"Three years ago, Fatah al Islam, a jihadi group based in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al Bared in northern Lebanon, launched a bloody attack on the Lebanese military. In the next three months, most of the camp was destroyed and dozens of civilians, nearly 200 Lebanese soldiers and several hundred fundamentalist militants – most of them not Palestinians – were killed.
Palestinians did not always have the short end of the stick in Lebanon. Until the 1980s, they enjoyed considerable self-rule. But in the view of most Lebanese, they abused this freedom. Palestinian factions had turned a weak Lebanon into a convenient operational base against Israel, eroding the country’s sovereignty.
During the 1975-1990 civil war, they were active participants, as well as victims. They muddled its politics by aligning themselves with competing domestic factions, sharpening its already combustible sectarian tensions. In 1982, they brought unwanted Israeli wrath on Lebanon in the form of an invasion. The trauma of the civil war and the fact that camps remain outside the authority of the state spawn the belief that Palestinians are a source of instability, extremism and crime as well as a Trojan Horse for outside players."
"Three years ago, Fatah al Islam, a jihadi group based in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al Bared in northern Lebanon, launched a bloody attack on the Lebanese military. In the next three months, most of the camp was destroyed and dozens of civilians, nearly 200 Lebanese soldiers and several hundred fundamentalist militants – most of them not Palestinians – were killed.
Palestinians did not always have the short end of the stick in Lebanon. Until the 1980s, they enjoyed considerable self-rule. But in the view of most Lebanese, they abused this freedom. Palestinian factions had turned a weak Lebanon into a convenient operational base against Israel, eroding the country’s sovereignty.
During the 1975-1990 civil war, they were active participants, as well as victims. They muddled its politics by aligning themselves with competing domestic factions, sharpening its already combustible sectarian tensions. In 1982, they brought unwanted Israeli wrath on Lebanon in the form of an invasion. The trauma of the civil war and the fact that camps remain outside the authority of the state spawn the belief that Palestinians are a source of instability, extremism and crime as well as a Trojan Horse for outside players."
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100629/OPINION/70...