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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Focus Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Staying the execution
By Graham UsherTo no one's real surprise, the meeting in Washington on 15 June between President Bill Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ended without any progress in the snarled Oslo process. The US and Israel had hoped that the meeting might serve as a launching pad for a trilateral summit between Clinton, Arafat and Israeli Premier Ehud Barak to hammer out a framework agreement on the final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, settlements, borders and water resources.
But by the end of his three-hour session with the Palestinian leader the most Clinton was proposing was another trip to the region by Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Nor, when she arrives next weekend, will she be focusing only on the final status issues. The matters obstructing the talks now are the timing of Israel's next West Bank redeployment and Arafat's demand for the immediate release of 230 of the 1,650 Palestinian political prisoners interned in Israeli jails. Israel has offered to release three.
For most Palestinians, the outcome of the meeting was as predictable as it was depressing. But for the 300,000 or so Palestinian refugees in Lebanon any delay in holding a Camp David-like summit will be seen as a further stay in the possible execution of their rights and cause. For it is this community that feels most imperilled by a final settlement in which Arafat will be expected (and pressured) to trade their long-held aspirations for Israeli and US recognition of a Palestinian state. They are right to be worried.
Following his meeting with Barak in Lisbon two weeks ago, Clinton made the cryptic comment that Israel's precipitous retreat from Lebanon "will heighten the anxiety of the Palestinians" there. After 52 years of neglect, the US president's concern could hardly be seen as "a pang of conscience," says the PLO activist in Beirut's Mar Elias refugee camp, Suheil Natour. Rather, he believes Clinton's off-the-cuff remark was another step in readying Arab and international opinion for a "separate" solution to the problem of Lebanon's Palestinians.
According to Natour, and confirmed by other Palestinian sources in Gaza, despite the overall lack of movement in the talks first in Stockholm and now in Washington, "a temporary deal" is being concocted on the fate of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. If accepted, it would partially realise the long-held Israeli objective of having the refugee problem solved via their resettlement in their "host" countries or relocation to others rather than through their internationally endorsed right to return to their lands in what was Mandate Palestine. Natour explains the solution:
"The Israeli and American proposal is for some of the refugees to be naturalised in Lebanon, another 100,000 to be relocated to a Palestinian 'state' in the West Bank and Gaza and another 100,000 to be 'reunited' with their families in the Galilee over a 10 year period," he says. "It is a way of closing the file on the Palestinians in Lebanon without resolving the refugee problem as a whole."
Could it be executed? At the most basic human level the ground in Lebanon is "fertile" for such a solution, admits a Palestinian analyst in Lebanon, who spoke on condition of anonymity. This is due to the absolutely wretched conditions under which the refugees are forced to live in Lebanon. Once the cradle of the Palestinian "revolution," Lebanon's Palestinians have long since assumed the role of culprits in the Lebanese national consciousness. They are held responsible for Lebanon's 15-year long civil war and Israel's 22-year occupation. And their resettlement in Lebanon is not only opposed by every major political party and religious confession but also outlawed under Lebanon's 1989 Constitution.
To vanquish the prospect of resettlement, Palestinians in Lebanon are denied the most rudimentary of civil rights. They are barred from employment in 72 professions and entitled to no social services save those provided by the UN and a smattering of non-governmental organisations. The result is an average unemployment rate among them of 40 per cent -- 60 per cent in the camps -- and a semi-official process of quietly encouraged emigration, with as many as 100,000 Palestinians leaving Lebanon in the last decade, according to Natour. In such an environment of hopelessness and poverty relocation to a Palestinian state or a "third country like Canada" may be seen by Palestinians "as the least of the evils available to us," he admits.
Against this, the Palestinians' main hope is that such an Israeli and US-driven solution would never be acceptable to the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. In this they draw confidence from the recent reaffirmation by the man who will probably be Syria's next president, Bashar Al-Assad -- whose country hosts 370,000 Palestinians -- of his father's pledge that either there would be a "comprehensive solution" for the Palestinian refugees in the Arab countries or there would be "no solution" at all.
Palestinians in Lebanon have also drawn inspiration from Hizbullah's victory over the Israeli army in south Lebanon. This "demonstrated to us, for the first time in a long time, that Israel's will is not God's will on earth and can be resisted," says Natour. The liberation of the south from Israeli occupation also enabled Palestinians from the Galilee and Lebanon to meet across "the fence" with Israel, dramatising in the most moving way their yearning to unite and return.
Above all, says the Sidon-based Palestinian analyst, Jaber Soleiman, Palestinians in Lebanon will look to their kin in the West Bank and Gaza to take matters into their own hands, impressing on their leadership that there can be no peace without a just solution for the refugees. "If the Palestinians reach the 13 September deadline without a final status agreement and no resolution for the refugees, there will be a new phase of struggle in the occupied territories, accompanied by protests from Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria," he predicts.
Natour is less categorical. For now he believes the Palestinians should stay put in Lebanon and hold fast to their cause, "since no one ever gave Arafat the mandate to barter on our right to return." Nor, as long as despair is kept at bay, does he believe they will give up on the cause, given their history of defending it.
"Look, after our flight and expulsion from Palestine in 1948 we were utterly destitute. We no longer had a country, we didn't have organisations, we didn't have international assistance and our Arab brothers were defeated. We were refugees only, living under trees in the south of Lebanon or in caves along the Syrian border. At that time, Israel came along and offered to take back 100,000 Palestinians out of a total refugee population of 750,000. We refused the offer. Now we are 4.5 million, and 52 years later Israel comes along and offers to take back 100,000 under a policy of family reunification over a period of ten years. We will refuse the offer again."
