About the Book - Pictures of Palestine

I've worked in the book trade for much of my life and, one day, a publisher asked me to write a book about the Israel-Palestine conflict. "No chance", said I, "It's far too complex to cover in one book without excluding a lot to prove one's point". Then some years passed.

In 2009 I went on one of my trips to Palestine and, to save answering my friends individually about what was happening, I wrote a blog. It all went surprisingly well - my writing style and the content were better than I expected.

After two months of this someone e-mailed me to say, "Palden, can't you make it into a book?". After two days of pacing around dwelling on it I realised, yes, it would make a good book. The remarkable thing was this: since, when writing a blog, you generally write whatever comes up on that day, I had found that, over the three months, I had covered many of the different and thoroughly paradoxical aspects of life in Palestine.

I had successfully and unwittingly achieved an all-round summation of the situation here in an easy-reading way, covering most aspects of the conflict and suggesting some solutions.

So, when I returned to Britain, I re-edited the blog, added some bits, drew maps, sorted out photos and it became this book.

The book is available both in print and as an e-book. There are various threads running through it. It's about:

• everyday life in the West Bank, particularly in Bethlehem;
  

• personal experiences working as a humanitarian;
  

• history and geopolitical issues;
  

• the remarkable story of Hope Flowers School;
  

• the tricky, paradoxical and illogical aspects of life under occupation;
  

• humans and how we deal with living in a very challenging situation.
  

Most of the chapters are quite short, so you can read the book in bed or on the bus or the train, and you can dip into it anywhere. You don't even need to be specifically interested in Palestine, for this book is a good read.

I wrote it for people like you - people who think about the state of the world, who have had Palestine hovering in the periphery ever since you can remember. It's for you who don't understand what it's all about and why it just keeps going on and on.

It's for you who have been concerned about the kids in the streets throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, about people under occupation with tanks rolling along outside their houses, about apartheid and separation walls, and about the dubious role that other countries play in keeping it going - particularly America, Europe and the neighbouring Arab states.

Palestine and Israel are a bipolar world of conflicting certainties and claims on the same small piece of land. They're a kind of microcosm of the world and many of its issues. If peace is achieved here, it will surely be infectious - the world is waiting for Israel, and Palestine is waiting for the world.

NEXT: Meet the Author