During a workshop at the American University of
Beirut last year on the subject of the right to work and to purchase a
home for Palestinian refugees, a young business major from the Christian
village of Bikerki posed a question that surprised some in the
audience: “Why if Palestinian don’t like it in Lebanon do they not
go home? Why did they even bother coming here in the first place?”
“Caroline” was not being antagonistic. Many of the younger
Lebanese population are taught in private and religious schools by the various
sects using a curriculum including subjects that are heavily politicized and
skewed, none more than modern Lebanese history.
Talking with Caroline during a tea break, she explained that she
feels very politically oriented, but admitted that she really doesn’t
know much about Lebanese history and only vaguely why there are Palestinians in
Lebanon. What she does know, she explained, came from her parents and
family members and not from schools in her Christian hamlet which happens to be
the seat of Lebanon’s Maronite Patriarch, for whom she is a part time volunteer
working with orphaned children.
In most private and public schools in Lebanon, sensitive political
subjects have long been culled from textbooks by polarized confessional watchdog
committees seeking a proper education for their children. UNWRA
schools are forbidden to teach Palestinian history in Lebanon or even their
history in Palestine lest the US Congress cut UNWRA funding.
This has prevented the development of a unified history
curriculum. Most history lessons end in 1946, three years after Lebanon’s
independence from French colonial rule. Many schools avoid teaching Lebanese
history in order to prevent sectarian and political fervor.
According to Ohaness Goktchian, professor of political science at
the American University in Beirut, “We are raising another generation of
children who identify themselves only with their communities and not their
nation… history is what unities people. Without history we can’t have unity.”
Sari Hanafi, a Palestinian professor of sociology at the American
University of Beirut, says a unified history curriculum is necessary. “I think
in terms of social identity it’s important for the Lebanese to have a shared
history which also highlights their differences. We hold absolutely different
visions of Lebanon. We should admit this, and admit our own limitations.”
Hanafi continues, “There should be no vote (the content of history textbooks)
by the council of ministers or the parliament… It should be defined and
approved by a committee of historians and that’s it.”
All sects, get involved is checking what is being taught.
One of the Hezbollah officials this observer most admires is MP Mohammad
Fneish, former Labor Minister and currently Minister of Agriculture. Fneish
raised an issue with the Ministry of Education last week concerning the use of
an American text book called Modern World History that is used at
Beirut’s International College (IC), a popular private school. What the
Hezbollah MP and others found disturbing was that the US book states that
“Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are terrorist organizations.”
A solution was quickly agreed upon by the Ministry of Education,
the International College administration and Hezbollah. The offending passage
was simply covered over in each of the books with a sticker and everyone seems
more or less satisfied for now.
As a consequence of this impasse in education, which often sees
1946, three years after the end of the French occupation, as the end of the
period of history taught in Lebanon, Caroline honestly did not know why
Palestinians came to Lebanon. When it comes to the second half of the 20th century,
what happened during the Palestinian Nakba and its effects here in Lebanon are
largely unknown among youth.
Caroline and I became friends and I gave her some articles from
different scholars to read on the Nakba as I sensed she was becoming interested
in this subject. Partly as a dare, she agreed to do research and get back
to me with what she discovered about the Nakba and its effects on
Lebanon. She wanted to write from the perspective of a Lebanese student
and I in turn would try to help her get college credit for her thesis and maybe
even published.
Frankly I had not thought much about our research arrangement for
months, and was very happy and surprised when she contacted me the other day to
say that she needed me to read her manuscript.
And quite a manuscript it is.
Why, Caroline asked her readers, did more than 129,000
Palestinians come to Lebanon during 1948 while a similar number arrived next
door to Syria?
Then she laid out what she had learned and her conclusions:
The current fate of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, living for
decades in inhumane conditions worse that any refugees on earth, is primarily
the fault and responsibility of those who stole their lands and ethnically
cleaned them during the 1948 Nakba. Additionally, the Palestinian refugees’
abject existence is the responsibility of those who have egregiously nurtured
the nineteenth century Zionist colonial enterprise with aid and weapons while
averting their eyes from the Palestinians Right of Return and the international
responsibility to implement international law including many UN Security
Council Resolutions 242, 338 and UNGAR 194. In addition to the United States
and Europe, responsibility attaches to much of the World community.
They were forced out of 531 villages and 11 cities in Palestine as
part of a series of detailed and meticulous ethnic cleansing campaigns rarely
witnessed since Germany’s Third Reich. Indeed, many of the same methods
used to transfer the population of Palestine through terror and intimidation
experienced under the Nazi administration of Germany were employed by the
Zionist organizers of the Nakba.
“For more than six decades”, she wrote: “the Zionist
colonial enterprise that still occupies Palestine, falsely claimed that the
Palestinians left their farms and homes because they were ordered to do so by
Arab governments in order to clear the way for a massive Arab army that would
soon throw the Jews into the sea. It was nonsense of course, since the
so-called Arab “army” was ten percent of the Zionist forces, had no such plan,
and in the case of Syrian forces ran out of ammunition early on and the Jordanian
did not want to fight at all and left after the fall of Lod and
Ramle.”
But, according to Caroline, “the Zionist lobby in the USA and
Europe repeated this and many other lies for more than half a century.”
Caroline wrote that relatively recently, Walid Khalidi (1988), Zionist
historian Benny Morris, the eminent Palestinian scholar Salman Abu Sitta and
others exposed this lingering fraud.
Yet, during the 2012 American presidential campaigns in Florida,
New York and elsewhere this shibboleth surfaced again without challenge or
rebuttal by the main stream media, debate sponsors or claimed debate “fact
checkers.”
A summary of Caroline’s research instructs us about the reasons
Palestinians left their homes and land seeking sanctuary in Lebanon.
In approximately 90 per cent of the 531 villages, direct Zionist
military attacks emptied the Palestinian population. This took the forms
of expulsion by Jewish forces (approximately 15 per cent), direct military
assault by Zionist gangs and militia (60 per cent) and approximately 18 per
cent as a result of an imminent attack following the destruction of a near-by
village sometimes in view of neighboring villages.
Other villages were emptied by insidious “whispering campaigns”
whereby Zionist agents, posing as “friendly Jewish neighbors” would whisper to
Palestinian villagers that a horrible bombardment of their village was imminent
and they must, at risk of their lives, leave for a week or so until ‘the
situation’ returned to normal. Another 38 villages were ethnically cleansed
because of “fear of Jewish attack” and five villages were emptied on orders of
a local leader or Muktar.
Palestinian refugees who were forced into Lebanon more than six
decades ago were all part of the Zionist creation of the so-called “refugee
problem.” They came as a direct result of a fanatical genocidal war waged
against them by European colonial Zionists before, during and subsequent to the
League of Nations British Mandate. Zionist tactics included military and
psychological projects and both allowed for hasbara which generated some
credence for the fake Zionist slogan: “Palestine is a land without people for a
people without land”.
The myth that the Israelis were few and fought with sparse weapons
against many well equipped Arab armies was only true in Hollywood’s “Exodus
Fantasy.” The number of Arab armies participating went down during the war. The
only ones who remained to the last rounds in October, November, and December
were the Palestinians and Egyptians, according to Caroline. The Zionist plan
from the very beginning emphasized the urgency of building a large army and out
of a population of approximately 650,000. More than 100,000, or roughly 16 per
cent of the colonial population were under arms.
Caroline is a credit to her religion, village, country and
generation, in that she is determined to learn what Lebanon’s confessionalized
education does not allow. She has pledged to send her research to all Member of
Parliament and to support the intensifying campaign here in Lebanon to secure
the right to work and home ownership for the ethnically cleansed Palestinian
refugees.
