Palestinians to this day still fashion their sorrows in the first person plural, whether or not they have heard of Tolstoy's remark. For if the Palestinian people have a collective narrative-a story, rooted in history and usually beginning with Balfour's 1917 Declaration, a promise to European Jewry of a homeland for Jews in historic Palestine—this nation possesses-in the human sense-a wealth of stories that compile the variegated destinies of Palestinians, cutting across themes of exile, resistance and homeland. These stories-both those that are constantly being reinvented and those that are still possible-center around the "ordinary human rights" that Palestinians have been deprived of, thereby transforming the Palestinian into a wretched human being narrating his own private wretched tale.