Letâs start at the beginning, with the startling opening of Nikula Khouryâs memoirs, with his assertion that he had lost the materials for his memoirs not once and not twice but three times, because of the 1910 Karak Revolt and the First World War and the nakba. âHere, I have returned yet again to collect these memories and to write them down for the fourth time,â he concludes. âAll I can hope for is that the luck of this account will not be, this time, that of its antecedents.â
Khouryâs hopes came true. You hold his memoirs in your hands. Even so, let me begin this preface with a note about those other three times, about absence and loss. They form a significant and inextricable part of this textâof its very existence.
Among them, the nakba stands out. Itâs a singularity, âthe terrible catastrophe,â to Khoury, and an event at the scale of a national collective, Palestine. This is not the case for 1910 and 1914â1918. The causes and forms of those three instances of politically motivated violence differ widelyâand their outcomes vary wildly. Itâs in exile that Khoury writes his memoirs for the fourth time.
At the same time, the nakba can at all stand out because Khoury mentions it and the other two events in one breath. The fact that 1948 is extraordinary does not mean it exists in a void. It is alive with contexts and embedded in pasts, however historians may interpret them. To clarify: historians do not see 1910 as being related to 1948. World War I and specifically the British Balfour Declaration, issued in 1917, is trickier. It mentioned only Jews, not Arabs, by their own name and established only their politically relevance in and for Palestine. This founded a pattern of presence-versus-absence that found a parallel in the result of the nakba and the 1948 War: Israeli statehood versus Palestinian statelessness. Put differently, while one canât claim that looking forward from 1917 the nakba was the only possible future of Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine, one canât deny, looking backward from 1948, that the nakba had roots in 1917 (and other events, of course).
This âstructuralistâ statement is mirrored in Khouryâs âsubjectiveâ lived experience, i.e. the memory he presents of it. To mention 1910, 1914â1918, and 1948 in one breath means to see and feel, present and represent them as fundamentally equal parts of one chain: his life. Together, they shape and show what his life was all about to him: loss, time and again, but also and equally the dogged determination to go on and try again and push forward. These memoirs are a virtual triple palimpsest, then: a text penned on top of a fragmented version Khoury recalls, on top of another version, on top of yet of another one.
There is much here that invites reflection: Khouryâs life as an educator, his evolving political work, the tensions within his Church, and relations to other Christian denominations, to name just four. While this is not the place to broach all these mattersânot the least because I am not a specialistâI should note how deeply and structurally they are intertwined. Consider education, politics, and organized religion. They are not neatly separate parallel tracks in Khouryâs life. Rather, each by necessity shaped his engagement in the others: a fundamental condition of how people live and make sense of their lives, crisscrossing categories that we historians tend to specialize in.
One point I found particularly remarkable in Khouryâs memoirs is the multiple ruptures and way stations in his lifetime. While the most dramatic expression of this reality comes at the start of this text, instances are scattered throughout. For one thing, although Khouryâs life is centered on Palestine, he also lived in (what would become) Jordan and in Egypt and Lebanon. These moves occurred in different and shifting family constellations and for different reasons, whether politicsâthe nakba exile in Lebanonâor work, be it his fatherâs, who moved to Karak, or his own, when he sojourned in Cairo. One dimensionâsometimes a cause, sometimes an outcomeâof this pattern was Khouryâs education. He was not schooled in one institution and place. His schooling may have been particularly eclectic, but not atypical per se. After all, a large a number of different sociopolitical actors and stakeholdersâlocal and imperial governments, native Churches, and missionaries, to just name threeârubbed shoulders in Palestine and surrounding countries. A more existential dimension of Khouryâs periodic mobility concerns his children, not only those who lived but those who died. One of the most haunting sentences of this text is âwe planted a baby in every city we lived in, Karak, Ramla, Jerusalem, and Birzeit, as a result of all the calamities we went through, but we thank God in every circumstance.â This is a real, and really personal, geography of loss. At the same time, Khoury turns death into life, loss into belonging. While he writes âburiedâ in other sentences, here, he says âplanted,â as in a tree, a living being. Even if he and his kin are not in Palestine anymore, itâs as if theyâcertainly as individuals and family members; perhaps also as Palestinians?âstill have loved ones left behind.
Christian-Muslim relations are a recurrent theme in these pages. There is a fascinating tension here. On the one hand, Khoury, a follower of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, is a bona fide Palestinian nationalist of some standing; and he is somebody who believes that both Christians and Muslims are Palestinians and nationalists. On the other hand, he often uses words like âastonishedâ to describe Christiansâ or Muslimsâ reactions to multi-religious political moments. This suggests that said multi-religious reality was tenuous. In everyday political occurrences Muslims and Christians continue to negotiate what is expected and ânormalâ and what is not. Multi-religious nationalism was not a fait accompli, but a project in the making. Thus, Khoury says he helped to head off a Christian-Muslim clash triggered by a (presumably) cocky Christian adolescent in Ramla, and that he asserted multi-religious nationalism when accepting the invitation to orate at the al-Aqsa mosque, in Jerusalem.
Another invitation Khoury accepted was that to head a Christian Palestinian delegation to the Balkans to convince Orthodox politicians and masses there to support the Palestinian cause at the League of Nations, in Geneva, where Khouryâs journey ends. (The specific context is the debate surrounding the British Peel Commission of 1938.) This journey demonstrates the continuation of at least some politically relevant religiously based ties between European and Middle Eastern ex-Ottoman provinces deep in the post-Ottoman world. This is not âjustâ a transnational story, then. It is rooted in a shared historyâshared in that both Palestine and Balkan countries had been Ottoman and that Orthodoxy played an important role in both, too.
Let me conclude with a note related to the final chapter of Khouryâs life as covered in this memoirs, his exile in Lebanon. In late 1948, he writes, âI was allowed to take care of the church [of Wadi Shahrour] as the legitimate priest of the village from 15th November 1948, without a fixed salary, relying on what I received from the offertory basket, the feast day gifts and other spiritual services.â Indeed, the nakba settled Palestinian statelessness. Central to this reality was, and remains, exile from the homeland and/or not enjoying really full citizenship in the homeland, now Israel. This condition comes hand in glove with an existential structural precariousness and, related, dependence on others, in Khouryâs case Archbishop of Lebanon Elia Karam, who arranged the post in Wadi Shahrour for him. Being thrown into exile as a modern nation in the very age of the nation-state has been a rather distinct, extraordinary fate. And exile and the collective precariousness resulting from it is an existential experience of the highest order: one that even Palestinian individuals who have acquired another countryâs citizenship feel and experience. All Palestinians, no matter their myriad places of residence and citizenships, share a profoundly existential trait, thenâa national commonality whose sheer depth and soldering quality is second to none. But at the same time, the differences between individual Palestiniansâ everyday lives are massive, indeed second to no other nation, either. Just consider Palestinians in, say, Haifa, Hebron, Amman, Beirut, and Damascusâor Geneva, Moscow, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Cape Town. Even within one country of exile there are worlds of difference. Lebanon is a case in point, and Khoury a good example. He is dependent on Karam, sureâbut at least he has somebody to be dependent on. Many other did not, be it because they did not have Khouryâs pre-1948 capital and transnational networks that helped after 1948 outside Palestine, or for other reasons. The exilic end of Khouryâs memoirs, then, is an apt reflection of the extraordinary complexity of post-nakba Palestinianness, of a nation at one and the same time more unified and more diverse than others.