Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits belligerent nations from colonising territory seized in wartime. Israel is the last colonising nation. Lebanese Palestinians are entitled to return to their homeland which today consists of the Gaza prison camp and 22% of the West Bank. Why are Palestinians dispossessed?

The vast majority of Lebanon's Palestinians, their children or grandchildren, are refugees, possibly 500,000, some 65,000 of them live in the squalor of Ein-el-Helweh. Each slum quarter is named after their lost towns - Acre, Haifa and Hittin. Palestinian refugees survived the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982 even the camp wars of 1985 and 1986, certain of Arafat's promise of a return to 'Palestine.'

Nimr came from a village 2km inside Israel on the Lebanese frontier, he survived an Israeli massacre of all the male villagers. The story of Salha and six other villages goes back to 1923, when the British ruled Palestine and the French ruled the newly formed state of Lebanon - Pays du Liban. Paris suddenly ceded to London a few square kms of Lebanon, this was the so called 'the Good Neighbourhood' agreement. Every villager was doomed.

Nimr went from a Lebanese under French mandate to become a Palestinian under British mandate. The villagers of Salha were never consulted on the matter. The British departed and the Jewish army surrounded the village. An Israeli attack - 'Operation Hiram' [Israeli Military Archives, 1948]- resulted in 94 villagers being blown up in a house on 30th October 1948. Nimr described how, ' thirteen tanks surrounded us, we were made stand together, when, they opened fire on us. We did not have a chance.'

Nimr was shot, the dead sheltered him. He crawled away that night. Nimr told his story in 2000.

Lebanon treated Nimr and others as Palestinians. In 1998 the Lebanese government awarded them all Lebanese citizenship.

The question how should Lebanon address its 'Palestinian issue' is both disingenuous and an insult to the history of the Middle East. The Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, Palestine, due the creation of the Israeli Zionist state in 1948. 750,000 Arabs fled their homeland, Palestine, in response to massacres of Arabs. The Arab-Jewish struggle is an epic tragedy whose effects have spread around the world and continues to poison the lives, not only of the participants but of our entire western political and military policies, towards the Middle East and the Muslim lands.

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