{"id":892,"date":"2016-10-14T15:51:49","date_gmt":"2016-10-14T12:51:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/?p=892"},"modified":"2016-10-14T15:51:49","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T12:51:49","slug":"pj-media-review-sept-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/2016\/10\/14\/pj-media-review-sept-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"PJ Media review, Sept. 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"optimizely-1-201435\"><strong>The &#8216;New Middle East&#8217; That Never Was<\/strong><\/p>\n<p class=\"optimizely-1-201435\">P. David Hornik<\/p>\n<p>Matti Friedman, a journalist and writer who moved from Canada to Israel in his late teens in the late 1990s, has written a powerful little book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Pumpkinflowers-Soldiers-Story-Matti-Friedman\/dp\/1616204583\/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1472360194&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=pumpkin+flowers\">Pumpkinflowers<\/a>,<\/em> that takes you deep into Israeli and Middle Eastern reality.<\/p>\n<p>The Pumpkin was a hill in the southern-Lebanon security zone, which Israel set up in 1985 and withdrew from in 2000. \u201cFlowers\u201d was military code for casualties. In those years Hizballah was able to inflict a steady toll of \u201cflowers\u201d at the Pumpkin and other security-zone outposts. It was that\u2014along with the 1997 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/1997_Israeli_helicopter_disaster\">helicopter disaster<\/a> (a horrendous accident)\u2014that swayed Israel into finally leaving the zone. As well as a hope\u2014soon shattered\u2014that doing so would lead to peace. &#8230;<\/p>\n<p><em>Pumpkinflowers<\/em> is ultimately a story of an individual\u2019s and a society\u2019s growth and adjustment to reality. Rendered in Friedman\u2019s lean, pinpoint prose with its frequent poetic intensities, it\u2019s an engrossing read and leaves\u2014I\u2019m already finding\u2014a strong impact.<\/p>\n<p>(Read the full review <a href=\"https:\/\/pjmedia.com\/blog\/the-new-middle-east-that-never-was\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The &#8216;New Middle East&#8217; That Never Was P. David Hornik Matti Friedman, a journalist and writer who moved from Canada to Israel in his late teens in the late 1990s, has written a powerful little book, Pumpkinflowers, that takes you deep into Israeli and Middle Eastern reality. The Pumpkin was a hill in the southern-Lebanon security zone, which Israel set &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":894,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions\/894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mattifriedman.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}