Serbia! Brazil! Israel (🤞)

I’m in Israel now, and the news coverage of the massive collective punishment in Hebron is basically zero. Shameful self-censorship by most of the media, which has been going on for more than three years.

Tel Aviv tonight. Let’s win this thing! (Photo by Amir Goldstein.)

Just checked in for my flight from New York to Israel. There’s not even one empty seat on the plane. Let’s go win this thing!

Let's go win this thing!

Smug fatalism is the one position I can’t stand. When I was a kid, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were ruled by military dictators. Walls with barbed wire cut Berlin and Jerusalem in half. Being gay was illegal in Spain, and interracial marriage was forbidden in Virginia. You can make your own list of the changes you've seen, but the point is that humans have agency, nothing is static, and hope never dies. Onward!

There is a perverse cycle in the Israeli right that goes something like this: 1. “The world has always hated us, so we need to do whatever it takes to defend ourselves, regardless of what the world thinks.” 2. Do some really stupid shit that annoys anyone with a pulse. 3. Respond with astonished indignation: “Why do they all hate us?! You see, we told you they’ve always hated us.” Rinse and repeat. (Note to them: To take just one trivial example, a small country that can win the Eurovision contest four times in 40 years was *not* hated by “everyone.”)

We are simply not designed to absorb so much bad news at the same time, from all over the world, with no way to respond to much of it. We are like whac-a-moles trying to raise our heads for a bit of hope, and then we get whacked again.

Some things are complicated. This is not. The Israeli government could stop all settler terror in the West Bank within 24 hours. It very deliberately chooses not to.

I am 65. I hope that in my lifetime I will be able to drive up the coast from Alexandria to Gaza, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beirut, Tripoli, Latakia, and on to Izmir, where my grandfather was born, in one beautiful and uneventful trip. Here's to that!

I have Palestinian friends with whom I could sit down and get to a peace/coexistence agreement in a couple of days. There are thousands of people on both sides who feel this way. This is one more reason why all of this hurts so much.