Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice

Authors: Raja Shehadeh
Publisher: Profile Books
Edition: 1
Publish Year: 2015
ISBN: 9781781253762

When conflicts become entrenched over generations, the language of war infiltrates everyday life, concealing destruction and hardening positions. Nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East.

Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create—legal and cultural—that confine today's Palestinians just like the borders, checkpoints and so-called "Separation Barrier". He shows how the peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that have degraded the word "peace" itself.

The situation at the world's greatest political fault-line has never looked bleaker, but still Shehadeh finds reason to hope and explains why.