As a settlement to end the two-year-long intra-Palestinian conflict between Fatah and Hamas grows more and more unlikely, despite a breeze of false hope recently in Cairo, a normalized, cooperative relationship between the two organizations already exists – albeit in northern Lebanon. 

In Beddawi Palestinian refugee camp, located five kilometers north of Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, the rival organizations meet weekly alongside 11 other major Palestinian factions as part of the camp’s faction councils (sometimes referred to as popular committees).

The agreement among the Palestinian factions in Beddawi to cooperate on issues concerning the camp is unique, as the Palestinian political landscape in Lebanon’s refugee camps can largely be characterized as heavily fractured – mirroring the larger intra-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
 
Beddawi’s factions meet in both a political and security council to handle the concerns of the camp. The security council has presented a united front against any outside groups looking to exploit the camp. This security cooperation among the factions has been seemingly worthwhile – several months before the battle at Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, Fatah al-Islam initially tried to operate in Beddawi, but were engaged militarily by the forces of the factions, captured, and handed over to Lebanese authorities. This event possibly prevented Beddawi from suffering the same fate as Nahr al-Bared, which was destroyed in 2007 during a four-month-long battle between Fatah al-Islam and the Lebanese Armed Forces.
           
The effects of what happened to Nahr al-Bared are felt especially hard in Beddawi, which absorbed the majority of displaced from the destroyed camp – an act of generosity that has now overtaxed Beddawi’s resources, according to camp residents.
 
The events at Nahr al-Bared also served as an example of what can happen to a camp bereft of political unity.
 
“After what happened in Nahr al-Bared, such an arrangement [inter-factional dialogue through a faction council] becomes a necessity,” said Fatah media spokesman Mustafa Abu Harb, “We don’t want the Lebanese people to say that we are not welcome in Lebanon.”
 
While Beddawi’s security council is perhaps the most obvious example of cooperation, the political council, which meets regularly, gives hope for a broader atmosphere of cooperation between Palestinian factions in other areas, both in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories.
 
Officials from both Hamas and Fatah in Beddawi expressed their satisfaction with the inter-factional dialogue in the camp and hope to see similar councils arise in other Palestinian refugee camps.
 
“We want the other camps to use Beddawi as an example – it can prevent bad things from happening to them,” said Abu Harb.
 
In the same vein, Jamal al-Shihabi, the political leader of Hamas in northern Lebanon said, “We hope that there will be councils [like the one in Beddawi] in the other camps – and we are doing our best to form these councils in the [other] camps.”
 
Elsewhere in Lebanon, relations between Palestinian parties are not as good as in Beddawi. In the refugee camps in Beirut and in southern Lebanon, factions are broadly split between the PLO (dominated by Fatah today) and Tahaluf (an alliance of Palestinian groups headed by Hamas that opposes Fatah) and only hold court with their allies.
 
Kazem Hassan, a Fatah spokesman for Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, blamed the lack of a cooperative relationship among the Palestinian factions in Beirut and southern Lebanon on what he said were Hamas’s hard-line stances and self-imposed alienation from other Palestinian parties.
 
“Hamas is against all parties – even ones like Islamic Jihad.  Any party that acts like this will not be able to liberate Palestine,” Hassan said. “For Hamas, the struggle is religious. For us, the struggle is political,” he added.
 
Hassan said that in Shatila, a security council is convened for all Palestinian factions – including Hamas – only when the camp faces an emergency situation or is asked to confront a problem by the Lebanese authorities. Otherwise, he said, Hamas is generally absent from most inter-factional events and meetings in the camp.
 
While Beddawi remains peaceful despite its proximity to both troubled Nahr al-Bared and Tripoli – home to the conflict-prone neighborhoods of Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen – other Palestinian refugee camps are by no means immune to violence. Most notable are the southern camps of Miya Miya, where senior Fatah official Kamal Medhat was assassinated in March, and Ain al-Hilweh, where Palestinian factions occasionally clash and most recently an attempt on the life of Fatah official Khaled Mashoul was made in early October.
 
In 2008 a Political Command designed to bring top PLO and Tahaluf leaders in Lebanon together and provide Palestinians in Lebanon one source of authority was set up, but friction between the two sides led to the dissolution of the arrangement before it could begin working.
 
The Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee (LPDC) – an organization created by the Lebanese government in 2005 to foster better relations between the Lebanese state and its Palestinian inhabitants and to improve the lives of Palestinians in the country – has emphasized that unity among Palestinian factions in Lebanon is imperative to its mission. Similarly, officials from every faction interviewed in Beddawi said they felt that disunity among Palestinian factions in Lebanon served as a roadblock to the current projects of the LPDC – such as the rebuilding of Nahr al-Bared – and to any attempt to gain rights for Palestinians in Lebanon.
 
Despite the troubled relationships among Palestinian parties across Lebanon and the broader Middle East, the factions in Beddawi camp speak kind words of one another – constantly emphasizing that the key struggle is not the intra-Palestinian rift, but working towards a Palestinian state and, in the interim, bettering the lives and status of Palestinians in Lebanon. While in the scheme of the intra-Palestinian conflict and the overall Arab-Israeli conflict, northern Lebanon today plays a marginal role at best, the relationship among Palestinian factions in Beddawi serves potentially as an optimistic microcosm of what future Palestinian internal dialogue could look like – if members of Palestinian factions could put aside their differences in other areas of the Middle East.