One effect, if she gets it, is that she will probably, in her sixties, spend more time in her native land than at any time since her childhood. And that may help, if not to resolve the problem of her identity at least to live with it. For she herself is seeking funding for a media-related project in the West Bank supported by the United Nations Development Programme. But the Western powers, the European powers and later the United States joined in and decided that we would foot the bill. How on earth can anyone be expected to accept that?"Her months in Ramallah working for the Palestinian Authority have sharpened her perception, she says, of "a belated sense of guilt on the part of these Europeans who were the culprits who created the initial problem which takes the form, as far as I can see, of handouts" - with, she believes, paradoxically disastrous results for the Palestinians."With the exception of those agencies and donors who are funding really important life projects like agriculture, like health, water purification, the rest have been in my view utterly pernicious It has created a culture ... of dependency because they are impoverished, and therefore if you deprive a people of their normal means of livelihood and make them depend on handouts then people change and they start to look to their handouts and distort their performance and political messages."An example of the donor mentality she suggests is the current tendency of the international community to prefer channelling aid to Gaza rather than pressing Israel to take the steps - for example on border crossings - which would allow Gaza to revive its economy by itself.There is an irony here, as Dr Karmi admits.
But the book is also a poignant account of the heartbreaks involved in her own assimilation into English culture at school - she went first to a convent and then to Henrietta Barnett in Hampstead Garden Suburb - Bristol University and her marriage to an English farmer's son and Army medic.The marriage was fiercely opposed by her family and was already under severe strain by the Six Day War of 1967. Having studiously ignored developments in the Middle East - and in many ways even her own background as an Arab - she became, while working as a senior house officer at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol, transfixed like most of the rest of the world by the television spectacle of triumphant Israeli forces overrunning Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and above all East Jerusalem and the Old City, where she had played hopscotch in front of the Dome of the Rock 20 years earlier."As the memories came back," she wrote, "I felt a dull ache, as if an open wound, which was thought to be long healed, had just been reopened."But worse, when she found that her husband shared out loud the widespread admiration for Israel's victory prevalent among the rest of her colleagues she was crushed by the thought that her life as an Englishwoman had been "nothing but a sham ... We were not responsible for Hitler, World War II, the pogroms We had done nothing of this kind. "More and more I understood what a despicable trick had been played on the Palestinians and it was played by the Europeans, and the Europeans had done the damage to the Jews ..."The Jewish problem is a world problem; not our problem. Going from one cultural pole to the other she was briefly married to a Tunisian in the 1980s - the one unalloyed benefit of which was the birth of her now 24-year-old daughter Lalla Salma.She did locate within herself a "burning sense of injustice" about the events of her childhood. Their opposition to my stand on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs meant I could never be one of them.
But then, who was I one of?"Her marriage ended a year later; and so began a journey into Palestinian nationalist activism, albeit one which left that searching question about her own identity at least partially unresolved. Indeed Dr Karmi makes the point that despite their profound and irrevocable sense of grievance about 1948, the "gut anti-Semitism" they encountered among some of their English neighbours was "alien to us". In her book, which among much else is a compelling portrait of growing up in the austere climate of late Forties and Fifties Britain, she recounts how almost all of her closest school friends were Jewish as was the family GP; indeed the family saw nothing odd about that, they had been patients in Jerusalem of a German Jewish doctor.She, her father and her brother, in an area where the only foreign food was at a Jewish delicatessen, acquired a taste for kosher salami. Hasan Karmi, an accomplished linguist who had worked for the British Mandate government - and is, remarkably, still alive at the age of 100 and living in Jordan - had by now secured a job at the BBC, and improbably, on the face of it, a terraced house in Golders Green, one of the areas in London to which so many Jewish refugees from Hitler had congregated. "If you don't give us our state, then you'll have to live with a load of wogs.
