On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion

On the Brink is a compelling collection of short essays that chronicle a fact-finding and solidarity visit the author made to the West Bank and Israel during the last three weeks of June 2014. Physician, author, filmmaker, and longtime activist Alice Rothchild uses her powers of careful observation and her deep understanding of the consequences of racism and occupation to craft a lively, honest, heart breaking collection of reports from the field.

On the Brink documents stories and lives that seldom make the evening news, but that are essential to understanding the context in which that news occurs.

Praise

“Alice Rothchild takes us on an extraordinary journey into the heart and soul of Palestinian life. Her observations are poetic and her analysis acute. She creates a shared understanding between the reader and the people she writes about that cannot be forgotten. Exquisitely rendered.”
—Sara Roy, senior research scholar Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

“Alice Rothchild’s journal On the Brink captures the range of Palestinian and Israeli reactions to the events and reality that generated the recent Gaza invasion. Palestinian resilience, victimhood, steadfastness, anger, and determination to live despite the horrible conditions and dehumanization policies. She also managed to reflect the dominant Israeli public frame of minds which has been hostage to the tension between Jewish values and Zionist ideology as stated in one of her entries. A must read for those who seek to understand the Israeli Palestinian story from within and with an intense and direct call to reflect on the question of how long can people in this land sustain such a process of victimization, oppression, and manipulation of their various identities.”
—Mohammad Abu-Nimer, associate professor of the Peace and Conflict Resolution Program at the School of International Service, American University

“There are personal memoirs of people who’ve visited or lived in Israel-Palestine, there are scores of individual narratives about the people of that land, there are academic tracts on the historical, political, legal, sociological, or psychological issues that arise there—and then, there is Alice Rothchild’s account! Coming out of a visit to—in her words—an ‘abnormal place,’ she succeeds in showing us its ‘normalcy’: its diversity, its contradictions, its refugee camps, villages, towns and cities, its famous characters alongside its ordinary heroes, its extraordinary events as day-to-day experience. In an inimitable style that draws you in on a gripping voyage while encouraging you to deeply reflect on its meaning, Rothchild offers us a collection of iconic, heartbreaking tales and puts them in the necessary context of historical Zionism, its claim to (so-called) democracy, and its inexorable occupation of Palestine. She never succumbs to the conventional ‘two-sides-to-every-story’ or ‘different narratives’ temptation; instead, she recounts a moving, sensitive, knowledgeable real story. Reading this book, from its early ‘is anyone looking?’ to its final ‘great sadness and fear,’ will be a sobering, painfully gratifying experience.”
—Anat Biletzki, Quinnipiac and Tel Aviv University; Chairperson of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (2001–2006)

“An honest, compassionate and revealing account of the author’s travels through the region on the eve of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza. Trained as a physician, Alice Rothchild knows how to listen to her subjects and locate the heart of their stories, while offering us the reader an accurate diagnosis of all she has witnessed.”
—Jonathan Cook, author of Disappearing Palestine

“Alice Rothchild’s new book is a masterpiece of the journal genre. Carefully and beautifully written (the author is a wonderful stylist), it is invaluable as an ethnography blending slices of daily life among Jews and Palestinians with exceptionally keen insights and observations about the ongoing regional tragedy. She sees and listens with the trained, sympathetic eye and ear of a physician and also of a Jew who understands that Israel can end the occupation while Palestinians cannot. Eschewing polemics altogether, she persuades by compassionately attending to the fears, angers, hopes, and wishes of a broad range of people in effect representing the range of parties involved.”
—Gordon Fellman, Brandeis University

“Alice Rothchild, doctor, feminist, author, and filmmaker has produced a vivid and nuanced account of the troubled Palestinian-Israeli relationship, placing poignant vignettes (teenage boys on bicycles escorting tourists to their host families in the middle of the night in a refugee camp) in their historic context. Most of all, her work gives us the information we need to speak truth to power. A good read on an important subject.”
—Eva Spangler, author of Palestine-Israel 101: Nation, Race and Human Rights in the Conflict

“The daily diary format of Alice Rothchild’s On the Brink is particularly apt, allowing the urgency of the unfolding critical historical moment to come through clearly. Stories of the ongoing occupation weave together naturally with the events leading up to the invasion of Gaza as Rothchild experiences them, offering an indelible portrait of the reality of life in Palestine and Israel in the terrible summer of 2014.”
—Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director Jewish Voice for Peace

“In one of those tricks of fate that are surely necessary to produce great narrative, Alice Rothchild’s trip to the occupied West Bank in 2014 to observe health care conditions corresponded with the violent events that were a runup to the Gaza onslaught of that summer. Rather than getting away, Rothchild threw herself into a tour of the ‘mind-shattering’ Palestinian experience. In the most patient and neutral manner, she relates the views of mothers, fathers, children, activists, journalists, and other health professionals in encounters in the midst of terrifying violence, culminating with her stay in a Palestinian village being raided by the Israeli army during which she comes to respect the Palestinian resistance. The great surprise and satisfaction of her journey is that it forces her to turn her calm gaze within, to reckon with the cultural conditioning that allowed her American Jewish cohort back home to blind themselves to Palestinian persecution, even while insisting that we must never forget Jewish suffering in Europe.”
—Phillip Weiss, cofounder and managing editor of Mondoweiss

About the Author

Alice Rothchild is a Boston-based physician, author, activist, and filmmaker. Recently retired from clinical medicine, she previously held the position of assistant professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology in the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University. She has written and lectured extensively on many topics including the health and human rights effects of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Her previous publications include Broken Promises, Broken Dreams: Stories of Jewish and Palestinian Trauma and Resilience, and the documentary film, Voices Across the Divide. She also contributed to the anthology Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers on Palestine.

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