After the Nakba: An Experience of Exile in England

The year 1998, the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Palestine, occasioned an outpouring of eyewitness and other accounts of the events of 1948. But relatively few accounts exist of how the displacement affected people's lives in the immediate wake of the exodus from Palestine. The following is one such account, a memoir of the author's early experience in postwar London.

Ghada Karmi, a medical doctor and medical historian by training, has lectured and written widely on the Arab-Israeli conflict. She is an associate fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London. This article is extracted and adapted from chapters 5 and 6 of her forthcoming memoir about her family's flight from Palestine and experiences of exile.