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October 2006

October 16, 2006

Brave Heart: Jeffrey Goldberg

Most of us try to avoid people who'd like to wipe us out. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg goes right up to them and introduces himself. In his new book, Prisoners: A Muslim & a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, he writes about an unusual friendship that he struck up when he was a guard in the Israeli Army with a devout prisoner named Rafiq. Goldberg talked with Boris Kachka.

You started writing this before the Oslo process broke down in 2000. You must have been planning quite a different book.
I actually thought that I was racing against time--that when the book came out everybody would say, "Sure it's possible to make peace; we already have it." The second intifada was profoundly depressing for me, and I did lay it aside for a while.
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Across the Great Divide

In the late 1980s, Jeffrey Goldberg moved to Israel because he was committed to the idea of being part of the Jewish homeland. That meant, of course, going into the army, and before long, Jeffrey was working as a military policeman at a prison in the Negev desert. This was just around the time that the first Intifada was heating up, and Jeffrey was guarding Palestinians.

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