The Apartheid State in the Middle East

Menachem Kellner, Professor of Jewish History at the University of Haifa, whose resume lists advanced degrees from Washington University, Hebrew University and New York University, as well as nearly 100 books and articles, writes as follows in the September 27 issue of The New York Review of Books:

Max Rodenbeck is one of the best-informed, fairest, and most perceptive journalists writing about the Middle East ["Lebanon’s Agony," NYR, June 28], but even he occasionally lapses.

Rodenbeck’s analysis hints at but ultimately ignores one of the fundamental reasons for Lebanon’s agony: the anti-Palestinian apartheid practiced more thoroughly in Lebanon ("an island of relative democratic liberty" — so long as you are not a descendant of Palestinians who fled to Lebanon in 1948) than in any other Middle Eastern country.

As Mr. Rodenbeck himself notes, descendants of Palestinian refugees are barred from living anywhere in Lebanon but in slum-like refugee "camps," cannot hold decent jobs, are barred from citizenship (and thus cannot vote or hold office), are barred from Lebanon’s universities, are even barred from holding property, and, as noncitizens, even have a hard time getting passports.

Sixty years after their grandparents fled the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Palestinians in Lebanon are in many ways worse off than blacks were under South African apartheid.

Max Rodenbeck responded that Professor Kellner “overstates the case slightly.”  The key word is “slightly:”

I agree that the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon has been shamefully unjust, and that this has certainly been one cause of Lebanon’s many woes.  However, I fear that Dr. Kellner overstates the case slightly.

Specifically, it is not true that Palestinians are barred from living outside refugee camps, or from attending state-run Lebanese universities.  The problem is that since they are banned from owning property and have no citizenship, they must pay rent or tuition fees just as other foreigners.  Many are too poor to do so, partly because Palestinians are not allowed to work in dozens of circumscribed professions.  It is rather an exaggeration, then, to conclude that their lot is worse than that of black South Africans under apartheid, with its Pass Laws and rules against miscegenation.

Besides, there are some mitigating factors.  One is that in recent years the Lebanese government has taken steps to improve the Palestinians’ status, for instance by reducing the number of professions they are excluded from.  A second factor is that unlike black South Africans, or indeed unlike Palestinians in the West Bank under Israeli rule, Lebanon’s Palestinians are not "natives" oppressed by settlers inspired by an exclusionary ideology.  They actually cling to their "outsider" status as refugees, and to the hope, however unrealistic, of return to Palestine.  Their demand from the Lebanese is simply for normal civil rights and just treatment, not full citizenship.

In a more bitterly ironic sense, while the Palestinians’ own political institutions, including the PLO, have arguably contributed nearly as much as the Lebanese to isolating the refugees, many of the specific legal strictures placed on Palestinians in Lebanon are in fact products of Lebanon’s own horribly flawed but oddly representative democratic processes.  Sadly, one thing on which Lebanon’s myriad factions have tended to agree is dumping on the Palestinians.

You too might harbor an unrealistic hope of returning to Israel if your treatment at the hands of your Arab brothers had – for sixty years – included being banned from owning property, barred from citizenship, prevented from voting or holding office, discriminated against as “foreigners,” banned from working in “dozens” of professions, and dumped upon by all of Lebanon’s myriad factions. 

You probably would find it of limited consolation that at least the many “specific legal strictures” in Lebanon did not include rules against miscegenation.

And “ironic” would probably not be the word you would use to describe the fact that “the Palestinians’ own political institutions, including the PLO, have arguably contributed nearly as much as the Lebanese to isolating the refugees.”  Seven years ago the PLO turned down an unlimited right of return to a new state of Palestine in substantially all of Gaza and the West Bank (a state the Palestinians could also have had in 1947, without a single refugee), in order to fight a new war against the Jews.

And imagine the press coverage and commentary if Israel had done this with respect to terrorists in Palestinian refugee camps:

A mass of gray crumpled buildings and mangled concrete is all what is left from the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared in Tripoli, Lebanon Friday, Sept. 7, 2007.  The government’s three-month battle to drive the militant Fatah Islam group out of the camp is over, but thousands of Palestinians who fled the fighting worry they will never be allowed back to their homes.  (AP Photo/Grace Kassab).

Lebanese flags fly atop destroyed buildings in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared in Tripoli, Lebanon Friday, Sept. 7, 2007.  (AP Photo/Grace Kassab).

Armored vehicles and trucks are seen at the entrance of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared in Tripoli, Lebanon Friday, Sept. 7, 2007. (AP Photo/Grace Kassab) .