This text deals with an important often neglected subject: the Palestinian exodus and the creation of the refugee problem. It analyzes the connection between the refugee exodus and the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine and reviews the Palestinian exodus from 1948 through 1967.
"One of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement." –New Statesman An intimate memoir of the 1948 Nakba, exile and the dispossession of Palestinian lands In Search of Fatima reflects the author’s personal experiences of displacement and loss against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped conflict in the Middle East. Kharmi was born in Jerusalem but her family were forced out in 1948, following the Nakba, when Palestinians were dispossessed of their lands at the hands of the Israeli state. In this moving account of exile, she charts her family's displacement to Jordan, and finally to Golders Green, London, where she initially refused to lay down roots in alien soil. Through this journey, Kharmi charts the personal account of a young woman's search for identity: as a Palestinian far away from home. Speaking for the millions of displaced people worldwide who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither, this is a nuanced exploration of psychological displacement and loss of identity.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is one of the most intense and intractable international conflicts of modern times. This book is about the historical roots of that conflict. It re-examines the history of 1948, the war in which the newly-born state of Israel defeated the Palestinians and the regular Arab armies of the neighbouring states so decisively. The book includes chapters on all the principal participants, on the reasons for the Palestinian exodus, and on the political and moral consequences of the war. The chapters are written by leading Arab, Israeli and western scholars who draw on primary sources in all relevant languages to offer alternative interpretations and new insights into this defining moment in Middle East history. The result is a major contribution to the literature on the 1948 war. It will command a wide audience from among students and general readers with an interest in the region.
The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT
In the decade following the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, some 100,000 diasporic Palestinians returned to the West Bank and Gaza. Among them were children and young adults who were born in exile and whose sense of Palestinian identity was shaped not by lived experience but rather through the transmission and re-creation of memories, images, and history. As a result, "returning" to the homeland that had never actually been their home presented challenges and disappointments for these young Palestinians, who found their lifeways and values sometimes at odds with those of their new neighbors in the West Bank and Gaza. This original ethnography records the experiences of Palestinians born in exile who have emigrated to the Palestinian homeland. Juliane Hammer interviews young adults between the ages of 16 and 35 to learn how their Palestinian identity has been affected by living in various Arab countries or the United States and then moving to the West Bank and Gaza. Their responses underscore how much the experience of living outside of Palestine has become integral to the Palestinian national character, even as Palestinians maintain an overwhelming sense of belonging to one another as a people.
An extraordinary memoir of exile and the impossibility of finding home, from the author of In Search of Fatima “The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a place taking me back to London and thinking hopelessly, ‘flotsam and jetsam, that’s what we’ve become, scattered and divided. There’s no room for us or our memories here. And it won’t be reversed.’” Having grown up in Britain following her family’s exile from Palestine, doctor, author and academic Ghada Karmi leaves her adoptive home in a quest to return to her homeland. She starts work with the Palestinian Authority and gets a firsthand understanding of its bizarre bureaucracy under Israel’s occupation. In her quest, she takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the heart of one of the world’s most intractable conflict zones and one of the major issues of our time. Visiting places she has not seen since childhood, her unique insights reveal a militarised and barely recognisable homeland, and her home in Jerusalem, like much of the West Bank, occupied by strangers. Her encounters with politicians, fellow Palestinians, and Israeli soldiers cause her to question what role exiles like her have in the future of their country and whether return is truly possible.
From the refugee camps of the Lebanon to the relative prosperity of life in the USA, the Palestinian diaspora has been dispersed across the world. In this pioneering study, Helena Lindholm Schulz examines the ways in which Palestinian identity has been formed in the diaspora through constant longing for a homeland lost. In so doing, the author advances the debate on the relationship between diaspora and the creation of national identity as well as on nationalist politics tied to a particular territory. But The Palestinian Diaspora also sheds light on the possibilities opened up by a transnational existence, the possibility of new, less territorialized identities, even in a diaspora as bound to the idea of an idealized homeland as the Palestinian. Members of the diaspora form new lives in new settings and the idea of homeland becomes one important, but not the only, source of identity. Ultimately though, Schulz argues, the strong attachment to Palestine makes the diaspora crucial in any understandings of how to formulate a viable strategy for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
This book is the first full-length study of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Based on recently declassified Israeli, British and American state and party political papers and on hitherto untapped private papers, it traces the stages of the 1947-9 exodus against the backdrop of the first Arab-Israeli war and analyses the varied causes of the flight. The Jewish and Arab decision-making involved, on national and local levels, military and political, is described and explained, as is the crystallisation of Israel's decision to bar a refugee repatriation. The subsequent fate of the abandoned Arab villages, lands and urban neighbourhoods is examined. The study looks at the international context of the war and the exodus, and describes the political battle over the refugees' fate, which effectively ended with the deadlock at Lausanne in summer 1949. Throughout the book attempts to describe what happened rather than what successive generations of Israeli and Arab propagandists have said happened, and to explain the motives of the protagonists.
This book analyzes the evolution and cultivation of modern Palestinian collective memory and its role in shaping Palestinian national identity from its inception in the 1920s to the 2006 Palestinian elections.