‘It was necessary to uproot them’

Charles Glass

• A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples by Ilan Pappe
  Cambridge, 333 pp, £15.99, January 2004, ISBN 0 521 55632 5
• The Gun and the Olive Branch by David Hirst
  Faber, 624 pp, £16.99, August 2003, ISBN 0 571 21945 4
• The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited by Benny Morris
  Cambridge, 664 pp, £70.00, January 2004, ISBN 0 521 81120 1

Albert Aghazarian is a Palestinian, neither Arab nor Israeli, who lives in the eastern portion of Jerusalem annexed by Israel in 1967. His house stands within two sets of walls, those of the ancient Armenian convent of St James and, beyond them, the Turkish walls of Jerusalem’s old city. The convent is a haven, in the same sense Israel calls itself a haven, in which descendants of Armenians who escaped Turkey’s First World War massacres still live. When he was director of the public relations office at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, Aghazarian was often called on to mediate between the university and the Israeli military authorities. His Hebrew is fluent, as are his Arabic, Armenian and English. At the ulpan, or Hebrew language school, his favourite expression was Ze lo col khakh pashut: ‘It’s not as simple as that.’