ebrei contro l'occupazione

The Palestine Chronicle, 11/08/2010

The US-Israeli plan is that the naturalized refugees will be on their own.

For months, as Lebanon's historic debate over basic civil rights for Palestinian refugees has unfolded, the Obama administration has watched idly along the sidelines. As hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees cough and slow-bake while inhaling rancid camp air in Lebanon’s sweltering breezeless heat, the White House has now sent Lebanon’s Parliament a message. The United States will not support meaningful civil, social or economic rights for the world’s largest and oldest refugee population and it wants them naturalized anywhere except anyplace in Palestine.

Many had been hoping that President Obama would honor in Lebanon his calls for “American style civil rights” for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where daily US military actions betray American founding principles. Or that his administration would act to give some credence to Obama’s June 2009 Cairo speech or at least the pledges of Presidential envoy George Mitchell to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah that “the United States will work without rest until the inhuman conditions of Palestinians in all the refugee camps are ended.”

The US Embassy media office in Lebanon advised Palestine Civil Rights Campaign volunteers last month, referring to the Parliamentary debate, that “The United States does not have a dog in the fight.” An odd choice of words, one might think, given still fresh Lebanese memories of dogs in the fight from 18 years of Israeli troops brutally occupying 151 South Lebanon villages and using US funded attack dogs to terrorize the population and employing dogs to desecrate dozens of South Lebanon’s mosques.

In point of fact the Obama administration does have a dog in this historic civil rights struggle in Lebanon. Figuratively speaking, the cur is a cross between a Pit-bull-Doberman and rabid Rottweiler and is known locally as “NABI” (Naturalization Anywhere But Israel). The White House, and the Congressional Israeli lobby, intends that “NABI” shepherds and corrals Lebanon’s Palestinians and resettles them permanently and painlessly (at least for their well paid host countries) around the world. The further from Palestine the refugees end up the better with perhaps as many as 100,000 Palestinians slated to be kept in Lebanon, even though they will be arrested if they travel south anywhere along the ‘blue line’ and happen to rest at villages like Maron al Ras and wistfully gaze towards their former homes and villages near Akka or Safad, for example.