Shelling resumes at Lebanon camp

Two soldiers have been killed during clashes between Lebanese troops and Fatah al-Islam fighters in Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, security sources said. Artillery shelling continued to pound the camp on Friday as dozens of army tanks surrounded the camp for a possible ground offensive to end the 13-day standoff.

Lebanese security sources told Al Jazeera's Zeina Khodr that 10 Lebanese soldiers were wounded during Friday clashes. Buildings collapsed under heavy shelling and residents of the camp said they did not have any electricity or water - medical aid was also unable to enter the camp, she said. [More]


Comment:

This does not relate directly to the War on Terror (since Fatah al-Islam is not part of al-Qaeda), but anyone who thinks the Palestinian situation is irrelevant to anything in the Middle East, up to and including the relative humidity, needs to get their head checked.

The events unfolding at Nahr al-Bared are disturbing, not only because of the death and destruction, but because of the light they shine on the Arab governments' relations with the Palestinians. I had always assumed that relations were good, that because of the Arab regimes' anger and horror at the Nakba (the mass Palistinian exodus of 1947-48) would cause them to be kindly disposed towards its victims. Apparently, I was wrong.

It turns out that the regimes have a long history of at best mistreating, and at worst oppressing, the Palestinian refugees. The former head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has said, "The Arab states do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders do not give a damn whether Arab refugees live or die." The former prime minister of Syria, Khalid al-Azm, evidently agrees with him. In his memoirs, he wrote:

Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees ... while it is we who made them leave.... We brought disaster upon ... Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave.... We have rendered them dispossessed.... We have accustomed them to begging.... We have participated in lowering their moral and social level.... Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon ... men, women and children-all this in the service of political purposes ....

Both of the preceding quotations, as well as most of the data in this post, come from the Wikipedia article Palestinian refugee.

If the regimes have this semi-pathological apathy towards the Palestinians, what's their beef with Israel? That the Israelis displaced the Palestinians and continue to mistreat those that remain cannot be the reason; the regimes themselves do the same things (e.g. the 1990 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians). That they want access to the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock doesn't make much sense either. The Temple Mount is owned by an Islamic waqf, Jewish law prohibits any Jew from entering it, and under Israeli law, enforced by Israeli police, only Muslims are permitted to pray there.

I suspect that the Israelis are being used as scapegoats, to focus the people's anger away from the government. This is a tried and true method of social control, and the Arab regimes seem to have perfected it. By preventing the Palestinian refugees from integrating into their countries, they have managed to keep this fire burning for sixty years, even after most of the original refugees — those who actually were driven from their homes, who actually remember what the Cisjordan was like before Israel — had died of old age. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm not sure what else to make of the evidence.

NOTE: This post was about the Palestinians and the Arab regimes. It was not about Israel. I'm not trying to say that it's all the Arab's fault and Israel's blameless, nor am I saying that it's all Israel's fault, because I'm not talking about Israel. If I want to talk about Israel I will post something for that purpose.