Al Nakba

While working in the Lebanon in 2006 one of my Palestinian students asked me, what I think they, the Palestinians, should do? My reply was that I was an outsider and could not, therefore, really feel what they felt. However, while I too viewed "Al Nakba" as an ethnic cleansing, Israel was 'de facto' and indeed 'de jure' an entity that had to be dealt with and that I would look for some solution based on the status quo prior to the seven day war in 1967. It should also be emphasised that while some people with an agenda might want to discuss the "exact" meaning of Resolution 242 the demands made by international law for withdrawal from the territories occupied after that war are clear. The fact is that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. In a sense I felt pretty smug with my rational answer, that was before I began to ponder on a few certain home truths.
My nationality has never been important to me. Most of my adult life has been spent in Germany where I live a foot loose and fancy free globetrotter existence, thanks to my British passport. Somewhere down the line I am Scottish but, if asked to prioritise that on a scale of one to twenty, (one being most important) I would probably give it a twenty. However, I can always go back to Scotland and that is when it dawned on me that I was talking to someone who as a baby had to leave his home with his family, never to go back. Somebody who had spent all of his life living in a refugee camp in the Lebanon, someone whose family have had their property expropriated and it was then that the full meaning of "Al Nakba" sunk in and the realisation that being Scottish is not important to me because it doesn't have to be.
The picture above is of the cafe in Tripoli (the Lebanon) that serves the best ice cream outside Italy.