I really don't know what to feel about this book. It was well-written, compelling, packed with history. It was also defeatist, couldn't envision solutions on any issue in the conflict, and in the end, I came off leaving with a bitter taste in my mouth that the author failed to really convey the Israeli reality that had led us to this gloomy point in the dialogue. While I got a sense of Palestinians' humiliation, their persecution, the discrimination they face — a thorough psychological analysis, which had the effect of validating their "narrative" and their "addiction" to the current cycle of relations with Israel, to use the author's terms — the Israeli narrative felt one-sided and less deeply felt. (Perhaps with good reason!) Yes, the Holocaust and existential fear are overriding motivations for the country's at-any-cost approach to security, and the settler movement justifies its metastasis into the West Bank with biblical claims to a Greater Israel (which also, to be precise, is not the correct translation of "Eretz Israel"), but O'Malley fails to assign value to the Second Intifada beyond highlighting the difference in casualties, though Israelis are deeply traumatized by the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada, when terrorists exploded in busy restaurants and nightclubs, and he fails at all to even discuss the trauma of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, of watching the IDF tear away thousands of Israelis from their homes in settlements in the Gaza Strip only to see Hamas rise to power there. Finally, the last discussion about how both sides brainwash their kids: I don't remember being taught in school to hate Arabs, or seeing such material in my textbooks, and I do believe the type of explicit racist narrative-building is more prevalent in the Palestinian education system.

Overall, though, this was a strong indictment of the "peace" process of the last thirty years, especially of the Israeli side, which came off as manipulative, ruthless, willfully ignorant of the validity of the Palestinian narrative. Some of the strongest discussion here was the history of the negotiations, especially the failure at Camp David. I knew the question on the Right of Return was intractable but I never realized why, always seeing it perhaps as a Palestinian bargaining chip, though the discussion of it here made me see its relevance to individual Palestinians who should be able to return to the homes from which they were expelled. That Palestinian dispossession was an Haganah and state policy -- to rid the state of a potentially hostile minority population -- would always come as a shock to me. Most of all, I appreciate the breadth of interviews and the probing into the subjects' psychology. ( )