KEY POINTS:
Does friendship run true even when the world turns rotten? Author Jeffrey Goldberg thought so, once. Now, he knows that what becomes tested and true in a ravaged world are one's own beliefs.
Goldberg grew up in New York in the 1970s, inspired by a potent mix of socialist enthusiasm and Jewish history. But while most of his friends admired the PLO, Goldberg looked up to the Jewish fighters who created Israel. He became a Zionist.
So he moved to Israel and worked as a military police officer at a desert prison for Palestinian insurgents. Always a humanist, he finds he is out of place, the only guard there to believe Palestinians should have a state.
He talks to the prisoners. Amid the brutality of both sides, he meets a man named Rafiq from a refugee camp in Gaza, an intellectual less driven by violence than most of his compatriots.
The two men become entwined in a debate they both value intensely. Goldberg imbues their relationship with a symbolic importance. If they can communicate, isn't there hope for everyone? He is shaken to realise that, if they met again in the outside world, Rafiq would try to kill him. "It would not be personal", says Rafiq.
Goldberg refuses to accept this, and in the outside world they do achieve a kind of friendship. Then 9/11 happens and for many, the conflicts of the Middle East are reduced to a single template: Islam v America. Many more who refuse to see things this way find themselves rendered irrelevant.
Rafiq, a member of the largely secular Fatah group in the PLO, moves inexorably towards Muslim fundamentalism. Israel/Palestinian relations collapse into Intifada. Helicopter gunships and suicide bombers extract their terrible tolls, and Gaza becomes a "society ravaged by a cult of death".
But the tale is not unremittingly bleak. Jeffrey Goldberg, now an award-winning writer with the New Yorker, takes us far into the hearts and minds of all manner of people on both sides.
Fundamentalism provides Rafiq with truth. To Goldberg, it is "the thief of mercy". In the end, Rafiq tells Goldberg he worries for him if he hears of a bombing in Jerusalem when Goldberg is there. So they are friends.
It means so much and so little. Rafiq now belongs to the suicide-bombing culture. Goldberg is not a man to hate, although Rafiq has become one. Neither man resiles from the way his side wields power.
Goldberg quotes with approval the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, who says understanding will not bring change. We understand each other already, says Oz. And we reject what we understand.
There is a rare subject here: not the possibilities but the limitations of hope. Yet, disturbing and very moving, the book also retains an optimism. A great work.
* Simon Wilson is an Auckland reviewer.
* Picador, $38
