Old Abu Hassan clutched his walking stick and struggled to stand up before stepping out of his gloomy bedroom towards the cool balcony of his little house in the Palestinian refugee camp of Mie Mie in South Lebanon.
“Look at the water,” the 80-year-old man said, pointing towards the azure Mediterranean sea that stretched vastly in front of his eyes.
“You know that I envy this sea…it is free but we are not…it has been there for ages and but we have been displaced…it never grows old but we have grown very old and are about to die away from our lost homeland.”
Abu Hassan is among a handful of old men who are still alive in the tiny hilltop Mie Mie camp that overlooks the Mediterranean nearly 62 years after hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of their homes from Palestine.
Most of his old relatives and friends have died waiting since 1948 for the United Nations to fulfill its promise and get them back home. All of them have been buried in Lebanon, deprived of their homes in life and death.
Abu Hassan fled his home in North Palestine to escape Israeli massacres when he was a teen-ager. He now has at least 15 children and grand children, most of whom live with him in the same two-storey house in Mie Mie, which has a population of around 3,000 and overlooks the Southern Lebanese port of Sidon.
“Life here has become very boring and we don’t know what to do or what future we face,” said his 50-year-old son, Hassan, who is married with five children.
“Most people here are unemployed because they are not allowed to get jobs in the Lebanese public sector…private sector companies also rarely employ Palestinians while we struggle to get medical services, which are also rare.”
Hassan’s friend, Shawqi Mohammed Taha, blamed politics for the plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon, saying they face discrimination by the government.
“We can not own real estate or even an apartment…we do not enjoy any political or even human rights in this country although we were born here…what adds to our daily agony is that our camp is under siege by the Lebanese army……they are deployed at all entrances of the camp and you have to be checked and searched every time your enter or leave the camp…do you call this a life.”
Palestinians in Lebanon are estimated at around 400,000, nearly 10 per cent of the Arab country’s total population of four million.
As a result of this relatively large proportion of Palestinian refugees in the country it should not be surprising to find out that the issue of Palestinian refugees keeps dominating the political, humanitarian and economic discourse.
What is surprising though is the paucity of any serious studies that would attempt to gauge the impact of the problem.
According to a Lebanese analyst, the fiscal impact of the refugees is negligible and might even be positive as a result of the UN expenditures on healthcare, education and even some basic food commodities.
In a recent study, Ghassan Karam, a lecturer at the US Pace University in New York, said he believed the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon do not create an economic burden on the Lebanese but just the opposite-- they help in boosting the level of aggregate demand and they do contribute to increased labour competitiveness at the low skill end of the labour force.
In the absence of jobs inside Lebanon, Palestinians either rely on their relatives working in the oil-rich Gulf or on monthly wages provided by some Palestinian guerrilla factions to old members. A few of them have managed to open tiny shops inside the camp, where some Palestinians are still armed.
Such conditions have forced thousands of young Palestinians to migrate to Europe and other countries. Those who are left in the camps without jobs fan out in streets to sell cigarettes, vegetables and other goods.
“There is a big gap in our lives,” said Naji Shehadi, a 35-year-old unauthorised Palestinian taxi driver. “No one knows where we are heading…are we going back to Palestine or are we being given the Lebanese citizenship…I believe both options will not materialise because we will remain refugees.”
Despite its difficult conditions, Mie Mie’s plight is dwarfed by that of another refugee camp located just two kilometres away.
Ain Al Hilweh, which can wholly been seen from Mie Mie, is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. The teeming camp is home to more than 80,000 Palestinians although its area does not exceed three square kilometres.
“We live in tragic circumstances…the camp is like a big prison as it is surrounded by the Lebanese army from all sides,” said Ahmed Shabaita from Ain Al Hilweh.
“Living conditions are continuously deteriorating because of the large increase in the population and the absence of jobs and basic services….people here are now struggling to survive and just live for their day…no body knows where we are going and the Lebanese government is not making things easy for us…in a nutshell, we are living in a state of uncertainty and facing a bleak future—if there is any future….things could become bit easier if we can exercise our human rights…we don’t want part of Lebanon but we want Lebanon to help us.”
In his study, published in some Lebanese newspapers, Karam said the Palestinians are deprived from all political and civil rights in Lebanon and scoffed at government justifications that this would support the Palestinian cause.
“It would be difficult to argue that the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are not being treated as second class citizens and even as undesirables…... and the irony is that it is argued that all of these harsh measures are designed to benefit the victims…….. how can anyone make such an argument and expect to be taken seriously,” he said.
“The fact of the matter is that the Lebanese are opposed to integrating the Palestinian refugees for purely narrow and selfish reasons.”
According to Karam, a Christian, there is evidence that the Lebanese are driven to act as bigots against the Palestinians for two reasons.
“The overwhelming reason is the fear that if the Palestinian refugees are naturalised then it would be difficult in to maintain the archaic delicate sectarian balance in the rotten current political structure and (2) the totally unsupportable hypothesis that to offer the Palestinian refugees their human rights as dictated by UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), of which Lebanon was a major author, would weaken the argument for the right of return. This is balderdash.”
The sun was plunging beyond the Mediterranean to close the curtain on another monotonous day in the camp when Abu Hassan stirred and shifted his cosy chair away from the sea view. He gazed southward towards Palestine as if to gather memory of the day when he and his family were forced to cross into Lebanon.
“I still remember when we fled our homes…we had to walk more than 20 kilometres to the Lebanese border…we could not stay and fight because we did not have weapons and the Israelis were well armed,” he said.
“We moved to a makeshift camp in south Lebanon just close to Palestine…the United Nations gave us food and tents and assured us that these are only temporary pending our return to our homes…a year passed then they moved us to another location away from the border….we still waited to return…a couple of years passed then they moved us here…..
“They again gave us tents….a few years later, we built mud houses….some years later, we replaced them with small concrete houses…now they are big houses and we are still waiting for the UN to fulfill its promise of the return.”
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