Shropshire Magazine

Shirley Tart meets a woman who has left a lasting legacy in a country facing devastating internal struggle

Patricia Rantisi outside St Chad’s church, Shrewsbury, with her novel Miriam’s Legacy

It has everything a good, rip-roaring yarn might have. Romance, travel, adventure, love, warring, injustice, a fight for freedom and a whole lot more. A bit of a blockbuster, in fact.

Except that this is not just a story, nor even merely a colourful chronicle of our day. This is one woman’s often turbulent life and times.

Small, gentle and now well settled into Shropshire life, Patricia Rantisi could be just another charming older lady bustling about making coffee and with a host of tales to recall for the next generation. But most of her memories are many miles away from the neat Shrewsbury flat with its elegant town view and quiet surrounds, which is now Patricia’s home.

Her heart is in the heat and noise and bustle of the tempestuous Middle East, most especially in Ramallah in those occupied Palestinian territories which spell separation for Israelis and Palestinians, and which for nearly 40 years was Patricia’s home.

She went there as a young bride in 1965 after marrying her Palestinian Christian husband, Audeh, and two years before the Six Day War which started the 40 years of occupation we still witness. It could hardly have been more different from the country wedding at Meole Brace Church, Shrewsbury where her father, the Reverend Royden Greening, was the vicar, and family life in Ruyton-XI-Towns, where they had also lived. Patricia was a student at Shrewsbury’s Radbrook College before going into nursing.

Pilgrimage

She met her husband at Bible College, then went off to Peru as a missionary for six years. But they kept in touch and when Patricia and her parents visited his homeland on a pilgrimage, she met Audeh again. They realised it was love, she was prepared to embrace his country and so a wedding took place.

You could at this point say that the rest is history. But this is a land where its history is defined by so much: saving grace and pitiless persecution, the rewriting of ancient maps and frightening political flashpoints, giants of goodness and political pygmies. Now is just yet another beginning, scarred as it is by the dreadful isolating wall of separation.

It was the start of a happy marriage which was to last until 2001 and produce three daughters. During that time a successful home was founded by Audeh and Patricia for Christian Palestinian boys without families at all or from families who wanted a Christian upbringing for their children but couldn’t afford it.

She chuckles: “By the time we had been married for three months, we had 12 little boys. We grew, moved, then finally built a new home in Ramallah and had up to 40 boys. It was all the work of faith; we never appealed for the money. The building is now used as a vocational school.”

Audeh and Patricia in 1999

Audeh was a teacher when he and Patricia married, but like his father-in-law back in England he was to become an Anglican priest. Reflecting now on the past yet, indeed, still living very much for the present, Patricia says: “I lived there for 38 years and became a Palestinian. I own a Palestinian passport but I was born British so still have a British passport as well. But now, I am not allowed into Israel – and my daughter lives there, in Nazareth.

“I have managed to get in – I was there at Christmas but I can’t fly into Tel Aviv. I have to fly to Jordan and then cross the border to Ramallah. From there I used to drive the 20 minutes into Jerusalem but am not allowed to go there now. So this year I decided to risk it with my British passport to try to see my friends.

“I went to one of the biggest checkpoints. They looked at my passport, then at me and said my name was Palestinian, I could not cross the border. I said ‘Look, I’m an elderly widow, I don’t live here any more, I live in England. I just want to see my friends’, and after much pleading they let me through.”

Reaching her daughter Susan – also married to an Anglican priest – and family for Christmas was touch-and-go to start with, even after Patricia arrived at Ramallah, via Jordan.

She says: “The Bishop of Jerusalem was in Ramallah. As a bishop, he lives in Jerusalem and so has an Israeli car, but even he has to renew his permit every three months. He was going to the Galilee and gave me a lift; we stopped at the checkpoint but they didn’t check our passports.”

Having done parts of this exact journey myself last year – from Jordan to Israel, exploring Jerusalem then going on to the Galilee and Nazareth – with few problems, I am ashamed that it was so relatively simple for us when a lady who has given so much of her life to this place is treated in such a way.

Patricia looks back over her happy family years when, even at times of trouble, travelling around was still fairly easy; the big changes have come over the past 15 years, while that dreadful wall of separation for all of us who’ve seen it is like a veil of tears.

Difficult

Her husband died in 2001. Patricia says: “I stayed for another year and then decided it was difficult culturally for a woman to live on her own. I couldn’t live with my daughter in Nazareth because, as a Palestinian, I wasn’t allowed. I couldn’t go to Jerusalem and was starting to feel ‘penned in’ in Ramallah. Which was when I felt I could do more for the Palestinian cause by coming back to England.”

As it happened, she had a place to return to. Patricia bought her flat back in 1995 when her mother died and left her some money and, since her brother also lived in Shrewsbury, she had a family welcome as well, although he has recently left the area.

In that year before she left Palestine, Patricia was involved in one of the most frightening episodes she can remember. “It was during the incursion into Ramallah with Israeli tanks when they broke into our block of flats and took us all hostage. We were put into just one room for three days with all communications cut off.

“When they came to my flat, I was on the phone to my daughter Hilary who lives in America. I put the phone down and when the soldiers said I had to go with them, I put it on redial and managed to say to Hilary: ‘They are taking me, I don’t know where.’ Of course she rang my daughter in Israel and everyone was ringing and searching. Then, three days later, the soldiers went, leaving our flats in a terrible mess having been sniping from the windows.”

The home was a haven for boys without families of their own – or whose families couldn’t otherwise give them a Christian upbringing

It was surely a straw to finally break the camel’s back, and it convinced Patricia that her time to leave had well and truly come. Now, she is heavily involved in this country with the organisation Sabeel and its dual aims of uniting Palestinian Christians and educating people about the truths of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

“Those on the extreme right believe that all Jews everywhere have a right to come to Israel and make it their home, whether they have ever been before or not. Yet Palestinians whose roots go back hundreds of years but who may have been out of the country for maybe a few years, cannot go back.

“My husband was a refugee from a place called Lod – the biblical Lydda – now part of Tel Aviv airport and which belonged to the Rantisi clan. He was turned out in 1948 with dozens of others and while he was allowed to go back and look at his home, he was never allowed to live there again. It’s apartheid; it is political, not religious at all,” she says sadly.

She has written many articles and commentary pieces and updated her husband’s biography, Blessed are the Peacemakers. And now Patricia has had her own first book published.

A novel entitled Miriam’s Legacy, it is set in the Lebanon where she visited the refugee camps during her research. She says: “It’s the ongoing message of the Palestinian dilemma – they called it the catastrophe in 1948 when the Palestinians were exiled – and my aim was for the man in the street to pick up the book and understand what it is all about.”

Dreams

The very readable Miriam’s Legacy is set largely in the Lebanese Shatila Refugee Camp and a village in northern Palestine from where the woman Miriam was exiled. The main character is Miriam’s great-grandson, Farres, who grows up in a camp but dreams of being a doctor and one day seeing the land of his forefathers. A string of worry beads given to him by Miriam to remind him of Palestine, is her legacy.

And while it’s tempting to say the book is this author’s legacy to the Palestinians, that is not quite true. The legacy of Patricia Rantisi to the people she knows, loves and embraced, is far greater than that. She so willingly gave them some of the best years of her life.

• Miriam’s Legacy is £6.80, available from www.authorhouse.co.uk and Patricia’s next novel, My Name is Musa, will be published next year.