Mohamed Nanabhay's Blog

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending some time with Robert Fisk and at the end of our conversation I whipped out two of his books to have him sign. I started apologising for the battered and tattered condition of my over a decade old copy of "Pity the Nation : Lebanon at War" when he said

"I'd take a shabby book that had been read over a pristine one that had never been...".

Pity the Nation was such an important book for me in so many ways. Anyone who has read it immediately recalls the story of the refugees keys :

...the grandmother stood up and shuffled into a little hut-like concrete alcove, her bedroom, and emerged carrying something in a handkerchief. 'It is from our home in Haifa,' she said, unwrapping the cloth. And there was her key, its gun-metal grey shaft rusted brown but the handle still gleaming.

Fisk explains that

...one of the more subtle cruelties of Middle East history, the papers and the keys were to prove the most symbolic and the most worthless of possessions to the Palestinians. They acquired a significance that grew ever more painful as weeks and then months away from home turned into years.... For the keys - often made of a thick grey iron, sometimes with decorated handles - were in a sense a promise of return, a promise that history inevitably broke. The new owners of those homes forbade any return and then changed the locks.

After repeatedly being shown land deeds and keys to homes by these refugees, Fisk decided to go to Israel to find the same homes and knock on those doors, to answer the question 'Who would open them?' His chapter on 'The Keys of Palestine' describes his journey - I'll leave you to find a grubby copy of the book to see what he found...

Now I just need to get round to finishing his epic The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. It would be a shame to leave it in the pristine condition that it's in...