The Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians

The Infected Desert: Israel at War with the Palestinians is Harold Jaffe's last book, published four months after his death. The form is documentary poems, a turn Jaffe took in his final years toward verse that carries the same documentary charge as his prose.

The subject is the Israeli war on the Palestinians, and Jaffe addresses it two ways at once: through brief, tensely discerning free verse and through actual documents that he reconstitutes so the buried subtexts come to the surface. It is the method he spent four decades developing on prose, documentary source material rearranged just enough to expose what its ideology had kept hidden. The press frames the book against the suppression of truth-telling that runs through US discourse about the war, and credits Jaffe with the courage to do what he believed documentary poems must do, which is tell truth to power.

It is the closing line of one of American innovative fiction's most uncompromising documentary projects, and the form he ended on was the form the subject demanded. JEF also publishes Goosestep, Paris 60, and OD: Docufictions.