Revenge: A Story of Hope (review)

Blumenfeld's Revenge is the true story of a young American journalist obsessed by an urge to take revenge on a Palestinian who, thirteen years before, shot and slightly injured her father in a Jerusalem alley. During her first visit to the shooter's family, his brother explained the obvious ("it wasn't a personal vendetta"), but Laura did and does not see matters this way. She and the assailant, Omar (long jailed in Israel), undergo parallel transformations as they exchange letters. It is not clear that Omar regrets his participation in an act of terror, but on his release he renounces violence and decides to aid the Palestinian cause through a career in diplomacy: "It is only through personal contacts that Israelis and Palestinians will reach an understanding."

A true story with a happy ending.

On the other hand, last Friday early afternoon, Palestinian terrorists ambushed a private car on the highway north of Ramalla and killed Zvi Goldstein, a settler who had just returned home from his son David's wedding. Zvi's parents, American citizens, and his wife were wounded. The next morning Abdalla Qawasma, a senior Hamas operative from Hebron, was killed by an Israeli army ambush. During the past week, as I write, at least six more Israelis and more than a dozen Palestinians have been killed, a half dozen makeshift rockets have exploded inside an Israeli town near the Gaza strip, and at least three dozen Palestinians have been arrested by Israeli security. Since Blumenfeld completed her memoir, more than 800 Israelis, including many women and children, have been killed by suicide bombers, road ambushes, and other guerilla attacks; more than 2000 Palestinians, again including women and children, have been killed by Israeli air force assaults, tank shells, and other fire exchanges.

This tragedy is not a game of revenge. It is a political conflict between two peoples destined to live on a small piece of land together, but Blumenfeld insists on seeing her problem as "personal." Suffering is always personal indeed, but everything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is political and calls for political solutions. One commentator has written that the best prescription for peace "would be to mobilize 30,000 Laura Blumenfelds." I have been active in the Israeli peace movement for the last twenty-five years, trying hard to mobilize such people, not always without success. More than 65 percent of Israelis are ready to "forgive" and accord the Palestinian statehood; the same proportion among the Palestinians are tired of bloodshed and ready to reach a compromise. Yet the these personal realities have not produced the desired result. Not enough Lauras will ever stand up to be counted. Hope is not to be found in personalizing the conflict and resolving it as feuds are resolved. On the contrary, hope must come out of organized political communities willing and able to hold personal instincts and desires at bay.