The Other Side of Despair
Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land
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- £20.99
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- £20.99
Publisher Description
This compelling book takes the reader behind the headlines of the confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians, examining its human dimension and setting it in a balanced historical context. In the last decade of the millennium, the century-long conflict came within a hair's breadth of a solution through the Oslo Accords, only to explode in violence, hatred, and mutual recrimination, following the failed summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000. In his search for understanding, Daniel Gavron talks to Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion. Politicians and economists, entrepreneurs and writers, psychologists and teachers, men and women, veterans and youngsters, fervent militants and pragmatic realists all speak in these pages. We hear the Palestinian fighter and the Israeli soldier, the Jewish settler and the Arab Israeli, the negotiators from the opposite sides of the table, the bereaved parents. These Israeli and Palestinian voices reflect the excruciating agony of both societies, conveying a searing reality that, although seemingly hopeless, emphasizes the basic humanity of both peoples. In a startling final section, the author proposes a daring old-new idea to lead the region out of its tragic morass.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a part of the world where extremists seem to be driving political affairs, veteran Israeli journalist Gavron focuses on more moderate voices in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In doing so, he has created a moving, if somewhat uneven, book. Gavron (Israel After Begin) presents brief profiles of 15 Israelis and Palestinians: old-time leftists, young fighters, bereaved parents. The result is a humanized portrait of individuals trapped in the "cycle of violence" and unable to see their way out. "It isn't true we want to throw the Jews into the sea," a Fatah militia leader says; a few pages later, an Israeli reserve soldier says that Israel "must get out of the territories." Activists on both sides may protest the implied moral relativism that is part of the book's structure Gavron is fairly even-handed in apportioning blame for today's ongoing violence but most readers will appreciate the honest, behind-the-scenes look at how ordinary people suffer from everyday violence and try to make sense of it. In the final two chapters, Gavron shifts gears and resuscitates an old idea: instead of a two-state solution, he proposes creating a single, binational state, shared by the Israelis and Palestinians. The idea has little currency in today's Middle East, but it's a measure of the failure of the two-state solution that, when Gavron points out the extent to which Israel and the territories are already enmeshed, the plan doesn't seem so ridiculous. But it deserves a fuller treatment than Gavron gives it here. B&w photos, maps.
