Background of the Selected Text: Its Socio-Political Importance
We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population […] In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.2
World peace has been threatened with the recent incidents at Sheikh Jarrah, in the surroundings of Jerusalem. However, a British Palestinian Doctor of Medicine and daughter of a famous linguist and BBC broadcaster, Ghada Karmi, born in Jerusalem in 1939, records a similar experience of forced eviction in her 2002 memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. Karmi being a writer, academic, and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, writes prolifically for newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The Nation, and the Journal of Palestinian Studies. Critics like Said view this story of exile and displacement as a poignant, remarkable, and well-written text about the personal and communal life in mandatory Palestine, which brings out her skill and insight, and “intermesh…the political and the personal.”3 Her second book, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (2007) is a critical work of great enterprise and importance, highlighting the political and historical drama transpiring in the story of the plight of Palestinians.
