The Diamond Setter

PREFACE TO THE 2026 EDITION

The Diamond Setter revolves around Fareed, a young man from Damascus who longs to know, firsthand, his grandparents’ homeland of Palestine. He crosses the border from Syria into Israel and, with a few steps that seem to erase that border as if it had never existed, reaches Jaffa. Fareed’s personal journey unearths geographical, political, and human layers of a space that, until 1948, was shared by Palestinians and Jews from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, and other Arab cities, who spoke Arabic and were part of the same cultural and linguistic landscape. This space is not an imagined project of “coexistence,” but simply a shared life characterized by both intimacy and difference—a life encompassing travel, work, passions, and a profound affinity with land and people.
I come from a Jewish family of Damascene jewelers — part of that Arab world that all but ceased to exist in 1948. The stories I was told, which are wholly incongruent with our current reality, live inside me. Increasingly, I understand that they must serve as testimony. This book seeks to turn our gaze back to that shared Arab space and to salvage what is left of it: movement between generations, reminiscences, and a human reality that endures in memories, languages, and place.
The previous English-language edition of this novel, which was published in 2018, while I was still living in Israel, created a broad mosaic of characters who populated the stories of two families — the Palestinian traveler Fareed’s and the Jewish jeweler Menashe’s — as well as the fabled diamond that connects their histories. These are the stories I feel an urgent need to rescue, because they are, at times, all that is left. The book you hold now was my opportunity to revisit the characters and their tales through a contemporary lens, in which the wrenching events now unfolding in Palestine and Israel are refracted. Like gemstones passed from hand to hand, changing the fate of whoever holds them, they bear witness to a vanished world — and open the imagination to envision a future one.