Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and
the language of politics in the Israeli Palestine conflict, reflecting
on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine
today's Palestinians just like the physical borders, checkpoints and the
so called 'Separation Barrier'.
The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and
linguistic chicanery that has degraded the word 'peace' itself. No one
even knows what the word might mean now for the Middle East. So to give
one example of many, Israel argued that the omission of the word 'the'
in one of the UN Security Council's resolutions meant that it was not
mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967.
The Language of War, The Language of Peace is another important book
from Raja Shehadeh on the world's greatest political fault line.