Five years on from the Intifada in 2000, Israel and the Israelis have rarely been out of the news as a horrific cycle of violence consumes both Israelis and Palestinians. Linda Grant lived in Tel Aviv for four months in 2003 and began to realise that the world's 'solutions' to the deplorable situation had always lacked any understanding of the people involved.This is her account of the people she met and the issues raised by those encounters. She examines the language itself, and the very nature of a country made up entirely of immigrants, the Diaspora re-meeting itself for the first time in two thousand years. She introduces and exemplifies the condition of the bu'ah, the bubble, the place and state of mind by which Israelis protect themselves from the 'situation'; , for example - the conditions of the occupied Palestinians whose very existence determines every aspect of Israeli life. Using a novelist's eye, Linda Grant attempts to understand the human situation and the possibility that it is these conditions, deep in the psyche of individuals and a people, formed out of the experience of genocide and discrimination, that determine, or has predetermined, the fate of the region.

Shelf wear and fading.