I write about Israeli experience, and that experience, being so intense and concentrated, is probably a good background for distilling human experien… - Shulamith Hareven

There has been an intensification of tunnel vision, of efforts by fundamentalists to impose rigid constraints on us all, mostly the status quo has been maintained. Nevertheless, the pressure to conform to religious norms is simply unbearable and has led increasingly to acts of violence, the result of which is to divide us each against the other.

One essential thing did change: from now on it is not automatically Jew against Arab and Arab against Jew; it is the Jews and Arabs who support peace, and those, Jews and Arabs both, who oppose it-not one nation against another, but two bi-national coalitions. That in itself constitutes the greatest change in the Middle East, perhaps the only one that might succeed, indeed, perhaps a last chance. (Preface)

The word "teacher" does not mean a person who "presents" a lesson (what an awful expression!), who is responsible for the pupils' being able to quote a few details and dates. A teacher-if he or she is also an educator-is responsible for seeing that most of the pupils in his or her class leave school as autonomous individuals, capable of independent thinking and decisive and discriminating behavior. For a person to be able to make autonomous decisions (read: to be a proper citizen), he needs to have as much information as possible. Not myths. Not legends. Not lies. Information.