Review by New York Times Review
WHAT NEW INSIGHT can a bunch of Very Important Writers provide about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank? Phrased a little differently - Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman call these novelists and essayists "storytellers" - this is the question the two editors of KINGDOM OF OLIVES AND ASH: Writers Confront the Occupation (Harper Perennial, paper, $16.99) decided to pose on the occupation's 50th anniversary. (Moriel Rothman-Zecher was associate editor.) They gathered their friends, most of whom, they admit, had never given the occupation "more than a glancing consideration," and took them on weeklong tours of East Jerusalem, the village of Susiya in the south Hebron hills and the cities of Hebron and Ramallah, all flash points where Israeli control over Palestinian lives can be felt acutely. The result is an exhausting collection of essays. And with a few strong exceptions - like the pieces by Dave Eggers, Rachel Kushner and Waldman herself - they are what you might expect: fairly superficial, full of unearned authority and exhibitionist empathy. A parachute job. But maybe because they are impressionistic and repetitive - staring out the window of a moving car at walls and checkpoints and then more walls and checkpoints - the essays do convey something of the state of the occupation at half-century. The accumulation of similar details, deeply etched marks of subjugation, don't inspire shock and alarm so much as a sense of gray permanence, like watching concrete hardening. In one piece, the Qalandiya checkpoint is described as "an everlasting airport" and in another the occupation itself is defined as "depriving you of the ability to control time." Palestinian reality presents itself here as a line you're standing in that does not move but also seems to get longer in both directions. Chabon and Waldman's collection is one of a number of new books marking the anniversary, which is really a double anniversary. It is 50 years since the Six Day War, in which the young state of Israel administered a blistering defeat to Egypt, Syria and Jordan. The war tripled Israel's landmass overnight and gave it dominion over the lives of more than a million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Which leads us to the second anniversary: the occupation that followed. Tellingly, only one of these new books is actually about the war itself. Most of them are concerned with the seventh day, the one in which all of us are still living. It appears now to be a never-ending day. The anniversary is a moment, in fact, to acknowledge that the Six Day War produced a grand delusion, one that five decades later reveals itself in these books. Israel's occupation of large swaths of Arab land to which it had no legitimate right besides brute force was a problem. But it also eventually presented the possibility of a solution. There was now a way to "solve" the deep and existential conflict between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism - two peoples demanding sovereignty over the same land. The Jewish state could hand its mortal enemies the conquered West Bank and Gaza and thereby create two states for two peoples. This became the mantra and the dream, echoing through the decades. The delusion was to believe that Israelis and Palestinians would ever accept this solution. To see the West Bank and East Jerusalem today, as Chabon and Waldman's contributors did, is to encounter a military occupation that is deeply entrenched, while settlers, filled with zeal, are constantly and steadily expanding their enterprise. None of this speaks of a willingness to ever leave. Many, if not most Palestinians, meanwhile, even as they find themselves increasingly pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves of authority, have never abandoned the dream of owning the whole land. The Six Day War is not their central tragedy. It always was and still is 1948, when they were either expelled from or fled their homes during what they call the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It's the keys to these homes in cities like Acre or villages in the Galilee - Israel proper, that is - that they pass on to their grandchildren. The hope of a clean separation that would end what the Six Day War began is absent from these books. Instead, they all describe a status quo of chronic entwinement, choking the Palestinians and making the Israelis ever more unwilling to give up the security and religious connection that came with attaining the West Bank. We have returned to the crux of the conflict: Two peoples desire the same land, and they will not share it. The history of the war itself has undergone major revision in the past few decades. Since the 30-year declassification rule opened up the Israel State Archives to researchers in 1997, a number of books, including Michael Oren's "Six Days of War" (2001) and Tom Segev's "1967" (2007), have recast the David and Goliath myth that had risen up around the events of May and June 1967. Israel is no longer seen as the weak and passive actor threatened with a second Holocaust and forced into a preemptive attack, but as a confident strategist taking advantage of Egypt and Syria's blundering brinkmanship to fulfill a long-planned expansion. A new history of the lead-up to the war by Guy Laron, THE SIX-DAY WAR: The Breaking of the Middle East (Yale University, $28), reinforces this narrative. It presents the economic and geopolitical conditions that made the conflict almost inevitable for all the combatants. In Israel, since the birth of the state, the military embraced an "offensive doctrine" that looked for opportunities to alter Israel's borders, giving it more strategic depth than the thin lines it achieved at the armistice of the 1948 war. David Ben-Gurion, the founding father, had described those borders as "unbearable." And although in public he presented Israel as a "small state under siege by powerful neighbors," Laron writes, behind closed doors, "BenGurion saw the Middle East as an open vista, beckoning Israel to use its military superiority to expand its borders." When the moment presented itself, Israel's generals managed to push aside cautious civilian leaders like the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, and strike hard and fast, smashing the Egyptian and Syrian air forces on the ground in the first few hours and essentially winning the war before it really started. The conquering army effectively reset 1948 by uniting the entire land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River under Israeli control - what Jews think of as Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) and what to Palestinians is the whole of Palestine. This was a boost to uncompromising nationalistic visions on both sides, giving birth to a messianic settler movement and violent strains of Palestinian terrorism. To hear it from the people who currently live in the occupied territories - 650,000 Jewish settlers and 2.7 million Palestinians - it is now as much a zero-sum game as ever. Their voices come through in a land without BORDERS: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank (Text Publishing, paper, $16.95), a wide-ranging travelogue from Nir Baram, an Israeli novelist, translated by Jessica Cohen. The great virtue of his book is that Baram lets his interlocutors speak for themselves. Long stretches are verbatim dialogues. And what he hears is total and irreconcilable difference. The only real solution presented is for the other side to pack up and leave. "The Jews' problems were in the West, not in the East, and in the West is where they should solve them," Jalal Rumana, a school director and former Hamas operative, tells Baram. "There is no compromise between these two narratives. It will end only when one side gives up its aspirations," Dani Dayan, a former settler leader and now Israel's consul general in New York, declares. Dayan wants the Palestinians to move to Jordan. Most of the Palestinians Baram speaks with fantasize about Jews going back to Europe or to America. Their dreams are not about where the final borders will be drawn. They are about living anywhere in the land they want. In this, most settlers and Palestinians converge. What Baram takes from this is that the "separation paradigm is collapsing - geographically, demographically, politically." He also presents his own new idea. Baram is part of a small group of Israeli and Palestinian activists calling themselves Two States One Homeland. It envisions Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty each over their own citizens in two states separated by the pre-1967 border, but with the freedom to move and live anywhere on the whole land. This means settlers could remain in the West Bank, and Palestinians who wanted to return to their families' homes on the Mediterranean coast could do so. This is very far from any possible reality. What seems much more likely is that the state of perpetual limbo - one that favors Israel - will continue indefinitely. Nathan Thrall does a brilliant job describing the political and geostrategic reasons for this intractability in the ONLY LANGUAGE THEY UNDERSTAND: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan/Holt, $28). In one long original essay and a collection of his recent writing, Thrall, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, reinforces his central point that the only thing that has ever altered the basic contours of the conflict in any way is force - either actual violence or serious diplomatic arm-twisting with real stakes. Thrall stacks hard facts on top of one another, an approach that reads a bit too much like an NGO report. But his argument is smart and hard to dispute. From Israel's perspective, he says, the political cost of dragging out hundreds of thousands of settlers and giving up the security advantage of a presence on the West Bank is simply too high. It will always outweigh any moral dividend from ending the occupation. Some American college students and leftists in Europe may tut-tut, but no one with any real power has ever truly confronted Israel. The only country capable of doing so is the United States, and it has not been willing to go there for a long time (since Jimmy Carter, Thrall argues, who forced the 1978 Camp David agreement). For American politicians too, the domestic cost of giving Israel a shove is too high. As for the Palestinians, the only real card they have to play is violence, but they have been ground down by Israel's vastly superior military might. And the Palestinian Authority itself is made up of an elite class grown comfortable and dependent on Western money with no great incentive to upset a status quo that allows them their own slice of power. In short, Thrall writes, "it was, is, and will continue to be irrational for Israel to absorb the costs of an agreement when the price of the alternative is so comparatively low." On the approach of the 50th anniversary of the occupation, he admits, it is "hard to defend the notion that it was unsustainable." The seventh day will go on. The Palestinians have suffered the greatest damage from this indefiniteness. A nation in limbo, they continue to clutch those dusty keys. This is as much a matter of magical thinking (of a pathological variety) as that of the settlers, who imagine that the Palestinian people will one day simply evaporate. But for the Palestinians prospects are worse. Not only do they see their hopes shrink every year, but children are born today who are fourth-generation refugees, locked into lives of perpetual waiting. "Our mutiny is our remembering," a character in Haya Alyan's first novel, SALT HOUSES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), writes. Her book covers four generations of the Yacoub family, starting in 1963 and ending in the present, each chapter from a different perspective. If this sometimes makes the book feel scattered, more like a series of connected set pieces, the long duration has the advantage of illustrating the inherited longing and sense of dislocation passed like a baton from mother to daughter. The Yacoubs are not languishing in a refugee camp. When the story begins, four years before the Six Day War, they are living comfortably in the West Bank town of Nablus, having arrived there in 1948 from Jaffa, the ancient port city that was once a bustling center of Arab life. After the 1967 war they move to Kuwait, where they have upper-middle-class lives as doctors and professors in big houses tended by servants. When Saddam Hussein invades in 1990, the narrative moves with the family again, scattered now to Amman, Beirut, Paris and Boston. Trying to explain her Palestinian identity to Americans whose "memories were short," Souad, a free spirit who comes of age in the 1990s, finds confusion. "People's eyes glazed over when she tried to explain that, yes, she'd lived in Kuwait, but no, she wasn't Kuwaiti, and no, she had never been to Palestine, but yes, she was Palestinian." At the end of this family saga, Souad's daughter, Manar, goes to Israel and the Palestinian territories to explore her family's past. Nablus leaves her cold, and rather than inspiring "kinship," it's "the biggest disappointment of all." Only when she goes to Jaffa does she have a cathartic evening that ends with her writing the names of her family members on the wet sand, then watching them quickly erased. "A large wave washes over the sand, the water eating her words, her family come and gone in this sea that belongs to none of them." RAJA SHEHADEH'S FAMILY was also originally from Jaffa. A longtime civil rights lawyer and the celebrated author of the extraordinary "Palestinian Walks," he has written another deeply honest and intense memoir, WHERE THE LINE IS DRAWN: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine (New Press, $25.95). In a series of linked essays he focuses on his psychological and physical crossings into Israel, including visiting Jaffa as a boy just after the Six Day War, where he follows his parents into their old house, now occupied by a Jewish Romanian family. His father and mother, he writes, looked "wretched, with clenched, grim faces, as they were confronted with denuded walls and alienating surroundings." The major crossing that he chronicles is his friendship with a quirky, bearded Jungian analyst named Henry Abramovitch, a Canadian immigrant to Israel, whom Shehadeh first meets in 1977 when both men are in their late 20s. The entire 50-year history of the occupation is reflected in this incredible relationship with its many ups and downs. Shehadeh is unrelentingly candid in his assessment of his own complex emotions about Abramovitch - the love and connection, but also the anger and resentment. In the early years, when the nature of the occupation was still amorphous, the two would spend time together hiking throughout the newly boundaryless country. "Both short, one stocky, the other thin, we would stride down the hills in the Galilee or walk along the pebbly shore of the Dead Sea or through the Ramallah hills," Shehadeh writes. "And talking, always talking." Shehadeh admired Israeli society then as enlightened and believed that international law would sway it to correct injustices. But then comes the first intifada in the late 1980s, a Palestinian uprising in which he takes part nonviolently; the Oslo Accords that Shehadeh opposes for leaving Palestinians with nothing close to a state; and the increased violence, repression and settlement of the 1990s and 2000s. The relationship suffers. Shehadeh finds himself resenting Abramovitch, seeing him as complicit. He feels a slight even in the most innocuous comment. When Abramovitch writes from abroad that they should see each other when he returns "home," Shehadeh feels provoked by this one word: "Israel as home. It gave me pause. Henry was not born in Israel. He had come of his own free will. Didn't he need to make known his objection to what his adopted country was doing to the Palestinians? He insisted he would never join the army, but was this enough? Wasn't he confirming by the mere act of moving here that Zionism was working and that the settlements were justified?" Even though Shehadeh's friendship with Abramovitch often feels like a "luxury," the periods of estrangement never last more than a few years. And when they see each other their connection is instant. The talking and walking begin anew. Shehadeh finds ways to describe his hurt, and Abramovitch tries hard to be responsive and empathetic. It's a remarkable and hopeful thing, Raja and Henry. But one almost fears for the fate of such a sensitive man as Shehadeh living his life in the middle of a conflict that wrecks nuance and reasonableness every day. It seems almost unbearable to be him, aware of the rightness of his cause but also fully alive to the humanity of the other side. Real solutions can come only from someone like him, but as he writes, looking back on his long friendship with Abramovitch, "Yet he is not a leader in his community, nor am I in mine." Instead, Shehadeh can only gaze out from his home in Ramallah at his beloved hills and despair. One day not that long ago he took a walk with Abramovitch in the green valley that overlooks the Arab neighborhood of Silwan, where Israeli settlers have notoriously been evicting Palestinians from their homes in order to increase their presence around an archaeological park said to be the ancient site of King David's throne. Shehadeh makes an observation that could be a coda for this 50th and certainly not last year of the occupation, one meant for Israelis but that Palestinians could heed as well: "As I looked over the valley, I wondered whether it would have been possible for the Israeli people to create a presence and a history for themselves here without negating ours. All evidence indicated they couldn't. But until they accept that the land must be shared and that both peoples have the right to self-determination, peace will remain elusive." GAL BECKERMAN is the author of "When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
The war may have only lasted six days, but its impact echoes through generations of a Palestinian family in this ambitious debut novel. Alia, an eye-catching bride who struggles as a wife and mother and finally inhabits a fog of confusion as an old woman, is uncompromising in her longing for a home to replace the one she was forced to leave following the Six-Day War in 1967. The death of her brother, Mustafa, in the war haunts both her and her husband, who harbors his own aching desire for the past. Each chapter offers a crystalline glimpse into a different character's life, their stories jarringly redirected by the conflicts in the Middle East. Alyan uses deft storytelling to show that the way the characters' relatives see them does not always match the view from their own eyes. Each of those points of view offers insight into the clashes and misunderstandings that arise between the generations, aggravated by the tension between tradition and modernity. This is a moving story about a family's battle to salvage what remains when their home is taken away.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Alyan blends joy with pain, frustration with elation, longing with boredom in this beautiful debut novel filled with the panoply of life. The frontispiece tells the whole story in microcosm with a family tree of the Palestinian Yacoub family, who, for most of the book, no longer lives in Palestine. One brother, Mustafa, is lost in the Six-Day War and the sisters, Alia and Widad, relocate to Kuwait while their mother, Salma, moves to Jordan. Later generations end up in France, America, and Lebanon. Alia, the young bride in 1963 in the first pages, is the family matriarch with Alzheimer's as the book comes to a close. In 1977, her daughter, Souad, is a tantrum-throwing five-year-old in Kuwait City; by 1990, she is a student in Paris entering into an ill-considered marriage, then, 14 years later, a divorced mother of two, recently relocated from America to Beirut. Chapters focus on different family members as time and geography shift. These lives full of promise and loss will feel familiar to any reader; Alyan's excellent storytelling and deft handling of the complex relationships ensures that readers will not soon forget the Yacoub family. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In what feels like a very personal debut novel, the award-winning poet Alyan, her lyrical skills on full display, traces four generations of the Yacoub family as they are forced into the ranks of the Palestinian diaspora. Constantly uprooted by war, Salma, Hussam, and their children Widad, Alia, and Mustafa make disparate decisions that have ramifications for their offspring over five decades. First fleeing Israeli tanks that bulldoze through their home in Jaffa, later settling in Nablus, only to be routed by the 1967 Six-Day War, Alia and her husband, Atef, relocate with her sister Widad to Kuwait. Salma, now a widow, joins the family in Amman, Jordan, while Mustafa, the rebellious brother who was the light around which his family circled, disappears. The Yacoubs are fortunate. Not relegated to refugee camps, they have the wherewithal to fashion new lives for themselves. Still, Alyan makes it abundantly clear how displaced persons, separated from their culture, their religion, and their homeland, are forever altered. VERDICT This timely historical does for the Palestinians what Khaled Hosseini did for the people of Afghanistan. By placing readers inside the hearts and minds of one Arab family scattered from Paris to Boston to Lebanon, she beautifully illustrates the resilience of the human spirit. [See Prepub Alert, 11/14/16.]-Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"Nostalgia is an affliction" a character states in Palestinian-American poet Alyan's impressive first novel, which tracks the dispersal of four generations of a Palestinian family.As matriarch Salma reads the future in a cup of coffee the night before her daughter Alia's wedding in 1963, the Yacoub family has already been uprooted for 15 years. In the decades to come the Yacoubs' distinctly personal experiences will mirror the experiences of immigrants and refugees around the world and the Palestinians' dislocation in particular. Salma feels lucky; unlike others moved into resettlement camps when Israelis forced them from Jaffa, her husband's wealth afforded them a house in Nablus. But transience has become the Yacoubs' way of life. Alia's older, more traditional sister, Widad, has already moved to Kuwait in an arranged marriage. When the Six-Day War breaks out in 1967, Alia happens to be visiting Widad in Kuwait City while her husband, Atef, and beloved brother, Mustafa, close friends and anti-occupation activists, remain trapped in Palestine. Only Atef makes it to Kuwait, with a secret guilt that will haunt him for years. Unlike her sister, the independent-minded Alia has married Atef, a professor, for love. Their difficult marriage becomes one of the novel's most compelling elements as the couple creates a life in Kuwait with their three childrenRiham, Karam, and Souaduntil the 1990 Iraq-Kuwait war forces them to flee to Amman. Karam is sent to college in Boston and becomes an assimilated American despite summers with his kids in an inherited apartment in Beirut. Artsy Souad also ends up in Boston but never feels at home in America. After a divorce, she moves to Beirut, where she re-creates herself. While more traditionally religious than her relatively cosmopolitan siblings, Riham is as disturbed as any Western reader when her adolescent stepson flirts with political extremism. In the next generation, Souad's daughter finds her own sense of displacement painful yet freeing. It's not always easy to follow Alyan's complex geographic and emotional mapping, but this journey is well worth taking.A deeply moving look inside the Palestinian diaspora. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
