How often have people dismissed the Israel/Palestine conflict as “too complex” to understand? Are there only two sides to this 60-plus-year-old crisis in the Middle East? If you’d like to learn more from someone who has been on the ground, interviewing the people involved from a multitude of perspectives and histories, come and meet author Jo Roberts as she navigates this ongoing clash in the award-winning book, Contested Land, Contested Memory: Israel’s Jews and Arabs and the Ghosts of Catastrophe.
Toronto-based Roberts will give a reading on Tuesday, June 6 at 6:30 p.m. at the Courtenay branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library, 300 Sixth St. Hosted by Mid-Islanders for Justice & Peace in the Middle East (MIJPME), the talk is open to the pubic. Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing.
Trained in her native England as a lawyer and anthropologist, Roberts is now a freelance writer. For five years she was managing editor of the New York Catholic Worker newspaper, to which she frequently contributed. Her reportage from Israel and from the West Bank has appeared in EMBASSY, Canada’s foreign policy weekly.
Contested Land, Contested Memory opens in Palestine, in 1948: As Jewish refugees, survivors of the Holocaust, struggle towards the new State of Israel, Arab refugees are fleeing, many under duress. More than 60 years later, the memory of trauma has shaped both peoples’ collective understanding of who they are.
After a war, the victors write history. How was the story of the exiled Palestinians erased — from textbooks, maps, even the land? How do Jewish and Palestinian Israelis now engage with the histories of the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”) and the Holocaust, and how do these echo through the political and physical landscapes of their country?
Vividly narrated, with extensive original interview material, Contested Land, Contested Memory examines how these tangled histories of suffering inform Jewish — and Palestinian — Israeli lives today, and frames Israel’s possibilities for peace.
Roberts’ book earned second place in the 2014 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It has met with critical acclaim from reviewers of diverse political perspectives, including the Journal of Palestine Studies, the Electronic Intifada, and the Times of Israel, and was a finalist for the 2013 US Jewish National Book Awards.
According to EMBASSY, “Her writing has academic credibility and personal appeal. If that sounds unlikely, it is. Only a writer as good as Roberts could make it work — but work it does, as it proceeds to unravel Israel’s paradoxical political identity.…Roberts is empathetic to the suffering of Jews and Arabs alike but she doesn’t rush to judgment. Story by story, she introduces us to an often painful complexity that promises no quick solution, but somehow carries a faint hope.”
And National Catholic Reporter’s review of Roberts’ book has called it a “stunning new book…. Writers have used collective memory to explore the history of groups besides Israelis and Palestinians, but Contested Land, Contested Memory distinguishes itself on several counts… Roberts’ fine writing makes the discourse of collective memory more accessible than many other books do.”