Lebanese Parliament Considering Equal Rights For Palestinians--And Don't Expect Hezbollah To Help

Last month I blogged that Several Thousand Palestinians Protest For Equal Rights--In Lebanon. Now it seems that the Lebanese Parliament is considering whether to give Palestinians equal rights.--but the bill is meeting stiff resistance:

Lebanon's population of 4 million is divided between 18 sects, including Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Christians and Druse, and every community is highly sensitive to anything that could tip the balance of power in a country with a grim history of sectarian strife.

Christians and Shiites are particularly worried about any possible permanent settling of the refugees, who are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim.

So Palestinians in Ein el-Hilweh are deeply skeptical there will be any change.

The problem is that the Lebanese are skeptical of the Palestinians--and with good reason.


The enmity between the Palestinians and the Lebanese goes back to 1970, back to when Jordan kicked out Arafat and his group when he tried to establish a Palestinian government within Jordan. There are many Lebanese who have not forgiven Arafat and his men for launching attacks against Israel from Israel, leading to Israel entering the country and eventually establishing a buffer zone.

Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage and researcher at the University of Bedfordshire, writes that Hezbollah--for all their claims of wanting to aid the Palestinian cause and end the "occupation--has no fondness for the Palestinians either:

Hizbullah represents the Shi’ites in Lebanon, who describe themselves as an extension of the global Shi’ite body, with strong emotional and ideological ties to Iran. The Shi’ites in Lebanon have always felt threatened by the Palestinians, who are strictly Sunnis, and whose presence in Lebanon is viewed as adding demographic heavy weight to Lebanese Sunnis. While Lebanese Shi’ite figures never mention this fact, they have been vigorously working against it in practice; they even took up arms against the Palestinians during the Lebanese civil war. In fact, Lebanese Shi’ite were responsible for some of the most notorious atrocities against the Palestinians, with welldocumented massacres and the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps. Ironically, when they ended these in 1987, Shi’ite leader Nabih Berri told the press that this was “a gift for the Intifada.”

Some gift.

Meanwhile, the mistreatment and second-class status of Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon is virtually ignored by the media.

Technorati Tag: Lebanon and Palestinian Arabs.