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This is taken from The Guardian:
Hasan Karmi
Palestinian intellectual and broadcaster passionate about the suffering of his people
by Tim Llewellyn
Monday May 7, 2007
The long story of Hasan Sa'id Karmi, BBC Arabic Service broadcaster, lexicographer and man of letters, who has died aged 101, is that of every Palestinian Arab: one of exile, dispossession, oppression and separation - and an enduring sense of loss. But there are few other Palestinians who were approaching adulthood at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and whose lives stretched well into the first decade of the 21st century.
In an interview with me in 2004, Karmi summed up what all British politicians should have inscribed on their hearts: in the early 1920s, he said, "we were optimistic. We felt that eventually the Arabs would get their rights because they were the majority, the owners of the country and the ... land. We didn't imagine the [British mandate] government would help the Jews get hold of the land and the country." He lived to see this process promulgated by the British and entrenched by the Americans.
Karmi, who lived in Britain for 41 years, working for the BBC for most of them, never ceased to hold his host country primarily responsible for the loss of Palestine. In later years, with increasing vociferousness - angry at his and his people's loss, and fuelled by his researches into western philosophy and history - he developed intense theories of an endemic Judaeo-Christian campaign against the peoples of the Middle East and Islam, founded in that innate sense of superiority and "chosenness" so dear to the Protestant British and American soul, and playing to the Jewish concept of a "chosen" people.
But Karmi was not religious, as such; for most of his life, he was an intellectual informed by reason, study, reading and western, as much as eastern, culture. He was born in the small town of Tulkarem, on the West Bank, now a centre of Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories.
The son of an eminent shari'a court judge, Sheikh Sa'id al-Karmi, he studied in the local Qur'anic school, before going on to higher education in Damascus and the English College in Jerusalem. Soon fluent in, and fascinated by, the English language, he joined the British mandate government's education department and won two scholarships, in 1939 and 1945, to study at the Institute of Education in London.
During the late 1930s, and the Palestinian uprising against the British, Karmi became suspect among nationalist supporters of Haj Amin Husseini, the mufti, whose ranks he had refused to join, for being too close to the British. In the doctrine later enunciated by George Bush, not to be "with" was to be "against"; and Karmi's employment by the mandate government, which was unavoidable as it was the only public employer in Palestine, was seen as the problem. At one stage he was forced into hiding for six months for fear of reprisals from the mufti's men.
It was no secret that Karmi was an admirer and an expert in the English language and in the physical developments the British had brought to Palestine, if not the treacherous, brutal and inept system that accompanied them; but these subtle differentiations were lost in the violence that swept Palestine.
After his return from London in 1946, Karmi and his family watched the horrors consuming their country as the mandate petered out in disgrace and betrayal. In April 1948, with the British still notionally in charge (though concentrating on their retreat rather than the protection of their subjects) and hearing reports of the Jewish terrorists' massacre of Palestinian civilians in nearby Deir Yassin, Karmi, his Syrian wife, Amina, and their three children fled their home in the West Jerusalem suburb of Qatomon. It is an episode movingly described in his daughter Ghada's memoir In Search of Fatima (2002). As Karmi told an interviewer, years later: "Everything was left in the house - our provisions, meat ... I had a good library that I left because I thought I was coming back ... [but] my home was occupied and I could not go back."
In London, Karmi joined the BBC Arabic Service, of which he became a stalwart as a language supervisor, rationalising the babel of often poor or indifferent Arabic he found on his arrival. As the creator and writer-presenter of a weekly literary programme called Qawlun ala Qawl (Saying on a Saying) and devoted to Arabic poetry and proverbs, he became famed among a worldwide Arab audience. The programme was the longest running in the history of the Arabic Service, and he presented it for 30 years, 20 of them after he retired.
Not least of the ironies in Karmi's life was that on his arrival in London he set up home in Golders Green, where he had been informed by an Egyptian colleague that the amenities were splendid, but not, perhaps, that this was the most Jewish stretch of territory in Britain. Although Amina, who was never happy in England, made her house an Arab enclave, and Karmi withdrew inside with Plato, Descartes, John Stuart Mill and Wittgenstein as company, their children grew up with and made lifelong friends of their Jewish schoolfriends and neighbours.
In 1969, much to Amina's disapproval, Karmi went to Buckingham Palace to be awarded an MBE for services to the BBC, where through such difficult periods for the Arabic Service as the rise of Nasserism, the Suez crisis and the Palestinian resurgence of the 1960s, he retained his equilibrium and authority, even among (most of) his colleagues.
He returned to the Middle East, to Jordan, in 1989, Amina dying two years later after a long illness. He spent his remaining years working as hard and as expertly as ever at his dictionaries, of which there were 11, one Arabic-English, the rest English-Arabic. He was also a master of the art of finding equivalents of English and Arabic colloquialisms; he was a great admirer of the plasticity yet accuracy of English, and a critic of the sloppiness into which he judged modern Arabic had descended - which he felt was reflected in much Arab thinking, or the lack of it.
In later years, Karmi propounded his theories of a western plot against the Arabs with greater vociferousness, the events in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon fuelling his anger and frustration. He was not a man to tangle with: disagreement with him tended to convince him one was either thick or anti-Arab. He had trodden an ostensibly apolitical path through a practical and pragmatic life, but his soul burned for Palestine and the indignities visited on the Arab people.
He is survived by his daughters Siham and Ghada, and his son Ziyad.
· Hasan Sa'id Karmi, broadcaster and scholar, born 1905; died May 5 2007
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