Lebanon grants expanded employment rights to its Palestinians

Earlier this week, parliament voted to grant Lebanon’s Palestinian population wider employment rights. Previously, the jobs that they were aloud to do were mostly limited to manual labor, but the new legislation opens up every field that other “foreigners” are allowed to work in. This still excludes the areas of law, medicine, and engineering, which are reserved for Lebanese citizens.

The vote was a major step forward for Lebanese Palestinians, who number from between 300,000 and 400,000 depending on who you ask, but it is clear that there is still a long road ahead for this tortured group of people to attain a decent standard of living in Lebanon.

The subject of Palestinians is a touchy one in Lebanon. The Lebanese still recall the instability that the waves of Palestinians descending on their country caused. In 1948, thousands of Palestinians fled from the newly created “Israel” to wait out the Arab-Israeli War. The rest came in the early 1970’s from Jordan, when the PLO was expelled for its attempt to take over the country.

Two waves came, and each brought chaos and violence. In Lebanon, there is a fragile sectarian divide between Christian, Sunni Muslims, and Shia Muslims (among many other smaller groups). In this context, a flood of armed refugees spilling in and tilting the balance was incredibly destabilizing. One cannot help but wonder what the country would be like if the PLO never arrived and used Lebanon as a base to attack Israel.

For the Palestinian’s part, they say the new legislation will do little to ease their condition. Most live in squalid camps that are maintained solely by the United Nations Relief Works Agency. They still cannot own land, collect inheritances, or attend Lebanese schools. They cannot  build new homes, and they cannot make additions to the ones they have.

The whole system is geared towards giving them a place to live without making them so comfortable that they will want to stay and start demanding to become citizens. And whether you believe it or not, most Lebanese Palestinians say they don’t want to stay and they don’t want citizenship. They just want to be living a normal life and to be treated with dignity until they can return home to “Palestine”.

This might be true, but it might just be rhetoric to make their hosts feel more at ease with their presence. After what happened in the 1970’s and the subsequent Civil War (1975-1990), the Palestinian’s of Lebanon are perpetually walking on egg shells, careful not to demand too much.

But something must be done. The camps that they live in are overcrowded and are teeming with armed militants that administer law and order there, like some Palestinian reservation, with its own rules and guns. As a practice, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will not step foot in the camps.

Having so many unhappy people crowded into such small spaces with so many guns is bound to have an affect on the host state. Indeed, in 2007, members of Fatah al-Islam clashed with the LAF at the Nahr el-Bared camp near Tripoli. Hundreds of people were killed as a result, and the camp was completely destroyed.

Perhaps the recent legislation was meant to head off another such incident, but it is only a matter of time before the problem rears its ugly head again. Today, some leaders, including Druze Chieftain Walid Jumblatt, are calling for expanded rights for the Palestinians of Lebanon. However, Christian leaders, already feeling hemmed in by Muslims, are extremely weary of such a proposition, as for them it comes too close full naturalization.

Israel, as it enters into renewed talks with Hamas and Fatah next month, would likely prefer to see Lebanon’s Palestinians become naturalized citizens, which would make them less likely to make right-of-return claims during the negotiations. The right of return issue is one of the fundamental disagreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Many of the homes that they left in 1948 have vanished without a trace, and most have no legal documents backing their claims to the land.

Today, some Palestinian families are on going on their fourth and fifth generations living in the camps. With no end in sight to this purgatorial existence, they will take any legislative victory they can get. But it is painfully clear that more must be done.