I was born in West Jerusalem-- the part which was overrun by Zionist forces in April 1948. My family was a very ordinary one; my father was an education inspector who worked for the Mandate government and my mother was a housewife. I had a brother and a sister and we did all the things ordinary families do-- play, attend school, and go for outings with our parents.

Suddenly, we began to be aware that another people, most of whom had come from Europe, were laying claim to our neighborhood, our city, our country in fact. Palestinians resisted this alien claim and we were caught in the fighting that ensued between the two parties. Our road became a battlefield and our neighbors started to leave, family by family. Eventually, we too had to lock up our house and go to my grandfather's house in Damascus, Syria for safety. We took very few things with us because we were certain that we would be returning.

It never happened.

Israel was set up in May 1948 and no Palestinians were ever allowed to return. My father, in despair, decided to take a job with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Arabic service in London. In 1949, the whole family had to move once again but this time to a really foreign country, England. I knew no English and none of us had ever traveled far out of our native city. We had to overcome the difficulties of exile, adjustment to a new society and integration within it. But we also had to endure what was worse, namely that no one in England seemed to be on our side. We heard that Palestine was the land of the Jews who had 'returned' to it. No one was aware that we had ever existed. We were made to feel that we had been squatters in our own homeland.

Of course life went on. I studied medicine, my brother engineering and my sister chemistry. We were an apparently successful immigrant family. But we could not forget our homeland and so I became a political activist in the early 1970s and have been involved with the Palestine problem ever since.