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Reviews (1)
13 Jul, 2019
A fascinating and truthful story of discovery
The author's father was Matti Peled, a Zionist and a senior Israeli general in the Six Day War of 1967. After Israel's military victory, he argued that it should offer the Palestinians a state of their own because holding on to the West Bank and the people who lived in it was a mistake. Popular resistance to occupation would arise and Israel's army would be used to quell that resistance, turning the Jewish state into an increasingly brutal occupying power and eventually into a bi-national state. He later became a Professor of Arabic, an Israeli MP and a peace activist, who was increasingly critical of Israeli policies. He rejected the double standard that Jewish people deserve to live on the same land as Palestinians, yet deprive them of their rights.
His son, Miko, gradually developed similar views to his father, but at school was decried as an "Arab-lover". Drafted into an army special forces unit, he was told to walk up and down the streets in Ramallah and to "break every bone in the body" of anyone who looked at them. Years later he learned that people under military occupation have the legal right to engage in armed resistance.
Miko came to recognise that his father had played a major role in establishing a colonialist enterprise in Palestine through violence and then strove to maintain it through compromise with its victims, the Palestinians. "So it strikes me as ironic: the people my father wished to save, the Israelis to whom he dedicated his life, despised him; and the Palestinians, whom he fought to dispossess though he later thought it prudent to allow them limited rights, hail him as a hero."