When you walk down Beirut's chic Rue Hamra, past the sidewalk cafés and New York priced dress shops, the superbly stocked bookstores and pinball parlors, you can see the mark that thousands of middle class Palestinians have made in Lebanon.

The Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon present a special obstacle to a peace settlement in Geneva; Most of the 95,000 refugees in 15 camps in Lebanon come originally from the northern Galilee or from the areas around Jaffa or Acre on the Mediterranean coast. They do not consider the West Bank of Jordan their home — many had never even visited it before they fled in 1948 — and thus feel they have little to gain from a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state.

"Cairo — Hisham met me in Lappis, the second most popular cafe and patisserie in Cairo, where the young, well-dressed middle class Egyptians — male and female — meet for ice cream and Turkish coffee and gateaus. Tall, with the broad-shouldered physique of a football player, brown hair curling over his forehead, his English excellent and eager, a son of the solid middle class, he was not exactly a typical Egyptian student (a little too well off, a little too worldly). But his emotions did not differ much from many others I met.

The Jewish cemetery in Alexandria lay silent as I walked down its middle, the quiet broken only by the occasional bark of several vicious-looking guard dogs chained to rocks along the path.

CAIRO — When Salah Jaheen, Egypt’s leading political cartoonist, was visiting the United States in 1964, he was invited to the home of a Jewish family in a small town whose name he has forgotten. "The wife brought me a cartoon from an Egyptian magazine with a Jewish stereotype — a crooked nose. I said that this was a stupid cartoonist who doesn't know anything.

Cairo — Although sixty percent of Egyptians live and work on the land, the thinking of the great mass of fellahin (peasants) seems a mystery to outsiders and educated Egyptian city dwellers as well. Both supporters of the left and the right in Egypt concede that it is the middle class, grown large and strong under Nasser, which controls the political levers in the country. The right pictures the fellahin as a passive, infinitely patient mass, which will accept any regime imposed on it as the will of Allah. The visible left, limited now in Egypt to a small but articulate group of journalists, students and intellectuals, pictures the peasantry — without too much conviction — as a potential seedbed of political unrest, especially as the fellahin watch living standards in the city rise while the lot of the peasant remains basically one of poverty.

Mr. Said (a pseudonym) is a highly placed, well-respected official in the Egyptian foreign ministry. He is deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, both personally and politically, but is remarkably objective in his overall assessment of the Middle East conflict. He is convinced that peace cannot emerge out of a simple "deal" between the combatants, but will require a new, dynamic process through which forces on each side will strive to appreciate each other's differences and to establish useful channels of contact with each other. The key to this process, he believes, is the future relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

In July 1948, a young unemployed Palestinian heard that teachers were being recruited in Jordan for Kuwait. Hani Kaddumi had left Jaffa during the fighting and was desperate for work. He rushed to Amman only to find that the recruiter had left the previous day. Unwilling to give up, the former employee in the British mandate passport office in Jaffa sent a cable: "To the ruler of Kuwait: I am offering my services to work in the area of passports and immigration. I can also teach English, Arabic or mathematics." One month later a friend rushed breathlessly into his home with the reply: "You are offered the position of Director of Passports and Immigration in Kuwait."