Author Description

In his visits to the Middle East since the 1967 June War, Pryce-Jones, a British journalist and novelist, has seen a great many Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria and on the West Bank. He finds them generally quite decent, at least relatively. Indeed the non-refugee poor often try to get in; conditions in the camps have tended to improve in the past few years and refugees have heavily entered the labor force. Pryce-Jones also examines the political mechanisms of Israeli occupation, especially the courts and prisons. He concludes that the torture reports principally reflect Arab lack of respect for fact (noting that "The Westerner too is stuck with the stories he is told and those he tells himself"). He points to the Arabs' double humiliations when the Israeli occupiers turned out to be less than fiends, and identifies a kolubuja ("everything hurts") syndrome which "the bedside manner of the foreigner tends to bring out" in the Arabs. The main fact of life on the West Bank is a "slippery and unwilling slide into toleration" which has unmanned the fedayeen resisters' popular base. Pryce-Jones has little to say about the 1970 Jordanian civil war apart from its further weakening of the fedayeen. The book's descriptions make this one of the most distinguished books on the history of the region.