The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, explores life in the West Bank by the American novelist and journalist Ben Ehrenreich. It was a gripping read from cover to cover, which is a surprise, as good nonfiction about Israel-Palestine is relatively hard to find. Some books on the conflict are too polemical while others are well reported but written in prose so uninviting, that I have quickly returned them to the shelf.
The author, Ben Ehrenreich , lived with many of the people he writes about which makes for a wonderfully intimate read. Though politics is doubtlessly integral to the narrative, Ehrenreich is extremely attentive to the ways things work (and don't work) in 21st century Palestine but particularly in Nabi Saleh, a village north of Ramallah.
Ehrenreich reports on the myriad of daily ordeals suffered by the Palestinian diaspora over the last 80 years with stunning velocity; it is, at times, difficult to digest that this book is in fact a chronicle of real lives and real people. The author makes no secret of the fact that his viewpoint is not an objective one, though he pledges to write what he experiences and sees in the West Bank first hand. But the evidence he presents is irrefutable; a damning indictment of the Israeli government's occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people.
He openly criticises how Israel frames the occupation and violence that takes place on a daily basis, between Palestinian villagers who oppose occupation and the infamous Israeli defence forces and settlers who beat, shoot or gas them. Through his reports on the ever-encroaching Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Ehrenreich paints Palestinian people as ordinary people who want nothing more than to be recognised as ordinary people with ordinary lives. They are not so 'other', after-all.
As Israeli settlements expand and intolerance grows on all sides, the possibility of a two-state solution is rapidly fading away. It is so important for books like this to be written and for Palestinian voices to be heard, amid the mounting pressures of religious and political tensions in the Middle East and a wave of Islamophobia across Europe and the west.
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