The Message

I know that there are a lot of writers who believe they have access to a kind of artistic magic that allows them to inhabit any community in the world and write about it as if it is their own. I think those writers overestimate the power of their talent and intelligence, and underestimate how wisdom accrues over time, among nations and peoples, acr

the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.

An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television. Editors and writers like to think they are not part of such systems, that they are independent, objective, and arrive at their conclusions solely by dint of their reporting and research.

But the rules of writing are different, and great wealth has almost the same relationship to creating great writers as it does great basketball players. A literature fueled by a profound human experience must necessarily burn at a high flame, and thus a “material handicap” is transformed into a “spiritual advantage,” putting in the hands of the opp

And what was also clear was that I had gone to Palestine, like I’d gone to Senegal, in pursuit of my own questions, and thus had not fully seen the people on their own terms.

He told me about the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem—another site of memory, this one built directly on top of a Muslim graveyard.

“What wounds you most,” writes Darwish, “is that ‘there’ is so close to ‘here.’

Instead, Morris approvingly invoked a genocide. “Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians.”

“We will make agreements with the devil to save Jews from persecution and to secure the future of this state.”