Sayed Kashua was born in the small, impoverished village of Tira—an Arab Palestinian village within the borders of Israel—where he was raised and where he still thinks of as “home,” even after immigrating to the United States three years ago.
On 1979, an Israeli censorship committee chaired by the justice minister deleted five evocative paragraphs from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s memoir: his first-person account of the expulsion of Arab residents from the towns of Lydda and Ramle during Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-49. The description contradicted the heroic official line, which pictured Arabs as fleeing the fighting, not being deliberately forced out by Israeli forces.
This thriller about the Israeli-Arab conflict comes with rare praise from one of the masters of suspense fiction and with a premise that suggests exploration of deep moral dilemmas. The endorsement comes from Stephen King, who says the book is “about the lies we tell ourselves until the truth is forced upon us,” and is “what great fiction is all about.”
All sides have jumped on this tragedy to further
their own political agendas.
The pursuit of equal rights by Israel’s Arabs is challenging the Jewish character of the state. Moment explores the tensions at the heart of the political relationship between Arabs and Jews.
