This Heated Place - Encounters in the Promised Land (Electronic book text)

This Heated Place takes readers into twenty-first century Israel and the occupied territories. Journalist Deborah Campbell, previously a foreign student in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, returned to the region in fall 2001 to seek insights into one of the world's most intractable conflicts. She drives through the West Bank with an American-Israeli settler in his bombproof SUV; attends the Love Parade in Tel Aviv, where thousands of Israeli ravers celebrate under armed guard; visits a Palestinian family in Hebron following an Israeli army raid; talks to girls at an Islamic school in Gaza; meets Israeli refuseniks who have spent time in prison for their stance; and drinks tea at the refugee camp home of the family of twelve-year-old Mohammad al-Durrah, whose dramatic death in his father's arms made him the Arab world's symbol of opposition to Israeli occupation. Skillfully incorporating elements of political reporting, travel writing and personal observation, Deborah Campbell rejects the simplifications that characterize mainstream journalism, drawing instead upon her own experience of the many facets of Palestinian and Israeli society. Always, she is mindful of the words of someone she met along the way. When it comes to understanding this terrible conflict, he told her, "what you see depends on where you are standing."