That’s an excerpt from the opening chapter of my debut novel, Perfect Enemy. It’s a thriller set in contemporary Israel, and as you can already sense from those first lines, it doesn’t pull its punches. It grapples head-on with some of the most troubling themes of Israeli identity and society today: trauma, the desire for revenge against those who have harmed us, religious extremism, the pain of terrorism, and the persistent hopes for peace.

And it does all of that, as you can see from its terrific early reviews, in the context of being a suspenseful, exciting, page-turning thriller.

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I used to write a fair amount of op-eds about Israel education, Israeli politics, and Israel-Diaspora relations. But a few years ago, I realized that I wanted to tackle these topics from a different direction. “There is no end to the making of books,” says Kohelet, and I think that’s true more than ever today when we survey the scene, not of books per se, but of short-length internet writing. Newspaper op-eds, blog posts, Facebook posts, viral text messages… we are inundated by this kind of writing. Some of it is outstanding – I think, for example, that Thomas Friedman’s recent series of pieces for the New York Times are required reading – but for every seminal Friedman op-ed, there are a hundred other pieces floating across our screens, and all too often the excellent pieces get lost in that flotsam and jetsam. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using this blog post to make that critique!

In any event, I began to wonder if long-form fiction might be a different way to touch on some of the same issues. And then I came up with the idea for this novel… and started writing.

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Writing a novel allowed me to take some of the themes I’m interested in, and play them out in a very different way. Rather than summing everything up in 800 words, and wrapping it in a bow, I created characters and plot lines that dug into themes and explored them. What, for example, do we mean by “never again”? Some see that as a call for Israeli strength and might, using our powerful army to make sure that no-one can ever hurt as again. Some see it as a call for peace and co-existence, so that no-one, not just the Jews, will ever experience that kind of trauma. The characters and plot lines in Perfect Enemy explore that tension.

Or, to take another example: who are the Palestinians? Are they incorrigible terrorists, with whom no compromise is possible, or are they people who, while different from us, we can eventually find a way to live in peace with?

What about Israelis from the Left and the Right? Where can we empathize with and see the humanity of the other side of the political spectrum, and how do we react when they make strategic errors and troubling moral compromises?

Perfect Enemy raises all of these issues. It doesn’t – I hope – give any easy answers. It does – I hope – leave readers scratching their heads about them, and walking away from the book with more textured insights into the conversations about Israel, Israeli society, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Perfect Enemy functions on two levels at once: as well as confronting the reader with all these big issues and questions, it’s also an exciting, suspenseful story, with breathless chase scenes and mind-blowing twists and turns. And it has some great characters that I hope you’ll find memorable. And ultimately, that combination – the characters, the plot, the issues – will, I believe, give the reader – give you! – insights, and questions, and ideas, and more questions, about Israel than even the best op-ed can hope for.

Perfect Enemy can be bought on Amazon and most other websites, and can be ordered to any bookstore in the world.

We congratulate Dr. Sinclair on this new book, we are proud of him. Dr. Sinclair is a lecturer in the Melton Center's Master of Education program. He currently teaches the course "Visions in Jewish Education."