Saadeddin Malley

Saadeddin Malley's first brush with war came during a visit to the post office in Ramallah, in what was then considered Jordan. Then 14, he was picking up a parcel when a crowd of young men swept by cheering about a great military victory over Israel. It was June 5, 1967.

"These guys were cheering because they heard the Egyptians had shot down 20 planes of Israelis," Mr Malley recalls from Chicago, which has been his home for the last 40 years. "We were misled. We thought we were winning the war."

Hours later, there were planes in the skies over Ramallah. The Malleys woke the next morning in their home in Beitunia, a neighboring village, to find crowds of villagers walking on the road. Their homes had been hit.

People were urging one another to stay in their homes, Mr Malley recalls - not to repeat the disaster of 1948 when Palestinians who thought they were fleeing only for a few days were unable to return home.

Until then, the Malley family had been luckier than most. Like most people in Beitunia, they had no electricity until about a year before the war - no refrigerator or television. But they owned their own home and, more importantly, they had a foothold in America. Mr Malley's father had left for the US in 1956, where he found a job as a barber in Chicago.

Few of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the 1967 war shared that advantage. To this day, Palestinians account for only about 6% of the 3.5 million Arabs in the US - or about 210,000 people - according to the Arab American Institute. That includes the Christian emigres of the 19th century as well as refugees from Israel's wars and more recent arrivals.

The members of the Malley family left behind in Beitunia caught a ride in a neighbour's truck to Amman. "The thought of being refugees didn't cross our minds. We lived with people who were refugees in our town who came from pre-1948 areas. It never crossed our minds that we were going to be in the same boat."

From Chicago, Mr Malley's father eventually tracked his family down and made arrangements for them to join him.

For Mr Malley, then in his mid-teens, it was not a happy transition. "The streets were cleaner and wider, but I did not see the open spaces, the greenery, the mountainous parts that I was accustomed to, so in the first few months I was really miserable."

It has been an American life ever since. By the time he made his first return visit to Beitunia in 1977, he was already a US citizen and a university graduate embarking on a career in business.

Now 54, he is married to a Palestinian woman whose family lost their home in the 1948 war. He has two sons and two daughters. The children speak passable Arabic, they eat Palestinian food at home and one of his daughters wears a headscarf. He tries to take the family back to Beitunia every two years.

During the early days of the Oslo peace accords in the 1990s, he like other Palestinians used to fantasize about returning for good. "With the advent of turmoil all our hopes were dashed," he said. During the last trip to Beitunia two years ago, the family was held and questioned for four hours by the Israeli authorities when they crossed the border from Jordan.

Life in the US has also grown darker. Since the September 11 2001 terror attacks, Mr Malley is regularly subjected to special screening at airports. Racist graffiti has appeared on the walls of his business, and three years ago a petrol station also owned by the family was set alight.

"I've been here 40 years, and I was only there 14. People always seem to long for the place where they were first raised, but we kept putting it off," Mr Malley said. "I was thinking that after we get married, when the situation stabilizes, maybe. Times goes on. But then suddenly we think: 'we wish we would have stayed there'."