Between River and Sea by Dervla Murphy

Between 2008 and 2011 Dervla Murphy, an Irish travel writer of 26 books and aged 77 & 80, visited Israel/Palestine, the most conflicted area of land in the world. This, her last book, is a record of conversations, observations, and reflections from visiting many places and talking with many people from all sides of the political and religious divides.

Her goal was to understand everyday life and political realities so she spent time in villages, refugee camps, and ordinary homes, listening to the personal stories of her Israeli and Palestinian hosts and recording everything in her journal. The result is a book which pulls you along with her narrative skill then stops you in your tracks as she gives yet another another example of man's inhumanity to man. It is both immensely readable and profoundly disturbing.

Despite the fraught relationships, restrictions and many frustrations Murphy insists on seeing both Israelis and Palestinians as human beings. She condemns dehumanisation on both sides and tries to find areas of mutual understanding.

"One has to rage against the cruel absurdity of it all, the calculated dehumanising of people, categorising them into oppressed and oppressors, depriving ordinary Palestinians and Israelis of the right to relate to one another as individuals."

Much of the book focuses on life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. She documents restrictions on movement, checkpoints, settlement expansion, and home demolitions. Murphy sees these as daily expressions of systemic injustice that crush Palestinian dignity.

On the other side she also meets Israeli peace activists, ex-soldiers, and settlers and finds some Israelis deeply conflicted — aware of the moral toll of occupation but trapped by security fears and political conformity.

She also argues that Western governments, particularly the UK, EU, and US, have enabled the continuation of the conflict by failing to hold Israel to account for its breeches of international agreements. But she also condemns the suicide campaign of the 2nd Intifada that produced a powerful Israeli reaction and has had a huge impact on Palestinian society.

She meets people who despite the strong antagonism and even hatred on both sides who are trying to live normal lives and courageous members of both communities who seek to cross the divides and work for peace.

Murphy is clearly very sympathetic to the Palestinian experience and sharply critical of Israeli state policy, but she distinguishes between Israeli government actions and individual Israelis. Her resolution of the conflict at the time of writing was for a single democratic state involving all sides – now clearly out of the question.

Between River and Sea gives a grass roots perspective on perhaps the most intractable of all conflicts. Dervla Murphy is a great storyteller. The reader is carried along by her observations of people and places, the setting of context from history, ancient and modern, her persistence in going places and meeting people, her beer drinking and her ability to cut through the complexities of religion and politics to reveal the real lives of real people.