"From Homer to Chaucer, Primo Levi to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, literature has constantly taught us this: life goes on...."

A general view of Jerusalem's Old City. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/23/arab-israeli-book-review

The Arab-Israeli Book Review: Common ground in contested territory

In focusing on the shared culture straddling the Middle East's great divide, this new journal is a hopeful step towards mutual understanding

Toby Lichtig

• guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 06.37 EST

The Israel-Palestine struggle has not prospered from scrutiny. Few modern conflicts have caused more columns to be written, solutions proffered, hands wrung, bile spent or vengeance waged – and vengeance it so often is, even when dressed up as justice. (In the words of the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, "start your story with 'secondly', and the world will be turned upside-down".)

Amid the denunciations and counter-denunciations, counsel and complaint, from the Middle East to the west and beyond – not to mention the televised grief of Israeli occupation, Hezbollah rockets and the like – what tends to get bypassed is daily life, common culture, the actual stuff that comprises the societies the commentators spend so much of their energy trying to bring together (or keep apart). This normality is usually more important to the people who experience it than anything the rest of us witness in the news. From Homer to Chaucer, Primo Levi to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, literature has constantly taught us this: life goes on.

I was talking about this to the London-based Palestinian author Samir El-youssef last week, just before the official launch of his new online literary magazine, the Arab-Israeli Book Review. "I grew up in a refugee camp in southern Lebanon," he told me. "Do you think we talked about politics every minute of the day? My grandmother was more interested in whether I had brushed my teeth!"

Samir's new project helps to redress the narrative imbalance, away from policy and nationhood, towards people....READ MORE

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER PALESTINE AND PEACE]