The Other Side of Despair: Jews and Arabs in the Promised Land

This compelling book takes the reader behind the headlines of the confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians, examining its human dimension and setting it in a balanced historical context. In the last decade of the millennium, the century-long conflict came within a hair's breadth of a solution through the Oslo Accords, only to explode in violence, hatred, and mutual recrimination, following the failed summit at Camp David in the summer of 2000.

In his search for understanding, Daniel Gavron talks to Israelis and Palestinians of all backgrounds and shades of opinion. Politicians and economists, entrepreneurs and writers, psychologists and teachers, men and women, veterans and youngsters, fervent militants and pragmatic realists all speak in these pages. We hear the Palestinian fighter and the Israeli soldier, the Jewish settler and the Arab Israeli, the negotiators from the opposite sides of the table, the bereaved parents.

These Israeli and Palestinian voices reflect the excruciating agony of both societies, conveying a searing reality that, although seemingly hopeless, emphasizes the basic humanity of both peoples. In a startling final section, the author proposes a daring old-new idea to lead the region out of its tragic morass.

Born in London in 1935, Daniel Gavron emigrated to Israel in 1961. A long-time journalist, he has been a reporter for the Israel National Radio and the Jerusalem Post. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, and Ariel. His broadcasts have been aired on NBC and National Public Radio. He was a member of the team that founded Palestine-Israel Journal and the author of Walking Through Israel (Houghton Mifflin), Israel After Begin (Houghton Mifflin), and The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia (Rowman & Littlefield).