Shatila is a short car journey out of Beirut and a few minutes on foot down a street full of market stalls. You pass a refuse heap where goats browse and small children smash up polystyrene packaging, duck into any of the narrow alleys to your right and enter one of the oldest refugee camps in the world. It was established by the Red Cross in 1949 on behalf of Palestinians herded from their villages the previous year. About 700,000 people were evicted in 1948 and of these perhaps 100,000, many of them peasants and smallholders from the hinterland of Haifa, fetched up in Lebanon.

LRB 16 November 2006 | PDF Download