“Broken Promises, Broken Dreams” probes beyond the geopolitical realities confronting Israelis and Palestinians. It is a soul searching, painfully honest examination of ordinary people bonded in a tragic embrace. Ultimately this powerful book is about healing festering wounds and narrowing irreconcilable differences. It deserves the widest readership.” – Bernard Lown, MD, Professor emeritus Harvard School of Public Health, Co-recipient Nobel Peace Prize
“Alice Rothchild has written a poignant account of exploration, realization and courage. A beautiful and thoughtful rendition of the binding humanity in all people told from a Jewish ethical perspective. A heartfelt plea for proximity and embrace over distance and alienation.” – Sara Roy, Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle East Studies, Harvard University
“Alice Rothchild draws on her personal experience as a physician and her vast understanding of the depths and complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to write a uniquely informed, powerful, and brilliantly reasoned case for ending the conflict in ways that would benefit both Israelis and Palestinians. Rothchild is sensitive to the hurts, fears, and terrors among both populations and fully grasps the emotional realities that, unless fully acknowledged and honored, stand in the way of resolving the conflict. Her persuasiveness is all at once gentle, compassionate, and strong.” – Gordon Fellman, Professor of Sociology and Chair, Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies, Brandeis University
“Broken Promises Broken Dreams is a soul-searching, truth-seeking journey from childhood Zionism to advocate of Palestinian rights. Open, honest and compelling.” – Sara Powell, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
“A tour of Israel/Palestine that turns Birthright on its head. Broken Promises, Broken Dreams focuses a physician’s lens on the human rights violations and related atrocities being perpetrated against Palestinians under Israel’s brutal military occupation. A brief stint in Israel ‘proper’ followed by an extended tour through the OPTs foregrounds starkly the hypocrisy of moral ambivalence in the face of the occupation’s harsh physical realities. Alice Rothchild’s medical expertise reveals the failure of unilateral ‘solutions’ to the conflict, mired as they are in empty rhetoric that masks ongoing aggression and its devastating human toll. This candid travel diary offers an implicit plea for an internationally coordinated, culturally integrated, feminist path towards peace, anything short of which would appear insufficient and self-defeating.” – Terri Ginsberg, former Adjunct Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College
“Alice Rothchild’s book manages to be personal, factual, political, historical, and – dare I say so – ethical, all at once. It travels through Israel and Palestine, meeting Jews and Arabs and exposing the depths of their separate and shared pains – all through the eyes of an American of conscience. With no attempt at faked optimism, but with a glimmer of hope, it shows us how ‘this is no longer a question of Israel’s right to exist, but rather a question of how it exists.'” – Professor Anat Biletzki, Tel-Aviv University, former chairperson of B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
“Dr. Rothchild gives us what we so badly need–information, information and more information–about what is actually happening in Israeli-controlled Gaza and West Bank and, even more important, about the lives and struggles of those brave Israelis who reject their government’s policies of occupation and wish to bring about a future where it can be truly said, ‘We refuse to be enemies.'” – Dorothy M. Zellner, activist and former staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the US Southern civil rights movement