The author, Ben Ehrenreich introduces readers to his book “The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine” with this sharp observation: “The world is made not only of earth and flesh and fire, but of the stories that we tell”. With these comments Ehrenreich makes his intentions clear that through the stories of Palestinian resistance “the narratives…. will conjure up a [new] universe and determine its contours”.
While it would be stretching the realms of metaphysical possibility to suggest Ehrenreich can conjure up magic in Palestine, the American novelist has weaved stories from the West Bank in prose that are as beautiful as any found in a best-selling novel to speak about Palestinian resistance and of the people who “decline to consent to their own eradication”.
By any measure, “The Way to the Spring” is gripping. Ehrenreich opens the eyes of the readers to the daily acts of resistance carried out by Palestinians, their suffering and humiliation under the brutal Israeli occupation. The book is centred on Nabi Saleh, a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, whose out-of-bounds spring – the spring of the book’s title – is the focus of its inhabitants’ dogged protests.
This book has been shortlisted for the Palestine Book awards 2017, please click here to read the full review on the Palestine book awards site.