Emma Williams

It's Easier to Reach Heaven Than the End of the Street: a Jerusalem Memoir Emma Williams

In August, 2000, Emma Williams arrived with her three small children in Jerusalem to join her husband and to work as a doctor. A month later, the Palestinian intifada erupted. For the next three years, she was to witness an astonishing series of events in which hundreds of thousands of lives, including her own, were turned upside down. Williams lived on the very border of East and West Jerusalem, working with Palestinians in Ramallah during the day and spending evenings with Israelis in Tel Aviv. Weaving personal stories and conversations with friends and colleagues into the long and fraught political background, Williams' powerful memoir brings to life the realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She vividly recalls giving birth to her fourth child during the siege of Bethlehem, and her horror when a suicide bomber blew his own head into the schoolyard where her children played each day. Understanding in her judgement, yet unsparing in her honesty, Williams exposes the humanity, as well as the hypocrisy at the heart of both sides' experiences. Anyone wanting to understand this intractable and complex dispute will find this unique account a refreshing and an illuminating read.