Where the Desert Meets the Sea

by Werner Sonne

“Boker tov, good morning.” She ran her finger farther down the vocabulary list. “Laila tov, good night. Mazal tov, all the best.”

“There is much hate in some people,” he said. “It comes from far away.”

“Toda,” Yael said—thank you

“But it is their homeland, after all. You just said they’ve been living here for centuries.” “Yeah? So?” “I mean, now here we come. No wonder they’re scared we’re going to take it away from them.” Yael straightened up. “Judith, they’ve been here all along, but Jews have too. For thousands of years. We’re definitely not religious here on the kibbutz, you know that. But we are Jews, and we do intend to finally have our own homeland. Where we don’t have to keep apologizing for merely existing. Where we won’t be exiled or exterminated. If the Arabs can understand that, there’s enough room for all of us.” “And if not?” Judith interjected. “Then we’ll defend our ground. With all available means. We built this land up, working with our hands, hard goddamn work, every day. And we don’t have any intention of giving it all up again. Imagine sending all those refugees back—refugees like you, Judith. No country will take them. Where would they even go? Camps?” For a while, only the excruciating whine of mosquitoes could be heard in the room. “But how’s that supposed to work?” Judith asked. “It’s simple: we want a state, our own state, and they should have their own too.” Judith shook her head. “But that means—if we stay here in Galilee and expand our settlements, if this part of Palestine is supposed to become part of our state, then the Arabs in the village here will have to go somewhere else.” Yael shrugged. “They aren’t going to simply accept that!” Judith said. “There’s no peacefu...

“We Jews in Europe, we just learned firsthand what violence means,” Judith blurted. “We were victims. Must we now be perpetrators? Shouldn’t we be the very ones who are most committed to finding a peaceful solution?”

Yael took a deep breath. “We wish to settle here, peacefully, if possible. But that takes two.” She slid under her blanket. “And, by the way, the Palmach are holding shooting practice tomorrow. I think many here would view i...

“The United Nations General Assembly,” they heard over the speaker, “in a vote of thirty-three in favor, thirteen against, and ten abstentions, has decided to partition Palestine.”

“L’chaim,” he shouted. “To life!”

“Hatikvah,” the song of hope.

Within the medieval walls of the Old City stood the shrines of the three world religions: the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Muslim Dome of the Rock as well as the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Jewish Wailing Wall,

As Jewish tradition prescribed, Uri stomped on a glass, that symbol of mourning for the destruction of the Temple.

This book is a novel. It doesn’t attempt to take sides, but rather portrays the human face of this historic drama—in all its many facets. The main characters in this novel are fictional. Kibbutz Yardenim and the Arab village of Deir El Nar aren’t found on any map. And yet the story occurs within a concrete historical framework: it leads up to the two major massacres in the battle for Jerusalem—the attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin outside the city gates and the attack on the doctors and nurses of Hadassah Hospital. These were the two most shocking massacres the world saw in this bloody struggle; they were certainly not the only ones. Brutal murders, rapes, looting, terrorist attacks on innocent people—they too were part of this war. The peace activist Uri Avnery experienced that period as an Israeli soldier and impressively describes his experiences in his extremely readable book 1948: A Soldier’s Tale; The Bloody Road to Jerusalem. Dov Yosef, the military governor of Jerusalem appointed by Ben Gurion, gives the most comprehensive insight into the tense situation of a city cut off from all supplies in his account, The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948, doing so with facts and figures and in the sober manner of his actual profession, as a lawyer. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, is a joint work by British, Israeli, and Palestinian historians published by Cambridge University Press that I found as helpful for understanding the conflict ...

The series Dachauer Hefte provides important insights into events surrounding the liberation of Dachau concentration camp and is partially available in English, titled Dachau and the Nazi Terror: 1933–1945; Testimonies and Memories. My numerous trips to the region, to Israel, to the Palestinian territories, and to surrounding states, have helped me to better get to know the people on the ground and to understand the roots of the ongoing conflict—even when it’s sometimes hard to understand why two peoples simply cannot find common cause. This, despite solutions that finally seemed within reach, at least in the 1990s, when statesmen on both sides were even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, only to fall back into the old hostile patterns of behavior. In all the bitter disputes in the seventy years since the founding of the State of Israel, one institution has shown that it may be possible for those involved to view people as humans first and foremost, and to make the issues of nationality, religion, and ethnicity secondary. The Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, founded by and largely maintained by Jews from the United States, was then and remains now an island of humanity amid a sea of mistrust and hostility.