The People on the Street: A Writer's View of Israel

"The further away anyone was from that block of Ben Yehuda street, the easier it seemed to find a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, that stubborn mess in the center of the Middle East and the more I studied these solutions, the more I thought that they depended for their implementation on a population of table football men, painted in the colors of the two teams: blue and white for the Israelis, green, red and black for the Palestinians. All the international community had to do was to twist the levers and the little players would kick and swing and send the ball into the net, to victory." One block of a Tel Aviv street is the starting point for Linda Grant’s exploration of the inner dynamics of Israel—not the government and its policies, but the people themselves in all their variety. Iraqi shop-keepers, teenage soldiers, mob bosses, Tunisian-born settlers, Russian scientists, and the father of the victim of a suicide bomber are just some of the people she meets.

"The further away anyone was from that block of Ben Yehuda street, the easier it seemed to find a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, that stubborn mess in the center of the Middle East and the more I studied these solutions, the more I thought that they depended for their implementation on a population of table football men, painted in the colors of the two teams: blue and white for the Israelis, green, red and black for the Palestinians. All the international community had to do was to twist the levers and the little players would kick and swing and send the ball into the net, to victory." One block of a Tel Aviv street is the starting point for Linda Grant’s exploration of the inner dynamics of Israel—not the government and its policies, but the people themselves in all their variety. Iraqi shop-keepers, teenage soldiers, mob bosses, Tunisian-born settlers, Russian scientists, and the father of the victim of a suicide bomber are just some of the people she meets.

Linda Grant is the author of The Cast Iron Shore, Sexing the Millennium, Still Here and When I Lived in Modern Times, for which she won the Orange Prize.