DAMASCUS — The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Professor Richard Falk, came to Lebanon last week on an unofficial visit to survey opinion while fact finding the condition in Palestinian refugee’s camps.
It was the Professor’s first visit to Lebanon since the fateful summer of 1982. Back then, en route by sea to Beirut, which was under Israeli siege and blockade, Falk was Vice-Chair of the Sean McBride Commission of Inquiry into Israeli crimes against Lebanon. Mid-way between Cyprus and Lebanon, the Zionist navy, in a blatant act of piracy on the high seas, intercepted, boarded and commandeered the vessel. Eventually, under reported American pressure via US Envoy Morris Draper’s telephoned profanity to Tel Aviv, the pirates allowed Falk’s delegation to disembark at the port of Jounieh, just north of Beirut. Draper, who like so many US diplomats, claims he finally “saw the light after retiring”, told this observer that “I never swore so much in my life as I did at those SOBS during that summer of 1982 and after I learned the details of Ariel Sharon’s choreography of the Sabra-Shatila massacre!” Ambassador Draper added, “The world will never know the extent of Israeli crimes committed against Lebanon and its refugees until Washington threatens to cut off all aid until Tel Aviv opens up its archives on this period.”
Professor Falk, as he mentioned during several events here, including a first-rate conference on the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and their struggle for the most elementary civil rights to work and to own a home, organized by the Institute of Palestine Studies, came to Lebanon not to offer counsel to Lebanon’s sects or even to the Palestinians (the IPS, founded in 1969, is considered by this observer and many others as the most reliable and authoritative source of information on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israel conflict).
Falk came to listen and to learn. He did both. He listened intently to each speaker, scribing hurried notes regarding the current conditions of Palestinian refugees, including education and health status, in Lebanon’s 12 camps and two dozen “gatherings,” reports that were presented by several academics and NGO’s based here.
Falk and others in attendance at the briefings found the findings sobering and alarming. They included but are not limited to, the following.
There are currently 42,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria who have been forced into Lebanon as a result of the crisis in Syria. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reported to the IPS workshop, that they expect 80,000 Palestinians by the end of the year. Others estimate the December 2013 number will exceed 100,000. According to figures, forwarded to Professor Falk by the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, supplied by refugee camp committees, approximately 6,000 Palestinians who fled Syria remain in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, close to the Syrian borders, in two main gatherings, al-Jalil (4,216 refugees) and central Bekaa (2,352). In the North, Baddawi camp hosts 4,116 and Nahr al Bared 2,016. In Beirut, Burj al-Barajneh camp hosts 2,928 additional refugees from Syria, Shatila and the surrounding areas 2,800, and Mar Elias 862. In the South, 8,549 refugees arrived to Ain al-Hilweh and 2,400 are dispersed around Saida. Mieh Mieh camp hosts 1,512, with an additional 2,160 in Wadi al-Zaineh. Further south to Tyre, Palestinian refugees from Syria are distributed among Shabriha (184), Rashidieh (1,370), Al Bass (478), Burj al-Shemali (2,800), Qasimiyeh (372), and Jal al-Bahr (128).
Falk knew, before gracing Lebanon with his visit, that UNWRA is basically out of money and cannot continue to meet its mandate for aiding Lebanon’s Palestinians even less those arriving from Syria at the rate of more than two dozen families per day. On May 5, the popular committee representative at Jalil Camp near Baalbec reported that they receive on average 8 additional families per day, with dozens now living in the Jalil camp cemetery.
Palestinian children in Lebanon, Falk was advised, unfortunately provide textbook examples of the fact of life that it is difficult to concentrate on school when ones stomach is growling with hunger. And it’s even harder to stay in school when there’s even a remote chance to work odd jobs and earn money for food—something education doesn’t immediately offer. One new local initiative is the Meals for Schools, whose organizers hope serve food to impoverished schoolchildren in Lebanese slum areas. One idea is to give coupons for meals to schools. Unfortunately the scope will not include Palestinian children “at this time due to limited funding”, according to one AUB student hoping to help children stay in school by helping them to have breakfasts.
Palestinian refugee children have limited access to the public educational system in Lebanon. Only 11 per cent these “foreign” children can access free public education in Lebanon while most refugees can’t afford the high tuition fees of private schools. Palestinian refugees who attend one of the 58 UNRWA begin at age seven since UNWRA cannot afford pre-school level education. Consequently, for Palestinians here, while the elementary sector comprises more than 60% of students, the number drops to 28% in intermediate and only 10% at the secondary level. While the attendance rate for 7 year olds is 98.6%, by the time they reach age 11 attendance falls to 93.4%. But from this level, the primary level school completion rate cascades to only 37%, due to astronomical dropout rates. The above figures reveal that Palestinian education levels have been indeed progressively dropping in recent years. This is further supported by the passing rate in the Brevet Official exams (official diploma qualifying entry into secondary) which was in some schools as low as 13.6% in some schools according to the UNRWA results of Brevet exams, despite the average passing rate in UNRWA schools being 43% for the 2009-10 academic year.
Professor Falk was briefed on myriad realities including the fact that Palestinians camps in Lebanon remain sites of control and surveillance by the Lebanese Army. People’s mobility and access to construction materials have been restricted by the army check points at the entrance of camps. Palestinian refugees are forbidden by law—since 2001—to own or inherit real estate in Lebanon; consequently when a Palestinian dies, even if she or he inherited property between 1948-2001, before a wave of revenge led to the 2001 racist law, the property goes to Sunni Muslim Dar al-Fatwa, one of the richest real estate holding entities in Lebanon. Accused of deep corruption by some, their leadership has a history of opposing full civil rights for Palestinian refugees here remain opposed to home ownership.
The UN’s humanitarian chief, Valerie Amos, reported this week that seven million people need humanitarian assistance in Syria. “The needs are growing rapidly and are most severe in the conflict and opposition-controlled areas” of the civil-war ravaged country, Amos told the U.N. Security Council. Amos cited data showing there are 6.8 million people in need—out of a total population of 20.8 million—along with 4.25 million people internally displaced and an additional 1.3 million who have sought refuge in neighboring countries.
Falk was briefed on most recent household surveys of Palestinian refugees carried out by the American University of Beirut, which show that two thirds of Palestine refugees are poor. The extreme poverty rate in camps (7.9%) is almost twice of that observed in gatherings (4.2%). The study also developed a Deprivation Index based on components of welfare which included components such as good health, food security, and adequate education, access to stable employment, decent housing, and ownership of essential household assets. The Deprivation Index showed that 40% of Palestine Refugees living in Lebanon are deprived. The study reported that 56% of refugees are jobless and only 37% of the working age population is employed (Hanafi et al. 2012). It is unsurprising that the poor socio-economic situation often encourages students to leave school to get a paid job.
Despite the importance of education fewer Palestinian refugee students are actually interested in continuing their higher education. Lack of motivation to learn, is believed to be one of the main reasons for the high dropout rates. Palestinian refugees’ access to Lebanon’s public university is limited by their status as foreigners, and their access to private universities is restricted by a lack of resources to pay tuition fees (Hroub, 2012).
The old cliché that stated that “The Palestinians are the most educated Arab nation” is just a myth today. This educational hemorrhage among young Palestinians has been attributed to a number of factors such as the deteriorating socio-economic conditions amongst Palestinian refugees and the growing disillusionment with schooling and the benefits it brings. Palestinian students also suffer from an education acculturation as they are forced to learn only the Lebanese curriculum without being able to access the country’s system. The following section examines these three main challenges.
Statistics indicate that just under half of the classrooms in public schools have less than 15 students per class while 20% are overcrowded with 26 to 35 students per class. However, in UNRWA schools, the average number of students per classroom is 30, making them the most crowded classrooms in Lebanon.
With respect to the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), the current situation in both Syria and among the more than 450,000 Syrian in Lebanon is only marginally better than the conditions of arriving Palestinians. As Maeve Murphy, UNHCR’s Senior Field Coordinator in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, explained to this observer and others during a visit on May 5, near the Nicolas Khoury Center in Zahle, Lebanon, amidst sea of hundreds of Syrians, some waiting for three months or longer just to get registered, the UN refugee agency is also unable to meet its mandate for the same reason as UNRWA and the World Food Program and others. Ms. Murphy reported that over 453,000 Syrians have either registered with the U.N. agency or are waiting to register. An additional several hundred thousand people are thought to be refugees but haven’t approached the U.N.
Complicating the desperate situation of Palestinian and Syrian refugees seeking sanctuary in Lebanon is the fact that millions of Syrian refugees face food rationing and cutbacks to critical medical programs because oil-rich Gulf states have failed to deliver the funding they promised for emergency humanitarian aid, an investigation by James Cusick for The Independent on Sunday has found. Pledges for $650 million in donations from various sources including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, made during the January 2013 Kuwait UN emergency conference, have yet to materialize.
The World Food Program (WFP), the food aid arm of the UN, says it is spending $19 million a week to feed 2.5 million refugees inside Syria and a further 1.5 million who have fled to official camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and Iraq. By July, the WFP says, there is no guarantee that its work on the Syrian crisis can continue. A spokesman told the UK Independent, “We are already in a hand-to-mouth situation. Beyond mid-June—who knows?”
The emergency conference in Kuwait—hosted by the Emir of Kuwait and chaired by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon—promised to bring a “message of hope” to the four million Syrian refugees. Mr. Ban proclaimed the outcome a shining example of “global solidarity in action”. The reality has been markedly different. Oxfam recently issued an appeal: “The League of Arab States must urge all Arab countries that have pledged to the Syrian crisis, to be transparent and to share information about their commitments, and mechanisms for fulfilling their pledges.”
Mousab Kerwat, Islamic Relief’s Middle East institutional funding manager, said: “It’s better for countries to stay away from donor conferences than to attend and make pledges they don’t intent to keep. As a minimum, they should communicate where their pledges have gone in a transparent process.”
If Professor Falk was weary as he left Lebanon from all the data, visits, and wrenching experiences he was presented with, it would be understandable. But the humanitarian and scholar showed no signs of fatigue and rather appeared to be energized by the experience. Given his history as a supporter of resistance to occupation and oppression, Richard Falk’s assurances that he will continue his work armed with the above sampling of data offers new hope for Palestinian and Syrian refugees from Syria and to those who support their Right and Responsibility to Return to Palestine.
What your writer neglects to mention is that Prof. Falk was also a guest speaker at the Bill and Sally Hambrecht Distinguished Peacemakers Lectures, where, according to one of his admirers (quoting Iran Press TV in a Comment to Falk’s Boston Marathon Clarification blog), the “the anti-Zionist American Jewish professor … also praised Palestinian armed resistance against Israel – as the only viable mean to resist Israeli expansionism.”
Since the only armed resistance by the Palestinians thus far has been terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, which are war crimes by any definition, I assume that this is what he is now advocating, or is he going to issue a clarification for this too?
Why should Prof. Falk “issue a clarification” for something he, by your own account, didn’t say?
Furthermore, if you trace the claim you’re quoting, you’ll see it was written by Rehmat, who, in his usual lying style, wrote:
But here’s what that Press TV report actually said:
Notice Rehmat’s insertion of the adjective “armed” in there. Palestinian resistance has taken many forms, including nonviolence. Furthermore, the right to armed resistence against foreign occupying military forces is recognized under international law. Moreover, Prof. Falk has repeatedly condemned terrorist attacks against Israel and condemned rocket and mortar fire into Israel as war crimes.
But who can blame them, as Prof. Falk has put it.
Who can blame whom, according to Prof. Falk, according to you?
Who can blame Hamas of course, according to Falk. That’s the rhetorical question, but we’ve been over this already, and if you can’t understand what a 10-year-old child can understand, that’s your problem.
You’re arguing a strawman.
It`s quite incredible how supporters of Israel are adept at blaming everyone but Israelis.
European colonist flooded into Palestine for selfish self interest, using violence and terror, evicting the ethnic population to create space. David Ben Gurion said “Let us not delude ourselves, we (Israelis) are the aggressors, they (Palestinians)fight to defend their land.
No one gave Palestinian land to Israel, they took it by force, with political and military support provided by the US, Israelis operate double standards ignoring international law, morals and decent behaviour.
Sitting on a stockpile of nuclear weapons, with delivery systems provided by the USA, Israel accuses Iran, despite Iran`s denial, of building what Israel has in abundance, it`s obscene.
Not only is there no justification for the confiscation of Palestinian land, their is no justification for creating a land exclusively for a religious belief, not even if it were for Druids.
No wonder Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general object to Israel, perhaps objections might be less if Israel were to treat all her citizens in an equal manner, but there is no evidence of that and no chance either.
You reap what you sow.
You are confusing sovereignty with real estate. Owning land in Galilee or Miami Beach does not give the Arabs sovereign rights there. But more to the point, coming out of the Arabian Desert in the 7th century and conquering the Middle East and Spain also does not give the Arabs sovereign rights anywhere and certainly not in place of the Jews who had already inhabited the Land of Israel for two thousand years before the Arabs arrived, forged their national identity, created their culture and exercised sovereignty there; nor does the Arab Conquest turn the Arabs into an indigenous people, and certainly not the descendants of Arab migrants, which most of them are, who arrived from the surrounding area in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The fiction you are propagating is that these Arabs had a Palestinian identity and national aspirations. Other than a very small urban elite, this is simply not true. These Arabs thought of themselves as inhabiting Greater Syria and their “country” or “homeland” (biladi) as their villages. The second fiction that you are propagating is that Jewish settlers stole their land. Jews legitimately purchased land from absentee Arab landowners and did not take, seize or usurp anything. Why you think that Arabs migrating to the Land of Israel and having no national consciousness or identity are the rightful sovereign masters of the Land of Israel is beyond me.
At the very least the Arab-Israel conflict is a case of two peoples claiming the same land. The only way to resolve such a conflict is through compromise. The Arabs rejected such a compromise in 1948 and initiated two wars that have brought the Palestinians nothing but misery. The reason they rejected a compromise was and continues to be their inability to reconcile themselves to the existence of a non-Muslim state in the region. This ties in completely with the way radical Islam views the non-Muslim world, without reference to drones or any other Westerm sins.
Israel today has publicly affirmed its willingness to enter negotiations without prior conditions. This is the only path that will lead to the creation of a Palestinian state. It may well be that people like yourself do not wish to understand this, getting more satisfaction from vilifying Israel, but it is precisely people like yourself who encourage the Arabs in their intransigence by creating the illusion that if enough pressure is applied, Israel will be forced to compromise its existence and end up looking like Syria, which may also give you great satisfaction. This not going to happen but in the meanwhile, of course, the Palestinians will continue to live in misery.
“Compromise” is a most curious way indeed to describe a plan for the majority Arabs, who owned most of the land, to surrender their right to self-determination and hand land over to the minority Jews, who owned only about 6% of the land, such that 55.5% of Palestine would become a “Jewish state”.
Curious also to suggest the Arabs “initiated” the 1948 war when by the time it started, a quarter of a million Arab Palestinians had already been ethnically cleansed, three quarters of a million ethnically cleansed by the time the war was over, with Arab forces only managing to hold onto the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Using fashionable media words like “ethnic cleansing” without reference to any historic reality is what polemicists do, not historians. You would have to know a lot more than you do to ascertain the circumstances under which Arabs fled in Israel’s War of Independence. Some were fleeing a war zone, some were urged to leave by Arab leaders with the assurance that they would be able to return after the Jews were massacred and some were indeed expelled at the initiative of local Israeli commanders. The archive material on which real discussions of these events are based do not make it possible to acsertain how many fled for each of these reasons but do reveal that it was not Israeli government policy to expel Arabs. The way the refugee problem subsequently unfolded in a new reality is another issue. Wars cause displacements of populations and exchanges of populations, as in Pakistan and India. From Israel’s point of view, the parallel displacement of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab lands at the time represents such a tradeoff of populations, the difference being that Israel wanted the Jews fleeing Arab lands and the Arabs did not want the Arabs fleeing Israel.
As far as compromise is concerned, everyone knows what a final settlement is going to look like, including Abu Mazen. For your information, Arabs do not “own” most of the land. Most of the land on both sides of the armistice lines is public land and the issue is sovereignty, not land ownership.
Denying the historic reality that three quarters of a million Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Gaza is what willfully ignorant Israeli apologists do.
Well Fred,
You ignore the fact that the Hebrews were Arabs (historical evidence shows they were Iraqi Arabs)
Historical facts show that the Egyptian empire covered all of what we now call the Levant during the 70 odd years of the Kingdom of Israel, The Pharo Seti conducted a 7 year campaign against the Hittites (North Syria/South Turkey) which meant they marched through (and probably collected taxes) The Kingdom of Israel.
Jerusalem and Gaza city existed long before Moses existed, they were founded by Arabs, the Hebrew religion is now referred to as Semite, a word created in the 19th Century to describe those of Middle Eastern origin, Christianity and Islam are also Semite religions, all created by Arabs.
You assume incorrectly that “Arabs” came from Arabia Saudi in the 6th century, it was the Islamic ideals that came from there to convert those Levantine Arabs who held Jewish and Christian beliefs. The “Moors” who occupied Spain were from Morocco.
King David and King Solomon were Arabs, with Jewish beliefs, most of the descendants of the Kingdom of Israel converted to Christianity then Islam, Jewish beliefs has spread far beyond the Levant amongst people with not a scrap of Semite DNA, even to China! now what right does a resident of China with Jewish beliefs, have to evict the historical descendents of the Levant so he or she can live in Israel.
In my opinion, and that of most of the population of the Middle East, they have none.
This is so nonsensical, Mike, that it’s almost comic.
A standard reply from all those who believe in a State of Israel, with no attempt to debate the historical evidence that Zionist`s refuse to accept.
That Fred, is deplorable.
If a Hindu or a Sikh were to convert to Judaism they would be welcomed to Israel (and given financial assistance to do so), room would be made for them by evicting Arabs, it has nothing to do with race, simply religious belief.
Moslems, Christians and Jews believe in the same God, Moslems accept the teachings of Abraham, Jesus and Mohammed, Christians accept the teachings of Abraham and Jesus, Jews reject the teachings of Jesus and Mohammed, nothing wrong with that, what is totally wrong is to create a State exclusively for one self serving interpretation of the same Monoethist religion.
And it can only survive by force of arms.
The establishment of the State of Israel has nothing to do with any interpretation of monotheism. It is a secular state based on national identity and is Jewish in the same way that France is French and Spain is Spanish. Jewish immigrants arriving in Israel today do not in any way displace Arabs, whose population has steadily grown.
I call what you write nonsensical for reasons that have nothing to do with Zionism.
The fact that an Egyptian pharoah marched through the Kingdom of Israel is not proof that Hebrews were Arabs.
The fact that the word Semite is popularly misused in a racial sense is also not proof that Hebrews were Arabs. The word was coined in the 19th century to describe a family of related languages including Assyrian, Babylonian, Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician, Ugaritic and others.
The Arabic term al-‘arab refers historically to the nomads of the Arabian desert, and in fact the Arabs have always resented the use of the term by anyone else, like the Bedouin, who call themselves tribally Arab al-Tarabin or Arab al-Ta’amira, and certainly never referred to or recognized other peoples in the area as Arabs.
Gaza was founded by the Philistines, who were a Sea People who arrived from the West, possibly from Italy. Do you also want to call the Italians Arabs?
Sorry Fred, I was making the point that Egypt`s sphere of influence (Borders if you like) encompassed David`s and Solomon`s (or Daud`s and Suleiman`s) Kingdom of Israel, Moses never did “escape” from Egypt, and I believe the Torah states Moses was born in Egypt! The Egyptian Empire, at that time, covered pretty much what we now refer to as the Middle East.
The earliest historical evidence of a Hebrew faith (No one knows how or when Hebrew became Jewish) is in Iraq, with Jewish inscriptions dating back some 4,000 years, in the ancient “city” of Ur, regarded by modern archaeologists as the birthplace of Abraham (A current British team digging near “Ur” have within the past few weeks announced further confirmation of early Jewish faith amongst the Arabs of that time).
Loads of historical evidence that the Hebrews were Arab, not a scrap of historical evidence that they were not.
Gaza City and Jerusalem were founded by Canaanites, Palestine was a later name used by the Romans for the people of that area who, whatever name were referred to, were Arabs.
Israeli settlers came from many racial groups (including Arabs), united by a religious beliefs
Maurice Motamed an Iranian Jew (and Member of the Iranian Parliament), interviewed for a BBC documentary, was asked why he did not accept the $60,000 he would receive from Israel if he emigrated there, he replied, Why should I? I am an Iranian Jew, I am not a Jewish Israeli.
UN figures confirm over 4 million Palestinian refugees living outside the borders of Israel, every single one of them is denied, by Israel, the right of return, a right promised by Israeli settlers in the UN resolution for the partition of Palestine.
Sorry Fred, but you should not accept Israeli propaganda on face value, check the independent evidence, for Israel it makes grim reading.
I’m going to sign off on this now. Calling anyone who has ever lived in the Middle East an Arab is fine for the blogs but not for history. Why don’t you let the Arabs decide for themselves who they are and who they aren’t, which is exactly what they’ve done.
I thought you might Fred, and with a petty parting shot. When Israeli actions are questioned, it`s the usual response by Israel supporters.
One thing is certain, the Hebrews were not from Germany, Poland, Russia, Britain, The USA, Australia, South Africa etc. ect. ect. as Israeli colonist are now, or do you think Abraham came from Czechoslovakia?
Look at the independent facts, the ones that go unreported, e.g. since 2000, 129 Israeli children have been murdered by Palestinians, these victims details are easily available via Israel`s government website.
During the same time 1,516 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli`s (some whilst sitting at their school desks) yet no mention on the same website.
Double standard I expect from governments, it`s a shame they are accepted without question by intelligent people.
I enjoyed our “debate” Fred, and I wish you well.