They met in 1990 during the first Palestinian uprising—one
was an American Jew who served as a prison guard in the
largest prison in Israel, the other, his prisoner, Rafiq, a
rising leader in the PLO. Despite their fears and
prejudices, they began a dialogue there that grew into a
remarkable friendship—and now a remarkable book. It is a
book that confronts head-on the issues dividing the Middle
East, but one that also shines a ray of hope on that dark,
embattled region.
Jeffrey Goldberg, now an
award-winning correspondent for The New Yorker, moved
to Israel while still a college student. When he arrived,
there was already a war in his heart—a war between the
magnetic pull of tribe and the equally determined pull of
the universalist ideal. He saw the conflict between the
Jews and Arabs as the essence of tragedy, because tragedy is
born not in the collision of right and wrong, but of right
and right.
Soon, as a military policeman in the
Israeli army, he was sent to the Ketziot military prison
camp, a barbed-wire city of tents and machine gun towers
buried deep in the Negev Desert. Ketziot held six thousand
Arabs, the flower of the Intifada: its rock-throwers,
knifemen, bomb-makers, and propagandists. He realized that
this was an extraordinary opportunity to learn from them
about themselves, especially because among the prisoners may
have been the future leaders of Palestine.
Prisoners is an account of life in that harsh
desert prison—mean, overcrowded, and violent — and of
Goldberg's extraordinary dialogue with Rafiq, which
continues to this day.
We hear their accusations,
explanations, fears, prejudices, and aspirations. We see
how their relationship deepened over the years as Goldberg
returned to Washington, D.C., where Rafiq, quite
coincidentally, had become a graduate student, and as the
Middle East cycled through periods of soaring hope and
ceaseless despair. And we see again and again how these two
men—both of them loyal sons of their warring
peoples—confront their religious, cultural, and political
differences in ways that allowed them to finally
acknowledge a true, if necessarily tenuous,
friendship.
A riveting, deeply affecting book: spare,
impassioned, energetic, and unstinting in its candor about
the truths that lie buried within the animosities of the
Middle East.
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