Losing Israel

In 2007, while researching her family history, Jasmine Donahaye stumbled upon the collusion of her grandparents in the displacement of Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s – an early ethnic cleansing in which villages were erased to prevent the return of Palestinians. She set out to uncover a piece of Israel’s hidden history, and a part of family’s story unknown to her. What she found challenged everything she thought she knew about the country and her family, and transformed her understanding of the place, and of herself. Losing Israel is a moving and honest account which spans travel writing, nature writing and memoir. Through the author’s personal situation it explores the powerful and competing attachments that people feel about their country and its history, by attempting to understand and reconcile her conflicted attachments, rooted in her family story – and in a love of Israel’s birds. A life-long bird watcher, Donahaye uses birds in Israel, Palestine and her home in Wales to provide an unexpected and intriguing linking trope across the various themes of the book. Losing Israelstands apart from other titles about the Palestinian question with its focus on the British Mandate, Israel’s history in the 1940s and 50s, and the kibbutz movement. Her writing is frank and often immediate: the locations in Israel and Wales are sensually alive, and the author’s physical exertions felt by the reader. Her personal memories of her grandparents on their kibbutz, and her own experiences as a kibbutznik also bring originality her writing.Losing Israel works on many levels – family relationships, the nature of patriotism, cultural dislocation, the story of the Jewish diaspora and Israel, how history changes from one generation to the next, the histories of the dispossessed and the oppressed. In combining history, birdwatching, and her personal story Donahaye has written an accessible and human book about an habitual controversial conflict.

Jasmine Donahaye holds a BA in Celtic Studies from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in English from Swansea University. She worked for many years in the publishing sector and at the Welsh Books Council, and now lectures in Creative Writing at Swansea. Her publications include poetry, cultural criticism, fiction and creative non-fiction. Her poetry collection,Misappropriations was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh first collection prize, andSelf-Portrait as Ruth was longlisted for Wales Book of the Year. Her monographWhose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine published in 2012 by the UWP.