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NARRATIVE

Window on a troubled region

This is an unusual book, both for the story it unfolds and because it opens a rare window on one the most troubled regions of the world. It is welcome even as a documentary to the average educated Indian who would otherwise find it to explain in simp le terms what the long-running strife around Palestine is all about. All that most of us know is that trouble has been brewing ever since the victors of the Second World War chose to carve out a safe haven for the Jews in the West Asia.

Thereafter whatever we might state as facts would be conclusions and opinions, depending on the English language media and usually Western influences that we have been exposed to. Indians have had very little personal exposure; and not many would have voluntarily included Jerusalem or Tel Aviv in tourist itineraries along with London and Paris.

Ironically, this piece of disputed and blood-stained earth is probably one of the earliest inhabited regions on the planet and a sacred to at least three major world religions.

What is so amazing is that even officially the Jewish religion is seen as the mother religion by the followers of the Prophet Mohammed (as one of the people mentioned in the book says in so many words) yet the bitter enmity and carnage shows no signs of abating. If ever one needed proof that religion is man-made and the divisions pollute life on earth, here is a living testimony.

The book is a rare and lively narrative, written by an American Jew, who moved from his Long Island home to a kibbutz in Israel and later offered himself in service to the country.

Goldberg is an award-wining reporter on human rights and terrorism, and now the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. When he came to the land of his ancient roots, with stars in his eyes, he was barely out of his teens. And his friends and peers in America thought he was crazy to do so. Indeed, so did many Palestinians during several encounters subsequently, sometimes under interrogation, on suspicion of his motives.

He was posted to a military prison at Ketziot, where he found the suspicion and violence and utter disregard for legally sanctioned code of behaviour, such as the Geneva Convention, utterly repugnant to his softer, liberally educated American ways of looking at life.

The book’s title refers metaphorically to the real prison, of mutual hatred and ill-will, which prevails between any two sides, in such long-standing conflicts. And yet, it is in the sub-title that a ray of hope shines through. If two of the prisoners of the system — Rafiq, a Muslim, and Goldberg his Jewish prison officer — develop a relationship that lasts for many years thereafter, then maybe — just may be — there is some reason for hope left. This bridge of conciliation, chosen by both knowingly and tested out gingerly at first proves to be one of the fascinating parts of this tale, which reads much like a novel but is really a thorough and professional reportage by a brilliant writer.

In places it is frustrating to see the odds so much stacked against any form of rationality because of extremist and absolutist thinking on both sides. Nonetheless both Rafiq and Goldberg plod on regardless, and the fact that the attempt at finding some middle ground takes place in the US makes it a little easier.

After the Six Day War of 1967 when Israel proved its military superiority with the full support of the US, some sort of uneasy peace, if it can be so described, prevailed until the events of the past decade and a half and the Jihads and Intifada overtook both peoples. The Oslo agreement and the efforts of President Clinton to restore some form of co-existence also collapses and thereafter it is one storm of violence after another.

Both Rafiq and Goldberg suffer the loss of innocence that any idealist seeker goes through when faced with the brutality, corruption and venality that is rampant in all human mass movements, especially those driven by intolerance and desire to kill. In fact the only drawback of a very readable book is that it chronicles the violence a little too long without a possibility of any new turn of events, which of course is the essence of any piece of sustained, visually arresting journalism, in our age of graphic media.

Nevertheless here is a book that must bring much-needed basis for optimism, and yields a kind of balance in information about both sides. At least, no one can say the view is one-sided, because it is seen through two pairs of eyes and two ultimately very human personalities, expressed in mercilessly spare and descriptive prose.

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