Tears for Tarshiha

Olfat Mahmouds confronting autobiography asks when the world will deliver on its promise and allow her people to return home to Palestine.Olfat Mahmoud is a stateless Palestinian refugee. Born in a refugeecamp in Lebanon she is a descendant of the Christian and Muslim people who were forced from their homeland at gunpoint by the Israeli military in the 1948s Nakba Catastrophe and who fled Palestine in the period leading up to - and after - the subsequent founding of the state of Israel in 1948.Tears for Tarshiha follows Olfats career - as a registered nurse the director of an international NGO an internationally recognised peace activist and most recently the recipient of a doctorate - amid the death and destruction of Lebanons many conflicts; she chronicles the Palestinian peoples remarkable capacity for love and bravery in the most extreme conditions. Olfats extraordinary story is emblematic of the Palestinian plight illustrating their continued survival and determination that has become an inconvenience to the international community.