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The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
From an award-winning journalist, a brave and necessary immersion into the everyday struggles of Palestinian life
Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable New York Times Magazine cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring .
We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuściński, Ted Conover, and Philip Gourevitch among them. Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one's politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.
Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable New York Times Magazine cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring .
We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuściński, Ted Conover, and Philip Gourevitch among them. Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one's politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published June 14, 2016
188 people are currently reading
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About the author
Ben Ehrenreich
16 books104 followersBen Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. His fiction has been published in McSweeney's, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. In 2011 City Lights Publishers brought out his novel Ether.
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June 10, 2024
The author focuses on a Palestinian village in the West Bank called Nabi Saleh and the lives of its inhabitants. Ben Ehrenreich does not pretend to present a comprehensive or neutral analysis of the situation. The goal of the book is to make the Palestinian voices heard and tell their stories.
The title refers to a spring that has been taken by the settlers. The author joins the unarmed protest that a group of Palestinians from Nabi Saleh and some other places organize each Friday in an attempt to claim the spring back.
They obviously had no chance of winning against the Israeli army. Were their demonstrations a futile effort? Most likely. People keep losing and keep resisting because there is no other way for them. The book makes you think "What would you do in the position of these people?" If you were in their shoes, you might just do the same.
The book exposes constant violence, structural inequalities, impunity, violent separation, fear, humiliation, and sorrow, surveillance checkpoints, walls, wired fences, and less visible barriers that separate people in the region. Those things, no matter how brutal and even somewhat irrational they are, look normal to most people inside.
The day-to-day life of a Palestinian living in the West Bank is far from what is usually considered normal.
A colonial context that continues to influence the lives of the Palestinians is highlighted. Certain rules in the West Bank that apply to Palestinians remained from the time of the British mandate and even the Ottoman Empire.
Different laws target different people, the civil law for the Israelis and the military law for the Palestinians in the West Bank.
The widely practiced system of administrative detentions does not give even a semblance of justice, as the author points out.
The West Bank was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-day War. We should add that it was the King of Jordan who captured The West Bank in 1948, preventing the creation of the Palestinian state.
The author also provides the perspective of some Jewish settlers who have come to live in the West Bank. In their view, they are fulfilling God's command just by being there.
The Israeli army protects them.
The author describes how Israeli settlements have been expanding in the West Bank over the past decades.
In particular, he talks about the settler community in the city of Hebron. In 1929 there was a massacre and the Jews were expelled from that city. Settlers tend to use that tragic event as a pretext.
Ben is quite critical of the Oslo Accords when Rabin and Yarafat negotiated some sort of agreement.
The author talks about the Palestinian Authority collaborating with Israel to hold back unarmed resistance. The West Bank is divided into three distinct zones.
"Area A, where the PA was in charge of both security and governance, and which, in its earliest incarnation, comprised only 3 percent of the West Bank, on which about 20 percent of the Palestinian population resided; Area B, where the IDF and the PA would share responsibility for security and the PA would otherwise govern, and which included 24 percent of land on which 70 percent of the population lived; and Area C, which covered nearly 70 percent of the West Bank, and where the Israeli military would be the sole potentate over the remaining 10 percent of the Palestinian populace."
In the sector in which the PA has power, they, in many ways, replaced the Israelis in terms of suppressing the local population.
At one point, while reading this book, I had a distinct feeling that I was inside Franz Kafka's novel. The presumption of innocence is replaced with the presumption of guilt.
A young Israeli soldier wants to be kind to children. He offers some sweets to a Palestinian kid. He is then ordered to raid a Palestinian house at night. He and other soldiers are to draw maps of Palestinian houses, charting the rooms, the windows, and the doors. Just in case.
On that particular night, the soldier finds himself at the house of the same boy with whom he shared sweets. The boy is terrified, as is his father. The senior officer decides to arrest the father because his behavior looks 'suspicious.' After three days, the soldier finds the courage to inquire about the detained man. It turns out that the military authorities have forgotten about the man. After all, he is of no importance to them and has never been. He can be released.
When the young soldier presents the map he drew to his superior, he is told that there is no need for them. They already had the blueprint of that house as well as other Palestinian houses. It is hard not to conclude that often the night raids are carried out to terrify and humiliate the local people.
One of the takeaways from this book is that grief and laughter are not incompatible, they can go together.
The title refers to a spring that has been taken by the settlers. The author joins the unarmed protest that a group of Palestinians from Nabi Saleh and some other places organize each Friday in an attempt to claim the spring back.
Nabi Saleh’s resistance was unarmed. Boys throwing stones were not armed. Soldiers were. That was the distinction that mattered.
They obviously had no chance of winning against the Israeli army. Were their demonstrations a futile effort? Most likely. People keep losing and keep resisting because there is no other way for them. The book makes you think "What would you do in the position of these people?" If you were in their shoes, you might just do the same.
The book exposes constant violence, structural inequalities, impunity, violent separation, fear, humiliation, and sorrow, surveillance checkpoints, walls, wired fences, and less visible barriers that separate people in the region. Those things, no matter how brutal and even somewhat irrational they are, look normal to most people inside.
The day-to-day life of a Palestinian living in the West Bank is far from what is usually considered normal.
A colonial context that continues to influence the lives of the Palestinians is highlighted. Certain rules in the West Bank that apply to Palestinians remained from the time of the British mandate and even the Ottoman Empire.
Different laws target different people, the civil law for the Israelis and the military law for the Palestinians in the West Bank.
The widely practiced system of administrative detentions does not give even a semblance of justice, as the author points out.
The West Bank was captured by Israel during the 1967 Six-day War. We should add that it was the King of Jordan who captured The West Bank in 1948, preventing the creation of the Palestinian state.
The author also provides the perspective of some Jewish settlers who have come to live in the West Bank. In their view, they are fulfilling God's command just by being there.
The Israeli army protects them.
The author describes how Israeli settlements have been expanding in the West Bank over the past decades.
In particular, he talks about the settler community in the city of Hebron. In 1929 there was a massacre and the Jews were expelled from that city. Settlers tend to use that tragic event as a pretext.
Ben is quite critical of the Oslo Accords when Rabin and Yarafat negotiated some sort of agreement.
The author talks about the Palestinian Authority collaborating with Israel to hold back unarmed resistance. The West Bank is divided into three distinct zones.
"Area A, where the PA was in charge of both security and governance, and which, in its earliest incarnation, comprised only 3 percent of the West Bank, on which about 20 percent of the Palestinian population resided; Area B, where the IDF and the PA would share responsibility for security and the PA would otherwise govern, and which included 24 percent of land on which 70 percent of the population lived; and Area C, which covered nearly 70 percent of the West Bank, and where the Israeli military would be the sole potentate over the remaining 10 percent of the Palestinian populace."
In the sector in which the PA has power, they, in many ways, replaced the Israelis in terms of suppressing the local population.
At one point, while reading this book, I had a distinct feeling that I was inside Franz Kafka's novel. The presumption of innocence is replaced with the presumption of guilt.
A young Israeli soldier wants to be kind to children. He offers some sweets to a Palestinian kid. He is then ordered to raid a Palestinian house at night. He and other soldiers are to draw maps of Palestinian houses, charting the rooms, the windows, and the doors. Just in case.
On that particular night, the soldier finds himself at the house of the same boy with whom he shared sweets. The boy is terrified, as is his father. The senior officer decides to arrest the father because his behavior looks 'suspicious.' After three days, the soldier finds the courage to inquire about the detained man. It turns out that the military authorities have forgotten about the man. After all, he is of no importance to them and has never been. He can be released.
When the young soldier presents the map he drew to his superior, he is told that there is no need for them. They already had the blueprint of that house as well as other Palestinian houses. It is hard not to conclude that often the night raids are carried out to terrify and humiliate the local people.
One of the takeaways from this book is that grief and laughter are not incompatible, they can go together.
October 14, 2023
The Palestinians are a subjugated people.
This is an incredibly difficult read. The journalistic account and ground zero eye witness from our author are stunning and form an unassailable picture: the Palestinians are an oppressed people and are suffering from de jure racial apartheid perpetuated by the Israeli government and the IDF. The conflict is asymmetrical and the modern day impact is that there is a people that is kept in an open air prison in the Gaza Strip, unable to leave without clearance, living with 70% unemployment, poor quality water and electricity only 4 hours a day. On the West Bank, matters are only marginally better: racial apartheid, security checkpoints, unilateral state-sanctioned violence and a criminal justice system that criminalizes Palestinians.
In The Way to the Spring is an account mostly of the West Bank and the harassment and oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli military and settlers. We get a first hand account of the violence, sometimes murder, and a criminal justice system that specifically targets Palestinians. You'll get a little background information like the Intifadas as well as the Oslo Accord which simply seemed to be a legal way to segregate the Palestinians throughout the West Bank. During Ehrenreich's stay in Palestine, he finds a people beyond rebellion, some dejected from years of oppression and others continuing the struggle. The PA here is painted as mostly an enabler of the oppression, a willful participant in Israel's one-sided war on the people of Palestine.
Of course there are different views one can take on this but it is undeniable that this isn't a war in the traditional sense. What we have is a militarized nation, creating an open air prison in Gaza that is 25x5 miles with a population of 2 million--half children. These people cannot leave without permission of their captors and only for medical reasons, permits that are refused 50% of the time. Israel has been in flagrant violation of national law by refusing resettlement of Palestinians and allowing aggressive settlements along the West Bank. All protests in Gaza are deemed illegal. These protestors are murdered by sniper fire, including the disabled, medics and children. During the 2018 Great March protest, 60 unarmed protests were killed by sniper fire, 7 were children. These are war crimes. Yes, they are. Children are protected under the Geneva convection and Israel specifically targets them with sniper fire. Israel also uses illegal munitions like exploding bullets and toxic gases. This is just a small sampling of the lopsided fatalities and the absurdity of the party line: Israel has the right to defend itself.
Hamas violence does not happen in a vacuum.Yes there is violence on both sides and the violence is clearly disproportionate. Hamas weapons do not explode on contact, are cheaply made and are the equivalent of throwing stones compared to Israeli offensive attacks. Israel doesn't even need the iron dome against the ineffectual rockets.
It would seem that Israel has achieved the only American dream that is actually real: acting with impunity.
This is an incredibly difficult read. The journalistic account and ground zero eye witness from our author are stunning and form an unassailable picture: the Palestinians are an oppressed people and are suffering from de jure racial apartheid perpetuated by the Israeli government and the IDF. The conflict is asymmetrical and the modern day impact is that there is a people that is kept in an open air prison in the Gaza Strip, unable to leave without clearance, living with 70% unemployment, poor quality water and electricity only 4 hours a day. On the West Bank, matters are only marginally better: racial apartheid, security checkpoints, unilateral state-sanctioned violence and a criminal justice system that criminalizes Palestinians.
In The Way to the Spring is an account mostly of the West Bank and the harassment and oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli military and settlers. We get a first hand account of the violence, sometimes murder, and a criminal justice system that specifically targets Palestinians. You'll get a little background information like the Intifadas as well as the Oslo Accord which simply seemed to be a legal way to segregate the Palestinians throughout the West Bank. During Ehrenreich's stay in Palestine, he finds a people beyond rebellion, some dejected from years of oppression and others continuing the struggle. The PA here is painted as mostly an enabler of the oppression, a willful participant in Israel's one-sided war on the people of Palestine.
Of course there are different views one can take on this but it is undeniable that this isn't a war in the traditional sense. What we have is a militarized nation, creating an open air prison in Gaza that is 25x5 miles with a population of 2 million--half children. These people cannot leave without permission of their captors and only for medical reasons, permits that are refused 50% of the time. Israel has been in flagrant violation of national law by refusing resettlement of Palestinians and allowing aggressive settlements along the West Bank. All protests in Gaza are deemed illegal. These protestors are murdered by sniper fire, including the disabled, medics and children. During the 2018 Great March protest, 60 unarmed protests were killed by sniper fire, 7 were children. These are war crimes. Yes, they are. Children are protected under the Geneva convection and Israel specifically targets them with sniper fire. Israel also uses illegal munitions like exploding bullets and toxic gases. This is just a small sampling of the lopsided fatalities and the absurdity of the party line: Israel has the right to defend itself.
Hamas violence does not happen in a vacuum.Yes there is violence on both sides and the violence is clearly disproportionate. Hamas weapons do not explode on contact, are cheaply made and are the equivalent of throwing stones compared to Israeli offensive attacks. Israel doesn't even need the iron dome against the ineffectual rockets.
It would seem that Israel has achieved the only American dream that is actually real: acting with impunity.
January 3, 2023
4.5 ☆
Journalist Ben Ehrenreich first visited the West Bank in 2011 for a writing assignment. He subsequently returned for extended periods for the next several years. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine is his account of the Palestinians he met and their lives under a hostile foreign government. Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory of West Bank since 1967, when Israel wrested the land from Jordanian control.
Ehrenreich intended The Way to the Spring to be a book about resistance, how ordinary people have been impacted by Israeli military action in Umm Al-Kheir, Nabi Saleh, Hebron, and Ramallah.
Ehrenreich's visits had coincided with Secretary of State Kerry's futile attempts to craft a peace deal between the ostensible Palestinian leadership and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Negotiations had included the release of 100+ Palestinian prisoners, but discussions collapsed before there were any positive results.
The occupation of Palestine has been harsh despite statements and evaluations from the United Nations (see https://www.un.org/unispal/history/). In particular, Israeli settlers have aggressively advanced into the West Bank because
Prior to completing this book, I had been woefully ignorant of the plight of Palestinians. But Ehrenreich's reporting revealed the iniquities perpetrated by the Israeli government. And while it became increasingly evident that he "took the side" of the Palestinians, it was also clear that Ehrenreich strove to uncover the truth of the events he recorded. Palestinians have lost their land and their lives. They've been subject to a rigged military court system while settlers receive full due process under the Israeli civil court system. The Israeli military have killed unarmed Palestinians at checkpoints and then falsified evidence to justify their measures of "self-defense."
This is not a pleasant subject matter to read, especially during the holidays. But I have no regrets about filling my knowledge gap, especially since American taxpayers have funded $3+ billion in military aid annually to Israel since 2010 (for details, see https://www.macrotrends.net/countries...).
Palestine has a way of enchanting people.
Perhaps it is the intoxicating proximity there of grief to joy and love to fury, the scale and the awful clarity of the injustice, people's resilience in the face of it.
Journalist Ben Ehrenreich first visited the West Bank in 2011 for a writing assignment. He subsequently returned for extended periods for the next several years. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine is his account of the Palestinians he met and their lives under a hostile foreign government. Israel has occupied the Palestinian territory of West Bank since 1967, when Israel wrested the land from Jordanian control.
[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.
Ehrenreich intended The Way to the Spring to be a book about resistance, how ordinary people have been impacted by Israeli military action in Umm Al-Kheir, Nabi Saleh, Hebron, and Ramallah.
"There are military victories, where people destroy and conquer, but there is also the sweeter victory, where people try to create death and you create life out of that." -- Hani Amer
Ehrenreich's visits had coincided with Secretary of State Kerry's futile attempts to craft a peace deal between the ostensible Palestinian leadership and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Negotiations had included the release of 100+ Palestinian prisoners, but discussions collapsed before there were any positive results.
This was how it went, how it still goes. Anticipation, exultation, disappointment, heartbreak, anticipation again. Despair is not solid. Neither is joy.
There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss.
The occupation of Palestine has been harsh despite statements and evaluations from the United Nations (see https://www.un.org/unispal/history/). In particular, Israeli settlers have aggressively advanced into the West Bank because
... successive Israeli governments of both the left and the right had, sometimes begrudgingly but nonetheless with overwhelming consistency, thrown their institutional and military weight behind the settlement enterprise. The most wild-eyed settlers worked then, as they continued to, as an advance guard for the state, and convenient scapegoat for its ambitions.
... the spokesman for the settlers' council put it succinctly: "For every drop our blood, they [the Palestinians] will pay in land."
Prior to completing this book, I had been woefully ignorant of the plight of Palestinians. But Ehrenreich's reporting revealed the iniquities perpetrated by the Israeli government. And while it became increasingly evident that he "took the side" of the Palestinians, it was also clear that Ehrenreich strove to uncover the truth of the events he recorded. Palestinians have lost their land and their lives. They've been subject to a rigged military court system while settlers receive full due process under the Israeli civil court system. The Israeli military have killed unarmed Palestinians at checkpoints and then falsified evidence to justify their measures of "self-defense."
This is not a pleasant subject matter to read, especially during the holidays. But I have no regrets about filling my knowledge gap, especially since American taxpayers have funded $3+ billion in military aid annually to Israel since 2010 (for details, see https://www.macrotrends.net/countries...).
November 23, 2017
Ben Ehrenreich makes it clear from the beginning that his viewpoint is not objective, but that he will write what he experiences and sees himself, aiming for as truthful a presentation as he can manage. His subject, the lives of Palestinians of the West Bank under Israeli dominance and occupation, makes this challenging in at least three ways.
Firstly, he contests the Israeli propaganda about the occupation and the violence that takes place between Palestinian villagers, for instance, and Israeli defense forces and settlers. In incident after incident, he unpicks what happened at the time, and what happens afterwards to Palestinians opposing occupation and the Israelis who beat, shoot or gas them. Punishment for the Palestinians, often gaol, and excuses/justification for the Israelis.
Secondly, it is painfully difficult to read because of the desperate stories it tells of Palestinians from different communities who have lost their land and homes because of the ever-encroaching Israeli occupation. Ehrenreich takes time out to show that these are ordinary people who would live ordinary lives if they could, for instance in his description of a day out at a beach with a militant village family - not militant Islamists, but a family involved in weekly protests against the Israeli enclosure of the village well to which the title refers.
And this leads me to perhaps the deepest challenge. How can there be peace in Israel/Palestine given the entrenched positions of the dominant players? It was difficult enough to think about before the outbreak of civil war in Syria, and the pressures of religious and political conflicts within the Muslim countries surrounding Israel/Palestine.
Somehow it seems even more important to hear the Palestinian voices now that a two-state solution seems utterly improbable, Israeli settlements take more and more Palestinian land, and the rhetoric of intolerance grows on all sides.
Ehrenreich's writing is as capable as you would expect from a journalist of his experience, his prose style as easy as possible given the difficulty of his subject. And he has written an important book.
Later: have just read an excellent piece in The New York Review of Books on the corrupting effects on Israel of its occupation of West Bank and Gaza at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/...
Firstly, he contests the Israeli propaganda about the occupation and the violence that takes place between Palestinian villagers, for instance, and Israeli defense forces and settlers. In incident after incident, he unpicks what happened at the time, and what happens afterwards to Palestinians opposing occupation and the Israelis who beat, shoot or gas them. Punishment for the Palestinians, often gaol, and excuses/justification for the Israelis.
Secondly, it is painfully difficult to read because of the desperate stories it tells of Palestinians from different communities who have lost their land and homes because of the ever-encroaching Israeli occupation. Ehrenreich takes time out to show that these are ordinary people who would live ordinary lives if they could, for instance in his description of a day out at a beach with a militant village family - not militant Islamists, but a family involved in weekly protests against the Israeli enclosure of the village well to which the title refers.
And this leads me to perhaps the deepest challenge. How can there be peace in Israel/Palestine given the entrenched positions of the dominant players? It was difficult enough to think about before the outbreak of civil war in Syria, and the pressures of religious and political conflicts within the Muslim countries surrounding Israel/Palestine.
Somehow it seems even more important to hear the Palestinian voices now that a two-state solution seems utterly improbable, Israeli settlements take more and more Palestinian land, and the rhetoric of intolerance grows on all sides.
Ehrenreich's writing is as capable as you would expect from a journalist of his experience, his prose style as easy as possible given the difficulty of his subject. And he has written an important book.
Later: have just read an excellent piece in The New York Review of Books on the corrupting effects on Israel of its occupation of West Bank and Gaza at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/...
November 25, 2016
A great book. I never thought that as a Palestinian who follows every thing that has to do with the cruel Israeli Military occupation, I would still read a book that tells me more. I urge you to read this book and to give it as a gift to people who do not know much about the plight and suffering of Palestinians.
I am also lucky that I interviewed Ben for our live radio show True Talk. I will link the interview once it airs.
I am also lucky that I interviewed Ben for our live radio show True Talk. I will link the interview once it airs.
January 26, 2023
Let me be clear. I am biased against Netanyahu and what Israel has become: a grand occupier and oppressor of Palestinians and their land. There is simply no other way to look at it when you are informed and read the facts. I have read Noam Chomsky on this issue for decades now. Ben Ehrenreich states in his introduction: "I aspire here to something more modest than objectivity, which is truth." Please read it.
If I had a way to get this book into the hands of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, I would buy copies and mail them. This is a must read, especially by those who blindly support Netanyahu and the right wing militant settlers of Israel. The idea of a two state solution is long dead. Read this book and you will understand why that is so.
In chapter one, "Life is Beautiful," Ben Ehrenreich (the author) is asked by one of his main Palestinian contacts Bassem: "What do you believe?" He writes,"I was taken aback by the question's intimacy. I didn't know how to answer, or what exactly he was asking. Did he want to know if I was a Jew, or if I was religious at all, or where my politics fell? I told him I believed in struggle. I don't remember how much I stuttered on. I might have even said that I believed that God was struggle, the tension and conflict at the root of all things that pushes the universe onward, not consciousness or will so much as an infinitely echoing demand. Probably I didn't say that much. Whatever I said, Bassem nodded, and never brought it up again." p.22
"Why didn't they ask the Israelis about violence? The IDF shed Palistinian blood on an almost daily basis, yet no one asked Netanyahu to clarify his attitude toward violence, or suggested that he renounce it and disarm if he wanted the support of the international community. And that wasn't even acknowledging the less visible but equally deadly forms of systemic violence - the land theft, the permit system, the military courts, the economic hard squeeze in its multitude of forms - that every palestinian was born into and endured every day of their lives. And in the face of all this, Bassem exclaimed, they wanted to talk about stones, stones thrown at soldiers wearing helmets and body armor, soldiers who routinely fired far more sophisticated and lethal projectiles? Was there no form of palestinian resistance so innocuous that it would not win condemnation?" p.44
"Overall I spent about a month on Planet Hebron. Not very long really. Long enough. ... In the end, it was works of science fiction that helped (me understand) the most...:Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, an epic novel set in a hazy, dreamlike city, perhaps entirely a dream, separated from and forgotten by the world, where time skips and space rearranges itself without warning; and China Mieville's the City and the City an extraordinary work of speculative fiction about two cities, beszel and ul Zoma, that, interpenetrating one another, occupy the same geographic space. The citizens of each city are trained from infancy to unsee the other city and its residents, to not acknowledge even to themselves the existence of half the people and half the buildings that they walk past in the street. Any failure to do so, however brief - a gaze that lingers on the facade of a building that belongs to the other city, a moment's acknowledgment of the wrong human being - is the gravest crime that any resident of either polity can commit. So it was in Hebron." p.147
Ehrenreich offers a footnote that helps explain the Zionist belief: "Israel" and "the land of Israel" do not occupy the same space, or even the same type of space. The former can be found in any atlas. The latter lives only in the realm of myth: it comprises all of the lands promised to the Jews in the Old Testament, which, depending whom you ask, include the territory of the current state of Israel, plus Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, the Sinai peninsula, most of Jordan, and parts of Syria and Lebanon. note, p. 156
"Perhaps if he had remained in Boston, where he was born, Baruch marzel would have been a calmer man. Probably not. The unofficial leader of the Tel Rumeida settlement appeared to delight in giving offense, and also in taking it." p.197 "The movement to which he had devoted years of his life had been marginalized to the point of illegality. Now it was on the rise. Views that had once been expressed only on the furthest fringes of the Israeli right were aired openly and frequently in the local media, in the Knesset, in the streets...-that no coexistence with Palestinians was possible, and mass expulsion the only solution - had become a mainstream position." p.199
"I sat down in Jerusalem with an Israeli activist and former soldier named Eran Efrati. He had spent most of 2006-2007 stationed in Hebron. He was nineteen when he arrived there and at the time saw little reason to question the Israeli military's presence in the city. At his first briefing, he recalled an officer asking the troops what they would do if they saw a Palestinian running at a settler with a knife. 'Of course the answer was you shoot him in the center of his body,' Eran said. The officer posed the question in reverse: What if it was the settler with a knife? 'And the answer was you cannot do anything. The best you can do is call the police, but you're not allowed to touch them. From day one the command was - You cannot touch the settlers.'" p.201
This is what Ben writes about the "peace talks" circa 2013-2014. "Kerry came and Kerry left and Kerry came again. Unless you crossed paths with his motorcade, it was easy not to notice. In Ramallah, no one talked about the peace talks much, no more at least than they did the weather, or the traffic at Qalandia. Back in Washington, the secretary of state had enthused that the Israelis and Palestinians were closer to a deal than they had been for years. He may have been right, but that didn't mean much. Kerry delivered a speech at the Saban Forum - an annual gathering sponsored by the billionaire Democratic party fund-raiser and staunch Israel supporter Haim Saban - in which the erstwhile impartial deal broker boasted of his own '100 percent voting record for Israel' and before delving into his vision for peace, spent several minutes on the Obama administration's unbreakable allegiance to America's favorite cousin - the U.S., he said, was always 'particularly prepared to be the first and fastest to Israel's side in any time of crisis.' His audience in Washington may have required assurance, but few Palestinians were ever unaware of this." p. 233
"At the same conference, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, spoke with characteristic bluntness, cautioning that no one should get their hopes up. But even if the dialogue was predestined to fail, as Lieberman believed it was, it was important to keep the negotiations going in order, he said, 'to manage this conflict. This admission - that the point of Israeli participation in the peace talks was not in fat peace - confirmed what had long been a commonplace belief among Palestinians, as widely accepted as the corruption of the authorities and the whiteness of snow: that 'peace' was code for a sneaky sort of war, and that decades of U.S. brokered negotiations had served as little more than a useful spectacle that enabled Israel to keep Abbas's leash tight and potential foreign critics distracted while the bulldozers and the army went about their daily tasks." p. 233
"When Netanyahu's office prepared an illustrated, PowerPoint 'Incitement Index,' The New York times published the document online and in an accompanying article repeated Netanyahu's claims with a lack of skepticism that should have been astonishing. Given that Palestinian violence against Israel had reached a record low, it was never clear exactly whom or what Netanyahu thought Abbas might be inciting. it didn't have to be. It was implicit in the reasoning, perfectly circular, by which each act of actual israeli violence prevented another purely conjectural act by Palestinians, and all those imagined acts of terror, hypothetical though they may have remained, justified the next Israeli assault, and the next one, and the one after that, and the eventual, inevitable response by Palestinians - and it would come before the year was out - would justify all the killings of the past as well as future slaughters of far greater magnitude and horror." (2014) pp.237-8
"I understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair." p.252
"In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the [Kerry] negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: 'The Palestininans don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state. We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.. Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale.'
"When I first read that line, i nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. 'Only now,' the unnamed official said."
"Nearly half a century into a massive state-supported settlement enterprise that had, at the cost of thousands of lives, pushed Palestinians from as much as 60 percent of the West Bank? Only now? After nearly half a century of evictions, demolitions, confiscations, mass arrests, targeted killings, and the steady and methodical disenfranchisement, dispossession, and humiliation of an entire people? Only now do they realize that this is also about expropriating land??" p. 261.
"'What you see is not what is actually happening and what is happening is not what you see,' Gadi Zohar told the writer Peter Lagerquist in 2003. On the crust of the planet people fight and die and are broken for their beliefs or their land or their dignity. Their leaders stoop to praise them and promise that their sacrifices will not be forgotten. Whole nations are made of suc promises. But above and around it all moves money, which has no loyalties and no memory, and seeks solely to multiply itself. Its worshippers play all sides at once. Whatever uniforms they may wear and whatever oaths they might swear, their citizenship is with that ever-shifting cloud, which, moored to nor rock, forms and dissolves and takes new shapes and evanesces yet again. It was not a question of betrayal - Palestinian businessmen and high officials making deals with the enemy, or Israelis doing the same. It was that when you floated high enough, those boundaries and distinctions could no longer even be seen." p. 283
A footnote: "Fayyadist fantasies notwithstanding, development could work no magic within the framework of the occupation. As one UN report put it in the summer of 2014: 'short of a wide-ranging lifting of Israeli restrictions on the Palestinian economy and trade, and enabling greater access to economic and natural resources, the Palestinian private sector will remain unable to create jobs, and the severe unemployment crisis will worsen....Long-term sustainable development cannot be achieved without addressing the fundamental weaknesses and structural distortions that were fuelled by decades of occupation.'" n. p. 283
Salam Fayyad, former IMF economist whose economic reform program based in "institution building" and "transparency" was beloved by american officials and commentators. When fayyad resigned in early 2013, The New York times's Thomas friedman hailed him with blithe incoherence as "the Arab Spring before there was an Arab Spring." Most Palestinians, though understood Fayyad's slickly technocratic rhetoric to mean little more than public sector cuts, full economic cooperation with Israel, and the squelching of all forms of resistance that threatened the emerging Palestinian elite's profitable arrangements with their occupier. pp. 177-8
If I had a way to get this book into the hands of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren, I would buy copies and mail them. This is a must read, especially by those who blindly support Netanyahu and the right wing militant settlers of Israel. The idea of a two state solution is long dead. Read this book and you will understand why that is so.
In chapter one, "Life is Beautiful," Ben Ehrenreich (the author) is asked by one of his main Palestinian contacts Bassem: "What do you believe?" He writes,"I was taken aback by the question's intimacy. I didn't know how to answer, or what exactly he was asking. Did he want to know if I was a Jew, or if I was religious at all, or where my politics fell? I told him I believed in struggle. I don't remember how much I stuttered on. I might have even said that I believed that God was struggle, the tension and conflict at the root of all things that pushes the universe onward, not consciousness or will so much as an infinitely echoing demand. Probably I didn't say that much. Whatever I said, Bassem nodded, and never brought it up again." p.22
"Why didn't they ask the Israelis about violence? The IDF shed Palistinian blood on an almost daily basis, yet no one asked Netanyahu to clarify his attitude toward violence, or suggested that he renounce it and disarm if he wanted the support of the international community. And that wasn't even acknowledging the less visible but equally deadly forms of systemic violence - the land theft, the permit system, the military courts, the economic hard squeeze in its multitude of forms - that every palestinian was born into and endured every day of their lives. And in the face of all this, Bassem exclaimed, they wanted to talk about stones, stones thrown at soldiers wearing helmets and body armor, soldiers who routinely fired far more sophisticated and lethal projectiles? Was there no form of palestinian resistance so innocuous that it would not win condemnation?" p.44
"Overall I spent about a month on Planet Hebron. Not very long really. Long enough. ... In the end, it was works of science fiction that helped (me understand) the most...:Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, an epic novel set in a hazy, dreamlike city, perhaps entirely a dream, separated from and forgotten by the world, where time skips and space rearranges itself without warning; and China Mieville's the City and the City an extraordinary work of speculative fiction about two cities, beszel and ul Zoma, that, interpenetrating one another, occupy the same geographic space. The citizens of each city are trained from infancy to unsee the other city and its residents, to not acknowledge even to themselves the existence of half the people and half the buildings that they walk past in the street. Any failure to do so, however brief - a gaze that lingers on the facade of a building that belongs to the other city, a moment's acknowledgment of the wrong human being - is the gravest crime that any resident of either polity can commit. So it was in Hebron." p.147
Ehrenreich offers a footnote that helps explain the Zionist belief: "Israel" and "the land of Israel" do not occupy the same space, or even the same type of space. The former can be found in any atlas. The latter lives only in the realm of myth: it comprises all of the lands promised to the Jews in the Old Testament, which, depending whom you ask, include the territory of the current state of Israel, plus Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, the Sinai peninsula, most of Jordan, and parts of Syria and Lebanon. note, p. 156
"Perhaps if he had remained in Boston, where he was born, Baruch marzel would have been a calmer man. Probably not. The unofficial leader of the Tel Rumeida settlement appeared to delight in giving offense, and also in taking it." p.197 "The movement to which he had devoted years of his life had been marginalized to the point of illegality. Now it was on the rise. Views that had once been expressed only on the furthest fringes of the Israeli right were aired openly and frequently in the local media, in the Knesset, in the streets...-that no coexistence with Palestinians was possible, and mass expulsion the only solution - had become a mainstream position." p.199
"I sat down in Jerusalem with an Israeli activist and former soldier named Eran Efrati. He had spent most of 2006-2007 stationed in Hebron. He was nineteen when he arrived there and at the time saw little reason to question the Israeli military's presence in the city. At his first briefing, he recalled an officer asking the troops what they would do if they saw a Palestinian running at a settler with a knife. 'Of course the answer was you shoot him in the center of his body,' Eran said. The officer posed the question in reverse: What if it was the settler with a knife? 'And the answer was you cannot do anything. The best you can do is call the police, but you're not allowed to touch them. From day one the command was - You cannot touch the settlers.'" p.201
This is what Ben writes about the "peace talks" circa 2013-2014. "Kerry came and Kerry left and Kerry came again. Unless you crossed paths with his motorcade, it was easy not to notice. In Ramallah, no one talked about the peace talks much, no more at least than they did the weather, or the traffic at Qalandia. Back in Washington, the secretary of state had enthused that the Israelis and Palestinians were closer to a deal than they had been for years. He may have been right, but that didn't mean much. Kerry delivered a speech at the Saban Forum - an annual gathering sponsored by the billionaire Democratic party fund-raiser and staunch Israel supporter Haim Saban - in which the erstwhile impartial deal broker boasted of his own '100 percent voting record for Israel' and before delving into his vision for peace, spent several minutes on the Obama administration's unbreakable allegiance to America's favorite cousin - the U.S., he said, was always 'particularly prepared to be the first and fastest to Israel's side in any time of crisis.' His audience in Washington may have required assurance, but few Palestinians were ever unaware of this." p. 233
"At the same conference, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister, spoke with characteristic bluntness, cautioning that no one should get their hopes up. But even if the dialogue was predestined to fail, as Lieberman believed it was, it was important to keep the negotiations going in order, he said, 'to manage this conflict. This admission - that the point of Israeli participation in the peace talks was not in fat peace - confirmed what had long been a commonplace belief among Palestinians, as widely accepted as the corruption of the authorities and the whiteness of snow: that 'peace' was code for a sneaky sort of war, and that decades of U.S. brokered negotiations had served as little more than a useful spectacle that enabled Israel to keep Abbas's leash tight and potential foreign critics distracted while the bulldozers and the army went about their daily tasks." p. 233
"When Netanyahu's office prepared an illustrated, PowerPoint 'Incitement Index,' The New York times published the document online and in an accompanying article repeated Netanyahu's claims with a lack of skepticism that should have been astonishing. Given that Palestinian violence against Israel had reached a record low, it was never clear exactly whom or what Netanyahu thought Abbas might be inciting. it didn't have to be. It was implicit in the reasoning, perfectly circular, by which each act of actual israeli violence prevented another purely conjectural act by Palestinians, and all those imagined acts of terror, hypothetical though they may have remained, justified the next Israeli assault, and the next one, and the one after that, and the eventual, inevitable response by Palestinians - and it would come before the year was out - would justify all the killings of the past as well as future slaughters of far greater magnitude and horror." (2014) pp.237-8
"I understood for the first time that in its daily functioning, the prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair." p.252
"In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the [Kerry] negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: 'The Palestininans don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state. We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.. Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale.'
"When I first read that line, i nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. 'Only now,' the unnamed official said."
"Nearly half a century into a massive state-supported settlement enterprise that had, at the cost of thousands of lives, pushed Palestinians from as much as 60 percent of the West Bank? Only now? After nearly half a century of evictions, demolitions, confiscations, mass arrests, targeted killings, and the steady and methodical disenfranchisement, dispossession, and humiliation of an entire people? Only now do they realize that this is also about expropriating land??" p. 261.
"'What you see is not what is actually happening and what is happening is not what you see,' Gadi Zohar told the writer Peter Lagerquist in 2003. On the crust of the planet people fight and die and are broken for their beliefs or their land or their dignity. Their leaders stoop to praise them and promise that their sacrifices will not be forgotten. Whole nations are made of suc promises. But above and around it all moves money, which has no loyalties and no memory, and seeks solely to multiply itself. Its worshippers play all sides at once. Whatever uniforms they may wear and whatever oaths they might swear, their citizenship is with that ever-shifting cloud, which, moored to nor rock, forms and dissolves and takes new shapes and evanesces yet again. It was not a question of betrayal - Palestinian businessmen and high officials making deals with the enemy, or Israelis doing the same. It was that when you floated high enough, those boundaries and distinctions could no longer even be seen." p. 283
A footnote: "Fayyadist fantasies notwithstanding, development could work no magic within the framework of the occupation. As one UN report put it in the summer of 2014: 'short of a wide-ranging lifting of Israeli restrictions on the Palestinian economy and trade, and enabling greater access to economic and natural resources, the Palestinian private sector will remain unable to create jobs, and the severe unemployment crisis will worsen....Long-term sustainable development cannot be achieved without addressing the fundamental weaknesses and structural distortions that were fuelled by decades of occupation.'" n. p. 283
Salam Fayyad, former IMF economist whose economic reform program based in "institution building" and "transparency" was beloved by american officials and commentators. When fayyad resigned in early 2013, The New York times's Thomas friedman hailed him with blithe incoherence as "the Arab Spring before there was an Arab Spring." Most Palestinians, though understood Fayyad's slickly technocratic rhetoric to mean little more than public sector cuts, full economic cooperation with Israel, and the squelching of all forms of resistance that threatened the emerging Palestinian elite's profitable arrangements with their occupier. pp. 177-8
July 13, 2018
Quite a compelling book about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The author spends considerable time in the villages at the frontlines of civil resistance to the occupation, as well as the major cities of the territories that continue to exist under effective military rule. The segment on Hebron, shut down by soldiers and settlers, was particularly eerie. The book also does a good job of painting a picture of social life in the West Bank, including its class divisions and the daily nightmare that Palestinians must endure to simply commute or get along with their normal lives. A well-written and absolutely worthwhile contribution to a subject that is often accused of being "over-covered."
December 22, 2016
Even though I was already aware of the atrocities Israel commits against the Palestinians, this book made my blood run cold and renewed my anger at their right wing government and right wingers in general, who in my view are murderers and should be treated as such. The settlers in Israel are terrible people who should be given no respect whatsoever. They should be shamed by decent people.
The first time I got really upset about what is happening to Palestine, it was the year 2000 and I was a college freshman. Wanting to take in as much from college as I could, I attended a talk at a Lutheran church by a young Palestinian man. Though I'd gone due to having seen a flyer, I think I was the only person there who did not go to that church (although I have both Jewish and Christian family, I have no religion myself). The young man was a Christian Palestinian, a Lutheran. He told us of the atrocities he'd been the victim of at Israel's hands. He told us about a time when he an his father and other children from his church went on a school trip, if I remember correctly, trying to get to a religious location. They went in a van, but were stopped at a checkpoint. The soldiers made them sit in a stress position for hours before finally killing his father and one boy. I thought this was a horrible story, but as this book shows, these stories are completely typical.
It's clear that the right wingers of Israel intend to kill every single Palestinian. They regard them as vermin and have no problem with committing genocide against them. They are fine with killing children, fine with torture, fine with acting like yes, Nazis. They're fine with Palestine being, yes, a concentration camp. I have relatives I love very much who live in Israel who are not right wingers. They are on the left and have supported a two-state solution forever. But it's clear there will not be two states. Evil right wingers will murder every single Palestinian they can find. And their hatred will be a part of the right wing movements that are absolutely destroying the world.
This was a great book. It made me cry to think of the children and innocent people who are being murdered by Israeli settlers and soldiers every day in Palestine. I especially liked Eid (I'm assuming that is how his name was spelled, I listened to the audio version of the book) who is a thoughtful, spiritual person who includes animals in his kindness, doing his best to eat vegan only. I think everyone should read this book no matter what their religious background is. If you support Israel but do not read this, you are remiss.
(I have reserved a popular book about Israel from the library and will read that as well, but if it does not go into detail about what Israel does to Palestine, it could cause me to doubt the accuracy of any of the book. If it does tell about Israeli atrocities, however, I can take it seriously.)
The first time I got really upset about what is happening to Palestine, it was the year 2000 and I was a college freshman. Wanting to take in as much from college as I could, I attended a talk at a Lutheran church by a young Palestinian man. Though I'd gone due to having seen a flyer, I think I was the only person there who did not go to that church (although I have both Jewish and Christian family, I have no religion myself). The young man was a Christian Palestinian, a Lutheran. He told us of the atrocities he'd been the victim of at Israel's hands. He told us about a time when he an his father and other children from his church went on a school trip, if I remember correctly, trying to get to a religious location. They went in a van, but were stopped at a checkpoint. The soldiers made them sit in a stress position for hours before finally killing his father and one boy. I thought this was a horrible story, but as this book shows, these stories are completely typical.
It's clear that the right wingers of Israel intend to kill every single Palestinian. They regard them as vermin and have no problem with committing genocide against them. They are fine with killing children, fine with torture, fine with acting like yes, Nazis. They're fine with Palestine being, yes, a concentration camp. I have relatives I love very much who live in Israel who are not right wingers. They are on the left and have supported a two-state solution forever. But it's clear there will not be two states. Evil right wingers will murder every single Palestinian they can find. And their hatred will be a part of the right wing movements that are absolutely destroying the world.
This was a great book. It made me cry to think of the children and innocent people who are being murdered by Israeli settlers and soldiers every day in Palestine. I especially liked Eid (I'm assuming that is how his name was spelled, I listened to the audio version of the book) who is a thoughtful, spiritual person who includes animals in his kindness, doing his best to eat vegan only. I think everyone should read this book no matter what their religious background is. If you support Israel but do not read this, you are remiss.
(I have reserved a popular book about Israel from the library and will read that as well, but if it does not go into detail about what Israel does to Palestine, it could cause me to doubt the accuracy of any of the book. If it does tell about Israeli atrocities, however, I can take it seriously.)
November 12, 2023
As Ehrenreich documents the quotidian violence of israeli apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza, you have to keep track of the date, because it could just have easily been written in 2023, 2016, or 50 years ago. What I'm finding most haunting about this is how identical Operation Protective Edge was to what we are witnessing today - the lies of the israeli government, the reaction of the world, the unspeakable massacres of palestinians, the targeting of hospitals, the killing of UN workers...the list goes on and on. I really appreciated Ben's descriptive account of exactly what Palestinians living in the West Bank go through on a daily basis, and the clear love he has for the Palestinian people and their enduring spirit. Palestine WILL be free, from the river to the sea.
May 1, 2025
Truly eye opening. What the people in the West Bank have had to endure for decades of occupation is almost impossible to believe. Not only the killings, but the daily humiliations, the arrests, the loss of their property and means to make a living. And yet they find ways to keep going, to keep a hope which who knows where it can possibly come from. Truly sad and inspiring.
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September 27, 2022Nelikšu nekādu vērtējumu, jo nevaru šo vērtēt šo kategorijā "patīk-nepatīk". Ja godīgi, līdz šim Palestīnas jautājumā neko diži daudz vairāk kā Gobziņa iemācīto "Tikai palestīniešiem nav mājas..." tā arī nebiju apguvusi. Nu tas ir, es zinu, ka Latvija tā arī nav atzinusi Palestīnu kā valsti un to, ka Gazas joslā ir teju patstāvīgs konflikts ar Izraēlu. Tad nu šī bija iespēja uzzināt - ne gluži politisko vēsturi (un labi, ka tā), bet to, kas tur notiek. Autors jau sākumā atzīst, ka negrasās būt objektīvs, bet vienkārši atstāstīt to, ko pats redzējis un piedzīvojis. Un tas nav nekas jauks vai viegli uzklausāms. Cilvēks tomēr ir pats nežēlīgākais zvērs... Miljoniem sabojātu dzīvju. Nudien nav ideju ko darīt situācijā, kad 2 tautas noteikti nav gatavas dzīvot vienā valstī (un abas ir vienas teritorijas vēsturiskie iedzīvotāji (un jau vēsturiski viena otru necieš)- ir tikai skaidrs, ka neviens otram nepiekāpsies.
May 10, 2022
“[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpoints and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair.”~Ben Ehrenreich
Ben Ehrenreich wrote this book after bearing witness how the Israeli occupation was subjugating indigenous Palestinians. 'The Way to the Spring' primarily follows the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Hebron, and Jerusalem, telling the stories of the Tamimi family (ie Ahed Tamimi), Mariam Barghouti, and many other Palestinians fighting everyday for a free Palestine. In no way is Ehrenreich speaking on behalf of Palestinians in this book, if anything he is using his platform and privilege to elevate the voices of the Palestinian people and further attest to the world the horrors of the Israeli occupation. He covers the growing annexation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government, the daily dehumanization Palestinians face at the hands of the IDF and settlers alike, and the blatantly obvious and ever present proof that Israel is an apartheid state.
Ben Ehrenreich wrote this book after bearing witness how the Israeli occupation was subjugating indigenous Palestinians. 'The Way to the Spring' primarily follows the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, Hebron, and Jerusalem, telling the stories of the Tamimi family (ie Ahed Tamimi), Mariam Barghouti, and many other Palestinians fighting everyday for a free Palestine. In no way is Ehrenreich speaking on behalf of Palestinians in this book, if anything he is using his platform and privilege to elevate the voices of the Palestinian people and further attest to the world the horrors of the Israeli occupation. He covers the growing annexation of Palestinian land by the Israeli government, the daily dehumanization Palestinians face at the hands of the IDF and settlers alike, and the blatantly obvious and ever present proof that Israel is an apartheid state.
January 24, 2019
This is a long repetitive reportage of the Palestinians struggle under the Israeli rule. Don't expect any description of everyday life, industry or culture — the book consists of protests, arrests and shootings.
The author shows how Palestinians are treated as third-class people by Israel, which unfortunately seems to be true (at least consistent with what I've seen). However, Ehrenreich doesn't make any effort to explain the Israeli position.
Like here: "Rockets have not killed or severely injured a single Israeli civilian since 2012." The author doesn't bother to tell us about the Israeli's early warning system and a bomb shelter in every house, bus stop and playground.
Regularly the author goes too far in portraying Palestinians as victims. A mother fills a sink with water to describe how a sea looks like to her child. Another child later asks: "How big is America? Bigger than Jordan?". These pieces are just ridiculous, if you think for a moment. There is an ok internet in the West Bank and Ehrenreich himself proudly notes about schools and universities later in the book.
It is very important to show the atrocities that are commonplace in the disputed territories, but:
1. You don't need 448 pages to do that.
2. The value for a neutral reader drops drammatically if you clearly take a side.
The author shows how Palestinians are treated as third-class people by Israel, which unfortunately seems to be true (at least consistent with what I've seen). However, Ehrenreich doesn't make any effort to explain the Israeli position.
Like here: "Rockets have not killed or severely injured a single Israeli civilian since 2012." The author doesn't bother to tell us about the Israeli's early warning system and a bomb shelter in every house, bus stop and playground.
Regularly the author goes too far in portraying Palestinians as victims. A mother fills a sink with water to describe how a sea looks like to her child. Another child later asks: "How big is America? Bigger than Jordan?". These pieces are just ridiculous, if you think for a moment. There is an ok internet in the West Bank and Ehrenreich himself proudly notes about schools and universities later in the book.
It is very important to show the atrocities that are commonplace in the disputed territories, but:
1. You don't need 448 pages to do that.
2. The value for a neutral reader drops drammatically if you clearly take a side.
July 29, 2016
The best book about the horrors of the Palestinian occupation that I've read in a very very long time.
August 7, 2017
I read this book prior to a visit to Israel. It led me to ask uncomfortable questions of our guide who would basically lie. “How much West Bank land has been confiscated by Israel?” “Only 1-2%” This answer doesn’t include the 35% of land held by Israel as “security zones.”
The author stayed with various families in Ramallah, Hebron and other cities in 2014 and states that the book is not evenhanded but is about the plight of the Palestinians.
Intifada means "the shaking off. “It was to challenge the entirety of the occupation the almost infinitely complex system of control Israel exercises over Palestinians throughout the West Bank not just the settlements and the soldiers on hilltop bases but the checkpoints, travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences, the courts and prisons, the stranglehold on the economy, the home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession and humiliation that for four decades has been used to sustain Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities and even the duration of Palestinian lives.”
The 1st intifada 1987-91 was “the Intifada of Rock” and consisted of kids throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, a boycott of Israeli businesses and goods and the shutting down of Palestinian businesses. 300 Palestinians were killed many of them children and teens. No Israeli soldiers were killed. The 2nd intifada 2000-05 involved suicide bombers. The Israeli response was massive including tanks and airplanes. Thousands of Palestinians were killed. It was a disaster for the Palestinian cause. Israel shuttered 400 schools and two universities in the occupied territories for four years
The US provides $3 billion of military aid to Israel per year. The tear gas used in Nablus is made in Pennsylvania.
Israel has confiscated about 1/3 of Palestinian land. The wall along the green line often goes far into Palestinian territory separating Palestinians from their fields stealing Palestinian land.
The Israelis control the water supply to the West Bank where unlike in Israel there is terrible water pressure and long periods of no water. Some West Bank villages use 70L per person per day below the 100L recommended by the WHO for minimum water supply. Many adjacent settlements use 10 times that much.
With the Oslo accords Arafat gained no real sovereignty. Israel maintained absolute control over 70% of Palestinian land as well as the resources under it and the air space over it. Israel got everything it wanted and Palestine nothing. It was basically a surrender of Palestine to Israel. The Palestinian Authority was responsible for the welfare and safety of the population. Israel had outsourced their occupation sub-contracting out the duties and expenses required of occupiers by international law. Israel retained almost total control over the Palestinian economy. Palestine in effect became Bantustans floating in a sea of increasing settlements. Israel was allowed to collect taxes and was responsible for providing about 2/3s of the PAs budget which they would withhold to exert political control. They controlled what Palestine can import, mainly Israeli goods and export almost nothing.
It is a little known fact that the settlements are built by Palestinian labor. The Palestinian may have a deed to the land going back to the Ottoman Empire. He may sue in court and win. But the settlers will not obey the ruling and the police and Army will not enforce them.
Hebron is the only city in the West Bank in which settlers have made settlements. In the city there are checkpoints next to checkpoints next to checkpoints, cities within cities, within cities.
Some things that are normal and Hebron: Screaming. If you hear someone screaming because soldiers or settlers are beating him that's normal. Being shot at and having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at your house is normal. Soldiers firing teargas at children to mark the beginning and end of each day of classes is normal. Being arrested, held without charges and released without an apology is normal. Having your ID taken away at a checkpoint and put in a soldiers pocket until he felt you had waited long enough is normal. Having a soldier with an automatic weapon stationed in front of or behind your home if it adjoins settlers home is normal. Having a bullet hole in the wall in your children's bedroom or a bullet hole in your book of Jewish law is also normal.
500 settlers live in Hebron amidst 50,000 Palestinian. A map of the city is a patchwork of different areas depending on who lives there settlers or Palestinians and who can travel on what streets. Some streets on which Palestinians cannot travel are called “sterile” as if the Palestinians are some type of infection.
There are streets on which there are settlers live between Palestinian houses. The Palestinians cannot go on the street in front of their own houses but have to go out the rear or over the roofs as they cannot walk on the street near where the settlers homes.
The author visited a man in Hebron in a small apartment who wanted to expand. He got permits from the PA and the Israeli’s to build a 2nd level and began construction. A settler called the police. He was told to stop building. He argued and was arrested and beaten. In the 1990s certain torture methods were made illegal but could be used "when necessary.”
Israeli military authorities have the authority to declare any building or piece of land a “closed military zone” in which no one can enter. The military at any time or place can demand Palestinians to leave. It is used to clear Palestinians from their homes and lands and to make way for settlers.
Soldiers were told that if an Arab charges a settler with a knife they should shoot the Arab in the middle of the body while if a settler is coming toward the Palestinian with a knife they should do nothing and call the police. Part of the job of police and soldiers is to humiliate the Palestinians. Outside of the school the author reported seeing teachers stripped to their underwear in front of students and stand for hours because "all Arabs are potential threats."
The author interviewed a soldier who described “mapping raids.” They would go to a Palestinian home, get everybody out, take pictures of them, break some things in the house and make a map of the house so that if there was ever a terrorist in that house they would know all the rooms. They were instructed to break things so that the Palestinians would always feel like they were being chased. Later the soldier found out that the army had been doing this for 40 years; they had had maps of every house for years. They did this to terrorize the Palestinians.
The author describes an incident in which two Palestinians in a car are stopped at a checkpoint. One young man is asleep, wakes, steps out of the car, stretches and is shot dead from 2m away. The other brother gets out of the car and is pinned to the ground and handcuffed and then questioned for many hours as to why his now dead brother was agitated, unhappy, why he had a knife etc. The papers report that the dead boy threatened soldiers with a knife. The author interviews bystanders who deny this. Later the father, who has businesses in the Israel selling shoes is denied entry though he has a permit that has allowed him entry for years. He is told that he is now a security threat. So first they killed his son and then they deny him employment. The father is grilled just as the brother had been grill about the dead boys, did he belong to any terrorist groups, was he agitated etc. etc. Actually the family was non-political. No one had ever been arrested for anything; they just wanted to live their lives in peace. The farce is that the Israelis kept questioning relatives to corroborate the made-up story that the boy had attacked the soldier and was agitated.
The author describes the sorrow and suffering but also the joy, the singing dancing and laughing of the Palestinians. Some of the protests involving tear gas, rubber bullets and rock throwing were enjoyed almost as theater by the Palestinians with laughing and cheering and singing in the midst of the chaos apparently in the joy of communal resistance to the oppressive occupation.
Israelis keep the peace talks going as a form of control, keeping a tight leash on Abbas. It is really not a peace but a type of war in which they continue to maintain a stranglehold of occupation while they whittle away at the Palestinian lands.
Israeli special units will enter Palestinian areas and kill people they claim are planning terrorism. They always say an arrest was tried, the person resisted and was shot. Eye witnesses claim no attempt to arrest was made and autopsies show that the victims have been shot a number of times in the head. These are basically extrajudicial assassinations.
40% of Palestinian males have been jailed. Once you're detained it is like a shuttle, you are jailed again, again and again. You're under constant suspicion. Nearly all in Palestine have a relative in prison. The author tells of a man released from prison after 20 years. His family organized a huge homecoming. The Israeli army prepared for this homecoming by blasting his house with “skunk water”, breaking the windows and soaking the carpets. The water smells like bad feet and shit and multiple washings will not get it out of your hair and clothes. Israeli forces spray this water on protesters and into homes from big tanker trucks
Every Israeli government whether conservative or liberal, whether with eagerness or begrudgingly has given their support to the formation of new settlements. The fanatic settlers serve as the spear point of the expansion of Israel and serve as the object of blame for any problems. There are now 300,000 settlers in the west bank. The settlers are now the deciding force in mainstream Israeli politics. No government will be allowed to stand who tries to dislodge them.
The author realized that the reasons for the walls, the guard posts, the prisons, the police, the tear gas, the skunk water, the long lines, etc was not only to grab land but also to humiliate another people. The Israelis had built a highly functioning, efficient humiliation machine. And the battle for the Palestinians was not so much about getting their land back but about standing up and not being broken.
The author traveling in a car with other journalists and a Palestinian and was stopped at a checkpoint by a soldiers raised hand. The soldier motioned them forward and when they went several meters soldiers jumped out, opened the doors and told everyone to get out. They put everyone including the author up against the wall and roughly search them. When the author asked “Why are we being searched,” the reply was “Shut the fuck up, Because we want to.” Officers arrived and were told the Palestinian driver tried to run them down and that other folks with them including a woman had been throwing rocks. The author had been with this woman the entire afternoon and she had not done so. One of the soldiers came up to the woman and said, “I am going to fuck up your life.” and he did. She was taken off to jail.
Israel has expropriated about 30% of the West Bank land from the Palestinians. In the collapsed talks of 2014 the Netanyahu government had insisted, and Abbas had agreed to giving up huge chunks of the West Bank, Israel maintaining military control of Palestine and of the Palestinians being demilitarize, more concessions then had ever been made by any previous Palestinian government. Netanyahu responded by announcing 7000 new housing in the West Bank and breaking off talks.
The author visited a town where several young had been wounded in the knees with 22 caliber bullets from Israeli snipers. The Palestinian doctors explained that if the shot was a little lower or higher the wound would heal easily but right at the knee it would cause permanent damage. The Israeli army was creating a generation of permanently hobbled men.
99.74% of Palestinians tried in the Israeli military court system are found guilty. 20% of Israelis are.
2 boys were killed with single shots to the front and the back through their hearts leaving exit wounds during a demonstration when they were nowhere near the police and were not throwing rocks. The Israeli police said no metal ammunition was used. Rubber bullets cannot pass through the body. When a clip from a store video camera showed that one boy was just standing when he was hit in the other walking away the Israeli authorities said it was falsely edited. When the whole clip was released to the world press showing no editing the Israelis said it probably was a staged fake. Other videos came out including one from CNN showing the same incident. A high-ranking Israeli diplomat went on CNN and said that it wasn't even certain that the boys were killed although they had been declared dead in the hospital and buried. The man who made the recording had his house and shop raided and all his video equipment and computers taken. An Israeli officer said to him “We will crush you according to the law. You made the army look bad.”
In 2014 three Israeli boys hitchhiking in the West Bank disappeared. Later the car was found burned. Netanyahu without any data blamed Hamas. Hamas always made loud claims when it kidnapped wanting the publicity but denied any involvement in this case. Nevertheless, Netanyahu repeated that he knew it was Hamas. US newspapers began publishing Netanyahu statements without editorial comment. Israeli forces begin rounding up Hamas officials and anyone associated with them. Netanyahu was worried about an agreement between Hamas and Fatah earlier that year.
To stoke the country’s sadness to rage Netanyahu released a statement saying the three boys had been abducted and killed by “human animals.” Quoting an ancient poet he said “Satan has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a small child.” He did not mention that the line was from a lament on the futility of earthly revenge. Netanyahu would not let Satan's lack of imagination stop him. Hamas was responsible and they must be crushed. Politician after politician called out for a war of annihilation. The boys’ funeral was a national event televised on TV bringing the fractious nation together in a common purpose of hatred toward Hamas. Mobs gathered in the streets carrying signs saying “Revenge.” boys draped in Israeli flags wearing white yarmulkes chanting “Death to Arabs” roamed the streets looking for Palestinians to beat.
The police the army and the politicians all knew that the boys were already dead from an initial call from the killers. Yet the raids claiming to look for the boys went on. In Hebron nearly every house was trashed with doors broken, pantry contents dump on the floor and furniture broken. About two thirds of the over 1000 prisoners released months earlier were rearrested.
Then 2 Palestinian boys were abducted and burned alive by Israelis.
Gaza erupted. The next day 85 rockets were fired from Garza into Israel. Rockets had previously been fired but no one said anything earlier about rockets being an extensional threat to Israel or about Israel having to go to war over rockets. Mostly splinter groups had fired these rockets with Hamas attempting to stop them. The IDF responded with airstrikes. By the end of the night Israel had dropped 400 tons of explosives killing 65 Palestinians including 16 children. 2 Israelis were slightly wounded. Israel began bombing, firing artillery and invading, bulldozing houses, and destroying whole neighborhoods.
Even the rhetoric became genocidal. The Israeli government said “We will do more than mow the lawn in Gaza, we will scorch it.” A politician announced this was not a war against rockets and terrorists but a war against the Palestinian people. They talked about destroying the homes of the martyrs otherwise more “snakes will be raised there.”
Then Israel decided the real threat was "terror tunnels" in Gaza. They launched a full-scale invasion with tanks and planes. Hamas fought back. 13 Israeli soldiers were killed, 7000 shells landed on a single neighborhood destroying it. The hospitals in Gaza were filled with bodies stacked against the walls. And all of this because Gaza had fired some pipes into Israel. The “rockets” are crude chunks of steel. Not explosive charges. One when through the roof of a pottery studio, hit the floor without knocking pots off the shelves.
When it was over 2200 Palestinians were dead, 551 children. 11,000 Palestinians were injured, 500,000 people had to leave their homes about 1/4 of the population, the water and sewer system were decimated, the one electrical plant destroyed, hospitals were damaged including six that had to be closed, 148 schools were damaged along with 278 mosques including one that had been standing for 1365 years. The war lasted from June to August 2014.
The war remained overwhelmingly popular with the Israeli public. 94% of Israelis thought that the war had been justified. Only 4% thought that excessive force had been used. Six civilians were killed in Israel by Palestinian rocket fire. 66 soldiers would die.
Two Palestinians were identified by security services as responsible for the abduction of the Israeli boys. Both were killed by the police and their family homes bulldozed. No evidence was ever presented against them. A third Palestinian confessed to planning the kidnapping but his lawyer said the confession was obtained under torture. Physical stress such a shaking or stress positions which had nearly killed and had crippled other Palestinians have been approved by Israeli judges earlier in the year.
When the Israeli bodies were finally found and the original tape indicating the boys had been known to be dead from the beginning released there was no outrage about the government’s deception.
At the funeral for the 2 Palestinian boys burned alive the family carrying the casket barely made it a block before the police started shooting. Helicopters were flying overhead and the area was littered with teargas canisters.
Netanyahu had said “A deep in moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctified death where we sanctified life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion. This is the secret of our strengths.”
13 months later another Palestinian child would be burned alive, this one an18-month-old in his home. Settlers threw a firebomb through his window. The father and mother died within a month..
In the epilogue the author describes the violence that continued after his visit in 2014. Organize resistance had been crushed and Palestinian young men and women were acting on their own without any organizational structure. They began stabbing Israeli soldiers or others with knives. They were inevitably shot and killed. Palestinian youths felt they had no chance for freedom, no organization to guide them as Hamas had been crushed and this was something that they could do individually.
Some interactions were videoed including one in which a boy was shot and while the ambulance was in route the Israeli soldier walked up walked around him and shot him again to kill him, an extra judicial killing like so many others. Another showed an Israeli dropping a knife next to a Palestinian who had been shot by a settler.
The book made me sick to read. It's similar to reading books about the state sponsored racism in the South in the past. I visited Israel saw and heard things that verified the book. I have little desire to go back.
The author stayed with various families in Ramallah, Hebron and other cities in 2014 and states that the book is not evenhanded but is about the plight of the Palestinians.
Intifada means "the shaking off. “It was to challenge the entirety of the occupation the almost infinitely complex system of control Israel exercises over Palestinians throughout the West Bank not just the settlements and the soldiers on hilltop bases but the checkpoints, travel restrictions, permits, walls and fences, the courts and prisons, the stranglehold on the economy, the home demolitions, land appropriations, expropriation of natural resources, the entire vast mechanism of uncertainty, dispossession and humiliation that for four decades has been used to sustain Israeli rule by curtailing the possibilities and even the duration of Palestinian lives.”
The 1st intifada 1987-91 was “the Intifada of Rock” and consisted of kids throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, a boycott of Israeli businesses and goods and the shutting down of Palestinian businesses. 300 Palestinians were killed many of them children and teens. No Israeli soldiers were killed. The 2nd intifada 2000-05 involved suicide bombers. The Israeli response was massive including tanks and airplanes. Thousands of Palestinians were killed. It was a disaster for the Palestinian cause. Israel shuttered 400 schools and two universities in the occupied territories for four years
The US provides $3 billion of military aid to Israel per year. The tear gas used in Nablus is made in Pennsylvania.
Israel has confiscated about 1/3 of Palestinian land. The wall along the green line often goes far into Palestinian territory separating Palestinians from their fields stealing Palestinian land.
The Israelis control the water supply to the West Bank where unlike in Israel there is terrible water pressure and long periods of no water. Some West Bank villages use 70L per person per day below the 100L recommended by the WHO for minimum water supply. Many adjacent settlements use 10 times that much.
With the Oslo accords Arafat gained no real sovereignty. Israel maintained absolute control over 70% of Palestinian land as well as the resources under it and the air space over it. Israel got everything it wanted and Palestine nothing. It was basically a surrender of Palestine to Israel. The Palestinian Authority was responsible for the welfare and safety of the population. Israel had outsourced their occupation sub-contracting out the duties and expenses required of occupiers by international law. Israel retained almost total control over the Palestinian economy. Palestine in effect became Bantustans floating in a sea of increasing settlements. Israel was allowed to collect taxes and was responsible for providing about 2/3s of the PAs budget which they would withhold to exert political control. They controlled what Palestine can import, mainly Israeli goods and export almost nothing.
It is a little known fact that the settlements are built by Palestinian labor. The Palestinian may have a deed to the land going back to the Ottoman Empire. He may sue in court and win. But the settlers will not obey the ruling and the police and Army will not enforce them.
Hebron is the only city in the West Bank in which settlers have made settlements. In the city there are checkpoints next to checkpoints next to checkpoints, cities within cities, within cities.
Some things that are normal and Hebron: Screaming. If you hear someone screaming because soldiers or settlers are beating him that's normal. Being shot at and having rocks and Molotov cocktails thrown at your house is normal. Soldiers firing teargas at children to mark the beginning and end of each day of classes is normal. Being arrested, held without charges and released without an apology is normal. Having your ID taken away at a checkpoint and put in a soldiers pocket until he felt you had waited long enough is normal. Having a soldier with an automatic weapon stationed in front of or behind your home if it adjoins settlers home is normal. Having a bullet hole in the wall in your children's bedroom or a bullet hole in your book of Jewish law is also normal.
500 settlers live in Hebron amidst 50,000 Palestinian. A map of the city is a patchwork of different areas depending on who lives there settlers or Palestinians and who can travel on what streets. Some streets on which Palestinians cannot travel are called “sterile” as if the Palestinians are some type of infection.
There are streets on which there are settlers live between Palestinian houses. The Palestinians cannot go on the street in front of their own houses but have to go out the rear or over the roofs as they cannot walk on the street near where the settlers homes.
The author visited a man in Hebron in a small apartment who wanted to expand. He got permits from the PA and the Israeli’s to build a 2nd level and began construction. A settler called the police. He was told to stop building. He argued and was arrested and beaten. In the 1990s certain torture methods were made illegal but could be used "when necessary.”
Israeli military authorities have the authority to declare any building or piece of land a “closed military zone” in which no one can enter. The military at any time or place can demand Palestinians to leave. It is used to clear Palestinians from their homes and lands and to make way for settlers.
Soldiers were told that if an Arab charges a settler with a knife they should shoot the Arab in the middle of the body while if a settler is coming toward the Palestinian with a knife they should do nothing and call the police. Part of the job of police and soldiers is to humiliate the Palestinians. Outside of the school the author reported seeing teachers stripped to their underwear in front of students and stand for hours because "all Arabs are potential threats."
The author interviewed a soldier who described “mapping raids.” They would go to a Palestinian home, get everybody out, take pictures of them, break some things in the house and make a map of the house so that if there was ever a terrorist in that house they would know all the rooms. They were instructed to break things so that the Palestinians would always feel like they were being chased. Later the soldier found out that the army had been doing this for 40 years; they had had maps of every house for years. They did this to terrorize the Palestinians.
The author describes an incident in which two Palestinians in a car are stopped at a checkpoint. One young man is asleep, wakes, steps out of the car, stretches and is shot dead from 2m away. The other brother gets out of the car and is pinned to the ground and handcuffed and then questioned for many hours as to why his now dead brother was agitated, unhappy, why he had a knife etc. The papers report that the dead boy threatened soldiers with a knife. The author interviews bystanders who deny this. Later the father, who has businesses in the Israel selling shoes is denied entry though he has a permit that has allowed him entry for years. He is told that he is now a security threat. So first they killed his son and then they deny him employment. The father is grilled just as the brother had been grill about the dead boys, did he belong to any terrorist groups, was he agitated etc. etc. Actually the family was non-political. No one had ever been arrested for anything; they just wanted to live their lives in peace. The farce is that the Israelis kept questioning relatives to corroborate the made-up story that the boy had attacked the soldier and was agitated.
The author describes the sorrow and suffering but also the joy, the singing dancing and laughing of the Palestinians. Some of the protests involving tear gas, rubber bullets and rock throwing were enjoyed almost as theater by the Palestinians with laughing and cheering and singing in the midst of the chaos apparently in the joy of communal resistance to the oppressive occupation.
Israelis keep the peace talks going as a form of control, keeping a tight leash on Abbas. It is really not a peace but a type of war in which they continue to maintain a stranglehold of occupation while they whittle away at the Palestinian lands.
Israeli special units will enter Palestinian areas and kill people they claim are planning terrorism. They always say an arrest was tried, the person resisted and was shot. Eye witnesses claim no attempt to arrest was made and autopsies show that the victims have been shot a number of times in the head. These are basically extrajudicial assassinations.
40% of Palestinian males have been jailed. Once you're detained it is like a shuttle, you are jailed again, again and again. You're under constant suspicion. Nearly all in Palestine have a relative in prison. The author tells of a man released from prison after 20 years. His family organized a huge homecoming. The Israeli army prepared for this homecoming by blasting his house with “skunk water”, breaking the windows and soaking the carpets. The water smells like bad feet and shit and multiple washings will not get it out of your hair and clothes. Israeli forces spray this water on protesters and into homes from big tanker trucks
Every Israeli government whether conservative or liberal, whether with eagerness or begrudgingly has given their support to the formation of new settlements. The fanatic settlers serve as the spear point of the expansion of Israel and serve as the object of blame for any problems. There are now 300,000 settlers in the west bank. The settlers are now the deciding force in mainstream Israeli politics. No government will be allowed to stand who tries to dislodge them.
The author realized that the reasons for the walls, the guard posts, the prisons, the police, the tear gas, the skunk water, the long lines, etc was not only to grab land but also to humiliate another people. The Israelis had built a highly functioning, efficient humiliation machine. And the battle for the Palestinians was not so much about getting their land back but about standing up and not being broken.
The author traveling in a car with other journalists and a Palestinian and was stopped at a checkpoint by a soldiers raised hand. The soldier motioned them forward and when they went several meters soldiers jumped out, opened the doors and told everyone to get out. They put everyone including the author up against the wall and roughly search them. When the author asked “Why are we being searched,” the reply was “Shut the fuck up, Because we want to.” Officers arrived and were told the Palestinian driver tried to run them down and that other folks with them including a woman had been throwing rocks. The author had been with this woman the entire afternoon and she had not done so. One of the soldiers came up to the woman and said, “I am going to fuck up your life.” and he did. She was taken off to jail.
Israel has expropriated about 30% of the West Bank land from the Palestinians. In the collapsed talks of 2014 the Netanyahu government had insisted, and Abbas had agreed to giving up huge chunks of the West Bank, Israel maintaining military control of Palestine and of the Palestinians being demilitarize, more concessions then had ever been made by any previous Palestinian government. Netanyahu responded by announcing 7000 new housing in the West Bank and breaking off talks.
The author visited a town where several young had been wounded in the knees with 22 caliber bullets from Israeli snipers. The Palestinian doctors explained that if the shot was a little lower or higher the wound would heal easily but right at the knee it would cause permanent damage. The Israeli army was creating a generation of permanently hobbled men.
99.74% of Palestinians tried in the Israeli military court system are found guilty. 20% of Israelis are.
2 boys were killed with single shots to the front and the back through their hearts leaving exit wounds during a demonstration when they were nowhere near the police and were not throwing rocks. The Israeli police said no metal ammunition was used. Rubber bullets cannot pass through the body. When a clip from a store video camera showed that one boy was just standing when he was hit in the other walking away the Israeli authorities said it was falsely edited. When the whole clip was released to the world press showing no editing the Israelis said it probably was a staged fake. Other videos came out including one from CNN showing the same incident. A high-ranking Israeli diplomat went on CNN and said that it wasn't even certain that the boys were killed although they had been declared dead in the hospital and buried. The man who made the recording had his house and shop raided and all his video equipment and computers taken. An Israeli officer said to him “We will crush you according to the law. You made the army look bad.”
In 2014 three Israeli boys hitchhiking in the West Bank disappeared. Later the car was found burned. Netanyahu without any data blamed Hamas. Hamas always made loud claims when it kidnapped wanting the publicity but denied any involvement in this case. Nevertheless, Netanyahu repeated that he knew it was Hamas. US newspapers began publishing Netanyahu statements without editorial comment. Israeli forces begin rounding up Hamas officials and anyone associated with them. Netanyahu was worried about an agreement between Hamas and Fatah earlier that year.
To stoke the country’s sadness to rage Netanyahu released a statement saying the three boys had been abducted and killed by “human animals.” Quoting an ancient poet he said “Satan has not yet created vengeance for the blood of a small child.” He did not mention that the line was from a lament on the futility of earthly revenge. Netanyahu would not let Satan's lack of imagination stop him. Hamas was responsible and they must be crushed. Politician after politician called out for a war of annihilation. The boys’ funeral was a national event televised on TV bringing the fractious nation together in a common purpose of hatred toward Hamas. Mobs gathered in the streets carrying signs saying “Revenge.” boys draped in Israeli flags wearing white yarmulkes chanting “Death to Arabs” roamed the streets looking for Palestinians to beat.
The police the army and the politicians all knew that the boys were already dead from an initial call from the killers. Yet the raids claiming to look for the boys went on. In Hebron nearly every house was trashed with doors broken, pantry contents dump on the floor and furniture broken. About two thirds of the over 1000 prisoners released months earlier were rearrested.
Then 2 Palestinian boys were abducted and burned alive by Israelis.
Gaza erupted. The next day 85 rockets were fired from Garza into Israel. Rockets had previously been fired but no one said anything earlier about rockets being an extensional threat to Israel or about Israel having to go to war over rockets. Mostly splinter groups had fired these rockets with Hamas attempting to stop them. The IDF responded with airstrikes. By the end of the night Israel had dropped 400 tons of explosives killing 65 Palestinians including 16 children. 2 Israelis were slightly wounded. Israel began bombing, firing artillery and invading, bulldozing houses, and destroying whole neighborhoods.
Even the rhetoric became genocidal. The Israeli government said “We will do more than mow the lawn in Gaza, we will scorch it.” A politician announced this was not a war against rockets and terrorists but a war against the Palestinian people. They talked about destroying the homes of the martyrs otherwise more “snakes will be raised there.”
Then Israel decided the real threat was "terror tunnels" in Gaza. They launched a full-scale invasion with tanks and planes. Hamas fought back. 13 Israeli soldiers were killed, 7000 shells landed on a single neighborhood destroying it. The hospitals in Gaza were filled with bodies stacked against the walls. And all of this because Gaza had fired some pipes into Israel. The “rockets” are crude chunks of steel. Not explosive charges. One when through the roof of a pottery studio, hit the floor without knocking pots off the shelves.
When it was over 2200 Palestinians were dead, 551 children. 11,000 Palestinians were injured, 500,000 people had to leave their homes about 1/4 of the population, the water and sewer system were decimated, the one electrical plant destroyed, hospitals were damaged including six that had to be closed, 148 schools were damaged along with 278 mosques including one that had been standing for 1365 years. The war lasted from June to August 2014.
The war remained overwhelmingly popular with the Israeli public. 94% of Israelis thought that the war had been justified. Only 4% thought that excessive force had been used. Six civilians were killed in Israel by Palestinian rocket fire. 66 soldiers would die.
Two Palestinians were identified by security services as responsible for the abduction of the Israeli boys. Both were killed by the police and their family homes bulldozed. No evidence was ever presented against them. A third Palestinian confessed to planning the kidnapping but his lawyer said the confession was obtained under torture. Physical stress such a shaking or stress positions which had nearly killed and had crippled other Palestinians have been approved by Israeli judges earlier in the year.
When the Israeli bodies were finally found and the original tape indicating the boys had been known to be dead from the beginning released there was no outrage about the government’s deception.
At the funeral for the 2 Palestinian boys burned alive the family carrying the casket barely made it a block before the police started shooting. Helicopters were flying overhead and the area was littered with teargas canisters.
Netanyahu had said “A deep in moral abyss separates us from our enemies. They sanctified death where we sanctified life. They sanctify cruelty while we sanctify compassion. This is the secret of our strengths.”
13 months later another Palestinian child would be burned alive, this one an18-month-old in his home. Settlers threw a firebomb through his window. The father and mother died within a month..
In the epilogue the author describes the violence that continued after his visit in 2014. Organize resistance had been crushed and Palestinian young men and women were acting on their own without any organizational structure. They began stabbing Israeli soldiers or others with knives. They were inevitably shot and killed. Palestinian youths felt they had no chance for freedom, no organization to guide them as Hamas had been crushed and this was something that they could do individually.
Some interactions were videoed including one in which a boy was shot and while the ambulance was in route the Israeli soldier walked up walked around him and shot him again to kill him, an extra judicial killing like so many others. Another showed an Israeli dropping a knife next to a Palestinian who had been shot by a settler.
The book made me sick to read. It's similar to reading books about the state sponsored racism in the South in the past. I visited Israel saw and heard things that verified the book. I have little desire to go back.
January 17, 2025
The injustice of it all—the killings, the shameless lies, the daily terror inflicted by the Israeli military and settlers, the humiliations, the oppression of an entire people. This book was written ten years ago, and since then, the situation for the Palestinians has only worsened. Yet, it also offers lessons on resistance and resilience—on persevering and living your life, because it’s the only one you have.
August 20, 2019
After returning from a summer of teaching English in Bethlehem, I discovered journalist Ben Ehrenreich’s audiobook The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. “What I will remember of that long summer had nothing to do with Fatah or Hamas or the unity government of what appeared to be the real and final end of the peace process and the Two State Solution.” I will remember it as the summer of walls, stones, relationships, and reconciliation.
“To most Palestinians, the previous twenty years of on-again-off-again negotiations had been one long charade, a glitzy show for the cameras that served mainly to hide the grinding and ever-escalating humiliations of life under occupation. What Israelis experience as relative calm, Palestinians lived out as a slow and steady exercise in annexation: more settlements, more prisoners, more evictions and home demolitions, more land lost to the path of the wall...Assaults on Palestinians by soldiers at checkpoints, or by settlers anywhere else, were so common that they rarely made the news.”
“I don’t want to exoticize the place. Hebron is different from other earthly cities, but the painful truth is that Planet Hebron is not far off at all. I don’t just mean from Beersheba or Nablus, but also from Washington, London, Los Angeles, or New York. It’s our planet. We made it what it is. And by we I mean all of us – those of us who acted, and those who do not act...Hebron’s realities are the same as those in the rest of Palestine, only boiled down under tremendous pressure until they have been reduced to a thick and noxious paste. And Palestine’s realities are not different from our own. They are just starker, denser, more defined. The people I encountered in Hebron—the Palestinians, the settlers, the soldiers— were no different from people anywhere, except to the degree that the place and the maddening intimacy of its violence had coarsened and sometimes broken them.”
“In the taxi, Bassem asked me something strange. ‘What do you believe?’ he said. I was taken aback by the question’s intimacy. I didn’t know how to answer, or what exactly he was asking...I told him I believed in struggle...I might have even said that God was struggle, the tension and conflict at the root of all things that pushes the universe onward, not consciousness or will so much as an infinitely echoing demand.”
In my summer in Palestine and in the pages of Ehrenreich’s book, I encountered the God of struggle, the God of Jacob. “Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome’” (Genesis 32:28). May this promise of God prevail, that the Palesinian’s conflict with their neighbors cease and that they will reclaim the land of their inheritance after all.
“To most Palestinians, the previous twenty years of on-again-off-again negotiations had been one long charade, a glitzy show for the cameras that served mainly to hide the grinding and ever-escalating humiliations of life under occupation. What Israelis experience as relative calm, Palestinians lived out as a slow and steady exercise in annexation: more settlements, more prisoners, more evictions and home demolitions, more land lost to the path of the wall...Assaults on Palestinians by soldiers at checkpoints, or by settlers anywhere else, were so common that they rarely made the news.”
“I don’t want to exoticize the place. Hebron is different from other earthly cities, but the painful truth is that Planet Hebron is not far off at all. I don’t just mean from Beersheba or Nablus, but also from Washington, London, Los Angeles, or New York. It’s our planet. We made it what it is. And by we I mean all of us – those of us who acted, and those who do not act...Hebron’s realities are the same as those in the rest of Palestine, only boiled down under tremendous pressure until they have been reduced to a thick and noxious paste. And Palestine’s realities are not different from our own. They are just starker, denser, more defined. The people I encountered in Hebron—the Palestinians, the settlers, the soldiers— were no different from people anywhere, except to the degree that the place and the maddening intimacy of its violence had coarsened and sometimes broken them.”
“In the taxi, Bassem asked me something strange. ‘What do you believe?’ he said. I was taken aback by the question’s intimacy. I didn’t know how to answer, or what exactly he was asking...I told him I believed in struggle...I might have even said that God was struggle, the tension and conflict at the root of all things that pushes the universe onward, not consciousness or will so much as an infinitely echoing demand.”
In my summer in Palestine and in the pages of Ehrenreich’s book, I encountered the God of struggle, the God of Jacob. “Then the man said, ‘Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome’” (Genesis 32:28). May this promise of God prevail, that the Palesinian’s conflict with their neighbors cease and that they will reclaim the land of their inheritance after all.
July 16, 2018
Ben Ehrenreich admits to partisanship in the book he has written. Yet it is not the kind of partisanship that says everything good is on this side; everything bad is on the other. The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine is partisan in the sense that it is a story about Palestine and the Palestinians who live there. When I say Palestine, of course I am speaking of the Occupied Palestinian Territories which means, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Partially governed by the Palestinian Authority, part by the Israeli military, they are all ultimately under Israeli control. Ehrenreich describes day to day life in this area and what that means for the people who are trying to exist there. Since he's a journalist, he writes like one and while his sympathy for the people caught up in all of this is evident, the detached voice in which he mostly describes the events that take place makes it all more horrific and compelling rather than less. Humiliation, despair, death, and insanity becomes ritualized and commonplace.
The book centers around three specific places and is connected by "interludes" in which political and historical events are interspersed to give some cohesion and background. Most of the action takes place in the village of Nabi Saleh (near Ramallah). This is where the spring of the title is. The villagers have been cut off from access to the spring by the settlers who have encroached on the area and it is guarded by Israeli soldiers. For years the villagers have protested by conducting weekly marches to the spring and demonstrating. Ehrenreich lives with one of the families and chronicles what happens in his family and the rest of the village over a period of years. He also travels to Hebron where there is another large settlement of Israeli settlers that has disrupted life in that city to the point where markets, streets, and whole hillside are out of bounds to Palestinians in what, of course, is supposed to be Palestine. The third place is Umm al-Kheir. The people here are Beduins and they are being so pushed by the settlement in their area that their way of life itself is threatened. They are shepherds and most of their grazing lands have been taken over.
Whatever your views are as to who should win out in the Middle East; who's right or wrong; this book will simply leave you with a sense of implacable misery, a never-ending tragedy. I was left with the impression that all of them, Palestinians and Israelis are simply living in a small prison within a larger prison that is called the state of Israel. Or maybe a giant insane asylum where everyone, the inmates, the guards and the governing bodies are totally crazy.
The book centers around three specific places and is connected by "interludes" in which political and historical events are interspersed to give some cohesion and background. Most of the action takes place in the village of Nabi Saleh (near Ramallah). This is where the spring of the title is. The villagers have been cut off from access to the spring by the settlers who have encroached on the area and it is guarded by Israeli soldiers. For years the villagers have protested by conducting weekly marches to the spring and demonstrating. Ehrenreich lives with one of the families and chronicles what happens in his family and the rest of the village over a period of years. He also travels to Hebron where there is another large settlement of Israeli settlers that has disrupted life in that city to the point where markets, streets, and whole hillside are out of bounds to Palestinians in what, of course, is supposed to be Palestine. The third place is Umm al-Kheir. The people here are Beduins and they are being so pushed by the settlement in their area that their way of life itself is threatened. They are shepherds and most of their grazing lands have been taken over.
Whatever your views are as to who should win out in the Middle East; who's right or wrong; this book will simply leave you with a sense of implacable misery, a never-ending tragedy. I was left with the impression that all of them, Palestinians and Israelis are simply living in a small prison within a larger prison that is called the state of Israel. Or maybe a giant insane asylum where everyone, the inmates, the guards and the governing bodies are totally crazy.
September 15, 2020
Great book if you want to understand modern Palestine and how Palestinians feel, and why peace and progress is so hard. Well written, engrossing read, also sad; modern Palestine is a sad place because of (long list of things, chief among them occupation). Focuses on stories of individuals and the modern era.
February 1, 2022
This is an utterly brilliant book. It gives a real insight into the futility of resistance against a brutal and powerful occupation. It's a must read, but I absolutely hated it.
November 26, 2024
It is a truism that a good piece of journalism - simply telling the story of a few people or families - often gives a clearer picture of something than the most thorough academic analysis documented by endless tables, maps and graphs. That is what we have in this book here by Ben Ehrenreich, which focuses on some families in the West Bank to give a simultaneously devastating and inspiring picture of everyday life under Israeli apartheid during the 2010s. Even though I've read plenty of books on the subject, reading this left me dumbstruck by the sheer magnitude of the injustice faced by Palestinians, and obviously this all took place before the most horrifying wave of genocide yet by Israel, still ongoing.
October 25, 2023
This delves deep into personal stories of the Palestinian, illuminating challenges they confront under occupation. Through Palestinian experiences, you gain insight into underlying strength and determination of individuals living in a hostile environment.
July 15, 2021
So, even after days of having digested this book and trying to gather my thoughts together on its content, it's not that easy to sum up what I feel about it. Instead of trying to form a coherent review, I thought I might as well just do a thought-vomit.
On narratives & objectivity
Ehrenreich said outright at the start of the book, he's not writing this book to give an "objective" point-of-view of the escalating happenings in Palestine. In fact, to argue for objectivity in this instance is always a pointed move because oftentimes the objectivity is "'directed against' someone [...] the colonized, the marginalized, and the oppressed". In that sense, my objectivity is long gone when it comes to the Israel-Palestine divide, especially of late where we can see how one-sided the "war" against terrorism really is. (Statistics are enough to show you how many Palestinian civilians death there have been in the past decade.)
With that out of the way, there's something to be said about the way Ehrenreich chose to wove his narratives in this book. He'd stayed inside the West Bank areas instead of the Gaza strip, a few months before the bombardment of the Gaza strip happened. Things were tense, even in the West Bank, since peace talks are only that -- just "talks" -- and the Israeli settlements continue to rise in numbers and area while the Palestinians had to cede more and more of their land to their occupiers, which was oftentimes wrestled from them via illegal means.
Throughout the book, we get to meet different characters from different sides of Palestine, and Ehrenreich took the opportunity to include some of the Israeli settlers' viewpoints as well. It was interesting to read about these different viewpoints because you can see all shades of views in this book, from the Zionist extremist to the ones who gave up their livelihood to join the activists' side to fight alongside the Palestinians.
In giving these people their voices, Ehrenreich had given them their due credit.
On extremism & radicalization
Having read these accounts, it's easy to see how people can be radicalized to become extreme on both ends of the scales. Netanyahu and his advisory government had made it clear of their no-nonsense plan of eradicating all Palestinians without mercy (brings to mind that Maya Angelou quote: "when people show you who they are, believe them"), and with such a government at Israel's helm, is it any wonder that the citizens are similarly brainwashed to believe everything their government say?
Meanwhile in Palestine, it's hard not to become disillusioned by all that was happening around them. With no future prospect to look forward to -- their schools and universities closed and bombs, checkpoints everywhere, IDF soldiers barging into your house in the middle of the night several times a week, IDF soldiers inciting violence in a peaceful march, kids being gunned down by IDF soldiers, their own government supporting and aiding in their own oppression while the world's "biggest powers" either help Israel or watch on -- is it any wonder the younger ones are becoming radicalized to hate their so-called neighbor?
It's hard to find common ground when neither sides are unwilling to extend the olive branch and talk to each other. Muslims and Jews have co-existed somewhat peacefully in Palestine long before the UK decided to f**k it up, and it's sad to hear of the bygone eras when you think about what could have been.
On hope and the future
The personality that touched me the most out of all this was Eid. He seemed to have been born into the wrong place and the wrong time, but still he persevered despite what was happening to his beloved country. His views seemed naive at times, but it was so full of hope that it was hard to beat down that kind of optimism. I often wonder how he's doing.
Because if there was one thing the Palestinians had left, it was hope.
Conclusion...?
I found this quote to be impactful, in the grand scheme of things:
If there's one thing the pandemic and the past few years have shown, it's that our seemingly democratic and capitalist world is breaking down; cracks are showing up around the fault lines, which are only going to grow wider the longer we try to ignore that we have a problem on all of our hands. Whatever we have at the moment is tenuous and precarious at best, even if it may seem like we are all enjoying the spoils of the industrial and internet revolution.
Someday, sometime, something's going to give.
On narratives & objectivity
Ehrenreich said outright at the start of the book, he's not writing this book to give an "objective" point-of-view of the escalating happenings in Palestine. In fact, to argue for objectivity in this instance is always a pointed move because oftentimes the objectivity is "'directed against' someone [...] the colonized, the marginalized, and the oppressed". In that sense, my objectivity is long gone when it comes to the Israel-Palestine divide, especially of late where we can see how one-sided the "war" against terrorism really is. (Statistics are enough to show you how many Palestinian civilians death there have been in the past decade.)
With that out of the way, there's something to be said about the way Ehrenreich chose to wove his narratives in this book. He'd stayed inside the West Bank areas instead of the Gaza strip, a few months before the bombardment of the Gaza strip happened. Things were tense, even in the West Bank, since peace talks are only that -- just "talks" -- and the Israeli settlements continue to rise in numbers and area while the Palestinians had to cede more and more of their land to their occupiers, which was oftentimes wrestled from them via illegal means.
Throughout the book, we get to meet different characters from different sides of Palestine, and Ehrenreich took the opportunity to include some of the Israeli settlers' viewpoints as well. It was interesting to read about these different viewpoints because you can see all shades of views in this book, from the Zionist extremist to the ones who gave up their livelihood to join the activists' side to fight alongside the Palestinians.
In giving these people their voices, Ehrenreich had given them their due credit.
On extremism & radicalization
Having read these accounts, it's easy to see how people can be radicalized to become extreme on both ends of the scales. Netanyahu and his advisory government had made it clear of their no-nonsense plan of eradicating all Palestinians without mercy (brings to mind that Maya Angelou quote: "when people show you who they are, believe them"), and with such a government at Israel's helm, is it any wonder that the citizens are similarly brainwashed to believe everything their government say?
Meanwhile in Palestine, it's hard not to become disillusioned by all that was happening around them. With no future prospect to look forward to -- their schools and universities closed and bombs, checkpoints everywhere, IDF soldiers barging into your house in the middle of the night several times a week, IDF soldiers inciting violence in a peaceful march, kids being gunned down by IDF soldiers, their own government supporting and aiding in their own oppression while the world's "biggest powers" either help Israel or watch on -- is it any wonder the younger ones are becoming radicalized to hate their so-called neighbor?
It's hard to find common ground when neither sides are unwilling to extend the olive branch and talk to each other. Muslims and Jews have co-existed somewhat peacefully in Palestine long before the UK decided to f**k it up, and it's sad to hear of the bygone eras when you think about what could have been.
On hope and the future
The personality that touched me the most out of all this was Eid. He seemed to have been born into the wrong place and the wrong time, but still he persevered despite what was happening to his beloved country. His views seemed naive at times, but it was so full of hope that it was hard to beat down that kind of optimism. I often wonder how he's doing.
Because if there was one thing the Palestinians had left, it was hope.
Conclusion...?
I found this quote to be impactful, in the grand scheme of things:
It's our planet. We made it what it is. And by we I mean all of us--those of us who acted, and those who do not act. Hebron's realities are the same as those in the rest of Palestine, only boiled down under tremendous pressure until they have been reduced to a thick and noxious paste. And Palestine's realities are not different from our own. They are just starker, denser, more defined.
If there's one thing the pandemic and the past few years have shown, it's that our seemingly democratic and capitalist world is breaking down; cracks are showing up around the fault lines, which are only going to grow wider the longer we try to ignore that we have a problem on all of our hands. Whatever we have at the moment is tenuous and precarious at best, even if it may seem like we are all enjoying the spoils of the industrial and internet revolution.
Someday, sometime, something's going to give.
October 14, 2017
Highly recommend; an absolute must-read for anyone who cares about Israel, the Israeli-Palestine conflict or Palestine.
Ehrenreich paints an intimate portrait over 4 years of the lives of a few dozen people in the Occupied West bank, focusing on a few villages, Hebron, Ramallah as well as a tangent to discuss the new city of Rawabi under construction. To be clear this is not a survey of all of Palestine, or all of Palestinian politics, or a treatise on the conflict, or the region as a whole. He doesn't try to cover Hamas or Gaza in any depth; his view on the IDF and the Settlers, and the political classes in the PA is decidedly from the Palestinian grass roots perspective and not an attempt at "balance." I think that was a fine choice--what he does cover he does with great empathy and thoughtfulness.
He spent an incredible amount of time embedding himself in the lives of his subjects and brings them to life. The one chapter on Rawabi sticks out as as a very different kind of reporting and I think it is the weakest in the book. As it happens, I visited Rawabi last week and had a chance to meet with Bashar al-Masri. There are certainly many points of view on the project, and it has its critics, but Ehrenreich clouds the story in not very convincing webs of conspiracy theories. He writes, "Some of these things are tenuous. Others are quite direct. But when you begin poking around the various institutions associated with Rawabi, or with any major development project in the West Bank, the same groups and individuals keep coming up, the same bewitching haze of associations...." (p. 282) . OK, yeah, one needs to raise a lot of money for a major development project. The sources of the money are going to have a lot of other investments and interests some of which might not be to one's taste. And in the West Bank one can't do anything of this scale without being willing to work with both the PA (which is certainly tainted by many accusations of corruption) and Israel (which is the occupying power.) . So does this mean any and all attempts at significant economic development should be stopped until the occupation is over? Well, some believe this certainly. I do not. I found the vision of trying to provide economic development, hope, and employment for Palestinians to be genuine and groundwork for a much hoped for and necessary independent Palestinian state.
The Rawabi chapter aside, the book was tragic and infuriating--but also very human, well written, and compelling. Even among Israelis and American Jews I know who support a two state solution and co-existence of our peoples, I think few really have a full, fair, detailed view of what life has been like for Palestinians under occupation. I hope they all read this book. I am truly at a loss for how any Jewish person--in the tradition of Judaism that I was raised in--could read this book and still accept in any way the ongoing occupation of Palestine.
Ehrenreich paints an intimate portrait over 4 years of the lives of a few dozen people in the Occupied West bank, focusing on a few villages, Hebron, Ramallah as well as a tangent to discuss the new city of Rawabi under construction. To be clear this is not a survey of all of Palestine, or all of Palestinian politics, or a treatise on the conflict, or the region as a whole. He doesn't try to cover Hamas or Gaza in any depth; his view on the IDF and the Settlers, and the political classes in the PA is decidedly from the Palestinian grass roots perspective and not an attempt at "balance." I think that was a fine choice--what he does cover he does with great empathy and thoughtfulness.
He spent an incredible amount of time embedding himself in the lives of his subjects and brings them to life. The one chapter on Rawabi sticks out as as a very different kind of reporting and I think it is the weakest in the book. As it happens, I visited Rawabi last week and had a chance to meet with Bashar al-Masri. There are certainly many points of view on the project, and it has its critics, but Ehrenreich clouds the story in not very convincing webs of conspiracy theories. He writes, "Some of these things are tenuous. Others are quite direct. But when you begin poking around the various institutions associated with Rawabi, or with any major development project in the West Bank, the same groups and individuals keep coming up, the same bewitching haze of associations...." (p. 282) . OK, yeah, one needs to raise a lot of money for a major development project. The sources of the money are going to have a lot of other investments and interests some of which might not be to one's taste. And in the West Bank one can't do anything of this scale without being willing to work with both the PA (which is certainly tainted by many accusations of corruption) and Israel (which is the occupying power.) . So does this mean any and all attempts at significant economic development should be stopped until the occupation is over? Well, some believe this certainly. I do not. I found the vision of trying to provide economic development, hope, and employment for Palestinians to be genuine and groundwork for a much hoped for and necessary independent Palestinian state.
The Rawabi chapter aside, the book was tragic and infuriating--but also very human, well written, and compelling. Even among Israelis and American Jews I know who support a two state solution and co-existence of our peoples, I think few really have a full, fair, detailed view of what life has been like for Palestinians under occupation. I hope they all read this book. I am truly at a loss for how any Jewish person--in the tradition of Judaism that I was raised in--could read this book and still accept in any way the ongoing occupation of Palestine.
July 10, 2017
Ben Ehrenreich writes powerfully and persuasively about his experiences while living with Palestinian families in the West Bank. Yes, he admits his bias but the evidence he presents is irrefutable and a damning indictment of the Israeli government's occupation. The deaths and woundings of innocent children and young people (okay, some of them may be guilty of throwing stones) pile up until they become a horrible inevitability.
I am not a Zionist but I do support the continued existence of the state of Israel and my worry is that, if they carry on much longer with this brutal occupation, they will put their own future at risk.
I am not a Zionist but I do support the continued existence of the state of Israel and my worry is that, if they carry on much longer with this brutal occupation, they will put their own future at risk.
July 4, 2017
Outstanding piece of Journalism and reporting! Brilliantly written. The author captures superbly the daily struggles and lives of Palestinian people living under Israel occupation. How the lives of people in Gaza, West Bank...in the cities of Hebron, Ramallah, etc. are affected and how they cope with that on a daily basis...the security check points, the army, the settlers, everything working against them and still the unwavering spirit of the people to oppose the occupation and at most times without any kind of collective resistance. The tales from far off palces like Umm al Kheir and especially Nabi Saleh are worth reading. Even the small kids and women participate actively in the weekly protest march and fearlessly counter the soldiers. One kind of forms an affinity with the people mentioned in the book. A book which I picked up from the book store on instinct - judging by its cover and did not regret reading it. In fact, the picture on the cover beautifully captures the message of the book. Politically, you can be on any side, but this book offers a humane perspective of how life under occupation is a living hell for the people living -- for years now - under it.
February 25, 2019
A remarkable, moving, disturbing description, much of it first-hand, of life and death in Palestine under Israeli occupation. I read it to fill out my understanding of the relationship of the two peoples, after reading the remarkable, moving book, "My Promised Land" by Ari Shavit. I now have a strong, sympathetic appreciation of the deep need for Jews to build and protect a land where they can be masters in their own house, safe and free. And I despair in my understanding of what this initial need has devolved into, over time, and the irony of the current powers in Israel, in the interest of security, becoming complicit in the stripping of Palestinians of their lands, their dignity, their human rights, and their lives.
March 3, 2023
I struggled to read this book. I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and no doubt find the behavior of the Settler's atrocious. So I bought this book hoping to gain greater insight and hear about personal stories etc to add flavor and color to the cause.
I struggled with Ehrenreich's presentation of the material. It seemed a bit scattershot to me and therefore hard to follow. The personal stories were good and I certainly gained some details and personal accounts I did not have before, but the reading was a slog. I think if he had just made chapters devoted to individuals would have been easier. But this is just my opinion. I think there is material worth reading in the book, it is just hard to read.
I struggled with Ehrenreich's presentation of the material. It seemed a bit scattershot to me and therefore hard to follow. The personal stories were good and I certainly gained some details and personal accounts I did not have before, but the reading was a slog. I think if he had just made chapters devoted to individuals would have been easier. But this is just my opinion. I think there is material worth reading in the book, it is just hard to read.
October 25, 2023
A sobering book that tells the story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the eyes of an American journalists who is sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. After reading this book, I don’t think peace in Israel is possible and it seems to be a war of annihilation on both sides, except that one side is fighting with stones and the other with US funded tanks.
Listening to this book reminded me of the previous books I had consumed on the plight of the Uyghur and Tibetan people, except turned up to 11.
I am still waiting for a history book from the viewpoint of the Israeli people, but I’m not sure how it could help me digest the unspeakable injustice that has been documented in this one.
Listening to this book reminded me of the previous books I had consumed on the plight of the Uyghur and Tibetan people, except turned up to 11.
I am still waiting for a history book from the viewpoint of the Israeli people, but I’m not sure how it could help me digest the unspeakable injustice that has been documented in this one.
August 20, 2018
This was a tough book ( emotionally ) to get through. However it was very eye opening. Most of my life I have only heard perspectives from the Holy Land coming from a Zionist perspective. So, to hear about day to day hardships and life from a people living in the Palestinian inhabited areas was pretty shocking and sad and caused some internal conflict. Since I was listening to audiobook and since the concepts were to new to me, (in regards to things like the effects of the Oslo Accords), I think I only probably caught about 1/8 th of it. But to introduced to this frame of reference was good.
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