Return by Ghada Karmi

Author:Ghada Karmi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

CHAPTER 10

Evenings with My Father

I awoke the next morning to the sound of birdsong coming from the direction of Margo’s room. She was in the habit of putting out stale bread on her windowsill for the sparrows in the garden each day. If she overslept, they would knock with their beaks against the window panes to wake her. I lay there in the quiet atmosphere of my father’s flat and thought how far away occupied Palestine and its crises and dramas seemed. Israel, its soldiers, the checkpoints, the difficult crossings could have been on another planet for all their impact here. People in Amman were preoccupied with the problems of their own lives, high prices, little money, finding jobs, coping with unreliable services, dealing with unhelpful officials, and so on. There was often little sympathy to spare for their fellow Palestinians across the bridge labouring under a different yoke. I used to find this apparent indifference disconcerting and would try to break into banal conversations about the high cost of fuel or the problems of importing foreign cars with some shocking account of what I had seen in Jerusalem or Hebron.

Palestinian society in Jordan was markedly different from that in the West Bank. To a certain extent it was understandable, given the military occupation there and the relative freedom of life here. Nevertheless, that did not explain the parochial and often petty nature of people’s preoccupations in Amman, their inability to look beyond their own lives and see a larger picture. They behaved as if the only issues that mattered were those concerning their families and daily lives. The political apathy they displayed towards events not far from their own doorsteps, and their inertia in the face of the often unfavourable political situation in Jordan itself were remarkable. It was not that they felt nothing for their fellow Palestinians, but rather that decades of living in a relatively stable Arab country where they had citizenship and a measure of rights had created a certain complacency and a desire to protect that status. It was as if they saw the depredations suffered by Palestinians at Israel’s hands, the insecurity visited on them in many Arab countries from which they could be deported at will, and the struggle so many had had to survive in faraway places, not to speak of the refugees incarcerated in their camps, had made them decide they wanted no part of that misery and cling to what they had.

This bred a certain passivity of reaction in the face of Israel’s repeated aggressions against the Palestinians under its control, a sense of resignation that nothing could be done. After all, no Arab state had been able to defeat Israel: in fact the Arabs were helpless against its power. How much less, therefore, could be expected of ordinary people like them? But in this stance there was also a weariness with the futility of past political struggle, the defeat of the PLO, the failure of Black September in 1970,

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