ABSTRACT
The Sabra and Shatila camps for Palestinian refugees, in the southern suburbs of Beirut, are not ‘camps’ at all, and have not been so since soon after the present dwellers' forebears fled into Lebanon from their homeland, whence they had been evicted by force and by fear of the Jewish founders and fighters of the nascent Israeli State. The tented camps the United Nations set up for them then have long become breeze-block, brick, and corrugated-iron slums, areas of squalor and degradation, home to some thirty thousand people who scrape an existence while they await what seems to be the impossible: return to their homeland, Palestine, to which they have an inalienable right under international conventions but which Israel and Western powers ignore.
