Lebanon’s First Refugee Crisis and the Paradox of Non-Integration
Lucas Allam, Reed College in Portland, United States
Lebanon’s first major crisis after its independence in 1943 was the Nakba, Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians between 1947 and 1949, which forced more than one hundred thousand Palestinians to flee to Lebanon. According to UNRWA, the UN agency created to manage aid for Palestinian refugees, there were approximately 127,000 refugees in Lebanon by 1950. Their presence, while tolerated, was far from welcome.
From the start, Lebanese authorities insisted that Lebanon was not a country of asylum but merely a country of transit for refugees. Palestinians were viewed as a temporary problem that would resolve itself once they returned home after the war. The new Lebanese state, seeking to preserve its fragile sectarian balance and nascent sovereignty, adopted a policy of non-integration. This approach, intended to prevent refugees from altering the demographic and political composition of the country, would ultimately haunt Lebanon for decades. Instead of ensuring the refugees’ departure, it produced enduring social and political structures within the camps: structures that would later serve as the foundation for Palestinian autonomy.
At first, most refugees stayed close to Lebanon’s southern border, hoping to return to their villages soon. Early camps were makeshift, established by the Red Cross or informally by refugees themselves. UNRWA soon assumed management, distributing tents and ration cards and organizing camp committees led by Palestinian notables. These camps were intended as temporary shelters until return became possible. Yet as months turned into years, and years into decades, the prospect of return faded. Impoverished and under-resourced, Palestinians had to seek work and better housing, but the Lebanese government feared that a large, settled refugee population would destabilize the new republic.
Politicians argued that Palestinians threatened Lebanon’s political stability and economy, and insisted that camps remain provisional installations. To prevent permanence, the state imposed regulations that restricted even the most basic improvements: cement construction was banned for a decade, and installing water infrastructure was forbidden. Many Palestinians who tried to live outside the camps were pressured to relocate to them, sometimes through bureaucratic coercion, such as requiring camp registration for UNRWA aid, and sometimes through direct military measures, such as the army’s relocation of refugees from the southern border to approved camps.
Segregated into a dozen or so camps with limited services, Palestinians faced severe mobility and employment restrictions. Lebanese law treated them as foreigners who needed work permits—rarely granted and subject to frequent renewal. Palestinians could only find work in low-paying, unprotected sectors such as construction and agriculture. The 1952 Labor Code denied them access to social protections and barred non-citizens from full union membership (Article 91). Having lost everything during their displacement, Palestinians now faced systemic exclusion that ensured their continued destitution.
Yet Palestinians were not passive victims of these policies. Within this repressive context, they built spaces of economic and social survival. With the Lebanese state largely disengaged, UNRWA became the main provider of education, healthcare, and welfare. Over time, these UNRWA-administered systems, run with Palestinian staff and local committees, became parallel structures of governance. They nurtured a sense of community, continuity, and national identity. Segregated UNRWA schools, following the Lebanese curriculum but serving only Palestinian children, not only raised literacy rates but also reinforced a shared sense of Palestinian belonging. Despite being conceived as temporary, the camps evolved into organized, semi-permanent spaces.
By the 1950s, Lebanon’s own restrictive policies had inadvertently laid the groundwork for Palestinian autonomy long before organized nationalist movements emerged. Lebanon’s insistence on remaining a “transit country” has never prevented refugees from staying permanently, whether Palestinians in the 1940s or Syrians decades later. The combination of short-term policy thinking, rigid citizenship boundaries, and deep social exclusion did not safeguard Lebanese sovereignty or stability. Instead, it fostered conditions for self-organization among those excluded from the state.
By the late 1960s, as global support for the Palestinian national movement grew, refugee camps in Lebanon expelled the Lebanese army and achieved partial self-governance. Ironically, Lebanon’s determination to avoid the permanent settlement of refugees (and to outsource their welfare to international agencies) did not facilitate repatriation. Rather, it created the very social and institutional infrastructure that enabled Palestinians to establish politically autonomous communities within Lebanon.
From the Nakba to the Syrian Civil War, Lebanon’s insistence on temporary refuge has proven untenable. Refugees remain for generations, trapped between exclusion and permanence. The story of the Palestinian camps in the 1950s reveals a central paradox: policies designed to deny belonging instead produced new forms of community, identity, and political self-determination within Lebanon’s borders.