Rooted in Judea

Chana drives forty kilometers to work each morning on a road through Judea where a stoning can happen any day. She checks her tires in the driveway. She drives the climb to the checkpoint past the bend where, some mornings, once the car stops the men come down off the ridge with the heavier stones, the knives, the firebombs, sometimes the guns. The morning of the four flats, she drove on rims to the checkpoint and was late to her first client of the morning.

Chana's road is the subject of this book.

Rooted in Judea reports the region from inside it - the ridge towns and the kitchens, the courtrooms and the master plans, the families who hold the road and the law that holds them. It dismantles three imported framings the international press has spent generations installing. The word "settler," on a British Jew who came home to her husband's family in a village of several hundred. The claim that violence runs one way, against figures the Israeli criminal record refutes. The institutional voices that produce both, traced through a documented funding chain from Tehran and Doha to the NGO methodology arriving on the campus quad. Every claim runs to the named source - the Knesset record, the High Court ruling, the cash going where.

The reader who finishes this book will be at a table somewhere - Atlanta, Cleveland, Manchester, Toronto - with someone who has not. Rooted in Judea is what to bring to that table.