Salah takes us to Hayy al-Mahatta, where railroad employees used to live before 1948, but which nowadays is a low-income area associated with poverty and drugs. I've been told to look for a woman called Najla M'harb, who lives there, and who has a history as an NGO organizer. Salah has to call on friends to help him find Najla's home. He drops us there and disappears, since he doesn't know Najla. We enter a small courtyard through a gate made of a sheet of corrugated iron. A young woman - Najla's daughter Hanine - asks us to sit down in the yard and wait for her mother. When she appears, she is a dignified woman with short gray hair whom one can easily imagine as director of a section of a factory. She says she can only speak to us for a very short time as she has to fax an important document to her son, a student in Haifa University.

Her married name is Zbarka, she comes from Galilee, and her husband is dead. She's very proud that all of her eight children are educated, in spite of her being a widow, and in spite of living in Hayy al-Mahatta. Two of the younger ones, a son and daughter, attractive and neatly dressed, sit with us in the courtyard.

Leena wants to photo mother and children together, a triptych of promise emerging out of adversity. But Najla doesn't want to be photographed, not here, not today -- though she promises that if we return some other time, she will allow it. Her daughter Hanine is even more opposed to being pictured in this back yard, where nothing has been painted or mended for years. Najla says she has been interviewed on Israeli TV, and her children's friends asked them, "Do you really live in a place like that?" Hanine has been on a trip to the USA with Jewish students, and maybe will go again next summer.

I ask Najla about the NGO associated with her name. She says that a few years back she and two or three other women from Hayy Mahatta formed an association to try and improve

conditions. Now it has ended because some people weren't honest. Now she just works for her family. She's the 'foreman' of a group of agricultural workers who harvest for a nearby settlement. Unlike most Arab mothers, she rejects being called 'Umm-Somebody', preferring her personal name, Najla. Her clothes and speech robustly proclaim her identity as rural working class.

After the recording, Najla leaves for the Post Office, putting on a 'mandil' (headscarf) that she didn't wear at home. Hanine walks with us to the bus stop back to Tel Aviv.

Najla M'harb begins to speak:
"My name is Najla, Najla M'harb in the past, Najla Zbarqa now. I'm married and I have eight children. I live in Hayy Mahatta. Years ago they were, my father was - in 1948, my father had lands, a lot - hundreds of dunums. (Where?) In Sabiya. A place called Sabiya, near Kfar Saba' 10. When the Jews came to the land, they threw them out. When they came, they threw him out from all his land. In place of all the dunums he owned, they gave him a few dunums in Lydd. A few dunums were not enough for us to live on. We couldn't sow on it because it was so little. They went on harassing us. It was forbidden for us to build houses, it was forbidden for us to progress. We used to do everything with our hands, with no help from the government or the municipality. We always were - we have been living in a state with houses that aren't licensed. The house is built without a licence. At night we used to build the house, in the morning they'd see it built and finished. They used to threaten to demolish the houses, and we used to resist. The whole village used to unite as if it was one house [ie family]. They couldn't come into the village and destroy anything because all the people at that moment were united. We always stopped them, we resisted them in every way. Until we built a village called Shannir 11. We made buildings and houses. We lived there. But there were no social activities - it lacked clubs, asphalted roads, kindergardens, clinics, nurseries..."