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Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Reading Response, Last Chapters
We have now as a class, finished the book. The information in the novel that AKren armstrong provided. "One City, Threee Faiths," had ultimately lead me to a deeper and much more clearer insight on the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict. I feel a little lost and confused though as to how Armstrong focused on literally zero points of political outside ofcus in order to analyze the present situation. She solely used ancient history and analysis of hte past to clear in her opinion, what hte present has been created because of. I am not entirely sure if she is just divying away from main points politically, or if she has little knowledge, datat and information about outside influence on the conflict. I kept waiting and waiting in anticipation for when she would incoorporate other countrie's involvement in Jerusalem and Gaza, but it ceased to happen as I read through the entire book. It seems that her only goal was to use religion as a center focus for defining the entire conflict, which is absurd in my opinion. Sure it seems that she writes in a non-biased form, whilst in reality, she opposes political incorporation of statistics in a sly way to get around the fact that she was once religious and ultimately from her form of writing; creating a deliniation of the fact that she is almost completely pacifist. She makes it clear to any insightful reader. I am not saying that being pacifistic is a bad thing by any means, but it can be more dangerous than being the opposite. "Walking into a battle blind and with negligence, can be deterent, while walking into a battle with knowledge and a goal can save lives." I like the points she tries to make in her book, but she fails to reach out to multiple genres of readers. At least in this novel, it is the case and it honestly aggravates me. I feel she is intelligent, but she redirects information to manipulate particular readers into a negative avenue of approaching the conflict for future resolvement.
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I agree that it was surprising that Karen did not incorporate other countries involvement into the history of Jerusalem because other countries played a big part in the conflict. I think that international involvement is so complex that she could never incorporate all those complexities into one novel. I wonder if she thought about incorporating this, but ultimately decided against it? it would be interesting to ask her!
ReplyDeleteI understand your frustration that Armstrong did not include any political resources regarding Jerusalem's current status. I think that Armstrong tried so hard to create an unbiased account of Jerusalem's history and into the present and in doing so, she lost some credibility. She had to use generalizations, few citations, and emotionally invest herself in each historical event in her novel. It would have been interesting for her to include multiple political viewpoints to express how certain people feel about modern day Jerusalem, but it would set her back from her ultimate goal of creating an unbiased account. I think she gives an interesting version of its history because there are numerous political accounts of Jerusalem especially within the last 50 to 100 years.
ReplyDeleteI would bet that she is quite knowledgable about politics and had to understand each political viewpoint thoroughly as to avoid accidentally slipping propaganda into the novel, disguised as her own opinion.
I think it's important to look at why she wrote the book. In my opinion, she wasn't trying to examine the political reaction to the conflict, but rather to detail the historical circumstances leading up to the political conflict of today. Without understanding this history, it becomes very difficult to understand the political turmoil. With that being said, it would be nice to read more about the political response to the history, as presented by Armstrong, but I think that would end up making the book twice (maybe three times) as long.
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