Review of Mohammad Tarbush, My Palestine: An Impossible Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Munich, Germany (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) –– –– It is probably impossible for a single autobiography to capture the lengths of modern Palestinian history. But if one book can get close to this, it is Mohammad Tarbush’s “My Palestine: An Impossible Exit.” Tarbush, who passed away in 2022, had an extraordinary life. His daughter Nada Tarbush, who authored the introduction to the book, is to be thanked for asking her father to write down his memories, which he published posthumously. After growing up as a refugee in a family with a humble background, Tarbush would become managing director at Deutsche Bank and then at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS).
Tarbush was born in the village of Beit Nattif in Mandate Palestine in 1948, only some months before Israel’s declaration of independence and the Palestinian Nakba [catastrophic expulsion]. Beit Nattif was a scene of major fighting during the war and was turned into rubble. Tarbush’s family escaped first to Bethlehem and then to Jericho, living in a refugee camp before moving to a dilapidated house.
Tarbush explains how, while growing up, the massacre of Deir Yassin (where Zionist paramilitary forces killed over 100 Palestinian civilians in April 1948, prompting many others to flee) was present in everyone’s minds. At the same time, the Deir Yassin killings were rarely openly discussed as it was considered “disrespectful to the victims and hurtful to the survivors.”[1] The experience of internal exile was especially traumatic for Tarbush’s parents. About them, Tarbush beautifully writes: “Their deep attachment to the land and its produce was reflected in the touching gesture of blessing and naming old fig, almond, and olive trees as if they were branches of their own family. Away from Beit Nattif they were lost and felt like fish out of water.”[2]
In 1960, Tarbush met a Swiss couple visiting Jericho on a touristic trip. This was a moment that would change his life. Four years later, after working for months on occasional jobs to save some money, Tarbush contacted the Swiss couple to ask whether they knew of any job opportunity for him in Switzerland because he intended to work there while receiving an education. Not disheartened by their reply that it would be complicated to find a job without knowing any of the country’s languages, Tarbush took up their invitation to visit Switzerland.
In 1965, before turning 18 and with only fifty dollars in his pockets, Tarbush embarked on a hitchhiking journey that took him to Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Italy before finally crossing the border into Switzerland. He arrived in the Alpine country with a friend he had met in Italy. The hitchhiking trip, which took months, must have been a formative experience for a teenager who had never traveled before and whose foreign language skills were restricted to some basic knowledge of English.
But Tarboush’s daring, accompanied by a fair dose of luck, was ultimately successful, in one of the many episodes in his life where this combination proved key. In Switzerland, while working in the Goetheanum, the world center for the anthroposophical movement, he met a professor who opened the doors of higher education in England for him. After college, where he studied for his A levels, he was accepted into Oxford in 1972.
The boy who had left Palestine with so little money had made it into one of the most prestigious universities in the world, where he worked on a PhD thesis discussing the military’s role in Iraqi politics. His supervisor was none other than Albert Hourani, the author of the seminal Middle East history book “A History of the Arab Peoples”. All the while, Tarboush supported himself economically with scholarships and temporary jobs, for instance as a deputy press attaché at the Kuwaiti embassy in London.
Tarboush showed his boldness in many other episodes during this period. When a visit to London by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was announced on TV, Tarboush decided to go there with a banner to draw the monarch’s attention and ask him for economic support to continue his studies. He succeeded in talking to Faisal, who promised to support him financially. The Faisal subordinate charged with helping Tarboush was far less generous, however, and he only received a two hundred dollars transfer.
Although Tarboush managed to establish himself in England, the distance from Palestine weighed heavily on him, especially during the first three years in which he couldn’t visit his family. Palestine was both close and far away from him. The impossible exile mentioned in the book’s title refers to the fact that he felt he carried Palestine with him, but also to his struggle with the physical distance from home. As a student, he engaged in political debates at the campus to defend the Palestinian cause and started to write numerous op-eds for publications such as the Guardian Weekly or the International Herald Tribune.
The author recounts how the setbacks for Palestine were felt even more severely away from home. When the Six Days War broke out in June 1967, Tarboush advised his family not to move from Jericho. The departure from Beit Nattif, which was supposed to be temporary but became permanent with the destruction of the village and Israeli occupation of the area, was very much in Tarboush’s memory. But Jericho had been bombed, and his family had left for Jordan. At the end of the conflict, Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, complicating even more the chances for a Palestinian state.
It was not until 1977, when Tarboush was close to finishing his thesis, that he casually got in contact with the banking world and was offered a job at the Banque Arabe et Internationale d’Investissement (BAII). After many doubts – “me, in such a capitalist institution? I could not match myself with banking”[3], writes Tarboush – he accepted. Banking would be his profession from then on, but he remained closely connected to the main Palestinian intellectuals and political events in Palestine.
A friend of Edward Said and Ghassan Kanafani, he was also consulted by Yasser Arafat. He accompanied the Arab leader to the World Economic Forum to Davos in 1994, where he acted as Arafat’s translator. Tarboush is generally critical of the PLO and Arafat. Negotiations with Israel and the US were very complicated to start with, but Tarboush argues that the PLO was often under-prepared for the talks, widening even further the power inequalities between both sides. During the last years of his life, Tarboush continued to be the Charmain of the Board of Trustees of the United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), a charity founded in 1978 and modeled on the United Jewish Appeal (UJA). The UPA empowers Palestinians in the fields of health, education, and community and economic development.
In his book, Tarboush recounts his life but also leaves some key reflections. Having stranded both the Western world and Palestine, Tarboush was often disappointed about Western countries’ positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author mentions on different occasions that Palestine paid the price for Europe’s bad conscience for the Holocaust. He also does not spare criticism for Western media.
About them, he notes: “Manifestations of Zionist extremism or terrorism rarely made the headlines in the West, while Western media readily reported and analysed Christian and Islamist fundamentalist movements. It seemed that from the perspective of mainstream Western media, when the actor was Israel, the substance of what had been said or done no longer mattered. What mattered was the identity of the actor, not the act itself.”
Tarboush concludes his book with some notes about the future of Palestine and Israel. Written before the October 7 attacks against Israel killed 1,200 people and the ensuing war on Gaza, Tarboush’s comments might sound today too optimistic. The author notes that “the story of a land haunted by violence does not need to be the future of Palestine and Israel. A peaceful future is possible.”[4]
Some of his reflections apply to the current context, however, in which Israel’s network of alliances has remained almost untouched despite the more than 62,614 people who have died in the ongoing war on Gaza. Tarboush noted that Israel would not end “its settler-colonial project voluntarily unless it has an incentive to do so and a disincentive not to – that is, unless the cost of continuing is made to outweigh the benefits of finding a new way forward.” This remains the situation until today.
Like many other Palestinian intellectuals who moved to advocate for a one-state solution for the different religious and ethnic groups in historical Palestine, Tarboush also defends a joint state in “My Palestine.” As he argued, without knowing that this would become even more true in the years after he wrote these words, “It is a fact that the whole area of land that extends from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean – which includes Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza – is under the control of one entity, Israel.”[5] The one-state is a reality, the sharing of a state by the different communities appears today a distant dream.
[1] Mohammad Tarbush, “My Palestine: An Impossible Exile” (Haus Publishing: London, 2024), p. 36.
[2] Ibid., p. 118.
[3] Ibid., p. 165.
[4] Ibid., p. 298.
[5] Ibid., p. 310.
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