Description

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.