My first foray into the troubled world of Israeli-Palestinian politics came in the late 1980s, not long after the outbreak of the first Uprising (the Intifada). I was leading trip after trip to Israel, guiding students around the countryside teaching the Bible from a wide array of biblical sites. When I finally stepped off Israel's well-worn tourist trail, I was astonished at what I saw in the Palestinian territories. I thought I was in another country.

I wrote up these experiences in 1993 (Who Are God's People in the Middle East?) and naïvely thought that my evangelical readers would be fascinated to learn that there was another side to the story. That there was something else, some other narrative, if you just turned off the famous road to Bethlehem, if you dared go to Bet Jalla or even Hebron. Some evangelical readers were interested. Some were decidedly not. My formal work on the problem—as a theologian masquerading as a political scientist—began in the 1990s and culminated with another book (Whose Land? Whose Promise?) that set me deeper at odds with evangelicalism's political-right turn during that same decade. We had publicly decided on our narrative to explain the Middle East, and we weren't going to budge.

Most work in this area concerns the plight of those Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation (over 3 million) or the many others (4.2 million in the Middle East alone) who have been made refugees by Israeli land seizures following a series of wars (1948, 1967, 1973). When television footage shows conflict with so-called Palestinian "terrorists" with gunfire and smoking tires, these scenes generally come from Gaza or the Occupied West Bank, areas captured by Israel in fighting that effectively took millions of Arabs captive. Two uprisings later—one that began in 1988 and another in 2000—the story continues to draw our interest. Peace proposals rise and fall; exhausted people hope and despair; the news moves on.

But there are two more stories that are now unfolding. First, Israeli historians have begun to revisit their country's cultural narrative and challenge its sacred mythologies.1 Some Israelis (such as the prolific Benny Morris) and American Jews (Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul University) have been bold in their critique and in many cases inflammatory. They challenge the usual perception of a besieged Israel surrounded by massed Arab armies and the near-miracle victories of wars in 1948 and 1967. Using research from Israel's own archives and the stories of Arab and Israeli witnesses, they describe the conquests of these early decades, atrocities on both sides, the mass expulsion of Palestinians, and the intentional confiscation of Arab land. And they understand the present Palestinian uprising as a reaction to Israeli oppression and occupation. When they refer to these events as an "Israeli Pogrom" against Arabs, their words are guaranteed to ignite debate. And when they refer to walled-in Palestinian villages with terms such as "apartheid" or "prisoner camps," well, you can just imagine.

Despite the combative voices either dismantling the Israeli myth (Finkelstein) or defending it at all costs (Alan Dershowitz), even mainstream Israeli scholars and diplomats are writing up the story with a new sensitivity to the evils brought by both sides in this conflict. Shlomo Ben-Ami is an Israeli with a distinguished record of achievement: Oxford-educated, he taught at Tel Aviv University before beginning an illustrious career in public service that culminated with an appointment as Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was a participant in many of the Arab-Israeli peace conferences and attended the Camp David summit in 2000. In Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Ben-Ami gives what may be the most comprehensive study of Israel's modern history to date. What is remarkable is his ability—limited still, but impressive nonetheless—to openly describe the faults of Israel's own behavior:

The State of Israel was born in war, and it has lived by the sword ever since. This has given the generals and the military way of thinking … a paramount role in the Jewish state and too central a function in defining both Israel's war aims and her peace policies. Throughout, the army preached "activism" and frequently overreacted to real and sometimes imaginary threats.

It is hard to imagine such words written by an Israeli government leader even 15 years ago. To be sure, Ben-Ami spares no words when it comes to Arafat and the leadership of the PLO more generally. But this is to be expected. Ben-Ami's greatest despair, he tells us, was prompted by the failure of overtures to Arafat made during Ehud Barak's tenure, when opportunities for concession and agreement were lost thanks to arrogance on both sides. The results of this failure were catastrophic, giving the Palestinians into the hands of Hamas, destroying the Israeli peace movement, and handing the reins of Israeli politics to the far right.

But certainly Ben-Ami exhibits a new sensibility, a new willingness to acknowledge what is happening in the occupied territories. And what is happening there? Consider the case of Hamdi Aman. One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2006, Hamdi, 28 years old, living in Gaza and proud of his new white Mitsubishi, rounded up some family members to take them for a drive. He pulled up to an intersection in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood. An SUV approached from the rear and began to pass. Then all hell roared. A missile fired from a silent Israeli attack helicopter slammed into the SUV, destroying it. But at the same time, the explosion and its shrapnel ripped through Hamdi's car, killing his wife, Naima (27), his mother, Hanan (46), and his six-year-old son, Muhannad. Hamdi's three-year-old daughter, Maria, and his uncle, Nahed (34), remain hospitalized with severed spinal cords, unable to breathe on their own. This once proud father today is left alone with a two-year-old son, Mu'min. (I include the personal names of these victims so that I can remember that they are not mere statistics, occupying another couple of lines in the accident record.)

The Israeli response? An investigation, regret, and a promise to learn to reduce such risks in the future. According to Israeli civil rights groups the Israeli army has killed 234 Palestinians like this in the last five years—and they've killed 123 innocent bystanders. The army claims that they are assassinating "terrorists"—but they cannot be sure who is in the targeted car, nor is the person given a trial. They are simply executed from on high. And the bystanders? Collateral damage.

Now here is the shift. Israeli condemnations of Palestinian violence now share the spotlight with Israeli condemnations of Israeli violence. You can read about Hamdi's story in the newspapers (as I did), where Israelis express frustration with their own country's violence. The same is true regarding Israel's disproportionate bombing attack on Lebanon in August 2006. Not only were vast residential areas ruined, non-military targets destroyed, and 1200 civilians killed, but in the last days of the war—even as the world was calling for a stop to it all—Israel dropped 1.2 million cluster bomblets all over South Lebanon, virtually turning it into a minefield. (The American government, which supplied the cluster bombs, was oddly silent.) And for the sharper critics, this behavior on both sides deserves no finer word than "terrorism."

The second important development comes from within Israel itself. Few realize that before Israel's war of independence in 1948, Palestinians were the majority. In 1948 the population of Israel proper (excluding the current occupied territories) was about 1.5 million, of whom 900,000 were Arabs. When the war was over, 85 percent of these Arabs were uprooted and became refugees. This was a well-planned Israeli strategy to shift (or "ethnically cleanse") the population and build their state. The Palestinians left behind eventually were integrated into the growing Israeli society; now numbering about a million, they are Israeli citizens. But they live a tenuous life between two worlds—one Palestinian compared it with "holding two watermelons with one hand."

The Israeli government has produced a great deal of research on these Arabs inside Israel. For instance, they average five persons per household (50 percent more than Jews), they have a 60 percent higher unemployment rate, 75 percent of them are "low income," and a high proportion rely on welfare payments. Their town councils receive about 50 percent less money per capita than Jewish town councils. They own less land (they are 16 percent of the population but own 3.5 percent of available land). And since land allocation is generally done with an eye on ethnicity (e.g., Israeli settlements), the idea of allocating land for a "Palestinian settlement" is deemed by most Israelis as absurd. The government even subsidizes mortgages, but this is a benefit for those who serve in the military (as most Jews, but few Arab Israelis, do).

I had thought that I was fairly shock-proof when it came to the Palestinian story. And then I came across the little book Coffins on Our Shoulders. The Experience of the Palestinian Citizens of Israel. A number of things make it unique. It is authored by one Jewish scholar and one Palestinian scholar. Dan Rabinowitz teaches sociology at Tel Aviv University, while Khawla Abu-Baker is a lecturer at Emek Yezreel College. Rabinowitz and Khawla discovered that not only were their careers similar (as academics invested in the social sciences) but their family roots took them both back to early 20th-century Haifa. His family came to Haifa from Eastern Europe (Kiev, Ukraine) and hers migrated from the village of Ya'abad (near Jenin in today's West Bank). Two families—one Jewish, one Arab—both young, looking for a future. But that is where their common experience ends.

Each chapter in this book does something remarkable. The authors walk us through the history of Israel/Palestine by telling the narrative of their family's story in a given period. First you may hear Rabinowitz ("Asher Bodankin was born around 1883 in Pinsk on the border zone between Byelorussia and Poland") and then it is Baker's turn (" 'Aarif Abu-Shamla was born in 1903 to a well-to-do rural family in Ya'abad"). The narratives are told with honesty and respect. And then the authors interpret the period together.

The book shows in stunning detail how Israeli Arabs are marginalized and dismissed—to a degree that reminded me of the African American experience in the mid-20th century. Through each war, through every uprising, the crushing of the Baker family identity in Israel is told. In contrast, Dan Rabinowitz describes how his family was heir to an expanding Israel's successes: opportunity for education and jobs, access to social advantages, mortgages subsidized by the government—the list is endless. And he admits that his family simply did not "see" the Palestinian world.

But his conversion came in 1989. In his doctoral work at Cambridge, Rabinowitz had studied the relationship between Arabs and Israelis in Nazareth. He lived in Nazareth Illit (or Upper Nazareth, which is Jewish) while a large Arab community was in the lower "bowl" of the village. By the 1980s he was a freelance journalist and in 1989 it was a story, a horrible story, that got him.

A small army jeep convoy, entering the nearby village of Faqu'a, was hit with a barrage of stones. The convoy sped away, but the commanders felt that the unit's pride had been wounded. And so they returned with a vengeance to teach Faqu'a a lesson. First they destroyed some Palestinian houses. Dan picked up the story there and interviewed a number of the village residents. But then the army unit returned, this time with intent to kill. One of Dan's primary interviewees, Yusuf Abu-Na'im, saw the soldiers, ran from them through an olive orchard, but was hunted down and executed. Dan Rabinowitz was never the same. He now saw what his family had missed.

Meanwhile, Khawla Abu-Baker's life had taken her into social work in a psychological care center in Gaza, helping train therapists how to use role-play for victims of the violence. But the story she tells is entirely different. She and the younger generation she describes represent a body of Palestinians who will no longer accept wholesale discrimination. When told by some "but your life here is better than, say, those other Arabs in Gaza," she will recoil and ask what sort of state Israel pretends to be.

The book begins with a scene that is as symbolic as it is poignant. One of the gems of Arab Galilee is the small mountain village of 'Iblin. This is where the now-famous Father Elias Chacour has built Mar Elias College, a school dedicated to higher education for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. And this is where anyone can meet young Arabs who understand their culture and the way in which opportunities are systematically denied them—and who are determined to resist.

During a recent graduation ceremony at Mar Elias, a choir sang what has become a deeply moving Palestinian song, Mawtini ("My Homeland"). When the first notes began, the audience stood in silence. They continued standing for the next song as well. It was Samih al-Qasem's "Muntasib al-Qama" ("The Standing Tall"). And here one refrain stands out:

Standing tall I march,
My head held high,
An olive branch in my palm,
A coffin on my shoulder,
On I walk.

Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker tell us story after story of olive branches and coffins, story after story of Palestinian and Israeli mistakes along the way—but above all they describe a "new sociological generation called the Stand Tall Generation. Its representatives and leaders, many of them women, display a new assertive voice, abrasive style, and unequivocal substantive clarity. They have unmitigated determination, confidence, and a sense of entitlement the likes of which had only seldom been articulated previously by Palestinians addressing the Israeli mainstream."

If asked to recommend one book to place in the hands of friends who already know the basic facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or think they do, Coffins on Our Shoulders is the book I would choose.

Gary M. Burge is professor of New Testament at Wheaton College & Graduate School. He is the author of Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians (Pilgrim).

1. See Ilan Pappé, "The Post-Zionist Discourse in Israel, 1900-2001," Holy Land Studies, Vol 1, No. 1 (2002), pp. 9-35.

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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