THERE'S A FIRST STONE IN HERE SOMEWHERE....:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0817/p06s01-wome.html>For stoic Lebanese, a cycle of rebuilding (Nicholas Blanford, 8/17/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

[T]he turmoil in this region stretches back to 1948 when the state of Israel was created and tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees fled into neighboring countries, including Lebanon. [...]

Lebanon's independence from French mandatory rule in 1943 passed by unnoticed by most southerners, the region's farmers and fishermen considering it an abstraction that had little bearing on their daily lives. But Mr. Shaalan does remember the arrival of the Palestinian refugees five years later during the first Arab-Israeli war.