Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine
Two rabbis, visiting Palestine in 1897, observed that the land was like a bride, 'beautiful, but married to another man'. By which they meant that, if a place was to be found for Israel in Palestine, where would the people of Palestine go? This is a dilemma that Israel has never been able to resolve.
No conflict today is more dangerous than that between Israel and the Palestinians. The implications it has for regional and global security cannot be overstated. The peace process as we know it is dead and no solution is in sight. Nor, as this book argues, will that change until everyone involved in finding a solution accepts the real causes of conflict, and its consequences on the ground.
Leading writer Ghada Karmi explains in fascinating detail the difficulties Israel's existence created for the Arab world and why the search for a solution has been so elusive. Ultimately, she argues that the conflict will end only once the needs of both Arabs and Israelis are accommodated equally. Her startling conclusions overturn conventional thinking — but they are hard to refute.
"This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become."
— The Guardian
"This is a well-written book, and one of the best accounts of the Arab-Israeli narrative."
— Times Literary Supplement
"Ghada Karmi's storytelling eloquence is celebrated. Now the sheer power and sense of her analysis throws down a challenge to those who claim the 'problem' of Israel and Palestine cannot be solved. She shows it can."
— John Pilger
"A compelling read. Her book is well-written and extraordinarily honest."
— Dr Nur Masalha, Reader in Religion and Politics, Director of the Centre for Religion and History and of the Holy Land Research Project, St Mary's University College, University of Surrey
"The destructive impact Zionism had on the Arab world and on Palestine in particular is presented in this book with lucidity and clarity. ... A must read!"
— Ilan Pappe, author of A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
In Search of Fatima
Ghada Karmi’s acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, the flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and coming of age in the coffee-bars of Golders Green, the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London. A gentle humor describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in “Little Tel Aviv” and, later, her struggle, like that of many other women in the late fifties, to get a university grant to study medicine. Ghada’s personal story is set against the continuing crisis in the Middle East. In Search of Fatima reminds us that the only crime the Palestinians committed was to be born in Palestine. Its author, a committed physician, is desperate for the wounds to heal; History, however, refuses to oblige.
“A very timely book in the current political situation… This should serve to remind people just what the big fuss in the Middle East is all about.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“In Search of Fatima brings to life more effectively than anything I have read the fears, ambivalence and confusions experienced by Palestinians.”
— Women’s Review of Books
“Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch.”
— Economist
“Ghada Karmi writes simply and poignantly. Here is a story of … exile and dispossession.”
— Jewish Chronicle
“Her memoir is the story of a fascinating woman . . . If it is a truism to say that no one endures such a catastrophe as that of 1948 with anything except great difficulty, it is certainly not always true that special individuals can make something humanly rich and interesting out of such dire stuff."
— Edward Said
