Zuhayra phones, she's found me someone to record with, a refugee woman from Gaza. We meet at the traffic circle north of Nasra, and walk from there to cluster of old tenement apartments built into the hillside, overlooking the town. Here I record with Umm Sa'id, a tiny fair woman as thin as a potato crisp, an active Rakah party member until quite recently. She's originally from Gaza, married before 1948 to a cousin from Majdal (a coastal city whose name was changed by the Israelis to Ashkelon).

Dead now, Abu Sa'id's portrait photo on the wall shows a strong dark-featured man. He also was a party member, and for this was arrested by the Egyptian Army during the war and sent to concentration camp. At the time it was announced that he had been killed in an Israeli air-raid, along with eleven others. Six months later he was released and given the choice where to go in Israel. Um Sa'id had meanwhile gone to Gaza with her children. She tells a little about life in Majdal before the expulsions, more about their flight to Gaza. In Nasra life was hard but they were well integrated through the party. Umm Sa'id missed her family but expressed no nostalgia for 'home', whether Majdal or Gaza. Relations with neighbours in Nasra had been good. If she felt sad about anything it was that the national situation was so bad, especially here in Nasra. 19

Umm Sa'id begins speaking:
"I'm originally from Gaza. I was living in Majdal, and I had three children. (Before the hijra?) No, at the time of the hijra, I had three children. We were living well in Majdal. After a while, the problems of 1948 began. Shelling! War planes! Bombing on the borders! We left. Because of the increase in the shelling, we left for Gaza. We left at night, at midnight. We walked on the sand and in the sea until we reached Gaza. It was at night. My late husband didn't want to walk once the sun came up. When we still had about an hour and a half of walking, between Majdal and Gaza, he said, 'Why should we leave? We should go back to our country. We shouldn't leave'. So we returned, we returned walking, to our house in Majdal, from Gaza to Askelon with the three children. We were carrying them. Our feet were like this! - each foot, from walking. Yes! We started telling people that they shouldn't leave -- 'This is our country, we don't want to leave it, Oh people!' We started telling everybody that, 'Oh people, don't leave! Don't leave!' We stayed. That night there was the event of Deir Yassin, there was a big battle in it. We were frightened. We gathered ourselves and left for Gaza. Also at night. After returning, we left again. People said, 'Majdal is becoming really dangerous for us'. So we left -- because my husband was a communist, a member of the party. We reached Gaza, and the Egyptian Army sawibna (?). They surrounded the area that we were in, I and my husband and the children. They were searching for my husband and they took him... "

After the recording, Zuhayra tells me that Umm Sa'id was a real party 'work-horse', always ready to demonstrate, or distribute pamphlets, or cook for summer camps. She says that the communists have always been the best nationalists - a claim I recognize as part of the ancient and still continuing split in Palestinian politics between 'Right' and 'Left'. But what fascinates me most about this recording is its revelation that the Arab governments were hunting Palestinian communists in the middle of the 'war' of 1948. This is an aspect of

the Nakbeh that no one has researched up to now.

Zuhayra wants to show me the video film she helped make about Saffouri, a large village whose ruins, half covered by forest, are clearly visible from the heights of Nasra. It's one of a documentary archive that she and friends have been making about villages and Arab city quarters. In the film, a group of Saffouri people (many of whom took refuge in Nasra) decide to visit their ruined village, a spring ritual that commenced with 'Yawm al-Ard'. As the group walks through the forest an armed Jewish settler suddenly appears and shouts at them to leave. The leading walkers approach him calmly and try to explain why they are here. He continues to shout and wave his gun threateningly, unaware perhaps that his actions are being recorded on film. It's a revealing incident. There's no settlement here. And if it's state land, Saffourians have as much right to walk on it as he has.

As always I'm amazed by the plenitude of Zuhayra's life. The tiny flat she shares with her son is full of books, photos, paintings, dried herbs, home-made pickles, embroidery, crochet. Yet she's so generous with her time. Today she bought vegetables to deep-freeze, yet instead she has looked after me.

April 17: It's getting towards the end of my stay, and I'm torn how to manage the last few days. I wanted to visit so many other places, especially the site of al-Bassa, and the many villages that friends in camps in Lebanon come from. If I could get to Akka, the ride to al-Bassa would only be a short one; but I know no one in Akka, and the contacts I try to make there don't work out. NGO people, like Muhammad Zeidan of the Human Rights Association, have been friendly and helpful, but it takes time and phone calls to foster the contacts they suggest. Galilee is so large and time is running out.

I decide to stop off in Haifa on the way back to Jerusalem and ask Muhammad Abu Haija for help in finding someone to record among inhabitants of the 'unrecognized villages'. He is chairman of one of the oldest NGOs in Galilee, the Association of Forty Villages.

But today Jamil 'Arafat has promised to take me to record with people from 'Arab al-Sbeih. They mainly inhabit a village called Shibli, not far from Kafr Kanna. But others from this 'tribe' of sedentarized bedouin are still displaced, following a massacre carried out against them during the expulsions of 1948. Jamil witnessed the massacre - or part of it - as a boy. He tells me: "At the time of one of the attacks, during 1948, I was a boy of fourteen or fifteen years old. I saw the battle of al-Sbeih, with my own eyes. I was a graduate of the 7th grade...I heard people saying there was a battle in al-Sbeih, only five or ten kilometers away. I went to see what was going on. I saw the dead bodies with my own eyes. I saw children, young girls of 17 or 20 years old, whole families exterminated - the number of the killed was 63, and more than half of them were children. When this massacre occurred, the majority of the people of 'Arab as-Sbeih fled -- to Irbid, to Amman. Only a small number, less than 15%, remained here." 20

Jamil takes me first to meet the Mayor of Kafr Kanna, deputy to Azmi Bishara in his Progressive Party. The Mayor, Abu Ammar, isn't there when we arrive, so we have to sit and drink coffee and chat. Jamil is in low spirits today; Umm Riadh has had a chemo treatment and is feeling sick.