Essay in Swedish Expressen April 24, 2024

Fida Jiryis: Stranger in My Own Land. Palestine, Israel and One Family's Story of Home, Hurst & Company, London 2023.

 After the catastrophe

In January 1970 I met a young Arab lawyer named Sabri Jiryis in the city of Haifa in northern Israel. That’s what Palestinians were called then,  Arabs, and that’s what most Israelis still call the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the destruction and expulsion of 1948-49.

After the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Some years before, Sabri Jiryis had published a book in Hebrew, "The Arabs in Israel," which I had just read, becoming deeply upset by what it had to say about the conditions of the Arab minority in Israel.

These conditions included indefinite “administrative detention” without trial and verdict. When I met Sabri Jiryis, he was forbidden to leave Haifa without a police permit and subject to a nightly curfew – from one hour before sunset until dawn.

A month later, he was put in “administrative” prison under the same haphazard conditions. It was not the first time and not the last, and Sabri Jiryis was not the only one.

"The Arabs in Israel" depicted a reality that few Israelis wanted to acknowledge and few in the outside world knew about and was soon translated into several languages, by me into Swedish (Pan/Norstedts, 1970, author's name spelled Geries). I was convinced that the book would open the eyes of the world to the oppressive and discriminatory aspects of Israeli society, but when it was published in Sweden it was met with suspicion, if not hostility. A review in the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren called the book "a terrible example of falsification" and Jiryis himself "a bitterly lonely" Arab in Israel.

On September 9, 1970, Sabri Jiryis and his wife Hanneh left their homeland and went into exile.

Their daughter Fida Jiryis (born in Beirut in 1973) has now told us what happened next, and what happened before, in a gripping book that in the fate of one family manages to capture an important part of the Palestinian tragedy.

Born in 1938 in a Christian-Arab village in northern Galilee, Sabri Jiryis belonged to the young generation of Palestinian intellectuals who in the 1960’s hoped to organize a political movement against the confiscation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel, and the emergency laws and military control zones that governed their lives, and ultimately against a state that defined and treated them as second-class citizens.

But their organizations were banned, their newspapers confiscated, and one by one they were imprisoned, silenced and exiled. In 1964, Sabri Jiryis had tried to get a political party registered under the name of Al-Ard, the Earth, calling for a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel based on the 1947 partition plan, but the party was declared a threat to Israel's existence and henceforth Sabri Jiryis went in and out of  “administrative” prisons and detention centers, in good company with the leading poets, writers and journalists of the young Palestinian Arab generation.

Fida Jiryis’s book tells the story of how her father in exile joined the circle of PLO leader Yasser Arafat and was made head of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut; of how Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, shattering the country's fragile political structure, paving the way for the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and the bombing of the Palestinian Research Center on February 5, 1983, which deprived nine-year-old Fida and four-year-old Mousa of their mother, Hanneh.

We are also told the remarkable story of how, following the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO, Sabri Jiryis and his two children, among very few, were allowed to return to their homeland, and for a brief moment a new Palestinian-Israeli future seemed possible.

What follows is the adult Fida’s deeply personal story about becoming a stranger in her own country. About the humiliation and harassment of the Israeli occupation as she tries to work and live in the "Palestinian" Ramallah, surrounded by military roadblocks. About the culture of violence and hatred that she sees taking root as the occupation intensifies, the annexation of Palestinians lands continues, and the hope for freedom and justice is extinguished.

The Nakba did not end, Fida Jiryis ends her book; not the expulsion of Palestinians from their houses and homes, not the annexation of Palestinian land, not the transformation of Palestinians into second-class citizens in their country or residents in an apartheid regime on occupied land.

The book was written before the Hamas attack and massacre of October 7, 2023, but with Israel response of the total destruction of Gaza, not to mention the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, the word Nakba has not only taken on a new dimension but also a new international impact. The Palestinian catastrophe, recently ignored by the outside world, has been made visible again, and the Palestinian cause has regained its rightful place on the international agenda. More than ever, it is clear that the future of Israel and the entire region depends on how this issue is handled.

Not every small family story can be used to portray a great historical drama, but the story of the Jiryis family is such a story. Fida Jiryis weaves together, in vivid and down-to-earth detail, the life and fate of a Palestinian family in a Galilean village in the decades before and after the "catastrophe", with the role of her father and other family members in the failed attempt to organize a peaceful Palestinian resistance movement within Israel, the failed attempt to organize an armed Palestinian resistance movement in exile, and the failed attempt to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The life and fate of Sabri Jiryis embodies in many ways the Palestinian tragedy, not only for all that happened to him and his family and ultimately to the Palestinian cause to which he had devoted his entire life. But also because of what I want to believe that he and his Palestinian generation could have meant for the possibility of peace and reconciliation between two closely knit peoples on a narrow strip of land between the river and the sea. Here was a peaceful Palestinian opposition in the making, not an armed guerrilla army, let alone an Islamist terrorist group. There was certainly a difficult and bitter conflict to manage, but also a shared future to create. We do not know what Israel could have become if a genuine Arab-Israeli (Palestinian) opposition had been allowed to organize itself instead of being banned and driven into exile. We only know what an Israel without peace and reconciliation has become today - and have good reason to fear what it might become in the future.

The Pity of It All is the title of a book about Germany and the German Jews 1743-1933, written by the Israeli historian Amos Elon. Amos is no longer alive, but I got to know him well enough to believe that he could have given a similar title to a book on Israel and the Palestinians 1948-2024.

If nothing else, that's the title that comes to my mind after closing Fida Jiryis’s book.

The pity of it all.