3 Visiting Jaffa: Jaffa, 1978 (pp. 29-57)
Shehadeh visits Sarah, a Polish woman whose parents had escaped from Poland to Israel. Sarah and her husband live in Jaffa in a house that had formerly belonged to an Arab family. She says that many people were displaced by the Second World War but continued with their lives whereas Palestinians have languished in refugee camps living off charity for three decades. She finds this despicable.
"Throughout [Sarah's] neighbourhood, the Arab families received no grants and no services. Every attempt was made to make their lives so unbearable that they would leave." (p. 50)
"As we passed the empty houses I thought about how their inhabitants had left them fully furnished as they fled. They had no time to gather anything during the Nakba. There was large-scale looting after the city was evacuated." (p. 52)
Later, speaking to another woman, Shehadeh thinks:
"I felt like asking this middle-aged woman how she could establish her nursery on land expropriated from villagers who were now forced to live in crowded refugee camps with no land to cultivate for themselves. I wanted to shake her out of her equanimity." (p. 55)
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