LEBANON’S PARLIAMENT has adopted a law granting employment rights to Palestinian refugees living in the country, which will partially normalise their status.
The legislation gives Palestinian refugees the same opportunities other foreigners enjoy. All are barred from work in professions requiring Lebanese certification such as medicine, engineering, and the law as well as the police and armed forces. These occupations are reserved for Lebanese citizens. Palestinians will also be given social security coverage.
Until the Bill was adopted, most Palestinian refugees had been permitted to work as farm and construction labourers only. They are still not permitted to own property, are not entitled to state healthcare or considered for naturalisation even though three or four generations have been born in Lebanon since they fled their homeland on the establishment of Israel in 1948.
Palestinians have always rejected resettlement in host countries and insist on repatriation.
Lebanon has refused to integrate the refugees, mostly Sunni Muslims, since their absorption would alter the delicate balance between Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox Christians, and Sunni and Shia Muslims. Maronites, once the most powerful sect in Lebanon, feel particularly threatened by the extension of rights to Palestinians and regard this Bill as the first step towards citizenship although the Lebanese constitution prohibits naturalisation of refugees.
A minority of Palestinians, mainly Christians and wealthy Sunnis, have been permitted to practise as doctors, lawyers, and architects and some have become Lebanese citizens.
Refugees living in the dozen camps – now urban slums – run by the UN Relief and Works Agency remain outside the Lebanese economy.
Between 1970 and 1982, the Palestine Liberation Organisation built a separate Palestinian economy inside the camps by establishing workshops, businesses and offices. A great deal of this economic infrastructure was destroyed when Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon and west Beirut in 1982 and expelled the PLO, thereby dismantling the so-called Palestinian “state within a state”.
According to the relief agency, there are some 400,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon but the Lebanese authorities put the figure at 300,000 because of emigration. Most live in camps where they rely on the agency for shelter, food, healthcare and education. The camps, which are off-limits to Lebanese security forces, contain heavily armed elements loyal to PLO factions as well as dissidents. Many Lebanese want to see their security forces retake control of the camps.
