By Palestinian author Muna Hamzeh

If you are Palestinian, you tend to go through life believing that you know everything there is to know about the Palestinian dilemma and what it feels like to be stateless and dispossessed.

This, at least, is what I used to believe until 1990, when I decided to leave the comforts of my life in the United States and make Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem my new home.

My life with the camp's refugees over the next decade taught me that being Palestinian doesn't mean that one has a full grasp of what it really is like to be a refugee.

True, the great majority of Palestinians are refugees and we each have a story to tell about 1948 when our parents and grandparents had to flee their homes and become part of the longest-running refugee quagmire in the world. And we each have a story to tell about how we've spent our lives in exile, waiting for the day when justice would prevail and we would return to live in our homeland.

But let's face it. If, like me, you attended private schools, continued your higher education in the West and became an American citizen, how can you claim to know what the real suffering of a refugee is all about?

A friend in Dheisheh told me once that when he was in fourth grade, his family was so poor that he and his brother had to share a single pair of sandals, taking turns wearing them to school.

To know such deprivation, especially as a child, must be horrible. Yet this is how it was like in Palestinian refugee camps in the 1950s and 1960s.

Over the past decade, I spent countless hours socializing with families in Dheisheh. While lazily sipping strong black Arabic coffee or sweet tea with mint, the elderly, the middle-aged and the young all had stories to tell about their lives within the confines of their refugee camp.

'The Catastrophe'

The elderly, of course, loved to talk about the early years of the "Catastrophe", a term Palestinians use to describe the creation of Israel in 1948. All of Dheisheh's refugees who fled from nearly 42 villages that were subsequently destroyed by Israel to build Israeli colonies in their place, were peasants who lived off their land.

		Between 550,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948
		In 1967, a further 120,000 were displaced
		There are now more than 3.7m Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, and many more elsewhere

The way they describe it, it was a simple and wholesome life, centering around planting, harvesting, tending to livestock and storing what the land produced for the long winter months.

When rumors that armed Zionist groups - such as Irgun and Stern which formed the nucleus for the future Israeli army - were entering villages and massacring residents, the villagers fled into nearby hills or to other villages.

They were not only uprooted, but each family, regardless of its size, suddenly found itself living inside the tiny confines of a tent donated by the International Red Cross. Little did the refugees back then know that their status as refugees and their lives inside the newly formed refugee camps would spill over into the 21st century.

	Dheisheh refugee camp, 1959, UNWRA

In the late 1950's, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency built a single-room dwelling for each refugee family which served as a kitchen, living room and bedroom for families consisting of at least six people.

To have to make the shift from the open space of a village with the surrounding hills, valleys and open fields and suddenly be squeezed in Dheisheh's total area of 1 ½ square kilometers had its toll on the refugees.

Most were only a drive away from their old homes and their land. The fact that Israel was denying them the right to return to their rightful homes is not something that the refugees have been willing to accept.

They ask how a Russian Jew or an American Jew, who has no connection to the land, can come and live in Israel just because he is a Jew, when the Palestinians continue to be stripped of their very basic right to their homes and their property?

After Israel's occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in 1967, many residents of refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza became the cheap labor that worked in construction inside Israel.

Life under occupation

Until Israeli troops redeployed from Dheisheh in December 1995, the camp survived 28 years under military occupation. Shooting deaths, arrests, house demolitions, military curfews, sporadic house searches at all hours of the night and day were the norm.

Yet for 28 years, each child, woman and man in Dheisheh had to endure the daily humiliation of their occupiers. A life under military occupation is not a life.

For the inhabitants of Dheisheh, there is nothing that anyone can say to justify the presence of armed soldiers in the midst of a civilian population. And it is part of human nature to fight back.

		The love for the land lingers on and is naturally inherited by the younger generation

Every year, when it is thyme or olive picking season in Palestine, dozens of refugees from Dheisheh pack picnic lunches, take their mothers, wives and children and sneak past Israeli military checkpoints and make their way to the land they were forced to leave in 1948.

At the end of the day, they return to the camp with big bundles of thyme leaves or sacks of freshly-picked olives.

	Living under occupation, Dheisheh, 1976, UNWRA

The mothers immediately get busy packing one or two kilograms in about a dozen plastic shopping bags. Once they're done, the children make the rounds around the neighborhood and to the nearby homes of different relatives and in-laws.

They hand over the bags with a proud smile. "We picked this thyme from our land this morning. Mother wanted you to have some".

And so the love for the land lingers on and is naturally inherited by the younger generation.

And year after year, the refugees will make these trips back to the places where their villages used to be, and they will pick their thyme and their olives, and they will tell their children the stories of the way it used to be before 1948, before the "Catastrophe" and dispossesion.