Part I: Palestine In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story by
Ghada Karmi is a story of displacement and loss. A yearning for
that place in one’s mind that can never be reclaimed. It is a
yearning known only to the displaced and the refugee, a yearning
for their childhood and that place called home which is forever
lost. In Search of Fatima provides us with a personal and
political history of Palestine from 1939 onwards. The suffering
and injustice endured by the Palestinians from the time of the
British mandate to the present is reinforced by Karmi’s personal
account. In 1880, there was a Jewish population of 3,000, in
1948 it was 806,000 and in 2003 it was 5.4 million, accounting
for 38 per cent of the world’s Jews. We discover that the state
of Israel was built on British betrayal, at the very least
complacency by surrounding Arab states and terror by the
invading Jews of Europe – the Haganah Irgun Zvei Leumi and Lehi
or Stern Gang, Menachem Begin and David Ben Gurion (all long
before Hamas and Islamic Jih