New Report: Housing, Land and Property Issues in Lebanon

[Cover Page of the Housing, Land and Property Issues in Lebanon Report] [Cover Page of the Housing, Land and Property Issues in Lebanon Report]

New Report: Housing, Land and Property Issues in Lebanon

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The UNHCR and UN-Habitat have recently launched a new report assessing the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon by studying issues of housing, land and property. Entitled Housing, Land and Property Issues in Lebanon: Implications of the Syrian Refugee Crisis, the report is authored by lawyers Nizar Saghieh and Karim Nammour and Mona Fawaz, associate professor of urban studies and planning at the American University of Beirut, and is accessible through UNHCR’s “Syria Regional Refugee Response” sharing portal. The report is organized in five chapters: the first presents key findings and recommendations (and is available in Arabic), the second discusses the context of housing, land and property in Lebanon, the third examines access of Syrian refugees to shelter in Lebanon, while the fourth and fifth chapters focus on the case studies of Naba’a in Bourj Hammoud (Beirut) and Akkar in North Lebanon. The purpose of the study is “to inform humanitarian and government entities and help in designing policies, planning decisions and programs so as to ensure that refugees and vulnerable Lebanese families have access to safe, affordable and adequate shelter.” The report includes valuable maps, diagrams and quantitative information about housing, land and property in Lebanon.

Below are excerpts from the report’s Introduction:

Lebanon hosts the highest number of Syrian refugees in the region. UNHCR estimates that over one million refuges currently in Lebanon, in addition to at least 50,000 Palestinaian Refugees from Syria (PRS). Most of this influx has occurred in the past year. In January 2013 the refugee population was less than 150,000, but grew almost six-fold during 2013. It is estimated today that one out of every five residents in Lebanon is a refugee. These refuges are distributed across the country, with the highest population concentrations in the Bekaa (35 percent), Beirut (25 percent) and North Lebanon (25 percent). Most of these refuges are settling in cities and peri-urban areas outside towns and villages, creating different challenges from those normally found in a rural context.

The Syrian refugees’ crisis has had a huge impact on Lebanon. At the onset of the crisis, host communities in Lebanon welcomed and supported many refugees, sometimes without asking for anything in return. However, as the crisis has become prolonged, supporting refugees has become an increasing burden on communities and public authorities alike. In the context of a weak central government and in the absence of a comprehensive national strategy to respond to the crisis, humanitarian actors have increased their cooperation with municipal authorities. In fact, municipalities have in many cases been the Government’s “first responders” to the refugee crisis. There are signs, however, that municipalities’ capacities are increasingly strained and that they are becoming more and more frustrated with the situation.

The urgent need for basic shelter has pushed many Syrian refugees to live in poor conditions, frequently in spaces not designed as shelters. The situation is further exacerbated with the arrival of new refugees, reducing hence the availability of housing and increasing the risk of eviction. The presence of these refugees has also adverse consequences for host communities due to increased competition over affordable housing, the inadequacy of existing infrastructure and services, and competition over limited employment opportunities.

[…]

The key findings and recommendations are organized into five topics: shelter conditions and trends; housing markets; housing, land and property rights; settlement patterns and land use; and governance. The recommendations follow the same broad structure, but also include suggestions regarding potential pilot projects that combine several recommendations into an integrated program approach. In general the recommendations are organized to present shot-term measures first.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412