Hezbollah critic to fight "revenge trial"

[Originally posted at NOW]

After nearly three years of detention by Syrian and Lebanese authorities, a Shiite cleric has been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment on charges of collaboration with Israel – charges that activists and his lawyer say were fabricated in a bid to silence the cleric’s criticism of Hezbollah. The verdict, handed down by the Lebanese Military Tribunal on April 15, is set to be appealed.

Sheikh Hassan Mshaymish was first arrested in Syria in July 2010 on undisclosed charges. The Syrian government’s official silence on his continued detention prompted criticism from Amnesty International, and his family alleges he was tortured during this period. He was transferred to the Lebanese authorities in October 2011, after which he was formally accused of collaboration with Israel, a crime under Article 278 of the Lebanese penal code.

Mshaymish had in fact been a member of Hezbollah until the late 1990s, after which he became an outspoken critic of the party and its ideological adherence to wilayat al-faqih, the authoritarian system of religious government pioneered by the late Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As NOW has previously reported, a number of prominent Lebanese Shiite critics of Hezbollah have long maintained that it was these open attacks on the powerful Syrian ally – typically expressed in his monthly publication Difaf (“the riverbanks”) – rather than any dealings with Israel that led to Mshaymish’s arrest.

As is typical of cases handled by the military tribunal, no information pertaining to the trial has officially been made public. However, a legal source involved with the case who requested anonymity due to its sensitivity told NOW the evidence presented by the prosecution chiefly comprised telephone records purporting to show calls made by Mshaymish to Israelis. Mshaymish’s lawyer, Antoine Nehme, alleges these records were falsified, and claims to possess originals proving as much that were ignored by the court.

In addition, the legal source told NOW the prosecution had pointed to a meeting Mshaymish had in Germany in 2005 with an individual whom he suspected of working for “an intelligence apparatus seeking to collect information about Hezbollah.” Mshaymish himself informed Hezbollah of the meeting upon his return to Lebanon. In court, says the source, Nehme argued this meeting failed to violate Lebanese law; first because the man Mshaymish met was German, not Israeli, and second because Article 278 pertains only to divulging information about the Lebanese government, not a party such as Hezbollah.

Adding to these question marks is the comparative lightness of the sentence, which some commentators have interpreted as further evidence of the dubiousness of the charges. (Collaboration with Israel carries a maximum sentence of death.)

“Is it logical that his sentence is only five years for cooperating with the enemy?” asked Ali al-Amin, al-Balad journalist and a fellow Shiite critic of Hezbollah who has campaigned for Mshaymish’s release.

“This trial is political, it’s not based on any evidence. It is a revenge trial, to punish Sheikh Mshaymish for his stand against Hezbollah,” Amin told NOW.

Similar sentiment was expressed by Lokman Slim, another Shiite supporter of Mshaymish who has raised awareness of his case through his “Hayya Bina” NGO.

“For someone collaborating with Israel, five years is not exactly the heaviest sentence he could receive,” Slim told NOW. “So for me the philosophy of such a sentence is that it achieves a moral assassination of Mshaymish. It’s neutralizing and killing the man symbolically, a kind of murder without blood.”

Looking ahead, Mshaymish still has a chance of clearing his name with a successful appeal. The legal source told NOW that Nehme, the defense lawyer, is confident of overturning the verdict.

Yet Slim told NOW the appeal, even if successful, would likely take a long time, adding to the two years and nine months of detention Mshaymish has already undergone.

“The appeal could take years. Given he’s already served nearly three years in prison, he could end up serving the full five years with his appeal still in process.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

Sidon's Salafists eager for battle

[Originally posted at NOW]

Fadel Shaker was in a talkative mood when NOW found him standing outside Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir’s Bilal Bin Rabah mosque on Wednesday afternoon. The former celebrity pop singer turned arch-partisan of the Sidon cleric was with half a dozen young men also sporting Salafist-style beards, and could scarcely have been less reticent when approached for questions.

Would he be joining the “Free Resistance Brigades,” the new Sidon-based militia established by Assir on Monday? “Of course!” was his reply, quickly echoed by the rest of the men. NOW then asked if he and his comrades would also be heading to fight in Syria, as per Assir’s call for “jihad” against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces and Hezbollah. The response was equally prompt: “Insha’Allah! [God willing]”

At this, Shaker grew animated. “All Shiites are brothers of whores!” he declared in a raised voice. “Write that down!” NOW asked if he indeed meant all Shiites, or was only referring to Hezbollah – a distinction typically made by Assir. “No: all of them! Shiites are the same as the bottom of my shoe!” he replied, to much laughter from his comrades. He continued cursing the sect for another thirty seconds or so, turning his ire on the late Iranian Grand Ayatollah Khomeini before NOW thanked him and parted ways.

In his apartment facing the mosque, Assir himself adopted a distinctly more restrained tone. “We’re not here to fight the Shia. The goal of the Free Resistance Brigades is self-defense – against Israel, if they choose to attack us, and against Hezbollah if they do,” the sheikh told NOW. “We have said many times that we refuse fighting and causing civil war in Lebanon.”

Assir has been talking of starting a militia since last November, and its formation is still in the planning stages, he told NOW. At present, he says, around 300 Lebanese and Palestinians from Sidon and its suburbs have signed on to join – a number he hopes will grow to several thousands (registration takes place outside his mosque after evening prayers) – but no formal training has taken place. He confirmed that he and his sons would personally be members of the Brigades.

These are not necessarily, however, the same people Assir intends to wage jihad across the border. “The people addressed in the fatwa[religious decree] for jihad are those living on the border, because it’s easier for them to access Syria.” He added, though, that “if there’s a need, we will back them up.”

Assir’s call to arms – seconded by prominent Tripoli cleric Sheikh Salem al-Rafei – comes at a time of intense fighting in and around Syria’s Qusayr, a rebel-held town roughly 10km from Lebanon’s northeastern border. The battle for Qusayr, which pits regime loyalists including an estimated 800-1,200 Hezbollah members against opposition militants, was reportedly described by Assad himself as the “main battle” in all of Syria at present.

“Hezbollah is fighting in Qusayr, and the Lebanese state isn’t saying a word against them,” Assir told NOW. “We’ve stayed away for two years, but now with Hezbollah attacking our Syrian brothers from one side and the regime attacking them from another, they’re under siege. We have to support them, this is a matter of shari’a [Islamic law].”

This was also the line taken by Rafei, who pledged Monday to “send men and weapons in support of our Sunni brothers in Qusayr.” Assir told NOW that due to Rafei’s substantial influence in Tripoli, he expects he will send over a thousand fighters across the border. Rafei could not be reached by NOW for comment.

With the line thus blurring between Syria’s and Lebanon’s fighters (“We say to our Syrian brothers, your war is our war,” as Rafei put it) and the prospect of organized sectarian war between Lebanese Sunnis and Shiites in Syria, analysts tell NOW the Assir-Rafei plan may bode ill for Lebanon’s security.

“This definitely drags Lebanon further into the Syrian conflict,” said Dr. Imad Salamey, professor of political science at the Lebanese American University. “We now have two sides in Lebanon – Hezbollah, which is already fully engaged in the fighting, and the pro-opposition Sunni groups promising similar military engagement. If things continue on this course, it may eventually bring the border villages and mixed Sunni-Shiite areas in the Beqaa Valley into similar conflict. This is really alarming and dangerous.”

Moreover, argues Salamey, “whether they know it or not, [Assir and Rafei] are playing into the Syrian regime’s hands, by turning the crisis into a region-wide one, which will lead the international community to prefer a political settlement in the regime’s favor.”

With that said, however, Salamey adds that the extent of the damage may be limited by Assir’s still-marginal following within the Sunni community. “Assir’s significance is not as it seems in the press. Sure, he can send some fighters to Syria, but this is also him trying to attract some attention and demonstrate his strategic relevance in swaying politics in Lebanon and Syria.”

“He and Rafei are trying to show that Hezbollah is not the only party that can play the ‘Syria’ card.”

Yara Chehayed contributed reporting.

From Sufism to Salafism: How Tripoli inspired the global Islamist revival

[Originally posted at NOW]

Tucked behind a wall of bushes on the banks of Tripoli’s Abu Ali river, just a hundred meters south of the Crusader fortress, sits a peculiar domed building of white stone plated with chestnut wooden window frames. The Takiyya Mawlawiyya, as it’s called, is in fact a defunct Sufi temple; a 17th-century relic of a departed era in which the mystical brand of Islam was, in many if not most Muslim cities, the predominant one.

Looking at it today, one wouldn’t think it a structure of much historical consequence. Inconvenient to access, it was entirely deserted when NOW paid a visit last Saturday. Though recently renovated with the help of the Turkish government, no street signs declare its existence. It isn’t even on Google Maps.

Yet it was at this very site that, some 130 years ago, the young man who was to become the most influential Islamic thinker of a generation had an experience that permanently shaped his ideas – and, by extension, the Muslim world today.

That man was Muhammad Rashid Rida, born in 1865 in the nearby village of al-Qalamun. After receiving what was, for the time, a fairly radically advanced education in Tripoli (that’s to say, he was taught the new European sciences and languages in addition to the traditional Islamic curriculum,) in his early adulthood he took the not-uncommon step of joining a Sufi order (the Naqshbandi one, to be exact.) Thus it was that he found himself one Friday at the same Takiyya Mawlawiyya, where, as he later recalled, his first sight of the whirling dervishes sent him into an empurpled fury of piety:

“I could not control myself, and stood up in the center of the hall and shouted something like this: ‘O people, or can I call you Muslims! These are forbidden acts, which one has no right either to look at or to pass over in silence, for to do so is to accept them’.”

Abandoning Sufism on the spot, Rida sought the “true” Islam elsewhere, and found it in the reformist movement of the renowned Egyptian scholar Muhammad Abduh, whom he met in the 1880s during one of the latter’s visits to Tripoli, and of whom he became an ardent disciple. Building on the path first paved by his own mentor, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Abduh argued for a reconciliation of Islam with the European Enlightenment; for an embrace of modern science and technology, of wider education, of accountable government, and of increased rights for non-Muslims, while yet preserving the theocratic institutions of the caliphate and absolute faith in the Qur’an.

Rida followed Abduh to Cairo in 1897, where he began publishing a periodical, al-Manar (the beacon in English.) Though this began as little more than a medium for propagating Abduh’s ideas, as Rida grew older he developed views of his own, and took al-Manar in a distinctly more hardline direction than Abduh would have endorsed. Crucially, whereas Abduh had understood the theological concept of the salaf (ancestors in English) – the companions of the Prophet, traditionally held as the “best” Muslims – metaphorically to mean the great Islamic thinkers across the centuries, Rida took it literally: the only Islam was that of the Prophet’s generation.

Accordingly, he started openly denouncing the “illegitimate innovations” of Shiism and intensifying criticism of Sufis (even, according to one biographer, saying he would have them beheaded if he were in power.) He wrote contemptuously of Christianity. When the Wahhabis conquered the Hejaz in 1925, it was only natural that Rida should have been thrilled, seeing in their unflinching puritanism an admirable return to first principles. The Encyclopedia of Islam describes al-Manar at this time as an “active center of Wahhabi propaganda,” and indeed he was even to make personal contact with Ibn Saud (thus earning him the distinction of being Tripoli’s first Saudi ally.)

Such ferocious reactionism was all the more conspicuous for being so plainly contrary to the spirit of the time. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were generally periods of dramatic liberalization and even secularization in the Arab world. Modernity required laws and governance based on reason, rather than religion, believed many writers (including another Tripolitan, Farah Antun, who was initially a friend of Rida’s before falling out for obvious reasons). Darwin had buried the myths of religion for good, said others. Feminism was gaining ground even among men, and in 1923 a group of Egyptian women led by Huda Shaarawi made history by discarding their veils altogether.

As against all this, Rida was defending concubinage (sex slavery) and polygamy, while calling for a revamped caliphate (the old one having been permanently abolished by Atatürk in 1924) that would put apostates to death. It was in this capacity as champion of the counter-revolution against the Arab Enlightenment (or nahda) that Rida was to inspire the next generation of what we would now call Islamists.

Not least among these young devotees was Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood at just 22 years old. In his office at the American University of Beirut, history professor and nahda specialist Samir Seikaly told NOW that al-Banna was “certainly influenced by Rida.” Pulling worn volumes off his densely-packed shelves, he showed NOW how the young Egyptian “frequently visited Rida [and was] animated by [his] writings,” even briefly succeeding him as editor of al-Manar after his death in 1935. In al-Banna’s conviction that secular decadence was the root cause of the Arabs’ decline and that therefore (in the Brothers’ party slogan) “Islam is the solution,” Rida’s imprint is clear.

Indeed, al-Banna seems to have consciously taken it upon himself to popularize Rida’s thought, much as Rida himself had Abduh’s: Muhammad Musa al-Sharif, a Saudi professor of Islamic studies at King Abd al-Aziz University argues that the achievement of al-Banna was to “develop [Rida’s] movement, which had been confined to […] the upper classes [into] a movement […] accessible to the ordinary people. This was the first time that anyone had been able to do this.”

Is Rida, then, the ideological grandfather of Islamism today? To an extent, says Professor Seikaly. “In as much as he influenced al-Banna, and in as much as al-Banna then influenced the following generations, Rida’s ideas can be said to be still alive,” he told NOW.

That influence is strongest in Muslim Brotherhood circles, according to Omar Bakri Muhammad, a Syrian cleric who led the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir party in the UK in the 1990s before being banned from the country and winding up in Lebanon.

“Rida’s thought is closest to the Brotherhood, rather than the Salafists as some people claim,” Bakri told NOW. “Salafists do not generally read Rida today. They might come across some of his articles, but they won’t read his tafsir [exegesis]; they read the tafsir of Ibn Kathir, while jihadists are more likely to read that of Sayyid Qutb. The Brothers, however, still refer to the tafsir of al-Manar.”

(It may be worth noting that Bakri’s definition of a Salafist is somewhat stricter than most: “I believe Salafism does not really exist in Lebanon. If they call [Sidon cleric] Ahmad al-Assir a Salafist, then Mother Teresa was al-Qaeda.”)

No small achievement for the Qalamun son, then, to be the acknowledged muse of a supranational organization that continues to command influence from Thailand to Turkey to Tunisia (where the local Brotherhood leader, Rashid al-Ghannushi, praises Rida even while having the nerve to name his party after the nahda.) At a time of monumental transformation in the Arab world, in which the very foundations of states are being reconstructed, the abstract disputes of Rida’s day concerning the place of Islam have perhaps never before been so consequential. It’s both tragic and fitting that Tripoli itself – where, in a sense, this whole business began – is proving one of the bloodier arenas of the contest.

The Rida quotes, and much of the background information in general, come from Albert Hourani’s ‘Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798 – 1939’.

Boris eulogizes poet-jailing Qatar

[Originally posted at NOW]

No day is a good day to pen a thousand words of uncritical praise for a violently repressive theocracy, but London mayor Boris Johnson’s decision to do just that in yesterday’s Telegraph was timed even worse than it might otherwise have been. Scarcely had the ink of his parodically rose-tinted tribute dried than a Qatari court sentenced another luckless soul to medieval punishment for crimes against the Almighty; in this case 40 lashes for imbibing the illicit Dionysian harvest. One wonders whether – as with Salam Fayyad’s resignation and the Obama visit – the authorities were putting off the announcement until his plane had safely left the tarmac.

Boris, of course, has his own history of moral policing on the alcohol question, but he’s convinced there’s far more common ground to be found than that. “There is so much we can offer [to Qatar], so many ways to build on this partnership,” he tells us. “We have more friends than we sometimes imagine.”

Which is certainly more than could be said by, e.g., Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami, the Qatari poet sentenced to life imprisonment last November (later reduced to 15 years) for a poem deemed an act of incitement against the regime (it expressed admiration for the Tunisian revolution), who might conceivably expect some support from a nation claiming to value democracy and free speech.

Johnson – tipped, don’t forget, as a possible future prime minister – might also consider his “partnership” (or lack thereof) with the Arab world’s liberals and secularists, who at every turn are seeing their courageous efforts at combating tyranny knocked back by the Doha-sponsored Muslim Brotherhood, if not (as in Bahrain) by the thugs of the al-Thani regime itself. Women, too, deserve better than to have the barbaric practice of (often forced) polygamy shrugged off as a mere “traditional” eccentricity, as harmless as falconing and camel racing.

Of course, Johnson’s dilemma is obvious: Britain is poor; Qatar is the richest country on earth. The man is simply in no position to lecture what is already one of his city’s largest investors. His article is ultimately, then, a testament not to the endearing qualities of the “natives” (a word he actually uses) but rather to Britain’s frightening subservience to them, and the profoundly troubling consequences of their transformation from colonial protectorate to imperial potentate.

There *is* a US-Zionist conspiracy - in Assad's favor

[Originally posted at NOW]

If I were the sort of person who opposed the Free Syrian Army for its treacherous subservience to American imperialism, I imagine things like this lede from the Wall Street Journal yesterday would make for rather perplexing reading:

“Senior Obama administration officials have caught some lawmakers and allies by surprise in recent weeks with an amended approach to Syria: They don't want an outright rebel military victory right now because they believe, in the words of one senior official, that the "good guys" may not come out on top.”

Nor would my confusion be any the slighter were I the kind of provincial Western reactionary who places the blame for Syria’s appalling humanitarian emergency on my own government’s excessive support for the opposition (Exhibit A: Peter Hitchens).

Yet, for those who have monitored the signs carefully, this is not in fact an “amended approach” of any kind, still less a “surprise.” In a depressingly excellent piece of analysis for Syria Deeply last week, Thanassis Cambanis made the observation that:

“A handful of voices in the Western foreign policy world are quietly starting to acknowledge that a long, drawn-out conflict in Syria doesn’t threaten American interests; to put it coldly, it might even serve them. Assad might be a monster and a despot, they point out, but there is a good chance that whoever replaces him will be worse for the United States. And as long as the war continues, it has some clear benefits for America: It distracts Iran, Hezbollah, and Assad’s government, traditional American antagonists in the region. In the most purely pragmatic policy calculus, they point out, the best solution to Syria’s problems, as far as US interests go, might be no solution at all.”

This view, he added, is one that “several diplomats, policy makers, and foreign policy thinkers have expressed to me in private.” It also happens to be the one espoused by Daniel Pipes, who has taken it to its logical conclusion by saying outright that, “Western governments should support the malign dictatorship of Bashar Assad.” Yes, that Daniel Pipes, the man who was Bush’s pick to head the Institute of Peace, who calls for bombing Iran “now” and annexing the remains of Palestine to Egypt and Jordan.

Indeed, where does Israel stand on this question? Though Assad and his groupies have naturally smeared the opposition as Zionist proxies from the outset, this has always been a transparent pantomime. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the October 1973 war, which is another way of saying it’s been four decades since the Assads have flung so much as a pebble across the Golan. It’s become standard practice for IDF top brass to refer to the rebels as “terrorists,” and if a Haaretz article today is to be believed, Netanyahu is about to tell David Cameron “to be extremely cautious about arming the Syrian rebels.”

From here it’s not a very great leap at all to Obama actually droning the FSA, something for which the CIA has reportedly already made plans (no talk whatsoever, you notice, of droning the shabbiha, let alone the regime). The best the rebels can expect is an ice-cold shoulder from Washington for the foreseeable future – a policy which, if nothing else, has the merit of consistency. This, sadly, truly is pernicious “imperialism,” though not the sort that gets condemned by those who define their politics as the negation thereof.

FSA turns guns on Lebanese village

[Originally posted at NOW, with Yara Chehayed]

The blood of Ali Hassan Qataya where an FSA rocket killed him on Sunday (NOW/Alex Rowell) 

The road from the northeastern Beqaa town of Hermel to the border village of al-Qasr doesn’t feel like one leading to a bloody war zone. Lined on both sides with neatly cultivated olive groves, the green plains of the distant Homs basin gleaming under a pastel blue sky, the scene Tuesday morning was positively serene. Even the Bashar al-Assad posters and Hezbollah flags that tile the route from the central Beqaa to Hermel grew increasingly sparse as NOW neared the village.

Nor did al-Qasr itself feel like a place hit by lethal rocket fire just two days ago. Despite an army statement Sunday declaring its increased presence in the area, there wasn’t so much as a routine checkpoint impeding our entrance. In the village center, all shops were open; adults and children alike going about their business as usual. It could have been anywhere in the Beqaa.

Except, of course, for the two crumbled walls near the main mosque, results of an unprecedented series of rockets fired Sunday by Syrian rebels that, for the first time, left one resident dead and up to nine injured (another was killed by the same attack in Hosh al-Sayyid Ali, a nearby village on the Syrian side of the border). The blood of 23-year-old Ali Hassan Qataya, light brown by now, still spans the width of the street where he died.

“He was just visiting,” said a local resident who did not give his name. “He lived in Beirut, and came here to visit his fiancée.”

Why, then, was Qataya killed? The Syrian National Coalition, the opposition body recognized by over a dozen countries as the representative government-in-exile, said Monday that “the Free Syrian Army was forced to respond to [the] repeated aggressions” of Hezbollah, whom it accused of carrying out “military operations on Syrian territory.” Reports have long suggested fierce clashes between Hezbollah and the Free Syrian Army in the Homs province, with five Hezbollah fighters killed in Syria being buried just Monday. As a result, the Free Syrian Army has been threatening to attack Hezbollah positions inside Lebanon since February.

However, NOW saw no evidence of a Hezbollah military presence in al-Qasr itself, and indeed, the area where the rockets fell appeared entirely residential – a few modest breeze block homes surrounded by others under construction.

“They call this a military area? Show me the military area!” demanded another resident scornfully.

A clue also lies in the particular weapons used by the rebels. NOW sent a video purporting to show the rockets being launched to Eliot Higgins, the Syria analyst who gained international renown after uncovering, among other things, the use of cluster bombs by the Assad regime and a Croatian arms supply channel to the rebels (as first reported by NOW’s Michael Weiss). Higgins told NOW the weapons included 107mm and S-5 rockets (both launched from a homemade device), a 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer, and a mortar. That the Lebanese army confirmed Qataya’s death was the result of a 107mm rocket would seem to attest to the video’s veracity (as does the rebel excitedly shouting, “To Qasr, to Qasr!” after one launch). Higgins further unearthed similarities in the equipment used in other videos by the “Omar Farouq Brigade,” a possible relative of the Independent Farouq Division (IFD).

Significantly, Higgins described the weapons as “pretty indiscriminate” and “of questionable accuracy,” suggesting that the rebels ran the risk of hitting civilians even if they were aiming at military targets. And there is in any case reason to doubt that they were, given what the IFD commander told AFP: “If we have to, we will target civilians just like [Hezbollah] do. Our civilians are not less valuable than theirs.” Another rebel vowed to strike Lebanon again if the government did not “take practical steps to put a stop to [Hezbollah’s] shelling.”

Such a course of action could potentially take border clashes to levels yet unseen. The mayor of al-Qasr, Hassan Zeaiter, has publicly said essentially the same thing in reverse; namely, that if the government did not prevent rebels from attacking Lebanese villages, the villagers would “take matters into our [own] hands.” In an attempt to calm the situation, the government has declared it will file a complaint about the strikes to the Arab League.

NOW met Zeaiter after leaving al-Qasr in his Hermel dentistry, where he complained of a government “absence” from the area.

“Look at all the kidnappings,” he said. “Look at the pilgrims held in Aazaz. If we’re going to wait for the state to help us, we’ll be waiting forever.”

A fast and charismatic talker, Zeaiter’s photo of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on his shelf proved a sound indicator of his political views.

“The people who fired these rockets are not from Qusayr. I lived in Qusayr, I know all the young guys there. These ones aren’t even Syrians! I saw them on video, they’re all Chechens, Afghans, Pakistanis. The people of al-Qasr and Qusayr are one; it’s only the Jabhat al-Nusra foreigners who want to drive us apart.”

Nevertheless, when NOW asked Zeaiter if he expected further rockets from Syria, his reply was optimistic.

“I don’t think they’ll do it again. The government sent a letter of protest to the Arab League, who are financing Jabhat al-Nusra. I think President [Michel] Suleiman is negotiating under the table with the Arab League so as to ensure there will be no more attacks like this.”

[Video] Palestinian refugees from Syria launch hunger strike

[Originally posted at NOW]

There is no such thing as a lucky or privileged refugee, and to contrast the sufferings of different displaced peoples is rather like choosing between cancers. At the same time, it has for some time been an inescapable conclusion that if there’s one thing worse than being a Syrian refugee in Lebanon, it’s being a Palestinian refugee from Syria in Lebanon.

As such, it’s sad but not overly surprising that a group of such Palestinians has decided to launch a hunger strike near the United Nations office in Beirut in protest at systematic under-provision of aid by the UN Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), the body responsible for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.

“Our people are sleeping on the street, we are asking for food baskets, for medication. When we go to the hospital they say we need to pay 40% of the bill, and I don’t have a penny,” says one of the strikers in the above clip. “UNRWA, who raises the slogan of freedom and human rights, are neglecting us and treating us like animals.”

Neither the scarcity of aid nor the resentment it fosters are new. As I reported in January, Syrian refugees – who are handled by a different organization, UNHCR – simply receive better benefits than Palestinians from Syria, as UNRWA itself admits. This is not, however, on account of some conspiracy or prejudice against Palestinians, but rather the problem that plagues UNHCR and UNRWA alike: money.

Back in January, UNRWA had only about half the funds necessary to cater for the 20,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria in Lebanon. As of Monday, UNRWA estimates the number is now closer to 40,000, and there is no evidence that the funding situation has improved.

It might be worth mentioning, then, that you can donate to UNRWA here.

Thanks to Yara Chehayed for translation.