ABSTRACT

Palestinians constitute the oldest refugee community in the region since the Second World War. Today in Lebanon, more than 50 per cent of the registered refugees still reside in the UNRWA camps, which symbolize the vulnerability of the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. On the one hand, Palestinians face a wide range of legal, political and social constraints in Lebanon. On the other hand, from the Cairo Agreement in 1969 to the Israeli invasion in 1982, Palestinians have enjoyed in this country a freedom of action that no other host state ever gave them. Sixty years of exile have generated new forms of local integration, especially in urban areas where refugee camps are now part of the cities that surround them. Since the late 1940s, refugee camps transformed deeply from tents to highly dense, built-up areas. As mentioned by Jihane Sfeir (2008: 208), since the 1950s the places where Palestinians settled in the suburbs of Beirut were not only Palestinians areas, but

poor and segregated neighbourhoods where marginalized migrants, such as Syrians, Kurds or Armenians, also settle. Parallel to the urbanization process, refugee camp population has profoundly changed due to emigration, internal displacement and social mobility. The Palestinian experience in Lebanon challenges the dichotomy between urban refugees vs. camp dwellers and leads us to reconsider the boundary between these two categories.