Against the Stranger

While travelling the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the author interviewed Jews and Palestinians so as to document their lives. She watched the intifada flourish and then wane, Middle East peace talks come and go and the lengths to which people of both sides are driven when they become desperate.

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Translated from the Arabic, intifada means the shivering caused by fever. In political terms it means an explosion. The Palestinian uprising erupted in the Gaza strip in December 1987 after 20 years of Israeli military occupation. It quickly spread to the West Bank and Jerusalem. What the world saw of the intifada were the photographs of Israeli soldiers breaking Palstinians' bones, Palestinians hurling Molotov cocktails at Jewish housewives or rocks at soldiers. The author writes about the real life behind those photographs. She travelled throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip interviewing both Jews and Palestinians in an attempt to document their lives. She watched the intifada flourish and then wane, Middle East peace talks come and go, and more frightening, the lengths to which people of both sides are driven when they become desperate.
Weaving together accounts of weeks spent with armed militant factions of the PLO, the memories of a Holocaust survivor who defended the Palestinians in military courts for 25 years, the faded dreams of the Israeli Left and the emotional impact of occupation on the children, the author builds a complex picture of "the new Sparta of the Middle East". Part reportage, part travel book, this is a personal account of the stories of people trapped by history and geography.