Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted

Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted is an ambitious endeavor to present a comprehensive, fact-based narrative of one of the most intense and divisive topics in the twentieth and twenty-first century (and, as Sokatch delineates, much earlier). Starting with the Biblical history of the region and tracing its growth through the millennia, Sokatch underlines the factors that have compounded into the conflict as the world sees it today. What sets the book apart from other tomes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Sokatch’s frank honesty and self-awareness of the human biases that drive perspectives.

Punctuated with illustrations by Christopher Noxon, the book goes beyond typical discourse by addressing the emotional and spiritual conflicts just as much as it does the history and politics. Sokatch outlines the invented narratives and erasures that drive cognitive dissonance on both sides, while also clearly discerning the colonial implications and human rights issues of Israel’s occupation and governance on an existing people’s land. While it doesn’t offer simplistic solutions or even a simplistic answer to its posed question, Can We Talk About Israel? is a crucial work that prompts its reader to understand, rather than reject, human emotions and bias while still accepting the facts of what has happened and what is happening.