Language of War, Language of Peace

Raja Shehadeh

Profile Books, 160 pages, RS. 299

Palestine’s leading writer, Raja Shehadeh, explores how the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israel–Palestine conflict, create walls—legal and cultural—that confine today’s Palestinians just as much as physical borders and checkpoints. The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery, Shehadeh says. For instance, Israel argued that the omission of the word “the” in one UN Security Council resolution meant that it was not mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967.