Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August 2008, page 64

Books

Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine

By Ghada Karmi, Pluto Press, 2007, 315 pp. List: $22.95; AET: $18.

Reviewed by Janet McMahon

IN HER EVOCATIVE and compelling memoir In Search of Fatima (available from the AET Book Club), Palestinian physician and writer Dr. Ghada Karmi recounts her and her family’s flight from their West Jerusalem home in April 1948 and their eventual resettlement in London. Far different from the multicultural post-colonial capital it is today, 1950s London could not have been more foreign to the young Arab girl, whose tale is one of adaptation to an alien culture and eventual reclamation of her own native heritage. Nevertheless, her life was changed irrevocably, as exemplified by the fact that, having lost her homeland, she eventually became a British citizen.

In her latest book, Married to Another Man, Karmi argues that the only just—and long-term—solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a single state in which all its citizens enjoy equal rights. While this would mean an end to the “right of return” of Jews from around the world who may never previously have set foot in Israel, current Jewish citizens of Israel would retain their right of residence. Diaspora Palestinians and their descendants would be allowed to exercise their guaranteed right of return—the same human right enjoyed by citizens of other countries who may have lived abroad for years, if not decades (the recently returned American author Gore Vidal, for example, comes to mind). In an interview during her spring book tour of the U.S., Karmi described this solution as both “realistic and humane.”

The author’s meticulous research and probing analysis are evident throughout the book, whose chapter headings include “Why Do Jews Support Israel?” and “Why Does the West Support Israel?” To this reader, however, one of the most powerful aspects of Married to Another Man is Karmi’s ability to convey the devastating impact of an alien Western culture (which we Westerners fail to see as alien, of course) on Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole.

“To comprehend the complex phenonmenon that is Israel and those who support it demanded a familiarity and empathy with European history and culture that was simply beyond the majority of Palestinians,” Karmi explains on p. 56. Later, on p. 120, she elaborates: “they had no psychological or historical sense of the intricacies of the Jewish-gentile relationship in Europe, and no comparable tradition of cruelty against Jews to help them understand its effects on such people. In just a few decades, they found themselves hosting a tormented, suspicious, complicated and neurotically self-absorbed community, toughened by centuries of the need to survive. Not only were Arabs required to accommodate this community, which was alien to them in every way, but to love it as well.”

(Imagine, for example, that the U.N. awarded China, as compensation for the Japanese occupation of the 1940s, more than half of the U.S., and that Beijing subsequently followed the same expansionist and exclusivist path as Israel. Could Americans be expected not only to welcome their new occupiers, but to fully embrace the Chinese language and culture?)

Six decades after the establishment of a state for Jews only, and more than 15 years after the “peace process” theoretically initiated a dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis, the discussion remains Eurocentric. Israel clearly considers itself a Western country—and why not, since that is the place of origin of its dominant Ashkenazi Jews? Still trying to atone for the European Holocaust, a guilt-ridden Western world tiptoes around perceived Jewish sensibilities and cannot bring itself to demand that Israel abide by international law. But as Karmi said to me in the course of our interview, this guilt has nothing to do with the Palestinians! Yet it is they who are expected to bear the burden of European history.

Ironically, it is precisely because Karmi came of age in the West that she is able to comprehend and articulate 20th century European political culture and explain its impact on the region of her birth. Whether she wanted to or not, Karmi was immersed in and forced to come to terms with the culture that was responsible for her dispossession.

The two-state solution—finally and, one suspects, somewhat desperately being espoused by Israeli and American leaders—will not work, Karmi argues, because it is a short-term solution at best. It is doomed to fail because it is not just—and justice is one of Karmi’s basic premises. In Married to Another Man, moreover, she demonstrates that justice is not merely an abstract principle, but a practical—indeed, crucial—component of any successful resolution of the Zionist conflict that pulls more and more people and nations into its destructive and inhuman orbit. (As the book’s title notes, the underlying dilemma is Israel’s.)

In her two books, Ghada Karmi has done the West an immense favor by allowing it to see itself through the eyes of those whose world it so arrogantly disrupted. Insha’llah, this knowledge will be used to construct a peace that is just and lasting for all.

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.