The Message

think that what we were being taught was less a body of knowledge than a way to be in the world: orderly, organized, attentive to direction. There is nothing wrong with developing those skills—in fact, I’ve learned the hard way how useful they can be. What is wrong is their fetishization, the way they were allowed to outrank the actual body of know

the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.

We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.

Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

Disturbing as this knowledge was, it made me stronger because it made me wiser.

Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool.

In 2003, future prime minister Ehud Olmert called on Israel to “maximize the number of Jews” and “minimize the number of Palestinians.”

And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world.

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.