On July 3, Lebanese police arrested a sixty-four-year-old woman named Um Wissam for violating a set of laws that make it extremely difficult for Palestinians like herself to build new homes. Um Wissam is a resident of Rashidieh, the country’s second largest Palestinian “refugee camp”—which in reality is a small city populated mainly by Lebanese-born Palestinians whose parents or grandparents fled Israel during the 1948 war. Bassam Tawil comments:
The Lebanese government hardly misses an opportunity to condemn Israel for defending itself against Palestinian terrorism. Yet, this is the same Lebanon that has for decades practiced systematic discrimination against Palestinians and keeps them in squalid, ghetto-like camps surrounded by barbed wire and walls. This is also the same Lebanon that has thrown a Palestinian woman into jail for the crime of lacking a building permit.
In 1997, the Lebanese authorities issued a decree that banned Palestinians refugees from transporting building materials into refugee camps in the southern part of the country. The Lebanese authorities claimed that the purpose of the ban was to prevent Palestinians from establishing permanent residence in Lebanon. . . . The Palestinian camps in Lebanon . . . are ghetto-like settlements, sometimes surrounded by segregation walls, barbed wire, and military surveillance.
Had Um Wissam been arrested by the Israeli authorities, her story would have made headlines on the front page of every major media outlet in the West. Her plight would have been highlighted by the United Nations, by every so-called human-rights organization, and by every anti-Israel group on university campuses across the U.S. . . . Foreign journalists would have been standing in line outside her family’s home while hoping to trash Israel further by using the details of her case. But as Um Wissam had the misfortune of being imprisoned by Lebanese authorities, her case holds no interest for the West.
Read more on Gatestone: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19807/palestinians-apartheid-lebanon