How Lebanon Compares with Israel In Its Treatment of the Palestinians
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How does Lebanon, that has not once been condemned by the U.N. Human Rights Council, compare with Israel in its treatment of the Palestinians?
In Israel, the Arab citizens can serve on the Supreme Court, sit in the Knesset, go abroad as ambassadors.. In Lebanon the Palestinians are prevented from obtaining Lebanese citizenship. Consequently, they cannot possibly sit in the Lebanese Parliament, much less serve on the Supreme Court. In fact, they cannot work at any government job. Nor do they have the vote.
What about the workplace? In Lebanon the Palestinians are banned from all of the professions – law, medicine, engineering, architecture, university teaching, and many more, for a total of more than 20 that are strictly forbidden to them. In Israel, on the other hand, the Arabs can practice any of the professions, without limit. Many Arab Israeli have become doctors, engineers, architects, businessmen, professors, journalists, restaurant owners, and more recently, workers in high-tech companies. The chairman of Israel’s largest bank, Bank Leumi, is an Arab. None of those jobs could conceivably be open to Palestinians in Lebanon.
Most Palestinians in Lebanon do not have Lebanese citizenship, and therefore do not have Lebanese identity cards, which would entitle them to government services, such as health and education. They must rely on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for basic services, such as health care and education that the Lebanese state denies them. Nor are they are granted access to the other social services the Lebanese government provides.
The Palestinians are also legally barred from owning property. Employment in Lebanon requires a government-issued work permit, and, according to the New York Times, although “Lebanon hands out and renews hundreds of thousands of work permits every year to people from Africa, Asia and other Arab countries… until now, only a handful have been given” to Palestinians. Some find employment at small stalls selling food, clothing, and electronics inside the camps, some are allowed to work outside the camps, but only in menial jobs, and for some – the best job of all –is to be employed, in the camps, as part of the staff of UNRWA itself.
There is no apartheid in Israel. Arabs serve in the government, as ambassadors, as members of the Knesset, as justices on the Supreme Court. They work in the same factories and offices, are treated in the same hospitals by the same medical personnel, both Arab and Jews. They study in the same universities. They play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. They own small businesses, including restaurants, together. There is only one difference between how Arabs and Jews are treated in Israel. Jews must, and Arabs may, serve in the IDF.
In Lebanon, the Palestinians suffer from living in an apartheid state. They cannot own property, including houses outside the camps, and cannot build permanent structures inside the camps. They are forbidden from practicing 20 professions, including law, medicine, engineering, architecture, and many more, and are allowed to work outside the camps only in menial jobs, such as construction, low-paying administrative work, and selling their home-made crafts. From elementary school to university, they remain apart from the Lebanese. They receive what education and medical care that are available to them inside the camps, at UNRWA facilities. They are kept by the Lebanese government confined as much as possible to those camps, and permitted as little contact as possible with the Lebanese themselves.
But despite all this, it is Israel that, both at the U.N. and in the unsympathetic international mainstream media, is whipped from pillar to post as an “apartheid” state; the epithet is completely undeserved, but once it had been affixed, it has — by dint of constant repetition by the many enemies of the Jewish state — been made to stick. Meanwhile Lebanon is an apartheid state in the fullest sense of the word, which denies its Palestinian population the right to own property, to vote, to practice almost every profession, to receive a public education and government medical care, even to be employed – save for a few exceptions — outside the refugee camps.
Israel been denounced at the U.N. Human Rights Council for, among its other crimes, its practice of “apartheid,” drawn and quartered hundreds of times. As for Lebanon, not once in the entire history of the UNHRC has Lebanon been made to answer for its policy of “apartheid.” It has never come up.
How should we explain that? What could it possibly be?
