Of human bonds and bondage

The title of the book suggests a mawkish story about a Muslim-Jewish friendship amidst the flames of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It says much for Jeffrey Goldberg's reportorial skills and engaging honesty that it is saved from such a fate.

These qualities, however, by no means, make this a great book, but they certainly make it a thought-provoking one.

Prisoners traces Goldberg's evolution as a Jew, from unquestioning belief to hardened Zionist to a more tempered outlook against the background of the West Asian crisis.

As a dewy-eyed Zionist Goldberg travels to Israel to work, like all good Jews, in a kibbutz. Niggling doubts about this modern-age Promised Land develop as he cleans out chicken pens in an atmosphere that is far from attractive. They grow when, as part of his compulsory military service, he is detailed to Ketziot, the biggest Israeli prison stuck out in the Negev desert.

As part of the military police guarding some of the future leaders of Palestine, Goldberg finds his American values at odds with the extreme positions on either side of the wire fence. The Israelis at the camp consider him a bleeding-heart liberal. The Palestinian prisoners mostly treat him with suspicion.

Nevertheless, Goldberg strikes up a guarded friendship with one of them, the studious Rafiq. A statistician by training, Rafiq's positions on the conflict are at once nuanced and biased. Goldberg is intrigued enough to continue the friendship after both leave Ketziot.

Indeed, the choice of title is a clever one, suggesting that both the Israelis and Palestinians are prisoners of their ideologies.

Certainly, both Goldberg and Rafiq struggle to come to terms with their religions and nationalities. For Goldberg, the Ketziot experience convinces him that he can be an American and a Jew, without compromising his loyalty to either identity. Rafiq is more ambivalent as a moderate Palestinian committed to the cause of his people as well as to peace.

Yet, their relationship is never free of suspicion. There is one telling passage when Rafiq asks Goldberg to carry back a clock and a packet of seeds as gifts for friends and relatives. Later in the hotel, Goldberg suspects he's fallen for the oldest trick in terrorist book and destroys the clock.

Even as Goldberg comes to terms with his identity, Rafiq abjures the brute uncertainty of Palestinian politics to study in a Washington university. Despite this, he becomes an Islamic fundamentalist in his world-view. He insists his wife be veiled and views America as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

The appeal of the book lies in the fact that it is an essentially human and flawed personal journey that offers no concrete answers to age-old problems. Most of all, it is refreshingly free from the tiresome determinism that plagues the West Asian crisis.

Goldberg is at his best with straight reportage, especially when he travels through the West Bank and Gaza in the aftermath of the short-lived Oslo peace accords to meet Palestinian leaders, some of whom he guarded at Ketziot. His accounts provide a useful worm's eye view of why the Oslo talks failed to bring peace to West Asia.

He rightly criticises the Palestinians for taking extreme positions against the reality of Israel's existence and he correctly identifies the Israeli siege mentality that has turned yesterday's Holocaust victims into today's oppressors.

If the book irritates it is mostly because Goldberg clings to his belief in the Biblical shibboleth of the Jewish homeland and he falls back on the old arguments of the Holocaust to stake the claim.

He is also startlingly blinkered in his views of the Quran, noting the number of anti-Semitic references within it. He is far less discriminating about the Old Testament, which preaches a similarly exclusionary religion. It was, after all, the poor old Canaanites, the unbelievers, who faced the brunt of the returning Jews all those centuries ago.

Coming from a hard-nosed reporter, this outlook is unexpected. By viewing an essentially political crisis through a religious prism, he falls into the same trap as politicians on either side of the negotiating table.

Goldberg also ignores the fact that anti-Semitism is not a West Asian creation but a Christian one. It developed, ironically, as a byproduct of the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was this deep-rooted anti-Semitism across Europe that enabled Hitler to murder six million Jews nine centuries later. Today, West Asia is paying the price of a European folly.

PRISONERS
A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide

Jeffrey Goldberg
Picador
Price: £16.99; Pages: 312