LOSING A LIFELINE
Many Palestinian residents in Lebanon remain reliant on UN aid, but moves by the US mean they are now fearing for their futures. Loveday Morris and report
The do-it-yourself tattoo on Jihad al-Qassim’s arm shows a faded outline of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, a brand from decades ago signifying a teenage hope to return to the land his family fled. But now, at age 49, his yearning is to get out and go anywhere. “We are suffocating,” he says.
Over 70 years, this half square mile of canvas tents erected by Palestinian refugees who fled the fighting when Israel was created in 1948 has grown into a densely packed neighbourhood of at least 50,000 people.
Despite the fact that many were born and raised in here in Lebanon, Palestinian residents remain reliant
on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), an entity that provides aid to millions of Palestinians around the region, particularly for basic services like health care and education. Now, however, the Trump administration is trying to dismantle that lifeline, leaving many Palestinians fearing for their futures.
In a statement last summer announcing a decision to halt funding, US State Department officials described UNRWA as “irredeemably flawed”, echoing the Israeli sentiment that the agency perpetuates the refugee problem, rather than solving it, and allows the countries that host them to shirk their responsibilities in resettling them.
The move placed increased scrutiny on UNRWA, which has struggled to raise the $1.2bn (£932m) it needs annually to serve a population it estimates has grown from 700,000 to 5.5 million – with some Palestinians even acknowledging that the time has come to hold the agency to account.
At the same time, the United States has also tied the matter of UNRWA reform to a much wider aim: taking off the bargaining table Palestinians’ “right of return”, one of three key issues integral to the Middle East peace process.
These efforts are sparking debate over what it means to be a Palestinian refugee and highlight questions on resettlement, and whether residency or citizenship in another country would diminish their claim to a future Palestinian state.
For the US, at the heart of the matter is how to define those like Al-Qassim, who has only ever known Lebanon as home, and whom UNRWA classifies as a refugee.
Erasing Palestinians’ right of return in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is unlikely to prove as simple as rearranging the UNRWA’s head count
Yet, erasing the right of return in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is unlikely to prove as simple as rearranging the agency’s head count, and US efforts to financially squeeze UNRWA appear to be failing. Last week, the agency announced it had almost closed the funding gap triggered by the cut in US aid, with more than 40 other countries increasing their contributions this year.
Al-Qassim and his family live in a spartan, leaky two-room apartment, tucked into a jumble of alleyways tangled with electric lines, pipes and Internet cables. “We were born here. We live here. We know Lebanon more than Palestine,” he says. “We don’t know Palestine.”
But Lebanon is a perpetual limbo for the Palestinians here.
“We are still on the road,” says Ibrahim, Al-Qassim’s 22-year-old son, describing the feeling of not belonging. Life in the camp is like being stuck in a “horror movie”.
He can’t find work. His sisters want to study at university, but he can’t afford to send them. He describes his daily routine as “coffee, cigarettes, coffee, cigarettes”. By doing odd jobs, he has saved $430 of the $1,200 he needs to buy a scooter, which he hopes could secure him a job as a delivery driver.
Unable to return to their ancestral homes, the refugees are also unwelcome in Lebanon, where they are legally banned from more than 30 vocations as well as from owning property. Camps have become a magnet for drugs, crime and extremism, with security left to their own committees, rather than the state. UNRWA had been slowly reducing services long before Washington – previously its largest single donor – slashed $360m in annual funding. “It’s much better to leave to get a future,” Al-Qassim says. He talks constantly of Europe and Canada. “I’d take another nationality,” he says. “But in my heart, I’d always be Palestinian.”
The Trump administration is conflating two issues, says Daniel Kurtzer, the former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt and a professor of Middle East policy studies at Princeton University.
“What the Trump administration is doing, in one sense, is long overdue, which is to hold up a mirror to the international community and say: ‘Is this what you really intended?’” he says, citing the millions of dollars the international community pays to support an ever-growing population.
However, Kurtzer says the way the administration went about addressing issues with the agency was “ham-handed” by tying it to the broader question of refugee status, a separate issue that should be settled in negotiations.
Even if UNRWA is eliminated, Palestinians will continue to assert that the United Nations has endorsed their right of return, as well as the Palestinian leadership that will negotiate on that basis, he says.
“You can’t simply announce that you’ve taken it off the table,” Kurtzer says. “You’ve got to deal with it; that’s going to be hard.”
He adds that the way officials have dealt with it “undercuts the administration’s ability to make any progress in the peace process”.
Palestinian officials have called the cuts cruel and vindictive, saying that together with the decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it is an attempt by the US to unilaterally impose a solution before a plan was ever unveiled. UNRWA strongly disputes the US assertion that it is an irredeemably flawed operation, but accepts that its numbers may be off.
This institution is the father and the mother of the Palestinians. When this organisation is threatened, we panic
“Don’t ask me how many Palestinians are in the country, because the answer is: I don’t know,” says Claudio Cordone, director of UNRWA affairs in Lebanon.
The agency says it has registered 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon but has no way of knowing how many of those have left the country. UNRWA provides services to fewer than half the registrants, about 204,000 people, Cordone says.
Globally, 3.5 million of the 5.5 million UNRWA counts on its books access its services, according to one UNRWA official who declined to be named because of the politically sensitive nature of the information.
A survey conducted under the guidance of the Lebanese government and published this year, which counted residents of the country’s refugee camps and 156 other areas where Palestinians live, put the number at just more than 174,000.
Dozens of the young men in Bourj el-Barajneh’s coffee shops are doing what they can to no longer count among them. Many have risked the perilous sea journey to Europe, joining the wave of Syrians fleeing violence in their war-torn country.