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

Daniel Gavron (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0742517527 | ISBN-13: 978-0742517523 | Publication Date: November 19, 2003

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a part of the world where extremists seem to be driving political affairs, veteran Israeli journalist Gavron focuses on more moderate voices in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In doing so, he has created a moving, if somewhat uneven, book. Gavron (Israel After Begin) presents brief profiles of 15 Israelis and Palestinians: old-time leftists, young fighters, bereaved parents. The result is a humanized portrait of individuals trapped in the "cycle of violence" and unable to see their way out. "It isn't true we want to throw the Jews into the sea," a Fatah militia leader says; a few pages later, an Israeli reserve soldier says that Israel "must get out of the territories." Activists on both sides may protest the implied moral relativism that is part of the book's structure-Gavron is fairly even-handed in apportioning blame for today's ongoing violence-but 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. In the final two chapters, Gavron shifts gears and resuscitates an old idea: instead of a two-state solution, he proposes creating a single, binational state, shared by the Israelis and Palestinians. The idea has little currency in today's Middle East, but it's a measure of the failure of the two-state solution that, when Gavron points out the extent to which Israel and the territories are already enmeshed, the plan doesn't seem so ridiculous. But it deserves a fuller treatment than Gavron gives it here. B&w photos, maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

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. (Publishers Weekly )

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. (The Guardian )

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. (Ha'aretz )

A useful, insightful book. (Resurgence )

Daniel Gavron's new book is hugely impressive--even-handed, interesting, and original. (Deborah Treisman )

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.... (The Guardian )

A lovely, hopeful, daring book that offers the whole mishegas in one volume. (Clancy Sigal )

Beginning with a remarkably balanced, 40-page overview of the historical evolution and contemporary situation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Gavron then profiles 16 Palestinians and Israelis to bring a human dimension to different perspectives of the struggle. . . . Recommended. (Choice Magazine )

Many of the testimonies are moving and revealing. (Jewish Chronicle )

I highly recommend this fascinating and original book, which is full of wisdom, sanity, and hope. (Deborah Maccoby Jewish Quarterly )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (November 19, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742517527
• ISBN-13: 978-0742517523
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,570,646 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Looking for a solution to the wrong problem, December 24, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land (Paperback)

Gavron is to be commended for trying to find a solution to the long conflict between Arabs and Jews over Israel. And he has some good points to make. But I still think he fails to come up with any ideas that will prove useful as they stand.

The author starts by saying that there are four ways to resolve the conflict. One is to expel the Jews from the area. Two is to expel the Arabs. Three is to divide the area into two states, one for each side. Four is to have a single-state solution.

Gavron dismisses the first two solutions. I agree with him on that. Not only do I think these would be immoral and unjust, I think they would fail to achieve peace.

The next issue is the "two-state" solution. That might make sense if a few things were true. If there really were two nations that needed states there to defend their people and their rights, and if both of these nations really wanted a state, then I think we'd try to figure out how much land each side had, how much land each side could propose to purchase, and so forth. That is, we could try to accomodate each of them. If they were willing to keep their side of a bargain, they could get what they needed.

Gavron sees part of the problem here. Right now, neither side wants any part of a two-state solution. Israel wants one only if it can thereby have peace. The Arabs want one only if they can keep fighting Israel. And he concludes that the only way a two-state solution will work is if it is totally unnecessary.

That is a very useful point. And the author then states that we do not really need a border between two states, so a one-state solution is the right answer.

Still, Gavron says that we also need to get rid of the Israeli Law of Return. In exchange, the Arabs could drop the demand to give millions of Arabs a right to move into Israel.

I think this latter idea misses the point, and it is a serious error. In fact, many Zionists in the period between World War One and World War Two did not demand a Jewish state. All this changed when Jewish immigration to Israel was curtailed by the 1939 White Paper. At that point, it became clear that to protect human rights, Jews needed a state. That is why Israel exists today. A solution to the present conflict that curtails immigration takes us back to the pre-state problem.

Moreover, the problem is an Arab problem as well. Arabs are going to need to live in peace with their neighbors. And that means that one day, they will need to demand rights for both themselves and their neighbors, rather than for neither. Unless they do that, they'll wind up in wars with all their neighbors, not merely in a war with the Jews.

All sorts of peoples have states. The French do. The Germans do. I see no reason to deny the Hebrews a state. But let's suppose that for some reason, our species needed to deny statehood to the Jews and only to the Jews. Well, in that case, I think as a minimum, we'd need to make such a state unnecessary by making sure that Jews would have rights to life, liberty, and property in the region. And a right to immigrate into it. That's why I think Gavron's idea is so bad. By asking to get rid of the Law of Return, he's showing us that we really need to find a solution in which the Jews themselves have control over Jewish immigration.

What we need is a serious discussion of a proposal that would permit all this. After all, there are over five million Jews in Israel. They live on less than ten thousand square miles of land. If one wants peace, why not simply make peace with them? Why not let them live on this rather small amount of land and enjoy human rights there? It's unlikely that the Jews would refuse such an offer! More important, peace would benefit the Arabs as well. Solutions such as the one Gavron proposes will not contribute to peace or to human rights.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good intentions are not enough, January 8, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land (Paperback)

Daniel Gavron is a veteran reporter in Israel who has a great knowledge of the local scene. This book is an effort at finding a solution to the Arab- Israeli conflict, or as Gavron prefers to define and confine it here, the conflict of two peoples over one land. Gavron makes an effort to grope toward a solution by sympathetically interviewing people from both sides, people who seem closest to the idea of accomodation and peace. Gavron's fundamental idea is that the basic plan for solution of the 'peace camp' has been mistaken. He believes that it is impossible given the present mix- up of populations- over two hundred thousand Jews within ' the West Bank' and over a million Arabs within Israel to divide the land. He advocates instead one unified state that would presently have a small Jewish majority.
Gavron has good - intentions and has a real capacity to listen to others and hear their stories. However his whole enterprise is undermined by the false symmetry he works to apply between the traditional Jewish and traditional Arab stances to the problems. i.e. the great majority of Jews have always sought a peaceful answer, and have made generous offers to that effect throughout the course of the conflict while the Arabs have said ' leh' repeatedly and continue to do so. Gavron also does a serious injustice to the Jewish citizens of Judaea and Samaria in indicting them as principal cause of the absence of peace. He makes a very serious moral error in not seeing that there is a world of difference between the deliberate murders of civilians the Palestinian Arabs have been engaged in, and the civilian casualties inadvertently caused by Israeli preventitive acts against terror.
Aside from the fundamental misreading of the conflict in this sense Gavron also fails to flesh out his ' one- state - plan'. There is of course no sign whatsoever that the Arabs would agree to such a plan. And there is too no reason the Jews should accept a plan which would mean that in a fairly short number of years the Jewish state would be transformed into an Arab- majority one. For anyone who cares for the historical struggle of the Jewish people to return to their land and establish a state of their own this book's program is a non- starter.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dare to hope!, June 29, 2004

By 

simon barrett "blond omnivore" (Beckenham, Kent, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land (Paperback)

As a fresh perspective on the world's most intractible (and dangerous) conflict, this book has to be worth more than 3 stars so I'm giving it 5 (unread - but see Arnold Wesker's review in the Guardian Online) - but why has no-one else reviewed this? Do those spectators most involved in the conflict, Jewish or Moslem, want to see it resolved - or perpetuated?