Sonja Mejcher-Atassi, An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait: Jerusalem Before and After 1948 (Columbia University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Sonja Mejcher-Atassi (SMA): It has been a long journey. In a way, this book goes back to my childhood because I grew up hearing myriad stories about the Middle East, and Israel/Palestine in particular. But I grew up in Germany, where these stories found little resonance outside my immediate family. I always felt there was something missing in how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was covered. Reading what more aptly is described as the ongoing Nakba through the lens of a group portrait, and more precisely the “small ecumenical circle” (a description I borrow from Walid Khalidi) at the heart of my book, allowed me to draw a more personalized picture, to contextualize, and to embrace messy contradictions, the complexities of real-life stories, and everyday intimacies past.
An Impossible Friendship is the story of five friends, then all young men and women. The book cover shows a photograph taken in 1946 of them sitting together (from left to right): Walid Khalidi, Sally Kassab, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Rasha Salam, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. What brought these Muslim, Jewish, and Christian friends together, and what became of them in the aftermath of 1948, the year of the establishment of the State of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba? To tell their story—which is told for the first time in my book—I draw on archival material, unpublished photographs, personal diaries, letters, and other orginal material, pursuing an interdisciplinary approach, bridging literary studies and the social sciences, and more specifically life writing/biography and microhistory. Whereas Walid, Wolfgang, and Jabra would go on to become acclaimed writers and intellectuals, Rasha and Sally, like so many women of their generation the world over, did not step into the public spotlight; based on private papers I sketch experiences and expectations past which may enable us to imagine, albeit in fragments, their lives in Jerusalem. Storytelling matters. Because stories put names and faces to a history that all too often has been reduced to numbers. Because stories move us, shifting our perspectives but also stirring our emotions and setting free feelings of empathy and practices of solidarity in a world we share. I felt there was an urgency to telling this story of friendship and coexistence across religious lines. The individual lives depicted in my group portrait are being lost—literally disappearing from visibility against the background of current developments in the region, where diversity is dealt with as a threat and ideologies of one religion, one people, and one language dominate the politics of the day, as in the Basic Law passed by the Knesset in 2018 which defines Israel as an exclusively Jewish nation-state. This feeling of urgency has only increased since the tragic events of 7 October and Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza.
An Impossible Friendship is as much about the present and the future as it is about the past, inviting us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
SMA: An Impossible Friendship takes us back to Palestine under the British Mandate, and more specifically to Jerusalem. Just as stories matter, I believe the past matters, the stories we tell about the past matter because they are the building blocks of our identity, of how we perceive of ourselves today, and of what, who, and where we want to be in the future. An Impossible Friendship is as much about the present and the future as it is about the past, inviting us to glimpse alternative possibilities that exist within and alongside the fraught history of Israel/Palestine.
The book opens with the King David Hotel bombing on 22 July 1946, a momentous terrorist attack carried out by the Irgun. In part one, I reconstruct in fragments a world forever lost, reimagining what brought the group of friends together in Jerusalem. In part two, I trace the afterlives of their friendship, attempts at reconnecting in different geographical and temporal settings and under new historical circumstances. Following the life trajectories of my protagonists allowed me to read the Holocaust and the Nakba in conversation, not in comparison but as linked/entangled histories, with all the difficulties that this entails. And here, of course, I draw on Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg’s edited volume The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. My research has not been without surprises and challenges, stemming from the question of archives. Living and working in Beirut, I was investigating the life trajectories of individuals who came together in Jerusalem before 1948, but each life took me in different directions: some had their beginnings in different locations—Adana, Hamburg, and Beirut—and all continued out of Palestine after 1948—in Germany, Iraq, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Switzerland.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
SMA: As part of my PhD, I had worked on the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who went on to play an important role in Baghdad’s cultural life as a driving force of Arab modernism, next to the Saudi-born novelist Abd al-Rahman Munif and the Arab-American writer and artist Etel Adnan, published as Reading Across Modern Arabic Literature and Art in 2012. The connection to my previous work is the book’s focus on cultural figures, some deeply enmeshed in politics, but not politicians. I depart from my previous work by trespassing more confidently from literary studies into history, and by studying German Jewish exile in connection with Palestinian Arab exile. Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s role in the small ecumenical circle is intruiging. He came to Palestine as a teenager in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany. He distanced himself from the German Zionist circles of his parents and developed a critical stance toward Zionism. He may have been a conflicted person. I think he was deeply traumatized by his experience of working as an interpreter in the Nuremberg trials, when he returned from Palestine to Europe after World War II. He became a well known author in postwar German literature and a member of the renowned literary group, Gruppe 47. In 1967, he, like so many European intellectuals, sided with Israel. His political views then were diametrically opposed to those of Walid Khalidi, who today is known as one of the most important historians of Palestine. Against the background of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and Siege of Beirut in 1982 and the First Intifada in the late 1980s, Wolfgang again became more critical of Israel. It is important to remember that we are dealing with real people, people change, and this also means that change is possible.
I also depart from my previous work by freeing myself—at least partly—from the straitjacket of academic writing. Next to tenure, two factors helped me: First, creative writing is part and parcel of my home department, the Department of English at the American University of Beirut. Second, there is a tendency in literary studies to embrace history, and a tendency in history to embrace fiction. The latter has been documented by Enzo Traverso in Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography. The former has gained ground with new historicism since the 1990s, and more recently with Saidiya Hartman. Hartman’s approach to reading the Atlantic slave trade is useful in reading the ongoing Nakba, I argue, as both have been mostly reduced to single storylines that offer few glimpses into entangled stories of people dispossessed, lives broken and taken. In recuperating and redrawing storylines running counter to the one storyline across the pages of history, I want to open different perspectives, respecting the gaps and silences in the archive which urge us not to rush to a closure where there is none.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
SMA: I hope this will be read widely by young and old, here in the region as well as abroad. By students from a range of disciplines but also by a general public interested in the Middle East, and in particular Israel/Palestine, or just intrigued by a group portrait and the story of an impossible friendship in the midst of political turmoil and war.
J: Tell us more about your book title, what do you mean by An Impossible Friendship?
SMA: The title of my book alludes to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and his love for a Jewish woman known as Rita, who appears in Darwish’s poetry on several occasions, notably in “Rita wal-bunduqiyya” (“Rita and the Rifle”). Darwish returns to Rita many years later in “Shita’ Rita” (“Rita’s Winter”). I use a few lines of these two poems as epigraphs to part one and two of my book. As Tamar Ben-Ami, the real-life Rita, says, “There’s something about that impossible love that is … beyond wars and perhaps because of them at times” (my emphasis). An Impossible Friendship argues that what brought the ecumenical circle together in Jerusalem was more than mere historical coincidence; it was beyond wars but, paradoxically, also because of them. Peaceful coexistence, justice, and freedom for all was and is possible, despite attempts at setting Arabs and Jews apart, as is the idea of egalitarian binationalism which recognizes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self determinations in Israel/Palestine. The two state solution may have been possible at some point but with Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory ongoing, it is doomed to fail, and I think we need to think about other possibilities, be it a one-state solution, as Edward Said imagined in the 1990s, or some sort of confederation. Inscribed in An Impossible Friendship is the possibility of friendship, and it is this I want my readers to see.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
SMA: In the fall, I am teaching a class on Palestinian life writing, autobiographies and memoirs. With the horrors we witness unfolding in front of our very eyes in Gaza, I feel at a loss of words and seek answers in Palestinian narratives. I am particularly interested in literature archives, writers’ private papers, and what we can do here at the American University of Beirut to build, preserve, and make such archives accessible for research, keeping in mind the political and ethical questions this implies.
Excerpt from the book (from the prologue, pp. 1-4)
A group of friends strolls through the magnificent lobby of the King David Hotel, Jerusalem’s first five-star property, a palatial, six-story structure built of locally quarried pink limestone on an elevated site overlooking the Old City and Mount Zion. The elegantly dressed young men and women walk toward the bar on the ground floor. There, they ensconce themselves in plush leather chairs and are joined by a tall young man, his longish hair falling over his cheeks and light-colored eyes, a pipe in his hand. He sits down next to a woman, her dark curly hair cropped short. The bar stools are mostly occupied by British Army officers and civil servants working for the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan. Reflecting the gentle twilight of early evening, the large, beveled mirror over the bar makes the luxurious, Tudor-style room appear even larger than it is. The officers trade jokes, laughing at a volume that betrays colonial entitlement. The friends order drinks—lager, Scotch, or Campari soda, perhaps—from the Sudanese waiter, who sports his customary white robe with a red sash. They discuss a reading of English Romantic poetry they attended a few days earlier at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), which is located just across the street in an equally spectacular building. As the conversation drifts inevitably toward politics, the friends exchange worried glances and hopeful smiles, then rise out of their comfortable chairs and continue the evening at La Regence, a swank restaurant in the hotel’s basement. There, they toast Walid and Rasha Salam Khalidi’s first wedding anniversary and bid the couple farewell, as the Khalidis will soon depart for Beirut.
The celebration included a group of friends that Walid Khalidi, many years later—in an article about Albert Hourani, who worked at the Arab Office in Jerusalem after World War II, before he went on to become an acclaimed Oxford historian—would refer to as “a small ‘ecumenical’ circle of friends which met regularly in Jerusalem at its ‘headquarters,’ the bar of the King David Hotel.” In the same article, Khalidi also recalls “an evening in Lulie [Abul-Huda]’s flat where we all sat around on the floor listening to Albert [Hourani] read T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland by candlelight.” Khalidi’s use of the term ecumenical in his description of the group indicates its members’ diverse religious backgrounds—a coming together of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Ussama Makdisi employs the same word, ecumenical, tracing its etymology from the Greek word oikoumenē, which denotes the whole of the inhabited world, both Christian and Islamic usages of the term draw from. He goes on to outline an “ecumenical frame” with which to reevaluate “a new kind of intimacy and meaningful solidarity that cut across Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious lines” within the Middle East, refuting accounts of both continuous sectarian strife and overidealized coexistence as communal harmony.
Such an ecumenical framing is crucial to understanding what allowed these young men and women to come together, as depicted in the photograph on this book’s cover: Walid Khalidi, Sally Kassab, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Rasha Salam, and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. The “small ‘ecumenical’ circle” (as I shall henceforth designate them) recalled by Khalidi in his article on Hourani is grounded in what Makdisi refers to as an age of coexistence. Yet the friends came together not in the “golden” years of that coexistence but toward its end, when coexistence was under threat by war and combating national aspirations and political ideologies, in the specific historical context of Palestine under the British Mandate and Jerusalem in the early 1940s in particular. Their friendship was also subject to what Kris Manjapra refers to as an age of entanglement,4 one of transnational circulation and encounter that was contingent on British colonial rule. Seen in this context, the ecumenical circle intersected closely with notions of race, class, and educational opportunity that set this group of friends apart from other segments of society in Mandate Palestine as an intellectual elite, enmeshed in a cosmopolitanism of affluence, as I illustrate in chapter 1.
As an instance of literary circulation, Eliot’s “The Waste Land” resonated with the ecumenical circle in Jerusalem as it did with lovers of modernist poetry across Europe and well beyond. As Eliot’s poem aptly puts it, the world they had known—and with it their means of epistemic representation—was being transformed into “a heap of broken images.” As Jabra suggests, “Arab poets responded so passionately to ‘The Wasteland’ [sic] because they, too, went through an experience of universal tragedy, not only in World War II, but also, and more essentially, in the Palestine debacle and its aftermath.”
The celebration of the Khalidi’s first wedding anniversary was the last time the ecumenical circle came together. The next day—July 22, 1946—life in Jerusalem would be shaken to its core by a momentous terrorist attack. The King David Hotel bombing was part of a series of Zionist attacks against the British Mandate authorities, which started in 1944 and saw the assassination in Cairo of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, the killing of British policemen and soldiers, and attacks on major railroad and highway bridges across Palestine. The first such attacks were carried out by the Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Freedom Fighters of Israel), known as Lehi or Stern Gang, and the Irgun Zva’i Leumi (National Military Organization), known as Irgun. The Haganah—the paramilitary organization of the Yishuv, as the Jewish population in Mandate Palestine had come to be called—joined forces with its militant offshoots as the United Resistance Movement, within which each group retained its independent existence, only after the end of World War II.
The King David Hotel bombing killed more than ninety people in a humanmade avalanche of rubble. Thurston Clarke provides a minutely detailed description of how the Irgun prepared the bombing, while life in the hotel went on as usual until 12:37 p.m., when more than 750 pounds of TNT brought down the entire south wing of the building, in whose upper floors the offices of the British government’s army headquarters and chief secretariat were housed. The explosives were concealed in milk churns, which the Irgun terrorists, disguised as Arab workers—one of them wearing the uniform of a Sudanese waiter—had moved into the kitchen of La Régence and placed next to the pillars that supported the floors above. Another bomb was planted in the street outside the hotel; it was to be detonated first to block the road and create a diversion that would allow sufficient time to light the fuses on the explosives inside the hotel. Once the explosives were all in place, the terrorists placed a number of telephone calls to evacuate the hotel. The adequacy of these warnings has caused controversy; as Clarke suggests, the calls were either ignored or considered to be a false alarm, or else they came too late.7 Those injured in the first explosion outside the hotel—among them passengers on a bus coming up Julian’s Way, mostly Arab women en route from the Old City to the western neighborhoods—were helped into the hotel, thereby increasing the number of casualties from the attack inside the hotel. Clarke lists, according to government announcement, the final toll: “91 dead and 46 injured. Of these 91 dead there were 21 first-rank government officials, 13 soldiers, 3 policemen, and 5 members of the public. The remaining 49 were second-rank clerks, typists, and messengers, junior members of the Secretariat, employees of the hotel, and canteen workers. By nationality there were two Armenians killed, one Russian, a Greek, an Egyptian, twenty-eight Britons, forty-one Arabs, and seventeen Jews.”
Clarke provides us with an idea of the wide range of the victims, but his list of the dead by rank of “importance” is unseemly, and his breakdown of the dead by nationality misleading, given that “Arabs” and “Jews” did not figure as nationalities in Palestine (yet). Jews and Arabs very well may have been among the “twenty-eight Britons,” and the “seventeen Jews” may have been of different nationalities, some of them perhaps citizens of Palestine, like most but not necessarily all of the “forty-one Arabs.” Representations of Arabs and Jews as disparate and opposed communities are not carved in stone; rather, they are recent developments, generated first and foremost by European colonialism and in particular by British imperial policy in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, before which Arabs and Jews were just as likely to be aligned with each other as they were with other common if complex identities, such as Ottoman, Syrian, Iraqi, or Palestinian, with all of these categories in a dynamic process of transformation.
Excerpted from An Impossible Friendship by Sonja Mejcher-Atassi. Copyright (c) 2024 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
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