He ended up at a technical college in Lithuania instead. Like Iraqis fleeing Saddam Hussein who fetch up in Lebanon, many a Palestinian now entrusts himself to this emigration mafia. The quest for the immediate, individual solution has supplanted the never-never collective political one. Indigence aggravates the hopelessness. The four main resources have all declined.
Most families have an income-provider in the Gulf, but opportunities are drying up there.
Lebanon has officially closed some 60 occupations to Palestinians. If local institutions take them, it is because they defy the widespread anti-Palestinian sentiment or they hide them during government inspections. A Palestinian doctor with the Palestine Red Crescent earns in a month what a Lebanese, in a clinic just down the road, can make in a day. But certainly most people in Ain Hilweh understand that, even in the best of circumstances, it will fall far short of Return in the pure and literal sense to which Miari senior still clings. They loathe their statelessness.