On Arabs and Jews

There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. — Nadezhda Mandelstam

From the beginning, Zionists aimed at a kind of normality, and political Zionists at a very particular kind. They sought the normality of statehood: a people on its own land, with its own institutions and its own police and army, freed from the dangers of exile and persecution (though not from the dangers of war). The political Zionists were like those elders of Israel who came to Samuel and said, “Make us a king to judge us like all the nations.” Theirs was not a utopian vision, though it was often expressed in prophetic language, and it was and is open ...