Kim Ghattas

Yeah, and then 1967.

And then slowly, slowly, they became shanty towns with a little bit of brick and mortar and building little alleyways, etc.

Corrugated roofs, whatever you can get.

Women and children live there in dismal conditions because Lebanon also doesn't want them.

the reality is that there may have been a lot of sympathy but there's also a lot of hypocrisy and the lebanon the lebanese state did not want them they're not allowed to build up real houses they're not allowed to bring in construction material they're not allowed to work they're not allowed to have jobs they're not allowed to have residency permits certainly not citizenship

And certainly not citizenship.

So what makes me really upset, I don't know if it's on behalf of Palestinians, you know, I'm Lebanese, but what makes me upset is there's a lot of talk about the Palestinian cause, but actually at the end of the day, there's very little really that is done to help the Palestinians in a way that can really advance at least their civil rights.

And some, of course, also ended up in the West Bank itself.

Exactly.

I myself sort of at first struggled to understand why there were refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, but obviously this is some where they came from within Israel.

So these tent cities then turn into shanty towns.

They're all over Lebanon.

They're in the north, they're near Tripoli, they're in the eastern districts of Beirut in Christian areas, they're in the southern suburbs of Beirut, they're in southern Lebanon, they're everywhere.

The Palestinian organization, liberation organization, headed by Yasser Arafat at the time, builds a state within a state.

They have schools, they have TV stations, they have newspapers, they have businesses.

It's a multi-million dollar enterprise, actually.

And it brings also a lot of money.

into West Beirut and Lebanon itself.

So it is part of the intellectual life of West Beirut, of the American University of Beirut, the cafes, the diversity of life and cultural and political discourse that is really still, even in the middle of a civil war, only possible in Lebanon.

William, the siege of Beirut was just an atrocious moment in Lebanon's history, and frankly, in Israel's history and American history in the Middle East, because it is a siege that is the birthplace of, as I said, a lot of impunity on all sides.