From the Publisher
Combining in equal measure the critical and the compassionate, the tragic and the absurd, this memoir chronicles two interlocking, often clashing journeys—an exploration of the cult of martyrdom in the underground media of the intifada, on the one hand, and on the other, the struggle for friendship across seemingly impossible divides.
The authors lived for six months with a Palestinian refugee family in the Gaza Strip at the beginning of the intifada, and then for the next six years, collected graffiti, videotapes, audiocassettes, posters, and other street media in over one hundred towns in the West Bank and Gaza. Their book is based on these primary materials (with 66 illustrations included) as well as dozens of interviews with leaders and followers, including a rare interview with a Hamas suicide bomber whose bomb failed to explode on an Israeli bus in Jerusalem. Dispensing with the cliches and platitudes surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the book provides access to materials hitherto unavailable and presents in a new and compelling voice the master scripts of the intifada and the rise of the suicide bomber. Disseminated by nationalists and Islamists alike, these materials make it clear that the suicide bomber is not just an Islamist phenomenon but rather a widely shared fantasy that skips across religious and political divides. Indeed, the fantasy of the suicide bomber, the authors suggest, is global in scope.
Here is an important and timely work that will challenge the way we think about the intifada, suicide bombers, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
History Today
"An intense, street-level tour of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . . . [A] unique study"
Financial Times
"A highly unusual and - its subject matter notwithstanding - thoroughly enjoyable book. Part memoir, part travelogue, part portfolio and review of street media - from graffiti to pre-mission videotapes - the book provides just what it promises: a journey into the world of the suicide bomber. . . . The second [part] introduces a unique and quite fascinating collection of major scripts of the intifada, replete with the symbols of self-sacrifice, martyrdom, jihad and victory. . . . Oliver and Steinberg are interested in drawing a portrait, not analysing a movement. They write with humour and often affection for their subjects, and keep their own personalities entirely out of the story. With a light hand they provide a cogent account of the distinctions and the tensions between the nationalists and the Islamists, and the gradual institutionalisation of Hamas over the course of the first intifada. They provide harrowing accounts of the interrogation of collaborators and the murder of an Israeli. They describe not a cult of martyrdom, but an entire social system that supports martyrdom. Without proffering analysis, they describe tight social networks, intense small-group loyalty and the motivating power of the desire for revenge. The presentation of the final video is riveting. The authors describe the irrational exuberance - or what they call the 'ecstatic obliteration' - of this group of young men, for whom life has never been better, more intense or so full of meaning, than on the night before they kill themselves and others. Far from being depressed, suicidal types, these are excited and happy young men revelling in being the centre of attention. Oliver and Steinberg write: 'What the rank-and-file [of Hamas] seemed to live and die for, in the end, was neither hospitals nor politics nor ideology nor religion nor the Apocalypse, but rather an ecstatic camaraderie in the face of death on the path of Allah.' . . . Riveting storytelling."
Washington Times
"[A] beautifully written yet disturbing book . . . written by authors who demonstrate great understanding of the Palestinians' internal and external struggles"
The New York Review of Books -
Christian Caryl
"In The Road to Martyrs' Square, their remarkable and creepy account of life in the Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, Oliver and Steinberg, who lived with various Palestinians there, give us a look at the Hamas milieu from within. It's a world where the cult of 'martyrdom' is celebrated in graffiti, videos, and posters, creating a toxic atmosphere of sadism, kitsch, and religious ecstasy. The book is valuable for its exhaustive documentation of the martyr cult's various uses of propaganda."
Independent columnist -
Johann Hari
The Road to Martyrs' Square is a strange, seductive hybrid . . . captured in sparse prose refreshingly free of academese. Oliver and Steinberg have an almost Proustian ability to capture the essence of a situation through describing a simple sense experience or visual image. . . . The book is at its best when - along with its intellectual analysis - it also conveys the surreal, phantasmagoric nature of ordinary Palestinian life.
Starred Review Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
-
Publishers Weekly
With the beginning of the first intifada in 1987, American scholars Oliver and Steinberg spent six years living in Gaza, collecting interviews and Palestinian political ephemera, much of it related to the multifaceted organization known as Hamas, which first carried out suicide bombings during that time. The pair characterize Hamas's ideology as schizophrenic; the book they have produced feels intentionally disorienting. Part one episodically traces Hamas's development through a political biography of its leader, Sheikh Yasin (who was killed by an Israeli missile last March). Oliver and Steinberg offer a tremendous amount of anecdotal texture, giving a chilling sense of what it was like to live in Gaza as it was engulfed by an Islamism that professes "not only not to be afraid of death, but to love it passionately." Part two offers an unprecedentedly extensive set of photos, translations and interpretations of Hamas graffiti; this section is horrifying and fascinating. Part three offers the most sustained and detailed views, in English, inside the preparation and deployment of suicide bombers, featuring extended exchanges with cell members and the families of the bombers themselves. Knowledgeable, colloquial, relatively nonpartisan and deeply skeptical and smart, this book offers an intensive look at one of the major forces in Palestinian society, one that is as unsettling as it is penetrating. (Jan.) Corrections: In the Nov. 22 review of America's Military Today by Tod Ensign, the author's current employment was misstated. Ensign is the director of Citizen Soldier, not of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. Almost Paradise will, contrary to what's stated in our review (Dec. 13), include a chapter and epilogue dealing with the outcome of the trial of Daniel Pelosi for the murder of Ted Ammon.
Kirkus Reviews
Of suicide as a way of life: a study of the culture of violence surrounding the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When the intifada began in 1988, independent scholars Oliver and Steinberg moved to Gaza and lived with a Palestinian family to study the situation. "We gladly talked to anyone who would talk with us-nationalists and Islamists, leaders and followers, stone throwers and spokesmen, militants and bystanders," they write. Over the next years, some of those people talked with them reluctantly, while others were quite proud to speak openly of how they would "cut off the head of a Jew or a collaborator." Oliver and Steinberg are sympathetic to the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians, including the suicide bombers they take pains to humanize even while showing them to be automata trained by murderous masters. In a memorable sequence, Oliver and Steinberg recall the Hamas ("zeal") movement's spiritual leader: Sheikh Ahmad Yasin, the author of much of the rhetoric of Palestinian terrorism, who, "renowned for his asceticism, would in later years be seen driving around the camps of Gaza in a specially outfitted brown Range Rover, which some said was a gift from the Saudis, while others insisted it was from none other than Arafat." Image is everything, of course, and the authors work with a large collection of photographs and videotapes depicting such things as a knife-wielding giant hand stabbing an Israeli soldier "like a machine gone mad" and mobs of young children waving copies of the Quran while lionizing fallen participants in "martyrdom operations"-not all of whom seem to have believed that they would really earn martyrdom in the bargain. The authors also look closely at therhetoric of the suicide bombers and their coaches-for in such things as taking one's own life in the service of a cause, one Hamas leader tells us, "the importance of 'spurring on' cannot be underestimated."Of much interest to students of the Middle East, and of the psychology of cults.
What People Are Saying
The Oregonian
"A street-level view of how the conflict . . . exploded into a horrific cycle of violence epitomized by nihilism's grandmaster."
Tikkun
"Urgent and hypnotic."
The Winnipeg Free Press
"Completely, refreshingly honest"
Maclean’s
"An informative and deeply unsettling book."
The Raleigh News & Observer
"Tolkienesque"
Loading...