The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
4/5
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Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
From an award-winning journalist, a brave and necessary immersion into the everyday struggles of Palestinian life
Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been traveling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. Along the way he has written major stories for American outlets, including a remarkable New York Times Magazine cover story. Now comes the powerful new work that has always been his ultimate goal, The Way to the Spring.
We are familiar with brave journalists who travel to bleak or war-torn places on a mission to listen and understand, to gather the stories of people suffering from extremes of oppression and want: Katherine Boo, Ryszard Kapuściński, Ted Conover, and Philip Gourevitch among them. Palestine is, by any measure, whatever one's politics, one such place. Ruled by the Israeli military, set upon and harassed constantly by Israeli settlers who admit unapologetically to wanting to drive them from the land, forced to negotiate an ever more elaborate and more suffocating series of fences, checkpoints, and barriers that have sundered home from field, home from home, this is a population whose living conditions are unique, and indeed hard to imagine. In a great act of bravery, empathy and understanding, Ben Ehrenreich, by placing us in the footsteps of ordinary Palestinians and telling their story with surpassing literary power and grace, makes it impossible for us to turn away.
Editor's Note
Compassionate & intimate…
Ehrenreich fills in the historical gaps and adds the empathetic element that’s missing from nightly news blasts about Palestinian’s resistance to Israel’s militaristic settlement of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
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Reviews for The Way to the Spring
12 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Sigh. Need I say more?
I’m a liberal Zionist. I have major issues with Israeli policy, in many ways. But this book fails to attribute any Palestinian suffering to their own leadership, Egypt, or Jordan, who treat them like dirt. The second someone fails to apportion blame equally, I am no longer interested.
As for the reviewer who argued that the Holocaust is not unique: nonsense. It is. It is the only example of industrialized slaughter intended to decimate ONE religious or ethnic group. The Final Solution was entirely focused on destroying Europe’s Jewish population, nobody else. It is absolutely unique. There is no comparison between the the establishment of Israel, the subsequent 70 years, and the Holocaust.
Claims of genocide against Israel are preposterous. The Palestinian population has grown exponentially and consistently since 1948, even excluding the Jordanians who claim to be Palestinian. Genocide never involves a consistently increasing birth rate and population growth.
Also, Jews are indigenous to Israel. It’s objective, incontrovertible fact. So whilst I object to continued settlement, I object to many things Bibi does, but this book does nothing to object to Palestinian leadership’s final objective being eradication of Jews from their indigenous home. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5THE WAY TO THE SPRINGBen EhrenreichThis has turned out to be the hardest book I have ever had to review—and I only have to because I said I would. No one will hurt me if I don't. Already that feels strange: the book is all about people being hurt for no good reason. I won't get hurt either way. I've never been hurt, never been threatened; yet somehow my entire life from the age of five or six has been attached to empathizing with people who do get hurt. First it was Roman subjects in the Levant when I was taught about Jesus, then it was blacks I learned about through fanatical sports reading, and native Americans I learned about from westerns that had stopped lying about them. Then it was the Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Chileans, Cubans, Nicaraguans—I mean I went to college.So I became a protestor, an enemy of a state that did not recognize its internal enemies any longer, having understood that in that way we had no power. Throughout the 1980s I endured my fecklessness with chin up, mingling with the other dozen or so protestors at a variety of events, slowly coming to realize that the people of the nation had changed if the nation had not. In the US we are raised to feel superior in a way that somehow works, far more effectively than the Nazis were able to brainwash their people. Somehow in the face of a genocidal trek cross country, expading into a two ocean nation that had decimated every people in its way or swallowed them perhaps—a third of Mexico remains within US borders, so I guess decimated doesn't work. Yet people in the US felt so damn good to be what they were taught they were they could not tolerate the truths leaked by Nixon, Kissinger, and hearings about assassinations—so that very quickly what was shocking and made for riveting television became that which we save for the night-time of forgettable dreams. Here is the psychological secret to the Reaganization of the United States. We were not raised to feel bad about ourselves and the need to do so would have destroyed us. And if there is one thing to know about the US empire it is that it will not be destroyed.So in the 90s I became a political recluse and in 2001 became an exile. Apparently at the same time I relinquished all rights to be a successful writer. A promising start to a career ended. My agent ditched me. He did not understand anything written about the world outside US borders. But I kept writing. I even wrote some rather funny books involving politics and history. I wasn't a mere dabbler.But then this summer I read Rodolfo Walsh's Operation Massacre. This masterpiece of defiant hammerblows was written in 1957 about an Argentina that remained as ugly when Walsh was assassinated in 1976. Within the first twenty pages I was a changed man, a changed writer. A faucet had been turned on. Here I was, a 57 year old man, and I wondered if everything I had ever written had been utterly inutile, ultimately the work of a lumpen-dilettante. I should have devoted my writing life to non-ficitonal journalism attacking the powers that caused misery throughout the world. I hsould have take C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite and run with it.Fuck it. Such thoughts inevitably go away. Except that I had already 'pre-ordered' Ben Ehrenreich's The Way to the Spring, which arrived before I could exorcise Walsh. I will never be the same.I knew Ehrenreich's book would be very good, for I had read some of his journalism about Palestine as well as his novel Ether. This was a great writer. But lots of journalists are quite good, and besides, what did I not know about Palestine? About ten years ago I gave a couple lecture to geography students about Palestine and the idiocies we have all been forced to swallow. How a land filled with people had become a land without people for a people without land. How the nomads of the Negev had been told to move—and never return, of course, move along for good--along so the permanence of nuclear weaponry could remain. How after the horrors of the Holocaust, no horrors perpetrated by Israelis could be internationally sanctioned. (You can imaging how long that paragraph could be.)The first error was thinking I knew what I was talking about. Ehrenreich's book added more than a dozen surprising facts to my eastwest bank of knowledge. And I was impressed at his approach, not the often lauded admission he makes that the book is going to take a side, rather his means of refusing to remove himself from the book at the same time he refuses to inject himself into his book. It was on page 22 when he was discussing his beliefs with one of his friends made during his times in Palestine, when he wrote 'I might even have said that I believed that God was struggle...', ending the paragraph a couple lines later with, 'Whatver I said, Bassem nodded, and never brought it up again.' I knew then that, on the deepest possible level, I was reading an honest book.And thoughout the book I came across instance after instance of superb writing of all kinds. In such a journalistic book, the narrative cannot get lost in the mastery of the writing, but what is the point of writing if one is going to refuse the quest for mastery? Ehrenreich is a master. I will provide but one example, because I am so impressed by it that it ranks with the many lines I have noted throughout my reading life that I half-wish I had written: “Most of them looked happy, or if not happy, at least excited and relieved, like people gulping hungrily at poisoned air.”And reading the book you will get more than your quota of horror stories about what happens to powerless people ruled by monsters, instance after instance of injustice, dehumanization, casual brutality. Post-Holocaust Zion become the free zone for a Utopian Lord of the Flies. And after all, there is the spirit of the matter: a people of extraordinary faith—and what good is that, one may now fairly ask—an ancient people of highly evolved morality—that we forget like all moralities may rapidly devolve, something well known in the prisons of Odessa and beyond—that the spiritual under the greatest of trials is indeed easily defeated: for all your tales of faith and courage, the genre of Holocaust survival tales, even if only an idea survived, for all these tales you have one basic countering fact: the state created to balance an historical wrong is among the most barbaric and morally corrupt we have ever seen on the planet…Not so surprisingly given iron lung support by the only country that rivals Israel in barbarity, hypocrisy and corruption, the land of a thousand broken treaties…So what then? I think Ehrenreich would say that the struggle continues as it must. And he is certainly not wrong. But what do I do? What have I ever done? Nothing, really, and it’s too late to do anything effective besides think and write and tell the truths, leave behind mole turds where Walsh and Ehrenreich left behind fine spices and herbs. Yet no, maybe there is one thing I can do after all, and I will try to do it. I will try to find the question that is not being asked, the question that might some day change the farcical play at dialogues. I’m beginning to form that question even now: I have a sense that questions of such import are always very well hidden, and where would I hide a question about Israel? Easy: among the unspeakables. In the box one is strung up (or jailed a la Vanunu) for opening. It has been opened before and all who did so have been labeled lunatics—probably because they were: I hope they fell short of establishing a genre, these holocaust deniers. But there may be something else in the box that needs adjusting, and maybe that is the thought that the Holocaust as a unique event is an absurd and even by now a pathetic survival need for those who not only have survived but have moved on to mimic their persecutors. Holocausts, genocides, whatever the fuck they are called today, tomorrow, as they are in process, are not at all unique, nor any of their victims more noble than any other. The Nakba, of course, is a Holocaust, big fucking H, but so are all the expansionist slaughters of indigenous peoples, so are nuclear tests on atolls, so are mass and complete removals of people from British Islands for US military use as at Diego Garcia, so even in their disorganization and halting natures the many assaults during the years of the USSR on the stans of today and the confusions of the Caucusus, so, for that matter, is perhaps the worst the nibbling and perpetual genocide perpetrated from time beyond recall by man against woman…One must end all arguments against Israeli atrocities with some sort of apologia. I don’t think Ehrenreich stooped to that. I don’t remember and don’t know how far back I would have to read to be sure he did not. So nor will I. Israel is a rogue nation practicing appalling acts that need to be stopped as soon as possible. The concern, of course, is that Israel’s enemies have long refused to recognize Israeli right to nationhood. Perhaps they have yet to demonstrate that they deserve to be considered worthy of belonging among that small group of nations that deserve to be recognized as such.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book has revised my way of thinking about some of the issues involved in the Middle East, particularly those involving Israel and the Palestinians. The author, an accomplished journalist, lived with his subjects during a 3-year-period so he knows firsthand about the subject. It is too easy to forget what life is like when one is living under the rule of another, especially when that other abuses their power. I can’t even imagine trying to live under the conditions the Palestinian people have endured for so long – the abuses of the Israeli military, the settlers stealing their land, poverty because everything they owned and valued has been stolen from them, their constant humiliation and degradation, not being able to travel freely even in their own areas and the horrors of having loved ones jailed and killed for none or minor infractions. This book has decimated my respect for Israel and its military and increased my respect for the people of Palestine.