Gaza

In 1989 Gloria Emerson, an audacious and respected American journalist, lived in the Gaza Strip in order to witness and understand Palestinian resistance to Israeli military occupation, which began in 1967. She chose Gaza, a sliver of land with huge refugee camps, because the intifada began there in late 1987. In her acutely observant and moving book Emerson describes how the daily lives of Gazans are deformed by the occupation in all its harsh, injurious forms. Not just a war of stones and slingshots, the intifada touches all Palestinians, whom she describes as ordinary people unable to tolerate what their lives have become, the punishments they must constantly swallow. The Palestinian "problem," cynically used by Saddam Hussein to increase his own power, is still the deepest wound in the Middle East -- the Palestinian crusade for their homeland affects not only Arab nations but now our own country as well. The book holds us because of a wide range of interviews of a type that is rarely published, giving voice to Arabs who are not "terrorists" and who defy the stereotypes so easily accepted in the West. This is a book about punishment and love, defiance, failure, and martyrdom, and above all about the attempts of a people to restore themselves while leading lives of humiliation and helplessness. It is a record, too, of a small hotel in Gaza where Westerners and Palestinians may meet on safe ground, of how the women of Gaza have risen up, and of children dancing into battle against armed soldiers who, wielding so much power, are wielded by it.