It was not surprising that the students introducing Palestinian activist Dr. Ghada Karmi, who was soon to speak to a bustling PAC 001 on the highly controversial question of a Palestinian homeland, made sure to warn the audience to behave respectfully. But despite Karmi’s contentious thesis—that the only just solution to what she calls the situation of apartheid in Israel is the formation of a single, multi-ethnic democracy—her audience was uniformly civil and mostly receptive to the general sentiment, if not necessarily all the particulars, of her Wednesday night talk.

Dr. Karmi settled in Britain as a child after her family was forced to leave Jerusalem in the wake of the 1948 war. In the midst of a tour for her recent book on the conflict, “Married to Another Man,” Karmi says she has become frustrated by what she deemed American’s dismissive attitudes toward the Palestinian cause.

“I’m handicapped when I talk of this issue in this country,” she said. “I am very conscious of the feeling that when I speak of this I’m speaking to people whose minds have been made up for them by one story, one narrative.”

That narrative, she said, is one of persecuted Diaspora Jews, returning triumphantly to their rightful homeland after 2,000 years of exile and continuous persecution. The Palestinians only figure in this story as peripheral figures, she said, occasionally terrorizing the Israelis for no apparent reason. Karmi stressed that as long as this interpretation of events holds, no true understanding of the conflict will be had.

“Now, let’s talk a little bit about what really happened,” she proposed. “Once you understand the root of the problem, there’s no way you can misunderstand what happened later.”

This is where the slightly titillating name of Karmi’s book comes in: two nineteenth century rabbis were sent to Palestine to appraise the land as a possible home for the Jews.“She’s a beautiful bride,” Karmi said the rabbis reported back, “but she’s married to another man.”

The very fact of the Palestinians’ existence, both within Israel’s original borders and on the land occupied after the 1967 war, is what Karmi explained as the foundational problem of the Israeli state—and one the country seems intent on avoiding, she added. Israel, she said, keeps moving the goalposts of peace farther and farther afield every time it makes territorial gains. After the ’67 war, then, the issue became the return to the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When Israel built settlements in certain parts of the West Bank, it began offering the Palestinians only a partial return of that territory—and so forth.

Karmi urged the audience to remember that despite the events of the last 60 years, the original dispossession of Palestinians in order to create a Jewish state was and remains fundamentally unfair.

“The roots of the issue are that a foreign, European movement made a decision to occupy another people’s country,” she said. “In doing so, they displaced the indigenous population, who became refugees—three quarters of a million refugees.”
These days, Karmi put the number of Palestinians who are barred from their homeland at just under 7 million. Karmi, who holds nothing but contempt for the two-state arrangement that is typically trumpeted as an answer to the political imbroglio, demanded that, in the interests of justice, the Palestinians be allowed to return and become full citizens of a democratic state incorporating both Arabs and Jews.

“Israel and Palestine are living in one state as we speak,” she said, motioning to a map of Israel that depicted a network of Israeli settlements, roads, and checkpoints thickly laid across the occupied territories. “The Palestinian state cannot happen, except in the imagination…There is nowhere to put it.”

In answer to a question drawing a parallel to the European dispossession of the Native Americans as a regrettable but nevertheless irreversible historical fact, she held her ground.

“Yes,” she said, “the history of this country is despicable. The people who are here are a result of the ethnic cleansing of the native population. You don’t think I’m defending the United States, do you?”

As for the willingness of the Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah to stop fighting with each other and agree to participate in a multivalent government, Karmi placed the blame on the US for, she said, manufacturing the internecine strife to serve its own ends. She also pointed to the existence of openly racist parties in the Israeli Knesset (legislature) as evidence of undesirable political realities on both sides.

Ayesha Hoda ’08, a member of The Association for Dialogue and Awareness about Palestine/Israel Today (ADAPT), the student group who brought Dr. Karma to campus, was initially unsure about how her assertive style would go over.

“I was worried how people would receive her talk because of how straightforward she was,” Hoda said. “Usually speakers who are used to talking in America about Palestine know they have to sugar coat the reality so people don’t get defensive. Talking about the right of return and the racism attached to the ’demographic problem’ is still a hushed topic, which is why ’liberal’ Wesleyan students have been so keen on advocating for the two-state solution. I’m really glad that Ghada’s talk will end that silence on campus.”

Audience member Ben Sachs-Hamilton ’09 appreciated the gist of Karmi’s message, though he had some reservations.

“Some issues of history she oversimplified to make a point,” he said. “And while I might agree with the core of what she was saying, I think at some points she painted Israel in a too-uncharitable light. In all, I’m glad she came. She made me think more than I have in the past about the one state solution—which I’d not seen before as something that would be plausible.”

Melina Aguilar ’10 also generally approved, though she was unsure about the practicality of Karma’s proposal.

“It was interesting how she presented the issue as a colonial issue,” Aguilar said. “Because I’m a CSS major and we study imperialism and colonialism a lot, to have it presented in that light was interesting. I love the utopian solution she presented, but I still don’t see it happening. Her ideas are so great but they just seem a little unrealistic.”

Before leaving the podium, Dr. Karmi acknowledged the less-than-ideal aspects of her proposed one-state solution while taking a final blow against the Israeli version of events.

“We are forced into this position,” she said. “We didn’t say how wonderful it would be if we could have a load of European Jews living with us in this one state. The trouble is, they’re there. This is the best that can be made out of a very bad situation.”