I might as well begin with my own experience of 1948, and what it meant for many of the people around me. I talk about this at some length in my memoir Out of Place. My own immediate family was spared the worst ravages of the catastrophe: we had a house and my father a business in Cairo, so even though we were in Palestine during most of 1947 when we left in December of that year, the wrenching, cataclysmic quality of the collective experience (when 780,000 Palestinians, literally two-thirds of the country's population were driven out by Zionist troops and design) was not one we had to go through. I was 12 at the time so had only a somewhat attenuated and certainly no more than a semi-conscious awareness of what was happening; only this narrow awareness was available to me, but I do distinctly recall some things with special lucidity. One was that every member of my family, on both sides, became a refugee during the period; no one remained in our Palestine, that is, that part of the territory (controlled by the British Mandate) that did not include the West Bank which was annexed to Jordan. Therefore, those of my relatives who lived in Jaffa, Safad, Haifa, and West Jerusalem were suddenly made homeless, in many instances penniless, disoriented, and scarred forever. I saw most of them again after the fall of Palestine but all were greatly reduced in circumstances, their faces stark with worry, ill-health, despair.