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Source of national bride: inside story of Palestine
Married To Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.
By Ghada Karmi. Pluto Press
THE main title of Dr Karmi’s brilliant and searching book – Married to Another Man – may puzzle some readers, but in fact the meaning of it lies at the very heart of the Palestine-Israel problem, as she explains in her brief preface.
When the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine was initially suggested, at the first Zionist Congress, in Basel in 1897, two rabbinical representatives sent to Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire) to assess its suitability as a homeland for the Jews, sent a message stating simply that “the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man”. In other words, the land was already inhabited.
This did not stop the enterprise forging ahead, leaving the Palestinians dispossessed and their descendants as inferior citizens.
Ghada Karmi is one of them, forced from her home as a little girl in Jerusalem with her parents, sister, brother, maid-servant and dog, by armed Jewish irregulars in April 1948 (more than a month before the British rulers departed their sorry Mandatory legacy), first to the bits of Jerusalem and Palestine the Arabs held on to in 1948, then to relatives in Damascus, and ultimately to Britain.
Dr Karmi has described this sad exodus and its consequences for her, her family and her people in her moving first book, In Search of Fatima – A Palestinian Story, which was published by Verso in 2002 and is to be reprinted in paperback early next year.
If that book was the emotional, individual and narrative “how” of the Palestinian catastrophe, the nakba, as it is known to all Arabs, this book is the intellectual “why”.
She shoots out the props from under many Zionist myths which even non-Zionists have come to accept as beyond argument – such as where European Jews actually hail from – and examines in detail why the West, especially the Americans, but with Britain and other European nations close in the vanguard, so steadfastly supports Israel, its continuing oppression of its Palestinian subjects.
This is a book of facts and lessons, to be sure, but it is also very much a book of ideas.
It is not a negative onslaught on Israel, or an embittered polemic, but a heartfelt search for justice, for all the peoples of the region, a justice without which the Middle East will continue to be swallowed up in misery and violence.
TIM LLEWELLYN
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