India, Oct. 31 -- In Majed Abu Maraheel's life lies the short, brutal history of modern Palestine.

Maraheel, the first Palestinian athlete to compete at the Olympics, was born into a Bedouin family who farmed an ancestral plot on the coastal edge of the Negev desert, and lived with their sheep in the oasis town of Beersheba nearby.

The Bedouin's have lived, uninterrupted, in this region for 4,000 years. Nonetheless, Maraheel's parents were among the estimated 7 lakh people forced to flee during the nakba (literally, catastrophe in Arabic; now used as a byword for mass expulsion) in 1948, when the Israel Defense Forces began to colonise their homelands.

Maraheel's parents, shorn of their land, animals and home, found themselves at the f...