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Return: A Palestinian Memoir
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 plane 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.
“The journey filled me with bitterness and grief. I remember looking down on a nighttime Tel Aviv from the windows of a plane 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.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2015
29 people are currently reading
1346 people want to read
About the author
Ghada Karmi
14 books154 followersDr Ghada Karmi was born in Palestine and then had to flee with her family when it became Israel. She grew up in Britain and now she's a doctor, author, academic, and well-know international commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ghada still vividly remembers a huge bombing just behind her house in Jerusalem. "It was absolutely dreadful. I was bewildered, I was scared - I could see my parents were scared, which is very scary for a child because you think your parents know it all and they look after you. I knew, from that moment on, things had changed for us. I didn't know how, but things weren't going to be the same again."
After fleeing their family home, her family eventually settled in London. "My mother was very angry about the loss of the homeland. She didn't speak English, she didn't want to come that far afield, she just wasn't prepared. I'm afraid she never adapted, she stayed very Arab. I think it's a very great tragedy, one of the many, is people like my mother, who could not accept her exile, and was never really happy in Britain - and never found happiness again, in fact."
Unlike her mother, Ghada settled in fairly quickly. "I was a child. I made friends, I became very much part of the English way of life. I married an Englishman! I felt not just integrated, but assimilated."
Her idea for a one-state solution in the Middle East hasn't got much support as yet. "This is still a minority view. There is a constituency for it, on both sides, and also by the way among non-Jews and non-Palestinians, but the good news is - this constituency is growing. A few years back nobody was talking about the one-state solution. Today, three or four years on, we are hearing more and more voices raised in support. That, to me, shows that the trend is growing."
Ghada still vividly remembers a huge bombing just behind her house in Jerusalem. "It was absolutely dreadful. I was bewildered, I was scared - I could see my parents were scared, which is very scary for a child because you think your parents know it all and they look after you. I knew, from that moment on, things had changed for us. I didn't know how, but things weren't going to be the same again."
After fleeing their family home, her family eventually settled in London. "My mother was very angry about the loss of the homeland. She didn't speak English, she didn't want to come that far afield, she just wasn't prepared. I'm afraid she never adapted, she stayed very Arab. I think it's a very great tragedy, one of the many, is people like my mother, who could not accept her exile, and was never really happy in Britain - and never found happiness again, in fact."
Unlike her mother, Ghada settled in fairly quickly. "I was a child. I made friends, I became very much part of the English way of life. I married an Englishman! I felt not just integrated, but assimilated."
Her idea for a one-state solution in the Middle East hasn't got much support as yet. "This is still a minority view. There is a constituency for it, on both sides, and also by the way among non-Jews and non-Palestinians, but the good news is - this constituency is growing. A few years back nobody was talking about the one-state solution. Today, three or four years on, we are hearing more and more voices raised in support. That, to me, shows that the trend is growing."
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
July 18, 2016
The author left Palestine in 1948, and was raised in England. This book is the story of her return to Palestine in 2005 to work as a media consultant, mixed in with some personal family stories. I had a number of different reactions to the book.
In one sense, it is valuable, because it supplies a Palestinian perspective not often viewed in the Western world. The daily humiliations and sense of powerlessness that pervade Palestinian life under Israeli occupation are well described. The wall-building, settlement activity and violence toward Palestinians are deeply disturbing.
On the other hand, the book is frustrating because the author's perspective is so limited, Her world view is very simple. In 1948, an outrage was perpetrated on the Palestinians when their homeland was invaded by, and taken over by, the Jews. Everything Arab is good, everything Israeli is wrong. The Palestinians are a peaceful people who are constantly victimized without justification by the Jews. Her ideal solution is to turn back the clock to the Palestine of her memory - the Arabs get all of the land back, and the Jews leave. She has no empathy for the Jews, never mentions the Holocaust, acknowledges no validity to any attachment that the Jews might have to the "Holy Land," and ignores any security concerns that Israel might have. Violence against civilian populations, including "suicide operations," are viewed as justified resistance to a hostile, occupying enemy. Her world is very black and white.
The book is irritating in some respects, because page after page is devoted to the details of the bureaucratic infighting involved in her media consulting. The author had little or no respect for the Palestinians attempting to work within the Palestinian Authority and she regarded most of the work that she was doing as wasted time and effort. Those who lacked her revolutionary fervor are portrayed as tools of, or collaborators with, the evil Israelis. Those who choose non-violence are seen as buffoons.
The book does evoke sympathy, however. Many, many persons were displaced to make way for the establishment of the State of Israel. They lost their land and their homes. Increasing settlement activity, checked by no one, adds to the outrage, and it seems that nothing can be done about it. They lack land, jobs, and a means to defend themselves. Unlike the author, many Palestinians have moved on. They do the best they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves. The author, seeking a long-cherished ideal, is dismayed that her dream is so far from realization.
The personal stories are, in many ways, the best part of the book. They add some personal faces to the author's story and illustrate the injustices better than she does in the descriptions of her activities.
So I'm ambivalent about the book. There is much in the story of Palestine that needs to be illuminated, and it can be done better than the author has here.
In one sense, it is valuable, because it supplies a Palestinian perspective not often viewed in the Western world. The daily humiliations and sense of powerlessness that pervade Palestinian life under Israeli occupation are well described. The wall-building, settlement activity and violence toward Palestinians are deeply disturbing.
On the other hand, the book is frustrating because the author's perspective is so limited, Her world view is very simple. In 1948, an outrage was perpetrated on the Palestinians when their homeland was invaded by, and taken over by, the Jews. Everything Arab is good, everything Israeli is wrong. The Palestinians are a peaceful people who are constantly victimized without justification by the Jews. Her ideal solution is to turn back the clock to the Palestine of her memory - the Arabs get all of the land back, and the Jews leave. She has no empathy for the Jews, never mentions the Holocaust, acknowledges no validity to any attachment that the Jews might have to the "Holy Land," and ignores any security concerns that Israel might have. Violence against civilian populations, including "suicide operations," are viewed as justified resistance to a hostile, occupying enemy. Her world is very black and white.
The book is irritating in some respects, because page after page is devoted to the details of the bureaucratic infighting involved in her media consulting. The author had little or no respect for the Palestinians attempting to work within the Palestinian Authority and she regarded most of the work that she was doing as wasted time and effort. Those who lacked her revolutionary fervor are portrayed as tools of, or collaborators with, the evil Israelis. Those who choose non-violence are seen as buffoons.
The book does evoke sympathy, however. Many, many persons were displaced to make way for the establishment of the State of Israel. They lost their land and their homes. Increasing settlement activity, checked by no one, adds to the outrage, and it seems that nothing can be done about it. They lack land, jobs, and a means to defend themselves. Unlike the author, many Palestinians have moved on. They do the best they can in the circumstances in which they find themselves. The author, seeking a long-cherished ideal, is dismayed that her dream is so far from realization.
The personal stories are, in many ways, the best part of the book. They add some personal faces to the author's story and illustrate the injustices better than she does in the descriptions of her activities.
So I'm ambivalent about the book. There is much in the story of Palestine that needs to be illuminated, and it can be done better than the author has here.
January 13, 2026
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi Review
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi is a deeply personal and reflective memoir about identity, displacement, and the emotional complexity of going home. After her family was forced into exile following the 1948 conflict, Karmi grew up in Britain and built her life there as a doctor, academic, and writer. In 2005 she decided to make the long‑held dream of returning to her homeland a reality by taking a position with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, hoping to help with peace‑building and contribute to her community. What she encounters, however, is a homeland transformed by occupation, militarization, and political paralysis, a place breathtakingly beautiful yet strained by decades of conflict and bureaucracy. Her narrative is both a chronicle of personal pilgrimage and a meditation on belonging, illuminating the emotional tension between memory and present reality as she navigates encounters with land, people, politics, and the everyday struggles of life under occupation.
Reading Return feels like sitting beside someone who has carried both hope and heartbreak in equal measure for decades. Karmi’s voice is honest, eloquent, and deeply human: she speaks with warmth about reconnecting with her birthplace, with frustration at unhelpful bureaucracy, and with a raw sense of loss when the homeland she remembered seems distant from the one she finds. Her reflections on identity, exile, and the limits of political idealism reminded me that “home” is not always a fixed idea but a living, evolving landscape of emotions, memories, and realities.
I was moved by how she wove her own story into the broader Palestinian experience without ever turning it into abstract theory: her encounters with ordinary Palestinians, with checkpoints and walls, and with the weight of history and displacement made the narrative feel intimate and urgent. While the book does not offer easy answers, Karmi’s unflinching honesty and the poignant way she carries both grief and resilience made this memoir a profound, thought‑provoking journey into what it truly means to seek belonging in a land defined by loss and longing.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Because Karmi’s emotional honesty and powerful reflections made this memoir an unforgettable exploration of identity, displacement, and what it means to go home.
Return: A Palestinian Memoir by Ghada Karmi is a deeply personal and reflective memoir about identity, displacement, and the emotional complexity of going home. After her family was forced into exile following the 1948 conflict, Karmi grew up in Britain and built her life there as a doctor, academic, and writer. In 2005 she decided to make the long‑held dream of returning to her homeland a reality by taking a position with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, hoping to help with peace‑building and contribute to her community. What she encounters, however, is a homeland transformed by occupation, militarization, and political paralysis, a place breathtakingly beautiful yet strained by decades of conflict and bureaucracy. Her narrative is both a chronicle of personal pilgrimage and a meditation on belonging, illuminating the emotional tension between memory and present reality as she navigates encounters with land, people, politics, and the everyday struggles of life under occupation.
Reading Return feels like sitting beside someone who has carried both hope and heartbreak in equal measure for decades. Karmi’s voice is honest, eloquent, and deeply human: she speaks with warmth about reconnecting with her birthplace, with frustration at unhelpful bureaucracy, and with a raw sense of loss when the homeland she remembered seems distant from the one she finds. Her reflections on identity, exile, and the limits of political idealism reminded me that “home” is not always a fixed idea but a living, evolving landscape of emotions, memories, and realities.
I was moved by how she wove her own story into the broader Palestinian experience without ever turning it into abstract theory: her encounters with ordinary Palestinians, with checkpoints and walls, and with the weight of history and displacement made the narrative feel intimate and urgent. While the book does not offer easy answers, Karmi’s unflinching honesty and the poignant way she carries both grief and resilience made this memoir a profound, thought‑provoking journey into what it truly means to seek belonging in a land defined by loss and longing.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Because Karmi’s emotional honesty and powerful reflections made this memoir an unforgettable exploration of identity, displacement, and what it means to go home.
January 13, 2016
An interesting look at Palestine and its politics through the eyes of this Palestinian author albeit seen through a western prism.
January 4, 2025
This is an admirably candid memoir of Ghada's time in the West Bank as an advisor to the Palestinian Authority. It reads a little like the writing is a way to make sense of her own experiences, especially perhaps her disillusionment with the PA, her attachement to the people of Palestine, and her abiding anger at the binds that tie them. The scenes set in Gaza were hard to read because of the 2025 context of reading them, and trying to understand just how much worse what is going on now is than what could possibly have been imagined.
August 7, 2015
A surprisingly good read, against the better efforts of the author, who tries to use it as a political vehicle. Through Karmi's eyes, one sees a narcissistic and embittered woman, who wants to resurrect her childhood, even though 50 years have happened and the world has moved on. With haughty disdain, she looks her nose down at the Palestinians who remained. How could they not be more like her, refined and sophisticated and demanding of an ethnic cleansing of Jews? Most just want an ordinary life.
Karmi deeply hates Jews (she calls them "nervy", "these people", and other nasty little insults) and spares no bile in every encounter. She has no problem erasing any Jewish history. The Tomb of the Patriarchs being a Jewish shrine dating back to Herod? Nope. Al Aqsa also being the Temple mount? Heavens to Betsy, that can't even pass through her mind.
In many ways, she's the mirror image of the settlers she so despises, she envisions a world where they just don't exist and so do they. She listens to Hamas partisans discussing how Jews need to "learn their place," and doesn't blink, same as they listen to violent religious leaders.
They deserve each other.
It's glorious to see this hateful woman put in her place by Palestinians who live there, who have no patience for this wealthy foreigner telling them how to live their lives, and the realization that the majority of Palestinians don't want to "return," and have lives, and most importantly, that the world has moved on.
Karmi deeply hates Jews (she calls them "nervy", "these people", and other nasty little insults) and spares no bile in every encounter. She has no problem erasing any Jewish history. The Tomb of the Patriarchs being a Jewish shrine dating back to Herod? Nope. Al Aqsa also being the Temple mount? Heavens to Betsy, that can't even pass through her mind.
In many ways, she's the mirror image of the settlers she so despises, she envisions a world where they just don't exist and so do they. She listens to Hamas partisans discussing how Jews need to "learn their place," and doesn't blink, same as they listen to violent religious leaders.
They deserve each other.
It's glorious to see this hateful woman put in her place by Palestinians who live there, who have no patience for this wealthy foreigner telling them how to live their lives, and the realization that the majority of Palestinians don't want to "return," and have lives, and most importantly, that the world has moved on.
January 21, 2024
Beautifully written & v informative. Describing Palestinian refugee camps with their spirit for determination as the only corners that are left of Palestine was heartbreaking
August 28, 2015
Forced to leave Jerusalem as a child under the 1948 Nakba or Palestinian Exodus, Ghada Karmi felt the need to experience life in one of the semi-independent areas set up on Palestinian soil under the Oslo Accords of the 1990s. In 2005 she moved to Ramallah in the West Bank to worked as a consultant in media and communications for the Palestinian Authority.
As she might have foreseen, this proved to be a privileged sinecure in a closed bubble of complacent bureaucrats and politicians bent on furthering their status and material interests without rocking the boat, of expatriates caught up in romanticised demonstrations against an Israeli occupation which did not affect them personally, and poorly paid junior staff who kept their heads down for fear of losing their hard-to-obtain jobs.
Despite this, she managed to witness examples of ongoing injustice: camps like those in Gaza, “islands of memory in an erased landscape”, increasingly the sole places where isolation and hardship keep the fight for an independent state alive; Qalqilya, a town on the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank, surrounded by a twenty-five foot wall with razor wire and watchtowers ironically reminiscent of a concentration camp, but justified by the need to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and to protect settlers from their Arab neighbours; one of the few farms in Hebron still Palestinian-owned, where the defiant owner agonised over his withered vines, deprived of water by the Israeli authorities which disconnected his piped water supply and blocked his well, as part of the process of connecting the surrounding Israeli settlers.
Ghada Karmi made me realise for the first time how many Palestinians live outside camps, assimilated over time into countries like Jordan and Israel, inevitably resigned to the situation even if it makes them second-class citizens. She portrays the West Bank as a land of self-delusion: there is no sense of solidarity with Gaza, and many bright young people are employed by NGOs, precariously dependent on grants of foreign aid, to produce detailed research reports which remain unused. Likewise, frequent references to the conferences and political initiatives are depressing since we know now they failed to achieve any progress. It all seems like a displacement activity to allow the Israelis to consolidate their displacement of Palestinians. I was also intrigued to learn that middle class West Bank families wish to get their children educated at American universities, undeterred by the irony that it was US support which protected and empowered Israel.
I was interested in the views of Ghada Karmi’s ageing father: when she expresses concern over the apparent increase in traditional Islam as a “retreat into the past” which will “play into the hands of the West”, he counters that it is the West which has armed Israel and left the Arabs “dependent and enslaved” – “Islam is all they have left”. Sadly, this is the closest we get to her sole major omission: an epilogue updating events on the rise of a democratically Hamas and the increase in fundamentalist terrorism in the Middle East.
Although the author comes across at times as a self-absorbed and possibly difficult person, her intellect rises above understandable emotion to provide a revealing and thought-provoking analysis of an ongoing injustice which left me, like her, with a sense of “gut-wrenching despair” which needs to be more widely understood.
As she might have foreseen, this proved to be a privileged sinecure in a closed bubble of complacent bureaucrats and politicians bent on furthering their status and material interests without rocking the boat, of expatriates caught up in romanticised demonstrations against an Israeli occupation which did not affect them personally, and poorly paid junior staff who kept their heads down for fear of losing their hard-to-obtain jobs.
Despite this, she managed to witness examples of ongoing injustice: camps like those in Gaza, “islands of memory in an erased landscape”, increasingly the sole places where isolation and hardship keep the fight for an independent state alive; Qalqilya, a town on the Green Line between pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank, surrounded by a twenty-five foot wall with razor wire and watchtowers ironically reminiscent of a concentration camp, but justified by the need to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and to protect settlers from their Arab neighbours; one of the few farms in Hebron still Palestinian-owned, where the defiant owner agonised over his withered vines, deprived of water by the Israeli authorities which disconnected his piped water supply and blocked his well, as part of the process of connecting the surrounding Israeli settlers.
Ghada Karmi made me realise for the first time how many Palestinians live outside camps, assimilated over time into countries like Jordan and Israel, inevitably resigned to the situation even if it makes them second-class citizens. She portrays the West Bank as a land of self-delusion: there is no sense of solidarity with Gaza, and many bright young people are employed by NGOs, precariously dependent on grants of foreign aid, to produce detailed research reports which remain unused. Likewise, frequent references to the conferences and political initiatives are depressing since we know now they failed to achieve any progress. It all seems like a displacement activity to allow the Israelis to consolidate their displacement of Palestinians. I was also intrigued to learn that middle class West Bank families wish to get their children educated at American universities, undeterred by the irony that it was US support which protected and empowered Israel.
I was interested in the views of Ghada Karmi’s ageing father: when she expresses concern over the apparent increase in traditional Islam as a “retreat into the past” which will “play into the hands of the West”, he counters that it is the West which has armed Israel and left the Arabs “dependent and enslaved” – “Islam is all they have left”. Sadly, this is the closest we get to her sole major omission: an epilogue updating events on the rise of a democratically Hamas and the increase in fundamentalist terrorism in the Middle East.
Although the author comes across at times as a self-absorbed and possibly difficult person, her intellect rises above understandable emotion to provide a revealing and thought-provoking analysis of an ongoing injustice which left me, like her, with a sense of “gut-wrenching despair” which needs to be more widely understood.
June 4, 2015
Ghada Karmi is a doctor, author and academic, born in Palestine but forced to flee with her family after Israel occupied her country. In this eye-opening and extremely illuminating memoir she recounts the story of how she returned to her native land to work for the Palestinian Authority and describes the problems, obstructions and difficulties the Palestinians face today in their own country. Essential reading for anyone who want to learn more about the reality of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
January 1, 2016
This is a fascinating look into the everyday lives of a handful of Palestinians living in Remallah. The author travels from London back to the place of her birth (or near it at least) to work in the media section of the Palestinian Authority. While she does a good job of giving some background information about the Israel/ Palestine situation, I found her daily encounters with her coworkers to be the best part of the book.
July 4, 2015
I admire her strong conviction, and determination to the Palestinian cause and it pained me to find in the end she became disillusioned by the Palestine of today, when in her heart she hoped to find the Palestine of her memory.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 31, 2025
Excellent memoir, by Dr Ghada Karmi, who left Palestine in 1948 with her parents and siblings, spending time in Syria and then moving permanently to the UK. We follow her as she returns to Israel/Palestine in the mid 00s, sent to work for the Palestinian Authority by the United Nations - officially as media consultant.
The book was published 10 years ago in 2015, so obviously we know that things are about to get so much worse for the Palestinian people, but already there, it was bleak. I knew that but it was so interesting to read the daily life beyond the random arrests, the bombing of refugee camps and the checkpoint humiliations that make the headlines. She describes working for a government that has essentially given up, that is disorganized, where everyone is trying to do busywork and organize conference after conference, to please donors and NGOs and where everything has to be made palatable for a Western audience. Her colleagues don't get on, there are office rivalries everywhere, and the staff is not getting paid, sometimes for months at a time. Everyone relies on NGOs and on working for various associations - because there is no other work. No one seems particularly combative, everything seems pointless, hopeless. She meets many, many bright young Palestinians, working for various organizations, their talent wasted organizing yet another seminar with the same topics and the same speakers as last month.
She also travels - to Gaza and other places, visits villages completely surrounded by Israeli settlements, where the well has been blocked, farmers displaced from their ancestral land, mothers trying to look after families with no resources. Her own family left in 1948, packing very lightly, leaving behind her beloved maid and nanny Fatima - the chapter on searching for Fatima was very moving - because they thought they'd only be away for a couple of weeks. The enormity of a people coming to claim land from another people is incredible; the British orchestrating it is criminal. The idea of a one state solution is floated, but no one sees it and no one believes in it.
Chapter after chapter, she describes a culture and a people disappearing, their customs, houses, ancient buildings, people... reduced to almost nothing already. It is shocking to read, and to see how the Palestinians are trying to keep the international community interested and aware, and how no one really was paying attention. I remember protests and gatherings for Palestine around that time, but the governments have mollified even more.
It is a very pessimistic book - Ghada Karmi ends it with a note on how no one really believes a peaceful solution is possible, but the Palestinians have no means to fight back anyway, and will cease getting any essential funding from abroad if they express the view that peaceful protest hasn't worked. I loved the personal stories she included in her memoir, and the descriptions of how the Palestinian Authority is failing - I did wonder why throughout the current events, the PA has seemed very quiet - and how Hamas, elected in 2006 in elections that the UN reporters have described as "free and fair", is starting to gather supporters despite their support of violence and armed struggle that the Palestinians cannot sustain.
Really interesting overall, and really a book that I recommend.
The book was published 10 years ago in 2015, so obviously we know that things are about to get so much worse for the Palestinian people, but already there, it was bleak. I knew that but it was so interesting to read the daily life beyond the random arrests, the bombing of refugee camps and the checkpoint humiliations that make the headlines. She describes working for a government that has essentially given up, that is disorganized, where everyone is trying to do busywork and organize conference after conference, to please donors and NGOs and where everything has to be made palatable for a Western audience. Her colleagues don't get on, there are office rivalries everywhere, and the staff is not getting paid, sometimes for months at a time. Everyone relies on NGOs and on working for various associations - because there is no other work. No one seems particularly combative, everything seems pointless, hopeless. She meets many, many bright young Palestinians, working for various organizations, their talent wasted organizing yet another seminar with the same topics and the same speakers as last month.
She also travels - to Gaza and other places, visits villages completely surrounded by Israeli settlements, where the well has been blocked, farmers displaced from their ancestral land, mothers trying to look after families with no resources. Her own family left in 1948, packing very lightly, leaving behind her beloved maid and nanny Fatima - the chapter on searching for Fatima was very moving - because they thought they'd only be away for a couple of weeks. The enormity of a people coming to claim land from another people is incredible; the British orchestrating it is criminal. The idea of a one state solution is floated, but no one sees it and no one believes in it.
Chapter after chapter, she describes a culture and a people disappearing, their customs, houses, ancient buildings, people... reduced to almost nothing already. It is shocking to read, and to see how the Palestinians are trying to keep the international community interested and aware, and how no one really was paying attention. I remember protests and gatherings for Palestine around that time, but the governments have mollified even more.
It is a very pessimistic book - Ghada Karmi ends it with a note on how no one really believes a peaceful solution is possible, but the Palestinians have no means to fight back anyway, and will cease getting any essential funding from abroad if they express the view that peaceful protest hasn't worked. I loved the personal stories she included in her memoir, and the descriptions of how the Palestinian Authority is failing - I did wonder why throughout the current events, the PA has seemed very quiet - and how Hamas, elected in 2006 in elections that the UN reporters have described as "free and fair", is starting to gather supporters despite their support of violence and armed struggle that the Palestinians cannot sustain.
Really interesting overall, and really a book that I recommend.
June 10, 2021
The content, effort, research, and emotional labour put into Return: A Palestinian Memoir must have been insane. I applaud Ghada and all her contributors for putting together this neat, cohesive, educational and semi-chronological book. I truly learned a lot while reading which I greatly appreciate! It took a while for me to get through the book, I’m a slow reader and general and Return doubled the length it usually takes me to read a book, because of the heavy subject. I really like the way Ghada was able to weave the story with history, while you read through the events of her life, she tacked on additional information to contextualize what you were reading. It was a good book! It was nice to see all sorts of perspectives for the solution of the Palestine/Israel conflict. I also thought it was very interesting to see the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, we got great insights into the PA through Ghada’s job and how Israeli soldiers act toward the Palestinians. My favourite parts of the book had to have been how Ghada talks about her family, I really think her dad is a very cool intellectual. I’m very glad I read this book and it’s opened me up to more information I will explore.
August 8, 2024
Ghada’s storytelling throughout this book feels incredibly like a cathartic release, both in her realisation and reckoning with her role, as part of the wider Palestinian diaspora, to play in the future survival of Palestinian culture and thought as well as a vivid coming to terms with her more personal relationships within her own family and how the occupation of Palestine and her family’s subsequent exile has affected these crucial elements in her life. At times Ghada pulls no punches with how she views certain people she meets across her time in the occupied territories and her more personal association with the loss of her homeland is keenly felt when encountering the younger generations of Palestinians who she routinely feels more distanced from in her grasp to find her own place in the attempted building of a true Palestinian state. Her fiery nature leads Ghada to openly question the sights she sees across the land her family used to call home and whilst it may be argued this was neither conducive or productive to her then environment, no one can question Karmi’s passion and political thought. Overall a really useful introduction to the different aspects between 1st/2nd generation Palestinian’s and their relationship with Palestine as part of the growing diaspora.
December 19, 2024
Incredibly informative memoir from the perspective of a Palestinian refugee temporarily returning to modern Palestine and the clash that has with her own romanticized idea of Palestine.
Dr. Ghada Karmi is an incredibly interesting person and that really comes across in her book.
It's really interesting seeing the way that institutions in the west bank, and ramallah more specifically, work. And the contrast between the people working there, the Palestinian refugees/exiles like the writer, and Palestinians in refugee camps inside Palestine.
Dr. Ghada Karmi is an incredibly interesting person and that really comes across in her book.
It's really interesting seeing the way that institutions in the west bank, and ramallah more specifically, work. And the contrast between the people working there, the Palestinian refugees/exiles like the writer, and Palestinians in refugee camps inside Palestine.
December 13, 2023
This was a well-written look at the Palestine of today contrasted with pre-Israel Palestine through the eyes of some one who experienced both, albeit at a distance. Karmi is always clear about her status as someone raised in England, and I don't think that makes this memoir any less valid or important. I appreciated her look at the mundane reality of bureaucracy contrasted with the brutality of occupation. Showing up on a lot of "books to read about Palestine" lists right now.
January 26, 2024
Looking for some perspective and insights behind today's Gaza headlines? This book offers more than a few. Karmi paints a less than flattering picture of what passes for a government in Palestine plus NGOs as well as consultants like her swirling in orbits around the bureaucrats. But more than anything, she offers a vivid, honest, harrowing portrait of life for Palestinians under Israeli occupation since 1948.
January 10, 2021
Ghada Karmi's much awaited sequel to "In Search of Fatima" begins in modern day Palestine and its hopeless post Oslo intrigues. The sequel later links Ghada's own personal struggles from where she left them in "In Search of Fatima." A must read for anyone interested in understanding Palestine.
April 2, 2020
I wonder what this author would think of my family....
Insightful read— learned many new things.
Insightful read— learned many new things.
December 20, 2023
An important and often interesting story....but the author is just a very unlikeable person. It often gets in the way of her points and arguments.
January 18, 2024
I couldn’t get interested in her experience working with the ministry.
January 30, 2024
Read. 3.5.
February 4, 2024
So very complicated.
January 14, 2025
Slightly self indulgent, but I guess allowed to be as a memoir.
October 10, 2024
Really liked some chapters
September 15, 2024
“I had travelled to the land of my birth with a sense of return, but it was a return to the past, to the Palestine of distant memory, not to the place that it is now. The people who lived in this Palestine were nothing to do with the past I was seeking, nor were they a part of some historical tableau frozen in time that I could reconnect with.”
Many authors, including Mourid Barghouti, describe a sense of disappointment upon returning to Palestine after a period of displacement (“I do not live in a place. I live in a time.”) In her autobiography, the author describes her advocacy work for Palestine as well as hardships faced at the PA’s Ministry of Media & Communications. She boldly labels the Palestine Authority’s ministries ‘pretend places’ given the lack of an official Palestinian state.
“By presenting a picture of a false parity between the government of Israel and that of ‘Palestine’, as if they were equivalent in power and resources, it absolved the world of its responsibilities towards the Palestinians too… removing the ‘middleman’ that the PA had become would force Israel into direct contact with the people it occupied and compel them to take charge of their affairs. Only then would the world understand the true situation in ‘Palestine’.”
Much preferred this sequel to the author’s previous autobiographical work, ‘In Search of Fatima.’
Many authors, including Mourid Barghouti, describe a sense of disappointment upon returning to Palestine after a period of displacement (“I do not live in a place. I live in a time.”) In her autobiography, the author describes her advocacy work for Palestine as well as hardships faced at the PA’s Ministry of Media & Communications. She boldly labels the Palestine Authority’s ministries ‘pretend places’ given the lack of an official Palestinian state.
“By presenting a picture of a false parity between the government of Israel and that of ‘Palestine’, as if they were equivalent in power and resources, it absolved the world of its responsibilities towards the Palestinians too… removing the ‘middleman’ that the PA had become would force Israel into direct contact with the people it occupied and compel them to take charge of their affairs. Only then would the world understand the true situation in ‘Palestine’.”
Much preferred this sequel to the author’s previous autobiographical work, ‘In Search of Fatima.’
June 16, 2015
I won this book in a Goodreads giveway.
This is a memoir about a woman who returns to her homeland of Palestine to work as a consultant for the Palestinian Authority. The chapters describing the impact of the land and people are eye-opening. I enjoyed the stories of her childhood and life, especially on her circumstances of motherhood. The chapters relating to work in the PA were very kafka-esque.
This is a memoir about a woman who returns to her homeland of Palestine to work as a consultant for the Palestinian Authority. The chapters describing the impact of the land and people are eye-opening. I enjoyed the stories of her childhood and life, especially on her circumstances of motherhood. The chapters relating to work in the PA were very kafka-esque.
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