My Palestine: An Impossible Exile by Mohammad Tarbush (Hardcover)

Nonfiction - Biography & Autobiography - Memoir - History - Middle East - Isreal & Palestine

Foreward by: Nada Tarbush

RELEASE DATE: 9/9/2024 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

A memoir that combines political and economic commentary with personal and national history.

Mohammad Tarbush was born in British Mandate Palestine. As an infant, he and his family were forced to evacuate their village together with its entire population, after the Zionist victory that led to the establishment of the State of Israel. Then as landless refugees in the West Bank, the family sank into poverty. When, as a teenager, Tarbush left home one day under the pretext of visiting relatives in Jordan, he in fact set off on a year-long hitchhiking journey to Europe, where he would eventually become a highly successful international banker and a key behind-the-scenes promoter of the Palestinian cause. In My Palestine, Mohammad 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.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Mohammad Tarbush (1948-2022) was born Beit Nattif, near Jerusalem. In 1988, he became managing director at Deutsche Bank and then at UBS. He is the author of several books including Reflections of a Palestinian. His writings on Palestine have appeared in the Guardian and Financial Times, among others.

CONTRIBUTOR BIO: 

Nada Tarbush represents Palestine as a diplomat at the United Nations in Geneva. She holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, and Master's degrees from Columbia University, Sciences Po Paris, and the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

"This autobiography offers a gripping account of the trajectory - from destitute refugee to writer, scholar, banker and public advocate - of an extraordinary individual, while at the same time illustrating the story of the Palestinian people. Politically astute and sensitive to the nuances of the Western societies where he was educated and worked, Mohammad Tarbush describes living in a world where Palestinians did not exist, or existed only as the nemesis of Israelis, and his efforts to remedy this erasure and this bias."-- "Rashid Khalidi"

"Far more than a memoir, Mohammad Tarbush's remarkable and courageous life, which he narrates with great lyricism, offers readers a keyhole through which to see the immense forces that created one nation by stealing another. While insisting on justice for the crimes of the ongoing Nakba, Tarbush's vision for a shared future - rooted in true equality for all people from the river to the sea - feels at once inevitable and irresistible."-- "Naomi Klein"

"With righteous indignation, his heart thumping, but a fair mind, his reasoning untainted by hate, Mohammad Tarbush delineates the catastrophe that has befallen his people, starting with his own family, and articulates how there can be no way forward in the Middle East but through truth-telling, good faith, justice, and co-existence. This book is a work of necessity and hope. Read it and be wiser."-- "Yann Martel"