Palestine remains a country of the mind

"A mighty crash shook our house, the worst we had experienced in months of shooting, explosions and mortar bombing. We were virtually the last family remaining in our street. All the others had left weeks before, terrorised by the snipers hidden in the buildings, and random attacks and the eruptions of fighting."

The narration hasn't changed much from that April morning in 1948 when a number of Jewish terror gangs were creating havoc in Palestinian towns and villages, and nowadays horrible war crimes of house demolition and collective punishment in what it is called now the Occupied Territories.

The aim is still the same: To drive the Palestinians out of their homes, villages and towns into the wilderness and displacements, in order to either house newly arrived Jewish immigrants or create new illegal colonies.

In her memoir, In Search of Fatima*, the Jerusalem-born British physician and political activist Dr. Ghada Karmi travels in her memories and tries to stitch the pieces together and comes out with an image of events never ceases to happen.

"For months, our area (Qatamoon) of West Jerusalem had been the target for attack by advancing Jewish forces from the colonies to the west of us. These Jews were predominantly Europeans and alien to us."

The Palestinians by then had lost all the trust they ever had with the British mandate authority. "Everyone said those Jews had come to take over our country, and the British, who ruled us, would let them."

Catastrophe

In fact Dr. Karmi's father, Hasan, blamed the British entirely for what happened to the Palestinians, and what had become later known as the Catastrophe, Al Naqba.

The late Karmi, a former schoolteacher and civil servant who later worked for BBC Arabic Service, blamed the British for letting the Arabs down on many occasions between the First and Second World Wars.

The British played a double standard and devastating role. On the one hand they were materialistically aiding the process of creating the state of Israel, while on the other hand they were giving the Arabs false promises of protection.

During the mandate period, the British supported Zionism and enabled mass Jewish immigration into Palestine, so that, by 1948, foreign Jews comprised a third of the country's population.

In a recent revelation, unprecedented by a British official, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw admitted to the "many historical errors" by Britain's colonial power in Asia and Africa in the past century.
"In India, Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa," Jack Straw has said in a recent interview, "we made some quite serious mistakes."

In the Middle East, "the list is huge, there is hardly a country..." he checked himself, before going on: "The problems we have to deal with now are consequences of the British colonial past."

"The odd lines for Iraq's borders were drawn by Britons. The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which we were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis."

Again and again, a very interesting history for Britain, "but not an entirely honourable one," Straw concluded.

Not realising till much later, the Karmis and tens of thousands of other Palestinians, lost everything that day, the April morning of 1948: Their home, their belongings, their whole society and the right to normal life and a future in their own land.

The Karmis were among the lucky ones who managed to get to Damascus during the terrible flight of 1948 in cars and some other forms of transports.

Other were less fortunate, particularly the people of Safad in northern Palestine, driven from their homes, had walked to Syria through rain, mud, and cold, old and weak abandoned where they fell, and children separated from their parents.

There were few tents to house them and they stayed in homes, mosques, the streets, anywhere they could. Of course, many ended up later in the refugee camps currently scattered in a number of Arab capitals and major cities.

Since 1948, Israel set about systematically destroying Pales-tinian history, culture and identity. Over 400 Palestinian villages were demolished and replaced by Jewish settlements.

Hebrew place names were substituted for the Arab ones. The link with the past, which was all that the displaced Palestinians had, was deliberately severed.

Visiting Qatamoon 50 years later where their house had been, Dr. Karmi saw the old Palestinian stone villas that had belonged to friends and neighbours now boasting Hebrew name plaques on their doors.

"Joseph Schneidermann, architect," an oriental wrought iron gate read. And on the outside wall of the Karmi's own house, "Ben Porath" was written.

In Jerusalem's old city, a classic Muslim monument was now called "David's Tower"; in Jaffa, the traditional Arab merchants' houses on the quay were now described as a Jewish artists' colony.
Palestine has been transformed into Israel so crudely. Everywhere the road signs in Hebrew and English, the Arabic in small and insignificant script, coming poor third, although Arabic is officially Israel's second language.

The home the Karmis longed for was a country of the mind, a place of memory preserved as it was last seen. To that place, there can be no return.

Plight

The human cost of Israel's creation to Palestine's people has never been properly computed or recorded. Palestinians are to this day being pushed around, and have become objects that can be "transferred", to use Israel's preferable term for naked expulsion.

Their plight is continuously being dehumanised in abstract terminology and mere statistics. Their right of return is discussed outside all the principled conventions recognised by the world community.

For many Palestinians, the home they knew will never come back, but the country they had remains the source and symbol of their origin, their past and present identity and their future, if they ever were allowed to return one day.

*In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian story, is published by Verso.

The writer is the former president, Foreign Press Association in London.