Abbas works in Al-Ittihad, and it's there that I meet him to record his recollections of the Nakbeh. He's Lebanese in origin, from a village near Tibnin, and came as a young boy with his older brother to Nazareth. Around twelve years old 1948, interested in everything that was happening around him, he gives a detailed account of conditions in Nazareth as refugees from Haifa and surrounding villages streamed into it, and of its final surrender.

Why the Zeinedin siblings came to Nazareth, and why they remained there after fighting intensified, is not explained in Abbas's account. They may have been orphans, and his older brother a migrant worker seeking better wages; or perhaps a communist escaping persecution in Lebanon.

In 1952, Abbas went to Haifa to attend a rally of Communist youth, and found a job there in an Arab workers' cooperative. His interest in Haifa and its history moved him to ask people who had stayed on there what had happened during and after the expulsions. They told him that Israel had made a concentration camp in Wadi Nisnas and gathered all Arabs there. Life was very insecure. A defence committee was formed by leaders such as Toufiq Toubi to protect Palestinians from Jewish gangs. He tells about the changing of street names; the killing of three Palestinian young men in 1961, and the enormous funeral demonstration that followed; and about the steady influx of Palestinians from rural areas, though the authorities forbade this.

After the recording is over, Abbas drives me out to Beled al-Sheikh, a few kilometers to the north of Haifa. Its people fled after an early massacre, on April 25, 1948; I know some of their descendants in Shatila camp (Lebanon). The old village has gone completely, covered by new suburban housing, but

the cemetery is still there, still containing the grave of Sheikh Qassam Izzedin, who organized resistance cells in and around Haifa, and sparked Palestinian revolt against the British Mandate. The other Palestinian leader buried here is Sami Taha, workers' union organizer, whose assassination in 1947 was suspected of being ordered by the Mufti.

The Israeli authorities want to drive a road through the heart of the cemetery, now disused. But local resistance has managed to prevent this so far.

Abbas Zeinedeen speaks:
"My story is like this. I was born in Lebanon, originally, in a small village called Safed al-Bottikh 5 In 1947, we came here on a visit to the town of Nazareth, I and my younger sister and my older brother. After a while the fighting began to take a new form. There was - the English withdrew on May 15 - and we gradually started hearing more about the fighting between the Arabs and the Jews. In Nazareth there came first people thrown out of Tiberias, from the east. Then from Haifa. Many people came. They talked about the war. I suppose I was about eleven or twelve years old. I used to like listening to the news. There weren't radios in every house. I used to go to coffee shops, wherever they had coffee there they would have a big radio that ran on batteries. I was too young then to go into a coffee shop and order a cup of coffee. So I used to stand near the door of the coffee shop. The news was always that the Arabs were winning, that the Arabs were achieving victories, which was the opposite of what was really happening. There was also the Arab Salvation Army, it came to Nazareth. There were battles in several places, including a place called Mantaqat al-Shajjera - if you've heard of Naji al-Ali, it's close to his home. They also used to bring the dead, martyrs from the battles, and bury them in the cemetery of Nazareth..."