Republican News · Thursday 6 March 2003

A narrative of displacement

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Palestinian author and political activist, DR GHADA KARMI, was in Belfast recently. Exiled as a child in 1948 from her home in Jerusalem, she spoke to An Phoblacht about her latest book, In Search Of Fatima, and its relevence to an Irish audience.

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"First of all, this book is for people who do not actually know what that conflict is about - and there are more of them than meets the eye - and the book blends the political and the personal. The whole time people are aware of the story's political backdrop, political events, but the point is how those events affected the personal story and the lives of an ordinary family.

I was born in Jerusalem. We lived in the west of the city and it became a place where more and more European Jews began to settle. These people were Zionists though - so they were not just coming along as neighbours. They were coming along as part of a political programme to displace us. We didn't know that, of course, but after 1945 they started to put that plan into effect. They did it by conducting daily bombings of houses, of hotels, shootings, snipers in buildings... When you walked down the road you didn't know if you'd be shot dead. This kind of campaign of terror was the one that led directly to our leaving.

The aim of the book is to humanise the story and invite people to feel as I feel. I want them to be able to get inside my skin, feel my experience, and come to a universal understanding.   - Dr Ghada Karmi

I was eight years old and I didn't know why we had to go. All I could think of was that I didn't want to leave. Everything I had, everything I knew and loved was there, including my dog Rex and Fatima, a village woman who looked after all of us. I loved her deeply. But we left that morning in April 1948 not knowing that we would never, ever return. I never saw Fatima again. I never returned home. It's the most tragic and deeply etched memory that I have of that period of my childhood, and I think my childhood ended there and then.

The reason I wrote the book was that for years nobody read anything about the Palestinian issue except through the medium of political analysis, statistics, abstracts, and United Nations resolutions.

These things are very dehumanising and the result was that people couldn't have seen Palestinians as human beings. Instead, we became a series of collective nouns. We became "refugees" or "terrorists" or "extremists", always a people without a name, without a face or personal story. And I know that the Palestine case has suffered as a result.

Also, the climate is not pro-Palestinian. It is the other narrative - the Israeli narrative - that is prevalent. People understand this conflict through Israelis eyes, and that is very wrong indeed, because it is distorted and it's simply not what happened. I became aware that that was how it was, and we had suffered consequently.

I draw two very important paralells to make my point. The first, of course, is the parallel with the Jews under the Holocaust. You know, there's nobody I'm sure, amongst your readers, let alone in Europe and Ireland and elsewhere, who is not aware of Jewish suffering during the Second World War. Why? Not because they've been reading about it in history books or looking at legal documents drawn up after the war or numbers of displaced persons or something.

It's because there is rich, narrative literature written by Jews and non-Jews - plays, films, diaries... The Diary of Anne Frank did more to enlighten people about how it must have felt to be a Jew in the Second World War than anything else I can think of, because it was a personal story. So I looked at that and I looked at the Irish example.

Most of us are well aware of the Irish question. We may not have the facts completely, but certainly we have a feel for it, a sense of it. Again, not because we all ran around reading Irish history but because of the rich narrative literature written about the Irish question and its personal and human aspects. So I looked at these two examples and thought, 'well, why the hell isn't this happening with us? Where are our novelists, stories, diarists, playwrights?'

So in my own humble way, modest way, I thought - right, well, I'm going to do that. I'm going to write my story. And that's actually the aim of the book - to humanise the story and invite people to feel as I feel. I want them to be able to get inside my skin, feel my experience, and come to a universal understanding.

The book took me two years to write. It was very painful at times and it brought back memories I'd long since buried, but that's not a bad thing. I realised that the experiences that came out of my story are ones that aren't necessarily to do with Palestine. I like to think that they are universal experiences - experiences of being forcibly pushed out of your home, losing your home, losing your childhood, your history in a way. I wanted to look at the whole issue of displacement - what happens to people when they are displaced.

I didn't end up in a refugee camp, luckily for me, so I couldn't say to you that I have an experience of freezing to death in a tent or dying of starvation, but I was psychologically displaced. For years I was completely disturbed. Was I Arab? Was I Palestinian? Was I English?

Now those experiences are not specific to me. I can imagine they are also shared by all the Irish who were displaced by the Famine and far more recently in Irish history. I am sure they are shared by people throughout the world. I thought about that issue of displacement - the feeling of not knowing who you are, the difficulties of trying to adjust to a society not your own and having to make something of that - not just survive, but make something of it. These are all human, universal experiences. And as I was writing, I saw that my personal experience had been transcended by this universalism.

I wrote this book partly for Jewish readers, and I would really like it translated into Hebrew. I don't think the Israelis have the slightest idea what has happened to the Palestinians, what they have suffered, what they are suffering still. And it's much worse than that.

Israelis have all been taught a distorted history of what happened in their schools. So there's not only ignorance - ignorance is bad enough - but they have an alternative narrative, a mythological narrative, based on a mythical history that never happened. They have these very crude ideas. They think that the land was empty when the Jews came, that there were a few wandering Arab tribes about, and the Palestinians came in after the Jews had settled, becoming aggressive to the Israelis... it's quite extraordinary.

I very much hope that the problems you face here in Ireland will be solved. You're so much further along than we are. There is an Irish agreement - a process that has much more life in it than any process we have in the Middle East. And I can't help but draw parallels between the unionists and the Israelis, who are hanging on for dear life to the ideas and supremacist beliefs that they lived with for so long. They cannot accept that the game's over. The Israelis are drunk with power but they too will have to understand that the game is over and they cannot go on behaving like this.

We watch your situation here with the greatest interest and anxiety, hoping that we can learn lessons for our own struggle. I hope and believe that your readership will find a lot of points of identification and sympathy in my story, but I want a sympathy based on knowledge, not just instinct. I want sympathy based on the facts. I hope this book conveys that.

If this attack on Iraq takes place, the present Israeli government will implement plans, which they have already drawn up, for the further expulsion of Palestinians from areas Palestinians now occupy. These plans are taken so seriously by Palestinians that several agencies have put out a call - an urgent call - to the international community begging for international protection against this eventuality.

I know that I suffered by being expelled, and my family and the three quarters of a million other people who were expelled in 1948 also suffered. We know the misery that that has brought on all of us, not to mention the poor people who are still in camps.

"The idea that the Israelis would create a new refugee exodus and a new lot of displaced people is unthinkable, unacceptable and it's got to be stopped."

• In Search of Fatima is available at the Art Shop and An Cultúrlann MacAdaim Ó Fiaich in Belfast and in all other good bookshops, price £15/¤24.15 (hardback)