The Tribes Triumphant

Charles Glass, an award-winning commentator on the Middle East, resumes a journey throughout the Levant that was violently interrupted in 1987 when he was kidnapped by Shiite gunmen. The voyage, from Aqaba on the Red Sea to Alexandretta in southern Turkey, begins again in September 2001, haunted by the 9/11 attacks on America and the ensuing invasion of Iraq. Along the route, Glass visits the Israeli settlements and Arab towns on whose land the settlements were constructed, speaks to Israeli conscripts and Palestinian demonstrators, to priests, rabbis and mullahs, politicians and assassins, the tortured and their torturers. He also revisits the scene of his captivity, confronting the men who kidnapped him over two decades ago.