On the Hills of God

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Summary: A journey back in time!
Review: I teared for Jerusalem as I got deeper into this book. It is a crucial read for anyone interested in the Palestinian-Israeli war, but more important, for anyone interested in Life, in truth, and in super writing. "On the Hills of God" is the story of Palestine in 1947-48, through the eyes and Life of a Christian Palestinian surrounded by Moslems and Jews. The characters are fictional, the town is fictional, but Ibrahim Fawal somehow manages to incorporate all the truths and all the facts in a well told novel. I did not live those years, but my Grandparents were married in Palestine in March of 1948, and when I asked her about incidents I read in the book, my Grandmother, teary eyed, told me that it was so. She told me about the daily terrorist acts against the Palestinians accounted in the book. And I was able to follow her through the streets of Jerusalem that the author paints so vividly. The characters may be fictional, but the rest is fact, the rest is a compelling truth. It is the story of an exodus, it is the story of Palestine, it is the story of the Jews that were also forced into the ways of Zionism. Read this book if you want a truthful account of what happened in 1947-48 in the form of a beautifully written novel. I guarantee that you will be transported back in time, and when you wake, your outlook on the region will have changed.

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Summary: Palestinian and Israeli conflict through a teenager¿s eyes
Review: On the Hills of God is set 50 years in the past, yet is written with such heartfelt fervor that readers will be sucked into the story, as if it were happening in the present. The teenaged narrator, Yousif Safi, gives voice to Palestinians who have lost a way of life because of politics, war, appropriation, and injustice that all continue to the present. Ending on a note that makes peace a hopeful eventuality, this book should attract a wide audience.

Rating:
Summary: Hills of Whose God?
Review: One way to deepen your understanding of what happened toward the end of the 30 year period during which England occupied the power vacuum left by the pullout of the Ottoman Turks (or perhaps we can call it a blast-out, in deference to English motorcyclist and honorary Bedouin Lawrence of Arabia), and as the ancient Arab peoples re-packaged into a league of new Arab states interacted with the ancient Jewish diaspora newly energized by WWII and supported by the new American world power, would be to read this book.

The stages of disengagement between indigenous Jews and Arabs, which precede the reverse-Exodus of the diaspora (or at least the portion of the diaspora classifying itself as Zionist), and which co-incides with the Arab expulsion from this ancient and perpetually famous territory, is documented in the lives of Fawal's fictional characters with intricate detail and with constant imagery of the surrounding geography and references to the distant and near-past history of the places.

I don't know enough to say if the New York Times articles and radio addresses wrapped into the story are accurate depictions. Using them this way gives the story a realistic feel.

Having read some of the dramatic founding of modern Israel, and with a working knowledge of Biblical Israel's history, this caught my attention and brought some modern light to bear on the peoples previously categorized in my mind as modern Philistines, many of whom are actually now Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and of course Muslim. As the liberals always tell us, there is a great deal of complexity to this particular area of the world, and this novel deliberately reflects a cross section of it.