LIFE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE (AND THE WAR AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS).

Ben Ehrenreich, The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (New York: Penguin Press, 2016) (From the book cover: "We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and want . . . . Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one's politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers, who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy, and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away." From the text: "With this work I hope to correct, or to begin to correct, an imbalance of long standing, one that has already exacted far too great a cost in lives. The world--the human part of it anyway--is made not only of earth and flesh and fire, but of the stories that we tell. It is through narrative, stories woven into other stories, that we conjure up the universe and determine together its present contours, the shape of the past, and our future. The exclusion of discomforting and inconvenient narratives, the near exclusive favoring of certain privileged perspectives and the tales that affirm them, this sets the world off balance. It makes it false. It is the task of the writer, and my task here, to battle untruth and the distortions it wreaks on our lives. All of our lives, on all available sides." Id. at 2.).