The Palestinian Condition… The Diaspora

The resolution on the partition of Palestine, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947 and known as Resolution 181, brought the State of Israel into existence over a territory of fifteen thousand square kilometres, whose population did not then exceed half a million settlers. The same document called for the creation of an Arab state on eleven thousand square kilometres, at a time when the Palestinian people numbered one million four hundred thousand inhabitants. The resolution further provided for the placing of Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international trusteeship. The Arab and Palestinian rejection of this partition triggered the outbreak of the war over Palestine, with consequences that proved catastrophic: Israel was thus able to occupy 78% of the land and compel some seven hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants to leave.

Of those who fled, the ones who made their way to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon accounted for no more than half that number, the other half settling in the camps of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In other words, more than a million Palestinians never left their land, despite their internal displacement. The paradox lies in the fact that collective consciousness nonetheless came to treat them as a refugee people, owing largely to the Jordanian nationality law and the Israeli naturalisation law.

As for the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian administration issued refugee identity cards to the populations of Gaza’s own towns and cities, people who had never left their soil, thereby transforming them, in their turn, into refugees.

Truce

Lebanon received some one hundred thousand Palestinians, to whom were added roughly as many Lebanese who had been residing in Palestine and now returned home. A portion of these still appears in the statistics of UNRWA, which had defined a refugee as any person who had resided in Palestine before the Nakba.

But when the Palestinian refugees learned of the armistice agreements concluded between Israel on the one hand and Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon on the other, they understood that the military defeat had been formally enshrined, as had the new Israeli reality, in spite of every hollow slogan that continued to be brandished.

Once life had been somewhat stabilised in the camps and in certain villages and towns, reflection on destiny and on the future began to assert itself. A decade and some years elapsed since the Nakba in what certain elites described as a period of drift and loss of direction.

In the nineteen-fifties, individuals attempted to return to their homeland by their own means, while others formed armed groups of which some succeeded in their operations and others failed, with most eventually being absorbed into Arab armies for purposes of military reconnaissance.

The majority of refugees, however, accepted the authority of the host state and submitted to its laws, particularly in Syria and Egypt, where the Palestinian cause was instrumentalised to shore up the legitimacy of the regimes themselves.

In Lebanon, the situation differed markedly, as the authorities treated the refugees as a special case entrusted to the management of the security services, applying laws of isolation, restricting freedom of movement, prohibiting all construction, even the building of a simple private lavatory for a family, and subjecting individuals to brutal security interference in their daily lives, under the pretext of containing the spread of Nasserist, Baathist and other nationalist currents among the generation of the Nakba.

The Cairo Agreement

It was not misery alone that drove the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to take up arms. The role played by Egypt and Syria after the humiliating defeat of June 1967 had a decisive influence in supplying weapons, providing military training and opening up routes of access to the fronts surrounding Israel, foremost among them the south of Lebanon.

When the crisis of dual power erupted in Jordan, pitting the Palestinian revolution against the Hashemite throne during the events of September 1970, President Gamal Abdel Nasser played the role of the fedayyin’s saviour by securing their withdrawal from Amman, launching the rallying call that “the resistance exists to endure,” which meant, in other terms, that the official Arab regimes continued to need it. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, completed this formula for his part by declaring that “the resistance exists to endure and to prevail.”

This explains the role Nasser played in producing the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which responded to the persistent need of the official Arab order to maintain an armed resistance operating from the frontline states, a situation that continued until the October War of 1973.

In a belated Palestinian critical reading of this pivotal episode in Lebanon’s contemporary history, the text of the apology addressed to the Lebanese people, known as the “Declaration of Palestine in Lebanon,” stated in particular:

“…But fairness demands that we acknowledge that the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, by its human, political and military scale, weighed heavily upon this fraternal country and imposed upon it burdens that exceeded its strength and its capacity to endure… to the point of inflicting upon its state, its economy, its social fabric and its formula of coexistence deep wounds that are no longer hidden from anyone. It is equally fair to say that Palestinian involvement in Lebanon, as it unfolded, and particularly during the wars of 1975 to 1982, was in its entirety almost the product of compulsion, driven by internal and external circumstances akin to force majeure.”

This revision was not merely a moral exercise; it flowed from a profound evolution and a genuine turning point in Palestinian political thought, one that had been successively nourished by the declaration of independence of the State of Palestine at the National Council convened in Algiers in 1988, which anchored the Palestinian peace project within the broader framework of the Arab peace project, and then by the conclusion of the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the subsequent formation of the Palestinian National Authority.

All of this, combined with the restoration of Palestinian-Lebanese relations in 2005 following the end of Syrian tutelage, led the new Palestinian policy to define itself henceforth in the logic of statehood rather than revolution. The Palestinian apology thus acquired its political and moral weight, and its credibility in practice before it was expressed in words, as the following passage attests:

“…Opening the door to revision, and helping ourselves all to purify our memory… we take the initiative, for our part, of apologising for any harm we have caused to beloved Lebanon, wittingly or unwittingly, and this apology is unconditional, without awaiting any apology in return.” — 7 January 2008

The Lebanese Parliament’s decision to abrogate the Cairo Agreement in 1987, for its part, was less rooted in a logic of rebuilding the Lebanese state on the basis of a weapons monopoly than it reflected the struggle waged by the Assad regime against the PLO leadership for control and dominance over the camps, Lebanon serving once again as the theatre of that confrontation in the wake of the Palestinian withdrawal of 1982. (The war of the camps, the war of the dissidents., the events of eastern Sidon, etc.)

One can therefore conclude now with clarity that when the current administration, through its inaugural address and its government programme, took the decision to concentrate arms in the hands of the state, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was simultaneously launching, through its embassy in Beirut, its political and practical initiative to implement that very decision.

What took place in the camps last year regarding the handover of heavy and medium weapons bears witness to the credibility of Palestinian policy in building a relationship of trust with Lebanese legitimacy, a relationship founded on respect for the Lebanese national interest and on the commitment not to undermine it, within the framework of resolving the accumulated problems of the Palestinian refugee community, understood as forming part of the Lebanese challenges that must be addressed through a new perspective, without causing further harm to the country.

A Word of Honour

The occupation of the Holy Places in Palestine had painful repercussions for believers, who found themselves barred from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

In this spirit, the Holy See multiplied its initiatives, most notably through the papal visits to Palestine over the past two decades, thereby joining analogous initiatives emanating from Al-Azhar, from Marrakech, from Abu Dhabi, and from local endeavours in Lebanon, both official and civil in character.

Most of these initiatives shared two fundamental affirmations. The first held that Palestine constitutes the land and the geography of the Christian message; the second proclaimed that Lebanese Christianity had embodied, in this region, civilisational, cultural and human dialogue, remaining thereby the most luminous beacon of the Christian presence in the East.

If the emigration of Christians represents a major challenge for the entire Levant, it is an even greater one for Lebanon and Palestine, where the Christian presence continues to shrink under the effects of an Israeli occupation that seeks to see a Palestine emptied of that presence. From 13% that it once represented, it has today fallen to below 2%, through systematic policies designed to exclude the Christian role in resistance to the occupation.

In these blessed days of Lent and Easter, on 29 April 2008, a large Palestinian delegation comprising leaders from Ramallah, headed by the Ambassador of Palestine to Lebanon and accompanied by virtually all the local leadership, made its way to the patriarchal seat at Bkerké, presenting a document issued by the Palestinian leadership and entitled “A Word of Honour and a Pledge of Faithfulness to Our Christian Brothers in Lebanon,” whose terms read as follows:

“We, Palestinians, Muslims and Christians, regard ourselves, we in Palestine as you in Lebanon, as an authentic part of an Arab majority called upon to play today, as it has in the recent past, a pioneering role in a general renaissance, to spread the message of peace, love, progress and openness… And in expressing our choices and our orientations in this generous country, through a sincere and candid revision, we address to you this word of honour and pledge ourselves, to ourselves as to you:

“First: to respect fully your Lebanese and Levantine particularity, and to stand at your side in warding off any danger that may threaten beloved Lebanon as an independent entity and a sovereign state.

“Second: to resist any attempt to resolve the problem of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon at the expense of this country, or outside the provisions of international legality, foremost among which is the right of return as enshrined in Resolution 194.

“Third: to work towards the healing of souls and the purification of memory, and to strengthen the spirit of reconciliation, so that your homeland Lebanon and our homeland Palestine may remain a source of spiritual radiance and a platform of civilisational and cultural expression, as they have been throughout the ages.

“Such is the word of honour and the pledge of faithfulness that we hope to seal with deeds worthy of God and of our national conscience.”

Signed: the Ambassador of the State of Palestine to the Lebanese Republic

This initiative, among others, has carved a new channel for reconciliation and the purification of memory. On the political level, what can be affirmed today is that the current Lebanese government, in the framework of its decisions aimed at concentrating arms in the hands of the state, has entrusted the “Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee,” tasked with addressing the affairs of the refugee community, with the preparation of a preliminary policy document entitled “The Lebanese National Plan for the Governance of Palestinian Camps in Lebanon.” It is the first of its kind at the level of the Lebanese state, with the objective of bringing the camps out of the sphere of security management and placing them under the protection of the state, of extending its sovereignty over all its territory, of proceeding with the withdrawal of Palestinian arms from the camps, and of ensuring a dignified life for the refugees until the moment of their return.

One may say, finally, that the future carries within it the promise of transcending the past.