"I am asking all Israelis to be outraged, so that they may never have the right to claim: we did not know."

In his 1987 book The Yellow Wind, the Israeli novelist David Grossman said: "In Israel, the reality is that it is easier for a man to change religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinions." Nearly a quarter of a century on, the only modification that sentence needs is to replace the words "maybe even" with "certainly". And there is a possible further modification, if we are assuming that this sentence refers to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: insert the words "not only" at the beginning. I was quite amazed, for instance, when a link was posted on Facebook to some overheard mutterings, full of bravado, which purported to "prove" that the activists on the Mavi Marmara were actually looking for a fight. When I suggested, perhaps facetiously, that this accounted for the people who were shot in the back, I was very quickly unfriended. More...

Don't miss:

1. The world is tired of us, says Israeli minister...
2. Elderly Palestinian evicted from home and shot...
3. Palestinian girl tells how her parents were killed...
4. Israel bars German minister from Gaza...
5. Israel's greatest loss: its moral imagination...
6. Young, Jewish and Left...
7. Robert Fisk: Yes, the Jews were once victims, but they too are guilty now...