Pastoral in Palestine (Paradigm, 43) - Softcover

Hertz, Neil

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984201033 ISBN 13: 9780984201037

Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2013

Synopsis

For decades, Israel and Palestine have been locked in ongoing conflict over land that each claims as its own. The conflict is often considered a calculated landgrab, but this characterization does little to take into account the myriad motivations that have shaped it in ways that make it seem intractable, from powerful nationalist and theological ideologies to the more practical concerns of the people who live there and just want to carry out their lives without the constant threat of war.

In 2011, Neil Hertz lived in Ramallah in Palestine’s occupied West Bank and taught in Abu Dis, just outside Jerusalem. With Pastoral in Palestine, he offers a personal take on the conflict. Though the situation has resulted in the erosion of both societies, Hertz could find no one in either Israel or Palestine who expressed much hope for a solution. Instead, they are resigned to find ways to live with the situation. Illustrated throughout with full-color photographs taken by the author, Pastoral in Palestine puts a human face to politics in the Middle East.

About this title

About the Author

Neil Hertz is a literary critic, photographer, and professor emeritus in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime and George Eliot’s Pulse.

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Abstract

This essay offers an appraisal and critique of some aspects of the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem and the West Bank, in the form of a first-person narrative of the author's experiences while teaching at Al-Quds University during the spring semester of 2011. The author's sense of the unstable hierarchical relations of Palestinians and Israelis, as seen through the lens of the literary-theoretical notion of 'pastoral', is developed, first, out of a consideration of the effect the starkly stony landscape has on thinking about these competing societies, and then through an account of a vendetta between two Palestinian villages that he was witness to over the course of the semester.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prickly Paradigm Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0984201033
• ISBN 13: 9780984201037
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 122