Saturday at the book club

So, for the past few months (since moving to Israel), I have had a wonderful time meeting with a group of ladies (a mixture of Americans and people from the UK) for book club. We meet about once every six weeks and often read literature that I would never consider reading on my own. But with a book club, it makes it a lot more interesting. Last time was Brideshead Revisited, and English classic, and this time around we read The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan. It is a (non-fiction) story of an Arab family who lost their home in 1948 (when thousands of Palestinians fled, evacuated, or were forced from their homes) to a Bulgarian Jewish family, and their unusual friendship that develops from the Six Day War in 1967 until 2004.

Half of the women in our book club are married to Israeli Arabs, so it's very interesting to here their perspective on things. And one of them was raised in an incredibly pro-Zionist family, so she had grown up with idea that the Jews had a sort of "Right to Return" to their Promised Land ("A people without land to a land without people," as the saying goes). Now, as a woman married to an Arab man, her viewpoint on the Arab-Israeli conflict has been tempered somewhat. Needless to say, with such a hot topic in this part of the world, there was some fantastic discussion and all of us were moved by the story.



And here's two of our little ones playing after discussion. Amelia is so enamoured with him!

So, if you get a chance, I would recommend the book. I think the author does a pretty good job of writing as objectively as possible, but it's hard to come into this conflict without a prejudice toward one side or the other.