The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land

This compelling book takes the reader behind the headlines of the confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians, examining its human dimension and setting it in a balanced historical context. In the last decade of the millennium, the century-long conflict came within a hair's breadth of a solution through the Oslo Accords, only to explode in violence, hatred, and mutual recrimination, following the failed summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000. In his search for understanding, Daniel Gavron talks to Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion. Politicians and economists, entrepreneurs and writers, psychologists and teachers, men and women, veterans and youngsters, fervent militants and pragmatic realists all speak in these pages. We hear the Palestinian fighter and the Israeli soldier, the Jewish settler and the Arab Israeli, the negotiators from the opposite sides of the table, the bereaved parents. These Israeli and Palestinian voices reflect the excruciating agony of both societies, conveying a searing reality that, although seemingly hopeless, emphasizes the basic humanity of both peoples. In a startling final section, the author proposes a daring old-new idea to lead the region out of its tragic morass.

About the Author :
Born in London in 1935, Daniel Gavron emigrated to Israel in 1961. A long-time journalist, he has been a reporter for the Israel National Radio and the Jerusalem Post. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, and Ariel. His broadcasts have been aired on NBC and National Public Radio. He was a member of the team that founded Palestine-Israel Journal and the author of Walking Through Israel (Houghton Mifflin), Israel After Begin (Houghton Mifflin), and The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Rowman & Littlefield).

Review :
A useful, insightful book..... Daniel Gavron's new book is hugely impressive--even-handed, interesting, and original.....--Deborah Treisman, fiction editor, The New Yorker In his hugely intelligent and originally structured book [Gavron] has interviewed and drawn portraits of 16 remarkable Palestinians and Jews. His conclusions are startling. In this clearly assembled, imaginatively researched selection of interviews, Gavron offers those different angles of vision, many of which were unknown. The Jewish, Palestinian, and Christian voices within his book reaffirm a humane sanity of which we are all desperately in need.... Most readers will appreciate the honest, behind-the-scenes look at how ordinary people suffer from everyday violence and try to make sense of it..... The first chapter lays out the historical background to the Middle East conflict, with the next six providing an engaging, if not novel, attempt to understand the violence through the deftly woven portraits of 16 Israelis and Palestinians.....