Dark Hope
Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine
For decades, we’ve been shocked by images of violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But for all their power, those images leave us at a loss: from our vantage at home, it’s hard for us to imagine the struggles of those living in the midst of the fighting. Now, American-born Israeli David Shulman takes us right into the heart of the conflict with Dark Hope, an eye-opening chronicle of his work as a member of the peace group Ta‘ayush, which takes its name from the Arabic for “living together.”
Though Shulman never denies the complexity of the issues fueling the conflict—nor the culpability of people on both sides—he forcefully clarifies the injustices perpetrated by Israel by showing us the human dimension of the occupation. Here we meet Palestinians whose houses have been blown up by the Israeli army, shepherds whose sheep have been poisoned by settlers, farmers stripped of their land by Israel’s dividing wall. We watch as whip-swinging police on horseback attack crowds of nonviolent demonstrators, as Israeli settlers shoot innocent Palestinians harvesting olives, and as families and communities become utterly destroyed by the unrelenting violence of the occupation.
Opposing such injustices, Shulman and his companions—Israeli and Palestinian both—doggedly work through checkpoints to bring aid, rebuild houses, and physically block the progress of the dividing wall. As they face off against police, soldiers, and hostile Israeli settlers, anger mixes with compassion, moments of kinship alternate with confrontation, and, throughout, Shulman wrestles with his duty to fight the cruelty enabled by “that dependable and devastating human failure to feel.”
With Dark Hope, Shulman has written a book of deep moral searching, an attempt to discover how his beloved Israel went wrong—and how, through acts of compassionate disobedience, it might still be brought back.
“Dark Hope is the compelling story of an activist, an eminently reasonable, even nonpolitical man. David Shulman was moved to put himself on the line to nonviolently counter the Israeli occupation and what he considered to be the crazed, predatory settlers who had nearly free reign to terrorize ordinary Palestinians. The mournful, elegant words of his journal depict not only horrific atrocities but expose, too, a frighteningly deep and wide fissure in Israeli society. Those words tell of a shameful, ugly side of Israel, while revealing a courageous, gentle part of Israeli society prepared to reverse history.”—Joel Migdal, coauthor of The Palestinian People: A History
“Each word of this remarkable book seeps with the palpable anguish of a witness to the scourge of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Shulman’s description of what he experienced is poignant and deeply disturbing, but his memoir also bears witness to the abiding power of the conscience and human solidarity.”—Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of German Jews
“In the tortuous saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been going on for more than 120 years, a special chapter, at once tragic and heroic, belongs to those efforts by Israelis and Palestinians to break through the usual, official ways of thinking or doing in order to ease human suffering by personal acts of dialogue and joint action on the ground. David Shulman’s book, Dark Hope, is one of the most fascinating and moving accounts of such Israeli-Palestinian attempts to help, indeed to save, human beings suffering under the burden of occupation and terror. The book's human power derives from the author's unusual personality, in which three separate components come together: an ‘American’ optimism about our ability to change the world, an ‘Israeli’ longing for peace and sense of guilt, and a certain spiritual attitude which transcends borders but which has its roots in Far Eastern civilizations. 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
“Dark Hope is 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, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
1 Introduction
2 Jinba, Twaneh, the South Hebron Hills
3 Jerusalem: Isawiyya, Mount Scopus, ‘Anata, Silwan
4 Samaria: Salfit, Yanun, Banu Hassan
5 Saying No
6 The Wall: Maskha, Abu Dis, Ar-Ram, Bil‘in
7 Epilogue
Postscript Glossary Select Dramatis Personae
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