinforced by their limited legal status. Like most Arab countries — except for Jordan — Lebanon does not grant citizenship to the Palestinian refugees, saying that to do so would undermine their “right of return” to their land, an option that remains purely theoretical. Beyond that, Palestinians in Lebanon are prohibited from owning property and from working in dozens of skilled professions.
In neighboring Syria, although Palestinians are not given citizenship, they have the same rights as Syrian citizens with regard to work, education and government services. But unlike Jordan and Syria , which are majority-Sunni Muslim countries, Lebanon is religiously diverse, and the country’s 15-year civil war — in which Palestinian factions were also combatants — was in part driven by sectarian divisions.
As a result, says Simon Haddad, a Lebanese political scientist who has studied Lebanese attitudes about the Palestinian population, Christian and Shia Lebanese populations tend to look on the mainly Sunni Palestinian refugees as a threat. Members of the Sunni and Druze sects are more accepting.
“Lebanon’s decision was non-integration because of the sectarian nature of Lebanon,” Haddad says. “Palestinians are discussed, as anything else, in terms of confession.”
Mohammad Hassan, a 37-year-old father of four from the Nahr al Bared camp in northern Lebanon, says he appreciates the Lebanese support for Palestinians on the question of Jerusalem, but remains frustrated with the government’s approach to the Palestinians living in Lebanon.
“We need to have human rights: to be able to live, to learn, to dress, to work, to eat, to go out,” he says. “My right is that if I got educated, I should be able to work. All of this doesn’t exist. Because of this, we’re angry with the Lebanese system.”
The situation in Nahr al Bared is particularly complicated. In 2007, fighting broke out between Fatah al-Islam, a militant Sunni Islamist group, and the Lebanese army. In the ensuing battle, much of the camp was reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of civilians — including Hassan’s family — were displaced.
Ten years later, some families live in shipping containers converted into dwellings while they wait for their houses to be rebuilt. Outsiders need a permit from the Lebanese Army to enter, meaning that the days when Lebanese residents of nearby towns used to come to do their shopping in the camp are long gone. The work that exists is mainly in reconstruction. Even there, Palestinian workers have been partially supplanted by Syrian refugees.
“The Syrians work cheaper,” says Hassan, who has been without work for the past two months. “It’s not that we don’t want them here. They are also coming from a crisis and there’s a war in their country and they’re coming here and want to work. But Lebanon is not Germany, Sweden, Britain — Lebanon is a small country.”
The unemployment rate is about 18 percent among Palestinians in Lebanon — and particularly high among younger workers — compared to an overall 6.8 percent. An International Labor Organization survey from 2012 found the average Palestinian wage in Lebanon was 537,000 Lebanese pounds a month, or about $358, considerably below the Lebanese minimum wage of $450 a month.
Ambitious young people often set their eyes on emigrating abroad, an option that was also easier before the Syrian crisis and influx of refugees to Europe.
Raed Abdelal, 25, also of Nahr al Bared, graduated from Lebanese International University with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and spent a year and a half searching for a job before he found temporary work as an Android and iPhone developer for a French company with an office in the city of Tripoli. There, he says, he made $500 a month, while a Lebanese co-worker doing the same job made $1,500. Even the salary of the people cleaning the office was higher, he says — $600 a month. After that, Abdelal said he gave up on finding work and instead returned to school.
“Now I’m just thinking about the master’s degree, and after the degree maybe I will travel.”
In part because of the outflow of young people, the Palestinian population in Lebanon has been shrinking, a fact that was highlighted by the release in December of the results of the first-ever government-commissioned census of Palestinian refugees.
The only official measure of the Palestinian population previously was the number registered with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — around 450,000. But UNRWA does not track the number of registered refugees who leave the country.
The newly released government-sponsored census found 174,422 Palestinians living in Lebanon’s 12 formal Palestinian camps and 156 informal settlements. Palestinian groups have seized on the lower number as evidence that the refugees are not a heavy burden on Lebanese society.
Sheikh Abu Sharif Akl, a spokesman for the Islamist faction Osbat al-Ansar in the Ain al Helweh Palestinian camp, said in a statement, “There are those who have always been trying to inflate the Palestinian presence in Lebanon and talk about half a million or more.”
The fact that the true number was found to be only around 174,000, he says, should “contribute to the realization of more civil rights for Palestinians living in Lebanon, whether it’s the right of ownership or the right to work.”
It remains to be seen whether the census and the increased attention to Palestine will translate into political change in Lebanon. In spite of the recent furor around the question of Jerusalem, Haddad says Lebanese political leaders are more concerned about the question of the 1.5 million Syrian refugees, the upcoming parliamentary elections and Lebanon’s place in regional power struggles.
“The political situation has enough problems to discuss,” he says. “The Palestinian issue is not a priority for the time being.”
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Palestinians in Lebanon Struggle to Find Own Identity originally appeared on usnews.com
