A review by alyssarubin
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation by Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman

5.0

Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon have compiled a harrowing collection of stories that feel simultaneously painful, damning, and tragically mundane. As someone who is engaged in anti-occupation work, I was shocked by how viscerally the stories affected me, and I felt that I had been desensitized to some of the horrors of the occupation. What is transformative about this body of work is the realization that occupation is as violent physically as it is temporally — the Israeli government's control of land, bodies, narratives, and most strikingly, the control of Palestinian time, is a process that dehumanizes both oppressed and oppressor.