’Rich and moving...Goldberg writers with savage self-lacerating irony...[Prisoners]offers many fascinating and Unusual Insights into the Middle Eastern mess and its appalling moral dilmmas’

--Times Literaty Supplement

Jeffrey Goldberg moved from Long Islan’d to Israel while still a college student. In the middle of the first Palestinian uprising in 1990, the Israeli army sent him to serve as a prison guard at Ketziot, the largest jail in the Middle East. Realizing that among the prisoners were the future leaders of Palestine, and that this was a unique opportunitytolearn from them about themselves, he began an extended dialogue with a prisoner named Rafig.

This is an account of life in that harsh-desert prison and of that dialogue - the accusations, explanations, fears, prejudices and aspirations each man expressed - which continues to this day.

Prisoners is a remarkable book: spare, impassioneed,energetic, and unstinting in its candour about both the darkness and the hope buried within the animosities of the Middle East.

Author’s note

One: The Thief of Mercy

Two: The Mysterious Child of Lies

Three: Our Lady of Lourdes

Four: The Hill of Jewish Bones

Five: God’s Golden Shore

Six: The Blanket Party

Seven: Desert Eagle

Eight: Rafiq

Nine: The Army of Muhammad

Ten: The Giving Famishes the Craving

Eleven: Let My People Go

Twelve: In the Valleys of Jerusalem

Thirteen: The Past Is the Past

Fourteen: Peace Without Guns

Fifteen: Prisoner Number 265o5

Sixteen: Refugees

Seventeen: You Were the Devil to Me

Eighteen: You Are Most Welcome Here

Nineteen: Abraham Was a Muslim

Twenty: A Kitbag Question

Twenty-one: A Lesson for America

Twenty-two: A Happy Man in Palestine

Twenty-three: Good Guys

Twenty-four: Stop Being Jewish

Twenty-five: I Want You to Live

Acknowledgments