This article by Robert Fisk was commissioned by the 'New Yorker', who subsequently declined to publish it on the grounds that it was too 'polemical'

Selma Tawil brought the fifty-year-old keys into the room, sat down in her corner armchair and let them spill out of her hands onto the floor: heavy store-room keys, rusting cupboard keys, keys shaped like backbones for office safes, car keys for an old British-made Hillman, and one larger steel key with a three-and-a-half inch shaft, gun-metal grey with an elegant knot at one end and a broad, worn blade. Aunty Selma picked this key up in a hand spotted with age. She is 90 now and her facial skin hangs in folds, but her grey hair is pinned back in a neat bun and though her hearing is impaired, her memory is as sharp as it was the day she left Palestine. The key in her hand was the front-door key of her home in Haifa.

LRB 23 February 1995 | PDF Download