You may wonder why I am recommending a book when I start off by saying I nearly gave up after the first couple of chapters. It’s by Dervla Murphy, the Irish traveller and writer whom people may remember for Full Tilt, her account of cycling, single, from Ireland to India in 1963. Some may also remember A Place Apart, her account of cycling the boundary between the two communities, Catholic and Protestant, Northern Ireland and Eire in 1978.
Between 2008 and 2011 she spent time listening to equally divided voices in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, intending to write a book about the life of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation. In the end her travels provided the material for not one but two books: A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza (2013) and Between River and Sea (2015).
From her first breakfast in Jaffa, gazing at a silver-blue sea she reflects ‘never before had I arrived in an unknown country, carrying so much emotional baggage and feeling ill-at-ease rather than eagerly curious.’ She meets entrenched positions, adamant judgements and unconscious generalisations, and conversations with contacts become stilted.
Dervla Murphy has read widely, ploughing through reports, international surveys, histories. How the involvement of outsiders has led to scorn for ‘the human rights industry’ with its ‘internationals’. She walks, talks to anyone who listens, meets all varieties of belief (many unconscious), is shouted at and stoned, listens.
We hailed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dervla Murphy opened my eyes to what it is like to live beside the Wall defacing the land that once grew generations of olive trees beside the families that tended them, that she calls ‘Apartheid Wall’. The tiresomeness of trying to travel through it if you have the wrong papers. She knows her Bible and the history of Zionism with its multiple strands. Above all she records the never-ending, day-in day-out drip of delays, permit-checking, queues, refusals, one-person-turnstiles, that has been Palestinians’ life for 42 years. And the warning, when she marvels at the patience: ‘there is anger there and it is growing’.
I nearly gave up because it all seemed so unchanging. I’m glad I didn’t.
[We have copies of Between River and Sea and A Month by the Sea in the library, as well as three other books by Dervla Murphy]
