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Reading the Conflict - The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian's Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker

Soon after 1967's Six Day War, Israel annexed the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, extending Israeli law over all the city's inhabitants. In subsequent years, it became a standard part of the Israeli narrative that Jerusalem was unified that day, and that the city is Israel's "eternal and undivided capital." The annual holiday of Jerusalem Day marks that reunification, and falls this year on June 1.

What the holiday and official Israeli pronouncements gloss over is the fact that the city is, in fact, very divided -- and always has been.
Jewish Israelis generally don't step foot in Palestinian neighborhoods, the residents of which are consistently shortchanged in terms of planning and budgets, and many of whom have had their homes demolished or their residency revoked. Israel touts the laws it enacted to protect religious freedoms, but fails to note the frequent imposition of strict limitations on who may worship at Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, in the heart of Jerusalem's Old City on the Temple Mount.

In short, the Israeli narrative is long on the Jewish claim to city - and short on the fact that Palestinians live there, too.

An important corrective to this vision can be found in The Hour of Sunlight, the memoir of Jerusalemite Sami al-Jundi, raised in the Old City home to which his family moved when forced out of their home village of Zakariyya in 1948.

Al-Jundi offers a glimpse into a life most Jewish visitors barely see as they rush past Arab shops and schoolchildren in the Old City. He writes of being raised by two blind parents, about neighbors and childhood pranks, and through his eyes, we see the constant, oppressive, and confusing nature of the conflict, even within Israel's eternal and undivided capital. We see his mother reduced to tears by Israeli soldiers, and his aunt asking for figs from her home village of Deir Yassin - site of a horrifying 1948 massacre by Irgun forces, and today Givat Shaul, at Jerusalem's western entrance, and site of a furniture factory at which al-Jundi gets his first job.

One story beautifully reflects a theme that repeats itself in al-Jundi's tale: He and a young friend go swimming on the Jewish side of town one summer day, and are quickly taunted by a group of Jewish boys. They soon leave, but returning to retrieve a forgotten towel, al-Jundi is set upon.

"The circle of boys began shoving and pushing me. 'F*cking dirty Arab. We don't want garbage like you here!' One boy spit on me."

As he falls to the grass, protecting his face and stomach as best he can, al-Jundi hears a Jewish man yell: "What are you kids doing? Leave him alone!" Stopping the attack and helping al-Jundi to his feet, the man brings the Palestinian boys safely to the pool's gate.

On the one hand, brutality and willed ignorance - on the other, human kindness.

For several years, the anger engendered by the former guides the young man, even as he develops warm relationships across the national divide. Deciding that the only way to fight for his people's rights is with the PLO, he joins friends in attempting to build a bomb with which to target a Jerusalem supermarket after hours.

The bomb explodes prematurely, however, killing one of the would-be terrorists, and grievously wounding the others. Al-Jundi is picked up from the hospital by Israeli authorities, interrogated, tortured, and eventually sentenced to ten years in prison.

Paradoxically, it's in prison that al-Jundi is able to tap into the shared humanity he'd experienced before joining the Palestinian resistance. Delving deep into a prisoner-organized study program, al-Jundi reads philosophy, literature and history (including that of the Jewish people), and is especially taken with the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, ultimately leaving prison a co-existence advocate.

Today, al-Jundi remains in the Old City, where he works closely with Israeli and American Jews to end "the circle of bloodshed." In his memoir, al-Jundi never ignores the failures and foibles of either side of the conflict, and yet he never fails to see their shared dignity and humanity as well.

Beautifully written with co-author Jen Marlowe, The Hour of Sunlight is both easy and hard to read - the prose carries the reader easily from page to page, but on occasion, a Jewish reader can be forgiven for having to put the book down, to grapple with new information and collect his or her thoughts. For me, the understanding that I pass the site of the Deir Yassin massacre every time I drive into Jerusalem to visit my mother-in-law was a particularly painful shock.

Painful and hard, but also beautiful and deeply necessary. As Jerusalem Day approaches, I urge you to read The Hour of Sunlight, written from the other side of Israel's undivided capital.

Emily L. Hauser is an American-Israeli  freelance writer who has studied and written about the contemporary Middle East since the early 1990s, and is an active member of a Chicago-area Conservative congregation. She blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head and can be followed on Twitter. She also crossposts at Angry Black Lady Chronicles (despite being only an Angry Lady and not at all Black) and atheist-interfaith blog NonProphet Status. All recommendations are entirely her own.