In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story

50 years later, Ghada does return to what is now Israel--and to
her city of Jerusalem. Briefly, she is able to visit her childhood home, now occupied by Jewish immigrants. She and her family were never compensated in any way for their
loss of home, possessions and country.

The author presents many insights about the culture in Jerusalem before the Israeli takeover. She describes the open, social interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims at that earlier time. She and her family are Muslim.


An Arab-English Hybrid   December 11, 2002
Ronald Bleier (New York, NY USA)
31 out of 36 found this review helpful

Ghada Karmi's book tells the dramatic story of her search for personal and political identity. Her family was forced out of their comfortable West Jerusalem home by Jewish attacks meant to rid the area of Palestinians beginning in January 1948. Finally the infamous Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948 made them realize months and weeks after most of their neighbors that their personal safety was at risk. Since the author was a girl of 9 at the time she was young enough to be strongly influenced by English culture when their family finally landed in London about a year later.

Much of Ms. Karmi's book is devoted to the story of her bumpy and courageous journey to discover whether she is English, Arab or "some kind of hybrid." As devoutly as she wished to become English, events intrude on her in both personal and political ways. She loses out in a school speaking contest not on the merits but because the judges refuse to reward a prize to the "little dark girl," instead of to an English girl. The 1956 Suez War highlights for the teenage Karmi English discrimination and hatred toward Arabs and makes her an outcast at school. Another key turning point was the smashing Israeli victory in the 1967 war which plays a role in breaking up her marriage to an Englishman. The war once again makes her an outcast and forces her to recognize that she can no longer escape her Arab identity.

Among the treasures of this book are the glimpses we get along the way of buried historical events of special concern to Palestinians. For example we learn that it was the Iraqi contingent in the war of 1948 which saved Tulkarm, a town on the West Bank, from attacking Jewish forces; and she quotes an Israeli soldier who wonders why the Iraqis didn't proceed along the road to Tel Aviv which might have turned the tide of the war. We learn that the Israeli Knesset is built on the Palestinian town of Lifta and that the Holocaust museum also is built on confiscated Palestinian land.

Finally, surveying the wreckage that is the patrimony of Palestinians today, the author has the courage to raise the question of whether the Palestinian people will remain adrift as mere "flotsam and jetsam...the detritus of history...doomed to be fragmented and dispersed." Readers will have to decide such questions for themselves and Karmi's book provides them with a unique and marvelously told Palestinian story on which to base their judgment.


What happened to Palestine and the Palestinians   August 15, 2003
Hania Qutub (Arlington, VA United States)
29 out of 33 found this review helpful

This is an excellent and thoughtful book that takes the reader through the events that led to the destruction of Palestine and forced hundreds of thousands of people, like Fatima and her family from their homes. For many Palestinians, reading this book relives memories of a tragedy that so many of us have suffered and so little of the American public knows. I highly recommend it as an introduction to Palestine and the origin of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel.

The second half of the book which deals with the protagonist's search for identity in England is also very characteristic of what the Palestinian families who were forced to emigrate to different countries all over the world have to face: complete assimilation versus living in the injury done to us by the creation of the Israeli state.

There is no need for "the other viewpoint" in this book. This is the personal story of a Palestinian in the Palestine-Israeli conflict. Ms. Karmi does not need to justify the Israeli's feelings, although I think she actually tried.


Well-written and gripping, but lacking in accuracy   April 27, 2003
Leah Suslovich (Brookline, MA USA)
21 out of 65 found this review helpful

I see this book as having two distinct parts. The first is Ms. Karmi's relation of an her experience as an Arab immigrant in England, and that part is excellent. I would give it five stars. (Just one example: of her relatives, she writes, "It was as if Englishness to them were a form of clothing, a coat or a dress which you wore when you went out into English society, but which you removed as soon as you were back with Arabs.") The second part, which seems to be the main reason for the book, is Ms. Karmi's relation of her version of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This part of the book, unfortunately, is very troubling.

When I started reading this book, it was because I was interested in hearing the Palestinian point of view. I had heard from some people that it contained a distorted view of the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but as I started reading, although the book was clearly one-sided, I did not think it was actually falsified. It just represented what a young Palestinian girl at the time would have heard about. She would not have heard about Arab massacres of Jews, obviously, while the case of Jews massacring Arabs (Deir Yassin) would have stood out quite clearly in her mind. She might have really thought that the British were pro-Jewish (though this actually made me laugh aloud). So, for the first half of this book, although I raised my eyebrows frequently, I felt that I was getting exactly what I had wanted.

But as Ms. Karmi started writing from the perspective of an adult, I found such allowances less convincing. Is she really entitled to start her account of the 1967 war with "On June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes attacked Egypt."? True, she admits that she stopped following the Middle East until that day, but a certain amount of minimum research is to be expected once she decides to put historical information into a book. As I continued reading, it became clearer that these omissions are not a result of ignorance, but of something more disturbing. In a footnote on page 370, for example, Ms. Karmi is not even willing to concede that the Western Wall ("the so-called Wailing Wall," as she puts it) was part of the Jewish Temple -- a matter of incontrovertible historical fact.

This even spills over into her otherwise excellent relation of her immigrant experience. Apparently, she spent her youth being innocently tormented by those arrogant, insular Jews, but when she informed a Jewish classmate that "Hitler should have finished the job" she was un-influenced by any anti-semitism she might have heard at home. (I believe that she didn't "realize the import" of what she had said, as she claims, but in her long, rambling explanation of how innocent the incident was, she never mentions where she heard the phrase in the first place.)

As a whole, I have to say that I am disappointed with this book. It is very well-written and, as I said above, a valuable relation of an immigrant experience. But the author should have done more research, and should not have let her prejudices get carried away with her when it came to writing down simple matters of fact. I am not suggesting that she should write a "fair" history -- like I said, the whole point was to hear the Palestinian point of view. But I believe that the Palestinian point of view can be related without resorting to misstatements of fact.


The real tragedy in Palestine   January 30, 2003
Hanna aboulghar (Cairo, Egypt)
13 out of 17 found this review helpful

This book is probably one of the best to reflect the true impact of what happened in Palestine in the 1940s and what it has meant for millions of Palestinians to grow up in exile. People tend to focus on the everyday violence, the blood shed and the lives that are lost, and while this is a true tragedy, we have to remember that the real tragedy is the loss of a whole people's citizenship, homes, past and future of generations who have been forced to abandon their land, and homes and with them their culture, and their sense of identity. The real tragedy is to know you have a home and that someone else is living in it.