In the year 1948 Israel became a state and I became stateless. For the next twentyfive years Israelis were building a nation and I was inhabiting a world of nothingness in which I experienced no halcyon period, no moment when my very essence as a man was not negated and my very rights as a human being were not dismissed. In 1948 the world applauded the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. I was a Palestinian, and the Jewish homeland was being established in my country, at the cost of displacing me and creating in us all a nation in exile.