Resistance and loss

After years of exile, a Palestinian in his 80s returns as a tourist to his home village, now in present-day Israel, to sit under the mulberry tree in his garden. “For him to go there … was to be reunited with a part of the old Palestine and a sort of return,” Karmi writes.

But a sense of belonging in Palestine eludes Karmi, who also confesses her struggle to find a lasting romantic partnership and criticizes prevalent attitudes towards women in Arab society. She devotes a chapter to single motherhood after the birth of her now adult daughter, a period of survival clouded by guilt and shame.

Return is bookended by the painful process of Karmi’s father, the BBC Arabic Radio broadcaster and intellectual Hasan Karmi, dying in exile in Amman.

Faced with two very personal blows — the loss of her father, and the excising of the right of return from the heart of the Palestinian cause — Karmi struggles to conclude her book with optimism.

Yet young flames burn bright in Gaza’s unhappy and dilapidated Jabaliya refugee camp.

There, Karmi writes, “The older children’s grasp of political events and their confidence in the rightness of their parents’ struggle were striking.

“Tomorrow’s fighters, I remember thinking. Israel beware.”