Sublime

in

Heidi’s defense of a neutral public culture is simply cosmopolitan tribalism. This tribalism might be dismissed as mildly amusing if not for the fact that Heidi insists that, as a shared neutral space, the public square must reflect her “neutral” views.

double standard under which Israel is blamed for offering peace and the Palestinians are rewarded for rejecting peace.

Such trends compelled me to stand my ground. I worked to expose Said’s Orientalism screed, noting that the first experts on the Middle East came from Germany and Hungary, neither of which ever colonized the region.

“Even unavoidable occupation is corrupting occupation,” he wrote soon after the war in a column for Davar, then the Labor Party newspaper. It was a position he would espouse, along with other Israeli novelists like David Grossman, for decades.*