In Summer 2007, amidst popular support, the Lebanese army destroyed Nahr al Bared Palestinian refugee camp (in Northern Lebanon). This paper attempts to understand how this was possible. Against the writings of Nezvat Soguk and Giorgio Agamben, this paper traces this campaign to a history that deploys the “state of exception” as a mechanism to govern Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. This history casts the Palestinian refugee in Lebanon outside the law, and therefore out of both accountability and protection; making the Palestinian a clear case of Giorgio Agamben’s “Homo Sacer.” It also traces the campaign to a Lebanese public discourse that fixes normality within the nation state, and therefore fixes human rights within citizenship, making it possible to suspend the right of the non-citizen, cast as an aberration in this discourse. The paper also tries to map the Lebanese discourse surrounding the campaign, which made it possible to celebrate the destruction of civilian space as a nationalist victory. This paper also makes use of Sari Hanafi, who used the writings of Agamben to explain the situation in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, but also attempts to fill in a number of theoretical and empirical gaps left by Hanafi’s work. To fill in some of those gaps, this paper includes a survey of a number of articles and speeches that construe a discourse that casts Palestinian refugee camps as “security foci” and spaces of aberrance and lawlessness.