BY RIHAB CHARIDA
Ghada Karmi's recent book, In Search of Fatima, is a very significant Palestinian narrative. Karmi takes the reader through the Palestinian experience of life interrupted, colonisation and dispossession. Karmi's book talks about the traumatic experience of the Nakba, the catastrophe of Palestine that began when the State of Israel was established in the homeland of the Palestinian people in 1948.
Central to the book is Fatima, a peasant who helped Karmi's family with housework. Fatima was left behind with the key to their house when Karmi's family fled from their home in Jerusalem in 1948.
The book also tells of Karmi's disturbing experience of forced migration into a foreign land and having to deal with the Western view of blaming the Palestinians for "not allowing" the Israelis to settle peacefully in Palestine. She suggests that this view was adopted as a way for Westerners to evade their guilt in the treatment and persecution of the Jews of Europe. Western rulers adopted the Zionist view that Palestine "belonged" to the Jewish people and Zionist Jews were merely "returning" to their "promised land". They even accepted the Zionist myth that the Palestinians did not exist.
In her book, Karmi explains how the word Palestine or Palestinian was hardly ever heard or used in the Western world prior to the late 1960s. She also discusses the way the English (and other Europeans) celebrated the establishment of Israel.
In the month that marks the 55th anniversary of the Nakba, I asked Karmi about her experience of the colonisation of her land, as well as her opinion on the current road-map to "peace".
The exodus that took place during the Nakba, 750,000 people — nearly 70% of the Palestinian population — were forced to flee from their homeland, most of them ending up in neighbouring Arab countries. Karmi and her family lived in Syria for a year before migrating to England. The massive numbers of Palestinians settling in neighbouring Arab countries meant a shortage of jobs. As a result, Karmi's father made the decision to migrate to England, where he was offered a job with the BBC.
"It was very traumatic to be uprooted from our homeland", Karmi said. "I left everything that I knew and was familiar with and loved in Jerusalem. I was a child and I didn't understand why we had to leave or what was happening at the time. I lost my home, my dog, Fatima, all the people I knew, my school friends. I lost everything. It was very traumatic.
"The change from Syria to England was very profound. No sooner had I began to settle in Syria, and we were uprooted again. I had to leave somewhere I was familiar with twice in a very brief time. It could not have been a more stark change".
"How did you deal with that sense of loss, growing up in England?", I asked her.
"I dealt with it by suppressing all memory and began to forget", she replied. "I didn't remember any longer what our house was like, what the dog was like or what Fatima was like. I went into an amnesia. I didn't even remember that I was hurt or upset; all my memories had been buried in Palestine. I know that to be the case, because when I wrote the memoir, I began to feel feelings I hadn't had for a long time. The only way I dealt with it was by suppressing it completely. When I began to write about the actual events, I remember vividly that I would be writing and I would suddenly feel terribly unhappy. What was coming back were the actual feelings that were associated with that departure".
I asked Karmi about her experience as a Palestinian growing up in England. What was the general attitude towards Palestine and how did it make her feel?
"It made me feel terrible. People in Britain and the West simply do not understand what happened in Palestine because of the Zionist narrative which has been extremely successful, which they pushed and promoted very hard in the 1950s and 60s. That's when they were doing their hardest work and it has born fruit, because it has resulted in this idea that it is their land, that they have a 'natural' right to it, and they're not being allowed to live a normal life.
"The case has been presented by the Zionists that this is unquestionably their land and the Palestinians keep attacking them for no reason anyone can understand. It's even more pernicious than that — there's even an implication that the Palestinians are violent by nature. Once the situation is set up like that, it becomes very difficult to counter."
What sort of solution does she believe people should be thinking about?
"We [Palestinians] have to stop playing the post-1967 game which is exactly what the Israelis want. They want us to forget about the fact that they stole our land in 1948 and the only issue now is what happens to the land they stole in and after 1967. In other words, the original theft and the dispossession of the Palestinians is okay, that is now Israel and everyone has to accept that.
"I think we have to go back to square one and say 'just a minute — the whole place is occupied; all of it'. Because then, when we talk about a two-state solution (which I don't support), we may be talking about a 50-50 split of the land, but only 20% for the Palestinians is what these negotiations are about.
"To me it is typical Zionist logic to constantly push the goal posts so that people are no longer talking from the first goal post but the second one. They keep pushing it further and people start talking from the third goal post and so on. That is how they do it. It is typical Zionist, European colonialist thinking. The way to deal with it is by never accepting the first premise — which is that Palestine is Jewish land. This is false. They stole it."
Karmi rejects the idea that there is any justice in any of the present negotiations.
"There is a proposal by the strong to the weak, where the strong are saying they want to come to a deal. But the deal is grossly disadvantagous to the Palestinians. It's made for the benefit of the stronger side, the Israeli side.
"Unfortunately for the Palestinians, there are third parties like the US, siding with the strong. It is a completely unjust, unbalanced, inequitable situation and it has to be seen in that light.
"The Palestinians are so tired and it is understandable that they may feel they want to take what they can and survive to fight another day. But if they lay down the only thing they have which is their arms, and sign on all sorts of agreements which will hem them in, then this will make our struggle in the future a hundred times more difficult.
"We must keep struggling. If the Israelis are going to keep on stealing our country, we should not make it easy for them. We should keep on fighting. The Palestinians should not be afraid to do this because there are forces in the world that understand this and support them. Who would support the creation of small bantustans? It would be like the ANC signing a peace agreement with the apartheid government. The Palestinian people will not accept this." [Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima is published by Verso. Her other works include Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process? and, as co-editor with Eugene Cotran, The Palestinian Exodus, 1948-1998.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 11, 2003.
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