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A COUNTRY OF THE MIND<br><br>Outside our old house in Jerusalem, I confronted the lost world of my<br>Palestinian childhood<br><br>By Ghada Karmi<br><br>[The Guardian, 19 October 2002}<br>A mighty crash shook our house, the worst we had experienced in months of<br>shooting, explosions and mortar bombing.<br><br>We were virtually the last family remaining in our street. All the others<br>had left weeks before, terrorised by the snipers hidden in the buildings,<br>the random attacks and the eruptions of fighting. For months, our area of<br>west Jerusalem had been the target for attack by advancing Jewish forces<br>from the settlements to the west of us.<br><br>These Jews were predominantly Europeans and alien to us. Everyone said they<br>had come to take over our country, and the British, who ruled us, would let<br>them. People told my parents they were either brave or foolhardy to stay on.<br>My mother said: "No one's going to drive me from my home!"<br><br>But by April even we could hold out no longer amid the danger and growing<br>devastation. That morning, as we packed hurriedly, a dilapidated taxi with a<br>nervous driver who needed the money was all we could find to brave our<br>bullet-riddled street. We took only one suitcase for the five of us. "No<br>point in taking more, we won't be away for long. Things are bound to settle<br>down," my parents said.<br><br>Amid the panic I lingered outside the gate, staring at our house, all<br>strangely closed up and shuttered. Rex, our dog, who was being left in the<br>care of a local woman, started jumping up and pushing against the locked<br>gate, thinking I was coming in. My mother pushed me into the back seat of<br>the taxi.<br><br>As we started to move off, I twisted round and looked out of the back<br>window. There, to my horror, was Rex standing in the middle of the road. We<br>can't have closed the gate properly and he had managed to get out. This was<br>not normally allowed, for fear he would be run over. He stood still, his<br>head up, his tail stiff, staring after our receding car.<br><br>"Look!" I cried out frantically, "Rex has got out. Stop, please, he'll get<br>killed." "Shh," they said, and pushed me down into the seat. "He won't come<br>to any harm. Now stop worrying." But I stared and stared at him until we had<br>rounded the corner of the road and he and the house disappeared from view.<br><br>The others sat silently, their eyes fixed on the road ahead. No one seemed<br>aware of my terrible anguish or how, in that moment, child though I was, I<br>suddenly knew with overwhelming certainty that something had irrevocably<br>ended for us there which, like Rex's innocent affection, would never return.<br><br>The memory of this scene still comes back to haunt me, though many years<br>have passed since that April morning in 1948 and I now live far away. We<br>lost everything that day, our home, our belongings, our whole society, and<br>the right to a normal life and a future in our own land.<br><br>The flight of 1948 was terrible. Somehow we got to Damascus, to join a huge<br>exodus of fleeing Palestinians, much worse off than ourselves. The people of<br>Safad in northern Palestine, driven from their homes, had walked to Syria<br>through rain, mud and cold, old and weak abandoned where they fell, the<br>children separated from their parents. We saw them arrive, wild-eyed and<br>dazed. There were few tents to house them and they stayed in homes, mosques,<br>the streets, anywhere they could. Many ended up in the refugee camps we know<br>today.<br><br>I could have been there with them, but I was among a small "lucky" few who<br>made it to an affluent country. Growing up in Britain, I enjoyed a<br>middle-class life, a good education and modest material comforts.<br><br>My father - a former schoolteacher and civil servant who now worked for the<br>BBC Arabic service - wanted us to be "normal", to forget politics and the<br>past. For he realised the newly established Israel would never willingly<br>re-admit us. He blamed the British entirely for this. During the mandate<br>period, the British had supported Zionism and enabled mass Jewish<br>immigration into Palestine so that, by 1948, foreign Jews comprised a third<br>of the country's population.<br><br>But we were not normal, neither refugees nor immigrants. True, we had been<br>forced to flee our homeland but, unlike refugees, we would have returned<br>there had Israel allowed it. And, unlike immigrants, we did not choose to<br>leave our country to seek a better life.<br><br>Eventually, my parents settled for a mini-Palestine they recreated in London<br>of similarly displaced Arabs, their reference point always the past. They<br>could hide there and feel they belonged.<br><br>But I could not join them. My Palestinian past had been too short and,<br>unlike them, I could not reclaim it. After 1948, Israel set about<br>systematically destroying Palestinian history, culture and identity. Over<br>400 Palestinian villages were demolished and replaced by Jewish settlements.<br>Hebrew place names were substituted for the Arab ones. The link with the<br>past, which was all that the displaced Palestinians had, was deliberately<br>severed.<br><br>Much later, visiting Qatamon, the area of west Jerusalem where our house had<br>been, I saw the old Palestinian stone villas that had belonged to friends<br>and neighbours now boasting Hebrew name plaques on their doors.<br><br>"Joseph Schneidermann, architect", I read atop an oriental wrought iron<br>gate. And on the outside wall of our own house, "Ben Porath" was written; in<br>Jerusalem's Old City, a classic Muslim monument was now called "David's<br>Tower"; in Jaffa, the traditional Arab merchants' houses on the quay were<br>now described as a Jewish artists' colony. And everywhere the road signs in<br>Hebrew and English, the Arabic in small, insignificant script coming a poor<br>third - although Arabic is officially Israel's second language.<br><br>For someone like me, displaced in mind and body, this vandalism was<br>unutterably traumatic. I had come to Jerusalem to find myself in the<br>remaining fragments of the past. A life spent in England had not helped me<br>belong there. I would always be alien.<br><br>"Very emotional, the Arabs," people said, meaning "irrational - not people<br>like us". I went to the Arab world trying to belong there, but was rejected<br>for being too western. "Loose morals, loose living" was the Arab view of<br>westernised women. There was no category for someone like me, straddling two<br>cultures and unable to belong in either.<br><br>Standing before our old house in Jerusalem, I felt defeated. This house, now<br>occupied by Canadian Jewish strangers and bearing an Israeli plaque, was not<br>home. The home I longed for was a country of the mind, a place of memory<br>preserved as I last saw it in childhood. And to that place there can be no<br>return.<br><br>The human costs of Israel's establishment to Palestine's people have never<br>been properly computed or recorded. The issue is usually dehumanised in<br>abstract terminology and dry statistics. Palestinians become objects that<br>can be "transferred", to use Israel's favourite euphemism for naked<br>expulsion. Their right of return is discussed in much the same mechanistic<br>way, as if they were parcels waiting to be posted. It is a method that<br>disguises the manifold tragedies of this complex story.<br><br>I did not suffer the trauma of living in a refugee camp, but I suffered none<br>the less the subtler effects of exile and dislocation, effects that will not<br>end with my generation. The home I knew will never come back, but the<br>country I had remains, and for me and countless others, it is the source and<br>symbol of our origins, our past and present identity - and our future, if<br>one day we are allowed to return.<br><br>ยท Dr Ghada Karmi's memoir, In Search of Fatima: a Palestinian Story, is<br>published next week by Verso. She is former president of the Palestinian<br>Community Association in Britain
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