IPSC book launch: Kenizé Mourad: "Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israel Conflict"

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | event notice Tuesday April 12, 2005 12:13 by Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign - IPSC supportpalestine at ireland dot com 087 207 2187

Irish Writers' Centre, 19 Parnell Square North @ 7.30pm

Journalist and author Kénize Mourad will launch her new book "Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israel Conflict" in the Irish Writers' Centre, Parnell Square, on Friday 22nd of April @ 7.30pm.

Admission free - all welcome.

Working for over 15 years as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Kenizé Mourad had resisted her desire to write a book on the region. She was all too aware of the risk of being accused of anti-Semitism from one side, or anti-Arab racism from the other. Now, she feels she has to give a voice to the men, women and children, both Palestinian and Israeli, who have been living in the centre of a terrifying struggle over which they have no control.

Sharing the discomfort of waiting for hours behind checkpoints in the scorching heat, Mourad collected first-hand accounts of some 40 people – from the mother of a suicide bomber to the sister of a bomb victim, and from an Israeli settler to an Israeli lawyer defending Palestinians. Mourad spent two to three days with each and saw their lives first hand. She hopes this book will in some way contribute to a better understanding of the human realities behind the political headlines.

Salim, a Palestinian tells how three times soldiers bulldozed the home he had built for his children, and how three times he rebuilt it. ‘Anyone in this world who has his land occupied and does not fight is an animal. We will continue to fight back’, he says.

Most of the voices express a hunger for peace, but there are also a minority for whom peace is not a goal, or who want it at the price of the other side’s total defeat. Mourad feels there is a terrible, and mutual, misunderstanding. “Manipulated by extremists at either end, most of those I interviewed were convinced that the other side wanted to annihilate them.”

For Kenizé Mourad, hope lies with those few Israelis who are fighting with a rare moral courage for universal human rights, who are fighting, not only for a victimised people, but also for their own country to survive.

In the Epilogue of OUR SACRED LAND, Yitzhak Frankenthal, whose son Arik was killed by Palestinians, calls bravely not for retribution, but the prevention of the deaths of innocent civilians: ‘I would rather have the finger that pushes the trigger or the button that drops the bomb tremble before it kills my son’s murderer, than for innocent victims to be killed.’ It is the simple and crucial message of this book that this call be heard.