00. 05.38 Shatila

Deep in the heart of Beirut, Palestinian refugees live much as they have lived for the past half a century. The plight of these people was once the central concern of the entire Arab world.

00.05.54 Old faces

But today they are the forgotten Palestinians... the Palestinians who have no place in Yasser Arafat’s new state... The Palestinians of 1948

00. 06.07 Archive

... who were driven from Palestine when the State of Israel was first created... Their exile will not be ended by Arafat’s small and fragmented state – a state built only on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.

00.6.21 Ain Helwe sequence

(2) There are more Palestinian refugees in Lebanon than in any other Arab country. More than 300,000 live in overcrowded camps like this – probihited from expanding outside their original boundaries.

00. 06.38 Poverty sequence

Many live in subhuman conditions 52 years after they first tasted exile. Streets are small and dirty. Sewers are open. Drinking water comes only jerrycans. It’s no place for children – or adults.

00.07.00 War wounded sync

We wait until midnight to sleep because of the heat from the tin roofs. It’s impossible to sleep before that. Almost 75 families live like this. Millions of delegations visit us here. They all make promises but we see nothing. They promise to fix the sewers, the water and the pipes and that’s the end of it.

00.07.29 Idle shots

Banned from 70 professions, from janitor to physician, and given no state benefits, most refugees live on the poverty line.

00.07.39 Imm Turki

Imm Turki was 26 when she was driven from Palestine. Today she’s 78 – and lives from hand to mouth.

00.07.48 Sync Imm Turki

My life in Palestine was wonderful. It wasn’t like it is here, in the garbage. See how it is? If we collect garbage, we can eat. If we don’t, we can’t. We are forced to eat dirt... dirt! Palestine was a golden land. It wasn’t like this. Here there’s nothing but noise, and the roads are all broken.

00.08.20 Soheil set-up

Most PLO offices in Lebanon have long since been closed. PLO officials who remain, like Soheil Natour, are fighting an uphill battle to improve the lot of the refugees.

00.08.31 Soheil sync

The Lebanese government is, of all the Arab governments, the worst in dealing with the Palestinians. They didn’t give us any civic rights. We only have the right of residence. We don’t have the right of work. We don’t have the right of civil, social security or education. We don’t have the right of access to government health care. Nothing in Lebanon. That’s why we are very impoverished. In the camps we don’t have infrastructure repaired since 15 years.

00.09.02 Bulldozer sequence

In order to have room to breathe, 75 families built new homes on the edge of this camp. The government’s response was uncompromising, as Namad Hamad remembers.

00.09.15 Couple sync

The noise of the bulldozers woke me at 5 o’clock in the morning. I have a young daughter and I took her to her grandmother’s. When I came back 10 minutes later, our homes were gone!

00.09.46 Tear gas

Troops using tear gas forced Abu Ibrahim to flee.

00.09.30 Old man

I was in my home when they raided us. I wanted to collect my medicine but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to get a shirt, but they wouldn’t let me. My wife wanted to bring her slippers, but they hit her.

00.09.43 Set-up Hoss

Lebanese policy has always been designed to prevent the Palestinians from putting down roots, as Prime Minister Selim el-Hoss acknowledges...

00.09.52 Sync Hoss

We will try to make life easier for the Palestinians, but we wouldn’t want to do anything that will smack of settlement... We cannot accept any resettlement of Palestinians in Lebanon. Not in the least actually. For the simple reason that Lebanon has been immersed in a 15-year war between 1975 and 1990. This internal war ended with a reconciliation formula in which there is an explicit provision that there should be no resettlement of Palestinians in Lebanon. After so much suffering in Lebanon we cannot afford to compromise.

00.10.40 PLO archive

The presence of Palestinian fighters was central to Lebanon’s civil war. PLO fighters attacked Israel across the border of south Lebanon and ran a state within a state from their headquarters in West Beirut. It was a domineering and often violent reign that ended with the evacuation of PLO fighters after the Israeli invasion of 1982.

00.11.05 Set up Yousef Sayigh

Professor Youssef Sayigh, once an advisor to the PLO, says life in Lebanon has become harder since ‘82.

00.11.14 Youssef sync

The horizon is closed. Palestinians don’t know what is going to happen to them. Those in Gaza and the West Bank they are on their land as it were. Those in Syria have more or less been absorbed. In Jordan the same thing. A Palestinian can be a prime minister in Jordan. But in Lebanon what are the options for the people here? Everything is blocked...

00.11.41 Unwra

Even funding from the UN Agency for Palestinian refugees – which has cut back its spending on Lebanon to concentrate on the Palestine Authority.

00.11.49 Sync Soheil

Inflation in Lebanon has reached during the last 10 years not less than 300% while the budget of UNWRA only increased by 2%. They have schools and we have children in these schools, but the new generation of children don’t find places in these schools...

00.12.10 Unwra demo

Palestinian youngsters denied an education have taken their protests to UNWRA headquarters. But there’s simply no money for Lebanon.

00.,12.19 Leila arriving at family home

Leila al-Ali works with young Palestinians...

in Chatila camp, where Christian militiamen masacred hundreds of civilians under Israeli eyes in 1982... Her mother Fatmi survived by hiding on this roof.

00.12.34 Sync Fatmi

The killing went on and on and on. We were at home. This home has been destroyed three times. My daughter was wounded and lost a leg. One son was shot. Another was captured. My children are scattered all over the world. We Palestinians have sacrificed a lot for the revolution and for the right to return.

00.13.01 Family g.v.

But the suffering endured in Lebanon is nothing compared to the pain Palestinians still feel at the loss of Palestine. Leila’s father, Rifaat el-Ali, was once an affluent man with land and herds. All he is left with are the papers that prove it. His land will be returned to him by Arafat’s state – and his family feels betrayed.

00.13.27 Sync Rifaat

We the refugees of Lebanon don’t want Arafat’s state. It means nothing to us. We want to go back to our land. Arafat doesn’t want us. He wants a place for himself. He doesn’t care about us. He doesn’t care about the Palestinians who sacrificed their blood for him. We will accept nothing less than our land. If they gave us Jerusalem instead of our land we wouldn’t accept it. We want the land of our parents and grandparents.

00.14.01 Arafat half-pic

Concern over the limitations of Arafat’s mini-state has tarnished his image among all but his closest supporters.

00.14.08 Sync Youssef

What kind of state will it be? It will not be a state with sovereignty... Decision-making will not be in the hands of the Authority either in the field of politics, economy or security. It will be an expanded municipality with authority to sweep the streets and look after the street lights and street lamps, but no more than that. It will not be a state in the real sense. There might be a national anthem and a flag and recognition by other governments. But in the minds of Palestinians who have political sense and a sense of reality it will not be a state...

00.14.59 Old folk hobbling home

But the dream of a real state that will enable them to go back to their homes is what keeps many Palestinians going in their difficult Lebanese exile. Hasna Mohammed and her 84-year-old husband El-Hajj Taha think of little else. They don’t know what rights the Palestinians of ’48 will have in Arafat’s state. Some may be permitted to settle there, or at least to visit. But for them it would be just a different form of exile.

00.15.30 Sync old man

Our land is still occupied. It’s been occupied since 1948. We must get it back. We’ll be happy if we get all Palestine back. The Palestine of 1967 gives us nothing. We’re the Palestinians of ‘48. Arafat wants a state? Let him have it! In Arafat’s state we’d just be refugees again. We want to go back to our land. To our homes.

00.16.09 Palestinians traipsing to the border

But the sad truth is that the generation of ’48, the generation that knew a real Palestinian state, is unlikely to get any closer to the land they lost than this... When Israel ended its occupation of south Lebanon in July, and withdrew to the international border, thousands of Palestinians journeyed south to look across the border at the land they knew as Palestine – land that Arafat has signed away to Israel.

00.16.39 Voiceover Palestinians hugging and weeping

Hearts were bursting on both sides of the wire...

They were crying and we were crying... We were strangers to each other.

00.16.59 Sync old man

We hadn’t seen each other for 50 years. When you see people you love, don’t you clasp them to you?

00.17.09 Border

All that Arafat’s state offers these people, the Palestinians of ’48, is an uncertain future in refugee camps where they have already spent half a century.

00.17.22 Sync Yousef

Surely it is neither fair nor just nor human or humane to expect people to submit to another 50 years in camps. And Lebanon will be putting a great deal of pressure to get all of them out... It may not succeed in getting all of them out. It may end with 25,000, 50,000, being absorbed into Lebanon. But where will the others go?

00.17.54 Street scene

Today there is palpable concern that Arafat has sold out the Palestinians of ’48... swept them under the carpet as he builds his Palestinian state. Despairing of their own leader, Palestinians are looking elsewhere for help.

00.18.08 Sync Yusuf

I think that the Arab peoples, who are much more honest and serious than their rulers, will rise in protest. There will be a lot of disturbance, a lot of violence, in support of the Palestinians.

00.18.26 Leb army and Pal fighters

Despite a close Lebanese eye on the camps, Arafat recently re-armed his Fatah movement in Lebanon... They sing the same songs that they sang when the PLO was a real fighting force in Lebanon. But no refugee believes any longer that young men like these can open the road to Palestine for them. They know that weapons in the camps are not the answer to their problems.

00.19.00 Hoss

This is a matter that should be discussed at all levels. This is not Lebanon’s preoccupation alone. This should be the preoccupation of the world community that was behind the creation of Israel and the eviction of all these refugees outside Palestine.

00.19.25 Empty streets

Children like these may never see Palestine without international pressure. It’s been a long time since the Arab world was united on anything. The Arab street today is as quiet as the alleyways of Shatila... The future of the refugees as impenetrable as the air they breathe.