Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A formerly imprisoned Palestinian's story of how he came to embrace and lead a joint nonviolent Palestinian-Israeli movement for peace--written with an American Jew. As a youth, Sulaiman Khatib encountered the occupation in his village and attempted to fight back, stabbing an Israeli soldier. He was imprisoned at the age of 14, and served 10.5 years of a 15 year sentence. In jail, Khatib encountered the deep injustice of torture. But it was also a broader political education. He learned Hebrew and English, met thoughtful and committed revolutionaries, and studied history and peace activists like Gandhi and Mandela. After his release he had a life to make--and to live.
The Same Water, the Same Stones tells the story of what eventually led him to reach out across the enmity and suspicion that so many Israeli and Palestinians have for one another and to dedicate his life to joint nonviolence. In his work with Combatants for Peace and other organizations that brought Palestinians and Israelis together to do the difficult work of learning to listen, Khatib slowly came to feel mutual recognition and acknowledgement--of each other's histories, each other's suffering, each other's humanity--was necessary to move forward. And yet it was work that could not lose sight of the great power imbalance in the relationship.
The Same Water, the Same Stones is a book of transformation, and of rooting in place. Intimate and political, it opens up the dangers and hopes of working with others across vast differences in power and experience. And like any deeply searching story, it is also about memory and imagination: all the complex ways these forces shape relationships, identities, and realities in Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere.
Synopsis
A narrative meditation on joint nonviolence, opening a window to the questions of power, multiple narratives, and imagination that touch on struggles for justice everywhere. As a Palestinian youth, Sulaiman Khatib encountered the occupation in his village and attempted to fight back, stabbing an Israeli. Imprisoned at the age of 14, he began a process of political and spiritual transformation still unfolding today. In a book he asked Penina Eilberg-Schwartz, an American Jew, to write, and based on years of collaboration between them, Khatib shares how his activism became deeply rooted in the belief that we must ground all work--from dialogue to direct action to healing--in recognition of the history and humanity of the other. He reveals how he became convinced that Palestinian freedom can flourish alongside Jewish connection to the land where he was born.
In language that is poetic and unflinchingly honest, Eilberg-Schwartz and Khatib chronicle what led him to dedicate his life to joint nonviolence. In his journey, he encountered the deep injustice of torture, witnessed the power of hunger strikes, and studied Jewish history. Ultimately, he came to realize mutual recognition was necessary for both Palestinians and Israelis to move forward. Still, as he built friendships with Israelis and resisted the occupation alongside them, he could not lose sight of the great power imbalance in the relationship, of all the violence and erasure still present as they dreamt forward together.
Intimate and political, In This Place Together opens us up to the dangers and hopes of working with others across vast differences in power and experience. And it opens a new space, shapes a third narrative, and finds another world that can exist--though it's often hard to see--inside this one.