Are Palestinian Students in Lebanon Being Pressured to Choose Kalashnikovs Over College?

(BEIRUT) - Ein el Helwe Palestinian camp -- The choice for many Palestinian young men in Lebanon has come down to guns or education. By force of Lebanese law and under threat of prison for violators, Palestinians are denied the elementary civil rights to work in more than 50 professions and are barred by a 2001 racist law from them or their families, more than six decades living as refugees in Lebanon, from even owning a home.
 

Among Palestinian youth, unemployment rates hover around 70%, while refugee students are also discriminated against in admission to Lebanese state institutions of higher education, including the relatively low-tuition fees at Lebanese University. This makes it difficult for young Palestinians in Lebanon to pursue higher education after graduating from UNWRA schools and passing the Baccalaureate II exam. Being barred from most jobs, it is very difficult to come up with even modest sums for tuition payments.
 

Against this backdrop of flagrant state sponsored discrimination, if one were to offer un-employed young camp resident, say $200 per month, an AK-47 with plenty of ammo, and free cigarettes, the odds are good that you just might have yourself a militiaman. Those journalists and observers who spent much of the summer of 2011 in Libya saw a similar phenomenon and now it’s also the case in Syria. In Lebanon, it is resurgent from the 1975-90 civil war days. The gun for hire resource is being exploited across the political spectrum here among many of the same confessions and political parties that ignited this country’s massively destructive civil war more than three decades ago.


Hiring young men as gunmen in Lebanon is also impliedly condoned by silence on this problem from various polarized and politicized religious leaders. Too often, hile standing in Janus-faced opposition to the elementary internationally mandated right to work for Palestinians in Lebanon, some of Lebanon’s religious personalities, wearing pious faces and donning prelatical Pope-wannabe, if sometimes comical, outfits and often sporting fingers ringed with gold and precious jewels, intone their gospels according to St. Mark or his equivalents about human dignity and being our brother’s keeper, and often referencing “our blood-veins support for Palestine and the Right of Return.”.

When a Palestinian is arrested for carrying a weapon, it’s often front-page news but also usually exaggerated or later shown to be inaccurate. What is more surprising is that more Palestinians are not in the streets, motivated by the Arab Spring and Islamic Awakening, demanding the civil right to work. Yet signs are starting to appear of a pending and overdue intifada in Lebanon demanding this universally recognized right of every refugee to be able to seek work to sustain oneself and family.

Rumors abound these tense days in many part of Lebanon as if to say, “I told you, it's the Palestinians who are the source of most of Lebanon’s problems!” (or the Zionists, Saudis, EU, Iranians, Syrians, other Lebanese sects, the Americans, or just about anyone except this nearly failed state's deeply destructive confessional system and the Lebanese who profit from it. Too many Lebanese politicians reject granting rights to Palestinian refugees while they seek to gain personal, regional and international benefits from playing the “Palestinian card”. Meanwhile, dangerous temperature and pressure levels are building in the huge Presto cookers that are Lebanon’s camps.

Outrageously, and in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law and fundamental fairness, one of the very few “legal” jobs being allowed for Palestinians today in Lebanon, are as hired gunmen.