Wherever a great promise is not and cannot be fulfilled, the resultant empty space is filled in by fantasy. Such is the case with leaders and followe… - Shulamith Hareven

It is a familiar sight: an intellectual so sure of his thesis or model that he pesters the powers that be to put it into practice. Accountability, however, will always fall on the person who acted on the theory, not the person who invented it. We confer upon the intellectual-by definition-the full and complete freedom to create a theory and to build an abstract model without any responsibility for the results, and this is indeed one of the most difficult problems to be pondered on in the humanities.

At some point we will have to decide whether Hebrew in the next thirty or three hundred years will serve merely as a channel of immediate and basic communication, as a language at the top of a pyramid, without any pyramid beneath it, a claustrophobic language not much different from Esperanto, or whether it will embody an entire non-Western culture that we know is worth preserving. Since language shapes us more than we shape it, this decision will be essentially about our own identity. It seems more and more certain that this will be a matter of a conscious decision.

If we insist on absolute justice, the reckoning of lives will never end. All we can talk about is beneficial justice, beneficial for both sides-that is, a territorial compromise and the continuation of the conflict at the negotiating table.