One of many temporary sheds in which Palestinian families from the destroyed Nahr al-Bared refugee camp share single-room homes.

Jane Power

By Jane Power

Thirty years ago, my husband and I spent a week in Beirut with a delegation of Americans visiting UN refugee camps. There lived the families of some 100,000 Palestinians—many of them Galilean farmers—who had fled the fighting as the state of Israel was established. When we arrived in Lebanon, these farm families without land had been there for more than three decades. By September 2009, when I returned to Beirut, they had been there for three decades more.

The exiles were unwelcome. Reportedly, officials believed (and still do) that if the Palestinians were comfortable in Lebanon, they wouldn’t want to leave. This influx of Muslims created a fearsome prospect for a government whose stability has always depended on a delicate balance of Muslim and Christian sects. More restricted in Lebanon than in any other Arab country, Palestinians are denied citizenship, forbidden to work outside their refugee camps (although this eased in 2006), and forbidden to buy property or improve on the UN's concrete huts. Yet during the 1970s, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was able to build up institutions including clinics, workshops, courts, a radio station, and a national archive. This picture of aging and homesick villagers, angry children, uncomfortable surroundings, and hopeful institutions was what I saw in Beirut in June 1979.

The exiles’ situation would worsen. The factions in the civil war—one right wing, mostly Christian, the other left wing, mostly Muslim—fought on bloodily until 1989. The Israeli army invaded briefly in 1979, then arrived to stay in 1982. (The last of Israel’s troops pulled out in 2000.) Many impoverished Lebanese appreciated the PLO's social services and many on the left appreciated its political support. Many other Lebanese held the Palestinian exiles responsible for both the civil war and Israel’s invasions. Days after the PLO's fighters were forced to leave Lebanon in September 1982, Israeli forces sealed the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and a Christian militia entered the camps and killed more than a thousand of the people who remained. Later, in the mid-1980s, a Shi'ite Muslim militia blockaded and bombarded Shatila, cutting off water, food, and electricity supplies for more than two years. Another brief Israeli invasion came in 1996, and then a longer one in 2006. In 2007, a group of heavily armed foreign Islamists moved into Nahr al-Bared camp in the north and began attacking the Lebanese army. Some 32,000 refugees in the camp fled; the Lebanese army leveled the camp.

This 30-year history was very present last month, when I again spent a week in Lebanon. On this trip, I was part of a large, mostly European group commemorating the 1982 massacre.

The country has come roaring back from devastation. Beirut is once again the “Paris of the Levant”. Hotels and condos destined for purchase by Gulf plutocrats are outrageously luxurious and chaotic traffic consists of imminent gridlock, darting Vespas, and fumes. Lining the coastal roads that coil and uncoil between wooded ravines and placid bays are billboards in English, promoting washer/dryers, tight jeans, politicians, cooktops, and private schools.

Currently, more than 400,000 Palestinian exiles—about a tenth of all Palestinian refugees—live in Lebanon. In the camps, we saw bright, spacious family centres and colorful, well-equipped playgrounds (often funded by foreign NGOs). We met social workers energized by national purpose. We heard Lebanese and Palestinian politicians express commitment to end party strife and work together for the people's good.

But we also heard stories and saw living conditions far worse than we did in 1979. Our group saw buildings in Shatila that were still missing walls from past bombardments. We saw a former hospital now housing 1,200 people. The camps get no municipal services; no sewer system, garbage collection, piped water, or reliable electricity. The aspiring Palestinian institutions of the 1970s were shattered in 1982. Lebanon's social services are closed to the exiles, who have come to depend on programs run by the UN or foreign NGOs, or to a new hospital with flexible fees (reportedly run by Hezbollah). We saw the refugees from Nahr al-Bared still huddled near their former homes in tin-roofed sheds—cold in the winter, hot in the summer—that they fear will be their permanent dwellings.

At the same time, the Palestinian exiles in Lebanon’s refugee camps are not cut off from news of the outer world, and their sense of national history and national unity is keen. They understand the human effects of blockades, bombardments, and massacres, whether in Beirut or in Gaza. One exile, Alaa el-Ali, recently wrote, in the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, "Here, in Sabra, the start of a painful path and Gaza and massacre. And over there, in Palestine, the end of a painful path and Gaza and massacre [sic], never ending. Only the dates change."

We are the ones cut off. In Gaza, as in Lebanon, the suffering and the strength go on before and after the invasions and the slaughter. But the big media quickly move away. We see these struggling mothers and fathers, energetic kids, and unbroken old people only when someone is killing them.

Jane Power will speak about her recent visit to Lebanon at an event billed as "Eyewitness Reports from Palestine and Lebanon". The engagement is scheduled to take place at the Rhizome Cafe on Thursday, October 22, and is sponsored by Jews for a Just Peace and the Canada Palestine Association.