“After a night of tension and aerial booms here in Jerusalem—including family time spent in the safe room as the air-raid siren blared in the street and the Iron Dome worked overhead—the direct consequences of the unprecedented Iranian attack on Israel aren’t clear yet. But like a flash going off in a dark room, the attack has finally given the world something valuable: a glimpse of the real war in the Middle East.
(more…)“To many on the left, Mr. Morris says, ‘I seem to have turned anti-Palestinian in the year 2000,’ when Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Bill Clinton offered a two-state solution and Yasser Arafat rejected it. ‘I thought this was a terrible decision by the Palestinians, and I wrote that.’ When the Palestinians, in response to the offer of peace and statehood, then launched a wave of terrorism and suicide bombings unlike any before it, Mr. Morris disapproved of that, too. ‘I began to write journalism against the Palestinians, their decisions and policies,’ he says, ‘and this was considered treachery.’
Mr. Morris was suddenly out of step ‘because people always forgive the Palestinians, who don’t take responsibility,’ he says. ‘It’s accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like.’ Mr. Morris doesn’t contest the claim of victimhood but sees it on both sides. ‘Righteous Victims’ is the title of his 1999 history of the conflict.
Source: Benny Morris, quoted in Elliot Kaufman, “History Goes to War in the Holy Land” (Wall Street Journal).
“Across the many conversations and hours of formal interviews I conducted for this article, I’ve encountered a persistent anti-intellectual streak. I’ve watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that they can protest as a pregame to a party. Indeed, two parties at Stanford were reported to the university this fall for allegedly making people say ‘Fuck Israel’ or ‘Free Palestine’ to get in the door. A spokesperson for the university said it was ‘unable to confirm the facts of what occurred,’ but that it had ‘met with students involved in both parties to make clear that Stanford’s nondiscrimination policy applies to parties.’ As a friend emailed me not long ago: ‘A place that was supposed to be a sanctuary from such unreason has become a factory for it.’
(more…)This week, I will (immodestly) point you to my own work: a Substack dispatch in which I discuss three incidents that unfolded last week that (I argue) embody poisonous patterns that are increasingly affecting Jewish/Israeli writers and literary culture.
