The Disaster That Never Ended | Books

ESSAY. In January 1970, in the city of Haifa in northern Israel, I met an Arab lawyer named Sabri Jiryis. At that time they said Arabs about Palestinians. That is what most Israelis do to this day about the Palestinians who remained in Israel after the wars and destructions and displacements of 1948-49.

After the Nakba, the catastrophe.

Sabri Jiryis had a few years earlier written a book in Hebrew entitled “The Arabs in Israel” and I had just read it and was deeply shaken by what it told me in its dry legal language about the conditions of the Arab minority in Israel.

The conditions included being able to be taken into “administrative” custody indefinitely without trial and judgment. When I met Sabri Jiryis, he was forbidden to leave Haifa without police permission and under a nightly curfew – from one hour before sunset to dawn.

A month later, he was put in prison on the same unjustified grounds. It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last, and Sabri Jiryis was far from the only one.

“The Arabs in Israel” depicted a reality that few Israelis wanted to know 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 myself was convinced that the book would open the eyes of the outside world to the oppressive and discriminatory sides of the Israeli social structure, but when it came out in Sweden it was met with distrust, not to say hostility. In a review in the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren, the book was called “a terrifying example of forgery” and Jiryis himself “a bitterly lonely” Arab in Israel.

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

About what happened then, yes also about what happened before, the daughter has Fida Jiryis (born in Beirut 1973) has written a book that paints the Palestinian tragedy in human and historical detail in its full extent.

Sabri Jiryis was born in 1938 in a Christian village in the Galilee and belonged to the young generation of Palestinian intellectuals who early tried to organize a political resistance against the annexations of Palestinian land that the State of Israel had instituted, and against the military martial law and control zones that governed their lives , and ultimately against a state that treated them as second-class citizens.

But their movements were banned, their newspapers confiscated, and one by one they were imprisoned and/or driven into exile. In 1964, Sabri Jiryis had tried to get a political party registered under the name 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 the young Sabri Jiryis went in and out of the prisons and house arrests of the Israeli emergency laws, in good company with the leading poets, writers and journalists of the young Palestinian-Arab generation.

In Fida Jiryi’s book, we get the story of how her father in exile joined the circle around the PLO leader Yasser Arafat and was made head of the Palestinian Research Institute in Beirut, about how Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, blew up the country’s fragile political structure, paved the way for the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and for the bombing of the Palestinian Research Center on February 5 1983 deprived nine-year-old Fida and four-year-old Moussa their mother, Hanneh.

We also get the now improbable story of how Sabri Jiryis and his two children, among a very few, were allowed to return to their homeland after the Oslo Accords of 1993 between Israel and the PLO, and for a brief moment it looked as if history had turned and a Palestinian future was again possible.

What follows is grown-up Fida’s deeply personal story of hope extinguished, doors closing, and the growing sense of being a stranger in his own land. About the Israeli occupation forces’ humiliation and harassment when she tries to work and live in the roadblock-encircled “Palestinian” Ramallah. If the culture of violence and hatred she sees taking root as the annexation of Palestinian land progresses, the occupation hardens and the catastrophe continues.

Nakban did not end, Fida Jiryis ends his book; not the expulsion of Palestinians from homes and homes, not the annexation of Palestinian land, not the transformation of Palestinians into second-class citizens of their own country and into residents of an apartheid state on occupied land.

The book was written before the Hamas attack and massacre on October 7, 2023, but with the total destruction of Gaza that has become Israel’s response, not to mention the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children, the word Nakba has not only acquired a new dimension but also a new international impact. The Palestinian disaster, 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 both Israel and the entire region is determined by how that matter is handled.

Not every small family story can be used to portray a great historical drama, but the story of the Jiryis family is one. Fida Jiryis weaves together in earthy detail the life and fate of a Palestinian family in a village in the Galilee in the years before and after the “catastrophe”, with the role of her father and other family members in the failed attempts to organize a peaceful Palestinian resistance movement within Israel, the failed attempts organizing an armed Palestinian resistance movement in exile and the failed attempts to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Sabri Jiryis is today 86 years old and has returned to his home village in the northern Galilee from where he can witness yet another phase in the Palestinian tragedy that he himself so much embodies. And not just for what happened to him and his family and ultimately the Palestinian cause he dedicated his life to. But also for what I want to believe that he and his young Palestinian generation could have meant for the possibilities of peace and reconciliation between two peoples bound together by fate on a narrow strip of land between the river and the sea.

Here there was a bitter history to deal with but also a common future to create.

Here was a peaceful Palestinian opposition in the making, not an armed guerrilla army. Here there were demands but also recognition. Here there was a bitter history to deal with but also a common future to create. What Israel could have become if a genuine Arab-Israeli (Palestinian) opposition had been allowed to organize instead of being suppressed, banned and driven into exile, we do not know. We only know what an Israel without peace and reconciliation has become and what it continues to become.

“The pity of it all”, the sad part 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 suspect that today he could give a similar title to a book about Israel and the Palestinians 1948–2024.

It is, if nothing else, the title that comes to me since I closed Fida Jiryi’s book.

The sad part of it all.

Göran Rosenberg is a writer and employee on Expressen’s culture page.