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.

Read the full review at the Palestine Book Awards website