[News] Arabs, UN must move to protect the status of Palestinian refugees

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://english.palinfo.com/articles/2020/5/12/Arabs-UN-must-move-to-protect-the-status-of-Palestinian-refugees
Arabs,
UN must move to protect the status of Palestinian refugees
By Ramzi Baroud - May 12, 2020
------------------------------
‘Heinous racism,’ is how the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights
Monitor described a recent decision by Lebanese authorities to bar
Palestinian refugee expats from returning to Lebanon.

Lebanon’s restrictions on its ever-diminishing population of Palestinian
refugees is nothing new. However, this event is particularly alarming as it
may be linked to a long-term official policy regarding the residency status
of Palestinian refugees in this Arab country.

Many were taken aback by a recent Lebanese government’s order to its
embassy in the United Arab Emirates, instructing it to prevent Palestinian
refugees from returning to their homes in Lebanon.

Tariq Hajjar, a legal advisor to the Euro-Med Monitor said in a statement
that “the circular includes heinous racial discrimination against
Palestinian refugees holding Lebanese travel documents.”

Hajjar rightly insisted that “the holder of this document should receive
similar treatment to the Lebanese citizen.”

Indeed they should, as has been the practice for many years. Otherwise,
there is no other place where these refugees can possibly go, considering
that Lebanon has been their home for decades, starting in 1948 when Israel
forcefully expelled nearly a million Palestinians from their historic
homeland.

Refugees, regardless of their race, ethnicity or religion, should be
treated with respect and dignity, no matter the political complexity of
their host countries. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon cannot be made an
exception.

Last April, the Palestinian Association for Human Rights called on the
United Nations to provide financial assistance to Lebanon’s Palestinian
refugees, indicating that due to the coronavirus pandemic, a whopping 90
percent of all Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have lost their jobs.

Under discriminatory Lebanese laws, Palestinian refugees are not allowed to
practice 72 types of jobs that are available to Lebanese nationals. This is
merely one of many other such restrictions. Thus, employed Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon (the vast majority of whom are now unemployed) have
been competing within a very limited work market.

A large number of those refugees have been employed at the various projects
operated by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Many of those who were lucky enough to receive university degrees opted to
leave the country altogether, mostly working in the teaching, engineering,
banking, and medical sectors in Arab Gulf countries.

However, due to the coronavirus, the severe financial hardship suffered by
UNRWA and to new Lebanese government regulations, all doors are now being
shut in the face of Palestinian refugees.

For thousands of those refugees, the only remaining option is sailing the
high seas in search for a better refugee status in Europe. Yet, sadly, tens
of thousands of those refugees are now living a miserable life in European
camps, or stranded in Turkey. Hundreds drowned while undertaking these
perilous journeys.

According to a recent survey by  the Lebanese Central Administration of
Statistics, conducted jointly with the Palestinian Central Bureau of
Statistics, only 175,000 (from nearly half a million) Palestinian refugees
still reside in Lebanon.

That said, the Palestinian refugee tragedy in Lebanon is only a facet in a
much larger ailment that is unique to the Palestinian refugee experience.

Syria’s Palestinian refugees arrived in the country in waves, starting with
the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine during the ‘Nakba’, or
Catastrophe. Others fled the Golan Heights after the Israeli invasion in
1967. Many more fled Lebanon during the Israeli 1982 invasion.

The relatively safe Syrian haven was ruptured during the ongoing Syria war
started in 2011. UNRWA’s mission, which allowed it to provide the nearly
half a million Palestinian refugees in Syria with direct support was made
nearly impossible because of the destructive war, and the fact that
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled the country or became
internally displaced.

The devastating impact of the Syrian war on Palestinian refugees was almost
an exact copy of what had transpired earlier during the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In the case of Iraq, where most of the country’s 35,000 thousand refugees
fled, the Palestinian refugee crisis was particularly compounded. While
Palestinians enjoyed a permanent residence status (though no ownership
rights) in Iraq before the war, they were still not recognized as refugees
as per international standards, since UNRWA does not operate in Iraq.
Post-2003 Iraqi governments exploited this fact to the fullest, leading to
the displacement of the country’s Palestinian population.

Since its advent, the US Administration of President Donald Trump has waged
a financial war on the Palestinians, including the cutting of all aids to
UNRWA. This infamous act has added layers of suffering to the existing
hardships of refugees.

On May 5, UNRWA, somberly declared that it only has enough cash to sustain
its operations until the end of the month.

The truth is that, long before Trump targeted the UN agency, UNRWA has
functioned for over 70 years with an inherent vulnerability.

UNRWA was established exclusively with a UN mandate that provided the
organization with a “separate and special status” to assist Palestinian
refugees.

Arab governments, at the time, were keen for UNRWA to maintain this
‘special status’ based on their belief that lumping Palestinian refugees
with the burgeoning world refugee crisis (resulting mostly from War World
II) would downgrade the urgency of the Palestinian plight.

However, while that logic may have applied successfully in the immediate
years following the ‘Nakba’, it proved costly in later years, as the status
and definition of what constitute a Palestinian refugee remained
historically linked to UNRWA’s scope of operations.

This became clear during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, but, especially,
since the start of political upheavals and subsequent wars in the Middle
East in the last decade.

This is precisely why the US and Israel are keen on dismantling UNRWA,
because, according to their logic, if UNRWA ceases to operate, the
Palestinian refugee ceases to exist with any status that makes him/her
unique.

This precarious reality calls for an urgent and creative solution that
should be spearheaded by Arab countries, UN-registered NGOs, and friends of
Palestine everywhere.

What is needed today is a UN-adopted formula that would allow the legal
status of Palestinian refugees under international law to remain active
regardless of  UNRWA’s scope of operation, while providing Palestinian
refugees with the material and financial support required for them to live
with dignity until the Right of Return, in accordance to UN Resolution 194
of 1948, is finally enforced.

For the rights of Palestinian refugees to be maintained and for the
Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria scenarios not to be repeated, the Arab League must
work within the framework of international law – as determined by the UN
General Assembly – to safeguard the Palestinian refugees’ legal status
which is currently under an unprecedented attack.

Palestinian refugees must not have to choose between forfeiting their legal
and unalienable right in their own homeland and accepting a life of
perpetual degradation and uncertainty.

*- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle.
He has authored a number of books on the Palestinian struggle including
‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine
Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at
Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of
California Santa Barbara.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20200512/4d09b900/attachment.htm>