Turbulent Times in Palestine: The Diaries of Khalil Totah,1886-1955

 

10 April 2013
The Palestine Center
Washington, DC

 

Dr. Thomas Ricks:
It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you for coming out in this hot weather.  It’s also strange to be talking about hot weather as well as about Palestine. But I’m going to be talking about something in Palestinian history that actually gets very little notice and that’s the issues of education. I’m going to talk today about one of the educators who lived during the British Mandate period, roughly 1919 to 1948, and his name is Khalil Abdullah Totah, and he was a resident of Ramallah, small town, just about ten miles north of Jerusalem, the hill of Allah, literally, but Ramallah about the time I am going to talk to you was merely a village, probably no more than 5000 people. Egyptian villages in the Delta at this period of time were about the same size. So we’re talking about a very discrete portion of what was then Mandate Palestine.

But like everything else in Palestinian history, and about history actually, there are always unrealized treasures and the work of a historian is to pull that thread out of the carpet as it were and make it a little bit more known. So it’s also strange to be talking about education though I’m delighted to do so as I’ve been an educator my whole life and feel very close to Khalil Totah and the people of Palestine of the era, 1920s to the 1948 period. And then his life extends into his coming to the United States and settling here permanently. After 1950 he’s an American citizen resident in the Quaker town at the Quaker College called Whittier College in in Whittier, California, where he would pass away in 1955, at the age of 68.

There didn’t seem to be too many deficiencies in the character of Khalil Abdullah Totah, although he was born into a very large family of five sisters, all of whom preceded him in age, therefore he was the miracle, the sixth child, now the son, and he’s followed very quickly by two brothers, so things were going well for the Totah family, they think at that time, finally.  But indeed the sisters as well as the parents became Quakers. The parents were converted to Quakerism from Greek Orthodoxy, the majority of the religion of the Fertile Crescent, in the 1880’s, actually it was 1868 that they were converted to Quakerism, to the Religious Society of Friends, to be more proper, by two Americans, believe it or not, who did not have it as their purpose conversions, at least any contact with the region. They were leaving Jerusalem, making their way north to Beirut, stopping as it was a one-night trip in the little village of Ramallah. In that brief stay they met certain people, who were Christians already, Greek Orthodox actually, who were interested in Quakerism and what it meant to be a Quaker. They were actually very interested in the idea of a school, and indeed the parents of Totah, were on their way to Beirut, to found the Quaker school of Brummana, in Brummana, area north of Beirut in the mountains. It turns out that during their brief stay, was accompanied by a young woman who approached them, a Palestinian, Mariam is her name. She wanted a school, had gone to a school for women in Jerusalem and felt that Ramallah needed to have a school for girls. So she asked that they stay and establish a Friends Girls’ School.

Well they said that they would send people to do that task because they were on their way to Lebanon, but they would be more than happy to give her some materials, which they did, and that she could go ahead and found a school. So she is actually the first teacher and founder and soon converted to Quakerism. So the Quaker Palestinian presence begins with this felicitous event of the visit of the Jones’, their last name being Jones, to the city of Ramallah in 1868, but they were moving on. And in order to establish a school there, having an international connection, the Jones’ stopped by London on their way back from Beirut, where they established Brummana, and requested that the Friends make an attempt to establish a presence in Ramallah. Well they did. British missionaries, Quaker missionaries, came and helped Mariam, and brought in a couple of teachers and established the grades 1-4, typical beginning of an elementary school system.

By the end of the ten years however things had changed in the Middle East, changed a little more radically than they had hoped. The riots had already occurred in Beirut of 1860, Britain had taken a profound interest in Lebanon, much more than in Palestine, that sounds improbable but it’s true, so much so that the Quakers in Ramallah, who were British decided that they wanted to switch places with those Americans up on Brummana. So the Americans returned in 1878, and have been in Ramallah to this day, both as a presence, as a school and there’s a Girls’ School and a Boys’ School. The Boys’ School came along in 1901, the Girls’ School had a head start and always felt themselves superior to the Boys’ School both the administrators, so a type of Palestinian feminism had already found its place in the heart of Palestine before the turn of the century in fact.  This comes to cause some trouble for our friend today, Mr. Totah, as I will come to.

He was raised as  a Christian Quaker, in a town that had increasingly become not just Christian but also Quaker, a significant community, we’re talking about a hundred people, no more, were now present by 1900 in Ramallah. There was a Friend’s meeting house established that still exists today in Ramallah, and it’s been refurbished, it looks brilliant, it’s been restored with a more vigorous attempt to keep the Quaker community alive and solid. So American Quakerism, American Friends are stillstill very much part of the history of Palestine, as far back as 1868, but more specifically in the 20th Century.

He always referred to himself as a birthright Quaker, a quaint term, I understand among the Friends today, to call oneself that. It has a certain amount of snobbery involved in it. He meant that his parents were Quakers, so don’t mess around with him. He has connections, and it was connections that become a major feature in his life. The Quaker network would see Totah leave Palestine in 1908 and go to a Quaker school called Oak Grove in Brattleboro, New Hampshire and Oak Grove Seminary, where he gets his last two years of his high schooling which prepares him then for college. His long desire was to go to Haverford College, in the neighborhood of where I’m coming from in Philadelphia. Haverford College was the key Quaker school on the east coast in terms of personalities, people like professor Rufus Jones had taught at that school and had an international reputation. He [Totah] wanted to study with Jones actually, primarily history and philosophy, those were the subjects of Totah’s interest. He didn’t do very well in science, as he  was to find out, but he did well in school overall. He had been already schooled by the English school in Jerusalem, he had had some schooling in the new Boys’ School established, in fact he has the honor of being the first boy in Ramallah to be registered in the Boys’ Friends School in Ramallah, the very first one. His father made sure of that, and his two brothers followed suit.

But by 1908 he was first of all too old, because it had only gotten up to ten grades, approximately by 1908, and so he had to leave and get his last two years of schooling in the United States, which he did. Meeting up with friends of course in the New England area who took care of him and guided him, were supposed to meet him in New York in fact when he was coming off his ship. But in fact his boat was delayed in Italy, he had to wait two or three days because he missed the boat. He had been touring Naples,so enthusiastically with a friend, not a Quaker friend but a female friend whom he had met on the boat to Italy, and they were both going together to the United States to New York, and he missed his boat and he had to take a boat four days later. Now he did worry the fact that the Grants were waiting for him in New York. Of course they waited and waited and they finally gave up and went to their summer place, which he knew about, up in Maine, South China, Maine. It’s difficult to find it on a map, even today. But he was indefatigable, at the age of 18, he made his way to New York, made some inquiries, took a boat to Boston, and arrived in the hometown of the Grants, but the Grants weren’t there. He was then told where he could find them, believe it or not, though it was the first time he was in the United States, and he already ran into some racial problems as the men on the boat put him not in the first class but in the place where they kept the horses on board the boat. These encounters come as blips on his screen. He gives very little weight to them, but he frequently because of his darker skin and the time period, faced the age-old unfortunate racism in this country.

He made his way to South China, Maine, much to the astonishment of the Grants, who suddenly realized they had an extraordinary person on their hands, and entered into not Haverford because he didn’t have enough money, he entered into Clark University, then called Clark College. And one of his first professors that he became close to was a man who’s last name was Goddard, yes the physicist, the famous Dr. Goddard, whose name is well known in this area, and in the area of science, the space rocket Goddard. He taught him physics, and he got a C in it. He says in his diary, that while he was a friend, friendship didn’t go beyond the grade. He had to put up with that grade, but he was delighted by this friendship because every Sunday he had dinner with the Goddards who by and large adopted him. I don’t know if the Goddards were actually part of the Society of Friends but it’s a touching story in that he touches at various parts of his life very famous people.

Well Totah finishes his high school and college in the United States. By 1910 he is already two years into college. By 1912 he is finished college, and we see Totah emerge in his first job. He goes back to Palestine. He’s the hometown boy who made well:he’s got his bachelor’s degree, his high school degree from American university, American high school, and now he’s back in Ramallah, and he begins teaching at the Boys’ Friends School.

I want to introduce you to this remarkable man by his look in1946 [shows transparency]. But when he was a young man he would appear in much younger status. He soon becomes a principal of the Boys’ School, in Ramallah, in 1912, and by 1914 he’s comfortably two years into his job. He sees this as his future. He is already thinking of a girl friend he had, a very good friend back in Clark College, actually she went all the way back to Oak Grove and then he would soon propose to her in South China when he would return unexpectedly to the United States. It was 1914, of course the coming of World War I. He, as all males of Palestine, were recruited into the Ottoman army, and as such he becomes a private, for the three month service in Jerusalem in the barracks which he said smelled horribly, and he couldn’t put up with it. So he was a teacher and he asked for leave of absence, that he could come every morning to the drill and then return to Ramallah in the evening so he didn’t have to stay in what he called “that Ottoman pig sty.” He was referring again to the barracks, not to Jerusalem when he made that comment. He’s in a uniform, and one particular day, two months into his training, which is quite rigorous, learning how to fire rifles was a new thing for a Quaker. He said he was a Quaker, that he wanted to be a conscientious objector, the Ottoman’s yawned, it wasn’t impressive to them. He was, as far as they were concerned, just another recruit, though they were going to place him in a high rank. He was going to be trained as an officer, which is no great pleasure, since the officers precede troops in the battle. At any rate, he runs into difficulties with the Ottomans because he shows up with some friends who were indeed Quakers visiting Jerusalem, and he’s not in uniform. You can’t be in Jerusalem, not in uniform because it’s then suspicious that he’s about to go AWOL.

He’s actually placed under arrest and is told that his sentence will be lifted when the pasha at the time, Jamal Pasha, has deemed it worthy. He’s held under arrest every time he returns every morning, placed under arrest for the entire day, doing nothing. At certain times he was allowed to go out and train with his troops, but he spends the last month of his three month training in actual misery, because he can’t look forward to an already tiresome task. So he finds a way to sneak out from under the nose of the British, he should also have said the Ottomans, and indeed he does. He goes AWOL by way of a boat through Jaffa, but he’s recognized so he goes back and lies about why he was there, a white lie, that he was in Jaffa shopping, returns to Ramallah, and then heads up to Haifa. He leaves by a Greek boat from Haifa and makes his way back to the United States.  Now he’s AWOL and cannot return to Palestine, as long as there are Ottomans, so he longed for the collapse of the Ottoman empire for very personal reasons.

But in the meantime he’s not idle. He attends Columbia University’s College for Teachers, and manages to get a Master’s degree in which he writes about Quaker education, naturally I might add. Now with an M.A., not just a bachelor’s degree from Clark College, but an M.A. from Columbia University’s College for Teachers, he now returns to Palestine in 1919, the Ottomans are gone and the very first job he applies to is a job at a very special school called the Men’s Teacher Training College, better known as the Arab Government College, and to Palestinians Kuliyah Arabiyya, the very famous Kuliyah Arabiyya. And while Khalil Sakakini, one of the leading intellectuals of the time, had been appointed principal, Sakakini had resigned because the High Commissioner, Samuel was in fact, Jewish and a Zionist, and he would not serve in a Zionist, not the British but a Zionist commissioned Palestine. So his resignation forced the British to take a look at who was the vice principal and it was Totah. He now gets a promotion and becomes the headmaster and the first principal, of two principals, of this elite etonian-like school, which takes the top students from the six districts of Palestine, the top three would take the final exam every year and give them an immediate scholarship to come to Jerusalem with room and board, and uniform, yes and logo on the pocket, all paid for, it was a book and a pen and an eagle. They were all part of a public school patch as it were in British terms.

He is, in fact, for six years the headmaster of this school. He lays the groundwork for the basic education of this elite school. He helps write a history book with a Palestinian historian, called History of Palestine, a geography book called A Geography of Palestine with a top geographer, and just the History of Jerusalem, again with a leading scholar of Jerusalem. He never called himself a specialist, by that he meant he wasn’t a philosopher, he wasn’t a historian, he wasn’t a sociologist. He said, “I am just simply an educator.” And indeed he was, he was well-groomed and well educated in the progressive education systems in Switzerland in the 18th Century, kind of a pre-Montessori education, hands-on education.  He was an advocate for innovation and Quaker education  throughout his entire life. He became very devoted to this and very proud to call himself an educator.

Totah, however, runs into difficulties, again because of principles that he has with himself and the society that he is in. In 1925, he’s in Jerusalem, still the headmaster, and running the school in a very strict British style. He always told students that, “Your demonstrations are fine but education is more important.” He hinted at one time to a colleague, in his diary, that “If we spent all our time in the streets, someone else is going to run our country.” Well, a prescient concept to hold to, but quite anti-nationalist, and got him into hot water. Students wanted to demonstrate on April 1st not because it was April fool’s day, but because Balfour himself was coming to Palestine. Balfour had been the foreign secretary who was responsible for the Balfour Declaration in 1918 in which a homeland is promised to the Jewish people without offending the civil rights of the non-Jewish population. This declaration made Balfour’s name on November 3rd, that declaration was written and every November 3rd since that date in 1918 was celebrated warmly by students and by street demonstrations. Schools would be closed down because students wouldn’t come to school.

This is something that distressed Totah frequently. Balfour was coming to Palestine because Balfour had been refused entry, he had been allowed to enter Beirut but he couldn’t go to Damascus, there were riots occurring in Beirut because of his presence, and he was ushered out of Beirut and sent to Mandate Palestine. Immediately the authorities of the Haram al Sharif, the Noble Mount and the Noble Sanctuary or Temple Mount, which is the term used by the Israelis, was closed to Balfour, he could not go there. There were schools that refused to have him come and attend them. He was coming to be at the opening of Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, the very famous Israeli university that still exists today. Boycotting this event students also from Kuliyah Arabiyya, from his very school, supposed to have been trained and disciplined, yet he noticed that there were trouble makers including teachers who refused to go to school, stage a demonstration and then begin to call Totah a traitor. They left their classes, the schools are closed, and on June 1st, Kuliyah Arabiyya re-opened, without Totah. The students said “We will continue our strike if Totah remains the principal of this school.” So much was the nationalist fervor, part of the politics of going to school.

He then decides that he already saw that there may have been some problems down the road for him, and he made plans to return to New York, he had actually written in March of that year, 1925, to see if he could get a scholarship and extend his education to a PhD program. He got a positive answer, and by the middle of July, 1925, he was on a ship with his wife to New York and to Columbia University.

I’m showing you a copy of his passport, and his wife’s passport. They were married in 1911. In 1925 she had an old passport, but she was put on the same passport in a paternalistic way, this would go against her feelings. Ermina was her name, Ermina Jones. She was a cousin to the famous Rufus Jones, therefore part of the old Friend’s Society in the United States. There you see the statistics and stats on him, the Government of Palestine indicated above at the very top, something in Hebrew, in Arabic and some in English, those being the three languages of the Mandate, and all official documents and coinage were in all three languages of course during the British Mandate.

He was on his way to get his PhD, which he did in one year, at the Teacher’s College. He returns to Palestine in 1926 now looking for a job again, and he knows he can’t get it at the prestigious Arab College now taken over by Emir Ahmed Samer El Khalidi, of the Khalidi family, who is the successor to Khalil Totah.  Totah, however, is invited back with great rejoicing by his friends in Ramallah, particularly his Quaker friends. And the Quaker community is joyous as he comes back now with a PhD from an American university. There were approximately 25 intellectuals by this time who had PhD’s, both from British universities, Camebridge and Oxford, and from Durham and Exeter, also from American universities such as Harvard and Columbia. So he’s in an elite crowd, the son of a wool merchant in the little village of Ramallah. His father owned no land, he was not part of the Palestinian landed gentry. In some respects he was snubbed by the elites, though he was in touch with them on all occasions, particularly Sakakini, and several others who were themselves involved with progressive education in Palestine. Abu Raiyah for example in Ramallah had his own private school as well.

Ramallah has tripled its size, its now 15,000 to 20,000. This is the early school [showing transparency], if you can recognize, if you’ve ever gone to the Boys’ School.This building still stands. That’s an entrance and there’s a little garden. This was all open fields. Now its choked with buildings as far as the eye can see. The structure itself exists as the main building. In the time of Totah returning in 1926, the buildings and the trees are all now planted, all by the Quakers. This is a Quaker owned property, run by the Quaker Foreign United Missions, FUM it’s called, in Richmond, Indiana, who owns these properties to this day.

This [another image] was an extension at the time just before Khalil was in Jerusalem, at the Arab College,  this was being built. It’s called Grant Hall and becomes the permanent residence of the headmaster. It too still stands to this day. Here is it [another image] in this later period, advancing from 1905, approximately 1908 to 1926.

Totah remains the headmaster until 1944 of the Ramallah Boys’ School and as he argued the Girls’ School as well. Now he has to do combat not with the British, or his angry students in the Kuliyah Arabiyya, now he has to deal with the Palestinian feminists at the Girls’ School. He wanted to make it more efficient. He said in the midst of World War II, 1940, he had written a long memo,the Quaker schools were in trouble.  The competitors were also in trouble. The attendance in the schools was beginning to decline. So it occurred to him that he needed to come up with a plan. He said, “Why have two schools when you could have one administration. Let the principals be principals and handle the education. Let somebody else called a director take care of public relations and finances.” Of course the footnote is Khalil Totah would be that director. That was understood immediately by both the Palestinian and American Quaker women teaching at the Girls’ School and they exploded with continuous letters to Richmond saying such things as “Totah is becoming a dictator”, “Totah is trying to take over the Girls’ School”,”Totah is this”, “Totah is that”.

Richmond in the meantime, about 1940, was getting worried about Arab nationalism, with a Palestinian, a poster boy for them, who had gone over to the United States, with a Master’s and a PhD, returns to the hometown, is in fact rising to the top of the Quaker community, he was indeed the chief Quaker of the town, the chief Friend. They became very nervous because of his increased popularity and perhaps the idea that this Arab nationalist movement might want to nationalize this very valuable piece of Quaker property, and were therefore beginning to look for ways to dismiss the poster boy. This was called devolution, the concept among missionaries by 1927 was that you should be turning your operation eventually over to the “host country nationals”, the Peace Corps would say, to people who are indigenous population. And in fact, that’s what the Quakers were doing. They were turning the entire operation of their schools in Ramallah, over to Khalil Totah, who was himself Palestinian, fluent in English, American educated. What better candidate, but indeed this was going to be problematic for them. So they begin to look for ways to dismiss him.

By 1943, this is now in the middle of World War II, he is now facing oppositions from even some of the Quaker community who find his rules are becoming a little oppressive and outdated. And his treatment of some of the teachers of the Boys’ School was a little heavy-handed, in his request, all of which were by the way, reasonable, but the damning part was his new plan to combine the Ramallah schools into one with a director and two principles,which by the way, is what the Quaker schools are doing today. They are not known as the Boy’s School and the Girls’ School any longer, they are the Ramallah Schools. There is one person, Dr. Ajlouni, who is the director, and two principals. Totah’s dream, his suggestion,a very practical solution to a declining role, to funding problems, and to the issues of education that have to change, because of changing realities of World War II, and a potential that Palestine may be lost, or won, 50/50, at that time, forced him to in fact take a back seat. He decided rather than to continue any arguments any further, that he would indeed take a break, and he goes on vacation, but he doesn’t return.

He leaves Palestine in 1944, with his family, concerned about their education because his children are no longer children, they’re teenagers, and he wants to get them into high schools and American universities, which he does.  The oldest of which of the two was Nabil, he was the oldest child and the boy. The second child was in fact a girl, and she was also approaching the age of high school, and finally Joy who was still in elementary school. And I have a very nice picture [shows transparency]. The Totahs – his [second]wife Eva was a teacher in the school with him, assisting him all his life, lives approximately three years beyond he does. She passed away in the late 60s. Joy is the only Totah presently living, in California, in North Berkeley, with her husband, and has given me access to all their records, the fourteen diaries of Khalil, the five diaries of his wife, Eva Rae Marshall. And now there is a book published by the granddaughter of Eva, called From Prairie to Palestine on her mother’s autobiography. This is Sybil [referencing transparency], this is Nabil, and Joy, and of course Khalil. This was taken in 1938, just before he began to run into the bus, saw complaints from his friends, who were, as it seemed, not so much their friends.

The school, however, prospered, as I will show you. The Boys’ School staff and the Girls School staff combined [shows transparency] involves all these remarkable people. You’ll see American faces, there are American educators in this display. Always Khalil and Eva are together. Khalil is here, Eve’s here. Throughout this period there always were Americans who assumed assistant principal positions. They always had a chief teaching position as well and were members of the staff, so it was an American/Palestinian project from approximately 1901 with the beginning of the Boys’ School right up to the period of Totah himself.

Totah became so well known that of course he was involved with the Mandate, deeply involved with various subjects as the Peel Commission. In 1937, January, he’s accepted as the headmaster of the Friends’ School, Ramallah, to testify about education, and its status in Palestine. This document is part of the book that I’ve published, published in full, is a stinging indictment of the British Mandate system. Their schools always had been said to be the best. If Britain did anything, they had built railroads that ran on time it’s said in India, and they built good schools. Kuliyah  Arabiyya was entirely a Palestinian school, not one British citizen involved in the administration, or the staffing or the teaching, and the students are all Palestinian. Those students who had graduated from the Kuliyah Arabiyya by the way were students who could enter the second year of university at Oxford and Cambridge, they entered the second year University of Cairo, skipped the first year because of the three years of education they were getting at the Kuliyah Arabiyya. It was an unusual project. There is yet to be a well-written book on the Kuliyah Arabiyya. It has been written several times by several authors in Arabic but we need an English edition, a study of the kind of education they had, which was truly a British education. They had to memorize the 17th century sonnets, they were taught Latin, which was the source of great puns and jokes among Palestinian intellectuals. Jerome Ferrell, who was the second Minister of Education for the Mandate, took great joy to come up and attend the seven o’clock in the morning Latin lesson at Kuliyah Arabiyya. Well he was punctual, anyway.

The students didn’t feel that the education was perhaps as directed as it should be. It was modern but it certainly made them think. They had to study throughout the evening, which was forbidden. I mean, into two or three o’clock in the morning. Frequently students would not go to sleep. They would stay awake for 24 hours in order to get their lessons done, in order to memorize those sonnets, this Shakespearian 17th century sonnets, and to translate, of all things, Latin. There was one joke told me by one of the students who graduated from Kuliyah Arabiyya who said that they knew a young man by the name of Ahmed, who was one of these very conscientious, staying up late, if caught you were disciplined, but staying up late nevertheless they would hide. He was hiding in the men’s bathroom, in a stall with a blanket over his head, to keep the light from the candle at a low level for outside viewing. He was nearly invisible, apparently. When the teacher came to the boy’s bathroom that late evening, and wanted to use that very same stall, when he opened up the door the teacher found a ghost appears before him because Ahmed unfortunately now frightened out of his mind,jumps up with a blanket over his head, and is running after the teacher and says, “It’s Ahmed, its’ Ahmed.” Of course he gave himself away and was duly punished, but this kind of event was not uncommon for the students who looked upon the Kuliyah Arabiyya as a prison.

It was only three minutes or ten minutes, depends on what you were transporting yourself on, from the city of Jerusalem, from the Old City, and yet they could never go into Jerusalem. They did once a year, to the movie theater. They were not allowed to read newspapers, or to listen to radios. So they were cut off completely, from the nationalist uprisings occurring in their very doorway. The elite of Palestine were being shut out within their own country.

In a sense, this is one of the things I wanted to end with. Totah writes a book in 1952, after having left Palestine, he came to the United States and immediately jumped into public education. His third job of his life was the director of IAAA, Institute of Arab American Affairs. Here’s a Palestinian boy, now an adult, PhD, Quaker, put in charge of all information about Arab Americans, 1945, in New York. He’s pummeled with questions and letters, writes angry letters to the New York Times, corrects Truman in some of the mistakes that he makes, tries to urge Truman to think differently about Palestinian affairs. He’s constantly called up, in fact once more he appears before a commission. The Anglo-American commission takes place here in Washington, DC, in 1946, and he’s one of the witnesses along with Einstein, brought to testify about the Palestinian question. It’s interesting that he loses his sting that he had in that early 1937 indictment of British education and British occupation. He’s a little softer. Was it because in 1946 he became an American citizen? I’m not so sure. But he in fact began to see the writing on the wall, and perhaps also tired, that as an educator this was his blow, no amount of education would change the public’s mind. He was just was only one person blowing in the wind. He was indeed frustrated, but by 1950, the money runs out from this 1946 to 50 period, he has no job, and he goes to California to retire.

In 1952 he has decided to take a trip to the Middle East for the last time. He goes to five to six different countries in the Middle East, including Palestine. He visits the West Bank and Ramallah, in 1952, this is now Israel, officially, that is to say parts of the Palestinian Mandate, but the West Bank is the West Bank and Gaza is independent. He visits both places, he visits old friends in Lebanon and Iraq; 1952 of course is interesting because this is the beginning of the Nasser, Nasserian uprisings in the Egyptian affairs. He’s an eye witness to this and writes about all that he sees, but what he says in the book is intriguing. He says, “Of all our intellectuals that we have,” of which there were many, Camebridge, Oxford, Harvard educated, Columbia university, he said, “we have done little to help our people. It’s strange that our intellectuals have not risen to the occasion.” And in a sense, it was an indictment to himself, and remains a puzzle, although I have some reasons I could give you to explain what that means in more detail.

In a sense, Totah was successful in Ramallah, but in his life as a Palestinian, Christian intellectual, he was a failure. He watches with great dismay, the collapse of his country and the birth of Israel, and the shrinking of Palestine to the West Bank and Gaza. Thank you.


Thomas Ricks is an independent researcher and scholar who specializes in the social and cultural histories of modern Palestine and the Persian Gulf. He is the author of numerous books and articles including, Voices from the Schoolyard: Memories of Palestine, School Days, and Mission Education and The Arbayeen Years of Israeli Colonial Occupation: Palestinian Schools and Universities in the Occupied West Bank,1967-2007.

This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.