Peace

Richard Ben Cramer's latest book is called WHY ISRAEL LOST. I started this book twelve hours ago and just finished a last page. I'm Polish and lost family members in struggles with Tzar's Russia two hundred years ago, and relatively recently - 60 years ago - in struggles with Nazis. My first thought was to purchase couple of hundred copies of this book and take it personally to movers and shakers of UK and EU and say: " Read this book. See1? there is a way forward in the Israel/Palestinian conflict! - just recognize that real people really hurt if you do nothing". I felt that the prose is so strong, so powerful, so illuminating, that if only it was to get to people it would actually, like some churchillian speeches in the Houses of Parlament, make a difference. I read a lot of books and I have never felt like this before. Ben Cramer's prose makes the hurt and the fear and the hate somehow understandable, human and, in an powerful beam of the work that manages to state the obvious, real. It is, as if the events described in the book translated the news and the statistics and the belicose statements of the politicians into real emotions, of real people, in the nightmare that they can neither shake of nor escape from.

Here I must confess that I am not impartial in the subject matter. I have therefore an emotional baggage which colours the way I read about the military campains, occupations of land, extrajudicial killings, checkpoints and targeted assasinations. You see - its not a fiction for me.

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