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Is the Umma Shatter-Proof? (Part 2)

Jul 26, 2019 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

A second news item comes from Lebanon, where “Palestinian” refugees — that is, the descendants of those Arabs who left what had been Mandatory Palestine just before, during, and after the 1948-49 war — have been engaged in protesting a new law regarding employment of non-Lebanese. Thousands of Palestinians protested in and around their camps on July 19 to demand that the Lebanese government end its requirement that all undocumented non-Lebanese must obtain a work permit to gain employment.

The intensifying protests were triggered by the closing down of two Palestinian-owned businesses last week, with the demonstrators calling on the government to reconsider its crackdown on undocumented non-Lebanese workers that they say is affecting their livelihood.

Critics have claimed that the Ministry of Labour’s recent measures are part of a campaign directed at the larger Syrian refugee population to force them to return home.

Speaking to a local TV station on Thursday, Camille Abu Sleiman, Lebanon’s labour minister, said the ministry was simply enforcing the laws that regulate foreign laborers in the country and denied targeting Palestinians.

True, the new measures did not target the Palestinians. But nor did it exempt them.

But the Palestinian refugees, who are already barred by Lebanese from working in dozens of professions as part of a long-standing policy to discourage them from staying in the country, fear the move will hit their employment opportunities further.

In Lebanon, where Palestinians have lived for decades, they have generally been denied citizenship, unless they marry Lebanese. The majority of them still are confined to camps, living in wretched conditions. They are denied the right to practice many professions. Such treatment has as its main purpose preventing the Palestinians from integrating successfully into the larger society, where they could no longer be held up as people whose situation can only be ameliorated if they are allowed to return to “Palestine.” They are political pawns of the Arab states where they live, which do not wish to improve their lot  but to keep them in conditions designed to win international sympathy for their “right of return.”

“The Palestinian worker is not a foreign visitor but rather a refugee forcibly living in Lebanon,” Fathi Abu Ardat, an official at the Palestinian Authority (PA) embassy, told reporters earlier in the week.

The Palestinians are not forced to live in Lebanon. There are other Arab countries to which some of them could move. There is work for them in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries. Many Palestinians already work in the Gulf Arab states, where the natives rely on large numbers of foreign workers. 240,000 Palestinians now work in Saudi Arabia. 200,000 live and work in Kuwait, which is down from 400,000 before the Gulf War, when the Palestinians sided with the Iraqi invaders, and as a consequence many were expelled:. But everywhere in the Arab lands obtaining citizenship is made exceedingly difficult for them to obtain.

The Palestinians now protesting against the new law in Lebanon, whereby the undocumented must obtain work permits, are not just angry about this law. They are angry that they cannot, except in special cases, become citizens, that they are still prohibited from practicing certain professions (though in 2005 70 previously prohibited occupations were opened to them). They are angry that so many of them continue to be made to live in a dozen camps, in wretched conditions, many with open sewers, where they endure miserable conditions so that the Arabs can score political points against the Israelis, who are always to be blamed.

And the Palestinians are no doubt angry, too, at the 1.5 million Syrians who are now in Lebanon, with whom they must share whatever private charitable funds exist for refugees in Lebanon, while previously that money was spent only on Palestinians. They are angry that the Syrians will work for wages even lower than what the Palestinians receive. As for the Lebanese, they  clearly don’t care for the well-being of the Palestinians; they could so easily make their lives easier, just by allowing them to practice more of the professions still prohibited to them, or allowing them to work in the pubic sector, or even giving them the right to own property. And the Lebanese have lost whatever fleeting sympathy they may have had for the Syrians, but now are eager to see them return home, since the civil war has wound down. The Syrians in Lebanon express no fellow-feeling for the Palestinians, whom they see only as rivals for relief. Palestinian protesters in Lebanon were not so much protesting against the new law that requires the undocumented to acquire work permits as they were protesting the application of that law to them.  They don’t care if it applies to the Syrians.

You can preach about Al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ all you want, but in Lebanon, pocketbook issues rule, and among the Lebanese, the Palestinians, and the Syrians, there is no love lost.

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Filed Under: Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald, Lebanon, Palestinian jihad Tagged With: Camille Abu Sleiman


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Comments

  1. Dennis says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 4:01 pm

    This article confirms what I have been saying about the Arab mentality that instead of concluding that it is in their best interests to try to emulate the success of Israel, by adopting its free society concepts, they continue to falsely rely on continuing claims that everything is Israel’s fault. How obscene! The Arab’s treat their own as they treated the Jews (although the Jews were thrown out of Arab countries) who previously were citizens of their countries. It is hard for me to find sympathy for them.

    • Mike says

      Jul 27, 2019 at 3:21 pm

      The only problem I have with your premise is that Lebanese are NOT Arabs. It’s enough how the Palestinians destroyed they Lebanon we knew. They can move back to Jordan, Sudan, Libya, Tunisia wherever the HELL they want to move. But keep them the F out of LEBANON

  2. Mr. Cohen says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 5:29 pm

    Mr. John Rossomando said:

    “[IUMS Trustee Sheikh Hassan Ould] Aldo
    and the [Muslim] Brotherhood use language
    similar to what Hamas used in its original charter,
    which rejected any peaceful coexistence.

    To them, Palestine is part of a waqf, a holy
    Islamic trust, that no person can negotiate away.”

    SOURCE: Muslim Brotherhood,
    Hamas: No Peace as Long as Israel Exists

    by Mr. John Rossomando, 2019 July 1
    http://www.algemeiner.com/2019/07/01/muslim-brotherhood-hamas-no-peace-as-long-as-israel-exists/

  3. Mr. Cohen says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 5:32 pm

    Mr. Stephen M. Flatow [an attorney in
    New Jersey and father of Alisa Flatow,
    who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored
    Palestinian terrorist attack in year 1995] said:

    “…Israel ended its rule over 98 percent [98%]
    of the Palestinian Arabs back in [year] 1995.
    It is the Palestinian Authority that rules them.

    The gang [of political Far-Leftists and Progressives
    and Socialists] knows that Israel does not rule the area.
    ……………………………..

    So why do the Progressive Networkers persist in
    promoting the fantasy that Israel rules over the Arabs?

    Because demonizing Israel as the occupier galvanizes
    their followers. It gives them something to be upset about…”

    SOURCE: Ten Jewish groups unite
    against Israeli democracy
    by Stephen M. Flatow
    http://www.jns.org/opinion/ten-jewish-groups-unite-against-israeli-democracy/

  4. Angemon says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 5:48 pm

    “Palestinians” in Lebanon? Lebanese should have learned from the Black September in Jordan…

    • Mike says

      Jul 27, 2019 at 3:26 pm

      WE DID with the help of Israel kicked the PLO out but as usual you can’t kill all the cockroaches always a few survive

  5. Kepha says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 7:52 pm

    The question of stateless “Palestinian” refugees in Arab states (even if those “Palestinians” never set foot in the place for four generations) is a long-festering obscenity. It should be a mandatory talking point for every US diplomat that the USA, that great Shaitain and oppressor of the poor, poor Palestinians, has given passport-holding-, voting rights-, public office-eligible-citizenship to more victims and descendants of an-Nakhbar than any seven Arabic-speaking countries put together, if you exclude Jordan and Israel itself. And, if we don’t call the grandchildren of a Palestinian refugee born to US-born parents a Palestinian, its’ only because the Fourteenth Amendment calls them Americans.

  6. gravenimage says

    Jul 26, 2019 at 9:13 pm

    Is the Umma Shatter-Proof? (Part 2)
    ………………………..

    Lebanon? This is grimly hilarious, since it was largely “Palestinian” s started the “civil war” there after being foolishly invited in by the Lebanese in the early 1970s.

    This today is largely about two things–Muslims seldom offering equal rights to anyone, even their fellow Muslims; and Muslims wanting to make sure that the “Palestinians” are never integrated into any Muslim country, lest Muslims lose one of their main “grievances” against civilized Israel.

    • Mike says

      Jul 27, 2019 at 3:24 pm

      No one in Lebanon invited anyone. Don’t rewrite history, it was forced on the Lebanese and Lebanon by that Muslim Brotherhood trash Abdel Naser and the Arab league, please spare me your foolish comment. By the way even Kissinger blessed that proposal by allowing the civil war in Lebanon as a guise to have the Palestinians create a new palestine and topple the Lebanese government. But we (the nationalists) prevented them.

  7. Westman says

    Jul 27, 2019 at 9:37 am

    The Umma – the unified body of believers that never existed.

    Muhammad, himself, referred to Africans as, “rasin heads”, and said believers should obey a cleric, EVEN if he is black. The media never talks about the rigid Middle East pecking order, or, ask Iranians what they think of Arabs. They will insist they(Persians) are superior to Arabs and the Arabs, in their own lack of unity, will differentiate themselves from each other by nation and tribe.

    Iran thinks it should be in charge of Mecca, Turkey wants to be the Caliphate, and no Arab nations want the “Palestinians”.

    Some unity; hardly equal to their unity of Quran-prescribed hatred for Israel.

  8. Robert_k says

    Jul 27, 2019 at 11:45 am

    Also in the time of the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs of Palestine insisted that they were not Palestinian but Southern Syrians. The Palestinians speak a dialect of Arabic known as Levantine Arabic. The same dialect the Syrians and the Lebanese speak.

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