Loyalty and emotional attachments to conflict-ridden Arab lands – Palestine and Libya -  are “a tough combination”, as Nelson Mandela observed when he met Adel Dajani in Tunis in 2002 en route to Tripoli to help sort out the Lockerbie bombing affair. Palestine

 From Jerusalem to a Kingdom by the Sea (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jerusalem-Kingdom-Sea-Adel-Dajani/dp/191619777) is a fascinating memoir that covers turbulent and disastrous periods in the history of both countries – and far beyond, ranging from England in the 1960’s to Tunisia at the height of the Arab Spring.

 This book’s sub-title – “the story of a family and its black swans” – is a clever way of describing unforeseen events that drove the Dajanis from their home in Palestine, where they were famously wealthy patricians, to Tripoli. But this is far from a typical story of Palestinian refugees. Their experience was “privileged but no less painful,” as the author writes.

 Dajani is himself an investment banker who was educated at Eton, Britain’s most famous and elite boarding school. He is also a writer and economic commentator on the Middle East and North Africa. Adel’s parents, Awni and Salma, left their stylish villa in “cosmopolitan and bubbly” Jaffa in January 1948 for a holiday in Cairo.

 “The ‘short visit’ would turn into a lifetime of wandering” triggered by the creation of Israel. His maternal grandmother then moved to Kensington, a high-end part of central London, where family values “became a glue after the violent dislocation of the Nakba”.

 Awni became a legal adviser to Prince Idris al-Senussi of Libya, then a British protectorate following the defeat of Mussolini, and one of the poorest countries on earth, which became independent in 1951. The Dajani children grew up close to the royal diwan.

 Adel was born in 1955 at the US Wheelus Air Base in Tripoli, which was known, like Jaffa, as the “Bride of the Mediterranean.” He referred to Queen Salma as Mawlati and the King as Mawlay and was friends with their adopted daughter. Visiting Cairo he lunched with President Nasser and accompanied Idris to greet King Hassan of Morocco at Tobruk Airport.

 Refugees attach special importance to education, and the family’s wealth and privilege enabled Adel to be sent to Eton, where he was probably the first Arab to study at Britain’s best-known private school. Still, he always enjoyed holidays back home, although in September 1969 his return was delayed by an unexpected development.

 “A Libyan schoolboy who was late for his English boarding school was not, I would imagine, high on the agenda of the Revolution, particularly one from a family that was close to the deposed king,” he writes. Muammar Gaddafi’s seizure of power was relatively peaceful, though his regime, over time, would “become bloodthirsty and tyrannical.” Awni was arrested but released after a month.

 Libya’s revolution turned out to be yet another “black swan.” In 1978, Awni’s property and business assets were nationalized in line with the strictures of the Green Book. “At the age of sixty, my father and family had lost two fortunes – first to the Israelis and next to the Gaddafi regime.” The Dajanis then moved east to Tunis, which reminded them of the orange groves of Jaffa, and lived there happily – but not ever after.

 Zine El- Abidine Ben Ali and Gaddafi were very different characters. Still, “living under systems that were beholden to the whims of a ruler was fraught with dangers and abuses of power,” as he explains. Adel then fast forwards. In December 2010 he and his wife attended an opulent party in Sidi Bou Said, a chic suburb of Tunis, which reminded him of the Tripoli beach parties he had attended as a teenager in the summer of 1969, which was followed by Gaddafi’s coup.

 By chance, Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act of self-immolation had taken place a few days earlier. This street vendor from Sidi Bouzid ignited the Arab Spring, though Tunisia emerged from that turbulent period better than any other country in the region. Dajani attributes this to President Habib Bourguiba, who was an autocrat but still left a legacy of “relatively strong institutions, civil society, active professional guilds, a strong nationalist labor movement and educated middle class”- all of which were absent in Libya. In 2014 Tunisia acquired the most progressive constitution in the Arab world.

 Dajani ends his thought-provoking and moving memoir where his family’s story began. Visiting Palestine and Israel with his son Rakan, they felt like “strangers in the land of our ancestors” – in Jerusalem and Jaffa. In Hebron in the occupied West Bank, they deliberately spoke loudly in Arabic in order to avoid being mistakenly identified as Israelis.

 His experience goes beyond the details of his own story. “Where is home?” he asks. “What is family? Where will we end our days? Does it matter? What is legacy? What are our roots? So many questions, many without clear answers.”

 Tim Mackintosh-Smith, the renowned British historian of the Arab world, praised “a book about lost lands, lost worlds (which) leaves us nostalgic but also full of hope.” Anyone who reads it must wish that he is right. Palestine

IAN BLACK levant

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