INTRODUCTION and in the A ra b countries have also shared their knowledge with me, but to mention names and specific debts here is unnecessarily to trivialize our shared experience, without which this book could not have been written. The two friends whose names are mem orialized on the dedicatory page could have had no idea that their lives so deeply moved and influenced me. Both were Palestinians, both lived the strange, obsessed lives o f exiles; both died bitterly unhappy and unfortunate deaths; both in my opinion were com pletely good men. Farid Haddad was a doctor who lived and died in an A rab country, where for a number o f years I knew him well. M ore than anyone I have know n, he had the keenest sense not only o f what human injustice was all about, but also o f what could be done about it. Thoroughly idealistic and selfless, he was tortured to death in prison in 1961, although at the time he died (so far as I have ever been able to tell), he did what he did as a human being and as a political militant, not necessarily as a Palestinian. Rashid Hussein was an ironic Palestinian poet, who left Israel in 1966 and lived until his death in the United States. From him I learned whatever I know about life in Palestinian villages after 1948, a life which informs the question o f Palestine with unique strength. His generosity o f spirit, openness, and political honesty were his gifts to everyone he met. W hen he died a particularly wasteful death in 1977, he had already suffered too much for what he was, an independent, genuinely radical Palestinian. Betw een them, Farid Haddad and Rashid Hussein have illuminated for me the Palestinian cause, to which, along with so many o f our com patriots in many places, they gave their lives.