Where the Desert Meets the Sea

by Werner Sonne

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 ...