In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family

by Lis Harris

An entirely fresh take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that examines the life-shaping reverberations of wars and ongoing tensions upon the everyday lives of families in Jerusalem.

An American, secular, diasporic Jew, Lis Harris grew up with the knowledge of the historical wrongs done to Jews. In adulthood, she developed a growing awareness of the wrongs they in turn had done to the Palestinian people. This gave her an intense desire to understand how the Israelis’ history led them to where they are now. However, she found that top-down political accounts and insider assessments made the people most affected seem like chess pieces. What she wanted was to register the effects of the country’s seemingly never-ending conflict on the lives of successive generations.

Shuttling back and forth over ten years between East and West Jerusalem, Harris learned about the lives of two the Israeli Pinczowers/Ezrahis and the Palestinian Abuleils. She came to know members of each family—young and old, religious and secular, male and female. As they shared their histories with her, she looked at how each family survived the losses and dislocations that defined their lives; how, in a region where war and its threat were part of the very air they breathed, they gave children hope for their future; and how the adults’ understanding of the conflict evolved over time. Combining a decade of historical research with political analysis, Harris creates a living portrait of one of the most complicated and controversial conflicts of our time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Israel, Audiobook, Middle East

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 17, 2019

Reviews

[Paula Yerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Middle East is a complicated mess and Jerusalem is a prime example of how messy things are. This book tells the story of an Israeli family and Palestinian family and their lived experience over three generations. I do believe that the Palestinian story is not often told and it is heart-breaking. I learned from this book but it was a difficult and long read for me. The stories did not keep me turning the pages as I had hoped.

[Dindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Liz Harris is an American secular liberal Jew who has been a staff writer at the New Yorker and is a professor in the School of Arts and Writing at Columbia University. She has written several other books and her writing background shows. The book is well written and easy to follow and understand. It snagged my interest quickly.

It follows several members of two families, the Palestinian Abuleil family who live in the Palestinian side of Jerusalem with family members in the West Bank too, and the Israeli Pinczoers and Ezrahis, who live mainly in the Israeli side of Jerusalem but have family members all over. Both families are largely liberal/moderates; the Abuliel family also strongly promotes the value of education, including their women, although they do not have the same resources as do the Pinczoer family and more challenges to overcome. Neither side supports nor condones violence as a solution. The Pinczoers support a two-state solution. Most of the Abuleil family does too, although many think it may never happen and focus on a one state solution. And although these are the points of contact it most definitely does not stay on them, instead talking about and with a great many members of both family and looking into family stories and histories.

The point of contact of the Israeli family is Ruth HaCohen, a professor of music, married to Yaron Ezrahi, artist in his youth and well-known political analyst and theorist in Israel.

The point of contact for the Palestinian family is Niveen Abuleil, a speech pathologist married to Mahmoud Abu Rumeila, an IT manager for Mercy Corps.

Although the two people are the points of contact Harris talks extensively to both of their extended families.
One final but important source for Harris was her cab driver, Fuad. He provides another point of view with his having to travel back and forth across the borders, his extensive contacts and family and another point of view from someone not as well off. The Pinczoers are very well off. The Abuleil family are middle to lower middle class. Fuad is among the poor. This also gives her first-hand experience with the problems of crossing the border, having experienced several unpleasant incidents herself, and hearing of more.

Her goal in writing this book was to look at Israel, its creation, the relations between Jews and Palestinians and its impact on the lives of people and what their thoughts. While it does provide the big picture on what was happening, it then relates them to family stories, thoughts, and experiences.

Her view of the situation is that in fleeing intolerable persecution, one that has been going on in some form or another for thousands of years, and brought to a climax with the Holocaust, the Jews created an injustice and tragedy, and, in a way, did the same to the Palestinians. I was struck by a sense of how the Jews, fleeing a continent in which all was taken from them then settled in a land and proceeded to take all away from the people already living there. Not as cruelly as theirs was in the end with the concentration camps and death camps, but taken, nonetheless.

Harris spends quite a bit of time on events in 1948, the creation of Israel, and in doing so you get the feeling of desperation on the part of Jews who could see no solution to what had happened to them other than taking matters in their own hands and creating a country for themselves. And they might have been right. Given history, there is a good chance they were. However, Harris does a good job of highlighting how many Jews thought it would be – either not really giving the Muslims a thought or thinking they would be grateful – to what actually happened. They did not intend to drive Muslims off their lands and thought they could live peacefully together; this was a result of naiveté, ignorance, and being blind, something that could be explained by what they had just experienced in Europe and their need to focus on their solution to creating a new country where they could live safely.

I can’t help but think if Israeli had been created differently, things might have turned out better. However, it was not, and relying on a great deal of new material that has been recently released from Israeli records of the time Harris shows how there was a mission on the part of some of the military to eliminate and push the Muslims out of Israel during the 1948 war. Further she shows how the treatment of Palestinians since has not been good on the part of Israel. Which, of course, leads into them fighting back the only way they could – terrorism. Which in turns traumatizes a people already traumatized by the Holocaust.

Even though I am more aware than most Americans of the plight of the Palestinians and the interactions between Israel and Palestine, and the challenges of being a Palestinian living within Israel, I still came away with the feeling that this book might have a slight bias towards the Palestinians. Although there is a great deal of material here about the daily tribulations and injustices heaped upon the Palestinians there is nothing comparable about the effects of Palestinian terrorism visited upon the Israeli’s.

o Such acts are mentioned in passing but seem to not have affected the Israeli family directly, other than their military service.

o On the Israeli side you have a lot about the reasons they fled to Israel and their struggles in creating a new life. But, after that period it becomes more about their relationship with the Palestinians, most usually second hand.

o The Israeli family section then concentrates a great deal of attention of their views towards Palestinians and what needed to be done, along with their thoughts about the strong conservative tilt Israel.

 They are for the most part liberal, although one has an interesting mix of conservative religious view and liberal.

 They do act. Speak out, protest marches (which some have given up out of disillusionment over their lack of results). One of the military members is part of the group “Breaking the Silence” a group of both active duty, reserve, and ex-military who are speaking out on what they see happening and the atrocities and injustices visited upon the Palestinians.

o Some of this could be social status. Although the Pinczowers did not start out that way, the Israeli family is now very well off with a high social status due to their education (it seems as if every member of that family now has two PhDs, at least) and careers. Also, some of their ancestry goes back to the late 19th century which adds to their status.

o For the Palestinians, you hear about their daily challenges even getting to work, the harassment, the encroachment of the settlements and loss of Jerusalem and what that means to them, both in terms of spiritually but in very practical terms.

 Even though they pay the same taxes as Israeli Jerusalem, trash piles up on the Palestinian side and neighborhoods, street repairs are not done, utility services are much harder to get, building permits take much much longer if they can be gotten at all (the Abuleil family had to wait for years to get permission to build a larger home for their family).

 Crossing the wall or border for jobs is a nightmare. In fact, one of the Abuleil family became much more religious due to this – three times she thought she was going to be killed by Israeli forces and wasn’t, something that she puts down to divine intervention.

 They go over losing their whole hometown, wiped away and levelled, a town their family had been prominent in and lived in for hundreds of years.

 And more of course. One of them, Aunt Rasmeah Odeh who spent years in prison for terrorism, an act she claims she did not commit and whose “confession” was gotten by torture (the torture is well documented, her role in the bombing, fuzzier). She was released on a prisoner exchange, got her education, emigrated to the US and became a citizen. Her citizenship was revoked due to a charge of immigration fraud – she did not declare her terrorist conviction and prison time, she said it was because she was not a terrorist and because of having lasting problems with PTSD (true). She was stripped of her citizenship and deported to Jordan.

 Another member of this family had to give up an international job that he enjoyed greatly due to the difficulties in traveling.

Bottom line on this - I am not sure though if it is a bias or more information and education for me. I know for sure that the situation of Palestinians living in Israel is on a par with the era of Jim Crow here. I am not so sure if it rises to the level of South African Apartheid yet (something Harris does talk about a bit). However, I am not certain it does not either. Even if it does not, this book is valuable in showing how the big decisions impact and effect families and provides a much-needed personal look at the lives of two families in Israel. And an education of what is happening to the Palestinians and their history. And does a good job of showing this is a tragedy in which even the oppressor is a victim too, one suffering nationally from PTSD.

Thank you to Beacon Books for providing an Advanced Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I felt like the folks chronicled for this book felt like they were so moderate and thoughtful that they felt cherry-picked. Otherwise, fascinating read.

“[Colleagues] got along fine and a cordial, even warm, relationship prevailed. But in times of violent Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, those relationships turned rigid because no foundation of trust existed despite their long history together. And nothing ever said at a conference or meeting or expressed in a document had ever changed that.”

“A sense of wrongs done to the Palestinian people never reached their radar, focused as it was on the wrongs done to the beleaguered Jews across the ocean.” [talking about her parents’ generation]

“The terrain of our little patch of the desert looked so unyielding, furthermore, that it was difficult to imagine the loud incursion of the bulldozers to tractors long associated in the Israeli imagination with growth and fecundity and in the Palestinian mind with destruction and displacement.”

“And what was the consequence of an unarmed since ancient times minority becoming an armed majority and how did that experience affect its democratic ideals?”

“By then it was taken for granted that [Trump’s] decisions to move the embassy and defund the Palestinians had political origins at the expense of diplomatic concerns.”

“And she spoke with the assured cadences of something comfortable with making sense of complex subjects.”

“Naveen’s mother was not among the household’s English speakers but was fluent in the ubiquitous Arab language of extravagant hospitality”

“While it's important to ascertain as best we can the sequence of the war’s events and their military and political causes, isn't it equally crucial to understand the impact of those events on people’s imaginations?... Isn’t the forgetting worth scrutinizing?.. Isn’t individual moral struggle or at least recognition of the two sides differing perspectives in the long painful history of this conflict bound up with remembrance and forgetting?... Surely the two ways of reconstructing the events we later on call history (memory and archival documentation) are complementary. The issues embedded in these questions are not simply about the value of repeating forms of historical evidence. They are directly related to the more elusive question of what constitutes history and will in the future play a major role in the country’s accepted narrative about its beginnings and the ambiguities. The stories people tell about their lives strongly shape the way a culture imagines itself. Both sides of the conflict are certainly attached to mythical as well as factual versions of their own history.”

“Nonetheless for more than a decade and a half both men appear to have been unaware that they were being used as pawns in a familiar British colonial strategy of distributing favor and patronage to discourage rebellion and sowing dissension among leaders so that they were unlikely to remain unified in their desire for self-determination.”

“Two additional and contrasting strains of thought made their way to Zionism's cultural table. One was the idea of the new Jew as a Nietzschean hero creating his own history with his will and strength, more interested in power than in rationalism and daring to ignore conventional morality in favor of self-interest. The other was the socialist model in which individual destinies are subordinated to collectivist goals.”

“Some of Naveen’s sisters dressed conservatively and some didn't. But I learned after a while to accept the limitations of my assumptions about the significance of traditional clothing.”

“Observers with an intimate knowledge of Hamas strategies have long pointed out the complexity of the organization’s political approach, its internal battles between hardliners and more reform-minded members, and some of its generally under-publicized pragmatic moves toward moderation over the years. On the one hand it had never at that point disavowed its fanatic, poisonously antisemitic fundamentalist charter that, among other things, lists the destruction of Israel as one of its goals and had never agreed to recognize Israel. On the other hand its ideology hadn’t stopped it from exercising a practical, strategic flexibility that allowed it to respond to its constituency. Sometimes in ways that appeared to contravene its charter.”

“Hamas surprised the international community by issuing a new declaration of principles that some saw as for the first time distinguishing between the Israelis and the Jewish people as a whole. The new document also framed the Palestinian struggle in ant-colonial rather than religious terms and set in writing what Hamas representatives had been hinting at for years. It was willing to accept a two state solution along the pre-1967 borders (something countless Israelis and Palestinians seemed by then to have given up on) provided that the Palestinians receive what one Hamas leader called ‘a true and genuine state’. The new document did not however recognize Israel or renounce violence. And thus it was rejected out of hand by Prime Minister Netanyahu who declared it insincere and an attempt to fool the world.”

“Ashkenazic, Sephardic, Ethiopian, Russian, and Druze”

“...who now spoke more fervently of nationalistic, messianic, and romantic or mystical ways about the occupied lands, about the chosen-ness of the Jewish people, and about redemption.”

“Three nos: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. A declaration that is often cited as the crux of Arab intransigence. But archival research has shown that there were actually parallel results from the conference: a decision and a statement. The statement or public consumption was the source of the three nos. The decision left room for negotiation.”

“Schooled as she had been in her religious reverence, her widening field of vision [from reading] brought her the perspectives of irreverence and skepticism.”

“A complicating factor in this particular corner of history was that whatever good relations existed between the inhabitants of various Arab towns and Jewish communities, it became more or less unacceptable to mention them. Palestinians didn’t want to look like they had been collaborators in their own tragic history. And Israelis wanted to maintain their own picture of an implacably hostile enemy, central to justifying Palestinian expulsion.”

“Nonetheless, Jawhariyyeh and Klein challenge the persistent idea that relations between Jews and Arabs were solely defined, always and forever, by the conflict between two nationalistic movements and utterly separate communities. Rather, they portray a common native identity that bit by bit was undermined and in 1948 torn asunder.”

“He points out the ways the historical ‘need to fight a war of survival to justify the ultimate sacrifice of lives and later to cope with terror coupled with a delayed reaction to the holocaust reinforced the tendency to idealize state power. But he also shows how that history badly weakened Israel’s ability to nourish liberal democratic principles.” (Yaron Ezrahi, author of Rubber Bullets)

“He said that accepting the situation as tragic was not useful as it left no room for change. Responsibility comes through distrust of your government, he said. And for him so did calling attention to its hypocrisies, such as hiding from the people the many attempts of the other side to negotiate.”

“Then I realized that he had been speaking hesitatingly because some self interrogation was happening as he went along. A phenomenon I had rarely observed among Israelis, at least the ones I encountered, who tended to present their opinions in a more signed, sealed, and delivered way.”

“And for a moment I had the wild thought that this small crowd, 200 or so that day, might constitute all that remained of the Israeli left. It didn't of course, the left comprises an estimated 8% of the Israeli population.”

“We do not enjoy the comforts of emotional coherence and moral clarity manifest in the attitudes of the enthusiastic supporters of the Israel and Western right, nor the self-assurance and patronizing attitudes of the automatic and unqualified critiques of Israeli policies and actions on the left…. The ‘Israel’ Chomsky accuses of a conspiracy to extermination can only exist in a mind in which the name of human values can dehumanize millions of Israelis who as living human beings have millions of contradictory opinions, ambivalences, and aspirations… To lump these Israelis together and describe a largely fragmented coalition government in a multi-party parliamentary system as a unified single-minded agent is a monstrous abstraction, a fantastic invention of a coherent demonic collectively conspiring entity, a fantasy which is, of course, very common not only among contemporary Middle Eastern fundamentalists but also among last century’s leaders of fascist Europe.” - Ruth & Yaron’s letter to friends

“We object to all attempts to see Hamas as an arm of Hezbollah or Iran and the call of the Israeli right that we should treat them alike.” - Ruth & Yaron’s letter to friends

“The increased incarceration of [Palestinian] women imprisoned in Israeli prisons was a far cry from the gender equality shift that the young Rasmi had yearned for. But it was the one she got.”

“...Draftees had been fed a steady diet of stirring words: ‘we’re the best army in the world’ and ‘you are the unit in the IDF’ et cetera.”

“The Breaking the Silence veterans were young men who had reported for duty in good faith and like all soldiers entering zones of contention were prepared to encounter hostile villagers in combat situations. What they were not prepared for, they say, was the devastating moral price paid for in a reality in which young soldiers face a civilian population on a daily basis and are engaged in the control of that population’s everyday life. As the soldiers write in the book’s forward, they were also not prepared to discover that when dealing with the degradations of the settlers they had no authority to stop them.”

[Paul Olkowski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lis Harris delivers a behind the news report about Jerusalem and Israel in general. The American news media lies and hides things from the American people. I'm sure that if the general public knew the facts that are reported in this book Popular opinion would have pushed the American ,Israeli, and Palestinian governments to solve this problem years ago.Because the News media as a whole picks and chooses facts from one side or another and doesn't give the entire story nor the entire facts of the story ,the general public form an opinion of Israel as a bully or a country in peril depending upon what you read and see in the news. The actual truth is somewhere in between.
Lis Harris opinion rides slightly to the left and against the current government over there, but she does try to tell the truth and the entire story from both sides, 2 families ,one Palestinian, one Jewish. She explains and gives examples of how the history of the country and the city of Jerusalem affect both.It took her years of interviews and many trips to the country to collect enough information to write this book as fairly as she could. She places the blame on both sides and the unwillingness of both governments to look at the problem realistically rather than politically.
It is true that both sides dislike each other mainly because of the decisions of the governments on both sides of the issue. The British actually started the entire situation back in the 1930's and the displacement of the native Arab population started a situation the cannot be solved 75 years later. The various wars since then only deepened the problem. Most of what is in the book was totally unknown to me because of the bias of American media against Israel as a whole. The Palestinian government doesn't seem to want to solve the problem. They want total destruction of the state of Israel and a return of their land ,even though that the current generation never had the land to begin with. Their grandparents had the land. After 75 years it is time to put an end to old feuds. New ideas and compromise must start on both sides to solve the problem. In a land that is 4000 years old and in dispute most of that time, compromise doesn't rear its head very often. Harris spells all of this out from first person accounts of the families she interviews.
It was an interesting read to say the least. Mostly history with personal stories of the family members that she interviews. It was a bit of a difficult read too, with all the places and names unfamiliar to me. in the country of Israel. A map at the start of the book would have been helpful to the reader, but all in all it was interesting. I did learn a lot about the entire problem over there. I know that i would never try to go for a visit. Peace is always just a day away from destruction . Maybe America's latest suggestions could help.But both sides MUST be willing to give up a lot to the other. I don't see it happening.
4 stars for IN JERUSALEM . This book will teach an unknowing American population about the life of the peoples of Israel.

[Judie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have been trying to finish this book for several months. The concept, the lives of two 3-generation families in Jerusalem, one Jewish in West Jerusalem and one Palestinian in East Jerusalem, if done well, should be be very interesting.. While the author, Lis Harris, had a good idea in mind, I am disappointed in the way she carries it out.
The backgrounds of the two families are very different. The Jewish family has members who were involved directly or indirectly in the Holocaust. They live in a nice area in Jerusalem. They are Chabad Orthodox do not represent the majority of Israelis, who are more secular.
The Palestinian family has members who left their homes in 1949 after the borders of Israel were determined and it became a state. It was immediately attacked by neighboring Arab/Muslim countries trying to destroy it. While many Palestinians remained, about 700,000 left for various reasons including being told by their leaders to get out of the way until the war was over and then they could go back. After Israel won the war, that was not possible. The Arabs remained became Israeli citizens.
Harris does not mention the 875,000 Jews were evicted from their ancestral homes in Arab countries after 1949. They fled with what they could carry, having to lose most, or all their assets in the process. None of them, like the 95 million refugees worldwide since World War II, are still considered refugees. She does not talk about the Jews from Arab countries.
There is no doubt the Palestinians have suffered since then. IN JERUSALEM talks about actions taken by Jews and Israeli government that proved harmful to Palestinians. The Palestinians, and the other hand, are always portrayed as a victims.
However, when relating some of their problems, she does not tell the reasons for the changes. For example, the dividing wall between east and west Jerusalem and the checkpoints were installed following multiple attacks by Palestinian groups and individuals into Israel from the West Bank. Since they were installed, the number of deaths and injuries from these attacks has been reduced dramatically.
Before 1949 there was a large Jewish population in East Jerusalem. Hadassah Hospital, Hebrew University, government, and religious sites. were located there. She doesn’t write about how the Palestinians, under Jordan control, took them over after that war ended. When Israel was able to return in 1967, they discovered synagogues have been used as barns, tombstones removed to pave roads, etc. Harris does write about Israeli destruction of Palestinian records. Nor she say who owned the property before 1948, who is responsible for providing services in Jerusalem, why the Arabs refused to agree on permanent boundary lines, or why Jordan did not create Palestinian state when it controlled the West Bank.
Harris seems to have decided what she wanted the focus of her story to be and then come up with examples to support it. Learning to speak Henrew or Arabic and about the historical background wouid have been helpful.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good premise, but the execution is a bit lacking. Rather than just focusing on the two families, there are brief profiles on what felt like dozens of minor characters, which all blurred together after a while. Instead of adding colour, they just crowded the canvas.

The thing that bugged me the most was the way she presented information that was new to her as if it was a major revelation. In a few places she clearly indicated that she was describing her own reaction, but too often she presented it as a scoop (ex. "some Israelis allow small furry mammals to enter and depart their dwellings at will, and even provide them with food and water!") Then launches into a 3-page exposition of the history of housecats during the British Mandate period, as if to prove that she did her homework. Followed by the obligatory anecdote from a Palestinian about the time their grandfather saw a cat scratch an Israeli soldier. And smugly presenting the whole thing as if she alone had finally gotten to the hidden essence of the situation. OK, maybe not quite that bad, but still extremely annoying.

Audiobook: as per usual, the narrator mangled just about every Hebrew and Arabic word and name, and a surprisingly large number of English ones as well. I get that proofreading audio is hard, but yikes.

[Amber M · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a perfect time to read this book! I knew very little of Israel and its history. I also didn't understand why there seemed to be so much fighting among the populous. Now, I get it. This book goes into the history of the country through the lives of two families; one Palestinian and one Israeli. I feel that the book is well written. I also didn't feel like the author had a bias towards either parties. Reading this book has helped me to see why there are so many conflicts in Israel today.

[J.A. Ironside · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great concept and does present some interesting perspectives, putting 'real' people at the heart of the struggle. However, historical fact was cherry picked.;The overall narrative was too biased; the 'real' people were not representative of either culture and seemed a little too convenient so they may have been fictionalised. Overall a disappointment displaying little desire to grapple with the highly complicated subject.

[Lynn Mcafee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a tremendous amount about the Middle East conflict, particularly the Palestinian perspective which seems to be rarely reported on or discussed. This really opened my eyes. Seeing both sides of a conflict is rare these days, but I think critical.

[Des · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad--interesting people--but if you can't figure out going in which side the book ultimately comes down on, you haven't been paying attention.

[Mohamed Nazirudeen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sociological research based on ethnographic immersion. An on-the-ground account of the lives lives of those caught in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis.

[MV · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is barely two stars for me. I think this is a very important topic and I was expecting this to be an engaging and educational read. Instead, it was a long slog that failed to hold my attention. I was really disappointed.