A Tree Grows in Al-Ramla
A journalist got hold of a good story and worked it into the ground and then wrote a book about it.
This is usually a recipe for a good book. "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman is another example of this, a story so rife with opposing viewpoints with irreconcilable differences, yet populated with people of good will who WANT to make things come out okay. It still haunts me years after I read it, with its lessons that lack of cultural understanding can make things go terribly terribly awry.
In the same sense I am glad to have read Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, And the Heart of the Middle East." I would give it a more enthusiastic review except I already feel beaten down already by intractable puzzles and this felt a bit like piling on to me. It's the story of how a Palestinian lost the house he built, and how it affected his family. It's not a fun story. It is, however, well-researched and documented history. This man is one of the premier journalists of our age and this is his honest effort to write the first pass of history. I appreciate the scholarship and I learned a lot.
But remember how horrified I was by the violence against children in "Slumdog Millionaire"? Let me tell you right now that I won't be watching the movie version of this book. Children are blown up and shot and starved and sent on a death march. The plight of the Palestinians is horrifying, and I struggle with any way to cling to my moral certainty that there was a need for a Jewish homeland in the middle east. As an ethnic Jew I never questioned this before: it seems readily apparent to me that Jews need a safe haven after the horrors of the Holocaust. I get this, and so does the author of this book. But this author holds the orthogonal idea in her head that they don't deserve PALESTINE. They do, but they don't. It's a story of bad options playing out.
I live in a world headed for a clash of bad options and I think it's worthwhile to open my eyes and stare at what that means. When someone beats on your door and says "the army is coming, run!" what does that MEAN? What do you take? What do you leave? What just HAPPENED? Because in the moment you might not realize it, but you just lost your property rights. That's what war means: the abrogation of rule of law.
Did I get any take-away messages from this? This book was largely about the value of dialogue, even when dialogue GOES no where. It's about providing a safe place to just TALK together, to be HEARD, to HEAR. It humanizes the situation and that works in the direction of preventing further tragedy. It has merit. So, yeah, the merit of dialogue is a central theme to this.
But I also got a lot out of the stories about what happens when you suddenly become a refugee. A few years ago I reviewed a book about wealth management during war. The gist of it was to own farmland and gold and stocks traded on the exchange of the eventual winning country. The other piece of advice was to grab your gold and GO the second invading armies came around... don't try to collect rents if you're a landlord. (That never works out well for the landlord.) The concept here was that title to land will revert, but in neither Japan nor Palestine did it, so that strategy backfired. And picking the winning side in advance (before a conflict!) for your stock ownership is a bit tricky. So once again the take-away message for how to prepare financially for this sort of catastrophe is to own gold. Selling pieces of jewelry brought needed food to the refugee family and bought better housing than most could get. (15 people in two rooms was "better"!)
I doubt most people reading this book would get "buy gold!" as the central message. I admit that I'm fairly weird. But it's still worth reading for the same reason the journalist wrote it: because it's a place where two people hold completely opposing viewpoints and they both can't get what they want and they need to co-exist anyway. This is a real place in our world. It bears thinking about.
This is usually a recipe for a good book. "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman is another example of this, a story so rife with opposing viewpoints with irreconcilable differences, yet populated with people of good will who WANT to make things come out okay. It still haunts me years after I read it, with its lessons that lack of cultural understanding can make things go terribly terribly awry.
In the same sense I am glad to have read Sandy Tolan's "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, And the Heart of the Middle East." I would give it a more enthusiastic review except I already feel beaten down already by intractable puzzles and this felt a bit like piling on to me. It's the story of how a Palestinian lost the house he built, and how it affected his family. It's not a fun story. It is, however, well-researched and documented history. This man is one of the premier journalists of our age and this is his honest effort to write the first pass of history. I appreciate the scholarship and I learned a lot.
But remember how horrified I was by the violence against children in "Slumdog Millionaire"? Let me tell you right now that I won't be watching the movie version of this book. Children are blown up and shot and starved and sent on a death march. The plight of the Palestinians is horrifying, and I struggle with any way to cling to my moral certainty that there was a need for a Jewish homeland in the middle east. As an ethnic Jew I never questioned this before: it seems readily apparent to me that Jews need a safe haven after the horrors of the Holocaust. I get this, and so does the author of this book. But this author holds the orthogonal idea in her head that they don't deserve PALESTINE. They do, but they don't. It's a story of bad options playing out.
I live in a world headed for a clash of bad options and I think it's worthwhile to open my eyes and stare at what that means. When someone beats on your door and says "the army is coming, run!" what does that MEAN? What do you take? What do you leave? What just HAPPENED? Because in the moment you might not realize it, but you just lost your property rights. That's what war means: the abrogation of rule of law.
Did I get any take-away messages from this? This book was largely about the value of dialogue, even when dialogue GOES no where. It's about providing a safe place to just TALK together, to be HEARD, to HEAR. It humanizes the situation and that works in the direction of preventing further tragedy. It has merit. So, yeah, the merit of dialogue is a central theme to this.
But I also got a lot out of the stories about what happens when you suddenly become a refugee. A few years ago I reviewed a book about wealth management during war. The gist of it was to own farmland and gold and stocks traded on the exchange of the eventual winning country. The other piece of advice was to grab your gold and GO the second invading armies came around... don't try to collect rents if you're a landlord. (That never works out well for the landlord.) The concept here was that title to land will revert, but in neither Japan nor Palestine did it, so that strategy backfired. And picking the winning side in advance (before a conflict!) for your stock ownership is a bit tricky. So once again the take-away message for how to prepare financially for this sort of catastrophe is to own gold. Selling pieces of jewelry brought needed food to the refugee family and bought better housing than most could get. (15 people in two rooms was "better"!)
I doubt most people reading this book would get "buy gold!" as the central message. I admit that I'm fairly weird. But it's still worth reading for the same reason the journalist wrote it: because it's a place where two people hold completely opposing viewpoints and they both can't get what they want and they need to co-exist anyway. This is a real place in our world. It bears thinking about.