cover image In Your Eyes a Sandstorm:  Ways of Being Palestinian

In Your Eyes a Sandstorm: Ways of Being Palestinian

Arthur Neslen. Univ. of California, $34.95 (322p) ISBN 978-0-520-26427-4

Part human-interest journalism, part ethnography, part national portrait, this study by Neslen (Occupied Minds) examines a people struggling with history, occupation, and diaspora. Neslen travels across Israel, the occupied territories, and several Gulf states, sometimes at great personal risk, to interview Palestinians from various walks of life—NGO leaders, supermodels, refugee camp residents, and jihadis. The book’s subjects share common experiences, among them the psychological effects of occupation, limitations on personal and economic mobility, bearing witness to extreme violence, and coping with religious and political factionalism. Neslen accesses some unique voices, including a zookeeper/taxidermist in the West Bank and a PFLP hijacker who became a poster girl for Palestinian resistance in the 1970s. One of the most salient themes to emerge from the collection is the experience of Palestinian women and their political marginalization by right-wing religious groups. Neslen’s occasionally awkward prose (“Below, chartreuse grass sprouted from sour hills like a halfhearted hair transplant”) and terse analysis prevent the book from being more than the sum of its parts, but as it is, it still offers important insight into the multifaceted Palestinian experience. (Nov.)