Publisher's Synopsis
Under the bleak Israeli occupation, not many would have imagined that love between the oppressed Palestinian women and the carefree Israeli settlers could take root, but it did!
Amal was tall, well proportioned, walked like a princess and talked with her eyes. One evening, she was spellbound watching the sunset when Aaron, a dashing Israeli settler approached her. In Hollywood stories, love blossoms between a man and a woman ever so slowly, but in real life, love strikes like a mongoose. Their love affair did not last long because the Israelis stoned Amal to death.
Almaz, Amal's sister decided to escape Israel's cast iron clutches, and with the financial help of her friends, studied at the Sorbonne, in Paris, because she believed that only the educated are free, an aphorism the divine Hypatia of Alexandria postulated. After graduating from the Sorbonne, she travelled to Adelaide, in Australia, to gain a perspective on the Middle Eastern muddle from a distance. With Jason, her lover, they storm the Citadel of the Enlightened where Jostein Gaarder, Gideon Levy, Alon Ben-Meir, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said and Margot Wallstr?m reside, to debunk several myths that proclaim the Israelis are God's chosen people who maintain the most ethical armed forces in the world and believe that killing Palestinians is not really a violation of human rights.
Author Bio's - Nicholas Fourikis, MSc PhD - Nicholas, turned to literary fiction after a distinguished career in Radio-Astronomy culminating in the discovery of five interstellar molecules and the authoring of two University textbooks; two literary books followed, and in this book, a 3-year-old child announces solemnly, "Am gonna tell God everything" before he dies from the ravages of the war that had a beginning in the Middle East but no end.
Nicholas was born in cosmopolitan Cairo and graduated from a Greek High School, where French and English were compulsory subjects; additionally he studied Modern / Ancient Greek Literature and gained a First Class Honours in Modern Greek Literature. After he and his family moved to Australia he graduated from RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in Radio Engineering, gained an MSc from Macquarie University and PhD from NSW University. After he joined the CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation), he gained a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship which allowed him to pursue his interests in the detection of interstellar molecules from the Tokyo University Observatory, the Kitt Peak National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Arizona and the Parkes Radio telescope.
After retirement he authored two University textbooks in phased arrays used for radio-astronomical research and two literary books.
Keywords: Middle East, Israel, Palestine, star crossed lovers, human rights
