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Strong Vision. Young men have grown old in the camps and a new generation has matured there, but the vision of Palestine remains strong. "I will never leave the camp," says one refugee in Jordan, "unless it is to go to Palestine." At Nahr el-Bared, an UNRWA camp housing 12,000 60 miles north of Beirut, Abu Saleh, 87, is the patriarch of a camp family that now numbers more than one hundred people. His grandchildren and now great grandchildren have never known any other life.
Abu Saleh was once a relatively prosperous farmer near Nazareth who fled in 1948 when his village became embroiled in the Israeli-Arab fighting. He gathered up his wife and children and abandoned his 400-acre farm. "It's all gone now," he says sadly. "I left everything behind. When we left, I thought we would be back soon." In Lebanon he worked as a farm laborer for a time, but was unable to make the transition as someone else's hand. In the camp he has raised seven sons, two of whom graduated from the American University of Beirut and became teachers. Another son is a commando in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "I don't remember much about Palestine," he says, "but I remember our house. Since I joined the Resistance I know it better. I have been there."
Palestine has been a troubled land for most of its history. In Arabic the word is Filastin; it derives from the name of the home of the ancient Philistines. The region was successively ruled by the Hebrews, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Maccabeans, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Egyptians, crusaders, Mamelukes and finally Ottoman Turks, who indifferently governed the backward, neglected territory from the 16th century until the British drove them out in World War I.
For the next 30 years, Britain ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. The British were largely responsible for some of the country's future troubles; in 1917, to gain Jewish support in the war, they issued the Balfour Declaration, which backed the Zionist ideal of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As the population mix and land ownership shifted in favor of Jewish immigrants, the Arabs, aware that they were losing control of their homeland to the newcomers, rioted against Zionist incursions; finally, in 1936 they attempted a full-scale rebellion against the British. One result of those disturbances was the organization of mujahidin (freedom fighters), who were the forerunners of today's fedayeen.
The Palestine that the refugees remember and dream of rebuilding was destroyed by two events. An estimated 750,000 Arabs fled their homes and farms in terror beginning in 1947, after the U.N. proposed dividing the country into Jewish and Arab sectors, and fighting between the sides increased. Israelis argue that the Palestinians were urged to abandon their lands by neighboring Arab governments in order to facilitate an invasion that would drive out the Zionists. The Palestinians reply that they were driven out by the Jews, and point to atrocities like the massacre of Deir Yassin; all 254 inhabitants of the village were reportedly killed by the Jewish underground organizations Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang. (The