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The 1948 hegira remains burned into the minds of those who took part in it, providing the foundation for the community of suffering that unites Palestinians in their diaspora. Dr. Sareh Nasser, chairman of the philosophy and sociology department of the University of Jordan, was a young boy when his family fled their village of Lifta near Jerusalem. "As we were leaving the house, my mother put the key in her pocket and said, 'I must get the veranda repaired when we come back.' She still has the key."
A second wave of Palestinians fled the West Bank in 1967 after Israeli armored forces occupied the area during the Six-Day War. Nonetheless, the largest number of Palestinians still live under Israeli rule, either in Israel, in the Gaza Strip or on the West Bank. The 470,000 Arabs in Israel are possibly the most prosperous but also the least happy of all Palestinians. The Israeli government did not lift military control from their towns and villages until 1966; even today these Arabs are routinely stopped and searched, and they play only a limited role in Israel's national life. Other Palestinians consider Arabs with Israeli citizenship "one of them" rather than "one of us." About 70% are Moslems, but they are not allowed by Saudi Arabia to make the sacred hajj to Mecca.
Mixed Feelings. Arabs on the West Bank, who have lived under Israeli occupation for seven years, have mixed feelings about the future. "If the occupation continues for another ten years," says Hikmet Masri, a wealthy businessman and politician in the town of Nablus, "the West Bank will be lost." Notes a young businessman. Said Kanan: "Even when our relatives die on the other side and we want to bring them back here to be buried, the Israelis won't let us. We must have a Palestinian state. Under Jordan we were suppressed and kept underdeveloped. In the gulf we are second-class citizens. The Lebanese hate us. Everyone, everywhere is against us. We feel so isolated."
The West Bankers have close economic ties with Israel, where 60,000 Palestinians hold jobs. At the same time, however, there are strong family ties to 900,000 Palestinians living on the East Bank—and Jordan, for the West Bankers, is also the entryway to the Arab world. Hussein is cordially detested by most West Bankers; the P.L.O. is both admired and feared. Thus many of these Palestinians would like to see the creation of a new state with some ties to both Israel and Jordan.
Even West Bankers who worry about being ruled by the P.L.O. some day accept the organization—as do the vast majority of all Palestinians—as the voice of their national cause. The P.L.O. was founded in 1964 by Ahmed Shukairy, a Palestinian nationalist who served for a time as Saudi Arabia's representative to the U.N. and who coined the organization's infamous and now abandoned slogan about "driving the Jews into the sea." The P.L.O. is an umbrella organization responsible for coordinating the activities and policies of the six major fedayeen groups, which disagree on goals and ideologies. Best estimates are that the six commando groups have a total membership of about 13,700. Perhaps 3,650 of these are hardcore guerrillas, most of whom were recruited from refugee