In 1987, David Grossman was invited to visit and talk with Arabs living under Israeli rule and to write about his experiences and the conclusions he drew from them. His conclusion was that the situation was damaging to conquer and conqueror alike. Written for an Israeli reader, he invites the reader to empathetically listen to their Arab neighbors, to reflect on the impact the situation is having on Israeli psyche and to forge a new path. I would love to see these conversations revisited 30 year...

Each chapter is a person or group's view on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. The opinions and speakers are varied. For example, the person interviewed in chapter 8 expressed the need to remember that the Palestinians will be the Israelis' neighbors someday and that even though Israel is the conqueror, Israel's actions today should start reflecting that future. Others share feelings of hopelessness or viewpoints that are just plain scary.This book is more emotional than inte...

In this book, Grossman describes several interviews he had with people in Israel & Palestine, both Jews and Arabs, from just about every perspective you can imagine. I read this book for a class in Intercultural Communication. In reading this book, the stories behind the headlines becomes personal. I found this book to be a little depressing, actually, because it it paints a picture of how little hope the involved people have for peace in their land. I do recommend the book, but just be aware th...

An accessible book about the Arab-Zionist conflict- described in vignettes about life on the margins. I've been reading about the conflict for a while and it provided a refreshing perspective

This is a powerful book written by an apparently open-minded Israeli author, about the shocking day to day facts of the Palestinians' existence in the occupied territories. Grossman seems genuinely moved, even appalled, at some of these facts, which he reports in a way that suggests "yes, I knew it was bad, but I never imagined ...". He seems moved, he seems sympathetic, he seems to sense that a wrong, perhaps a great wrong, is being done here ...And then one reaches, late in the book, the chapt...

I have never been able to approach the Arab-Israeli conflict, or even begin to understand it, and as a Jew I always felt I should. On numerous occasions I tried to delve into it through books and articles but nothing ever made sense, and nothing ever stuck. Then, I ran into an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "Unforgiven" by Jeffrey Goldberg. The article focused on the relationship of Israeli president Ehud Olmert and the Israeli writer David Grossman. And finally, through the prism of D...

David Grossman was a novelist when he was commissioned in 1987 to write a series of articles describing his perceptions of conditions in the occupied West Bank at the time of the twentieth anniversary of Israel’s Six Day War. What he wrote became a sensation in Israel. A book of the articles was published. Portions of that book were published in The New Yorker, and translations offered access throughout the world. My initial reaction upon reading this thirty years since it was written was that i...

Everything happened these past 20 years ,while nothing has happened at all.This book was released in 1987, 20 years after The Six Day War. Today, 53 years later, that sentence is still a precise description of reality. Much has changed yet everything still remains the same. Well, maybe that’s not completely true, perhaps what has changed is the development of more hatred and fear at both side’s ends. The “rude, cynical, dumb and condescending” Israelis vs. the “hateful, primitive, bitter and mur...

Written in 1987 after a journey through the West Bank, acclaimed Israeli novelist David Grossman discovers through the daily lives of the occupied and the occupiers the corrosive effects of the at that time 20 year Israeli Occupation of the West Bank (of the Jordan River). What he learns is the abject hatred of one side for the other and the daily inhumanities that cement these feelings. It is no surprise that almost 20 years later little has changed, other than a growing list of grievances on b...

This is old but excellent. I read it after reading Grossman's To the End of the Land. Nonfiction. He went to visit the West Bank and to interact with people there. Open-minded fact finding mission. Depressing that the situation really hasn't got better since 1987....

Some selected quotes:About the occupation: “It doesn’t matter at all who is really guilty of the refugee camps - we, the Israelis, will pay the price. We, and not the Arab countries or the world. It is us they will hate, these children living their whole lives in a colorless world without happiness, who spend long summer and winter hours in a cold and mildewed kindergarten, which has neither a glass window nor electricity. With the all-pervading stink rising from the ‘bathroom’ a grotesque symbo...

When I left on this journey, I decided not to talk with Jewish or Arab politicians or officials. Their positions are well known to the point of weariness. I wanted to meet the people who are themselves the real players in the drama, those who pay first the price of their actions and failures, courage, cowardliness, corruption, nobility. I quickly understood that we all pay the price, but not all of us know it.The Yellow Wind was published in 1988. The introduction was written in 1998. My copy ha...

Written in the late 1980’s, Grossman gave me a feel for this conflict - actually about longstanding conflicts in general. It doesn’t provide all the information that I need to truly understand the Palestinian/Israeli conflict but he captures the elements that cause negativity to deepen as time passes. It’s a good starting point and I hope to read more about the Palestinians.

The author writes "I have a bad feeling: I am afraid that the current situation will continue exactly as it is for another ten or twenty years." This book was written in 1988, and the author is correct. The situation continues and continues. Political leaders in Israel, the Gulf States, Iran, etc., etc., talk, but that doesn't change the situation for the people in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, or even Israel. The author closes with a quote from Camus about the passage from speech to moral acti...

In 1987, twenty years after the 1967 war, Israeli David Grossman traveled around the West Bank and Israel talking to people about "the situation". As a good journalist should, he asked questions and let the individuals he spoke to hold forth.What he found was plenty of anger and hatred on both sides resulting in despair that things could change. At the time, the first Intifada was about to begin. He wrote a forward to the book in 1998 and an afterward in 2002, when the second Intifada suicide bo...

An excellent read, and certainly the least biased book on the subject I've ever read. I was introduced to this book while reading a passage in THE OTHER ISRAEL written by Assaf Oron, a Sergeant Major in the Israeli Defense Force Reserves. Assaf is one of the reservists who has refused to serve in the occupied territories after years of serving there.In THE OTHER ISRAEL, Assaf wrote, "A copy of THE YELLOW WIND..., which had just come out, crossed my path. I read it, and suddenly it hit me. I fina...

Eye opening. Ground breaking. Startlingly honest. I read this years ago but really need to revisit in the context of the death of Grossman's son who died serving in the Israeli military during the Lebanese raids last year . Grossman's eulogy for his son is one of the most moving things I've ever read (wish I could have heard and understood his original reading of this) . Grossman is a rare writer, one that deserves a much higher readership outside of Israel. P.S. I have not seen his new afterwor...

Recommended to me by a friend from kibbutz, this ambitious journalistic look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the the best I've read on the topic. What's most amazing--and perhaps most disappointing--is that, while The Yellow Wind was written some twenty years ago, the injustices and tragedies it draws attention to, as well as a lot of the misconceptions each side has of the other, are still very real today.

David Grossman is one of Israel's most celebrated novelists and a bereaved father, having lost his son, Uri, during the Second Lebanon War in 2006.In his remarks, speaking at an alternative memorial for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Grossman referred to the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict and said, "The way to solve the enormous complexity of Israeli-Palestinian relations can be summed up in one short formula: If the Palestinians do not have a home, Israelis won’t have a home ei...

Heart wrenching! The author takes you deep into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, sharing stories of people on the ground, the settlers and the Palestinians. This is not a political rhetoric, rather the personal narratives, feelings, and attitudes of people who are directly impacted by the conflict. Why do the settlers feel the way they do? Why are the Palestinians in despair? Listen to their voices. It left me trembling. This book was first published in 1988, and you see how much has not change...