Eliezer Yaari pens a book on the other side of the ‘invisible’ divide, probing Israel’s bi-national dilemma
Eliezer Yaari, a native of Jerusalem, lives along an invisible border. The village of Tsur Baher, once part of Jordan and today part of the Jerusalem municipality, is a five-minute walk from his front door. But Yaari, a former fighter pilot and former head of the New Israel Fund, called his new book, which chronicles his daily walks from his home to the village, “Beyond the Mountains of Darkness.”
The title is only slightly tongue in cheek. Like most Israelis, he steered clear of the village until 2013, when he had open-heart surgery and his doctors prescribed walking for his recuperation.
These walks led him into Tsur Baher and into writing a book about the life of the village and those who inhabit it, probing Jerusalem’s — and Israel’s — bi-national dilemma.
What follows is a brief conversation with him on the backdrop of the pictures he took during his daily walks across the national divide, which, he said, will hopefully spark “the beginning of some kind of renewed relationship between the two sides.”
As reported by The Times of Israel