The Palestinians are no longer alone; Israel, despite the craven intimidation of some of its supporters, has ceased to be immune from truthful media criticism.
Edward Said once asked who, if not the writer, will “defeat the imposed silence and normalised quiet of power”. Ghada Karmi is such a writer. Her book In Search of Fatima: a Palestinian story, to be published this month by Verso, is one of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement, which western power and its creature, Israel, have “normalised”.
As a child in British Mandated Palestine, Ghada Karmi watched Jewish terrorists create the climate of fear and terror that gave Palestinian families the choice of fleeing or expulsion. She notes the irony that the word “terrorist” was invented by the British to describe the Jewish Irgun and the Stern Gang and its killers, two of whom became prime ministers of Israel.
Her family came as refugees to Britain, settling in, of all places, Jewish Golders Green. A few years ago, she looked for her home in Jerusalem and found in its place a kindergarten for religious Israelis. Everything of her childhood was gone, as if it had been airbrushed. “The scene could have come from the Orthodox Jewish part of Golders
— source johnpilger.com | john pilger | 7 Oct 2002