Peace activist, novelist and Melville House author, Samir El Youseff.

In a post on The Guardian (UK) book blog, Chris Cox reports on a new Arab-Israeli book club: “A groundbreaking new literary event offers new paths to understanding in what often seems an intractable conflict.”

The Arab-Israeli book club has been started by writer and lecturer Ariel Kahn and the Palestinian novelist and Melville House author Samir El-youssef, author of The Illusion of Return, in collaboration with the Jewish Community Centre in London.

According to the Guardian, “The club is intended to help people “listen deeply to other voices” in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as Kahn explained. While media coverage of Israel and Palestine often provides simplified narratives, novels insist on complexity, demanding that we consider individual characters and stories. Crucially, in a debate where so many have a vested interest in not listening to the other side, literature opens up a space where we can encounter multiple perspectives.”

The blog reports that their first session was a smash hit, “The room fizzed with energy as we discussed Arabesques by Anton Shammas.” Shammas’s book had been controversial on it’s release in 1986, being the first novel written in Hebrew by an Israeli Arab. “Blending novel and autobiography, the book explores what it means to be both Arab and an Israeli citizen by charting Shammas’s attempts to become recognised as an Israeli author, rather than an outsider in what he saw his own country,” writes Cox.

Adhaf Soueif, founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, told Cox: “To read a story, you have to care about its characters—that act of empathy can be a short-cut into a situation.” And the book club hopes to foster that empathy. Simple in its premise and grand in its ambitions, it is off to a promising start. As Cox writes, “The moment you make that daring leap into another person’s shoes, literature stops being a solitary pursuit and becomes something quite different: a radical act.”