Hooked

Israel. Palestine. What is it about the place that hooks people? And not just fervently religious people. Secular folks, too. People like the thousands of college students across America who find themselves embroiled in debates over Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. People like the roughly 1200 American Jews currently in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces who left their lives in the United States to come to volunteer in the Israeli military. People like the two of us. In 1999, Omar left a prestigious job at a Washington, D.C., law firm to go work in Palestine, a country he had never visited, for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), an organization reviled by many Americans. At around the same time, Mira returned to Canada after living for three years in Israel and resolved that, when she had kids, she would speak to them only in Hebrew–-a language spoken in only one country in the world, and a tiny one at that. How do we make sense of these kinds of attachments? Can Jews, Palestinians, and others learn to honor and dignify one another’s emotional connections to the slice of land known as Israel and Palestine? And is there room there for two peoples and so many strong feelings? These are the questions that inspired us, a Canadian Jew and a Palestinian American, to write this book. We aim to answer them as we travel to that wondrous, sad, beautiful, maddening, disorienting place together, bringing readers along on our journey. Hooked explores the high politics surrounding one of the most serious and protracted issues of our time—the conflict in Israel-Palestine—told through an intimate story of work, travel, friendship, and identity. It’s about what happens when two people from across the ethnic divide engage with each other in places that evoke extraordinary longing and loss. And it’s an experiment in attempting to envision justice and equality for a troubled land with so much at stake for its residents and for those around the world who harbor attachments to it. Through Mira and Omar’s direct experiences in real time along with the historical, legal, and political lenses they bring as scholar-experts and as deeply connected members of their respective Diaspora communities, readers travel from San Francisco to Jerusalem to the Israel Trail; from Jaffa to Tel Aviv to Gaza City; from Ramallah to communities abutting the Gaza Strip, to the Dead Sea on each of the Israeli and Jordanian sides, and to Amman. Omar and Mira entwine their personal and political worlds. They discuss what it means for outsiders and insiders to be attached to Israel and Palestine. Alongside these wanderings, they analyze the history of stop-start peace talks between Israel and the PLO, and evaluate the various peace plans for consideration these days, namely the “one-state,” “two-state” and “confederation” solutions, and examine their own assumptions about the place, about the people there, and about each other. Most importantly, they ask, what will it take for suffering and oppression to give way to justice and equality in a land that Israelis, Palestinians, and their respective refugee and Diaspora communities are able to call home?