Word: beirutization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Stacks of portraits of Mahmoud Abbas stand unused, gathering dust in the office of his Fatah movement in Beirut's Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Posters of Abbas - President of the Palestinian Authority, leader of Fatah and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) - would normally hang in offices and on street corners throughout Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps. But ever since Israel's incursion into Gaza earlier this year, Abbas has become politically radioactive to the approximately 400,000 refugees languishing in Lebanon, who were livid at his failure to act in defense of the beleaguered Gazans. "Abbas embarrassed...
...longer enough for most Palestinians here. High-ranking officials of Abbas' own party fear that he will trade away their right of return to what is now Israel. "Yassir Arafat went into negotiations with the olive branch in one hand and a weapon in the other hand," says one Beirut Fatah commander. "But all Mahmoud Abbas does is negotiate. He gets nothing, but he keeps negotiating. Palestinians believe in military operations because they want to go back to Palestine. They don't want to negotiate." (Read "After Israel's Election, Palestinians Weigh New Intifadeh...
...militant group that's also supported by Iran. And the refugees hear stories about leaders in the West Bank growing rich from embezzled international aid, while refugees see almost nothing in social services from the Palestinian Authority, which is controlled by Fatah. "Fatah isn't helping people," says the Beirut Fatah commander. "Hamas is taking advantage of this. They are entering deep, deep into the population...
...risks of living in Lebanon - a turbulent country no doubt, but one which, when not a war zone, is the vacation destination of choice for the Arab world. Sulhani, 85, is Palestinian, though, and his family lives in Shatila, an impoverished refugee camp on the edge of Beirut. Many Lebanese eat, drink and dance away memories of the violent past. But in the dank, swastika-graffitied alleyways of the camps, where four generations of Palestinians have come of age, there's little chance of forgetting. For most of the 220,000 Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, time...
Sulhani fled his home in Galilee for Beirut in 1948 - the year Israel was founded. Since then, there have been six wars and dozens of violent upheavals in Lebanon, and more often than not Sulhani's family has been caught in the middle. Abdullah's 59-year-old daughter Ahlam is still picking shrapnel out of wounds she received from artillery fire in 1975. The family survived the infamous Shatila massacre of 1982 by sheer luck, fleeing from Lebanese militiamen almost as soon as the slaughter began. When they returned afterwards, most of their neighbors were dead, and there...