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| Palestine: A Personal History by Karl Sabbagh |
Letters
Israel professes to want peace, yet whenever there is a danger of this happening, it protests loudly that the adversary is not to be trusted. In the case of the Palestinians, it sabotages peace efforts with assassinations and intensification of its illegal occupation. Without mythical enemies, Israel cannot justify its huge expenditure on security and defence, which contributes so much to the prosperity of the country. Israel's hypocrisy is most blatant in its possession of nuclear weapons, which it condemns in the hands of anyone else in the area. Without the artificial threats, money would not pour into the country from the US government and from Jews who have no desire to live in Israel, but contribute out of feelings of guilt. One day, Israel is going to have to realise that its only hope of peace and security is a fair and just sharing of the land with the people who used to form 90% of the population, the Palestinian Arabs. It was the theft of that land that led to the continuing hostility of Arab and Muslim countries, a hostility that will only go away when the Palestinians receive justice.
Karl Sabbagh
Author, Palestine: A Personal History
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[AS
ALWAYS
PLEASE GO TO THE LINK
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FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and
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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview13 Land of my father
Karl Sabbagh's latest book is a welcome addition to a new mini-genre of works on Israel and Palestine that focus on people rather than politicians. Sabbagh certainly has excellent credentials for relating the story of Palestine through his own family. The Sabbaghs trace their roots back centuries, often with a ringside seat by kings and potentates. His detective work has unearthed historical treasures such as Daher al-Omar al-Zaydani, who ran his own autonomous state of Palestine within the Ottoman empire during the 18th century, selling cotton to the French. Both of Daher's biographers were Sabbaghs, while another, Ibrahim, was Daher's vizier, or chief minister, and his doctor. Ibrahim, Sabbagh confesses, was "a nasty piece of work ... among other things, a miser and an embezzler".Sabbagh writes with an easy, engaging style. "I am the son of a Palestinian father, but I am endowed with few of the characteristics associated in the popular mind with Palestinians or Arabs. I am not poor, unshaven or a speaker of broken English. I do not know how to use a gun or manufacture a bomb. I have had little to do with camels, sand or palm trees." His father, Isa Khalil, was the lead broadcaster for the BBC Arabic service during the second world war, much loved across the Middle East for his perfect diction. His mother, Pamela, was a secretary at the BBC. The English beauty and the glamorous Palestinian made an attractive couple, although the marriage lasted just a few years.
Despite the book's subtitle, "A Personal History", much of the first half is a general history of Palestine. It would have made better reading to go straight into the Sabbaghs' family story, rather than spending time on another lengthy, partisan debunking of Jewish claims to the land. I would have liked more on Sabbagh's relatives, longer pen-portraits and, especially, much more on his relationship with his father, even some extracts from his broadcasts to give us a sense of this fascinating man. His mother, Pamela, is also curiously absent apart from a few mentions. But perhaps British reticence triumphed over Mediterranean candour.
The Sabbagh family history shows the absurdity of Israel Zangwill's claim that Palestine was "a land without a people for a people without a land". Sabbagh's grandfather was a lawyer in Tulkarm. His relatives were businessmen and traders, part of an intricate web of societal links that reached across Palestine and the Levant. Palestinian Arab society was highly developed, especially in the towns and cities, with a sophisticated cultural and political life. Sabbagh is good on what might be called the second "lost history of Palestine"(if the first is that of the Palestinians themselves): the good relations between many Jews and Arabs before 1948. When Sabbagh's uncle had a car accident outside the Jewish town of Nahariya, local people took him and his passengers in, gave them tea and cakes and tended to their injuries. A man called Azmi Audeh recalled the local Jewish fishmonger who served his father: "The Jew looked exactly like us; had the same skin colour, spoke the same Arabic language, dressed exactly like us, and even had the same nose. He seemed to be a very nice man, eager to please. So why was this man a problem?" The problem was, of course, not piscine but political: the Yishuv, the Zionist state in waiting, claimed Palestine for itself....READ MORE
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