Shipler expands

Reviewer: T.H. Seal

David Shipler has now expanded, revised and up-dated what was already the most considered and compassionate account in print of how Israelis and Palestinians (Arabs and Jews, as Shipler more contentiously puts it) think about each other, their shared pasts and their unclear future apart and together. Arab and Jew was published in 1986, revised in 2002, and now worked over once more. Shipler has decided to eschew the pessimistic advice of an Israeli friend, who recommended that he "simply insert a sentence at the beginning: Everything is the same, just worse".

I first met David Shipler during the five years when he served as bureau chief for The New York Times in Jerusalem. I value him as a friend, and greatly respect the integrity, the meticulously honest and accurate research, the moral force and drive in argument which he has brought to all his books, and now to his blog as well. Even, however, those who have never met Shipler should find Arab and Jew a remarkably cogent, hard-headed, clear-eyed assessment of the Middle East dispute.

What they will find first of all is evidence of a first-rate reporter in action, sifting and checking evidence meticulously, fairly ensuring that all voices are listened to, not taking anything on trust, analysing the context and the connotations of everything said to him. Those with no interest in the Middle East could still profit from scrutinising a master-writer at work.

Shipler's own voice (a shrewd, fair, demanding one) sets the tone for Arab and Jew, but the book is also jam-packed with a cacophony of other speakers and a miscellany of other characters. Shipler instructs by illuminating, shining light on one prejudice or article of faith after another, alternating between Israelis and Palestinians, trying to find common threads even if not common ground. Voices often relegated to the chorus are given their due. Shipler is a first-rate listener, and approaches his task with an ostensibly modest aim: "not to find the right answers but to ask the right questions".

Those questions pertain to history, geography, sociology, psephology, politics, but most especially psychology. Shipler's focus throughout is no attitudes, images and stereotypes, particularly on the way they have "insinuated like indelible stains" into people's most intimate thoughts and sentiments. That thinking and feeling is laid out, one bit after another, or one on top of another, or one head-butting and confronting the other. The net effect is not a collage or a pastiche but a proper, fully-formed palimpsest.

Other books tell us different things we need to know about Israelis and Palestinians. Lawrence Wright's 13 Days in September provides a quite gripping re-run of the Camp David negotiations. Aaron Miller claimed the best title for a book on the Middle East dispute, with his The Much Too Promised Land. Amos Oz's To Know a Woman would break anyone's heart, and confirm the injustice in Oz's not yet having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Raja Shehadeh (one of the voices in Shipler's book) writes poignantly about Palestinian trails and traces in the land. All those books evince two defining traits which Shipler identifies, "a continuity of calloused wisdom" and "a hardness to the dreams". There is hardness in Shipler;s writing too, but only the hardness which comes with doggedly seeking clarity, perspective and insight.