Ronit & Jamil

"Unbearable treacle. By setting Romeo and Juliet in Israel/Palestine, Laskin resuscitates the weepy “eternal hatreds” narrative, which laments the tragedy but assigns no responsibility, or rather blames “stubbornness” on both sides rather than acknowledging that one side has quite a bit more power than the other. Imagine trying to do this with say, a white girl and a black boy in the Jim Crow south, or apartheid South Africa. Jamil, the Palestinian boy piously reminds his father that “some of our people wear bombs on their bodies”, while there is no similar recognition of Israeli home demolitions, settler violence , or shootings of civilian protesters from Israeli Ronit. There are laments for the “children who die on both sides”, with no acknowledgement that the overall death toll for Palestinians to Israelis is approximately 4 to 1.<br/><br/>Laskin’s cultural ignorance is galling. She mentions “Arabs, Christians and Jews” as though these were three separate groups, apparently unaware that there are Jewish and Christian Arabs. She describes Jamil’s mother as wearing a burqua, which is NOT a garment commonly worn in Palestine. In her acknowledgments, she credits as sources 3 Israeli friends, 2 Jewish Americans, a Sri Lankan writer and a Syrian-Palestinian nephrologist in New York. So, no actual Palestinians.<br/><br/>In her introduction, Laskin claims that “there is no right or wrong here”, yet she glosses over some serious historical wrongs. She mentions the 1947 partition without explaining that it gave Israel the most land, (containing many Palestinian communities) even though Jews only made up about a third of the population. She claims “Arab Israelis” ( ie Palestinians) remained in Israel “not always with the same rights of Israeli citizens”; how about “never”? She mentions settlements but not that they are illegal under international law and are gobbling up Palestinian land.<br/><br/>I’m sure Laskin had the best of intentions in writing <i>Ronit and Jamil</i>, but if she wants teens to understand and empathize with young Palestinians and Israelis, she needs to break away from simplistic “both sides” narratives. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet was that the feud was nonsensical; no one in the play ever refers to an original cause , and of course the two houses are “alike in dignity”. To suggest that Palestinians have the same status and power as Israelis, or that their losses have been the same is to fundamentally misrepresent and trivialize their story."