May 18, 2003

‘There shall be one state in which both Israelis and Palestinians may live side by side on a footing of democratic equality. However, Israeli Jews will not accept such a solution because they are completely racists,’ concedes Ghada Karmi

THE tragedy of Palestine is too big for words. Told over and over again, it surprises us with new facts each time it is told. Tear and blood flow through it. There is no end to the variety of storytellers: they range from Palestinians to non-Palestinians: from Edward Said to Glubb Pasha; from Arab to English. Ghada Karmi is both — or perhaps neither. She asks, “Am I Arab, or English, or a hybrid?” This is the question to which she keeps returning in her frank autobiography In Search of Fatima.

The biography is brutally frank — brutally, because it comes from a Muslim woman, howsoever liberated.

Fleeing Jerusalem as Zionist thugs went about pillaging and murdering, Ghada and her family landed in London when she was nine, and lived, of all places, in Golders Green, a Jewish neighbourhood. She grew up to become a doctor and in that process turned from a shy Arab child to “a miniskirted” English girl.

Despite family opposition, she married an English doctor, who with his black hair, looked more a Middle Easterner than an Englishman.

Yet her “carefully cultivated Englishness” came down in pieces as she came across the deep-seated hatred of the Arabs among the English, including her husband. She found British Jews singing Israel’s national anthem at weddings and clicking glasses in toasts “To Israel!”

Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal threw the Britons into paroxysms of anger, followed by euphoria over Israeli victories in 1956 and 1967. Her marriage ended in divorce within four years.

Had the Arabs replaced the Jews as the object of hatred? Her analysis is remarkably original: “By some mad psychological inversion, the Arabs had taken the place of the Jews in popular scorn, and what had been an ancient tradition of European anti-Semitism was now converted into a racist anti-Arabism.”

Isolated, and disillusioned with the English in her, Ghada abandoned what she called her “dishonest English life,” turned to social service, visited Palestinian refugee centres in the Lebanon and returned to Britain to form Palestine Action to advance the cause of her people. This way, she felt, she had “cleansed” herself.

She travelled to Israel on her English passport and after great efforts managed to locate her home which her family had fled. Aliens — an American-Jewish family — had occupied their home. The lemon tree was still there, but the apricot tree and the vine were gone. The nameplate on the Karmi home said, “Ben Porath.”

Poles, Russians, and Germans had occupied her Jerusalem and called it their own; the Palestinians had no place in it. Her autobiography ends with the al-Aqsa mosque muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. She was “mesmerized.” The plight of the Palestinians in their own land shocked her.

She returned to the isles but, despite her Englishness, found the English “impenetrable.” She realized she had “no social home in England.”

She was in Pakistan recently on a lecture tour as a guest of Dawn. In Search of Fatima (Verso) has already sold out all copies, another edition is under print, and a Turkish translation is under way. Ghada can, of course, speak Arabic, but cannot really write the kind of literary Arabic that is needed for an autobiography of that sort. So the publisher may opt for an Arabic version later.

Ghada took two years to write her book, because she is also a practising doctor and has to earn a living. Her other books are: Jerusalem Today and The Palestinian Exodus (with Eugene Cotran). Besides, as a doctor she wrote The Ethnic Health Handbook.

She had been an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London; Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies; and Senior Visiting Fellow at the Department of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at Leeds University. She was also until 2001 the leader of the Palestinian Community Association in Britain.

After Palestine Action was wound up, she established another organization, the International Campaign for Jerusalem in 1995. She writes and lectures on Palestine regularly and appears on British TV and radio.

The book, In Search of Fatima, is a remarkable combination of the personal and the political. While the sweep of the book tells the reader of the racist brutality to which the people of Palestine have been subjected by European settlers, the pathos acquires personal dimensions when she links the political drama to the fortunes of her family, the exile from their homeland, and the trauma of living in an alien land.

Her mother remained Arab to the core till last, always thought their stay in England was temporary, and wondered why Ghada was taking to the English ways. This tussle with the family, especially her mother and elder sister Siham, occupies a great deal of her book, and tells of the anguish she suffered. “Who won in the end?” I asked her. “Neither,” she replied, or perhaps both. “I have something of both. I am different. I am not completely Arab, and not completely English” — unlike Siham, who was 18 when they landed in England, while Ghada was only nine.

She still lives in Golders Green and has no problem dealing with Jews so long as they are not Zionists, “for I do not like to deal with them, except to educate them and tell them of my point of view and what they have done to the Palestinians.”

“But are there any genuinely anti-Zionist Jews in this world?” I asked.

She said she had met a small number of Jews who, indeed, were “one hundred per cent against the state of Israel. This does not mean that they want all Israelis to be killed off or the state of Israel to be destroyed. But they do believe that the creation of Israel was a mistake, that it was no solution to the Jewish problem, and that the only solution now was that both Israelis and Palestinians should share the land.”

She is opposed to Yasser Arafat’s “two-state” theory, and thinks this is unworkable. Her own belief, as that of many other Palestinian thinkers, including Edward Said, is one state in which both Israelis and Palestinians will live side by side on a footing of democratic equality. However, she thinks Israeli Jews will not accept such a solution because they are “completely racists”.

Israel, she says, is a racist state run by Ashakenazis, who despise even Sephardic Jews. In a state embracing Israel ‘proper’ and the occupied territories, the higher Arab birth rate will eventually turn the Israelis into a minority “and that will mean the end of the Jewish state. The Israelis cannot even think of living in such a state with a people whom they despise, and for whom Arabs are little better than what the Germans call untermenschen.”

She said what mattered for her was “a vision.” While Arafat was a politician, she herself had “the luxury of not being a politician — thank goodness. So I can have a vision. The vision comes first, and politics come later. The present is not important. What is important is the future and the vision you have — and you must take steps to turn the vision into reality.”

She thinks Arafat’s two-state theory will also eventually lead to one state, because the two mini-states will be linked to each other by so many overlapping realities that the end-result will be the same one state. “But the Jews will not accept such a state, because they are scared of living with the Palestinians, and they fear the Palestinians will do to them what they themselves have done to the Palestinians.”

Ghada, however, had some sharp words to say for the Arabs when I ‘complained’ to her that the love between Pakistanis and Arabs was a one-way traffic, and that the Arabs just did not care for non-Arab Muslims.

Ghada said she was aware of it, and was “extremely depressed” about it. She had no full answer to this question, but she could speculate: Arabs, she said, “are really colonized in their heads. They have been colonized by Western civilization at a very, very deep level.” From this emerge their lack of awareness of and concerns for non-Arabs and their problems, like Kashmir.

She, too, was like them, she said, until she saw the monuments of Islamic glory in South Asia. “Lahore is glorious with its Mughal monuments”, so were the Muslim monuments like Taj Mahal and others she saw on a visit to India. “But it has never occurred to the Arabs to visit these places and take pride in what, indeed, is our common Islamic heritage. The only places the Arabs visit are Europe and America, because the Arabs think that is where the solution to all problems lies. Worse, they seem to despise their own institutions.”

I told her my feeling was that the Arabs’ historical experience with non-Arab Muslims was bitter. They had defeated and conquered Iran and till today despised the Iranians, but the Turkish-speaking people had ruled the Arab world from the times of Mutawakkil (d 861). For that reason, they despised both Iranians and Turks.

Ghada did not agree with me. She said if one talked to the Arabs these days, many of them would tell you, “Bring back the Ottoman Empire, and I am one of them. The Arabs’ fundamental mistake was that they put their trust in Britain and France during the First World War. It is true they wanted to get rid of the Ottoman Empire, but at least its rulers were Muslims. But the Arabs believed in British and French promises, and now look at the problems of the Arab world!”

Ghada said she was not being emotional in pleading for Islamic unity. “The Islamic countries are so rich; we have common problems and common aims, so why cannot we unite so that we are better able to meet the challenges posed to us by our enemies?”

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)