Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide

From Slate.com

Prisoners is the story of a redheaded Jewish boy from America—Jeffrey—who becomes a staunch Zionist, immigrates to Israel, lives on a kibbutz, and joins the Israeli armed forces, where the book really begins. Jeffrey serves as a military policeman and is charged with the unfulfilling duty of guarding Palestinian prisoners in the Ketziot prison during the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising of the late '80s.

In Ketziot, he befriends Rafiq Hijazi, a Muslim from the Jebalya refugee camp. The friendship between these two men and the many obstacles and barriers that both of them must overcome in the next 15 years or so—the years of the Oslo peace process and the years of the second, more bloody, Palestinian uprising—are the core of the book. It takes the reader to Jerusalem, Gaza, Jericho, Pakistan, Africa, Washington, Abu Dhabi, and many other places. It deals with the fundamental dichotomy of two men who like each other personally but belong to two rival tribes.

Boiling down the book this way raises the basic question: Can a Palestinian Muslim and a Zionist Jew be friends? In this first note, I want to focus on something at the end of the book—the positive, optimistic answer it gives to this question: "[I]f Rafiq and I could allow friendship to triumph over anger, then it wasn't impossible to believe that the rest of Isaac's children, and the rest of Ishmael's children, could stop their long and dismal war." Read the whole article (worthwhile, in my view)