Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror (Vintage) (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Goldberg (Author)
Key Phrases: kitbag question, revolutionary university, blanket party, West Bank, Tel Aviv, Block Four (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Not a light read, this memoir of the author, an American-bred Zionist, and his 15-year relationship with a Palestinian insurgent is bound to have detractors, in part because New Yorker Washington correspondent Goldberg is painfully honest—about his dreams, limitations and anxieties. "I wanted to... have it all," he writes, "my parochialism, my universalism, a clean conscience, and a friendship with my enemy." Goldberg lived in Israel as a college student, sharpening the contradictory emotions shared by many of his American peers and eventually watching his former certainty crumble under the weight of military service at Ketziot, an Israeli prison. Grounded in his relationship with a prisoner, Goldberg's book travels from Long Island to Afghanistan as he struggles to understand Israeli-Palestinian violence. His honesty is itself high recommendation; the book is also marked by beautiful turns of phrase and a forthrightness that saves it from occasional self-importance. Some readers will argue with some of Goldberg's assertions (such as his reading of Israel's offer to Arafat at Camp David), and the author's halting recognition of the role despair plays in shaping Palestinian thought. Like the warring nationalisms it presents, his book is complex and deeply affecting. (Oct. 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
A few years ago, when the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000 was still raging, I had occasion to chat with a group of young Christians who had come to Israel to help bring peace to the Holy Land. "If we could just get Jews and Palestinians talking to each other, that would be a huge step forward," one of them suggested hopefully.

Dialogue can indeed be a cause for hope, but it can also cause despair. Prisoners is Jeffrey Goldberg's sensitive, forthright and perceptive account of his years as a soldier and journalist in Israel -- and of his long-running conversation with a Palestinian whom he once kept under lock and key. It is a forceful reminder of how rewarding, and how difficult, discourse between Israelis and Palestinians can be.

Goldberg grew up in a family of liberal Democrats and attended a socialist Zionist summer camp. Like many other young American Jews, he grew up with next to no religious tradition but with a strong sense of Jewish identity. He was potently aware of his membership in an oppressed people that, in both distant and painfully recent history, had been unable to defend itself. But Goldberg also believed in another identity -- between his Jewish heritage and his humanistic values of peace and equality, which he saw as being one and the same.

That sense of identity impelled Goldberg to move to Israel after college and, in 1990, to join its army. He ended up in the military police and did his mandatory army service as a guard at Ketziot, the vast, desolate prison camp that Israel set up in its southern desert to hold the Palestinian rebels of the first intifada, which broke out in 1987.

Unlike his native Israeli comrades, Goldberg felt compelled to speak to the men he helped keep incarcerated. He knew that they were the enemies of his people, many with Jewish blood on their hands. But he hoped that by talking he might come to understand them and bring them to understand Israel. One prisoner in particular caught his attention: Rafiq Hijazi, a Palestine Liberation Organization leader, college math teacher and devout Muslim from a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

"I soon discovered," Goldberg writes, "that he was the only Palestinian I could find in Ketziot who understood the moral justification for Zionism. For his part, I might have been the only soldier he met who didn't deny the existence of misfortune in Palestinian history." Unlike most of the other prisoners, Hijazi read widely and was able to think outside the box of the nationalist and Islamist ideologies preached, respectively, by the rival Fatah and Hamas factions. Goldberg, unlike many of the Israelis he met, was able to relate to this individual Palestinian as a human being, rather than as a specific instance of the deadly Arab enemy. Goldberg hoped -- and hoped that Hijazi shared the hope -- that if he and his prisoner could somehow agree on a way that Palestinians and Israelis could live together, side by side, in two states, then maybe, just maybe, their leaders could do the same.

Disillusioned by the harsh realities of Israel's struggles, Goldberg ultimately returned to live in the United States but continued to visit Israel and the occupied territories as a correspondent for the Forward, the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker. Eventually, after considerable hesitation, he looked up Hijazi -- now released -- in Gaza. There, the tables were turned. "Are you frightened?" Hijazi asked when Goldberg balked at visiting the Hamas-dominated Islamic University of Gaza. "How do I know you're not setting me up?" Goldberg asked.

But fear soon gave way to a renewal of the friendship during that hopeful 1990s interlude when Israelis and Palestinians seemed to be heading toward peaceful coexistence within the framework of the Oslo peace process. Things were different later, when both men found themselves living in Washington -- Goldberg as a New Yorker correspondent, Hijazi as a PhD student at American University.

Goldberg's prose is sometimes unpolished, but he is at his best when he recounts the crisis that nearly ended the friendship. In the face of the bloody second intifada and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Hijazi moves toward fundamentalism. In the book's most telling pages, the two men read the Koran together and argue over passages that ostensibly vilify the Jews. In their prison conversations, Hijazi had told Goldberg that these verses were allegorical admonitions against arrogance. Now Hijazi thinks they predict God's coming punishment of the Jews and the destruction of their country. In the years after 9/11, Hijazi's anger seems to make any accommodation or mutual acceptance impossible.

Goldberg is also deft at portraying the huge dissimilarities in the two friends' lifestyles and cultures. His wife, Pamela, is a dynamic career woman who wears tank-tops and shorts on weekends; Hijazi's wife, Tahani, wears the hijab head-covering (and later, when they live in Abu Dhabi, adds a veil) and seldom leaves home.

Dialogue is indeed a first step but hardly a sufficient one. Goldberg and Hijazi are about as open to each other as two such men could be. Their friendship survives, but barely.

As such, Prisoners offers a modicum of hope but also a healthy dose of despair. These days, the work of bringing peace to Israel and Palestine often looks like an impossible mission. Still, as the Jewish sages taught, even if we cannot hope to complete the task, we are not allowed to shirk it.

Reviewed by Haim Watzman
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (January 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375726705
• ISBN-13: 978-0375726705
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #95,945 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Engrossing Book, February 20, 2007

By	Linda H. (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Hardcover)

"Prisoners" is an engrossing book on many levels. It is a personal story about the author's evolution from an idealistic adolescent into a realistic, principled man, while simultaneously serving as a lucid chronicle of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Historical references abound, written clearly so that the reader does not need extensive background in order to understand complex issues. The writing is wonderful, with vivid scenes, memorable characters, and quite a bit of humor. The book begins in 2001, and after a suspenseful end to Chapter I, flashes back to the first Gulf war when the author, serving in the Israeli army, guarded Palestinians in an Israeli prison camp. The narrative moves seamlessly through time and across continents, detailing the tenuous friendship between the author and one of his former prisoners. I had to keep reading, and found the ending hopeful and very moving.

All in all, it is one of the best books I've read in a long time. It is Mr. Goldberg's first book, and I hope he writes many more.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book Explains Middle East, February 12, 2007

By	Barbara Cannon (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Hardcover)

This is a great book if you want to know why the Middle East is the way it is. Jeffrey Goldberg is a great writer. He's funny, but he also explains everything about both Arabs and Jews in a serious way. He knows so much about Israel, the Palestinians and the Bible, and he talks about all of that in this book. I also thought it was a great adventure story! Amazing how much he has seen and been through. A definite must-read.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Friends of sorts . . ., April 9, 2007

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Hardcover)

Self-categorized on the book jacket as "Current Affairs," this book had me expecting an analysis of Israeli-Palestinian relations, the word "prisoners" in the title no more than a metaphor. In fact, a large part of the book takes place in an actual prison, and while it has much to say about Israeli-Palestinian relations, it is more correctly a memoir of an American Jewish journalist attempting to understand the nature of the conflict that has prevailed in that part of the Middle East since 1948. Finding the political in the personal, he tells of his own beginnings as a youthful Zionist living on Long Island and his years in Israel as his ideals are put to the test working on a kibbutz and then serving in the military police at a desert prison, where he first meets and attempts to befriend a Palestinian prisoner, Rafiq.

Later, working as a journalist based first in Jerusalem and then in Washington DC, the author travels often to Gaza and the West Bank to talk with Palestinians, many of them released prisoners, including his friend Rafiq. His conversations with Rafiq become a commentary on an accompanying account of the interlude of hope for resolution in the Oslo talks, the eventual collapse of the peace process, and the rise of suicide bombings. On both levels, it is a search for common ground that is as elusive as peace itself. The author clings to the hope that where friendship is possible between two men who cannot agree on anything else, coexistence is possible between Arabs and Jews.

This is a well written book that immerses the reader in the deeply bitter and violent conflict that has raged in this corner of the world for decades. The greater part of the book is peopled by Palestinians, each specifically drawn as they reveal themselves to the author, and representing a host of political points of view, from the reasonable to the extreme. Meanwhile, as the author's initial Leon Uris-fed idealism fades, the Israelis themselves are often portrayed as far less than admirable. Leavening the darkness inherent in his subject, the author often finds a kind of grim humor, frequently at his own expense, as he struggles to bring the light of reason to what becomes increasingly a litany of folly on all sides. Very much New Yorker style writing in its use of a personal perspective and its slow-moving, meandering structure, "Prisoners" makes for fascinating and rewarding reading. However, do not expect to be uplifted or reassured by its vision of a world mired in mutual distrust and hatred.