BEIRUT: Month after month for years, Abu Jamal scraped together meagre earnings to buy a home of his own. But the fruit of the 63-year old glazier’s labours, a small flat on the edge of a Beirut refugee camp, is worthless to him now.

Abu Jamal cannot register the flat in his name, cannot sell it and cannot pass it on to his nine children when he dies — because he is Palestinian.

Denied access to most jobs and services, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are campaigning to overturn a law banning them from owning property in a country where they have lived since the creation of Israel over half a century ago.

In October, Lebanon’s parliament tabled a proposal to amend the 2001 law — originally passed on the grounds that it would protect the right of Lebanon’s 390,000 registered Palestinian refugees to return to homes they fled in 1948.

“You work all your life to buy a home and in the end you can’t even pass it on to your children. Where is the legal or human right in that?” said Abu Jamal, sitting in the living room of his $15,000 two-bedroom flat.

“If we could go back to Palestine, we would leave 10 houses behind here. But in the meantime can’t a person live in a decent home and earn a bit of money to feed his children?”

The proposal — backed by 10 Lebanese deputies — would not have given Palestinians the same property rights as other foreigners, but let them buy a residential flat.

Deputies who backed the amendment say it was postponed because of fears that it marked a step toward the permanent settlement of Palestinian refugees, which Lebanese fear may weaken their hand in any talks with Israel and upset a fragile sectarian balance.

A previous proposal, also tabled, would have deleted the clause demanding foreign buyers belong to a “recognized state”.

“Owning a flat does not mean naturalizing the Palestinians,” said MP Marwan Fares, who backs an amendment. “If you own a flat in Germany or France it does not mean you get citizenship.”

LEGAL LIMBO: Campaigners for changing the law presented at a protest last month a petition they had circulated through the tumbledown concrete shacks and rutted lanes of a dozen refugee camps, where Palestinian children play amid rotting rubbish.

Together with millions of other Palestinians scattered among Israel’s Arab neighbours, these refugees are a potential source of instability, their fate key to any regional peace deal.

“The status of the Palestinians has been hostage to the peace process since it started,” said Nadim Shehadi, head of the Centre for Lebanese Studies at Oxford University.

He said an agreement over refugees that included host states as well as Israelis and Palestinians was a key to peace.

Many of Lebanon’s Palestinians have managed over the years to emigrate or marry to obtain foreign citizenship. In Syria, Palestinians have access to jobs, services and property. In Jordan, they can have passports.

Those who find their way out of Lebanon’s camps, but not out of the country, are left in legal limbo.

Palestinians who had not finished paying for homes when the law was passed face a dilemma: Continue to pay for a flat they cannot own or stop paying and lose money already invested?

Palestinians who had already registered real estate can no longer pass it on to their children. Those who did not register have lost that right, and cannot prove ownership.

Many, like Munir Kotob, have resorted to selling their flats back to the original owners at a fraction of the purchase price.

“There is pressure on Palestinians in Lebanon over everything,” said Kotob, a leading campaigner to amend the law. “All the Palestinians in Lebanon want to emigrate because this decision pushes them abroad.”

HOSTAGE TO POLITICS: While Palestinians insist publicly that they will go home one day, many believe privately that there is slim hope that Israel will allow them back after so many years. Lebanon has its own fragile religious balance to consider.

Many Lebanese fear settling the mainly Sunni Palestinian refugees could tip the balance between Christians, Shias and Sunnis in a tiny country still picking up the pieces of a 15-year civil war in which a multitude of religious sects and foreign fighters slugged it out.—Reuters