Ghada Karmi: The Strength of Palestinian Narrative in the Face of Violence

In Pakistan, where sympathy for the Palestinian cause is an acceptable and almost expected political stance, it is all too easy to become complacent and assume we know everything there is to know about the struggle for Palestinian statehood. Our own perceptions, however, are not based on our personal experiences with Palestinians, for the most part, but are in fact often shaped and colored by what we see on pro-Zionist television. The recent spate of suicide bombings in Israel, with the media manipulation of those events, has even begun to sway many liberal Pakistanis against the Palestinians’ use of violence in the struggle. But people like Dr. Ghada Karmi have a clear message: that there is more to suicide bombings that meets the eye, that the struggle of the Palestinians is not a struggle, but an asymmetrical war, and that despite the odds, there is still hope for the Palestinian search for nationhood.

Karmi, Palestinian by birth, physician by vocation, and activist by calling, was recently in Pakistan to lecture and promote her book, In Search of Fatima, her personal memoir of leaving Jerusalem at the age of seven with her family. She, her parents and elder brother and sister lived in Damascus with her grandparents for several years, but then moved to England when her father was offered a job with the BBC Arabic service. The book outlines Karmi’s journey from Jerusalem to England, her growth from child to medical student to political activist, and her return to Jerusalem to look for her childhood home and her maid, Fatima, who is a metaphor for the customs and traditions of a land that Karmi was forced to leave over fifty years ago.

In a series of speeches sponsored by the Dawn Group of Newspapers, Karmi spoke eloquently about the ground realities of the Palestinian struggle, as well as reading excerpts from her book. Well-received in Britain, she said that America was the country in which she really wanted it to see it succeed, although she felt that reviewers would be reluctant to handle a pro-Palestinian book. Her purpose in writing the book, she said, was the need for narrative accounts of the Palestinian experience in order to humanize the Palestinian people to the world, after their having been “dehumanized” and demonized for so long in the eyes of the Western media.

According to Karmi, the majority of accounts of the Holocaust are in English, as opposed to accounts of the Palestinian nakba, or “Catastrophe” (the creation of Israel in 1948) which are written mostly in Arabic. This ensures that everyone in the world knows about the pain and suffering of the Jewish people during World War II, whether they are in Europe, America, or even Asia, because English is the language of the decision-makers in the world. The number of Palestinian narratives that are written in English, on the other hand, “can be literally counted on the fingers of one hand”.

Karmi read a number of poignant passages from her book that illustrated the difficulties of accepting the deterioration and breakdown of one’s childhood environment through acts of violence and war. She read out a passage that described the fateful day of the bombing of the King David Hotel by Jewish terrorists, and the terror that her mother felt when British soldiers who were administering Palestine before 1948 came to search and ransack Arab houses. She spoke bravely about her own personal struggle, first with leaving home, then trying to assimilate into British culture as a young displaced Arab woman. She spoke courageously about her marriage to an English doctor, as Karmi said that she didn’t “love him, but I loved what he had to offer” – security and a sense of belonging. The marriage failed when during the 1967 war between Israel and the Arabs, she found out that her husband was “not on my side”.

During the question and answer session, Karmi was grilled by quite a few audience members, who asked her if she thought that the suicide bombings in Israel were detracting from the Palestinian cause; was she pro-suicide bombing; and why did Palestinians choose this method of warfare above media manipulation, propaganda, and other methods that the Israelis utilize so effectively?

Karmi explained that Palestinians do not call the suicide bombings “suicide” in Arabic; they are known as “martyrdom operations” and Hamas justifies them as legitimate responses to Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilian populations. “Believe me, when Israel says they are killing Hamas terrorists or extremists, they are planting their bombs in such a way that they kill civilians, everyone knows this. The suicide bombings are a retaliation to these civilian deaths.” She personally is not in favor of this violent method, but she says that it is a result of the lack of a well-armed, well-organized resistance to Israeli occupation. “The war between Israel and Palestine is an asymmetrical one, with F-16s and Apache helicopters on one side and only human bombs on the other.”

To make the audience understand the mindset of a Palestinian suicide bomber, she related the experience of a 45-year-old man who was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint (“they really are barricades, not checkpoints”), and told that if he wanted to pass the checkpoint, he would have to strip and walk naked past them. The man removed his clothes in the pouring rain, but was so ashamed that he lay face down in the mud, while his young sons were watching his humiliation from the other side of the barrier. “Whenever I put this scenario to Western audiences, and I ask them that if this were their father and they saw this happen to them, would they not want to go and kill all the Israelis they can? And they always have no answer.”

She went on to clarify further that she did not think suicide bombing was an acceptable way to deal with the issue of Palestinian statehood, but that it could at least partly be attributed to a leadership vacuum for the Palestinians as Israel has indefinitely jailed the one man who is universally seen as an acceptable heir to Yasir Arafat’s rule: Marwan Barghouti. Hannan Ashrawi is also a candidate of exceptional quality, but she has two black marks against her: being a woman, and being Christian. The Palestinian people on the street would have a hard time accepting a leader with those characteristics, no matter how good her credentials are.

In the end, Karmi related how she went to Jerusalem in the mid 1990s and found her childhood home converted into a kindergarten for Jewish children. She broke down on the street, telling her Israeli activist friend Akiva that there was no point in continuing the struggle, when their histories were so effectively erased; one might as well give up and accept the inevitable. Akiva told her a story that his father used to tell him:

“He said there was once a young frog and an old frog who fell into a jug of milk. They struggled to get out, but they couldn’t, and the old frog said to the young frog, ’Give up, my boy. It’s no use struggling. We’ll never make it. We’re going to drown, might as well accept it.’ And with that, the old frog sank back down into the milk and sure enough, he drowned. But the young frog could not accept it. Despite himself, he went on scrabbling and pushing against the side of the jug, so hard and so long that he churned up the milk, which curdled and turned into butter. And when that happened, he climbed out and survived.” He paused. “Don’t be like the old frog.”

Karmi believes that the future of Palestine rests in the hands of its youth. She continues to hold the belief that Palestinian statehood is a goal that can be achieved with the use of all options, including diplomacy, narrative and literature, media and propaganda, and armed resistance. It remains to be seen whether or not the Palestinians can turn their situation with Israel into butter, like the young frog of Akiva’s story, but as long as there are people like Ghada Karmi speaking for their cause, they are not going to give up.