A Season of Stones: Living in a Palestinian Village

by Helen Winternitz

An eye-witness account of the Intifada, by a journalist who lived in the West Bank for a full year, learning the ways of the Palestinians and experiencing the harsh realities of Israeli occupation

Genres: Nonfiction

303 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author makes some good points, but it's a political book by a propagandist. There is no balance because she seeks to persuade by emotion, not by facts. Winternitz comes across as a real pain, no one you would want to have lunch with whether you agreed with her stance or not. It is interesting to note that despite her potential publicity value, she was eventually asked to leave the village.

[Helen Winternitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's the review from the Washington Post:

LIVING ON THE WEST BANK
By Kathleen Christison
January 12, 1992
A SEASON OF STONES Living in a Palestinian Village By Helen Winternitz Atlantic Monthly Press. 303 pp. $21.95

FOR MOST OF the four decades since Israel's creation, Palestinians have been politically invisible in the United States. The intifada, the uprising in progress since 1987, has lessened that invisibility, bringing Palestinians into better focus as a distinct people with a pivotal role in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and ultimately winning them a seat at the Madrid peace conference.
Nonetheless, most Americans know little about the Palestinians and their lives in exile and under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Thus is it that the publicity sheet issued with Helen Winternitz's wonderful memoir of a year spent living in a West Bank village can hail it as "an unprecedented effort" to understand the Palestinians. In a striking recognition of American lack of interest in this side of a conflict that has engaged U.S. policymakers for half a century, the publicity notes, "No writer has tried anything like it." One wonders how Americans would view the Arab-Israeli conflict if until the late 1980s no writer had ever "tried anything like" living in an Israeli town.
Although it should not have to be remarkable that an American writer wants to learn something about Palestinians, journalist Winternitz truly did do something remarkable in the way she went about it. Despite being a non-Arabic-speaking single Western woman, she was able to worm her way into the confidence of most of the inhabitants of the traditional Muslim village of Nahalin, near Bethlehem, by learning Arabic, living like the villagers and demonstrating her interest in Palestinians.
She spent more than a year in Nahalin, from the spring of 1988 during the initial stages of the intifada until mid-1989. Nothing about it was easy. She was regarded with suspicion by many villagers. Some thought she was an Israeli spy. She inadvertently became entangled in intra-Palestinian politics by living initially with a family associated with one faction and arousing the suspicions of another. And she was repeatedly harassed by Hamas, a fundamentalist Muslim faction that gained strength as the intifada failed to make tangible gains against the Israeli occupation.
Winternitz overcame much of this mistrust but never was able to overcome Hamas's resistance to any show of independence by a woman or the kind of recurring doubts and fears that are inevitably focused on an outsider when a people is in despair and turmoil. After almost two years, she was asked by sympathetic but anxious villagers to leave, which she did only to take up residence for another year in nearby Bethlehem.
Winternitz came close to bridging the cultural differences that she encountered. She lived with many village families and was welcomed so warmly into their lives that she had to struggle with her very un-Palestinian desire for privacy. She joined in their mundane tasks, embroidering, picking olives, drinking endless cups of tea while wrapped in blankets against the winter chill in unheated houses.
She tried to stay out of politics but found it impossible. Palestinian factions competed for her attention, politicized villagers talked about their struggle. She mourned with one family as two of its sons were taken off to an Israeli prison. She watched as an Israeli settlement was constructed on confiscated village land on a ridge above the town, joining Israeli settlements on three other sides of Nahalin to complete a strangulating ring around the village.
Finally, she helped Nahalin pick up the pieces after a predawn raid by Israeli border police in which five villagers were shot to death and at least 23 others wounded. The raid, in April 1989, was so violent, the shooting so indiscriminate, it drew international attention. One UN official counted 25 bullet holes in the wall of a house, 50 in a rooftop water tank. One of the dead had 14 bullet holes in his upper body. Israel officially concluded that the raid had been "excessive"; the officers in charge were merely reprimanded or transferred.
The villagers of Nahalin whom Winternitz came to know were not the people who make the decisions in Palestinian politics, but they were the people whose discontent with Israel's occupation fueled the intifada and lit the spark under the PLO that brought its formal acceptance in late 1988 of co-existence with Israel. Nahalinis are ordinary Palestinians. They want peace, Winternitz found, and they want the dignity of independence.
But at the end, despite their sacrifices, Winternitz could see little reason for Palestinian hope. Life was likely to get harder for them, and real peace "remained as remote an idea as ever."

Kathleen Christison is a writer specializing in the Middle East and a former political analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency.