Daily Star - Petition Aims For Deeper Connection With Palestinians

By Dalila Mahdawi
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: Marwan, a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon’s Bourj al-Shemali camp, dropped out of school in the sixth grade because his family couldn’t afford the fees. But even if he had stayed, it wouldn’t have brightened his career prospects: Palestinians are barred from working in all but the most menial professions. “As a Palestinian in Lebanon I study and pay fees, then I can’t work,” Marwan says. “You can only work here in the hospital in the camp.”
Although Israel’s military onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip in December 2008 put the spotlight on the Palestinians, the international community often overlooks the plight of the 4.6-million Palestinian refugees scattered elsewhere across the Arab world. The conditions endured by Palestinians like Marwan in Lebanon are generally thought to be the worst, where most live in the shadow of historical events they weren’t alive to witness and each day is a struggle to make ends meet.
As the international human rights watchdog organization Amnesty International has said, although the notion of responsibility for Palestinian refugees goes well beyond the Lebanese state, Beirut has exacerbated the problems Palestinians face by denying them basic civil and human rights.
Up until fairly recently, over 70 professions were off limits to Palestinians. A recent amendment to that rule means Palestinians are still excluded from such professional fields as medicine, law or engineering, but that they can access more low-paying, menial and informal work. Work permits, however, remain elusive to most. In addition, Palestinians cannot legally own or inherit property in Lebanon, are vulnerable to eviction or arbitrary detention, are prohibited from repairing or building housing, and suffer from inadequate education and health care services.
The Economist has referred to the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as an “archipelago of misery” where more than half of the 400,000 refugees live in squalid, unhygienic and overcrowded conditions. An uprising in the summer of 2007 by a little-known Islamist group, Fatah al-Islam, reduced the once prosperous Nahr al-Bared camp in northern Lebanon to rubble, displacing its 31,000 residents for the second time in their history. Whether they are in the camps or in informal gatherings that are not privy to support from the UN Palestinian refugee relief agency, UNRWA, Lebanon’s Palestinians seem to be sinking further into poverty and desperation every day.
Recognizing the need for Palestinians to enjoy greater rights, activists have in recent weeks circulated a petition calling on the Lebanese authorities to ameliorate the conditions of the refugee population.
The petition, drafted by the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign (PCRC) and the Sabra Shatila Foundation, reads: “Secondary only to ending the siege of Gaza and achieving Statehood, the enactment of the basic civil right to work and to own a home for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Refugees living in squalor in Lebanon is perhaps the most critical and immediately achievable goal of the Palestinian resistance and the ideals enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The goal of the petition, says PCRC’s Beirut director Junko Hoki, is to secure a minimum of 433,000 signatures, with each signature representing a twinning to each Palestinian refugee thought to be living in Lebanon. The idea “is to connect people more deeply with the Palestinians.” Two weeks from its publication, the petition has already attracted around 1,600 signatures, from as far afield as Australia and as close as Beirut’s Bourj al-Barajneh camp.
Franklin Lamb, a board member of the Sabra Shatila Foundation, says he was motivated to create the petition after seeing the difficulties faced by his friends and colleagues in the camps. “They are only asking for respect from Lebanese society as they prepare themselves to return to Palestine,” he tells The Daily Star, careful to emphasize that the granting of civil rights is not equivalent to naturalization.
Because of Lebanon’s complicated and delicate confessional political system, the future of Palestinian refugees here remains a source of bitter debate. As most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims, some Lebanese believe the granting of rights to Palestinians could lead to their permanent resettlement or naturalization. But Lamb says there are easy ways to quell such fears. “Any of the civil rights, such as the right to work, can be term limited or made to expire when the refugees are able to return to Palestine,” he says.