Several years ago, not long before the signing of the Oslo agreement, I was in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. As I was walking through the camp with a male friend, a woman whom I did not know approached me. She gently took my arm as if we were intimate friends, pulled me close, and said, “I have nothing left to feed my children but black milk.” She then turned and walked away, leaving as imperceptibly as she had approached. My male friend immediately dismissed her as crazy. Yet I have never forgotten this woman or our momentary but wrenching encounter. It was not only the poignancy of her words that struck me, but their poetry. Her message to me was one of ultimate despair: I can no longer nourish my children. What good am I?