Checkpoints and Chances: Eyewitness Accounts from an Observer in Israel - Palestine [Paperback]

The collected reports have now been published in "Checkpoints and Chances". Katharine has a few advantages in reporting the situation there: she is a fluent Arabic speaker, and she is a woman, and so can talk to both women and men in that society. During the period of the reports, she travels extensively around the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, and also in Israel. She talks to many people - Palestinians with a wide range of views, Israeli soldiers and peace activists, people who have had their homes demolished or children shot, the parents of a suicide bomber. Many people she talks to are not exceptional, but ordinary people trying to get on with their lives in extraordinary situations: students on a long taxi journey avoiding roadblocks to get to their place of study, people allowed out of their homes for only a few hours a week because of a curfew. Their stories are the core of the book. Theirs are stories that never make headlines, but are nonetheless the stories we need to hear to begin to understand the conflict.

Katharine has an observant eye and a compassionate ear; the different personalities emerge clearly from her writing. We are drawn in to appreciate their aspirations and daily concerns, hopes and fears, which are not very different from ours, but played out in very different circumstances: Can I get treatment for my illness when there is a military checkpoint between my home and the hospital? How will my children be educated when there is a curfew for days on end? Where will my children play when snipers shoot down the street?

What is striking, given that the conflict has gone on for so many years, are the number of people on both sides who say the Jewish and Arab communities could peacefully coexist, if only the differences and injustices of the last 57 years could be addressed. There is a faint sense that it could all have been so different. Sadly, this is clearly not the view of those with power and weapons.

Katharine's reports also fill in the historical background, by noting the impact it is still having today. During the time she was writing, the so-called "security fence" was being built by the Israelis, ostensibly to prevent attacks by Palestinians, but, as becomes increasingly clear, its route seems designed to separate farmers from large swathes of their land.

For those of us receiving her emails at intervals, it seemed each one opened a window to shed light on a different aspect of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. To read them all at once in a book is a more intense experience - we are taken quickly from hope to despair, from peace to outrage at what people are capable of doing to each other, from seeing violence and bigotry to small signs of reconciliation. Katharine writes of her own reactions and we sense her warmth towards people, and her frustration, anger and exhaustion in response to what she has witnessed. The book is not without lighter moments, but the humour is often dark.

We also see Katharine's increasing understanding of the Israeli point of view. At Hebrew classes she meets recent Jewish immigrants. Elsewhere she meets long-term Israeli citizens, and gets more insight into the Jewish story and their desire for a safe haven after the Holocaust.

The conflict has been going on for decades. The grievances and bitterness it has generated seem to be at least a part of the underlying reasons for the attacks on New York in 2001 and recently here in London. To understand what is happening, we need to get beyond the agendas of the politicians and spin-doctors. Accompanying Katharine on her journey around "Checkpoints and Chances", discovering the stories of ordinary lives, is an excellent place to start. If you have read little about the conflict before, you may be surprised, and possibly disturbed, at what is happening that never makes it into "the news".

A word of warning - you may be so disturbed by what you read that, although Katharine doesn't discuss it directly, you may begin to question what the leaders of the Western nations are doing in our name. You may be so discomforted that you feel a need to go and find out for yourself. That's what happened to this reviewer - but that's another story.