Lebanon's parliament this week granted Palestinians, some living in UN-run refugee camps for five generations, the legal right to work in the country -- as foreigners.

The new law only underlines an anomaly: The only places in the world that won't accept Palestinians as citizens with equal rights are the Arab countries.

Some Palestinians have migrated to America, where they've became US citizens. Other Palestinians have found homes elsewhere in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Why won't their fellow Arabs accept them, too? Let's review the history.

Last century, tens of millions across the world were uprooted in the aftermath of World War II and the end of colonialism. Most have since resettled. Not so the 750,000 Arabs who left their homes (some willingly, some not) during the 1948 war that Arab states launched to quash the fledgling Jewish state.

A similar number of Jews fled Arab lands in that war. But Israel absorbed those and many other Jewish refugees, while Arab rulers proceeded to use their uprooted brethren -- some of whom had emigrated to Palestine just a generation or two before the 1948 war -- as a political tool.

Six decades ago they were settled in "temporary" camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and what is known now as the Palestinian territories. The camps -- many now simply towns -- are run by a special UN agency established in 1950 to deal exclusively with Palestinians. Like all welfare bodies, that UN Relief and Work Agency soon settled on maintaining dependency.

UNRWA camps now hold nearly 5 million people. Arabs shed tons of crocodile tears over their misery, but America is by far the largest UNRWA donor -- $267 million last year. The Arab countries together supply a mere 1.5 percent of the agency's budget, and they're hundreds of millions in arrears.

Meanwhile, the Arabs insist on the "right of return" for the refugees and their descendents -- the right to resettle in Israel. A UN report this week from a panel of Palestinian law experts commissioned by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, argues that Israel's UN membership (and implicitly its legitimacy as a sovereign state) "remains conditional" on its absorbing all descendants of the 1948 refugees who so wish.

Israel declines to become yet another Arab state, while the existing Arab states won't give up their propaganda tool. So the camp residents -- including those under Palestinian control in the West Bank and Gaza -- forever remain refugees.

This week's Lebanese decision won't much change conditions for the 400,000 Palestinians in the country's refugee camps, who've always worked in menial jobs. Now it's legal -- but not in professions reserved for "real" citizens. A Palestinian with an MD, for example, can get a job as a nurse, but not as a physician.

Five or six generations after arriving in Lebanon, Palestinians are still foreigners in the Arab world's most ethnically diverse country. As such, they're not allowed to purchase any property outside of the camps.

Will this ever change? At its 2002 meeting in Beirut, the Arab League adopted a Saudi plan for a conditional recognition of Israel (but not a Jewish state), now known as the "Arab peace initiative." Lebanon insisted on a paragraph assuring that no solution to the refugee problem will "conflict with the special circumstances of the Arab host countries."

The earlier deliberations made it quite plain what that lawyerly language meant: Lebanon and the other Arab states absolutely refuse to grant equal rights to the Palestinians whom they have warehoused for generations as "refugees."

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman meant the same thing last year, when he stated during a visit by President Obama's peace negotiator, George Mitchell: "US efforts toward peace will not come at the expense of Lebanon."

Mitchell stayed politely mum; he shouldn't have. Washington is set to announce, as early as today, the resumption of direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. But no peace is possible without resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem.

The United States needs to tell the Arab states explicitly that they must help solve a problem they're largely responsible for: They must offer citizenship to large numbers of refugees and their descendants.

As long as the Arab states insist that the only solution is the one that ends the Jewish character of Israel, the camp residents will continue to suffer -- and peace negotiations will lead nowhere.

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