Israeli-Palestinian Relations & Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin

In the wake of Obama's visit, Palestinian rocket attacks have resumed in Israel.

Here's today's BBC article, "Eilat rocket strike: Israeli city of hit from Sinai:"

At least two rockets have hit the southern Israeli city of Eilat.

Police said the rockets had landed in open areas, without causing damage or injury. The Israeli military said they were fired from Sinai in Egypt.

Warning sirens went off just before the rockets hit. The city's airport has been closed and security tightened.

Eilat, a popular tourist destination on the Red Sea, has previously been hit by rockets fired by militants in neighbouring Egypt and Jordan. The Egyptian military said it was investigating the incident.

Hours after the attack, a small militant Salafi group, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, said it had fired two Grad rockets at "occupied Eilat", in a statement carried on jihadist websites.

For a recent novel about Israeli-Palestinian relations try Susan Abulhawa's 2010 Mornings in Jenin:

Forcibly removed from the ancient village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejas are moved into the Jenin refugee camp. There, exiled from his beloved olive groves, the family patriarch languishes of a broken heart, his eldest son fathers a family and falls victim to an Israeli bullet, and his grandchildren struggle against tragedy toward freedom, peace, and home. This is the Palestinian story, told as never before, through four generations of a single family.

The very precariousness of existence in the camps quickens life itself. Amal, the patriarch's bright granddaughter, feels this with certainty when she discovers the joys of young friendship and first love and especially when she loses her adored father, who read to her daily as a young girl in the quiet of the early dawn. Through Amal we get the stories of her twin brothers, one who is kidnapped by an Israeli soldier and raised Jewish; the other who sacrifices everything for the Palestinian cause. Amal’s own dramatic story threads between the major Palestinian-Israeli clashes of three decades

For a novel set in Israel, the book I recommended in my post about Obama's visit was To the End of the Land by David Grossman:

Ora, a middle-aged Israeli mother, is on the verge of celebrating her son Ofer’s release from army service when he returns to the front for a major offensive. In a fit of preemptive grief and magical thinking, she sets out for a hike in the Galilee, leaving no forwarding information for the “notifiers” who might darken her door with the worst possible news. Recently estranged from her husband, Ilan, she drags along an unlikely companion: their former best friend and her former lover Avram, once a brilliant artistic spirit.

Avram served in the army alongside Ilan when they were young, but their lives were forever changed one weekend when the two jokingly had Ora draw lots to see which of them would get the few days’ leave being offered by their commander—a chance act that sent Avram into Egpyt and the Yom Kippur War, where he was brutally tortured as POW. In the aftermath, a virtual hermit, he refused to keep in touch with the family and has never met the boy.

Now, as Ora and Avram sleep out in the hills, ford rivers, and cross valleys, avoiding all news from the front, she gives him the gift of Ofer, word by word; she supplies the whole story of her motherhood, a retelling that keeps Ofer very much alive for Ora and for the reader, and opens Avram to human bonds undreamed of in his broken world. Their walk has a “war and peace” rhythm, as their conversation places the most hideous trials of war next to the joys and anguish of raising children. Never have we seen so clearly the reality and surreality of daily life in Israel, the currents of ambivalence about war within one household, and the burdens that fall on each generation anew.