April 1948, Jerusalem: It is the fifth month of what will become a nineteen-month conflict. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians flee their homes. Eight-year-old Ghada Karmi wakes to a shattering crash. Two suitcases are packed in a hurry. Loved ones (a nanny, Fatima, and the family dog, Rex) are left behind. Following a brief exile in Syria, the family settles in London. There, Karmi becomes a doctor and a staunch activist for the Palestinian right of return. She described those events in her first memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (Verso, 2002). This sequel narrates her own eventual return, more than fifty years later.
Karmi goes back to Ramallah in the summer of 2005 to take up a post at the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Media and Communications, helping to present the Palestinian case to the world at large. She is also seeking some kind of permanence from “the land”—a foothold, a life. This sense of a new beginning, the idea of it, like the idea of a revolution, turns out to be magical thinking: a hope that falls apart.
Return becomes, by way of these unraveling expectations, a book of fragments, a collection of feelings, observations, anecdotes. It backtracks, pauses, and veers into tangents. We are at her father’s bedside in 2007; we are in 2005, reflecting on 1991; we dip into 1994, 1948, then back to 2005. 1948 is recurring. The 2005 return, we learn, is not really the return, but a return—Karmi simply intended this one to be a longer stay. Her first journey back, which “broke a long-standing family taboo against ever visiting the place that had been Palestine and then became Israel,” was in 1991.
Karmi recounts that first trip as the real origin of the book, “a momentous journey that had filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a night-time Tel Aviv from the windows of the plane taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘Flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t ever be reversed.’”
Such is the language of the book: emotional, fraught, unresolved. On crossing the border into the West Bank from Jordan in 2005, she writes: “However many times I made the bridge crossing in later years, I never got used to this exercise of Israeli control over what was not Israel’s to police at all.” On an encounter with a man whose land was confiscated by the Israeli army: “How many stories like his had I heard over the years? The same defiance against injustice, the same brave spirit, and the same powerlessness to affect the doomed and inevitable outcome.”
We follow Karmi through her days: walking to work, speaking with a neighbor, going to a dinner party, attending a concert in Nablus; visiting Gaza, the walled city of Qalqilya, the City of David; interacting with colleagues at the ministry, preparing for a conference. Through it all, Karmi struggles to come to terms with disappointment and loss. Doubt begins to infect everything. She asks herself continually what she is doing there. At the ministry, she faces extreme resistance from colleagues, especially her resentful senior male counterpart, Dr. Sabah. She had anticipated that her United Nations Development Program pass would gain her respect. Instead, she finds only humiliation, disregard, and bureaucratic obstacles.
Karmi’s account can be jarring, disjointed, even banal. Though often vivid, it can also be dry and detached. We are stuck in her head, in her life—the emotional whirlwind of an exile trying to make sense of history and effect change. It is too much—too many details, too many characters and stories—and yet also not enough, in terms of depth, reflection, follow-through. One wonders if it is all still too raw.
Still, in Karmi’s fragmentary recounting, the reality of Palestinian life begins to come into focus. It is the reality of exile. Not the kind Karmi experienced in London, but that of Palestinians surrounded by Israeli settlements and checkpoints, the kind where you need permission to leave your own land. Among the many vignettes: Tariq, a young driver, born in one of the most crowded refugee camps in Gaza City, one of thirteen children, “had never travelled anywhere in his life, perhaps not even to Israel.” This is also an exile from certainty. Will there be water, power, or gas tomorrow? Will the roads be open or closed? Will land be confiscated? Will there be another conflict? Will the Rafah border really allow crossings? How much will be left—next year, the year after, in five years—of what used to be the Palestinian state? Everything is tentative, shifting, charged.
Karmi describes these challenges through the stories of those she encounters as she travels, documenting as much as she can. Her approach is at once academic and deeply personal; these two narrative voices intertwine and overlap. In one chapter, she writes of the tragedy of Hebron, Arafat’s miscalculation in the agreement that divided it, giving Israel the economic hub of the old city, as well as much fertile agricultural land. But even in possession there is a sense of futility: For those who kept their land, there often wasn’t enough water. Of one land-owner, Abu Ibrahim, she writes: “the Israeli authorities which came to connect the settlements around his farm to Israel’s national water carrier had at the same time disconnected his supply. They were deaf to all entreaty.” Abu Ibrahim’s vineyards began to yellow and wither.
In another chapter she is taken into the Jabaliya camp and makes her way through crowded, narrow alleyways “full of puddles of muddy water mixed with sewage.” Stopping at one house, she sees a kitchen filled with dirty dishes, a greasy floor, babies wrapped in dirty sheets, “a scene of hopelessness and squalor.” Her host, Um Sufyan, apologizes for the disarray, saying that she can barely manage, and her husband is disabled. He was injured on an Israeli construction site, where Palestinians “were usually given the most dangerous jobs with few health and safety measures. . . . If they were injured at work they were not normally offered treatment at Israeli hospitals.” Abu Sufyan survived, but many others died.
Karmi is acutely sensitive to these struggles, and doesn’t shy away from the disparities between the lives of Palestinians in the camps and those of PA officials like herself. She describes lavish dinner parties and lunches with top officials with a weary eye: “It was a pleasant enough dinner party: good food, plentiful wine, an affable host and intelligent conversation, but nothing I could identify with.”
Building on this, Karmi examines the problems that have undermined the Palestinian cause. She bluntly addresses the dispirited complacency of Palestinians living in relative comfort in neighboring Arab nations such as Jordan, and raises the question of the responsibility of the region at large. Egypt, despite its gestures toward helping the Palestinians by opening the Rafah border and tunnels, has long played a role in exacerbating the calamity of life under occupation. The Arab world has never really done its part.
What will happen, in the end, to this shrinking Palestinian land, overtaken by spawning settlements? And where should Palestinians go? What might it take for them to become citizens of the world, rather than the ostracized entities they are, turned down at all borders, often even their own?
Some of Karmi’s most revealing reflections come in the closing pages: “This Palestinian world I had briefly joined was different: a new-old place, whose people had moved on from where I had them fixed in my memory, had made of their lives what they could, and found ways to deal with the enemy who ruled them. . . . It was a life-and-death struggle, and it would continue until the end.”
Karmi’s book is partly a diary-like rumination on displacement and exile, but it’s also a plea for co-existence, not just between Israel and Palestine, but among Arabs and, significantly, among Palestinians themselves. Dire circumstances in the occupied territories have forced people to make lives out of what they have: “Had Israel finally succeeded in fragmenting us beyond recall?” she writes. “As this thought struck me, I felt a shiver of alarm.”
Survival, she seems to say, has become the only way of life.
Yasmine El Rashidi is a writer living in Cairo and an editor of Bidoun.