My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story [Paperback]

 

 

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I have the feeling, and I hope I am right, that `My Father was a Freedom Fighter' will become an iconic book regarding the Palestinian experience. For Ramzy Baroud's book encapsulates the Palestinian story.

It is a simple story that is simply and very movingly told.

`My Father was a Freedom Fighter' is the story of three generations of Palestinians, although it concentrates on the author's father of the middle generation, Mohammed, as the family recall their life in Mandate Palestine and are then ethnically cleansed from their village of Beit Daras to the refugee camps of Gaza - only a few miles, yet whole world, away.

We follow Mohammed as he tries to make a life and a living for himself and later his family as he lives with Bedouin in Sinai for a while, serves in the Egyptian army, the Palestinian National Army, as a street hawker in Saudi Arabia, a labourer in Israel and a merchant of reject textiles in Gaza. We see the lives, the loves, the loss, the despair but above all the resilience of ordinary Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian tragedy is encapsulated at the end, when Mohammed, suffering from chronic asthma, having sold his house to buy medicine, dies without his family there due to the fact they are dispersed across the globe but also within Palestine where, due to Israel's blockade, Mohammed never gets to see his grandchildren some of whom are only a few miles away in the West Bank.

All through this personal, family biography, Baroud weaves the history and the politics of the Palestinian struggle and experience with the Zionist behemoth that squats on their land, attempts to suffocate them and kills them on a daily basis. If you want a succinct version of the Palestine/Israel conflict and want to see it in human terms, the terms of the victims, this is it.

This is a great book. Buy it. Read it. Tell others about it. Get others to read it. And get angry.

Ramzy Baroud's "My Father Was A Freedom Fighter" is more than a book, it is actually a masterpiece. In an overwhelmingly evoking personal style Baroud manages to bring to light the history of the Palestinian people and their battle with Israel and Zionism. Through the story of the Baroud's family the book outlines every event in the history of the conflict and reflects on the way it transformed the Palestinian reality.

The book is a heart breaking depressing story of the Baroud family's journey from paradise to hell. It is a flight that starts in Beit Daras, a small pictorial village in the south of Palestine. It ends in a Gaza refugee camp. It is a tragic journey of a rural self-sufficient population that is driven into total dispossession, humiliation and absolute poverty. And yet, there is a beam of light along the book namely resistance: Ramzy's father Mohammed, was a freedom fighter. He didn't win a single war, not even a battle, yet, against all odds, in spite of his poverty and illness, he managed to educate his children and to plant hope in their young souls, to fuel Ramzy with fierceness, which along the years transformed the young man into a monumental inspirational writer and an icon of intellectual resistance.

My Father Was A Freedom Fighter may be one of the saddest books ever written, yet, Baroud peppered it with his witty sarcastic humour. In between sobbing and laughter we come to intimately grasp the depth of the Palestinian misery. We come also to understand the level of the depth of Israeli brutality. We comprehend why the Palestinians and Arab nations failed for so many years. As the tide is changing and people around the world gather a better understanding of the sinister murderous capacity of the Jewish state, we come to realise that there was not much of a chance for the Palestinians in 1948 to grasp what they were up against. I would even take it further and argue that even nowadays, some fail to fully grasp the depth and strength of the viciousness of Israel and the Zionist ideology. However, reading Baroud's book reveals the dark truth: the people of Gaza at least know it all by now.

In a very thorough manner Baroud manages to review the political shift within the Palestinian society. Through the story of his father, a self taught intellectual and a Russian literature enthusiast we learn about the complexity of the relationships between Marx, Arab Nationalism and Islam. The magical power of the book is due to its natural insistence to explore the Palestinian history from a Palestinian perspective. It is Palestino-centric in every possible good sense. After so many years of left and Jewish hegemony within the Palestinian solidarity discourse, now is the time to learn what Palestinians think about their reality, about the Left, Islam, Pan-Arabism, Hamas, PLO, Nakba, Naksa*, Israel, Zionism, USA, their priorities and so on. Rather than suggesting what should happen in Palestine, what kind of a state it should be and what political model the Palestinians should follow, we have here an opportunity to understand what Palestine and Palestinians are as themselves.

Here are Baroud's words describing his transforming moment while confronting IDF soldiers around the outbreak of the 1st Intifada. Baroud was a High School student at the time.

"Engulfed by my own rebellious feelings, I picked up another stone, and a third. I moved forward, even as bullets flew, even as my friends began falling all around me. I could finally articulate who I was, and for the first time on my own terms. My name was Ramzy, and I was the son of Mohammed, a freedom fighter from Nuseirat, who was driven out of his village of Beit Daras, and a grandson of a peasant who died with a broken heart and was buried beside the grave of my brother, a little boy who died because there was no medicine in the refugee camp's UN clinic. My mother was Zarefah, a refugee who couldn't spell her name, whose illiteracy was compensated for by a heart overflowing with love for her children and her people, a woman who had the patience of a prophet. I was a free boy; in fact, I was a free man" (My Father Was A freedom Fighter. Ramzy Baroud, pg' 132)

Baroud is not just a free man, he is also a free spirit, a spirit that can guide others through the Zionist darkness that threatens to swallow what is left of ethics and universalism. To resist is apparently the true meaning of freedom.

Long Live Palestine

My Father Was A Freedom Fighter is a searing little masterpiece that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the situation in Palestine.

Set alongside the personal tale of his father's and grandfather's lives Baroud presents a thorough and meticulously referenced history of the Gaza Strip from the days of the British mandate to the time of his father's death during the second intifada. This isn't the scholarly history-from-a-distance as told by Avi Shlaim in his equally thorough but somewhat impersonal (in places) Israel and Palestine, this is a history book written by a man whose country's history is his people's history is his family's history. Thus Baroud describes the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, the occupation of the 1967 war, the injustices of occupation and the machinations of Gazan politics in the same clean efficient prose which he uses to describe the lighter moments of his father's courtship of his mother, of his wheeling and dealing money making schemes and of his own childhood, of the fear and the adventure of life as a teenage boy during the first intifada. The prose is efficient but never stark, emotion is barely restrained and Baroud's lightness of touch allows the true import of events he recalls to sting as he tells them to you. The personal tales will make you laugh and will break your heart. The larger historical facts will make you rage. Baroud does not attempt to make this a 'non-biased' history of Israeli-Arab interactions, but he does this not as a conscious editorial decision, he simply writes what he knows. My Father Was A Freedom Fighter is simply the history of Gaza and the story of his family told as it was.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Personal and compelling account of a true Palestinian
This book is excellent, the author's father is the hero of the story and Ramzy Baroud leaves no stone unturned in this account of his father. Read more

Published 23 months ago by B. Salameh

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