This remarkable book tells the inside story of three young men caught up in the Palestinian intifada. Through their stories, the tangled and tragic web of the past twenty years of the most enduring conflict in the Middle East unfolds before us. For over a decade, Laetitia Bucaille lived in the Occupied Territories for months at a time, gaining rare access to the three militants she calls Sami, Najy, and Bassam and many other Palestinians they crossed paths with--those who grew up during the first intifada and whose lives became bound up with the second, which erupted in 2000. The result is an intimate yet unsentimental portrait of daily life in the West Bank and Gaza from the mid-1980s to today.

Raised in squalid refugee camps, and veterans of Israeli prisons and forced exile, Sami, Najy, and Bassam are torn between the struggle against Israel and a desire for a stable family life. Shooting a suspected informer at point blank range turns out to be easier than learning job skills for a globalized economy. For many young Palestinians, collective political failure mirrors their shipwrecked lives.

A riveting blend of social and political analysis, "Growing Up Palestinian" shows us Palestinian society as it unfolds in camps, prisons, homes, and the street. This is a society divided by class, age, politics, and religion, and consumed by corruption--a society that must somehow integrate its underprivileged and brutalized youth into nonviolent and productive activity if it is ever to meet the daunting challenges ahead.

In a new afterword, the author examines the social and political developments in the Occupied Territories since the book's publication in 2004, including the implications of Yasser Arafat's death and the challenges and opportunities presented to his elected successor, Mahmood Abbas.

Reconciliation between political antagonists who went to war against each other is not a natural process. Hostility toward an enemy only slowly abates and the political resolution of a conflict is not necessarily followed by the immediate pacification of society and reconciliation among individuals. Under what conditions can a combatant be brought to understand the motivations of his enemies, consider them as equals, and develop a new relationship, going so far as to even forgive them? By comparing the experiences of veterans of the South African and Franco-Algerian conflicts, Laetitia Bucaille seeks to answer this question. She begins by putting the postconflict and postcolonial order that characterizes South Africa, France, and Algeria into perspective, examining how each country provided symbolic and material rewards to the veterans and how past conflict continues to shape the present. Exploring the narratives of ex-combatants, Bucaille also fosters an understanding of their intimate experiences as well as their emotions of pride, loss, and guilt. In its comparative analysis of South Africa and Algeria, Making Peace with Your Enemy reveals a paradox. In Algeria, the rhetoric of the regime is characterized by resentment toward colonizing France but relations between individuals Reconciliationare warm. However, in South Africa, democratization was based on official reconciliation but distance and wariness between whites and blacks prevail. Despite these differences, Bucaille argues, South African, Algerian, and French ex-adversaries face a similar challenge: how to extricate oneself from colonial domination and the violence of war in order to build relationships based on trust.

The debate surrounding Islamist violence remains locked in oppositional sterility. Are such attacks perpetrated by Islamists as a matter of belief or do they reflect socio-economic realities? Is the suicide bomber a pathological case, as the psychologist maintains, or a clever strategist, as those steeped in the geopolitical approach claim? This book aims to transcend both the culturalist or underdevelopment explanations by focusing on the highly variegated nature of the phenomenon. For example, suicide attacks are relatively common in Kashmir and Israel/Palestine but almost non-existent in Algeria and Yemen, both of which have experienced long-running campaigns by violent Islamist groups. However a more nuanced reading, based on a series of case studies, reveals a less obvious set of meanings for suicidal political violence. These bring us closer to the Islamists' political mindset: a quest for purity in the next world that replaces the justice here on earth of which the militant despairs; the distress caused by the degeneracy of a failing ethno-nationalist rebellion, which encourages a shift in the struggle to the timelessness of death; or the paradoxical desire to assert one's individuality when the wider group is powerless by carrying out an 'exemplary' act of war against an enemy that is increasingly imagined rather than real. These are among the complex motivations of suicide attacks that this book brings to light.