FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“One of the most fascinating and moving accounts of Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror. Anyone who is pained and troubled by what is happening in the Holy Land should read this human document, which indeed offers a certain dark hope.”
A. B. Yehoshua, author of A Woman in Jerusalem

“A merciless eye- and heart-witness report on the corruption of the Zionist idea in the occupied West Bank. David Shulman, one of Israel’s most prominent scholars, documents passionately his and a small group of his activist friends’ resistance against overwhelming forces of fanaticism and indifference. This is an invaluable testimony to the still-living conscience which brings light to our darkness.”
Yaron Ezrahi, author of Rubber Bullets: Power and Conscience in Modern Israel

Dark Hope
Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine

David Shulman

On the eve of yet another effort at forging a lasting peace in Israel and Palestine, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes readers into the heart of the long-running conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening memoir that reveals the unforgettable human stories behind the angry faces and despairing pronouncements. A soul-searching memoir, Dark Hope chronicles the efforts of Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—in the peace group Ta‘ayush to bring aid to Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. In the face of hostile settlers, police, and soldiers, the members of Ta‘ayush work through checkpoints and blockades to deliver food, medicine, and basic human comfort. By focusing on the human dimension of the occupation, Shulman forcefully clarifies its inherent injustice. We meet ardent partisans on both sides—but we also see ordinary people radicalized by conflict. Settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, soldiers blow up houses, police savagely beat nonviolent demonstrators, and families and communities are irrevocably destroyed. With Dark Hope, Shulman has written an unforgettable book, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how it might still be brought back.

David Shulman teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been a MacArthur fellow. He was born in Iowa but moved to Israel in 1967 at age eighteen.

 

David Shulman is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Levi Stahl at (773) 702-0289 or lstahl@press.uchicago.edu