On the Brink

""Alice Rothchild takes us on an extraordinary journey into the heart and soul of Palestinian life. Her observations are poetic and her analysis acute. She creates a shared understanding between the reader and the people she writes about that cannot be forgotten. Exquisitely rendered."" --Sara Roy, senior research scholar Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University ""Alice Rothchild's journal On the Brink captures the range of Palestinian and Israeli reactions to the events and reality that generated the recent Gaza invasion. Palestinian resilience, victimhood, steadfastness, anger, and determination to live despite the horrible conditions and dehumanization policies. She also managed to reflect the dominant Israeli public frame of minds which has been hostage to the tension between Jewish values and Zionist ideology as stated in one of her entries. A must read for those who seek to understand the Israeli Palestinian story from within and with an intense and direct call to reflect on the question of how long can people in this land sustain such a process of victimization, oppression, and manipulation of their various identities."" --Mohammad Abu-Nimer, associate professor of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Program at the School of International Service, American University ""There are personal memoirs of people who've visited or lived in Israel-Palestine, there are scores of individual narratives about the people of that land, there are academic tracts on the historical, political, legal, sociological, or psychological issues that arise there--and then, there is Alice Rothchild's account! Coming out of a visit to--in her words--an 'abnormal place, ' she succeeds in showing us its 'normalcy' its diversity, its contradictions, its refugee camps, villages, towns and cities, its famous characters alongside its ordinary heroes, its extraordinary events as day-to-day experience. In an inimitable style that draws you in on a gripping voyage while encouraging you to deeply reflect on its meaning, Rothchild offers us a collection of iconic, heartbreaking tales and puts them in the necessary context of historical Zionism, its claim to (so-called) democracy, and its inexorable occupation of Palestine. She never succumbs to the conventional 'two-sides-to-every-story' or 'different narratives' temptation; instead, she recounts a moving, sensitive, knowledgeable real story. Reading this book, from its early 'is anyone looking?' to its final 'great sadness and fear, ' will be a sobering, painfully gratifying experience."" --Anat Biletzki, Quinnipiac and Tel Aviv University; Chairperson of B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (2001-2006) ""An honest, compassionate and revealing account of the author's travels through the region on the eve of Israel's latest attack on Gaza. Trained as a physician, Alice Rothchild knows how to listen to her subjects and locate the heart of their stories, while offering us the reader an accurate diagnosis of all she has witnessed."" --Jonathan Cook, author of Disappearing Palestine ""Alice Rothchild's new book is a masterpiece of the journal genre. Carefully and beautifully written (the author is a wonderful stylist), it is invaluable as an ethnography blending slices of daily life among Jews and Palestinians with exceptionally keen insights and observations about the ongoing regional tragedy. She sees and listens with the trained, sympathetic eye and ear of a physician and also of a Jew who understands that Israel can end the occupation while Palestinians cannot. Eschewing polemics altogether, she persuades by compassionately attending to the fears, angers, hopes,