Does Lebanon treat Palestinians worse than Israel does?

[december]

It sure sounds like it, according to the New York Times.

Mr. Shobani struggles to pay for a private vocational education because, as a stateless Palestinian, he is not allowed at the public school. He studies computer engineering but his future, he said, lies in the nearby orange groves, where many Palestinians in the camp work. The kind of computer programming job he wants is generally closed to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, he said…

…About 400,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, where the United Nations says their status is among the worst of those outside the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nearly two-thirds of the more than four million Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan…

Burj al Shemali is one of 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. It is a medium-size camp, with about 19,000 residents, and it is poor.

Waste water runs through a trough in the alleys. Human waste is disposed of in pits beneath homes. Some of the alleys have grown so jumbled that waste-removal trucks cannot get through, and filled-up pits are becoming a problem, Mr. Joma said. Residents say the Lebanese Army, which has a checkpoint at the camp’s entrance, sometimes searches cars to make sure no unauthorized building materials enter, so the camp does not become more permanent.

A two-year-old law also forbids people with no recognized state — Palestinians — to own property outside the camps, said Salah M. Sabbagh, a Palestinian-Lebanese lawyer in Beirut. “If Christ comes here he cannot own property, because he was born in Bethlehem,” he said.

(emphasis added) The UN doesn’t say that these camps are worse than those in the West Bank and Gaza, but the description makes it sound that way.

Now, Lebanon plans to review the citizenship granted in a 1994 decree to thousands of Palestinians. If it is revoked, many could lose their jobs, homes and access to public health care and schools. OTOH Israel has no plans to remove citizenship from its many Arab citizens.

“You feel like you are being punished, and the punishment is harder and harder,” said Mahmoud Joma, 51, a social worker in the camp, who said a number of naturalized Lebanese had expressed worry about the government move.

While the revocation is not imminent, its possibility is yet another indignity to the Palestinian refugees of Lebanon. A visit to Burj al Shemali, where many of the recently naturalized Palestinians live, serves as a reminder of the nether-world they occupy. They are not welcomed by a government that declares its allegiance to the struggle for a Palestinian right to a homeland. And the current effort for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, called the road map to peace, appears to offer little hope of resettlement in the Israeli towns and villages their families came from.

Also, one could question the motives of some organizations, which are so very concerned about the Paletinians who are mistreated by Israel, but which ignore those Palestinians mistreated by Lebanon and other Arab countries.

[TwistofFate]

Why are you so sure they are ignoring them?

[MC_Master_of_Ceremonies]

I think December you are profoundly ignorant of the living conditions of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

The living conditons in the camps in Lebanon pretty simlair to the occupied territories, not as bad as Rafah (where there is a stream of human effluence flowing down the main street) or much of the Gaza Strip though. Also about 50% of Palestinians in the occupied territories are suffering from malnutrition and there is a severe water shortage due to the fact that water from the territories is diverted to the settlements and Israel proper.

[december]

*Originally posted by MC Master of Cermonies *
**The living conditons in the camps in Lebanon pretty simlair to the occupied territories, not as bad as Rafah (where there is a stream of human effluence flowing down the main street) or much of the Gaza Strip though. Also about 50% of Palestinians in the occupied territories are suffering from malnutrition and there is a severe water shortage due to the fact that water from the territories is diverted to the settlements and Israel proper. **

Do you have a cite, MC?

[MC_Master_of_Ceremonies]

http://www.pchrgaza.org/

http://www.btselem.org/Download/engwater.doc

http://www.usaid.gov/wbg/focus_1.htm

http://www.usaid.gov/wbg/reports/Nutritional_Assessment.pdf

I should make a slight correction to what I said earlier, over 50% of the Palestinian population are suffering from micro-malnutrtion.

[Kimstu]

There’s quite a bit of documentation on the water-rights situation in the occupied territories. As the above-linked CNN article describes, Israel does indeed control the water resources in the occupied territories, and they are indeed disproportionately allocated between Israelis and Palestinians.

In the West Bank, Israeli authorities control who gets to sink wells and pump water.

“About 80 percent of the water resources right now are in the West Bank,” Koenig says. “And only about 20 percent of those are currently used by the Palestinian Authority.”

Experts estimate Israeli settlers in the occupied territories use three to five times as much water per capita as their Palestinian neighbors.

[…] “Palestinians will point across the road to an Israeli settlement where they see a swimming pool being filled and they point to their own community where there’s barely any water at all – and they’ll express a great deal of anger about it,” Klare says.

Details of the water crisis in the territories:

Among those particularly suffering from the water shortage are residents of villages and refugee camps in the Occupied Territories not connected to a running-water network. In the West Bank alone, as of June 2000, the number of such residents amounted to at least 215,000 persons living in more than 150 villages. The principal water source for these people is rainfall, which […] meets their water-consumption needs for only a few months, generally from November to May. In the summer, these residents must collect water from nearby springs (if such exist) in plastic bottles and jerricans, and purchase water from private dealers at high prices.

Several municipalities in the West Bank are compelled to implement rotation plans, particularly during the summer, to distribute the little water available. Under these plans, residents in a particular area of the city receive water for a day. The flow is then shut off for several days, while water is supplied to other areas until the sector’s turn comes again. […] However, while there is increased demand both among Palestinians and among Israeli settlers, Mekorot [Israel’s water company] discriminates and increases the amount of water supplied to the settlers, and does not increase, or even decreases, supply to Palestinian towns. Reduction at times when water consumption increases is accomplished by closing the valve of the main water pipelines through which water flows to Palestinian towns.

Unlike the West Bank, the worst problem in the Gaza Strip’s water sector is not the shortage or irregular supply during the summer, but the poor quality of water flowing through the pipes. The poor condition of the water seriously affects the quality of life of the local residents and exposes them to severe heath risks.

Nobody is arguing that the Lebanese treatment of the Palestinians is good, but I think december, in his usual automatic reflexive quest to forestall even the slightest criticism of Israel, made a tactical error in inviting comparison with the Israeli treatment of them. Living conditions for Palestinians under Israeli authority are pretty appalling too.

december: *Also, one could question the motives of some organizations, which are so very concerned about the Paletinians who are mistreated by Israel, but which ignore those Palestinians mistreated by Lebanon and other Arab countries. *

Would you mind pointing out just which organizations you’re referring to, so we can all join you in scolding them for their double standards? Thanks.

By the way, don’t many defenders of Israel constantly argue that it should be supported because it’s “the Middle East’s only real democracy”, “the region’s only developed country”, “far more free and democratic than any of its neighbors”, and similar characterizations? If Israel’s so much better than the rest of the region, it seems only fair to hold it to a much higher standard in terms of the human rights and quality of life it provides to those under its jurisdiction.

I dislike the both-sides-of-the-mouth rhetoric of people who argue in one breath “Well, Israel deserves all the support and aid we give it because it’s the region’s only civilized democracy!”, and in the next—when someone objects to Israel’s doing something rather barbaric or undemocratic—“Well, the other countries in the region do things just as bad, so you shouldn’t single out Israel!”

[Blalron]

I see clearly now. What Israel is doing is perfectly all right, because the lebanese are doing it too!! :rolleyes:

[Kimstu]

december: Now, Lebanon plans to review the citizenship granted in a 1994 decree to thousands of Palestinians. If it is revoked, many could lose their jobs, homes and access to public health care and schools. OTOH Israel has no plans to remove citizenship from its many Arab citizens.

This is misleading. The recent decision of the Lebanese government referred to the review of citizenship status of some of the Palestinians and Syrians naturalized under that decree in 1994. The Interior Minister stated “We will annul the citizenships of all the Palestinians who […] falsified documents and submitted thousands of applications in order to obtain it.”

In other words, Lebanon has decided to revoke the citizenship of immigrants who obtained it fraudulently. All countries do that, including Israel (e.g., “Three Ethiopian Christian girls are having their immigrant permits and citizenship revoked after 9 years on the charge that they had made ‘fallacious disclosures’ in applying for citizenship.”)

Mind you, it is pretty clear that Lebanon’s action, though technically legitimate, is at least partly influenced by leaders of its Christian population who are concerned about the growing numerical imbalance between Lebanese Muslims and Christians. But again, if we’re complaining about religious discrimination in citizenship policies, Israel has no room to talk.