The Plo And The Refugees In Lebanon
...for the Palestinians as thousands of them were forced to seek new places to establish in other Arab countries, such as Lebanon, which had traditionally been characterized for being a politically divided country among different religious groups. After the defeat of the Arab forces against Israel in 1967, in which the latter took control of all Palestine, there was a new wave of approximately 400,000 Palestinian refugees into Lebanon (Fraser, 1995, p. 77). The war also represented a big loss for Jordan as it lost the West Bank and the headwaters of the Jordan River.
Palestinians suffered the consequences of a government that denied them some of the basic human rights, such as the right to work, access to education and health. More significantly, the government did not give them any civil rights and confined them to refugee camps in specific parts of the country under deplorable conditions. On the other hand, the presence of refugees represented a form of cohesion in an otherwise divided Lebanese society.
In 1969, president Nasser of Egypt pressured Lebanon into signing the Cairo Agreement. The agreement legitimized the PLO's presence in the country, allowing it to carry out military operations in certain parts of the country as well as to have full control over the Palestinian civilians living there. It granted the PLO areas of operation beyond effective control of the Lebanese government and in turn, it gave extraterritorial status and freedom of action in the refugee camps, creating a "state-within-a-state" with important repercussions to the Lebanese government and society.
Beginning 1970, tensions between the PLO and Jordan came to a head. King Hussein turned his army against the Palestinians with the intention to destroy their forces. After the civil war and the suppression of the PLO, more refugees and members of the organization moved to Lebanon...
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