In a small stone hut, not far from the Valley of Zin, lived a young man whose father had sought to kill him. Ever since then his eyes blinked rapidly… - Shulamith Hareven

You know, I am not a pacifist...I fought in the War of Independence, and I have covered several wars, including Yom Kippur on the Golan Heights, as a correspondent. But both in the Lebanese War and in these past months of overkill in our reaction to the uprising, we seem to have lost our ability to differentiate between the necessary use of force and plain aggression. For everyone's sake, I hope we regain a proper perspective very soon.

Perhaps our region could have freed itself from this prevailing mode of thinking; perhaps not. One cannot play the game in retrospect. Neither can one talk about statistics and numbers without addressing the entirety of human misery, or, by extrapolation, without asking the medics.

To a certain extent, all writing is working within tradition: we use idioms, linguistic connections, and associations known to our tribe, because we cannot go outside language, and languages are tribal affairs.