{"content":[{"text":"Life on Planet Hebron - Defence Viewpoints from UK Defence Forum \n Sunday, 03 July 2016 10:38","bbox":{"left":0.076183,"top":0.013031,"width":0.599633,"height":0.035087}},{"text":"<p>Ben Ehrenreich's New Palestine Book Explores Life on \"Planet Hebron\" Reviewed by \n Charles Cross<br /><br />When I moved to Lebanon in 1972, a joke was doing the rounds \n about an Englishman, a Frenchman, and an Arab tasked to write books about elephants. The \n Englishman wrote How to Hunt Elephants, and the Frenchman came up with Recipes for \n Cooking Elephants �la Fran�ise. The Arab, meanwhile, produced 12 volumes titled The \n Elephant and the Palestine Problem. Since then, publishers have poured out thousands of \n tomes on Palestine and Israel, some bad, some good. Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to Spring: \n Life and Death in Palestine is the latest, and it is excellent. Read more on the next page</p> \n <p><br />You need a good reason to write or read a book on Palestine these days. Not only is \n the field over-tilled, it has become boring. We all know the facts or imagine we do, however \n differently we interpret them. To justify a new book, you have to provide new facts or a new way \n of looking at old ones. Ehrenreich does both. Many of his facts are new to us, his intended \n Western readership, if not to the Palestinians and Israelis who live them. His sensitive, \n novelistic method of depicting them can be dispiriting. But it is inspiring, as he introduces us to \n people who have been beaten to the ground and get up again and again.</p> <p>\"I do not \n aspire in these pages to objectivity,\" he writes in his introduction. \"I don't believe it to be a virtue, \n or even a possibility.\" He calls the book \"a collection of stories about resistance, and about \n people who resist. My concern is with what keeps people going when everything appears to be \n lost.\" Everything seems lost to the Palestinians. Three quarters of them lost their homes in \n Palestine in 1947 and 1948. Many ended up as helots in neighboring countries, while the rest \n fell under Israeli military occupation in 1967. Since then, colonies of Israeli Jewish citizens have \n seized most of their land. The Israel Defense Forces demolish thousands of their homes to \n make the settlement project possible. The IDF restricts their movement, their actions, and their \n speech, all the while confining them to smaller and smaller spaces on a landscape that \n threatens to vanish completely.</p> <p>An extended family called Tamimi in the West Bank \n village of Nabi Saleh populates this book like characters in a novel by Thackeray or Dickens. \n Ehrenreich took time to know them and has the novelist's talent to make us see the activist \n Bassem Tamimi, the beautiful and stalwart Nariman Tamimi, and the precocious Tamimi \n children. The youngsters flock to protests knowing that their homes are no safer than a \n confrontation line, particularly after Israeli shellfire killed one of them in his bedroom. These \n people are, to borrow a term popular in the First Intifada of the late 1980s that Ehrenreich does \n not use, samoud, steadfast. They endure prison and torture. They come home. They are \n beaten. They get up. A wall goes up to keep them in or out, and they find ways around it.</p> \n <p>Ehrenreich's introduction to Palestine came with two journalistic assignments, from Harper's \n in 2011 and the New York Times Magazine a year later. Rather than let the story go, as most \n journalists do when they find another one, he went to live in Ramallah. This nominal capital of a \n non-existent state became his base for close observation of Palestinians and Israeli settlers and \n soldiers throughout the West Bank. Nabi Saleh is, in theory, a 25-minute drive from Ramallah. \n When Bassem Tamimi needed to take his son Waed to a Ramallah hospital, Israeli blockages \n and settler roads stretched the journey to 12 hours. That was normal in a land where \"normal\" \n did not mean what it did in places like Chicago or London or Tel Aviv. The least normal place in \n the abnormal West Bank was Hebron, where Ehrenreich spent a month amid the Palestinian \n population and the few hundred Israeli settlers who have turned the West Bank's largest town \n into what he calls \"Planet Hebron\":</p> <p>It's our planet. We made it what it is. And by we I \n mean all of us � those who acted, and those who do not act. ... Hebron's realities are the same \n as those in the rest of Palestine, only boiled down under tremendous pressure until they have","bbox":{"left":0.071899,"top":0.087836,"width":0.855147,"height":0.824573}},{"text":"1 / 2","bbox":{"left":0.885489,"top":0.952395,"width":0.026152000000000064,"height":0.015203999999999995}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}