Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary

In Chapter 2, entitled, "Nationalisms: Paradise Lost," Shipler depicts life in the squalid refugee camps established in 1948 for Arabs expelled from their villages. It opens with a description of a twelve-year old Palestinian in Jabaliya in the occupied Gaza Strip. He has "no past and no future," because he clings to an idealized village in Israel that he never saw and never will. Shipler offers vignettes of a bent old woman picking through debris in the Rashadiye camp in southern Lebanon, after Israeli tanks demolished half the slum in 1982. He reveals life in the Dheisheh "ghetto" on the occupied West Bank, where every aspect of life, specifically including classroom and literature, instills yearning for a lost homeland and a militant determination to return instills militancy in youth.

The longing to return is central to the refuges of 1948 and to generations of their...