This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict - Paperback

by Greg Myre (Author), Jennifer Griffin (Author)

A profoundly different way of looking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times and Fox News respectively, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, witnessed a decades-old conflict transformed into a completely new war. The West has learned a lot about asymmetrical war in the past decade. At the same time, many strategists have missed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become one of them. This book shows the importance of applying these hard-won lessons to the longest running, most closely watched occupation and uprising in the world.

The entire conflict can seem irrational -- and many commentators see it that way. While raising their own family in Jerusalem at the height of the violence, Myre and Griffin look at the lives of individuals caught up in the struggles to reveal how these actions make perfect sense to the participants. Extremism can become a virtue; moderation a vice. Factions develop within factions. Propaganda becomes an important weapon, and perseverance an essential defense. While the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to achieve their goals after years of fighting, people on both sides are prepared to make continued sacrifices in the belief that they will eventually emerge triumphant.

• This book goes straight to the heart of the conflict: into the minds of suicide bombers and inside Israeli tanks. We hear from Palestinian informants who help the Israeli military track down and kill Palestinian militants. Israeli settlers in isolated outposts explain why they are there, and we hear the frustrations of a Palestinian farmer who has had his olive grove cut in half by Israel's security barrier
• Shows the important lessons that can be learned by viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of modern, asymmetrical war
• Authored by long-time reporters on the Middle East, the book provides a balanced and detailed look at the fighting based on first-hand experience and hundreds of interviews
• Explains how the landscape of the conflict changed and why the traditional approach to peacemaking is no longer valid

Front Jacket

No other conflict in the world has dragged on longer, engendered more bitterness or defied more attempts at resolution than the battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Over the past decade, Greg Myre covered this conflict for the New York Times, and his wife Jennifer Griffin covered it for Fox News, and they arrived at the same surprising conclusion: the conflict cannot be solved anytime soon.

In This Burning Land, they address a fundamental paradox. Israel is stronger than it has been at any time in its history; it has a vibrant society, a thriving economy, and a powerful military that suppressed the most recent Palestinian uprising. Yet, it cannot find a way to end the feud with the Palestinians. In turn, the entire world supports the Palestinian goal of statehood, and yet no such state is likely to emerge any time soon.

Arriving in Jerusalem shortly before the onset of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, Myre and Griffin soon found themselves reporting not on a new peace deal, but on the worst violence in the long history of this feud. They show how the conflict has changed dramatically in recent years as new physical and psychological barriers have gone up between the two sides.

The couple takes us to the heart of the conflict, where few writers have gone before. They delve into the thinking that motivates some Palestinians to be suicide bombers and other Palestinians to work as informants for Israel's security forces. Myre and Griffin travel to isolated West Bank outposts where Israeli settlers vow never to relinquish the land, and accompany Israeli troops as they stage midnight raids in militant strongholds.

Having also spent two decades chasing wars across Africa, Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East, the authors are students of modern, asymmetrical warfare that has become the norm in today's conflicts. They draw on this experience to offer lessons crucial to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian fighting, and other wars as well.

To cite a few:

Clear, decisive military victories belong to an earlier era, yet elements on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have a stake in keeping the conflict going rather than negotiating a solution.

Controlling the public relations battle is often as important as the actual fighting, and the competing Israeli and Palestinian narratives continue to diverge in societies that are ever more segregated from one another.

Actions that seem completely irrational to outsiders often make perfect sense to the participants. Extremism can become a virtue; moderation a vice. Despite the heavy suffering on both sides, many Israelis and Palestinians are prepared to make continued sacrifices in the belief they will ultimately triumph.

Myre and Griffin demonstrate an anthropologist's feel for the hidden sides of Palestinian and Israeli culture, a historian's understanding of the larger forces at work, and a novelist's ear for telling the stories that bring it all together. The broader lessons in This Burning Land will help inform the debate in the Middle East for years to come.

Back Jacket

"A stunning piece of nonfiction about the tortured and heartbreaking stalemate in the Middle East. This is a brilliant book--superbly written and devastatingly insightful. The fact that they raised two little girls while reporting this story makes every explosion, every riot, every checkpoint especially upsetting. I don't know how they did it."--Sebastian Junger, author of War

"Myre and Griffin have written an extraordinary story--personal yet hard-hitting--that takes you inside the world of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hopes and fears that drive it. There are no punches pulled here. A must-read for anyone who prefers Middle East reality over fantasy."--Aaron David Miller, author of The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace

"This Burning Land is what you get when you unleash two excellent reporters on one of the world's most compelling stories. With eloquence, insight, and a real sense of urgency, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin bring to life places like Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip during a time of siege and chaos. Even if you disagree with their conclusions, you will be swept up in their story of tragedy and hope."--Jeffrey Goldberg, author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror

"Superbly written and devastatingly insightful." -Sebastian Junger, author of War

Author Biography

GREG MYRE, formerly a correspondent for the New York Times, is a Senior Editor at National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

JENNIFER GRIFFIN is the national security correspondent for Fox News. Myre and Griffin have reported from wars across the world and spent nearly eight years covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.