Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

by David Dean Shulman

For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope , an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”

Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.

Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”

With Dark Hope , Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.

Genres: Nonfiction, Israel

236 pages, Hardcover

First published January 26, 2006

About the author

David Dean Shulman is an Indologist and regarded as one of the world’s foremost authorities on the languages of India. His research embraces many fields, including the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. He is also a published poet in Hebrew, a literary critic, a cultural anthropologist, and a peace activist. He has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on various subjects ranging from temple myths and temple poems to essays that cover the wide spectrum of the cultural history of South India

In 1967, on graduating from Waterloo high school, he won a National Merit Scholarship, and emigrated to Israel, where he enrolled at Hebrew University. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. degree in Islamic History, specializing in Arabic. He gained his doctorate in Tamil and Sanskrit. Shulman is a peace activist, and member of the joint Israeli-Palestininian 'Life-in-Common' or Ta'ayush grass-roots movement for non-violence.

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark Hope is heartbreaking, a text built from story after story of the work of peace activists in Israel and Palestine. Written by Schulman, an Israeli Jew, the book is not a record of large diplomatic efforts, but of everyday acts - standing the path of bulldozers that would demolish a house; picking up grains of poisoned barley a settler has dropped in the fields where a Palestinian farmer grazes his sheep; harvesting olives on trees that belong to Palestinians, but that the army won't let them reach.

Schulman recognizes that there are problems in Palestine as in Israel, but "it cannot concern me here. This conflict is not a war of the sons of light with the sons of darkness; both sides are dark, both are given to organized violence and terror, and both resort constantly to self-righteous justification and a litany of victimization, the bread-and-butter of ethnic conflict. My concern in these pages is with the darkness on my side." It's an eye-opening approach. I was particularly moved by his lengthy chapter about The Wall of Separation - a wall that he does not deny could bring greater security to Israel, but that he opposes in its present form, nonetheless. Build a wall, he suggests, but build it without cleaving Palestinian villages in two, or annexing 80% of the local water supply to Israel, or separating Palestinians from hospitals, their orchards, their fields, their jobs. The present situation, the present acts of the Israeli government will not result in peace, he predicts, but instead are poisoning everyone, Jew and Muslim, Israeli and Palestinian alike.

[Ash Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fascinating, but sadly, a lot of people have already made up their minds on the topic of Israel without really thinking.

When you feel like actually thinking about the Israel/Palestine conflict, add this book to the list of things you must read.

[Bettina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author is an Israeli peace activist, working for many years with Taayush, on the ground, with the Palestinians, peacefully. The accounts are not easy to digest, very well written, especially for Israelis a must read. (you can't say, you didn't know after this book).
very much recommended!

[Shirishin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly optimistic book. Shulman succeessfully portrays the israeli occupation in its brutal and complex everydayness, and yet leaves the reader with plenty of (dark) hope.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met David Shulman decades ago when he was a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin, and I participated in a graduate seminar on the Mahabharat he co-taught with Professor V. Narayan Rao. His deep scholarship and insights left a vivid impression with me -- I was an ordinary student and haphazard scholar at best. I always felt I was in the presence of a kind of genius, if you define that as a profound and brilliant energy. His work with Ta'ayush is herein chronicled in heartbreaking chapter after chapter. He leads the reader through his own observations and philosophy, and we see how it makes itself manifest in nonviolent action and resistance to illegitimate authority. It is an inspiring book and I hope more people, especially Americans, will read it.

[Nicpo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than I did. It's out of order, chronologically, and a bit monotonous.