Disemboweling The Right Of Return

The US is backing the naturalisation of Palestinian refugees in any country but Lebanon, while refusing to support their social and economic rights

By Franklin Lamb*
In Beirut
19 - 25 August 2010
Issue No. 1012
Courtesy Of "Al-Ahram"

For months, as Lebanon's historic debate over basic civil rights for Palestinian refugees has unfolded, the Obama administration has watched idly from the sidelines. As hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees cough and slow-bake while inhaling rancid camp air in Lebanon's sweltering summer heat, the White House has now sent Lebanon's parliament a message: the United States will not support meaningful civil, social or economic rights for the world's largest and oldest refugee population, and it wants them naturalised anywhere except in Palestine.

Many had been hoping that US President Barack Obama would honour in Lebanon his calls for "American-style civil rights" for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where daily US military actions betray American founding principles. Or that his administration would act to give some credence to his June 2009 Cairo speech, or at least to the pledges of presidential envoy George Mitchell to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah that "the United States will work without rest until the inhuman conditions of Palestinians in all the refugee camps are ended."

The US embassy media office in Lebanon advised Palestine Civil Rights Campaign (PCRC) volunteers last month, referring to the Lebanese parliamentary debate, that "the United States does not have a dog in the fight." An odd choice of words, one might think, given the still-fresh Lebanese memories of dogs in the fight from 18 years of Israeli troops brutally occupying 151 South Lebanon villages and using US- funded attack dogs to terrorise the population and desecrate dozens of South Lebanon's mosques.

In point of fact, the Obama administration does have a dog in this historic civil-rights struggle in Lebanon. Figuratively speaking, the cur is a cross between a Pitbull-Doberman and a rabid Rottweiler and is known locally as "NABI" (Naturalisation Anywhere But Israel).

The White House, together with the congressional Israeli lobby, intends NABI to corral Lebanon's Palestinians and resettle them permanently and painlessly, at least for their well-paid host countries, around the world. The further from Palestine the refugees end up the better, with perhaps as many as 100,000 Palestinians slated to be kept in Lebanon, even though they will be arrested if they travel south from the "blue line", happening to rest at villages like Maron Al-Ras and wistfully gaze towards their former homes and villages near Akka or Safad, for example.

The US also expects NABI to disembowel the Palestinian refugees' right of return, and it has begun arranging for Arab oil cash to foot the bill for this US-Israel plan. The Obama administration, colluding with Israel, is backing the gradual naturalisation of the Palestinians wherever they are or can be persuaded to be. In this context, and according to information acquired by the Kuwaiti daily Al-Anbaa, "the State Department has formed a team of Arabs and Europeans, in order to pressure the Gulf States into financing a fund to support any country that will accept and nationalise Palestinians."

During her congressional confirmation hearing last month, Maura Connelly, slated to replace Michele Sisson as US ambassador in Lebanon, was asked by a congressional American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) agent where the US state department stood on the issue of shipping Palestinians from Lebanon around the world. She replied, "senator, the United States is opposed to forced naturalization," implying that using cash inducements and other incentives to settle Palestinians, rather than a 1948 Nakba-style ethnic-cleansing operation, would be acceptable.

US assistant-secretary of state for near eastern affairs Jeffrey Feltman had assured Lebanon that the US was absolutely against the naturalisation of Palestinians in Lebanon, but that was during the run-up to last spring's Lebanese municipal elections, when many US political promises were being made in the hope of buttressing the poll prospects of the anti-Hizbullah and anti-Palestinian candidates, who today are by and large the same as the politicians opposing Palestinian civil rights.

Lebanese MP Michel Aoun, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement and a Hizbullah ally except on the issue of granting the Palestinians even elementary civil rights, has been warning of the US-Israeli plan. On 26 July, Aoun declared that "this [project to settle Palestinian refugees] is an issue that we reject, and we will not be subject to any foreign policy planning to execute certain plans. The US is not interested in ensuring the security, stability and sovereignty of Lebanon, but only in solving Israel's Palestinian problem at the expense of the Lebanese."

Phalange Party leader Amin Gemayel added his voice to that of his rival Aoun, expressing his fears of the Israeli-US plan to naturalise Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. He revealed in an interview with the television channel Al-Jazeera that he had information "about an Israeli plan, backed by the American side, to naturalise Palestinians through the efforts of international institutions."

Amin does not have a problem with any scuttling of the Palestinian right of return, and he is in favour of naturalisation as long as it does not happen in Lebanon. This is also 50 per cent of the Israeli and American position, the only point of contention being expressed by the Lebanese right wing having to do with the US and Israel having no problem with Palestinians being naturalised in Lebanon, in other words the NABI concept.

The Obama administration thinks that the Lebanese government can be "induced" to cooperate and that social services for the remaining Palestinian refugees can be paid for by allies, including some OPEC members, even as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is to be phased out, which Israel and the US favour in the intermediate period.

For Israel and its proxies in Washington, by the simple fact of its existence UNRWA is metaphorically like American author Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart that won't stop beating, in his short story of that name, and with each, ever-louder beat it reminds the world of Israel's crimes. The reason UNRWA must be mauled by NABI is that Israel has long believed that by its very name -- the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East -- UNRWA encourages people to inquire into its work and into what happened in Palestine during the Nakba.

Israel cannot abide the fact that younger generations of people, especially in the West, but also in Israel, are studying UNRWA's history of achievements for the Palestinians in the context of six decades of massacres, land grabs and ethnic cleansing. The "tell-tale heart" of UNRWA must therefore be silenced and its services assumed, at least for a few years, by Europe and the US using Arab money.

The US-Israeli plan is that the naturalised refugees will be on their own wherever they end up and that UNRWA can be permanently dismantled. US congressional sources close to Israel expect UNRWA to be abolished outright, or at least financially gutted following congressional hearings and an Israeli-lobby- organised vilification campaign that resurrects stories about "terrorists in their ranks" and false "anti-Semitic UNRWA textbooks" of the recent past. A campaign taking off from the never- proven charges made by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and others at AIPAC events, leveling charges about the raising of terrorists in UNRWA schools, is what is under consideration.

Yet, the fact of the matter is that UNRWA hermetically seals its 78 schools in Lebanon off from Palestinian politics and history. Youngsters in the camps have reported to the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign that UNRWA is so afraid of criticism by Israel or the US Congress that it does not even allow them to wear the traditional keffiyeh, or T-shirts, bracelets, necklaces or flag pins which might suggest (heaven forbid!) political support for their own country, Palestine.

At present, the US government strongly favours the draft law proposed by Samir Geagea's Lebanese Forces-14 March Coalition. This lowest-common-denominator, watered-down approach, currently scheduled for a 17 August parliamentary vote, offers the Palestinian refugees a few crumbs, including adjusting Article 9 of the Lebanese Labour Code to make it easier to secure a work permit, but it does not allow home ownership, meaningful social security benefits, or access to the more than 20 syndicated professions. As currently drafted, the 14 March "consensus proposal" will achieve nothing towards granting internationally mandated civil, social and economic rights for Lebanon's Palestinian refugees.

The US government is backing the 14 March Coalition proposal and will apply pressure to see that it is passed, all the more so if it looks as if the proposals made by the Jumblatt- Progressive Socialist Party or the Syrian Socialist National Party have a chance of being adopted. Either of these two proposals would be a huge improvement over the "scattered chicken feed" offered by the Lebanese Forces bill or the 14 March "consensus bill." If the American-brand legislation is enacted, the US administration will put pressure on its friends in the region to accept it and no doubt will announce "Palestinian civil-rights mission accomplished".

This will be a lie, and pressure from the younger generations in the camps, who are being denied dignity and any real opportunities in life, will continue to build towards an explosion. The US and Israel's concerns over Palestinian refugees in Lebanon securing the basic right to work and to own a home have nothing to do with fears of tawtin (naturalisation) or the loss of the refugees' right of return, which is a huge concern of the Lebanese. Indeed, the US-Israeli concerns are precisely the opposite. Both want the Palestinians to become citizens of dozens of countries if necessary, to fade into the woodwork, and to forget UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which mandated their unalienable right of return.

The only political force in the Lebanese parliament that can defeat this latest US-Israel strategy, which also indirectly targets Hizbullah and Iran, is the National Lebanese Resistance with its broad-based public support and legislative allies. The Hizbullah-led Resistance can marshal the 65 votes needed to enact an internationally mandated civil-rights law instead of the current feel-good gesture that the US and Israel and their proxies are planning for 17 August.

It would be better for all concerned if this vote were postponed for 60 days rather than be allowed to facilitate the US- Israel supported plan. If passed in its current form, it will guarantee bleak prospects for Lebanon's Palestinian refugees, and quite likely for Lebanon and the region for years to come.

* The author is director of Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, a board member of the Sabra Shatila Foundation and a volunteer with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Lebanon.