Kamil Shehadeh, director of Beit al-Na'ima, suggests I record with his sister Samia. Older than he is, she will remember their life soon after the Nakbeh. She is in charge of Beit al-Na'ima's 'Women's Club', and is active with Bat Shalom, a Jewish and Palestinian Arab feminist NGO.

I make two visits to Samia and her husband Shafiq, who live in a pleasant area between Allenby Street and Mount Carmel, consisting of one-up one-down apartments with balconies, gardens, cypress trees and palms. Their home isn't large. The first time we just chat, without recording. Samia tells me about her work with Bat Shalom. I ask her whether they visit women prisoners. She says they visit and support women prisoners who have killed husbands who beat them up.

But what interests me most are her stories about Jewish neighbours. There were the good Jewish neighbours "whose laps were warm". But there was also the time she took her kid brothers and sisters to the swings in the park, and the Jewish mothers pushed her away and called her 'sha'fit 'Arabi' (Arab 'piece' = nobody). I sense that these 'good Jew'/'bad Jew' experiences offer a point of equilibrium for Palestinians in Israel who want to play a public role beyond that of local community.

On the second visit Samia serves me an Israeli soft drink that is bright blue in colour, not like anything I have ever drunk. She tells me that she has been interviewed once before by an English woman doing a study of Palestinian women. She has also traveled to Jordan with the Bat Shalom. It's surely these public activities that give her such self-confidence in facing the recorder. She doesn't hesitate.

Shafiq cooks lunch as we sit in the living room. Samia records her story. She tells of her life as the eldest daughter in very large, very poor Haifa family. Fear sharpens memory: she remembers a barrel bomb explosion during the attack

against Haifa 4, stages of her family's flight, their return through Israeli checkpoints, and postwar Haifa -- life in one room, starting work at age 15 to help her parents. She tells about marrying a man she met outside the family circle, one not chosen by her father. And about the tragic death of their oldest son, whom they sent to America to escape being recruited by the 'mukhabarat'.

She doesn't repeat today the 'good Jew'/'bad Jew' anecdotes, a loss that reminds me that no two accounts of past personal experience will ever be the same, whether in contents, sequencing, or 'tone'.

Samia Shehadeh begins by saying:
"I remember one thing before the war, when the war first began. I remember my aunt was pushing me in a carriage. I was three years old. Such an event is important in a child's life, it stays inside. She was pushing me in a carriage. We were living on the street of Mar Hanna, at the bottom. She wanted to take me to my grandfather's house - she was my mother's sister - to their home. Suddenly people started shouting 'Bunduq'. I felt something was coming down, that people saw something that was going to explode in the street, like a barrel, or something they had put explosives in. They were throwing them down in the Wad. Haram! My aunt was so afraid. I was in the carriage and she wanted to hide me. I remember the place well, and whenever I pass it I say, 'She hid me here'. She found a gate with stones one on top of the other. She tried to get in but the stones and the carriage... So she tipped the carriage and threw me out into the house. She threw me like that. I remember this very well. We heard a loud noise. She fainted from her fear, I remember. There were many people, some of them looking for children, or for people who had been walking on the street. They carried us, and gave us water, and washed our hands. I remember that it took my aunt a long time to recover consciousness. They were saying, 'Suad! Suad!' to wake her"