Mohammad Tarbush’s memoir ‘My Palestine’ is a Palestinian story, as told by a refugee in his own land

The Israeli Defence Forces’ ongoing heartless and meticulous detonation of every house in entire villages in Lebanon and Gaza and the flattening of multi-storeyed buildings with civilians still inside have been beamed worldwide, thanks to the social media.

But this is a mere rerun of the brutality the world has witnessed off camera for the past seven-and-a-half decades. Mohammad Tarbush saw the slow strangulation of Palestinian aspirations in a post-World War world, right from the beginning when Jews from abroad landed to set up a country they claimed, without a shred of evidence, was pre-ordained for them to capture and rule.

Tarbush carved out a unique path for himself, right from his life in the battered ruins or shanty settlements after the first Israeli displacement (called The Naqba or The Catastrophe). Tarbush taught himself to read. His brush with tourists in Palestine was instrumental in realising his dream of reaching Europe to further educate himself. It was a wondrous world of the 1960s when, with a valid passport and a fervent approach, one could hitchhike through several countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain that had descended during the Cold War.

Bombed out of their idyllic village in April 1949 when he was an infant, Tarbush endured the dehumanising existence as a landless refugee in West Bank before deciding to leave for Europe on foot with very little money. As the national tragedy unfolded back home because the big boys on the global table, including the Soviet Union, soft peddled or overlooked Israel’s repeated defiance of UN resolutions, Tarbush in Europe displayed considerable chutzpah. As a student, he unfurled a banner pleading for tuition fees from the Saudi Arabian King visiting London. Several times, hopes did not come true. In this case, despite an audience with the King, all he got was a mere 200 dollars, initially due to a coldly officious assessment of his requirement.

After finishing the first draft of the manuscript, Mohammad Tarbush passed away in 2022. But for all those trying to make sense about the slow swirl to a global conflict in West Asia, the interleaving of a personal quest and national tragedy will offer a relatively unbiased window into its genesis.

On the way, Tarbush dispels the miasma that has surrounded the Palestinian story, all the while sending the message that no situation is desperate enough to throw up hands and give up despite 76 years of Palestinian dispossession and subjugation, 57 years of military occupation and 17 years of illegal blockading of Gaza. His repeated visits to Palestine, the first being from Europe, took place after the 1967 war, when “the streets were filled with people, mostly refugees in a pitiful condition”, while his parents had become sullen, silent and old before their time. It was after a while that his father opened up and described their panicky departure when the Israelis hit: “His face twisting with anger, he told me how they (civilians) had been bombarded even as they ran. Some people had been hideously burnt; children screamed with terror as they tried to claw the deadly, highly inflammable, sticky napalm from their bodies.”

While he flitted between visits to his homeland and academics, Tarbush began experimenting with explaining the Palestinian story to the rulers and influencers. Soon, he was writing copiously. His articles appeared in International Herald Tribune, Guardian and Financial Times, his credentials bolstered by a doctoral degree from Oxford and as MD of Deutsche Bank, followed by UBS. But unlike many of his ilk from the developing world who have subsumed their pain and deprivation in favour of aligning with the western systems, Tarbush did not shy away from challenging the ramifications of negative images about Muslims and Arabs: “My first name conjured up caricatures of an oil-rich sheikh or a backward misogynist, while my place of birth prompted dramatic images of the defiant terrorist or the abject refugee. The reality was far more nuanced, varied and humanly compelling than the stereotypes allowed.”

The drive to tell the actual Palestinian story to the world led him to an interaction with Costa Gavras, the reputed filmmaker who touched subjects none would — the coup in Chile (‘Missing’) or the end of democracy in Greece (‘Z’). The collaboration birthed ‘Hanna K’, a movie so compelling that it was not shown in the US.

After editing the rough parts of his book, his daughter Nada Tarbush, a Palestinian diplomat at the UN in Geneva, felt that Tarbush’s attachment to his homeland was too strong and his identity as a Palestinian too endangered to ever forget or move on.

Many pioneers of Palestinian history, including Ilan Pappe, Hillal Cohen, Adam Raz and Avi Shlaim, have predicted after each Israeli pounding of the Palestinians that the end of the assault will mark a new phase of resistance. Their words echo in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous nazm: Nisaar main teri galiyon ke aye watan; especially the fourth stanza:

Yunhi hamesha ulajhti rahi hai zulm se khalq/Na unki rasm nayi hai, na apni reet nayi/Yunhi hamesha khilaye hain hum ne aag mein phool/Na unki haar nayi hai, na apni jeet nayi.

(People have always challenged oppression, neither are their rituals new nor are our traditions novel; Because we have always coaxed flowers to bloom in fire, neither is their defeat new nor is our victory novel.)

This time, the conflict has a different texture as it could not remain localised. The world uneasily awaits the next round of the Israel-Iran slugfest and it would be the best time to get acquainted with the roots of the problem by a man who contributed immensely to the rise in awareness and advocacy about the plight of Palestinians, and the call for action against Israel on grounds of human rights and justice.

— The writer is a foreign affairs expert