No one does as good a job at acting the child, asking simple questions, than Tuvia Tenenbom.
I've reviewed Tenenbom's books before. His methodology is deceptively simple: go to major hotspots that people are talking about, where experts opine on what is going on on national news shows, and see the truth for himself. Live among the people being discussed, ask them simple questions, describe their situations, and write about it. He also manages to get interviews with politicians and other leaders and asks them similar questions about their positions.
What he discovers rarely matches what the media says.
His latest book, "Excuse Me, Is This Yours?" has him living for a year in what he calls Biblical Israel: Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, mostly among the Jews there. Yes, he goes himself to see the Hilltop Youth, the settler leaders, ordinary citizens, the Samaritan community, and to a smaller extent Palestinians.
The book is easily twice the size of his previous books, at over 470 pages. But he covers a lot of ground.
Most of his adventures are concentrated in Area C, which makes sense because that is the only area Jews are allowed to live in. And for much of the book, Tenenbom describes a giant geographical game of Go. Jews and Palestinians each try to grab land to surround their opponents land and stop them from expanding in any direction.
Starting in 2009, the Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad came up with a plan to work together with the Europeans to build as much as possible on Area C lands. Tenenbom sees huge, beautiful Palestinian houses, practically palaces, dotting the entire Area C, but he never sees any residents. We had seen how the EU builds schools and infrastructure, illegally, in Area C, but the PA apparently manages to convince wealthy Palestinians to build these houses, without permits, in strategic areas. So together with the Europeans they manage to encircle Jewish settlements.
The Jews, led by the hilltop youth and other ideological settlers, cannot build as easily as the Palestinians, because they have laws they still have to live under. Their strategy is to bring caravans on top of unclaimed hills, declare that a farm, and graze land with their cattle, and then the adventurous move on, building "farms" from hill to hill, and the grazed lands can then be claimed by them, supposedly, and in turn thwart Palestinian building in areas that their cattle go. This is all based on old Ottoman land codes that allow people, under some circumstances, to claim state lands after being cultivated or lived in for ten years.
So there is a strange situation where Palestinians still live in "refugee camps" under PA rule while mansions are left apparently empty. But plenty of Palestinians have moved into Area C, in recent decades. All part of their plan to expand into enemy areas.
You know, what the world accuses Israel alone of doing.
Tenenbom grew up a haredi in Israel, then became a religious Zionist, and then became non-religious himself. He is respectful to the religious Jews, as he is to everyone, but he clearly doesn't agree with their beliefs.
There is plenty here that Tenenbom reports that are not in any of the thousands of news articles about the "settlers." Like the constant terror attacks against Jews and how many of them have lost relatives to war. He also notes that there are many who follow Chabad and many who follow the very late Rabbi Nachman of Breslov.
There were also things I was not aware of. While the religious settlers say they want the entire land to belong to Israel, whenever there is a chance for a vote in Knesset to annex part or all of the land, they seem to get skittish. They worry about the American reaction to annexation. They love symbolic votes but not anything with teeth. And this includes the biggest monsters in Western media, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.
Another fact that amazed me was that it appears that a huge percentage of religious Zionists who grow up in the territories end up non-religious, perhaps 40%.
Speaking of secular Jews, there are plenty of them in the territories, perhaps 30% of the settlers, like the ones who live in the Jordan Valley, Shaked, and elsewhere. They are more hard core ideological in some ways than the payot and tzitzit-wearing religious settlers. Unlike them, they really want to see the land annexed to Israel.
Tenenbom being who he is finds a Palestinian who wishes that Israel would annex the entire West Bank as well. He despises the PA and Hamas wants to become an Israeli.
This is part of the whiplash one experiences when reading a Tuvia Tenenbom book. Nothing at all is as reported in the media, even the Israeli or religious settler media. And few people are immune from looking foolish trying to answer Tenenbom's deceptively childish questions.
In the second half of the book Tenenbom manages to hook up with s left-wing Israeli Jew, Robby, who willingly crosses the line into Area A, so Tuvia manages to get to the Arab areas he wanted to see. For example, the Palestinian Museum, a beautiful piece of architecture, seems to have no exhibits about anything outside the Gaza war.
He visits Rawabi, the planned Palestinian city, filled with beautiful buildings and almost no people. And then they visit Balata, a camp, where the graffiti is filled with images of Palestinian "martyrs" killed while trying to kill Jews and living Palestinians who suspect that they are Jewish and do not like it one bit. Robby gets nervous, and more nervous, and finally begs to leave Balata. When Tuvia asks why he got so upset with the Palestinians he loves so much, Robby answered, "I don't love them. Fuck all Palestinians. What I care about is that we, Jews, not mistreat them."
That's what the book is filled with. Idealistic people whose ideals often do not quite reach how they present themselves, from all political and religious stripes.
I cannot say whether the people Tenenbom interviews are representative; he obviously gravitates towards the nutty. But surveys do not tell the whole story either. Israelis, and perhaps even Palestinian Arabs, don't all fit in neat boxes and the boxes that Western media place them in are invariably oversimplifications. Tenenbom notes that the Jews of Area C were reluctant to open up to him simply because they had been treated badly by the media for so long, yet no journalist or writer - none - had ever decided to live with them for more than a day or two, let alone many months.
And this is why this book is so valuable. Even with the craziness, one fact shines through: most of the so-called settlers have a deep love of the land, a connection that goes back to Abraham, and a love that Tenenbom seems to share.
It is too bad that so many Jews cannot even fathom such an emotion.
