It's been 50 years since they first put up tents on the plot of ground called Dheisheh refugee camp, on the doorstep of Bethlehem. What was then a tent camp of Palestinian peasants fleeing Israeli armed forces who in the war of 1948 overran their villages, is now a densely packed, bustling city-like neighbourhood of over 10,000 people living in multi-plestory houses.
Highly educated, liberal, free spirited, and politically active, the people of Dheisheh have come a long way. A large proportion of the young are university graduates, and Dheisheh is known for its large representation of successful professionals in the surrounding areas' businesses.
Yet these 50 years on, the people will still tell you all this is only temporary. Someday, they say, they will return to their homeland villages. While the general Palestinian population may be reconciled to the political reality that Israel will not agree to a deluge of two to four million Palestinian refugees returning to lands now inside Israel proper, the refugees themselves are not.
The refugee problem remains one of the most intractable issues to be dealt with in the final status talks - and the refugees here on the West Bank feel politically marginalised and fearful of the unfolding scenario in the peace negotiations.
Their rhetoric is bold and bombastic: "Do you think any agreement [signed by Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian president] will stop the people when they are struggling for their rights? Nothing will stop my struggle - not the international community, not Arafat - not my mother. I want to return back to my village," says Ziad Abu Abbas, a camp leader and political activist.
And Abbas adds: "To achieve our rights as Palestinian refugees, the whole political map in the Middle East should be changed."
Yet these educated refugees know that that map won't be changed; and they know that Arafat is on track to sign a peace agreement that will not be sending them back to their fathers' villages. Still they cannot let go - of their dream, of their cause, and their sense of great injustice done them.
They say it was in Dheisheh that the first stones were thrown in the West Bank against Israeli soldiers during the Intifada. When the boys played their endless card games, the losers would pay by being sent to throw the stones. It is rare to find a man in Dheisheh that did not spend time in an Israeli jail.
"We paid the price," says Abbas. "We were the oil that fuelled the revolution."
"It may take a long time or it may be impossible [to go back to our lands]," admits Kamal Hammash, another camp leader, "but to live in a dream is better than to live in a half-city in a Third World country." He prefers to remain a refugee.
Hammash holds onto to one consolation: he believes that the state of Israel will not last forever. He can wait. "It may take decades, maybe centuries - that is not the question . . . I can put pressure on Israel forever."
That pressure will go down through the generations if he has his way. Hammash, like most older refugee fathers, continually indoctrinates his children about the return to village lands. "I have twins - two months old. Even now I whisper in their ears that they must believe in their father's homelands."
But some among the younger generation are beginning to have mixed feelings. Hanan Roman, a young married mother and nursery school teacher, sits in her comfortable living room looking into a modern kitchen equipped with snack bar and all appliances, and thinks about how she would react if offered the chance to go back. "To whose village, mine or my husband's?" she asks. "I would need new friends, a new house, new work. I think a lot about this."
And there is a strong attachment to Dheisheh itself. The streets and alleyways may overflow with water and garbage, but there is an odd warmth and happy spirit to the place. It's so safe a woman can walk the streets alone at any hour and some people don't lock their doors. Says Roman: "We are here in this camp from different villages - but we became as one family."