Return: A Palestinian Memoir
Palestine

Return: A Palestinian Memoir

by Ghada Karmi

Identity & Belonging Non-Fiction Memoir 2015

Summary

What happens when you finally return to the homeland you were forced to leave as a child—and discover that it no longer feels like home? More than fifty years after her family fled Jerusalem during the 1948 Nakba, Palestinian-British doctor and writer Ghada Karmi returns to Palestine, hoping to contribute to the struggle for peace and Palestinian statehood. Working with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, she encounters the realities of occupation, military restrictions, political bureaucracy, and a homeland transformed beyond recognition. As she revisits places connected to her childhood and confronts the loss of her family home, Karmi wrestles with a deeply personal question: can exile ever truly end? An intimate memoir of displacement and belonging, Return explores the painful distance between the homeland preserved in memory and the reality of returning to it.

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Palestine
Asia
About the author
Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi

Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian-British physician, academic, writer, and political commentator born in Jerusalem in 1939. Her family was forced to leave Palestine during the Nakba in 1948, eventually settling in England, where she grew up and pursued her education. She studied medicine at the University of Bristol and later earned a doctorate in the history of Arabic medicine from the University of London. After practising as a doctor, specialising in the health of migrants and refugees, she became an influential scholar of Middle Eastern politics and Palestinian history. Her work explores displacement, exile, identity, and the enduring consequences of the loss of homeland. Her acclaimed memoir In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (2002) recounts her childhood in Jerusalem and her experience of growing up in Britain. Other notable works include Return: A Palestinian Memoir (2015) and One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel (2023).

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Published
2015
Author
Ghada Karmi