"The Holy Land at War: A Journey into Israel, the West Bank and Gaza"

That is both the name of my new narrative nonfiction book and my anecdotal presentation. I take audiences on my recent odyssey into both sides of the conflict, visiting the worst-hit Oct. 7 kibbutz, which remains the way it was on that terrible day, more a testimony than a memorial. I sat with grievously IDF wounded in Israel's biggest hospital, where they told me their greatest joy is standing on a balcony seeing Israelis on bikes and sidewalk cafes - they fight so their country can live. I went into the Gaza war zone itself with the IDF, a dystopian landscape where I saw a recently discovered tunnel and a school where Hamas had been dug in. Young soldiers told me their grandparents used to tell them about pogroms and the Holocaust, which the soldiers considered from a long-past era, but now it had happened again on Oct. 7, which is why they fight. I also spent two days as the only non-Palestinian face I saw on the West Bank, experiencing both hospitality and hardship. I was driven by a Palestinian teacher and at one point, as we approached an Israeli army checkpoint, I pointed at a nearby Jewish settlement. Immediately, my teacher friend grabbed my arm and pulled it down - never point, he said; the soldiers will mistake it for a gun and shoot first, asking questions later. At the end of both my book and my speech, I bring the audience to one of Israel's rare Jewish-Arab schools, pausing by a kindergarten class, where I decided to count how many Jewish kids and Arab kids there were sitting in a circle. But I could not tell one from the other.