In 1945, the Soviet government announced its support for the repatriation campaign to “return” the Armenian Diaspora to its homeland, the Soviet Republic of Armenia. 30,000 Armenians renounced their Lebanese citizenship and relocated to the USSR. Facilitated by the Lebanese and Soviet governments, the Lebanese Arabic and Armenian press outlets celebrated and covered the departure of “caravans” from the port of Qarantina, Lebanon. This paper explores the coverage of this population transfer as published in the Armenian and Arabic press in Lebanon from 1945-1948. While all four Armenian daily newspapers of different political orientations initially supported Armenian repatriation, by 1947 their editorial content exposed a rift that amplified the different imaginations of how Armenians, as legally recognized Lebanese citizens, practiced Armenian national belonging in Lebanon. Armenian newspapers (along with their associated political parties) that opposed the repatriation stressed the supremacy of Lebanese citizenship and linked the continued presence of the Armenian population to the triumph of the newly independent Lebanese nation-state. Meanwhile, those Armenian groups that continued to champion Soviet Armenia as their rightful homeland simultaneously constructed Armenians as foreigners and temporary inhabitants of Lebanon. The main Arabic daily, an-Nahar, while not engaging in this intra-Armenian debate, also treated Armenians as expendable citizens, celebrating their “final” homecoming. Analyzing the assumptions and frame of reference of these various treatments of the Armenian repatriation in the press allows for the examination of how the multi-lingual—including the marginal language—press debated and fashioned Armenian and Lebanese national belonging in the early years of Lebanese independence. The exclusion of the Armenian repatriation program from the historiography of Lebanon characterizes the larger dearth of explorations into the role of marginal populations in the articulation and practice of citizenship and national belonging in the country. The debates deployed in the press demonstrate that the concepts of citizenship and homeland, which the extant historiography assumes were fixed, were extremely fluid during this period. Such fluidity can only be attended to by moving beyond an exclusive concern with the formal sectarian-confessional political system. The Armenian and Arabic Lebanese press constitute a rich set of primary sources through which we can follow discussions and debates among the “Lebanese” regarding the assumptions and practices of both citizenship as well as national belonging in relations to the Armenian community.