Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror
by Jeffrey Goldberg
Published by Vintage Books
Click on book
cover to order
at Amazon.com
Reviewed by Lauren Segelbaum
When this book originally came out in 2006, its title was: Prisoners–A Muslim and a Jew across the Middle East Divide. When I received the book to review it had a new title: Prisoners–A Story of Friendship and Terror. I found this very interesting because the new title seemed more hopeful, a strong message woven throughout this book.
Jeffrey Goldberg is the Washington correspondent of The New Yorker. Until recently, he served as the magazine’s Middle East correspondent. Before joining The New Yorker in 2000, Goldberg covered the Middle East and Africa for The New York Times Magazine. He is also a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces.
Prisoners is a memoir of his time in the Israeli Army. In 1990, during the first Palestinian uprising, Goldberg served as a prison guard in the largest prison in Israel. He decided early in his service that he would talk to the Palestinian prisoners, mostly out of curiosity but also because he thought it was possible to be friends with them. Rafiq, the prisoner and Fatah activist that he spent the most time with, was as he describes, “a bookish kind of guy who had some ironic distance from the essential absurdities of prison life.” Despite their extreme differences, they began a dialogue in the prison that grew into an astonishing friendship—and now a remarkable book.
Goldberg brings real faces to the war on both sides of the conflict, something we don’t always get when reading about this topic. He believes this book is meant for anyone who is mystified by the issues in the Middle East. He hopes that, through this memoir he will explain to all sorts of readers why the Middle East is such a puzzling and troubling place.
The message of his book is that it is not impossible—it is terribly difficult, but not impossible—to build a friendship with your enemy. Rafiq said it best: “If a million people in the Middle East could have the sort of friendship we have created—a tenuous, fraught friendship, but a friendship nonetheless—than the Middle East might become a better place.” We can only hope.
Armchair Interviews says: A thought-provoking story.