Written by Romane Ferera
A Lebanese government minister once described Palestinian refugees as “human waste”. The remark is extreme, but it exposes something that the language of treaties and protocols tends to hide. Under the Arab League’s 1965 Casablanca Protocol, Arab host states including Lebanon and Egypt promised Palestinians the same rights as their own citizens to work, travel and residency. In practice, Lebanon has barred them from 71 professions and from owning property, while Egypt reclassified them as foreigners in 1978, restricting their right to work, study and remain in the country. These are not oversights or failures of administration. They are the product of deliberate political design, which leaves Palestinians’ rights only as secure as the political calculations of the states hosting them.
The Palestinian refugee case is one of the most protracted and unresolved cases of displacement in modern history. Two key waves of displacement, in 1948 and 1967, pushed Palestinians into neighbouring states across the Middle East and North Africa, with a cumulative effect on the countries that received them. Jordan is often held up as the example of Arab hospitality, as the only Arab state to have naturalised Palestinians. But Jordan is the outlier, not the regional norm, and it masks enormous variation in how Palestinians are treated elsewhere.
Lebanon and Egypt, both of which have hosted Palestinians since 1948, tell a very different story. Taken together, they show that the way host states treat Palestinian refugees has far less to do with legal obligations or humanitarian concern than with political context and regime survival. The gap between Palestinians’ rights on paper and their lived reality is not incidental.
The problem starts with international law itself. The 1951 Refugee Convention and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were built to protect refugees, yet Palestinians fall into a legal lacuna. Article 1D of the Convention excludes refugees who receive assistance from other UN bodies, and Palestinians receive theirs from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), set up in 1949 to provide basic levels of care. UNRWA can provide assistance, but it is not empowered to guarantee refugees' security or their legal and human rights. The result is that no international body has taken on the critical role of protecting Palestinian refugees day to day.
Arab states did make their own promise. In 1965 the League of Arab States adopted the Casablanca Protocol, which guaranteed Palestinians the same rights as citizens of their host country in employment, travel documents and residency. Egypt signed without reservations. Lebanon signed with multiple reservations, agreeing to the Protocol only insofar as it accorded with existing Lebanese laws and regulations. In practice, that made the Protocol a legal commitment designed to be broken.
Egypt's record shows how little a formal commitment can be worth. The 1960s are remembered as a "golden era" for Palestinians in Egypt. In 1962 they were placed on par with Egyptian citizens in accessing public services, and Law 66 opened jobs in government and the public sector to them. Then, in 1978, President Anwar Sadat's Executive Decrees 47 and 48 demoted Palestinians to the status of foreigners, cutting them off from parts of the education system and restricting their freedom to work. Holders of refugee documents lost the legal right to leave and re-enter the country, and regulations in the 1980s ended Palestinian ownership of agricultural land. Because UNRWA does not operate in Egypt, there was no relief agency to fall back on.
On the ground, residency came to hinge on work certificates that Palestinians, pushed into the informal sector, struggled to obtain. Renewing residency now requires both a reason the authorities deem valid and a fee that many cannot afford in widespread poverty. That Egypt, the signatory most formally committed to Palestinian rights, enacted such a dramatic reversal shows that legal commitment is the least reliable predictor of how refugees will be treated.
The timing of that reversal is telling. It did not coincide with an economic crisis. It followed the February 1978 assassination of Youssef el-Sebai, a close ally of Sadat who had served as Egypt’s Minister of Culture. His killing shifted domestic threat perceptions, and came alongside Sadat’s peace process with Israel, which froze relations between Egypt and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Under Nasser, Palestinians had been useful to a pan-Arab agenda and were not seen as a domestic threat. Under his successors, they were increasingly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and recast as a danger to stability, with media campaigns portraying them as "unwelcome foreigners".
In Lebanon, exclusion was there from the outset. Decrees in 1962 singled Palestinians out as a distinct category of foreigners, depriving them of the right to work, higher education and healthcare. A 1964 law barred them from the professional syndicates required to practise medicine, law and engineering, a later decree barred them from 71 professions, and 2001 amendments stopped them from owning property. Today, 83 per cent of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have no formal work, and they have the highest rate of abject poverty of any Palestinian community in the Arab world. Even those with work permits have deductions taken from their pay for social benefits they are barred from receiving.
Conditions in the refugee camps are worse still. The 1969 Cairo Agreement gave the PLO autonomy inside them, briefly improving residents' status, but this protection collapsed after the PLO's departure in 1982. That year, Lebanese Christian militias massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps, and in 1987 the Lebanese government declared the agreement null and void. The camps now lack any genuine governance structure and are restricted from even hiring engineers to deal with acute water and electricity problems. Refusing to extend infrastructure and legal protection to the camps is a deliberate policy that keeps Palestinians “permanently temporary”, as Yafa El Masri, a geographer who was born and raised in Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp, puts it.
Lebanon's motives are rooted in its political system. A fear of tawtin, the permanent settlement of refugees, runs through mainstream political narratives, captured in the slogan "Lebanon for the Lebanese". Power in Lebanon is distributed through a fragile confessional system, and because most Palestinian refugees are Sunni Muslims, their integration would upset that sectarian balance. Palestinians have therefore been framed as a demographic and existential threat to the system itself.
What links both cases is securitisation. Once something is framed as an existential threat to the state, extraordinary measures that bypass normal rules become justified. That is exactly what has happened to Palestinians in Egypt and Lebanon: treated not as humanitarian subjects but as security problems, their rights have been expanded or revoked according to what each regime needed at the time. In much of the Arab world, regimes have expanded or contracted the rights of whole groups to shore up their own legitimacy. Some will argue that these restrictions are simply about protecting jobs and resources. However, crucially, that cannot explain why Egypt's reversal came with an assassination and a peace process rather than an economic crisis, or why in Lebanon this coincided with civil war.
Even the better periods, Nasser's Egypt and the Cairo Agreement years in Lebanon, were a matter of political management rather than genuine protection. And because Article 1D leaves Palestinians outside the international refugee regime, nobody steps in when host states change course. As Egypt and Lebanon show, that gap was built by design, and with no concrete solution in sight, it is likely to widen. Until the protection gap left by Article 1D is closed, Palestinian refugees will remain hostage to the shifting priorities of the governments that host them.
