Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon

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Apr 13, 2013 Syria
[Image from cover of below report by ANERA] [Image from cover of below report by ANERA]

Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA) in April 2013.] 

Palestinian Refugees from Syria in Lebanon

A Vulnerable Community

Following their expulsion from Palestine in 1948, many Palestinian intellectuals, businessmen, and craftspeople fled to Syria and established themselves as an integral part of Syrian society. Today that life has been broken and many Palestinian refugees from Syria have joined the ranks of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees, who some call the “forgotten people.”

Living in dark, cramped rooms without heat, these refugees have no respite from the fresh memories of the Syrian war and the gnawing pain of hunger and cold. Having built a vibrant society in Syria, they have been forced to flee to unknown places where their future is uncertain. Their plight echoes the forced exile from Palestine that they, their parents or grandparents endured decades before.

85% of Palestinian refugees living in Yarmouk camp have fled the fighting in Damascus. Seeking shelter and aid in Turkey and Iraq meant tackling bureaucratic red tape. Jordan has been reluctant to let more than a few thousand Palestinian refugees gather in a camp along the border. Approximately 37,000 refugees are seeking whatever shelter and protection they can get in Lebanon’s camps, where conditions are dire.

Living in the crowded and impoverished Palestinian camps in Lebanon, Palestinian refugees from Syria are finding very few legal protections and employment possibilities. There has been much less international attention focused on this vulnerable sub-population than on the general Syrian refugee population. The United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) is struggling to meet their needs but remains under-funded and ill-prepared to deal with the large influx of refugees into the camps.

Living sometimes 20 or more people to a room, the newly arrived refugees worry most about paying rent and providing meals for their families. Nearly all of them have experienced trauma in the form of death in the family, physical violence, kidnapping, and home destruction. They wonder how much longer they must bear the indignity of exile and statelessness.

Life in Syria Before the Fighting

Before the outbreak of fighting, Syria was generally seen as providing the best conditions for Palestinian refugees among the countries in the Middle East.

Nearly 500,000 Palestinians were living within the state’s borders. A 1957 law allows Palestinians living in Syria the same duties and responsibilities as Syrian citizens apart from nationality and voting rights.Palestinians have the right to work and own businesses, and are granted universal access to education and health care. Access to these sectors contributed to the stability and prosperity of Palestinians in Syria, as evidenced by the fact that a high percentage of them had the financial means to move out of refugee camps and reside elsewhere in the country.

With the onset of Syria’s civil war, work opportunities decreased. Many refugees fleeing to Lebanon had already depleted much of their savings while still in Syria.

Many are startled by the sharp contrast in living standards from what they had enjoyed in Syria. They also have been surprised to discover that their Palestinian identity has become the most influential factor in determining access to proper safety, shelter and work.

Conditions in Lebanon

ANERA and the National Institute of Social Care and Vocational Training (NISCVT) conducted research and published a report in March 2013 that reveals a host of unmet basic needs among Palestinian refugees from Syria. They don’t have enough food. Diapers are too expensive. Their meager shelters are falling apart. In winter, they suffer from the cold.

The huge influx of refugees is also having a devastating effect on the housing, financial, and psychological capacities of the camps, where resources were already strained.

Livelihood

Palestinian refugees from Syria are finding that their money is not worth as much, since the exchange rate for Syrian pounds has plummeted and the cost of living in Lebanon is much higher than Syria. This problem is made worse by the lack of work opportunities open to them in Lebanon. 

Palestinians from Syria do not have the right to employment in Lebanon as Syrian citizens do, nor do they have the decades-old experience of being migrant laborers in Lebanon like many Syrian citizens do. The result is they lack any economic lifeline in this crisis.

Unemployment is widespread among Palestinian families from Syria, regardless of age, gender, educational level, or previous employment status. More than 90% of the refugee families from Syria lack an income. They have to rely on the generosity of other poor refugees to sustain them.

Although not widely reported, child labor exists and families may resort to it as a means of survival in light of prolonged displacement and exhaustion of their financial sources.

Food

Hunger is a major issue for these families. Food is simply too expensive for most. Two-thirds of all families are not able to provide three meals a day.

Almost all families receive food aid from various sources, including host families and local and international organizations.

Housing

ANERA’s January 2013 survey shows that 74% of households interviewed are crowded with more than 10 people. To make things worse, almost 60% of all households are crammed into one room. Many families live without electricity, running water or proper heating. Large numbers of people share toilets and many have to leave their shelters to use facilities, raising the likelihood of illness.

Despite the terrible conditions, rents average between $150-$300/month. Families live in constant fear of losing their shelter because they cannot afford to keep paying.

Health Care

UNRWA is the main health care provider in Lebanon for Palestinians. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society, local organizations and private clinics are also extending their services to the refugees from Syria. These health care providers are overwhelmed by the dramatic increase in the number of patients without a proportionate increase in their organizational and financial capacities. This means that families are forced to pay out of their own pockets (when they can afford it) or, insome cases, refrain altogether from seeking care for their acute and chronic conditions.

Education

Many Palestinian children from Syria have witnessed horrible violence. Going back to school means a return to normal life for these children, but many resist enrollment efforts in Lebanon.

Curriculum differences and limited school capacity are the main reasons for non-enrollment. Integration into the Lebanese curriculum is difficult for most refugee children from Syria. Math and science courses are taught in Arabic in Syria, but in Lebanon the courses are taught in English or French at UNRWA schools.

Meeting the Challenges

UNRWA bears most of the burden of caring for Palestinian refugee families in Lebanon’s camps, but budget cuts and other constraints make it impossible for them to meet all of their needs. International foundations, institutions, non-profits and local community-based organizations are joining together to help bridge the gap during this crisis, providing:

  • small-scale renovations of host family homes and distributions of food and non-food items to host families so they can continue sheltering Palestinian refugees from Syria.
  • basic items like food, blankets, and clothing, with a special priority for newly-arrived Palestinian refugees from Syria.
  • cash-for-rent support and income generation initiatives that are critical to reducing these families’ financial insecurity.
  • additional support to UNRWA as the main health provider for Palestinians in Lebanon so it can expand its capacity and coverage.
  • additional emphasis on remedial and informal education, so that refugee children from Syria can continue their schooling while in Lebanon.

Palestinian refugees from Syria are an especially vulnerable sub-population of the Syrian conflict. The effects of statelessness multiply the horrors for Palestinians with each new war and subsequent displacement. With so much destruction at home, they fear their displacement could become permanent. The international response to the Syrian conflict must also prioritize a political solution for Palestinian refugees so there is a sustainable and more prosperous future for all.

[Click here to download the full report, including graphs and charts visualizing much of the data contained above.] 
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Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412