Eight kilometres outside Damascus is a Syrian town like any other, with narrow back streets, felafel stalls, housing developments and gleaming mosques. Its cake shops offer honey and pistachio pastries and its traffic roundabouts are decorated with committee-designed slabs of concrete art-work.
Its children, however, stalk each other from doorway to doorway with plastic machine guns. Yarmouk is Syria's largest Palestinian refugee camp, set up in 1956 to house the refugees who squatted there after fleeing their homes following the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.
These children are the third generation of those first exiles - their numbers now grown to five million - who have settled in neighbouring Arab countries as well as further afield in Europe, America and Australia. Every day, on Syrian television, the children of Yarmouk watch Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank demonstrating, throwing stones and petrol bombs, being killed and finally being carried through the streets in their death shrouds. Violence is a constant presence in their lives.
The possibility that these children might one day return to their former family homes, their right to return enshrined in UN Resolution 194 - not binding because it is a General Assembly rather than a Security Council resolution - is one of the main obstacles to a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.
Angela Williams, director of United Nations Refugee Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in Syria, explains the situation: "Here, Palestinian refugees have the same rights as a Syrian citizen except that they have travel documents instead of a Syrian passport. "In this way, they are protecting their Palestinian nationality, just in case they are ever able to go back or they are offered compensation for the loss of their homes and livelihood.
"A surprising number of them brought the title deeds to their homes and land when they were forced to leave."
But although the dream of return is a cherished one, it is unlikely that all five million would want to. In Syria - where there are 383,199 registered Palestinian refugees - the young are settled. Many have been to university there, have a circle of friends there, have jobs there.
Selim, who works in a Damascus shop selling Palestinian embroidery, is evasive when asked if he would return. To say no would be a betrayal of his parents' aspirations and perhaps of what some of his family have died for.
Abu Khalil, central committee member of the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine (his bust of Lenin and the gift of a 1986 Sinn Fein diary are proud possessions) speaks of the front's long-term hopes for a secular Arab-Israeli state.
"Israel's role is to protect American interests in the Middle East," he says, "but we long for an integrated Europe - our neighbours - that can act independently of America and bring about a balance of power."
He came to Syria as a child, in 1948. "My daughter, who lives in America, has promised me that, as soon as she gets her US passport, she will travel to Palestine and visit my village."
He does not say, however, that she wants to stay there. It is he, in Syria - as close to his former home as he is allowed to be - who keeps alive the dream of returning.
But across the border, to six million Israelis, the threat of five million Arabs returning home represents the annihilation of their state.
And so it is that dreams and fears are dominant players in this terrible conflict.
In the meantime, individual Syrians continue to do what they can.
During last month's Ramadan - the traditional time for giving alms - Syrians pledged over £400,000 to UNRWA to be used to help Palestinian children who have found shelter within its borders.