The words of my father : love and pain in Palestine

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Bashir, Yousef Khalil, 1989-

Physical Description:

224 pages : illustration, map ; 22 cm.

Genre:

Biographies.

Summary:

In the Gaza Strip, growing up on land owned by his family for centuries, fourteen-year-old Yousef is preoccupied by video games, school pranks, and meeting his father's impossible high standards. Everything changes when the second Intifada erupts and soldiers occupy the family home, turning it into a virtual prison. Over time, Yosef learns the rules of his new life in captivity - but he can't anticipate that an Israeli bullet is about too transform his future in an instant.

Contents:

Paradise -- Inferno -- Angels -- The journey -- Legacy.

Subject Term:

Palestinian Arabs -- Gaza Strip -- Biography.

Fathers and sons -- Biography.

Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000-

Publication Info:

New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2019]

Subject:

Palestinian Arabs -- Gaza Strip -- Biography.

Fathers and sons -- Biography.

Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000-

Gaza Strip

Biographies.

Bashir, Yousef Khalil, 1989-

Bashir, Yousef Khalil, 1989- -- Family.

Bashir, Yousef, 1989-

Arab Palestinians

Arabs -- Palestine

Arabs in Palestine

Palestinians

Sons and fathers

Aqsa Intifada, 2000-

Intifada, 2000-

Intifada II, 2000-

New Intifada, 2000-

New Palestinian Uprising, 2000-

Palestinian Uprising, 2000-

Second Intifada, 2000-

Second Palestinian Uprising, 2000-

Second Uprising, 2000-

Qiṭāʻ Ghazzah

Retsuʻat ʻAzah

SAILS ISBN:

9780062917324

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Foxboro - Boyden Library	953.1 BASHIR	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Plympton Public Library	B BAS	BIOGRAPHY	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Rehoboth - Blanding Free PL	956.943 BAS	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

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Summary

A Palestinian-American activist recalls his adolescence in Gaza during the Second Intifada, and how he made a strong commitment to peace in the face of devastating brutality in this moving, candid, and transformative memoir that reminds us of the importance of looking beyond prejudice, anger, and fear.

"Captivating."--Robin Wright, The New Yorker

Yousef Bashir's story begins in Gaza, on a verdant ten-acre farm beside an Israeli settlement and military base. When the soccer-mad Yousef was eleven, the Second Intifada exploded. First came the shooting, then the occupation. Ordered to leave their family home, Yousef's father refused, even when the Israeli soldiers moved in, seizing the top two floors. For five long years, three generations of the Bashir family were virtual prisoners in their own home. Despite this, Yousef's father--a respected Palestinian schoolteacher whose belief in coexisting peacefully with his Israeli neighbors was unshakeable--treated the soldiers as honored guests. His commitment to peace was absolute.

Though Yousef's family attracted international media attention, and received letters of support from around the world, Yousef witnessed the destruction of his home, his neighborhood, and the happy life he had known with growing frustration and confusion. For the first time he wondered if his father's belief in peace was justified and whether he was strong enough--or even wanted--to follow his example. At fifteen, that doubt was tested. Standing in his front yard with his father and three United Nations observers, he was shot in the spine by an Israeli soldier, leaving him in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down, for a year.

While an Israeli soldier shot him, it was Israeli doctors who saved Yousef and helped him eventually learn to walk again. In the wake of that experience, Yousef was forced to reckon with the words of his father. And like the generous, empathetic man who raised him, he too became an outspoken activist for peace.

Amid the tragedy of the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict, The Words of My Father is a powerful tale of moral awakening and a fraught, ferocious, and profound relationship between a son and his father. Bashir's story and the ideals of peace and empathy it upholds are a soothing balm for these dangerous and troubled times, and a reminder that love and compassion are a gift--and a choice.

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Bashir's candid and deeply felt coming-of-age story unfolds largely during the Second Intifada. Starting when Bashir was 11, Israeli soldiers occupied his family's farm on the Gaza Strip. He led a fairly average adolescent life--playing video games and watching soccer--while witnessing abuse, such as when soldiers would force his father, a respected school headmaster who advocated for peace with Israel, to submit at gunpoint to a daily strip search. Bashir's father remained a pacifist, even after 15-year-old Bashir was shot by an Israeli soldier from a watchtower outside his house just minutes past curfew. He was left paralyzed from the waist down for a year, and despite his anger, he recognized the complexities of his country: "It was a Jewish soldier who had shot me, but the nurses were also Jewish." Three years later, attending college in Boston, Bashir advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace and later became a member of the Palestinian Diplomatic Delegation to the U.S. Throughout, his father's words resonated: "Violence only leads to more violence." Even in the face of great adversity, Bashir prevails as an optimistic champion of peace, as he eloquently and subtly writes, "all I had to offer this world were my little words about the need for peace." This moving meditation of a young man's struggle to find peace amid turmoil will resonate with readers concerned with Israeli-Palestinian relations. (May)

Kirkus Review

Bashir delivers an urgent, impassioned call for peace between Palestine and Israel.The words of the Palestinian peace activist's father are, on the surface, incontestable: Strive for peace, he insisted, for "violence only leads to more violence." Yet, during the second intifada and in the face of the intransigence of Israel's government in dividing the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and barring movement between the two Palestinian areas, striving for peace became a difficult proposition to hold upand one that was particularly difficult to defend in a time of growing militance. By Bashir's account, the plot of land that his educator father had so carefully improved, building the soil, planting trees by the hundreds and crops by the row, became a dust bowl under a de facto Israeli siege. Moreover, an Israeli soldier shot him for reasons that he finds inexplicable today, paralyzing him for a long period and requiring multiple surgeries. Years later, writes the author, even as he mourns the passing of his father and the loss of the land that his father took pains to tell him was his forever, he found himself thinking obsessively of that transformational event and the Israeli soldier behind the gun. "That single shot had changed my whole life," he writes, "and I wondered if it had changed his." In the end, the story comes full circle, as Bashir travels the world to convey the message of peace in the Middle East, the bullet in his back, as he puts it, moving him forward and not restraining him. There is some bitterness nonetheless, especially when he recounts that Israeli soldiers commandeered all the cooking vessels in his family home and then left them behind, each full of feces. Even with that insult, in this eloquent and affecting memoir he adopts another remark of his father's as his own: "What happened to me makes me believe even more in peace."An inspiration to peace activists in all theaters of war and struggle and a book that deserves a wide audience. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

Bashir's memoir follows a young Palestinian man's development into an advocate for peace. His family had owned and lived on a farm in Gaza for generations. During the Second Intifada, a Palestinian uprising that lasted from 2000 to 2005, Israeli soldiers tried to seize the Bashir family's house. The author's father, Khalil, refused to leave, and so the soldiers set up a command post in the house's top two floors while the family lived below. The Bashir family's situation attracted international attention, and Khalil often spoke of his belief in peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. After a visit from UN officials one afternoon, a soldier shot 15-year-old Bashir in the back while he and his father stood in their front yard. He was paralyzed from the waist down for more than a year and had to relearn how to walk. Despite his injury, Bashir focused on his father's words of peace and found in them a new direction for his life. His memoir provides a fascinating look at growing up in extreme circumstances.--Laura Chanoux Copyright 2019 Booklist

Before I Start	p. 1
Part 1 Paradise
1 Our Land, Our Neighbors	p. 7
2 My Family	p. 21
3 The School	p. 29
Part 2 Inferno
4 Intifada	p. 37
5 The Soldiers	p. 49
6 House Guests	p. 63
7 Occupation	p. 77
8 Ramadan	p. 87
9 The Bullet	p. 95
Part 3 Angels
10 Tel Aviv	p. 107
11 The Sheekum	p. 115
12 The Miracle	p. 123
Part 4 The Journey
13 Escape	p. 133
14 Seeds of Peace	p. 147
15 Return	p. 157
16 Ramallah	p. 165
17 Desperation	p. 173
18 "Forward, Yousef!"	p. 181
Part 5 Legacy
19 America	p. 197
20 My Father	p. 205
A Letter	p. 213
The Words of My Father	p. 215
Glossary	p. 219
Acknowledgments	p. 223

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Summary

Summary

Reviews (3)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Kirkus Review

Booklist Review

Table of Contents