28 quotes
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
The question remains: aside from a great writer, or a writer-historian of Barbara Tuchman's stature, who can draw an accurate picture of the situation and not enrage those who were there? Who can highlight the distress of both sides, without betraying either one?
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
To this day our language has kept its stony, concentrated, concise character, striving for the essential. This makes Hebrew practically untranslatable; a phrase of three words in Hebrew becomes a phrase of eighteen words in French, so you can imagine what it does to poetry.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
Cultural change that enables people to think in terms of cooperation, rather than enmity and strife, is the conceptual change from the language and state of mind of a closed agrarian society, the forerunner of the nation-state, to that of an open technological one.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
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.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical."
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
In charismatic relationships there is no responsibility, only guilt; in more developed relationships, responsibility is present. With charisma there is no "other"; everyone is part of one familial porridge, a publis pabulum. Anyone outside of it is an enemy.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
If we insist on absolute justice, the reckoning of lives will never end. All we can talk about is beneficial justice, beneficial for both sides-that is, a territorial compromise and the continuation of the conflict at the negotiating table.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)