’Rich and moving...Goldberg writers with savage self-lacerating irony...[Prisoners]offers many fascinating and Unusual Insights into the Middle Eastern mess and its appalling moral dilmmas’
--Times Literaty Supplement

Jeffrey Goldberg moved from Long Islan’d to Israel while still a college student. In the middle of the first Palestinian uprising in 1990, the Israeli army sent him to serve as a prison guard at Ketziot, the largest jail in the Middle East. Realizing that among the prisoners were the future leaders of Palestine, and that this was a unique opportunitytolearn from them about themselves, he began an extended dialogue with a prisoner named Rafig. This is an account of life in that harsh-desert prison and of that dialogue - the accusations, explanations, fears, prejudices and aspirations each man expressed - which continues to this day. Prisoners is a remarkable book: spare, impassioneed,energetic, and unstinting in its candour about both the darkness and the hope buried within the animosities of the Middle East.

Author’s note
One: The Thief of Mercy
Two: The Mysterious Child of Lies
Three: Our Lady of Lourdes
Four: The Hill of Jewish Bones
Five: God’s Golden Shore
Six: The Blanket Party
Seven: Desert Eagle
Eight: Rafiq
Nine: The Army of Muhammad
Ten: The Giving Famishes the Craving
Eleven: Let My People Go
Twelve: In the Valleys of Jerusalem
Thirteen: The Past Is the Past
Fourteen: Peace Without Guns
Fifteen: Prisoner Number 265o5
Sixteen: Refugees
Seventeen: You Were the Devil to Me
Eighteen: You Are Most Welcome Here
Nineteen: Abraham Was a Muslim
Twenty: A Kitbag Question
Twenty-one: A Lesson for America
Twenty-two: A Happy Man in Palestine
Twenty-three: Good Guys
Twenty-four: Stop Being Jewish
Twenty-five: I Want You to Live
Acknowledgments