Dennis Fox’s Weblog

I flew into Minneapolis last night to participate in tonight’s panel discussion at Form + Content Gallery, where the month-long Dialogue on the Wall exhibit uses some of my Israel/Palestine photos. Fittingly, as the plane touched down I came to the final page of Alice Rothchild’s new book Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience. The book was fascinating on a variety of political and personal levels.

Here’s Alice’s summary:

This book is an intimate journey grappling with the complicated historical legacy of Israel and Palestine and my relationship to these issues as a Jewish American physician, grounded by the traumas of the Holocaust and my family’s passionate love of Israel.

I begin by sharing the voices of three Jewish women, two born in the Diaspora and one in pre-1948 Palestine. The remaining chapters of this book examine the complexity of Jewish Israeli attitudes, both Ashkenazic and Sephardic, and then delve into the lives of a number of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. Working with a health and human rights project, collaborating with Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, I bring to life the voices of people mutually entwined in trauma and conflict, and explore individual examples of resilience and resistance.

The personal and political consequences of crossing lines raises troubling questions regarding US policy and the mainstream Jewish community’s insistence on standing, unquestioning, behind Israeli policy.

Through first-hand narratives, I invite the reader to engage in a different kind of conversation about Israel and Palestine, rooted in Jewish humanism, grounded in empathy and forgiveness, and coupled with an appreciation of the urgent need for political action.

Alice Rothchild is a neighbor of mine. I met her five years ago, after I started writing about local aspects of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict in my Brookline TAB column. Alice was a founder of Visions of Peace with Justice in Israel-Palestine, which has since become the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. A medical doctor, she was instrumental in organizing a series of fact-finding and service delegations to Israel and Palestine, originally called the Jewish American Medical Project. In the past year the focus expanded. Last October I spent the first week of my ten-week visit to Israel and the West Bank with the re-named Health and Human Rights Delegation, which I described in detail on this blog.

Broken Promises, Broken Dreams is Alice’s detailed account of her own efforts to make sense of the conflict during three delegation visits. After an introductory chapter recounting the personal journey that brought her to this issue, the book explores a wide range of issues. Her approach, both descriptive and personal, makes good use of her perspective as a medical doctor concerned with the public health consequences of Israel’s occupation. Those consequences will shock readers who have paid little attention to the people ordinarily omitted from mainstream news coverage.

Alice’s concerns go much further than the purely medical, but as she describes the situation on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, it’s clear that the devastating public health situation is completely intertwined with the political. Israel’s imposition of roadblocks, checkpoints, permits, curfews, and the other mechanisms of occupation make ordinary life impossible. Alice doesn’t shy away from discussing Israel’s rationale for the Separation Wall and everything that goes with it, but she make it clear that the humiliation, disruption, and even deaths of innocents go well beyond any legitimate security concerns.

On a personal level, I was glad to see Alice’s descriptions of people I met and places I visited during my own delegation visit. It’s good to see people persisting, despite everything.

At tonight’s panel discussion, which I hope will draw an audience from across the political spectrum, I will recommend Broken Promises, Broken Dreams  to those who want to get past assumptions and stereotypes unquestioned for far too long. If you want to explore these issues for yourself, join the next Health and Human Rights Delegation. And if you’d like to bring Alice Rothchild to your community to speak about the book, see her website.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:52 am and is filed under Israel/Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.