CONTESTED LAND is an historical novel set in the Middle East half a century ago, shortly after the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The story is based on an incident during my voyage in the Dutch mv 'Oostkerk' in 1973, and a great deal of fiction.

On a November morning in 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, a Dutch cargo vessel arrives in the Syrian port of Latakia. As a result of a boycott action against the ship, a disaster follows. The ship becomes unmanageable and collides with a Soviet frigate, where fire is opened, damaging the ship and causing multiple casualties. In the aftermath, the crew is held hostage by the regime of Hafez al-Assad, but Nick de Rooij, a trainee of the Nautical College serving aboard, manages to escape.

Unwittingly he becomes mixed up in the Arab-Israeli conflict. He escapes Syria, aided by a young Palestinian woman, and ends up with her family in a refugee camp in North Lebanon. When he attempts to escape to Beirut in a fishing boat, the boat is attacked by an Israeli jet, with terrible results. Nick survives the attack by a hair's breadth, and returns home badly traumatised.

Years later he works as a Mate in the Merchant Navy, but he is still visited by nightmares and depressions. He returns to Lebanon to confront his trauma, and in the chaos of the Lebanese civil war he takes a job with the United Nations, to support humanitarian aid and search for his past.

Click here for an extract from the book.

RESEARCH

CONTESTED LAND is a work of fiction about ordinary people caught in extreme violence. Hearing the daily news you'd hardly believe it, but in that unhappy region there are normal people living like you and me, who are trying to survive in the face of oppression and war. People whose loved ones have been killed, who are tired of the horrors and dehumanisation and even try to build bridges to the opposite side.

The background of this book needed a great deal of research into the recent history of the Middle East. My research encompassed the causes of the conflicts in the region and their driving forces since around 1900, the political landscape of the Middle East in 1973 and the Lebanese civil war during 1975-1990. In general it can be concluded that European anti-Semitism and geopolitics following World War I caused large-scale Jewish immigration into (then) Mandatory Palestine, in which the rights of the Palestinian population were willfully ignored.

A century later we are still experiencing the backlash of the choices made at the time, exacerbated by the Holocaust, the violent birth of the state of Israel and the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland. The conflict grew even more complicated by Western and Soviet meddling during the Cold War, and more recently by Iranian interference. Especially today during the Israeli slaughter in Gaza and Lebanon, the subject is open to a great deal of strife and needs careful research of all information that is readily available in books and on the internet.