The further away anyone was from that block of Ben Yehuda street, the easier it seemed to find a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, that stubborn mess in the centre of the Middle East and the more I studied these solutions, the more I thought that they depended for their implementation on a population of table football men, painted in the colours of the two teams: blue and white for the Israelis, green, red and black for the Palestinians. All the international community had to do was to twist the levers and the little players would kick and swing and send the ball into the net, to victory’ One block of a Tel Aviv street is the starting point for Linda Grant’s exploration of the inner dynamics of Israelis – not the government and its policies, but the people themselves, in all their variety. Iraqi shop-keepers, Teenage soldiers, Mob bosses, Tunisian-born settlers, Russian scientists, and the father of the child victim of a suicide bomber are some of the people she meets.
Author
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads' database with this name. See this thread for more information. Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M.A. in English at MacMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and did further post-graduate studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she lived from 1977 to 1984. In 1985 she returned to Britain and became a journalist. From 1995 to 2000 she was a feature writer for the Guardian, where between 1997 and 1998 she also had a weekly column in G2. She contributed regularly to the Weekend section on subjects including the background to the use of drug Ecstasy (for which she was shortlisted for the UK Press Gazette Feature Writer of the Year Award in 1996), body modification, racism against Romanies in the Czech Republic, her own journey to Jewish Poland and to her father's birthplace and during the Kosovo War, an examination of the background to Serb nationalism.
