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Reviewed by:
  • Palestine Speaks: Voices from the West Bank and Gaza ed. by Mateo Hoke, Cate Malek
  • Melisa Ortiz Berry
Palestine Speaks: Voices from the West Bank and Gaza. By Mateo Hoke and Cate Malek (eds). San Francisco, CA: McSweeny’s Books, 2014. 320pp. Paperback, $16.00.

“There’s real suffering in Palestine, there’s real heartbreak. And it’s more than what people think it is,” says a chemistry professor and blogger in the West [End Page 204] Bank (109). These are the sentiments Palestinian interviewees express in Palestine Speaks: Voices from the West Bank and Gaza, compiled and edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke. A project of the nonprofit group Voice of Witness, which focuses on fostering a better understanding of human rights crises through the use of oral histories, the book seeks to show that Palestine is not doomed to hopelessness nor is it the victim of an “intractable conflict” (18). Instead, it aims to present Palestinians as a people with a united heart divided by geopolitical boundaries. The compilers and editors wanted to humanize what can seem like an unending conflict by focusing on the human experience of living under military occupation for generations.

Hoke and Melek met while studying journalism and previously worked together on a human rights project interviewing Mexican immigrants. Melek now teaches English at Bethlehem University and Hoke reports on issues from the Middle East to the Amazon jungle. Despite being journalists from the United States, they found that after receiving the hospitality of a shared coffee or meal, their Palestinian narrators living in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza were eager to tell their stories.

The interview process itself took almost four years and resulted in over 250 hours of audio. The team, made up of the editors, other interviewers, and translators, recorded over fifty people, fifteen of whose stories made it into the book. These fifteen were not chosen to represent the Israeli-Palestinian conflict per se, but for their diversity. The editors asked the narrators to give a birth-to-now chronology, then took the transcripts and edited them into first person narratives for a “novelistic level of detail” to avoid the appearance of being merely case studies (19). To ensure that the content and emphasis remained those of the narrator, each edited piece was returned to the narrator for final approval. The final fifteen narrated pieces have been fact-checked, and an italicized editor’s note on the interview’s context precedes each edited first-person narration. The book as a whole begins with an introduction, editors’ note, and map. It then concludes with useful appendices comprised of a timeline of the conflict, a glossary, Palestinian demographics, literary prose, and two academic essays.

The interviews themselves reveal a collective anxiety experienced on a daily basis. “It’s exhausting,” says one woman in the West Bank of the uncertainties and delays in her everyday life, from traffic to pop-up checkpoints (110). An Israeli settler adds, “What I feel isn’t anger. It’s frustration.” The frustration is felt by Gazans stuck behind a blockade that limits everything from a journalist’s desire for lip-gloss to the irregularity of necessities like potable water and electricity (124). And yet, out of a love for their land one man leaves a stable career in the United States for his parents’ residence in Gaza, and another stays rather than train elsewhere as a runner—for the land itself is the issue. Stifled by the regulations surrounding their rights to it, the narrators oscillate from describing a suffocating lack of personal space [End Page 205] to the loneliness of a divided people. These frustrations over daily hassles and the choices made to remain on the land expose a general sense of the interviewees’ anxiety.

The narrators reveal not only daily nuisances but also how frustration can turn into retaliation. One man who has since become a lawyer for Palestinian prisoners is an example of how this escalation occurs. He shared how, as children in a refugee camp, he and others responded to the taunting of soldiers and settlers by throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags, and then in their teens...

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