id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-1294	Robinson, Francis	It’s Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street: A Jerusalem Memoir By Emma Williams (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2010. 415 pages.)	2010.0	3	.pdf	application/pdf	787	25	54	We are told of the fear generated by sui- cide bombers – the head of one landed in the playground of the school attended by Emma’s children as the school day began; the regular deaths of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israel Defence Force, “the purest army in the world”; the “silent war,” the relentless theft by one means or another of Palestinian land; the sickening problem, from Emma’s point of view, of Israeli self-deception; the open talk of “trans- fer,” a.k.a. ethnic cleansing as a solution to Israel’s Palestinian problem; how western journalists find their reports censored by editors intimidated by Israel’s attack machine; the oppression and misery heaped upon the Palestinians at the checkpoints throughout their territories, where teenaged Israeli soldiers wield absolute power; the wall, or “barrier” as it is supposed to be called, illegal under international law, which wends its ways through the West Bank, annexing further Palestinian territory to Israel and thereby dividing community from community and farmers from their fields; the settlements on the West Bank, also illegal under international law, which not only rob the Palestinians of further land but also often prevent them from working what remains; the breathtaking injustices piled upon the Palestinians; the Palestinian quality of sumud, of remaining steadfast in the face of all difficulty; and the double standards of the United States and, indeed, of most western countries in dealing with the two sides. This book, which was first published in Britain in 2006, records her experiences and assessments of what she saw when she Book Reviews 109 accompanied her husband, a senior UN official, to Israel during 2000-03.	cache/ajiss-1294.pdf	txt/ajiss-1294.txt