My Palestine

The true story of Mohammad Tarbush is extraordinary by any account. In My Palestine, Tarbush combines poignant personal memoir with incisive political and economic commentary on the tumultuous events that shaped the history of Israel, Palestine and the modern Middle East.

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Tarbush was born in British Mandate Palestine. As an infant, he and his family are forced to evacuate their village together with its entire population, after the Zionist victory that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. As now landless refugees in the West Bank, the family sinks into poverty. Tarbush enrols at a local UN-sponsored school, but prospects for employment and a reasonable life are bleak.

Determined to make a different life for himself and his family, he takes matters into his own hands. He persuades his parents to accept his 'short trip to Jordan', but instead, without their knowledge, and with only a handful of dollars, a small duffle bag and a single change of clothes, he makes his way to Europe. After one year of rough travel and stints of manual labour in Italy and Switzerland, he finally reaches England where he enrols for A-levels and finds imaginative ways of financing his studies.

He then pursues higher education at the Universities of Durham, London and Oxford, where he is awarded his DPhil. To support his family in Palestine, Tarbush embarks on a high-level career in banking in Paris and Geneva. Yet all the while the former refugee kid cannot forget his childhood family experiences - their relative prosperity as successful small-holding farmers; the expulsion from their property; their languishing in poverty as refugees; the hopeless future facing all the victims of Palestine's plight. Tarbush decides, from his perch in the world of finance, to capitalise on the wide network of friends, contacts and connections he soon builds up among diplomats, politicians and the media. He sets about providing a sober and reasoned alternative narrative to Palestine's predicament.

This book is at once a deeply personal account of a refugee's determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles as well as a thought-provoking political and economic commentary on the major historical events that shaped Israel, Palestine and the modern Middle East. It will be of interest to students, journalists, diplomats and the general public.