This Heated Place: Encounters in the Promised Land

Lisa Arsenault is an elementary-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

This collection of personal observations and anecdotes about the
conflict in the Holy Land is written from the perspective of a
nonreligious, nonpolitically aligned Westerner.

The author, a Canadian student in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, made
many contacts and friends among both Jews and Arabs, and returned for an
extended stay in the region 10 years later. She uses her network of
acquaintances to gain access to protagonists on both sides of the
conflict and acquires some startling information about the true nature
of the Israeli occupation of land beyond their lawful borders. It is
also her mandate to look beyond the headlines into the lives of ordinary
people in order to better understand the conflict through their eyes.

Campbell is a good writer, with the ability to convey the common human
experience of living in a war zone, and a gift for metaphor: “But what
is careful? Terrorism works on a lottery system. If you are one of the
unlucky winners, you get the windfall. The chances are slim, but
everyone who lives here has bought a ticket.” Many descriptive
passages are evocative: her searing description of the new bus station
(Disneyesque, in a word) in Jerusalem is superb.

The author is an impartial, fair observer of events in Israel and the
occupied territories. Her open-mindedness infuses this highly
recommended book.