Causes the widening of poverty and blockage of the horizon in front of them

Shattered Dreams and Immigration Concerns Pursue Palestinian Youth in Lebanon

  • Children playing in the alleys of Shatila camp. AFP

  • Palestinians carry Palestine with them wherever they go. AFP

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In the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Palestinian youth are left with only shattered dreams and only hope of emigrating from a country that has not embraced them enough, even before an unprecedented economic collapse struck.

Nermine Hazina, a 25-year-old social sciences major, told AFP: "Palestinian youth are desperate because they are unable to achieve what they aspire to. There is something that limits their capabilities."

"Migration has become the main solution for the camp's youth. Everyone you talk to says they want to travel, legally or illegally, it doesn't matter."

She stresses that the idea of traveling to a country that "respects me and offers me an opportunity and a job" also haunts her, at a time when the Lebanese are not finding opportunities in the midst of economic collapse, "so how is the situation with refugees in camps amid difficult conditions?"

But the tone of despair quickly changes to a mixture of pride and enthusiasm, when the young woman talks about Jaffa, specifically her family's hometown of Manshiyya, as if she had lived in the city from which her grandparents fled with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

But 75 years after the Nakba, no settlement that preserves Palestinian rights is in sight and the dream of return is gradually fading, even if "Palestine is always present in the heart and memory," says Hazina.

In the camp's narrow and crowded alleys, recent photographs of Palestinian youths killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank are raised, along with old photographs of the late President Yasser Arafat, indicating the organic bond between Palestinians inside the country and the Palestinians of the "diaspora".

According to the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Dorory Klaus, 489,292 refugees are registered with the agency. They live in difficult conditions, exacerbated by the ongoing economic collapse since the fall of 2019, with 80% of them below the poverty line.

"There is no economic or political horizon for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon," says Klaus, explaining that "with no hope for a meaningful future, and with their basic rights deprived, they try to migrate whenever the opportunity arises."

Our simplest rights

Mohamed Abdelhafiz, 29, who roams the camp's narrow alleys on his motorcycle, told AFP: "We don't enjoy our most basic rights and we live every day."

The volunteer in the Palestinian Civil Defense continues: "I dreamed of being a doctor or an engineer, but I cannot work in these fields."

Lebanon bars Palestinian refugees from working in 39 professions, including law, medicine, pharmacy and engineering, and prohibits them from owning property, fearing that this would be a prelude to their settlement in Lebanon and prevent their right of return to their lands.

Abdul Hafeez makes no secret of his desire to emigrate, but his hope of obtaining a visa is almost non-existent, while the option of illegal immigration is risky.

He recounts how three young men from the camp died in September when a boat carrying dozens of migrants, most of them Syrian refugees, or stranded Palestinians, sank.

"They died because they wanted to secure their future," he explains.

Inside a PFLP office, where he spends his free time, Walid Othman, 33, does not see immigration as a solution, speaking of "a project that aims to hit Palestinian youth by starving them and reducing job and life opportunities."

Othman wishes he could complete his studies of political science in order to work in the field of defending the Palestinian cause in international forums, considering that "Palestine today needs educated and educated people who represent this issue before the whole world."

But the circumstances of life led him to stop pursuing his education in high school, to go to learn the profession of blacksmithing.

Our Core Home

75 years ago, Othman's grandfather fled the village of Nahaf in the Acre district, and his parents were then displaced from the Tal al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp in the northern suburb of Beirut, which was flattened in 1976 during the civil war (1975-1990).

During rounds of the same war, Shatila camp witnessed its share of tragedies with a massacre of its own, and the neighboring Sabra camp, during the Israeli invasion in 1982, and then during the camp war in 1985.

Palestinian camps in Lebanon, including Shatila, are home to some 30,2011 Palestinian refugees who fled neighboring Syria following the outbreak of conflict in the country in <>, mainly from Yarmouk camp in southern Damascus, according to UNRWA, which is chronically underfunded.

There are still about 400,2 Palestinian refugees registered with the Agency in Syria, where they enjoy the right to work, compared to 3.<> million registered in Jordan, where they enjoy the same rights as Jordanians, unlike Lebanon, which fears resettlement and denies refugees these rights under the pretext of guaranteeing their right of return.

Othman says: "No Palestinian, even if he is comfortable anywhere on earth, forgets Palestine. It is our permanent and fundamental homeland."

"People are born with a homeland, but we are born with our homeland in our heart."

Lebanon bars Palestinian refugees from working in 39 professions, including law, medicine, pharmacy, and engineering, and prohibits them from owning property, fearing that this would be a prelude to their resettlement in Lebanon and prevent their right of return to their lands.