The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, affirms its full and unequivocal support for the Palestinian student movement in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, placing it at the forefront of the struggle to defend national consciousness and the historical rights of our Palestinian people. We hold the UNRWA administration fully politically and morally responsible for the consequences of its policies, emphasizing that Palestine cannot be erased from books, removed from curricula, or eliminated from consciousness. We assert that UNRWA students today are proving, through action and not words, that the decision is Palestinian, and that the national will cannot be manipulated, tamed, bought, or confiscated.

UNRWA students are the true decision-makers in defending their national identity and educational rights, in the face of all attempts at subjugation, control, and imposition. The escalating Palestinian student and youth movement, and its declaration of escalating measures against the systematic cuts targeting UNRWA and against the political crime of removing the name of Palestine from educational curricula, constitutes a conscious and legitimate act of resistance against a clearly defined project aimed at erasing national memory and undermining the right of return through education, transforming the Palestinian refugee into a being stripped of identity, rights, and history.

What the UNRWA administration in Lebanon is doing, under the supervision of Director Dorothee Klaus, cannot be separated from the system of imperialist political and financial pressures, nor can it be justified as an administrative error or a technical procedure. Rather, it is a direct involvement in the liquidation of the Palestinian refugee cause, making the agency’s administration fully responsible for the explosive popular anger among students and for the repercussions of these policies that strike at the very heart of the Palestinian cause.

The burning of the UNRWA director’s picture by students in Lebanon is a symbolic and angry political expression of categorical rejection of these policies, and a clear message that the new Palestinian generation refuses to remain silent, breaks the prestige of the complicit administration, and clearly declares that Palestine is not a name that can be erased, nor an identity that can be negotiated, nor a right that is subject to blackmail or conditional funding.