GHADA KARMI: We stayed for just over a year. My father was looking for work desperately, because, of course, by then he was not, of course, allowed to return. He couldn’t come back the next day. That had all gone out of the window. And he was looking for work, because we had no money. He did find work, but he found it in London in the BBC Arabic service, which at that time was developing that service and wanted native Arabic speakers, and—who knows, I always like to think that the British had a kind of attack of conscience about the Palestinians, whom they had sold down the river, and that maybe—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?
GHADA KARMI: Well, you know, it was but for the British authorities in Palestine, there never would have been an Israel. It’s as simple as that. They gave—they allowed the Zionists to come into our country. They allowed them to establish themselves. Without Britain, there would be no Israel, quite simply. And so, I used to think maybe they had had an attack of conscience, and they wanted to help.
No matter what the reason, my father ended up in London, and he preceded us, and then he made plans for us to join him. So in 1949, we left again, and for me, a new wrench from my grandparents, and then we ended up in London. And what an irony. Not just any old London, but in the most Jewish part of London. It was an area called Golders Green. My father didn’t know anything about London. He didn’t know it was Jewish. He just asked for a house for a family, and they told him, “Look, try this area,” which he did. And we turned up. And, lo and behold, we’re surrounded by German Jewish refugees from the Second World War. And my mother used to say, in her more humorous moments, “Well, we might as well never have bothered to move out of Jerusalem.” It’s the same people. Anyway, I mean, one laughs, but of course it was all pretty devastating, all this stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was your relationship with your neighbors, with these German Jewish refugees who had not actually gone to Palestine, but had gone to Britain?
GHADA KARMI: Well, it was very good. Partly, my parents—really, it was quite interesting—never brought us up with the idea that we hated Jews. It was not about Jews. They always said it was the people over there. They meant in Palestine, and they meant the Zionists. They meant the Jews who came over to Palestine determined to take the Palestinians’ place. Therefore, we had no problem with these Jews, whom they considered as just neighbors.
So, not only did the next-door neighbor, who was a German Jewish doctor, became our—he became our doctor, and we were used to that, because in Palestine, actually, the best doctors were German, and they were usually Jewish, but, of course, in my school, many of the girls were Jewish, and I made lots and lots of Jewish friends. And I went into their homes, and I became particularly close to one family, and they had a daughter called Patricia, who has remained my friend ’til today, and she lives in New York, and I’m staying with her now, and she’s been looking after me. It was a very long friendship.
Now, but more seriously, although we got on and we were friendly—and I have described all this in the memoir—there was an important side to this, which I only realized later. I really began to understand about the Jewish imperative to create a Jewish state in my country. Now, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand me. I understood it. It did not justify it. It did not excuse it. But I understood the kind of emotions, the psychology, which was behind the devotion to Israel that I found as I was growing up in London. And that, of course, was amongst the very community—these are European Jews—the very same type of Jew that had started the Zionist movement that had gone to Palestine and had created this settler colonialist state in my country. At least I really—and from the inside, I began to understand the mentality of the Eastern European persecution, the pogroms, the Schtetl, all this stuff, which as a Palestinian, I never ever would have understood. But living there, I did.
AMY GOODMAN: But in addition to that, I mean, these German refugees, these Jewish refugees were refugees from the Holocaust, were the survivors—
GHADA KARMI: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —in—right after World War II—
GHADA KARMI: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —so often used as the justification for the establishment of Israel, that Jews would have a safe place to go, although the movement started well beyond that, but that was the final impetus, the moral sort of justification.
GHADA KARMI: Yes, that’s true, although it may surprise your audience to know that, paradoxically, the Holocaust was not such an issue shortly after it had happened as it is today. It’s amazing. I don’t know—well, we have no time to explain or to analyze why that should be—
AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually, Norman Finkelstein has written extensively about that, how it grew in importance as opposed to faded in importance, in his book The Holocaust Industry.
GHADA KARMI: That’s absolutely right. And that, believe me, is my own personal experience, that it didn’t feature as much in those postwar years, because I remember all my Jewish friends didn’t talk that much about the Holocaust. But there was—there was—but, of course, underlying it, I knew there was this feeling that Israel was a refuge, a place of refuge from persecution, wherever that might be.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your memoir, In Search of Fatima. Why did you call it that?
GHADA KARMI: You know, Fatima had been, as a real person—Fatima was a real person and also a metaphor. The real Fatima was the village woman who looked after us when we were small, and particularly me, and she helped my mother. She came and cooked and cleaned and such. She didn’t live with us, but she looked after me, and I was very, very attached to her. So for me, leaving Palestine in 1948, I left Fatima, really, who came to represent my childhood, Palestine, whatever that place was, that place of imagination after awhile. Because one’s memories were not very good as a child, it became a place, a country of the mind, and it became Fatima.
And so, in writing the book, I was trying to explain or ask the reader to share with me an experience of seeking for belonging, the search for my identity, who I was, having been wrenched from my roots so brutally in childhood and living in a—as it happened, moving to a society totally different from the one I was born into and, I should tell you, antipathetic to me. British society was pro-Israel. It believed in the Jewish state. It believed in the right of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine. So, for me, this was a double shock, and it led into a whole internal search, and a painful one, for where I belonged. Did I really belong with these English people I had lived amongst for so long? Did I belong in the West? Or did I belong to that place, that place which had become a place of the mind, the Arab world, the Fatima, and so on? So that’s why the book was called that.
AMY GOODMAN: You left Fatima there. And what happened to her?
GHADA KARMI: Well, this is the saddest thing of all for me. We don’t know. Now, we don’t know, because when we left, that was one of the terrible, terrible effects of the Nakba, that it not only took people away from their land and their belongings, it took them away from other people, and you never caught up with the other people. It was a complete rupture. Now, of course, that’s not true in every case. People did eventually find each other. Fatima disappeared into a black hole. We tried to find out what had happened to her. She was a peasant woman. There was no way of getting our letters to her.
AMY GOODMAN: Where did she live?
GHADA KARMI: She lived in a village called al-Maliha, which is just outside Jerusalem. And do you know, when I went back to Palestine-Israel in the early 1990s, I asked to see al-Maliha, and there it was, entirely Israeli, entirely Jewish Israeli. This wonderful little Palestinian village, which had had white houses, fields, a water well, all the charm of a Palestinian village, had now become totally Israeli. But they hadn’t managed to demolish the mosque, because I could see the minaret, which remained a kind of a solitary reminder that this was not a Jewish place. So there we are.
However, Fatima disappeared for years and years and years, and I knew nothing about her. And then in 2005, when I went to Palestine to work, I was determined to find her. I looked, and I looked. I went to the refugee camps, because of course she had gone—we knew she had gone into a camp. In August of 1948, the Israelis destroyed her village. And I knew—we knew she would have gone into a camp. That’s what happened to people. And I tried to find her.
Eventually, I found her grandson. I did. And I found him living in Bethlehem. And he retraced for me her footsteps from when we left her, how she stayed in our house waiting for us to come back, but of course we never could come back, and she was eventually thrown out. And then she and her family had to move, and they kept going on the move, being moved from one place to the other, eventually ending up in caves outside Bethlehem. They lived in a cave. And then they finally got out, and she lived in a house.
And until the 1980s, she kept telling her relatives, “Please look for the Karmis. Please. I want to see them again.” And my father, by then, was a well-known broadcaster on the BBC, so she used to hear his voice, and she used to say, “Surely, we can find him. Surely, we can.” And it was—believe me, it broke my heart when her grandson told me the story. But I never saw her again. And the thought that maddened me was there she was. In the 1980s, for God’s sake, I was an adult, I could have found her, if only I had known, if only she could have got them to look for us. What did they know? You know, how could they look us up on Google? And so, that—there we are. So I did know that she died, roughly when she died.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Palestinian writer, author, Ghada Karmi. Her book after In Search of Fatima is called Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Why “Married to Another Man”?
GHADA KARMI: Well, you may well ask, and I know this has mystified a lot of people, the title, and it’s been misunderstood. People have thought it was about matrimonial infidelity. It’s not, of course. It’s a quite—it’s a very serious book. The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote, that at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe, Jews, group of Jews who formed the Zionist movement, held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided that the only way to solve the Jewish question in Europe, the question of persecution, was for the Jews to have a state of their own. So they said, we have to create a Jewish state that can be a refuge for us, where we can be normal people, where we don’t have to be hounded, persecuted, etc. And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.
Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like. They were sitting in Europe. They didn’t know about it, so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the other man was.
And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.
So, in summary, Married to Another Man, had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already married. We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.
AMY GOODMAN: You advocate a one-state solution. Can you talk about that and why?
GHADA KARMI: Yes. Look, I wrote the book Married to Another Man, because I felt very strongly that, yes, as Palestinians, we will always mourn what happened to us—we mourn what is happening to us now—but we really have to try and see how this can be solved. And that has to come from us, because we are the people the most effected by this conflict. We are the people with the greatest stake in a solution which lasts. And I want to emphasize this. It is entirely possible to think up solutions for this conflict that are temporary, that might work for a short while. There’s no point in that. We want a solution that will be permanent and that will be durable.
And it seemed to me—and in the book, I tried to do it by taking the reader along with me to explain the conflict, to see how so many attempts had failed in the past, to explain why they had failed and to show, therefore, that there is in fact only one way forward, and that is, not to partition the land of Palestine, not to fight over percentages, not to have Israel say, “I’m going to keep my colonies on the West Bank, the hell with the rest of you, and I’m going to keep Jerusalem, and you people can’t come back to your homes.” No, don’t partition the land. We have already got a Jewish—Israeli Jewish community living in the land. We have already Palestinians who live in the same land. But most of their relatives don’t live in their homeland, because Israel doesn’t allow it. And those people have the right to return. Therefore, how are you going to do it? There’s only one way you can do it. That is, if it is one state for all its citizens, not a Jewish state, not an Islamic state, not a Christian state—a secular democratic state. That’s the answer.
Commentary 
