June Online Book Club: Where the Desert Meets the Sea by Werner Sonne

Where the Desert Meets the Sea
by Werner Sonne

Over the years, my book club has read about World War II many times. We’ve read about Americans fighting in Europe and Asia, the British perspective, Occupied France, German soldiers, German citizens caught in the middle, concentration camp victims and survivors, Russians, Japanese, Pearl Harbor, and POWs in the Pacific. Every available perspective.

Or so I thought. I was wrong.

I found something new to me, and hope you’ll like it too. I remember reading about Palestine and the establishment of Israel as a country in a high school history class eons ago. But until I saw this book, I had forgotten the significance of the lessons about the British occupying Palestine from 1922 until 1948.

Where the Desert Meets the Sea picks up in Jerusalem, 1947, and follows the conflict through the eyes of two women. Judith, a refugee from the Dachau concentration camp, travels by ship with other survivors to Mandatory Palestine seeking her only remaining relative, her uncle. Hana is an Arab Muslim nurse who works at a hospital that treats both Jews and Arabs. Hadassah Hospital (a real-life hospital) becomes a focal point in the conflict. Land that has been disputed since Biblical times changes around them in this action-packed page-turner filled with poignant, desperate moments.

People who survived the Nazis moved to where they expected freedom and a fresh start, but endured racism, religious restrictions, and oppression long after the war ended. Arabs who were used to living peacefully next to Jewish neighbors found themselves homeless because of decisions made by politicians living in faraway capitals, exhausted by war. 

Author Werner Sonne is a German journalist who is not Jewish, Arab, or Muslim. He has studied the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for much of his career, and does a great job showing both sides of the story without taking sides himself. There are no simple answers. The English translation by Steve Anderson is richly written as well.

I was unfamiliar with these years of history in the region. While fictionalized, putting faces to history is my favorite way to learn more about a topic. I highly recommend the book, especially if you enjoy studying history, war, and its effects on current events like those in Israel, Palestine, and even the war and refugee crisis in Ukraine.

(Map of UN partition plan: Israel and Palestine. Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc)