My Palestine, An Impossible Exile is an intimately written memoir by Mohammad Tarbush, which combines political and economic commentary with personal and national history. On May 23rd, 2024, the book was launched by Haus Publishing (London). It will be released and distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press on September 9th, 2024.
Mohammad Tarbush was born in Beit Nattif, near Jerusalem. After starting his education in a refugee camp in Jericho he continued in England, completing a doctoral degree at the University of Oxford. He went on to become a managing director at the Deutsche Bank, then at UBS. He wrote extensively on Palestine in, among others, the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian and the Financial Times, and for over thirty years he was chairman of the board of trustees at the United Palestinian Appeal, a non-profit, non-political charity based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books including Reflections of a Palestinian.
Nada Tarbush
The foreword is written by the author’s daughter, Nada Tarbush who represents Palestine as a diplomat at the United Nations in Geneva. She holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, and Master’s degrees from Columbia University, Sciences Po Paris, and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.
Talking about her father’s journey and how it eventually manifested as a book My Palestine, Nada reveals: “His journey from Palestine to Europe was filled with bumpy roads and any external onlooker would have deemed his plan to hitchhike from Jericho to Switzerland, inspired by a Swiss postcard featuring the Alps, to be veering on fantasy. His personal success conveys the message that with resilience and hard work nothing is impossible. Despite that, his exile was impossible – to him – because he could never leave Palestine behind. His attachment to his homeland was too strong and his identity as a Palestinian too endangered to ever forget or move on.
Adding, she said: “Throughout his years of exile, including during his high-level career in banking, the former refugee kid could never set aside his childhood family experiences: their relative prosperity as successful small-holding farmers; their expulsion from their property; their languishing in poverty as refugees; the hopeless future facing all the victims of a defeated, deprived and powerless Palestine. His work allowed him to rub shoulders with important figures in the worlds of global economics, politics and international affairs. So he decided, from his perch in the world of finance, to capitalize on the wide network of friends, contacts and connections he had built up with diplomats, politicians and the media. He used every opportunity he had to start a conversation with the Western public and explain the justice of the Palestinian people’s cause, using the most prestigious platforms he could to deliver his message.
‘Far more than a memoir, Mohammad Tarbush’s remarkable and courageous life, which he narrates with great lyricism, offers readers a keyhole through which to see the immense forces that created one nation by stealing another.’
Naomi Klein
Until his death, Palestine was his beacon of light. It defined and guided every aspect of his life: what he thought about, what he wrote about, what he ate for breakfast, what he grew in his garden, what he loved most. When I visited my father at home in the French countryside, I would almost always find him in the garden, tending to the olive, fig and pomegranate trees he had planted as if they were his children. He wanted to recreate a mini-Palestine in exile, he said. Our conversation would then shift to whether I had drunk maramiyeh (wild sage) tea that morning and to him reminding me that it, and olive oil, must always form part of my daily diet, these staples of Palestine having a multitude of health benefits.”
Mesmerized by her father’s epic journey, Nada’s years long persistent urgings of memorializing his life experiences in a book finally materialized during the COVID19 lockdown.
“His story shaped me and my life choices, and I felt privileged and grateful to have grown up hearing him tell it. I began asking him to write it down so that others outside of our family might read his story and be equally inspired. Asking turned into nagging, and I was so persistent during the Covid-19 lockdowns that he finally gave in to my demands. ‘Amrek yaba – at your command, my daughter,’ he said, and started to write. The minute he sat down to write, words flooded out onto the page. He could not stop. I would find him typing away until the early hours of the morning, taking short breaks to eat. It was as though the act of looking back at his life had unearthed a wellspring of memories that came bubbling to the surface and that he could no longer contain,” said Nada.
‘Here is a book with a big heart. A personal as well as political history of Palestine, poignantly written and closely argued.’
Arundhati Roy
Mohammad Tarbush
After finishing the first draft of the manuscript, Mohammad Tarbush sadly passed away in January 2022. “There are not enough pages to describe the immeasurable sense of loss and grief I felt at the passing of my father. My only consolation was that I held in my hands a manuscript that he cherished and on which he had worked during the final years and days of his life. In trying to dampen the feeling of his absence, I felt a certain solace in dedicating my time to bringing to fruition this project, and I was pleased when Haus Publishing expressed a desire to take over where my father had left off and publish the book. I am grateful that my father’s last words to the world have been eternalized in this memoir,” commented Nada.
As the name suggests, My Palestine, An Impossible Exile, is based on the author’s lived experience of displacement and exile. It is about Palestine, its history – it is a story that is bound to resonate with people as it is a human story about personal as well as national tragedies. Covert messaging, propaganda and media warfare has consistently, systemically and structurally dehumanized Palestine and its people. What this book accomplishes is like everyone living and breathing – be it in the East and especially the privileged West, Palestinians “are made of flesh and blood and their children feel the agony of pain as strongly as they enjoy the warmth of happiness.” Palestinian like all people are human beings.
The eternal hope and resilience which is the very essence of a Palestinian seems to now even manifest globally with an unequivocal rise in awareness and advocacy about their plight and a call for action in terms of accountability, human rights and justice globally.
The importance and relevance of this book at this particular time and given media bias and rampant dehumanization cannot be emphasized enough. Nada opined: “Given the events of and since October 7th, 2023, in Israel–Palestine, this book is more relevant than ever, and perhaps it is down to fate’s wisdom that it is being published only now. These tragic developments cannot be isolated from their historical and political context; they are the culmination of more than seven decades of history, which are duly analyzed in this memoir. They show that the status quo is untenable and that it is high time, for the sake of peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike, for action to be taken – not only to end the current tragedy but also to finally address and resolve the root causes of recurrent crises and suffering. Namely, seventy-six years of Palestinian dispossession and subjugation, fifty-seven years of military occupation of Palestinian land, seventeen years of illegal blockading of Gaza and chronic impunity for violations of international law.”
Book review coming soon. Excerpt Below Book Details
Book Details:
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Haus website: £22.00
University of Chicago Press website: $29.95
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Excerpt: As my thoughts evolved and my understanding of the general importance of identity took shape, I was also conscious of another aspect of my reality. Here I was, having made new friends and embarking on a promising new life that should lead to some degree of prosperity, comfort and security in a world that was a universe away from the miseries I was leaving behind in my Palestine, and yet ... and yet that pull of Palestine. Could the alienation I felt in this European apparent paradise ever be reconciled with the alienation I was beginning to feel from my Palestinian roots? But that very awareness of a drift away from my Palestinian identity seemed, strangely, to reinforce that identity. It was as if dwelling on my dichotomy actually drove me closer to the idea of Palestine, my Palestine. So, every time I thought about my identity I sank deep into despondency, consumed by mixed emotions. My European friends would constantly ask why we, the Palestinians, didn’t do as other migrants and refugees had done and adopt the countries we now lived in? I tried to point out how the Palestinian problem was different from the experiences of other migrants and refugees. In other cases, where war, upheaval or economic crisis had displaced people, there was usually an option for the displaced to return home – or, at the very least, a practicable right to return, whether they chose to exercise that right or not. Masses of Sicilians might have emigrated to America, impelled by economic needs; Ethiopians might have crossed into Sudan in search of relief from famine; Vietnamese might have taken to rafts to escape torture and war; and Russians might have fled from Bolshevik repression and firing squads. But Sicily remains Sicily, Ethiopia is still Ethiopia, Vietnam is still Vietnam and Russia and its culture are still very much in place. In our case, with Palestine, it was different. A conscious, systematic strategy had not just deprived us of our lands, it was trying to erase our individual identities and our nation’s identity. Israeli school textbooks deny the existence of the occupation, labelling maps of the whole of historic Palestine, including the occupied territories, as Israel, or, at best, they attempt to normalize it. Palestinian traditions have been rebaptised. Falafel, a popular Palestinian dish, was now presented to visitors as an Israeli delicacy. Palestinian embroidered dresses were worn by the Israeli national airlines’ flight attendants as symbols of Israeli craft. It is just so much Dead Sea salt in festering sores.
