My Palestine – An Impossible Exile

From the very first page of My Palestine: An Impossible Exile, Mohammad Tarbush opens a window into a lost world — his childhood village of Beit Nattif. Before its destruction in 1948, Beit Nattif lay on the Hebron Hills, about twenty kilometres southwest of Jerusalem. It was a thriving village of stone houses, olive groves, vineyards, and terraces. “The route to Beit Nattif from Bethlehem was a narrow road that twisted its way through the quiet cone-shaped hills encircled with terraces of white stone, where the vines clawed up through the dark, rust-red earth.”

This is how Tarbush begins his memoir: not with statistics or politics, but with the everyday life of a place that once was. He recalls family courtyards, the sound of the imam calling before sunrise, his brother collecting fresh eggs from the straw, and the work of milking goats and tending to fields. These scenes bring to life what was lost in 1948 Nakba,  real homes, real families, real communities.

But My Palestine is not only about what was destroyed. It is about what exile does to memory, identity, and belonging. Tarbush writes: “This book is my story as a Palestinian refugee who has had to struggle for things most people take for granted, who did not accept that as a preordained destiny and who, through resilience, hard work and faith decided to do something about it”.

That resilience becomes the driving force of the memoir.

Tarbush’s family, like thousands of others, was expelled from Beit Nattif during the Nakba. They lived as refugees in Bethlehem and then in Jericho, where he went to school. In Jericho, even amid hardship, he carried a dream. “Already, as a teenage refugee in Jericho, I had dreamt about and aspired to a university education in Europe. That propelled me to plunge into a dark unknown with a handful of dollars and hitchhike to Europe”.

That dream became an odyssey. “It took me six months to save about fifty US dollars. With those savings assured, my plan to travel to Europe began to crystallise”. His journey led him through Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Austria, Italy, and finally Switzerland. “At last, I was in Europe, I told myself, since much of Istanbul is on the European side of the Bosporus. The first thing I did was to buy a sleeping bag”.

The adventure was risky, improvised, often dangerous. But for Tarbush, it was also filled with determination. He clung to a motto from his youth: “la tai’as” — do not despair.

In Europe and later in Britain, Tarbush worked as a janitor, in hostels, and in manual jobs to fund his studies. Eventually, he entered banking. The career at first seemed impossible for a refugee from a destroyed village who hitchhiked his way to Europe. Even then, he could not reconcile his Palestinian identity with his position in high finance: “But me, in such a capitalist institution? I could not match myself with banking. It was a contradiction”. Yet he accepted it as a path that gave him influence, access, and a way to represent his people.

What exile never erased was his sense of Palestine. “I was born to Palestinian parents. Our way of life was steeped in Palestinian traditions. We ate Palestinian food, we spoke Arabic with a Palestinian accent, and the name of our village appears on very ancient maps of Palestine. Yet, during my travels in Europe as a teenager, I realised that Palestine had vanished from the map of the world, and my identity meant nothing to many of my European friends”.

This discovery — that his very identity was denied — shaped much of Tarbush’s activism. He wrote articles, gave talks, and confronted stereotypes. His first published letter in The Times in 1972 asked readers to “spare a thought for Palestinian refugees longing to return to their homes”. For Tarbush, getting his voice on a major paper debunking the pro-Israeli narrative, was a small victory. It was one of many victories that kept him going.

Tarbush’s memoir constantly weaves the personal with the political. He explains how, after 1967, Western narratives drowned out Palestinian voices: “Over the years the general apathy in the West towards the plight of the Palestinians finally began to change and a greater level of concern started to surface, but what has not been assimilated enough into the Western public psyche is the fundamental fact that, before the advent of Zionism, peaceful coexistence between Jews, Muslims and Christians had been the hallmark of life in historic Palestine, and, more generally, harmony prevailed between Jews and Muslims, be it in Arab-ruled Spain, North Africa or the Middle East.” 

For him, the issue is simple: “Israel’s relationship with Palestine should be seen in terms of occupier/occupied. Full stop”. This directness runs throughout the book. Tarbush does not romanticise the past, he admits there were inequalities and tensions, but he insists that Zionism shattered a coexistence that had long existed.

His critique extends to Western powers. Germany, he writes, “in its desperate search for redemption… has for seven decades provided state-of-the-art armament and granted billions of dollars towards the construction of Israel with hardly a thought for the subsequent destruction of Palestine or its people, the accidental victims of Germany’s crimes against the Jews”. Britain, too, he accuses of refusing to face its responsibility for the catastrophe of 1948 when Israel carried out a mass ethnic cleansing project.

Despite professional success, exile left a lasting wound. Tarbush writes of the strangeness of being told Palestinians did not exist, even while carrying Ottoman deeds proving his family’s ownership of land going back to 1802.

He also describes how exile seeps into daily life. In France, he planted olive, fig, and pomegranate trees in his garden, saying he wanted to “recreate a mini-Palestine in exile”. In this way, the memoir balances politics with intimacy: recipes, herbs, gardens, family memories, small fragments of a life in Palestine carried across borders.

The memoir ends not with despair but with a call for justice. “If my father’s story has taught me one lesson, it would be do not despair… he maintained a relentless and stubborn hope.” 

That hope takes the form of a vision. For Tarbush, “Israelis and Palestinians will live together in peace and prosperity as equals in a single state,” . This is not a utopian fantasy says the author but a moral and practical necessity. His epilogue is titled A Call for a One-State Solution, and it is clear he saw this as the only path to dignity for both peoples.

My Palestine is more than one man’s autobiography. As Tarbush himself admits, “the personal narrative merged with the national history of the Palestinian people and at times the two became indistinguishable.”

That is the strength of the book. It is at once a story of a boy hitchhiking across continents with a few dollars in his pocket, and the story of a people expelled from their land, erased from maps, yet still enduring. It is political analysis rooted in personal memory, and personal memory inseparable from history.

Reading My Palestine, one feels both the sorrow of loss and the persistence of hope. Tarbush never allowed himself to give in to despair. His life, like his book, is an act of resistance: against forgetting, against silence, against resignation.