GHADA KARMI: I was in a house in West Jerusalem. I had been born in that part of Jerusalem. And I was a child. I was eight, and I didn’t understand actually what was happening. Nobody talked to us really or told us what was really happening. But what I do remember is that everybody was very scared. And I wrote about this in my memoir, In Search of Fatima.
It was a very bad period in my life, because as a child, the things that mattered to me were what was familiar: my home, my dog. I had a lovely—well, a dog, which I loved dearly. We all loved him. He was called Rexy. And the thing that is very vivid in my mind is a scene of the morning that we left the house. It was in April 1948. And I knew that we had to leave the dog behind. And for me, that was the most painful thing I could imagine. I knew I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t make him understand that we wouldn’t be away for long, because my mother said, “We’re not going to be away for long. Don’t worry. It’s only because it’s very, very bad now, and we’re going to be back, not to worry.” And they believed that, of course.
But the situation around us was so dangerous. You could hardly go out of the front door, because there were Jewish militias, armed men who roamed the streets, who were in empty buildings, who took shots at people. And it was absolutely terrifying. So my parents thought, “Right, we’ll evacuate. We have a young family. We can’t leave them in this danger. It’ll be a couple of weeks, the whole thing will settle down.”
But for me, as a child, two weeks is an eternity. And as I embraced the dog, I hugged him, and I said to him, “Don’t worry. It’s OK. We will be back. We will. It won’t be long.” But I had a feeling somehow, a terrible feeling, that there was something wrong, and we—maybe we wouldn’t be back. And so it turned out to be.
We left in a taxi, very hurriedly, because the neighborhood was so dangerous. No taxi would come near it, but somehow we got a taxi. It was pretty old. It was very decrepit. And we got into it, and it drove us as fast as possible down to the old city, where there was a big bus depot where you could take transport out of Palestine. So we had a car from there, and we drove over to Damascus to my grandparents’ house, with the feeling—my mother constantly saying, “Look, don’t worry. We’re going to be back in a couple of weeks.” And that’s what we thought. But my memories were—some kind of dread. I don’t know what it was, some kind of child’s intuition—who knows?—that it was—we wouldn’t be—there was something wrong that was very, very serious. And we went to my grand-–
AMY GOODMAN: And who is “we”?
GHADA KARMI: There was my mother, my father; there were three children. I was the youngest.
But the worst part, of course, was that Fatima—was a woman who used to come and clean the house. She was a village woman. She used to look after my—she looked after me. She looked after our house. She used to help my mother cook. And I loved her dearly. She really was my mother, actually. I loved her. And leaving that morning, I left the dog, I left Fatima, in that order, and it was the most terrible thing. I can’t even think about it, it was so painful. And then we went, and we never returned. Israel never allowed us to go back.
Many years later, in the 1970s, just for the heck of it, I wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy in London, where of course we were living. I said I lived in Jerusalem, my house was there, I would like to go back to live there. And he wrote back—they wrote back, and they said, “No, that is not possible for you. You can come in as a—on a tourist visa as a visitor.” And that was it.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever?
GHADA KARMI: Yeah, I did. I wanted to find the house. I looked for it desperately in the early 1990s, couldn’t find it, because I didn’t remember. My brother and my sister, who did remember, weren’t with me.
But then I tried again, and I did find it. And we went in. There was a Canadian Jewish family living in it, Orthodox, and they didn’t speak Hebrew. I didn’t speak Hebrew either, but I had an Israeli friend in case I couldn’t make myself understood. So, however, we needn’t have bothered, because they spoke English. And they went—they were very uncomfortable. They didn’t want me to look around. I said, “Can I look around? This was my home.” And they said, “It’s nothing to do with us. It’s nothing to do with us.” In fact, they were tenants. And I went around, but they hurried me out. I didn’t have much time to look around, to relive the memories, to get the feelings, the feelings back, because as a child, you know, it’s the feeling that comes back. You don’t really remember where that chair was, where that wall was, where that—you know. I had to leave, and it was terribly—as you can imagine, it was extremely upsetting.
But then a very strange thing happened. I returned to Palestine in 2005, where I worked in Ramallah for the Palestinian Authority. I wanted to live in Palestine for a while, and I had a visa, and I went in there to do work. I was working for the United Nations. And one day, I got a message from a man called Steven Erlanger, whom I had never met. I didn’t really know who he was, but of course I realized he was the bureau chief for the New York Times, saying “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house.” And it was amazing. He said, “From the description in your book, it must be the same place.” Anyway, we arranged to meet. I went over to Jerusalem, and I met him. And indeed, it was my house.
And what had happened was somebody at some point had built a story above the old house, which was of course a one-story place, a villa, typical of that kind of architecture. But somebody had built a floor above it, and that belonged to the New York Times. And the incumbent at the time was Steven Erlanger, who had been moved by the memoir and said, “This is your house?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And he took me—I remember he took me—he had made friends with the people downstairs, who were not the Canadian Jewish family. They were somebody else. They were really quite nice people, Jewish, and—Israelis, in fact. And they—he told them, “Look, this lady used to live here.” And they said, “Please, come in.” And I had all the time in the world. I went around. I felt terribly sad. He took loads of photographs of me.
And actually, we talked, he and I. I said, “Look. Look at what’s happened. You’ve seen this—you’ve seen me. You know what happened here. How do you feel about Israel now?” And I couldn’t get him to say that what happened in 1948 was an iniquity and an injustice. He didn’t say anything like that. He remained diplomatic, I suppose you would say, noncommittal, very pleasant to me, but it was a very strange episode.
AMY GOODMAN: The narrative in this country of that period when you left was that the Arab governments called on the Palestinians to leave, not that you were forced out by the Israeli government or, before that it wasn’t Israel, by Jewish settlers.
GHADA KARMI: I can’t believe that anybody still believes this narrative. Is that so? I grew up with this nonsense, and I always used to wonder how sane human beings could actually believe that people would get up, leave their belongings, leave their home, their land, their livelihood and just walk away because somebody told them to. Now, of course, later—first of all, this was completely untrue. There was no such instruction. It was not—on the contrary, the leaders told the Palestinians to stay put, not to leave, but then they said, look, get the women and children out, evacuate them temporarily, but the men were not allowed to leave.
And, in fact, when we left in that April of 1948, they stopped our taxi. They stopped it. These were militia, Arab militias. And they said, “Where are you going?” And he said, “Look, this is my wife. These are children. I am returning,” which was perfectly true. He said, “I’m returning the next—tomorrow morning. I just have to take them to my in-laws’ house just for safety, and I will be back.” And they took his name and so on.
So, of course, this was all nonsense. But the thing, you know, that used to get me is that you’d say to friends of Israel and devoted friends of Israel—you’d say to them, “OK, supposing—alright, supposing we, the Palestinians, left either because we were told to or because we just felt like it, why were we never allowed back? Why? People go on holiday. They do. They leave their houses, and they go away for a bit. They go and visit somebody. So, does it mean they can’t be allowed back to their homes?” And, of course, they never had an answer for this.
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