Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe. |
We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory. |
And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so. |
The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people. |
One of the dreams of Zionism was to be a bridge. Instead, we are creating exclusion between the East and the West instead of creating bridges; we are contributing to the conflict between East and West by our stupid desire to have more. |
Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries. |
I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples. |
The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning. |
The weapon of suicide bombing is so desperate that you aren't even left with the possibility of taking revenge or punishing anyone; the terrorist is killed along with his victims, his blood mixing with theirs. |
We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned? |
So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on. |