January 26, 2003

Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian activist, academic and writer living in London. Her autobiography In search of Fatima tells the story of her flight from Palestine in 1948 and her life in exile.

I met Ghada Karmi in her London home. Filled with exquisite pictures and ornaments from the Arab world, it is incongruously planted in the middle of Golders Green: the centre of London’s Jewish community. Such discrepancies are at the heart of Ghada Karmi’s life, fractured like so many of her countrymen’s until the most stark paradoxes become part of everyday existence. Her latest book is such a contradiction, an autobiography focusing not on her own development, but the growth of the Palestinian nationalist struggle.

Using her life story to articulate Palestinian experiences, was the starting point of the book, “It is very uncommon to get a human face to the Palestinian conflict — or a human dimension. It has been presented in a de-humanized, mechanistic, academic way — even by sympathizers.” But it was a strategy requiring personal sacrifice.

“One of the things that I didn’t expect from writing an autobiography was how exposing it would be. I was determined not to disguise or conceal intimate details because I felt that was not an honest piece of writing. Already members of my family aren’t happy. My brother objected,” she confides. But she believes it was worth this to force the world to hear one of these human stories.

She spent a happy childhood in Palestine and was especially attached to Fatima who became her nurse, surrogate mother and playmate rolled into one. In her autobiography Fatima is a symbol of the rural, ancient Palestinian way of life. Karmi explains that this was a deliberate strategy to implicitly deny Israeli claims that there was never ‘a Palestinian people’.

“I wanted to demonstrate there was a complete, integrated, ancient society before 1948. People had developed all the things that mature societies do: arts, crafts, customs, beliefs, and ways of looking at the world,” she says.

As a child, she failed to register the British occupation. This, she believes, demonstrated the difference between colonization and the foundation of Israel, “The British aimed their brutalities at specific sectors of society who opposed them. Also certain institutions such as the health system were remarkably improved during the British mandate. But the Zionist occupation was exactly the opposite of that. There you have people who do nothing but destroy and assault the whole population on an equal basis.”

In 1948 the Karmi family was forced to flee Palestine. Life in London was not easy, especially for her mother, who, Ghada believes, exacerbated her own feelings of dislocation. “She could not accept the departure from her homeland and life in Britain. She just lived inside her head in an Arab society. I think if my mother had been different the difficulties of displacement and identity that I faced would have been less. She sharpened the conflict incredibly.”

For Palestinians, she believes, migration is especially hard. “A traditional migrant from Pakistan always knows he has Pakistan to go to when he gets married or has children. We knew we couldn’t. It (Palestine) was there but it wasn’t there,” she says.

Naturally, living in Golders Green, Karmi’s closest childhood friends were Jewish. This has informed her political work and made her angry that “any criticism of Israel was seen as anti-semitic or anti-Jewish”. In the seventies Karmi founded Palestine Action, and worked closely with some Israelis; a fact she remains proud of today. “I was among the very, very first Palestinians in contact with Israelis. There was no contact in the Arab world and hardly anything going on outside: because Israel was the enemy. It was very unusual and needed courage for an Arab to strike political friendships with Israelis.”

This was far from an easy political decision, and involved some secrecy as well as determination. “I kept it very quiet. I knew that if this was known outside the progressive circles, the Palestinians would not have understood. They would have thought I was some sort of traitor. I could never talk about it even to my own family.”

Her political work led to her meeting Yasser Arafat, who she deeply admired, and still has a great respect for. “He is a man who has had a remarkable and historic role with regard to the Palestine movement, in making Palestinians feel they belong and he did that through fighting and struggling. That position is unassailable.” But she does not see him as the leader for the future.

“There has been a lot of discord with those around him in the Palestinian Authority. He himself is not corrupt but the people around him have been known to be. This treatment of him by the Israelis making him irrelevant and making the Americans regard him as irrelevant has had a very damaging effect on him. That is very serious. It is that which has discredited Arafat.”

After leaving London, Karmi worked as a physician in Palestinian refugee camps. Her life in the UK made her an outsider in Arab society, but allowed her the objectivity to criticize faults within it.

“Quite honestly I think women are not treated well in our society and it’s something that I regret very much. This was something that I found very depressing. I terribly wanted to belong in Arab society because I had roots there but it was not to be — there was no way I could have belonged.”

In the early 1980s to 1995 she worked as a specialist in migrant and refugee health. She also became an academic expert in Islamic mediaeval medicine. “When I was in Karachi I visited the Hamdard Institute that practises traditional Arabic medicine”.

Moving back into politics between 1999-2001 she led a major project on Israel-Palestine reconciliation, always driven by her need to make the world understand the plight of ordinary Palestinians. “Everybody hears there is an occupation but it’s not my impression that anybody on this side of the world really knows what that means”.

An incident, which to her illustrates the true horror of life in Palestinian cities concerns the tanks currently at the centre of many of them. “These tanks are really terrifying and completely closed up and the soldiers never come out. The little children — because this is such an aspect of their lives — get up and play on these tanks.”

One day a girl of six was playing on a tank with some friends. “The little boys ran away in terror, but the little girl stayed. The soldier told her to get off. She just said, ‘You are very rude and I am not going until you speak nicely to me.’ The soldier was taken aback and apologized.”

This she says is a symbol of how Palestinians have been forced to accept destruction and violence into their lives, and the lives of their children.

Karmi’s other writings include Jerusalem today: what future for the peace process? I asked her who she saw as a future Palestinian leader. “Marwan Baghouti is without doubt a natural successor. He’s a secular man not a fanatic. He’s got a lot of experience on the ground He’s proved his ability to fight and resist. He’s faithful and he’s not corrupt. He exactly fits the bill and the Israelis know it and that’s why they’ve imprisoned him — I’m sure of it.”

She remains less than enthusiastic about the current sympathy for Palestine in the west, however. “In 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon they were so brutal they bombed Beirut, they threw napalm on South Lebanon, little babies were burning from napalm and when people saw this they didn’t approve of Israel. But somehow, each time, Israel makes it back. Don’t ask me how.” Ghada Karmi’s work has always tried to highlight such discrepancies. But countering the public’s amnesia towards Israeli behaviour through an autobiography is perhaps her most revolutionary and innovative idea. For her the struggle will continue until the world finally realizes that the Palestinian conflict is, “above all, a human tragedy visited on a whole people through absolutely no fault of their own.”

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