I've advocated for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for most of my adult life, and during all those years, I've been struck, time and again, by how little non-Palestinians actually know about the Palestinian people.

Thus, when I recommend books on the conflict, I tend to lean more toward works that emphasize the Palestinian narrative - certainly not exclusively, but, let's say: 60:40.
Anyone who's been to Hebrew school, or grown up in Israel, or even turned on the nightly news a time or two, has heard the Israeli narrative. They've likely even heard a variety of opinions, and calls for peace.

But very few have heard Palestinians speaking for themselves.

It's very hard for American Jews to get to know Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, if only because Israel/Palestine is so far away, and for Israeli Jews it's not much easier. Indeed, between the Gaza blockade and the various laws and physical obstacles controlling travel in the West Bank, it's increasingly difficult.

So: Books.

And this week's recommendation.

I Shall Not Hate is a memoir that is as lovely as it is heart-rending, by a life-long proponent of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, Gazan physician Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish.
"Your home is where you feel safe," he writes early in the book. "To be pushed out of it is to be marked with the scar of expulsion for the rest of your life."

"However I was never drawn in by the loss, nostalgia and outrage my grandfather expressed.... I knew there was a better way, and even as a child I set out to find it."

In spite of grinding poverty and the constant upheaval of violence, Abuelaish manages a sterling academic career, going to medical school and becoming the only Palestinian doctor to work in an Israeli hospital. He also finds himself something of "an unofficial peace envoy," hosting Israelis in his Gaza home, planning cross-cultural meetings with like-minded Palestinians, and raising his children to understand that "we are more similar than we are different, and we are all fed up with the violence."

Yet for all that, just as Israeli peace advocates have lost loved ones to terrorism, Abuelaish's convictions couldn't protect his family during Operation Cast Lead.

Two days before the 2009 ceasefire, Abuelaish's home was targeted by an Israeli tank; a shell smashed through a bedroom wall, and his niece and three of his daughters were killed instantly.

"Schoolbooks, dolls, running shoes, and pieces of woods were splintered in a heap, along with the body parts," he writes of that unthinkable moment. "There was brain matter on the ceiling."

His life shattered by horror, it would hardly have been surprising if Abuelaish had reversed his old convictions, or at the very least, withdrawn from the struggle for co-existence.

What is perhaps the most astonishing thing, then, is that he did not - and is able to write about "the potential good that could come out of this soul-searing bad," of the possibility that the sides "might bridge the fractious divide that has kept us apart for six decades."
Abuelaish is an impressively honest author, noting his own limitations and those of both sides to the conflict, and in spite of his incomprehensible loss, I Shall Not Hate provides a genuinely hopeful look into the heart of the conflict.

What does this man, who has suffered so much, believe stands between Israelis and Palestinians?

"I believe that the disease affecting our relationship - our enemy - is ignorance of one another."

Please read I Shall Not Hate.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli  freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter. She also crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles (despite being only an Angry Lady and not at all Black) and atheist-interfaith blog NonProphet Status. All recommendations are entirely her own.