I have a cherished memory of Balata, the densely populated refugee camp outside Nablus which, along with another equally densely populated camp in Jenin, was assaulted last week by Israeli troops in armored vehicles, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships.

On a trip I took to the occupied territories almost exactly ten years ago, in order to collect notes for a book that was to form the last of a trilogy I have written on exile, I was marched by my handler through a warren of narrow alleys lined with unbelievably wretched dwellings made of cinderblocks, with tin roofs held down by cement slabs, tires and rocks, to an elementary school in Balata run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Needless to say, I felt at home there, for I had grown up in one such refugee camp (in Lebanon), had lived in one such dwelling, and had attended one such unheated, understaffed and poorly equipped school, with classes at times topping forty students. I spent a richly edifying day interacting with many of the students and their teachers there. Before I left, I snapped a picture of a dozen or so 9-year-olds in the school yard, who posed for me, all smiling at the camera, all with hands raised in the victory sign.

I have treasured that snapshot ever since, and I recall wondering, as I flew back to the United States, if those children would ever get the chance one day to grow up in an environment free of fear, in a homeland whose political destiny is determined by their own chosen leaders, and in a society where the story of their people’s generations-old subjugation to foreign rule is a mere narrative in history books.

I dug that photo out last Thursday, on the first day of the attacks on Balata, now home to 22,000 people, and again wondered about those kids. Now in their late teens, would some of them, I asked myself wistfully, be active in the resistance? Would some have been killed in action, their pictures posted on walls around the West Bank and Gaza, identifying them as martyrs, fallen patriots who had learned, in a visceral way, that because they could not choose the way they lived, then they had to choose the way they died?

Come June 6, the Israelis would have been at it for the last 35 years, chalking up one brutality after another, building one settlement after another, and devising one phantom strategy after another to continue occupying and subduing their victims, with the predictable end result that each succeeding Israeli government — and the current one tops them all — has managed to generate not less, but more resistance.

And with more resistance has come sacrifice. The price that a little people like the Palestinians are paying to rid themselves of occupation has been unspeakably high, and their suffering has been beyond all rational understanding. No wonder then that their plight has seized the conscience of the entire Arab world.

A solution must be found.

And this is where Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace plan, or if you wish, his ruminations on a peace plan that he shared with a New York Times columnist three weeks ago, comes in. To be sure, the prince’s proposals are yet to be formally presented, as they perhaps might be, at the Arab League summit conference in Beirut later this month, and they are yet to be endorsed in a unanimous resolution by the member states of that body. Despite that, what has now universally come to be known as the “Saudi Plan” is rapidly gaining momentum in the Middle East and Europe, while the US is still kicking the tires on it.

Some commentators and diplomats have argued that what the crown prince proposed is not unprecedented, since the Saudi government had pushed a like-minded peace plan as far back as 1981 at an Arab League summit conference similar to the one that is about to be held in Beirut.

Though it is true that the Saudi government did in fact at the time present an eight-point peace plan that was accepted by the Arab states — but later foundered. That plan, absent an offer of normalization of relations, was not in the same ballpark as Prince Abdullah’s vision of full withdrawal from occupied Arab lands — with the presumption that Syria’s occupied national territory is included — in return for full recognition.

Meanwhile, by Monday, after five days of raids, Israeli forces had wreaked havoc on the two refugee camps in Nablus and Jenin, pushing far into the alleys with their armored vehicles, bulldozing homes, kicking in doors, terrorizing old men, woman and children, destroying water mains and electrical grids, and finally leaving over 30 Palestinians dead, virtually all of them civilians. (For their efforts, two Zionist soldiers paid with their lives.)

Where did these people learn all this savagery from? Was it from those who victimized them in Germany?

On Thursday, the first day of the raids, Marwan Barghouti, a resistance leader who is reputedly a fiery speaker even at the calmest of times, told reporters that Palestinians will not only resist the invaders but avenge their atrocities as well. “Our people will fight this,” he vowed, “and we will have our reckoning with the terrorists of Tel Aviv for their crimes.”

Sure enough, on Saturday, a Palestinian detonated a blast in Jerusalem that killed 10 Israelis and injured dozens, and the following day, a lone sniper from the resistance killed seven Israeli soldiers and three settlers at an army checkpoint north of Ramallah. As the confrontation between occupier and occupied entered another deadly week on Monday, Israeli forces shelled a pickup truck carrying a Hamas militant’s wife and three children through Ramallah, killing the four family members and two other children in a passing car. In retaliation, Hamas dispatched a fighter to the heart of Tel Aviv, who walked into a nightclub at 2.15 a.m. and killed three Israelis and wounded 32 others.

The New York Times’ James Bennet, filing from Balata on March 2, wrote that as Israeli soldiers in tanks and bulldozers waded through the entrance to the camp, they unsuspectingly passed under an arch that bore the Arabic lettering “Balata refugee camp welcomes you. Its martyrs will win.”

Do Israeli occupiers and settlers doubt, do they truly, truly doubt, the truth of that outcry? If they do, they are not only dumb, but dumber than we thought they could ever be.