This Burning Land; Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

xv, [1], 320 pages. Authors' Note. Chronology. Map. Illustrations (some in color). Notes. Index. Small tear at top of dust jacket near spine. Inscribed by the author on the title page. The inscription at reads: "Nov. 10, 2011 Here's hoping our next volume will be about peace! ' Jennifer Griffin Greg Myre". Greg Myre is an American journalist and an NPR national security correspondent with a focus on the intelligence community. Before joining NPR, he was a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press and The New York Times for 20 years. He reported from more than 50 countries and covered a dozen wars and conflicts. Myre is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. He has appeared as an analyst on CNN, PBS, BBC, C-SPAN, Fox News, and Al Jazeera. Jennifer Griffin is an American journalist who works as Chief national security correspondent at the Pentagon for Fox News. She joined Fox News in October 1999 as a Jerusalem-based correspondent. Prior to the posting, she reported for three years from Moscow for Fox News. Since 2007, Griffin has reported daily from the Pentagon where she questions senior military leaders, travels to war zones with the Joint Chiefs and Secretaries of Defense, and reports on all aspects of the military. Griffin coauthored This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict with her husband. A profoundly different way of looking at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reporting from Jerusalem for The New York Times and Fox News respectively, Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, witnessed a decades-old conflict transformed into a completely new war. The West has learned a lot about asymmetrical war in the past decade. At the same time, many strategists have missed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become one of them. This book shows the importance of applying these hard-won lessons to the longest running, most closely watched occupation and uprising in the world. The entire conflict can seem irrational -- and many commentators see it that way. While raising their own family in Jerusalem at the height of the violence, Myre and Griffin look at the lives of individuals caught up in the struggles to reveal how these actions make perfect sense to the participants. Extremism can become a virtue; moderation a vice. Factions develop within factions. Propaganda becomes an important weapon, and perseverance an essential defense. While the Israelis and the Palestinians have failed to achieve their goals after years of fighting, people on both sides are prepared to make continued sacrifices in the belief that they will eventually emerge triumphant. This book goes straight to the heart of the conflict: into the minds of suicide bombers and inside Israeli tanks. We hear from Palestinian informants who help the Israeli military track down and kill Palestinian militants. Israeli settlers in isolated outposts explain why they are there, and we hear the frustrations of a Palestinian farmer who has had his olive grove cut in half by Israel's security barrier. Shows the important lessons that can be learned by viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example of modern, asymmetrical war. Authored by long-time reporters on the Middle East, the book provides a balanced and detailed look at the fighting based on first-hand experience and hundreds of interviews. Explains how the landscape of the conflict changed and why the traditional approach to peacemaking is no longer valid. "A stunning piece of nonfiction about the tortured and heartbreaking stalemate in the Middle East. This is a brilliant book--superbly written and devastatingly insightful. The fact that they raised two little girls while reporting this story makes every explosion, every riot, every checkpoint especially upsetting. I don't know how they did it."--Sebastian Junger, author of War "Myre and Griffin have written an extraordinary story--personal yet har.…