When Ghada met Steven

In 1948, Ghada Karmi was a nine-year-old Palestinian girl growing up in Jerusalem when she was abruptly transplanted to London, her family having fled their home in the face of the Zionist takeover of Palestine, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
By an extraordinary irony, her father, Hasan Sa’id Karmi, bought a house in the north London suburb, Golders Green. A noted scholar who found work with the BBC Arabic Service, he did not realize that he was resettling his family in a neighborhood dominated by British members of the same race that had forced the Karmis, along with great numbers of other Palestinians, to leave their native land. For then, as now, Golders Green was a little London Israel.
A medical doctor by training, Ghada Karmi is famous for her book In Search of Fatima (2002). A memorable evocation of the grievous consequences of 1948 for her family and Palestinians at large, the book took its title from Karmi’s efforts to find the Palestinian village woman who had figured large in her childhood. Her new book Return: A Palestinian Memoir is a candid account of the period beginning in 2005 that she spent in Ramallah as a media consultant to the Palestinian Authority in the aftermath of the death of Yasser Arafat.
In a riveting chapter Karmi describes how, out of the blue, she was contacted by the New York Times bureau chief, Steven Erlanger, who informed her that he was staying in an apartment that belonged to what he felt certain was the West Jerusalem house she described in In Search of Fatima. Evidently intending a kindness, Erlanger wondered if she would care to see the whole house, knowing that the owners would be happy for her to do so. Karmi had been to the house before, once when she was given the chance to go inside, a second time when she met with extreme hostility from later Orthodox Jewish residents. Intrigued to be approached by journalist who worked for a US newspaper hardly known for its sympathy for the Palestinian cause, she readily accepted his invitation.
What Steven Erlanger can hardly have anticipated was that his guest would take the opportunity not just to survey her old home but to press him to explain how he felt about being, so to speak, “here” by virtue of the fact that “we” had ceased to be “here.” Did he feel nothing, Karmi inquired, about physically occupying a house, which had belonged to other people? Was he at ease about being in a country that came into being on the basis of the expulsion of its previous inhabitants? A courteous US Jewish liberal who found himself on the spot, Erlanger replied awkwardly that “history is important here,” that “these things are difficult,” that “some things aren’t either right or wrong.”
The episode might be felt to epitomize the moral evasiveness of much western liberal opinion when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. As Ghada Karmi observes, many people who condemn unequivocally all manner of injustices discover an extraordinary capacity for equivocation when it comes to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Fixated on the suffering of the Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany, such persons habitually judge the Jewish state by an altogether more indulgent standard.
Even the great American literary dissident, the late Norman Mailer, could remark that Arabs might have shown greater understanding about the predicament of Jews following the Second World War. There can be little doubt that this condescending, not to say fundamentally racist, attitude has done much to sustain western public acquiescence in a Zionist enterprise that long ago evolved into systematic ethnic subjugation, the fiendish organized oppression made manifest by the occupied territories’ endless check-points and community-strangling separation wall, not to mention Israel’s repeated military onslaughts on Gaza.
In her new book, Ghada Karmi writes as a “1948 Palestinian” who fears that those who have come after her are in danger of accepting subjection as a way of life. Younger Palestinians will probably not be slow to challenge her bleak verdict, but few will dispute the moral fire and clarity of mind with which it is delivered.