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"In this in-the-trenches account of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, award-winning journalist Matt Rees takes us deep within Israeli and Palestinian societies to reveal the fractures at the core of both. While the world focuses almost exclusively on the violent clash between the two camps, Rees steers our gaze toward their centers, exposing the internal rifts that drain each society of its ability to act cohesively. The Palestinians focus on the occupation of the West Bank, the Jewish settlers, and other Israeli actions, while the Israelis see only the intifada and the suicide bombings - and both overlook their bitter infighting. This narrative goes behind the familiar moves of the big players to reveal the individuals who are at war not only with the enemy, but also with their own people." "With heartbreaking detail, incisive revelations, and terrible and often moving stories of the human beings behind the intractable attitudes and violence, Rees offers a bold new perspective on this tragic and seemingly insoluble situation. In so doing, he also offers hope - the hope that by turning the spotlight inward, these societies might heal their internal wounds and move toward a peaceful future."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)
User reviews
Now that I've read it, this nuanced and thoughtful review of the realities of life for both Israelis and Palestinians joins my list of top books of the year. The highlight? The fact that instead of getting bogged down in retreading the same old ground in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, Rees forges new territory. Instead of looking at what divides the two groups, he discovers that what unites them is, ironically, the schisms within each society and the existence of factions that make life on both sides of the great divide complex and divisive in ways that are less familiar to us on the outside.
In the first section of the book, which examines life within the Palestinains, some of these rifts are more familiar, such as that between the PLO and Hamas (Rees's scorn for Arafat is glaring) but many are more intriguing and unexpected, such as the story of the rift between the "Israeli Arabs" who stayed behind in 1948, told through the experience of a filmmaker who is trying to address issues of concern to all Arabs living in the region even though he is technically Israeli. On the Israeli side, the internal are all the more powerful for being relatively little known here who don't have a direct connection to Israel. I, for one, hadn't realized the scope of the division between the growing ranks of the ultra-orthodox and the secular Jews; or understood the nature of the rift between the Sephardic immigrants from North Africa and the dominant Ashkenazim. Most poignant of all, perhaps, is Rees's chronicle of the ways in which many Israelis have shunned psychologically-troubled Holocaust survivors. Despite the fact that the fact of the Holocaust is responsible for the creation of Israel (the Holocaust, and the effort to prevent it from reoccuring, form a powerful argument in favor of Israel's existence for many), many native-born Israelis find the reminder of the fact that their weak coreligionists (in Rees's characterization of their views) allowed themselves to be shuffled off to Auschwitz without protest. (His thoughts on Ben Gurion's attitudes to the survivors are just as forcefully stated as those on Arafat.)
Rees links all his stories and word portraits to the main theme that readers will have on their minds throughout -- each side, he argues, "exists in a fantasy world of blamelessness, shifting guilt to a distant enemy and away from the consequences of the divisions within its own society, the pain Palestinians inflict on Palestinians and Israelis on Israelis." If there's one book you read about the Middle East today, make it this one, even though it's now been out for a few years. It doesn't deserve to overlooked.
All of his books are must reading!