Manal is forty-five years old. She lives in Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut. Her parents were from northern Palestine but were forced to flee in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Although she has lived in Lebanon all her life, she told me when I met her, in 2011, that Palestine ‘means everything’ to her – ‘self-respect, yearning and hope for the future’, and although she knows she may never return, she would ‘never forget about Palestine’.

Manal's account has echoes of other stories, told by refugee women who remember the traumatic events of 1948, when Palestinians had no choice ‘but to stand by helplessly and watch in terrified silence’ as their homes and land were stolen from them. Unlike Manal, Mariam witnessed these events first-hand. A middle-class widow now living in west Beirut, she was born in Jaffa in 1936; in 1948, at the age of twelve, Mariam fled from Palestine with her family. Her memories are of escalating violence and intense disruption. She recalled that her family left Jaffa by car but, on the way, there was an explosion and her father had to turn back; they saw many overturned and abandoned cars along the way. She said that buses were brought in and some armed men promised to protect them, so they started off again. ‘We believed,’ she said, ‘that the problem would be solved eventually and we would be able to return to our home in Jaffa’; they left most of their possessions behind. The memories, both real and inherited, that women such as Manal and Mariam possess, give them a kind of power in the sense that they have not only survived but have come to embody the dream of return.

This chapter explores the stories that refugee women tell about themselves, their community and their history, to make sense of an uncomfortable present and preserve the memories of what has happened to them. They are stories of identity and resistance, informed by past experiences, ‘memories’ of Palestine and a tradition of resistance; but these stories have been, in the main, ignored or trivialised. For Palestinians living outside their homeland, the situation is even more precarious as they struggle not only to survive the rigours of exile but also to preserve their sense of national identity.