If you’re writing a book about the Middle East it’s easy to set out your stall with rights on one side and wrongs on the other and then take up a position somewhere in the middle. Dervla Murphy has little patience with those inclined to weigh up the number of people killed on one side and the number killed on the other until some sort of balance emerges that lets us off the hook, so we go to our beds and sleep undisturbed by scales incorrectly calibrated.
For Murphy a fence is an extremely uncomfortable thing to sit on. So she did precious little sitting during her many visits to the region between November 2008 and December 2010, when she travelled each side of the “apartheid barrier”, meeting or staying with people en route. She spent time in a kibbutz, followed Anna, an idealistic young Israeli who works with Palestinian children injured by Israeli firepower, sat long into the night talking with an Israeli who spoke of the lost dream of a socialist, secular democracy.
Heading for Balata, the country’s largest refugee camp, where 24,000 Palestinians are confined in a square kilometre, she finds Ramallah’s bus station “disorganised, ill-lit, stinking of spilt petrol, scores of canary-yellow minibuses parked haphazardly with open sliding doors and no labels . . . Here I felt myself relaxing, both emotionally and physically – being at ease as I could never be in Israel. This admission does nothing for my reputation as an ‘objective reporter’ but I had long since abandoned that role. Amidst the Palestinian/Israel turmoil, not taking sides is immoral.”
Does that mean that in this, a book as enthralling as it is challenging, we get only one point of view: hers? Absolutely not, for when it comes to meeting people of every political hue and assiduously noting their opinions, Murphy gives voice to people whose ideas are grounded in history or in an ignorance of that history. Between River and Sea is thronged with Jews, both religious and secular, from Russia, east Africa, New York, South Africa – and the Palestinian territories. We meet them all, young and old, happy, righteous, angry and bewildered, as well as many kindly, welcoming and hospitable people.
It is the same among the Palestinians, except she rarely felt the need suddenly to invent an excuse to leave, whereas, with Zionists, so appalling were the comments and ill-informed opinions about Palestinians that a quick exit was the only solution. On other occasions, when her tolerance was being tested, it was a “badly needed beer” that did the trick.
Politics, of course, is everywhere, the politics of power and of disempowerment. We hear of a Palestinian with an honours degree in physics able only to get work as a binman, of Oxfam’s thwarted attempts to sink water shafts, of ancient olive groves uprooted, of the Palestinian Authority dispatching its own police to reinforce the Israeli Defence Force at anti-barrier demos.
We hear of a meeting delayed because of a funeral when the reality was that a Palestinian collaborator was being executed. We learn of village wells being illegally taken over by settlers and of the work done by volunteers who help with the olive harvests; unruly young conscripts are more likely to behave themselves when foreigners are present.
Murphy often sets out for long walks before dawn and, away from the nightmare of a military occupation, talks about how Hebron (where she rented a room and I once taught) had been an important Roman town and how trade routes linked Jaffa to Damascus, passing from one Ottoman caravanserai to the next. As she sits on the sea wall at Jaffa, eating freshly baked bread and za'atar, she tells us it was here that slaves unloaded cedars from Lebanon destined for the building of Solomon's temple.
Referring to the sociopolitical pressures that keep most Palestinians apart from most Israelis, to ensure the two sides never get to know each other, her friend Esther sighs, "There is no simple antidote to hasbara." Hasbara is Hebrew for propaganda.
Coincidentally, in the week I was reading this book, I attended a lecture chaired by Avi Shlaim, the British-Israeli Oxford historian, who closed the meeting with the words: "History is propaganda written after victory." Between River and Sea, with its maps, glossary timeline and detailed background to the turmoil, is an excellent and precious antidote to hasbara.
Mary Russell's books include My Home is Your Home: A Journey Round Syria
