The Eid Al-Fitr holiday has been bleak for Palestinians in Lebanon this year, but there are signs of hope, writes Franklin Lamb in Beirut Remarkably, during this last Ramadan holiday season in Lebanon designees from both the Shia Higher Islamic Shia Council and the Sunni Dar Al-Fatwa figuratively pointed their binoculars deep into the eastern sky and in almost-unheard-of unison proclaimed that the celebration of Eid Al-Fitr this year was to be on 19 August. It was a good omen for many in Lebanon that Shia and Sunni religious leaders had agreed on this important event, given the internal and external forces at work to divide further the two main denominations of Islam in the country, as well as all of Lebanon by sect, confession, geography, region, tribe, clan and neighbourhood. It was also good news for Palestinians living in places like Finland, which these days has approximately 20 hours per day of sunlight, since many devout Muslims have very long fasts. Mercifully, a majority of Muslims far up north tend to adopt the mere 16 hours of daylight for fasting, using Mecca hours for dawn-to-dusk days without touching food or water, as well as avoiding bad thoughts or acts of incivility, as they test and renew their devotion to Islam while engaging in introspective self-criticism. During the three-day Eid holiday, much of Muslim Lebanon becomes less active and many businesses close, including Lebanon's largest wholesale fruit and vegetable market which borders the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp. Just before closing time on the eve of the Eid, this observer entered the vast produce market, now run mainly by Shia who buy agricultural products from the Bekaa Valley and southern farmers (minus one of Lebanon's oldest and most important crops, hashish). With little refrigeration, many of the wholesalers next to Shatila dumped, in time for the Iftar and Eid feasts, large quantities of fine produce at a designated corner of the 10-acre market. They have been doing this for more than three years and ever since the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign was lucky enough to convince the owners to dump their leftovers or soon-to-spoil fruit and vegetables in the southeast corner bordering the Shatila Camp. As a result of this charitable act, rather than disposing of the extra produce in dumpsters, Palestinian refugee families are given the much-appreciated chance to collect free produce for their families. Every day, men, women and children from the Shatila Camp, as well as poor Lebanese and Syrian workers, can be seen climbing over and through holes in the cinderblock wall bordering Shatila and gathering excellent produce. This basic humanitarian gesture is an example of how the Shia can, and do, reach out to the largely Sunni Palestinian community. Cross-confessional gestures such as this are among the reasons Palestinians in Lebanon support Hizbullah and the growing regional and international resistance to Israel it leads. The Eid this year also coincides with International Al-Quds Day, which was introduced from Iran in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and is commemorated on the last Friday of Ramadan in order to express solidarity with the Palestinian people and oppose Zionism and Israel's control of Jerusalem. In Lebanon's refugee camps this holiday season, there is intense heat, little electricity or drinking water, and a paucity of fresh air or breeze available to the jammed-in populations. Ain al-Helwa, the largest of Lebanon's 12 camps, according to the most-recent UNWRA statistics houses 47,500 refugees but in reality is home to more than 100,000. These people, like their fellow countrymen elsewhere temporarily in Lebanon, have few reasons to celebrate this Eid. The competition for breathing space has increased as the camp's population has swelled even more with refugees fleeing the violence in Syria. This year there are fewer sweets for the children, less food, not many gifts or new clothes and few flowers to place on the graves of deceased loved ones, a gesture by custom made during traditional Eid cemetery visits. In the tightly packed Palestinian cemeteries, of which there are only four in Lebanon, sometimes as many as five layers of bodies are buried on top of one another due to a lack of space. There is another anniversary that coincides in Lebanon this year with the Eid Al-Fitr and with the International Al-Quds Day, but it's no occasion for joy among the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. This is the second anniversary of the 17 August 2010 amendment to article 59 of the Lebanese labour law, which constituted a betrayal of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese politicians. Before the vote, promises were heard across the political spectrum to enact legislation granting the elementary civil rights to work and to own a home in Lebanon to the Palestinian refugees. This country is the only one on earth that denies Palestinian refugees the basic right to work, or even to own a home. The legislation passed was a cruel hoax, and it has not facilitated one Palestinian refugee obtaining a job over the past 24 months. The amendment, while waiving work-permit fees that were never a serious problem in obtaining a work permit, left in place numerous restrictions and catch-22 Kafka-esque barriers that previously blocked Palestinians from being able to work. The Lebanese parliament also left in place the 2001 law that outlawed any Palestinian from owning a home in Lebanon. Lebanese ministers of labour over the past two years have failed to implement the new law, such as it is, by refusing the simple act of signing the implementation papers. Fewer than two months ago, a Palestinian delegation was promised yet again that the majority party in parliament would see to it that the minister of labour did his job as mandated by the Lebanese constitution. Once more, nothing was done. On this second anniversary of the fake Palestinian work-permit legislation, most Lebanese politicians who have made so many promises to this observer and to others over the past four years in order to comply with international and Lebanese law and to grant basic civil rights to Palestinians in Lebanon remain asleep on this issue. Nevertheless, the hope of the Palestinian refugees to achieve their basic civil rights to work and to own a home has not been extinguished in the camps this holiday season by the impotence of Lebanon's big-talk but do-nothing parliament. One reason for hope comes from the voices of people like Heba Hajj, a Palestinian living in the Ain Al-Helwa Camp. This observer visited her recently after sneaking into the Camp through a claustrophobic 30-inch and heavily-trafficked sewer conduit at its eastern edge. The US embassy has made crawling through this sewer line sort of obligatory for Americans wanting to visit the Camp, since it has directed the Lebanese Armed Forces not to grant Americans permission to enter the Camp out of presumed, but misplaced, concern for their wellbeing. Heba, meaning "gift" in Arabic, then a youngster of 14 years, proclaimed three years ago when she volunteered to help achieve the right to work and home ownership for "my people", as she referred to them, stated to this observer that "failure is not an option for the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign; our only choice is success." And so it remains. While the most elementary civil rights still have not been granted, Heba continues to inspire with her rapid, charismatic and at times mesmerising speeches outlining what needs to be done and how to do it in order to achieve dignity for her fellow refugees. This blooming, 17-year-old Jean d'Arc has zero problems countering, verbally at least, some of the toughest-looking wannabe Salafis and jihadists from the eight Islamist groups who periodically show up at Ain Al-Helwa. Heba explains that she wants the help of the Usbat Al-Ansar group, which earlier this month helped resolve the traffic-blocking sit-in by controversial preacher Sheikh Ahmed Assir in nearby Saida, but she draws a line at the Jund Al-Sham, or gangs who claim a spot under the loose cloak of Al-Qaeda. "I want you to do something worthwhile with your lives so we can get back to Palestine without more delay! Do you want to spend your whole lives in Lebanon? It's not and never will be our country," she scolds as she asks for help to organise a major Intifada, or uprising, here in Lebanon, the idea being to prevent another anniversary from passing without Palestinian refugees attaining the civil rights to work and to own a home. Heba is encouraged this holiday season, despite the failures of Lebanon's political parties, international activists and the international community -- "so very concerned with humanitarian values," as she lectures her friends -- and most especially the failure to date of groups here in Lebanon, including the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, to achieve such goals. This remarkable youngster idealistically reminds her coterie of like-minded teens of last week's words of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, in whom she and her friends trust and believe. During his International Al-Quds Day speech, Nasrallah stated that Khomeini's declaration of Al-Quds Day falls within the context of a long continuum of religious and political commitments to "the sacred cause of Palestine" and that Al-Quds Day should not be simply a seasonal occasion to support the Palestinian people. "Unfortunately, today the suffering of the Palestinian people has become secondary and just an ordinary news item in the Arab and Islamic world," Nasrallah said. "Even in the entire world, which claims to be civilised, the news has become secondary and even late news. Today, the nation can do much more for Palestine and its people. At the very least, the rulers can stop blockading the Palestinians before asking them to assist in lifting the siege of the Palestinians. A part of the blockade suffered by the Palestinian people is practiced by some Arab regimes. This embargo must be lifted and support must be reinforced." Heba and her friends interpret these words to mean Hizbullah will use its power in the Lebanese parliament to grant them the right to work in Lebanon, thus delivering a less bleak future. The Palestinians in Lebanon and their international supporters are acutely aware that Hizbullah holds the majority power in the Lebanese parliament and will do so at least until next year's parliamentary elections, if the latter are even held, which to this observer appears doubtful. Heba particularly liked Nasrallah's words, which she quoted, to the effect that "we must help the Palestinians to uphold the right of return and to refuse any resettlement, as well as to reject assimilation in any country, as is happening through their forced migration to countries in Latin America and Europe and to Australia and elsewhere." Members of the Lebanese parliament who support the country's granting the right to work and to own a home to Palestinians insist that if a political decision is made by the parliamentary majority led by Hizbullah, the necessary legislation, still in the legislative hopper from two years ago, can be enacted in the space of an afternoon. Heba and Hizbullah's other supporters, who share Nasrallah's oft-expressed views demanding human rights for Palestinians in Lebanon, believe that the resistance block will on this 30th anniversary of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Camps finally act on what Khomeini declared was a "moral, religious and political" obligation of all people of good will. The writer is a political analyst based in Beirut, Lebanon.
