In 1961, the great American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn reported on her visits to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, Gaza, Jordan, and Jerusalem, as well as to Arab communities in Israel. It seems that not much has changed since then. She found little squalor or misery, but a great deal of hatred for Israel and America. While, time and again, she was told stories of horrible massacres and the shelling of villages by Israel, her interviewees were unable to name a single family member, friend, or acquaintance who was killed. About the one exception, in a camp in Gaza, she wrote:
My UNRWA guide . . . took me to visit one of [the camp’s] trim, respectable self-made homes, belonging to a family he had known before in Jaffa.
The old mother was half blind; the recurrence of eye disease is a Middle Eastern, not a refugee affliction. My guide and this family had not seen each other for some time, and immediately after their first greeting, the old woman wept with incurable grief and was consoled, gently, but as if he had done so often before, by my guide. He explained: this family had suffered a great tragedy. One of the sons was killed by shellfire, in Jaffa.
I report this because it was the only family I met where an actual human being was known to be dead. Here, at last, the infallible witness testified; and here this death, thirteen years old, was mourned as if it had come upon them yesterday. My UNRWA guide behaved as if this case were unique and deserved the aching pity which everyone feels for those who have lost a loved member of the family in war.
I left Gaza, wishing that I could take all the young people [I met there] with me, and not to Palestine, but out into a wider world. Their destiny should not be to go back, but to go forth. They need exactly the opposite of what the Jews need. There is plenty of room for both needs.
Read more on Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1961/10/the-arabs-of-palestine/304203/