The last decade, marking the passing of fifty years and counting since the nakba, has seen considerable production of accounts of that year’s events in the publications of Palestinian political parties, NGOs, artists, poets, writers, intellectuals, film-makers, the media of various Arab states, as well as journalists and scholars sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. These accounts present 1948 as the pivotal point of Palestinian history and the bedrock of national memory and history. However, scholars of national memory remind us that unity is always effected through forgetting. Why are the events of 1948 accorded this privileged position within Palestinian nationalist narratives, given Israeli nationalism’ attempts to delegitimate the authenticity of Palestinian nationalism by portraying it as the by-product of the establishment of the state of Israel? What are the processes by which the experience of 1948 has shaped the identity of three generations of camp refugees in Lebanon? What differences in the experience of refugee-hood may be obscured by this privileging of 1948? Drawing on fieldwork conducted during 2003-2006 in Bourj al-Barajneh refugee camp located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, this paper explores these questions in order to examine the relationship between experience, memory and the construction of Palestinian nationalist narratives.