1) You say that ‘his prognosis is to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian-Arab one’. But of course that is the very opposite to what he is proposing – his piece is calling for a state for all its citizens – ‘a state where all have equal rights’. You are a making an a priori assumption that the nature of a state is dependent on which group is in the majority – when Jews are in the majority it is a Jewish state, when Arabs are in the majority it is an Arab state. But this is not necessarily so. In Britain, white Anglo-Saxons are in the majority, but it is not a white Anglo-Saxon state.  A clearer example is Northern Ireland – since its foundation it has had a Protestant majority, and for years was run as a Protestant state, where Protestants held all the power and ran the state for Protestant benefit. Since the Good Friday agreement and power sharing, Northern Ireland has become a state of all its citizens, where both communities share power, where the police force is mixed etc, despite there still being a Protestant majority. The nature of a state is defined by its constitutional setup and legal practices, not purely by the ethnic balance of his citizenship. So I reject the claim that White is calling for a Palestinian-Arab state.”

First of all, this is not just a theoretical exercise. Clearly you are right in saying that ‘a state where all have equal rights’ could mean just that. To understand whether this is what the author is advocating, we have to examine his writings a bit more deeply in order to see what his motivations are. That’s why I wrote, “Why can’t the second part of White’s vague vision not be fulfilled in a two-state, or a federal model? Why the insistence on one state in which Palestinians are guaranteed to outnumber Jews? More importantly, given Jewish history (which White never acknowledges), and the justifiable fear of surrendering the sovereignty that was regained 2000 years after it was lost, why does he not offer some comfort,  some qualification beyond the usual slogans? Why is he not interested in gaining the trust of those who – if he is to believed – will be at the heart of this wonderful new state?”

That being said, I have met one or two (but only one or two) people who are sincere in their commitment to some kind of equitable bi-national model. Perhaps you’re the third. But all the good will in the world doesn’t stop this from being more than just a theoretical exercise. You are right that the constitutional setup and legal practices of a state play a role in determining its nature, as does its ethnic balance, but you err in implying that all that matters is the constitutional setup. Given this, one cannot avoid making comparisons to other states and conflict zones, with the aim of assessing whether attempting to implement such changes (including implementation of the Right of Return, a point you ignore) will likely lead to a more positive future, as in Northern Ireland (which remains firmly under British sovereignty, incidentally), or war as in the Balkans. Judith Butler, from the comfort of her California home, has written in favour of a “federated authority for Palestine-Israel that was actually governed by a strong constitution that guaranteed rights regardless of cultural background, religion, ethnicity, race and the rest”, to which a friend who spent nearly two years living in the (Palestinian) West Bank wrote: “[This] is just an expression of blind faith in the possibility of cosmopolitan relations; I could be much more harsh. I don’t see how anyone who has spent any time in either country [sic] could be so sanguine.”

It is absurd to suggest that you simply create a ‘state for all its citizens’ constitution and then everything will be OK. It is particularly absurd coming from someone, like Ben White, who, given the vitriol which characterizes his writing about Israeli-Jews, clearly lacks the blind faith in cosmopolitan relations that we could generously accredit to Butler. It is one of the strangest aspects of one-state discourse, and perhaps its most deadly give away. BDS activists both transparently despise Israeli-Jewish society and claim that all they want is to create a state where it will be equal with that of the Palestinians. And of course they do this without offering any sort of the comfort I have mentioned above.

Most of all, though, both Israelis and Palestinians have consistently rejected the ‘state for all its citizens’ model in favour of two-states, a point that is of little concern to someone like Ben White who is neither Israeli or Palestinian, and in even the most utopian of scenarios for the region would not be allowed to take up citizenship here. This shows an impressive commitment to democratic values.

2) You use the term ‘Israel-proper’. But Israel proper doesn’t exist. There is only Israel, which at present governs the entire land (except Gaza) with a very limited form of devolution in small islands of territory in the west bank. This is an important issue, you can’t talk as if there is a two state solution when the reality on the ground is a one state one in which a large number of people are denied the vote.

If the reality on the ground is one state today then it was one state in 1967; the fact that the occupation has gone on for so long does not necessarily make it into something it is not. And I reject the notion that there is one state today. One state is sovereign, yes, but this does not mean that there is one state. As you said, there are areas of the West Bank with what we might call the trappings of devolution, but not sovereignty. And I am not arguing that there is a two-state reality either; the reality is one of occupation, with the occupying people having more rights than the occupied people. Needless to say, one doesn’t have to be in favour of one state in either the Utopian or the replacing-Israel-with-a-Palestinian-Arab-state model to find this state of affairs intolerable.

3) In your section ‘What if Israel had been called Jewland? Would that solve the problem?’ you have missed the point. If Israel were called Jew-land (or more probably, Judea) then all its citizens would be called Jews. Which mainstream Zionism is not willing to tolerate as it would redefine Jew as meaning anyone who was governed by the Jewish state, and thus would be a state for all its citizens. Or you keep the name Israel, and be clear that everyone in the state is Israeli, that the term Jew will have no legal status/privilege within the state. Either option represents the reasonable norm of citizenship policy. But at present the two terms (Israel, Jewish state) mean that the state only really belongs to some of its inhabitants and not others and to a group of other people who may have never been to that state). It would be a bit like saying Britain must remain an Anglo-Saxon state, other groups can be tolerated as national minorities, but cannot expect equality, because that would damage the Anglo-Saxon nation nature of the state. But of course Britain doesn’t do that – it makes everyone who resides within its borders British (and everyone in England is English) regardless of background. That’s the crux of that matter, if you have to use two different words to describe the name of the state and it’s ‘nature’ it’s a sure sign that there’s a problem.

First of all, my preference is for a model whereby the state is Israel and that Jews will have no legal status/privilege within the state. I agree with Jabotinsky that the societal culture (which is what I’m concerned about, not ethnic discrimination) will be determined largely by the majority group. Second, you don’t deal with my core point: “The anomaly emerges because the Diaspora preceded the modern nation-state; it certainly makes Israel rather unique. But being rather unique is not a crime; nor does Israel’s exceptionalism justify its elimination.” I’m aware that Israel is substantively different to other liberal democracies; at this stage it would be impossible for it to be otherwise without it losing its raison d’etre. Hopefully, at some point in the future, it will be able to evolve more in the direction I would prefer. It is still relatively young and it is still surrounded by countries and entities devoted to its destruction. The fact that it doesn’t meet these western norms does not justify throwing out the baby with the bathwater and replacing it with a Palestinian-Arab state. I would also argue that Britain’s culture remains largely English, and this is of course connected to its Anglo-Saxon origins. In short, though, we would agree that there is a problem with how Israel is currently constituted: my solution is to fight the manifestations of discrimination (which are primarily de facto); Ben White’s is to replace Israel with a Palestinian-Arab state. Your goals may be more noble, but you are a committed Diasporist, and so I’m not sure we will see you coming here to implement them in the near future (although it would be awesome if you made aliyah).

The Jewish community has always recognized that transmitting the Jewish “mesorah” — tradition — is facilitated through the family and through high quality education. The percentage of uneducated Jews has always been extremely low and even today, a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) points to Israel as the second most educated country in the world.

The Jewish educational system is dependent on outstanding Jewish educators whose vision, efforts and creativity are responsible for guiding and inspiring a new generation to take their place in the Jewish community and in society as a whole.

The Milken Family Foundation (MFF) recognizes this and has, since 1994, presented annual awards to Jewish education professionals to honor them for the high quality of their work, their community involvement, their support of their schools’ families and their professional leadership. This Jewish Educators Award is presented in recognition of the vital role that a quality Jewish education can play in a child’s Jewish identity. Children who receive a superior Jewish education develop strong Jewish values and remain faithful to their Jewish heritage. Lowell Milken who created the award want use it to strengthen the Jewish Day School movement.

The Jewish Educators Award publicly honors some of the dedicated and talented educators who work tirelessly to make Jewish education an engaging and high quality experience. The Award recognizes the contributions that excellent Jewish educators make to the Jewish community. Recipients include classroom teachers, learning specialists and administrators who work in Board of Jewish Education-affiliated Jewish Day Schools. Over the years the Milken Foundation’s Jewish Educator’s Award has been presented to teaching professionals who represent almost 40 schools nationwide, recognizing their scholarship, creativity and compassion.

The Award is based on the teacher’s practices in the classroom as well as the person’s relationship with their students’ families and with the larger community. Recipients are expected to demonstrate leadership skills which influence the school’s policies and originality in their educational methodology. Each year four educators are named to receive the Milken Educators Award. Award recipients receive $15,000.

While there is talk about a one-state solution on the fringes of the right and the left, a strong majority of the Israeli public supports a two-state solution, even if there is no agreement on the details. And yet, since the failure of Camp David in 1999, and barring one or two diplomatic initiatives since, every Israeli government has been content with the status quo, despite the fact that every passing year and every new home built in the settlements makes it harder for Israel to separate itself from the Palestinians and risks making the country an international pariah. Why do successive Israeli governments not show more urgency on this issue?” Read the rest at Times of Israel.

He begins by reluctantly acknowledging the principle of national self-determination which underpins Zionism, before arguing that this “does not mean exclusive – and exclusionary – statehood only for members of one group”. There is the usual problem here of presumption and imprecision, but – based on his previous writings – it seems that White’s objection is to Israel defining itself as the State of the Jewish people and not of its citizens, at least 20 percent of whom do not consider themselves to be members of the Jewish people. As White knows, the result of this has been some de jure and far too much de facto discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian minority.

I have many objections to how White describes the situation faced by Israel’s Palestinian-Arab minority (those who favour Jim Crow/South African apartheid analogies might ask if a television program like Arab Labour would have been made under those regimes), but let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that Israel’s current political arrangement necessitates the exclusion of non-Jews. What would be the best way to solve this problem? Well, to campaign to cancel discriminatory legislation, to guarantee funding for minorities, and perhaps to support positive discrimination. While even this would not make Israel “completely equal”, it would certainly be a significant improvement on the current status quo, and Israel would still be a Jewish state.

White’s solution, though, is to “unite” pre-1967 Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the half-occupied/half-autonomous Gaza Strip into one state, and then to invite back all the descendants of the Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948, numbering nearly five million (and presumably to annul the “racist” Law of Return), conveniently ensuring that there would be a permanent Palestinian majority and Jewish-Israeli minority. In other words, his prognosis is to replace the Jewish state with a Palestinian-Arab one, a strange form of equitable solution; the equivalent of amputating a leg when a plaster would suffice.

Next, White points out that the partition resolution “did not grant Jews and Arabs superior political and civil rights in their own states, nor did it extend the notion to encompass Jews and Arabs who were not already living there (that is, avoiding invoking an abstract right to self-determination of Jews as an extra-territorial group)”. He has a point here, although perhaps not the one he was trying to make (surely the GA had some goal in mind when it voted for creating a “Jewish” and “Arab” state). According to the anarchic international system which prevails, state sovereignty is supreme. This is one of the reasons why so many people – including Ben White – opposed the invasion of Iraq. And, although CAMERA cite General Assembly Resolution 181 as the source of Israel’s legitimacy, the truth is that the real source is Israel’s diplomatic relations with a majority of the states in the international system, each of whom have different positions regarding the contradictions at the heart of the Israeli polity, while at the same time recognizing that those who talk about an “equal” state are really talking about a Palestinian-Arab state in place of a Jewish one. It may or may not be true that “true equality” [a slogan which White never defines]…is only realisable in a state that is based on civic peoplehood”, but there are plenty of states in the world that even one as myopic as White would acknowledge are more “unequal” than Israel, and yet he does not think that their sovereignty should be revoked.

White then claims that the following sentence would be impossible if France was replaced with Israel and French with Jewish: “France is the state of the French, every French person is a citizen of France and all citizens of France are French.” What if Israel had been called Jewland? Would that solve the problem? The anomaly emerges because the Diaspora preceded the modern nation-state; it certain makes Israel rather unique. But being rather unique is not a crime; nor does Israeli exceptionalism justify its elimination.

Finally, this visionary of coexistence reveals his true animus: ‘Self-determination…does not give permission for an American Jew to go and live on the land of a Palestinian who is legally barred from returning home on the ground s/he is not Jewish.” If he’s referring to ‘Israel-proper’, this simply isn’t true. Ben White can say “international law” until the cows come home; the above statement remains merely an assertion based on his presumptions and whims. The international consensus continues to hold that there will be a “Jewish” state and a “Palestinian” state, side-by-side, that the societal culture of the Jewish state will be “Jewish” and the societal culture of the Palestinian state will be “Palestinian”, and that the descendants of Palestinian refugees who want to return will do so to land that stands between 10 and 100 miles from where their ancestral villages once stood. Mr. White is entitled, of course, to state his ideals, but it is disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that they are normative.

White devotes the tiniest of spaces to explaining how this utopia would work, relying on slogans and not explaining why the Palestinians, who, according to White, would have good reason to despise the Israelis, would want to share this glorious new homeland with them: “Within this framework, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs can exercise their rights to cultural, linguistic and religious freedom and autonomy if they wish. It is about a future solution that protects the rights of the Palestinian people and Jewish Israelis, an understanding of “self-determination” that means both groups sharing a common homeland based on full group and individual equality.”

This is the crux of the matter. They do wish. Poll after poll shows that a solid majority of Israelis and Palestinians support the two-state-for-two-peoples principle, even if they disagree on the details. It may be that there has been a spike in support for a one-state solution amongst Palestinians recently, but this is surely the result of years of stagnation on the diplomatic front (and settlement expansion) and because they recognize a useful doomsday weapon when they see it, rather than any ideological shift. Why can’t the second part of White’s vague vision not be fulfilled in a two-state, or a federal model? Why the insistence on one state in which Palestinians are guaranteed to outnumber Jews? More importantly, given Jewish history (which White never acknowledges), and the justifiable fear of surrendering the sovereignty that was regained 2000 years after it was lost, why does he not offer some comfort, some qualification beyond the usual slogans? Why is he not interested in gaining the trust of those who – if he is to be believed – will be at the heart of this wonderful new state?

Only he can answer these questions. But the constant evasions, accompanied by the arguments outlined above, suggest that, whatever his denials, White’s commitment to “equal rights” is actually a commitment to replacing Israel with a Palestinian-Arab state after all.

When Birthright started in 1999 Tzfat was allotted a two-hour visit. Tzfat’s importance was recognized by Birthright which mandated that a visit to Tzfat be built into each Birthright group’s schedule, but other than a short tour of the synagogues and a chance to shop in a safe enclosed lane little additional attention was given to the mountaintop town.

Today, the situation has changed. Tzfat proved to be one of the most popular attractions for Birthrighters and today many tour organizers ensure that their Birthright groups spend at least a half a day in Tzfat.

In addition to the obligatory visits to Tzfat’s synagogues and shopping time on the art street, there are many other opportunities for Birthright groups in Tzfat and, depending on the tour organizer, program staff and guide, the participants can see and experience elements of Tzfat that most tourists rarely see.

The Ascent Institute offers free classes on Kabbalah and other aspects of Jewish Mysticism and Hassidic philosophy to Birthright groups which give participants a taste of these unique Jewish theologies. Some guides, both religious and non-religious, take the male members of the group to the ARI mikve — ritual bath — for a spiritual experience while a representative of the new Breslev mikve sits with the young women to discuss the traditional Jewish view of women within Judaism and some of the customs and practices which relate to observant Jewish women.

The Livnot U’Lehibanot program runs a community service program that brings Birthright groups to a two-hour volunteer activity on Tzfat’s Citadel. These activities include a short 15-minute textual learning session about Judaism and “chessed” — lovingkindness.

A highlight for many Birthright groups is a visit to a Tzfat-based Kabbalah artist. These artists, notably Sheva Chaya Servetter, Avraham Lowenthal and Dovid Friedman, invite groups to come to their studios for discussions about Jewish mysticism and how they, as artists, incorporate elements of their studies into their art.

“Just as he had done many times before, Gjorg brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the man’s head. For a moment the head seemed to resist him, trying to elude his sights, and at the last instant he even thought he saw an ironic smile on the man’s face. Six months before, the same thing had happened, and so as not to disfigure that face (who can say whence that touch of pity came at the last moment?) he had lowered the front sight of his weapon and wounded his enemy in the neck.

The man came closer. Please not a wound this time, Gjorg said to himself in a kind of prayer. His family had had great trouble paying the fine for the first wound, and a second fine would ruin them. But there was no penalty for death.”

2.    The Kindly Ones (Jonathan Littell) – For its unparalleled ambition, and its dark, devastating humour.

“There, in the brightness of summer, I thought about that decision we had made, the extraordinary idea of killing all the Jews, whoever they might be, young or old, good or bad, of destroying Judaism in the person of its bearers, a decision that had received the name, now well known, of Endlosung: the ‘Final Solution.” But what a beautiful word! It had not always been a synonym for extermination, though: since the beginning, people had called for, when it came to the Jews, an Endlosung, or else a vollige Losunge (a complete solution) or also an allgemeine Losung (a general solution), and according to the period, this meant exclusion from public life or exclusion from economic life, or, finally, emigration. Then, little by little, the signification had slid toward the abyss, but without the signifier changing, and it seemed almost as if this final meaning had always lived in the heart of the word, and that the thing had been attracted, drawn in by it, by its weight, its fabulous gravity, into that black hole of the mind, toward the point of singularity: and then we had passed the event horizon, beyond which there is no return. We still believe in ideas, in concepts, we believe that words designate ideas, but that’s not necessarily true, maybe there aren’t really any ideas, maybe there’s really nothing but words, and the weight peculiar to words. And maybe thus we had let ourselves be led along by a word and its inevitability.”

3.    Soldiers of Salamis – Javier Cercas – For having Roberto Bolano as one of its characters, and for its understanding of heroism

“I saw my book, whole and real, my completed true tale, and knew that now I only had to write it, put it down on paper because it was in my head from start (‘It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sanchez Mazas facing the firing squad’) to finish, an ending where an old journalist, unsuccessful and happy, smokes and drinks whisky in the restaurant car of a night train that travels across the French countryside among people who are having dinner and are happy and waiters in black bow-ties, while he thinks of a washed-up man who had courage and instinctive virtue and so never erred or didn’t err in the one moment when it really mattered, he thinks of a man who was honest and brave and pure as pure and of the hypothetical book which will revive him when he’s dead, and then the journalist watches his sad, aged reflection in the window licked by the night until slowly the reflection dissolves and in the window appears an endless and burning desert and a lone soldier, carrying the flag of a country not his own, of a country that is all countries and only exists because that soldier raises its abolished flag; young, ragged, dusty and anonymous, infinitely tiny in that blazing sea of infinite sand, walking onwards beneath the black sun of the window, not really knowing where he’s going or who he’s going with or why he’s going, not really caring as long as it’s onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards.”

4.    Genesis (???) – For birthing a people, and – in the Babel narrative – for the greatest short story ever written.

“Everyone on earth spoke the same language. As people migrated from the east, they settled in the land of Shinar. People there sought to make bricks and build a city and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for themselves, so that they not be scattered over the world. God came down to look at the city and tower, and remarked that as one people with one language, nothing that they sought would be out of their reach. God went down and confounded their speech, so that they could not understand each other, and scattered them over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. Thus the city was called Babel.”

5.    Ancient Light (John Banville) – For proving once more that John Banville is the greatest living English-language stylist.

“And yet for all that, always, at the back of my mind, there was the suspicion that my efforts, and redoubled efforts, were not as welcome to Mrs Gray as they might be or as she repeatedly assured me they were. I have a notion that all men worry that all women do not really care for the physical manifestations of love, and only acquiesce to them so as to indulge us, their overgrown, needful, insatiate infants. Hence the unwavering hold over us of the myth of the nymphomaniac, that fabulous creature more elusive than the unicorn or the unicorn’s lady, which, once found, would allay our deepest fears. There were moments when, fastened to her breast or rootling about in her lap, I would chance to glance up and catch her smiling down on me with a fond benevolence that was nothing less, and nothing more, than maternal. At times too she was as impatient with me as any mother would be of her endlessly importuning child – ‘Get off me!’ she would grunt, and tumble me aside and sit up scowling crossly, looking for her clothes. Always I could get her to lie down again, though, simply by touching the tip of my tongue to the chocolate-brown mole between her shoulder-blades or walking two fingers up the soft, fishbelly-white inner side or her arm. Then she would shiver, and turn to me with something that was more than a sigh and less than a moan, her eyes closed and her eyelids fluttering, and offer me helplessly her open hot slack mouth to kiss. She was never so desirable to me as in such moments of reluctant surrender.”

6.    HaCol Zeriz (Sarai Shavit) – For its ridiculous, addictive plot, and for reminding me of my Hebrew when I thought I had forgotten it.

7.    The Book of Disquiet (Fernando Pessoa) – For giving us a glimpse of what Kafka might look like without the mystique.

“Even I feel almost mystical when I speak of them but I would be incapable of being more than these words written under the influence of a chance mood. Like all of humanity, I will always belong to Rua dos Douradores. In verse or prose, I will always be just another employee at his desk. With or without mysticism, I will always be parochial and submissive, the slave of my feelings and of the moment in which I feel them. Beneath the great blue canopy of the silent sky, I will always be a page caught up in some incomprehensible ritual, clothed in life in order to take part in it, and blindly going through the different gestures and steps, poses and mannerisms, until the party or my role in its ends and I can do and eat the fancy food from the great stalls they tell me are set out at the bottom of the garden.”

8.    The Bible Unearthed (Israel Finkelstein/Neil Asher Silberman) – For making the complicated debates of biblical archaeology exciting to the layman.

“The story of how and why the Bible was written – and how it fits into the extraordinary history of the people of Israel – is closely linked to a fascinating tale of modern discovery. The search has centred on a tiny land, hemmed in on two sides by desert and on one side by the Mediterranean, that has, over the millennia, been plagued by recurrent drought and almost continual warfare. Its cities and population were miniscule in comparison to those of the neighbouring empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Likewise, its material culture was poor in comparison to the splendour and extravagance of theirs. And yet this land was the birthplace of a literary masterpiece that has exerted an unparalleled impact on world civilization as both sacred scripture and history.”

9.    Strong Opinions (Vladimir Nabokov) – For Nabokov imposing his own rules on the interview genre.

“I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use any schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.”

10.    Bloodlands (Timothy Snyder) – For the dead.

“It is true that Germans sometimes avoided shooting younger children, instead throwing them into the pits with the corpse, and allowing them to suffocate under the earth. They also had at their disposal another means of killing that allowed them to avoid seeing the end of young life. Gas vans roved the streets of Minsk, the drivers seeking stray Jewish children. The people called the gas vans by a name that had been used for the NKVD trucks during the Great Terror a few years earlier: ‘soul destroyers.’”

The girls and boys knew what would happen to them if they were caught. They would ask for a tattered bit of dignity as they walked up the ramp to their death: ‘Please sirs,” they would say to the Germans, “do not hit us. We can get to the trucks on our own.”

11.    Public Enemies – Bernard Henri-Levy/Michel Houellebecq – For an inevitably addictive read.

“All this to say, Bernard-Henri, that I have no trouble believing you when you tell me that your fame was in no way premeditated.  It is all the easier to believe since almost nothing in my life has been premeditated (or, to be more precise, everything I premeditated failed). The only thing I have ever managed to plan, more or less, have been my novels (well, at least the beginnings; after the first hundred pages, it goes downhill). And moreover, it was because I never wanted fame. It is true that I wanted to earn money through my books; fiercely wanted it, for the reasons I’ve already given, as soon as I realized it was possible (which is to say sometime around September 10, 1998). Perhaps, had I been rich, I would have wanted fame as well; but that is not the way things went in my life. I became famous in September 1998; I became rich in May 1999 when the royalties arrived. Well, I say rich, it’s all relative. Let’s say, rich enough to be able to think about giving up a job that simply paid the rent – but that, in any case, always seemed to me the only meaningful benefit of being rich.”

12.    Delta of Venus (Anais Nin) – For telling some unpalatable truths.

“Women, I thought, were more apt to fuse sex with emotion, with love, and to single out one man rather than be promiscuous. This became apparent to me as I wrote the novels and the Diary, and I saw it even more clearly when I began to teach. But although women’s attitude towards sex was quite distinct from that of men, we had not yet learned how to write about it.”

13.    The Third Reich  (Roberto Bolano) – For its hints of what was to come.

“Such is life, I concluded, I’m sure your friend never imagined that he would die far from his homeland. Death and Homeland, he whispered, two tragedies.”

14.    Anna Karenina  (Leo Tolstoy) – For the way Tolstoy keeps moving things along.

“Vronsky and Kitty waltzed several times around the room. After the first waltz Kitty went to her mother, and she had hardly time to say a few words to Countess Nordston when Vronsky came up again for the first quadrille. During the quadrille nothing special was said: there was disjointed talk between them of the Korsunskys, husband and wife, whom he described very amusingly as delightful children at forty, and of the future town theater; and only once did the conversation touch her to the quick, when he asked her about Levin, whether he was here, and added the he liked him very much. But Kitty did not expect much from the quadrille. Her heart thrilled in anticipation of the mazurka. It seemed to her that in the mazurka everything must be decided. The fact that he did not during the quadrille ask for the mazurka did not trouble her. She felt sure she would dance the mazurka with him as she had done at former balls, and refused five young men, saying she was engaged for the mazurka. The whole ball up to the last quadrille was for Kitty an enchanted vision of delightful colors, sounds, and motions. She sat down only when she felt too tired and begged for a rest. But as she was dancing the last quadrille with one of the tiresome young men whom she could not refuse, she chanced to be vis-à-vis with Vronsky and Anna. She had not been near Anna since the beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her suddenly quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that thrill she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew that feeling and knew it’s signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace, precision, and lightness of her movements.”

15.    Open City  (Teju Cole) – For bringing the spirit of Sir Vidia into the post-9/11 world.

“And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.”

16.    The Honey Gatherers (Mimlu Sen) – For being as enjoyable as I hoped it would be.

“On the banks of this river of life,/My heart swings and my life swings,/I drown and gulp in the currents/Beyond the reach of grand thought/My heart swings and my life swings…/No one will stay with you for ever,/We will all go down the same path/Old or young./Who are we? Where are we from?/Where will we go to?/We deceive ourselves, Bhaba the madman says,/Exulting in moments of laughter, tears and play./We’ll drown in endless waters/Caught in this earthy mandala of illusion and desire./My heart swings and my spirit swings.”

17.    Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Katherine Boo) – For its original approach to India’s slums
“Abdul rose with minimal whining, since the only whining his mother tolerated was her own. Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. Outside his neighbors’ huts, some held together by duct tape and rope, damp rags were discreetly freshening bodies. Children in school-uniform neckties were hauling pots of water from the public taps. A languid line extended from an orange concrete block of public toilets. Even goats’ eyes were heavy with sleep. It was the moment of the intimate and the familial, before the great pursuit of the small market niche got under way.”
18.    The Map and the Territory (Michel Houellebecq) – For being Houellebecq’s most moving work

“I read in an article that, since the end of the Second World War, eighty percent of the cafés have disappeared in France,” remarked Franz while looking around the place. Not far from them, four pensioners were silently pushing cards around on the Formica table, according to incomprehensible rules that seemed to belong to the prehistory of card games (belote? piquet?). Farther away, a fat woman with broken veins on her face downed her pastis in a single gulp. “People have begun to spend half an hour over lunch, to drink less alcohol as well; and then the coup de grâce was the smoking ban.” “I think it’ll come back, in different forms,” Jed said. “There has been a long historical phase of increased productivity, which is reaching an end, at least in the West.”

19.    The History of History: A Novel of Berlin (Ida Hattemer-Higgins) – For its first hundred pages, and for trying but not quite managing to reach the heights.

“If the second version of Magda’s motivation were to be believed, then Magda was the only Nazi parent, indeed, the only tribunal in the world, to understand and confirm the Nazi crime – as a Nazi, for she was the only one to inflict upon her own family the Nazi penalty: death for the crime of evil-in-the-blood.”

20.    The Country Without a Post Office: Poems (Agha Shahid Ali) – For taking me back to the summer of 2011

“Don’t tell my father I have died,” he says,/and I follow him through blood on the road/and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners/left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From windows we hear/grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall/on us, like ash. Black on edges of flames,/it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods,/the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers,/Kashmir is burning:”

Cheesesteaks – Vinnie Paz

All Time Greats feat Party Arty – Showbiz/AG

Maad City feat MC Eiht – Kendrick Lamar

Choices – Apollo Brown

Looking for Astronauts – The National

Starting Over feat Ben Bridgewell – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

What a Day – Josephine

From the Woods!! – James Vincent McMorrow

Bridge Through Time – Apollo Brown

I Forgot To Be Your Lover – The Revelations

The Chorus in the Underground – Great Lake Swimmers

Octopus – Bloc Party

Only Love – Ben Howard

Guest of the Government – Admiral Fallow

Make the Sound feat Rhymefest – M.A.S.K.

Get Together feat Rapsody – MURS/9th Wonder

What I Do – Jon Connor

BFK – Freddie Gibbs

Cold feat Kanye West – DJ Khaled

Truth Be Told – Apollo Brown/Guilty Simpson

The 11th Hour – Apollo Brown

Pulling On A Line – Great Lake Swimmers

Everything – Ben Howard

How To Make It Through Hysteria – Skyzoo

HVN4AGNGSTA feat Master P – Game

The Red Carpet feat Raekwon & Ras Kass – Evidence

Hip Hop feat Scarface, Nas & DJ Premier – DJ Khaled

I Want You – Cee Lo Green

Work Everyday – Brother Ali

Need a Knot feat Bun B – Brother Ali

My God – Bombay Bicycle Club

The Wolves – Ben Howard

Lose You – Apollo Brown/Guilty Simpson

Never In A Million Years – Apollo Brown

Dudu – Haim Hefer

Ink Blotches – Apollo Brown/Guilty Simpson

All I Really Want feat The Dream – Rick Ross

Diamonds – Ben Howard

Wildflower – Cee Lo Green

Lit Up – The National

Can’t Hold Us feat Ray Dalton – Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

They Ready feat J. Cole, Big K.R.I.T. & Kendrick Lamar – DJ Khaled

Still – Great Lake Swimmers

Moscow Evenings – Sunset – The Alchemist

2.    Kolexxion – DJ Premier/Bumpy Knuckles – For demonstrating that Preemo’s rejected beats are better than most producers’ efforts, and for showing that – without Guru – Bumpy Knuckles knows how to handle them best.

3.    Dice Game – Guilty Simpson/Apollo Brown – For knowing it would be dope just from the press release.

4.    A Dream Deferred – Skyzoo – For Skyzoo’s voice and maturing vision.

5.    Ill Manors – Plan B – For being a UK rap album with true soul and depth.

6.    Baby Face Killa – Freddie Gibbs – For its sonic cohesion and Gibbs’ Tupac-like presence.

7.    Good Kid Mad City – Kendrick Lamar – For being the past, the present, and the future of West Coast hip-hop.

8.    Control Systems – Ab-Soul – For being the brightest young star in the new West Coast firmament.

9.    Mourning in America and Dreaming in Colour – Brother Ali – For proving that I should have listened to Brother Ali earlier.

10.    Trophies – O.C./Apollo Brown – For Apollo Brown being the new A-list producer in the underground.

11.    The Heist – Macklemore/Ryan Lewis – For being pop, real, and epic.

12.    God Forgives, I Don’t – Rick Ross – For Ross’s unique flow and his epic, cinematic beats.

13.    Ohnomite – Oh No – For being yet another solid Stones Throw release.

14.    Jesus Piece – Game – For marking Game’s graduation to OG.

15.    Interludes after Midnight – Blockhead – For being an inheritor to DJ Shadow’s tradition.

16.    Reloaded – Roc Marciano – For its grimy beats and gruff flow.

17.    Napalm – Xzibit – For surprising us by not falling off.

18.    Professor@Large – Large Professor – For its old-skool/nu-skool balance.

19.    Mugshot Music – Showbiz/AG – For reppin’ the Bronx section.

20.    Life is Good – Nas – For showing how rappers might manage the transition to adulthood.

THE BEST HIP-HOP JOINTS OF 2012

1.    They Ready – J.Cole/Big K.R.I.T./Kendrick Lamar
2.    M.A.A.D City feat MC Eiht – Kendrick Lamar
3.    Hip Hop – Nas/Scarface
4.    What I Do – Jon Connor
5.    South Bronx Shit – Showbiz/AG
6.    Ink Blotches – Guilty Simpson/Apollo Brown
7.    Pirates – Rick Ross
8.    Can’t Hold Us feat Ray Dalton – Macklemore/Ryan Lewis
9.    Need a Knot feat Bun B – Brother Ali
10.  Cold feat DJ Khaled – Kanye West
11.    Deepest Shame – Plan B
12.    Cheesesteaks – Vinnie Pax
13.    Make the Sound feat Rhymefest – M.A.S.K.
14.    Big Beast feat Bun B, T.I. & Trouble – Killer Mike/El-P
15.    The Don – Nas
16.    I Know This Game – Sadat X
17.    Blasphemy (Blast 4 Me) – M.O.P.
18.    HVN 4 A Gangsta feat Master P
19.    B.A.P. – DJ Premier/Bumpy Knuckles
20.    MARS – Large Professor
21.    Anotha One – O.C./Apollo Brown
22.    BFK – Freddie Gibbs
23.    Give it Up – Skyzoo
24.    Jingalin – Ludacris
25.    Food – Masta Killer

First, I think this is unfair on both Lapid and Yachimovich. The latter has almost single-handedly resurrected Labour from the dead – this has undoubtedly been an impressive achievement. Nevertheless, she faces a similar problem that Livni once faced; namely, that she is a woman with no security experience (this is the result of chauvinism and an over-reliance on ‘security’ types, but it remains a reality to be contended with). And when the electorate looks at the Labour list they don’t see many candidates with strong security credentials. As a result, taking a dovish stance or putting the Palestinian issue to the forefront would be suicidal. This is why she has done everything in her power to ensure that Labour isn’t seen as a left-wing party (thus losing my vote in the process) and why she seemed to be trying to out-right the right-wing in her vitriol during Pillar of Cloud. But this doesn’t mean that her Palestinian policy would be the same as Bibi’s, or that she would be less likely to join the coalition than Livni.

Lapid seems more likely than Labour to join the coalition, which is another reason why I won’t vote for him, but that’s another consequence of Israel’s absurd system, where a party with 10 seats can emerge from an election with more power than a party with 20. My main issue with Lapid is that he’s vapid, and there is little to distinguish him from an already crowded field. But I don’t see why he’s any more likely to join the coalition than Livni.

Even if my friend’s claims were true, however, I still don’t think ‘The Movement’ would be justified. And it’s partly because I agree with my friend that the Palestinian issue is so pressing that I think this way. We are on the verge of a situation where the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history will be replaced by an even more right-wing coalition, and where Yisrael Beitenu’s list may turn out to be more moderate than the Likud one. Far from confronting Israel’s existential problems, a Bieberman government will only make them worse. All that matters is beating Likud Beitenu. And, although the polling has been consistently discouraging, there remains one way in which the tide might be turned: a grand centre-left coalition led by the most popular centre-left politician. Currently that person seems to be Shelly Yachimovich.

If this wasn’t a possibility, Bibi wouldn’t have needed to team up with Lieberman. The only positive to come out of that decision was that it offered the possibility to simplify Israel’s bloated political arena. There may be differences between Yesh Atid and Labour and Meretz and The Movement, but are they any more significant than, say, the differences between the left and right of the Labour party in the UK? It’s easy to forget that Israel’s system rewards extremism; the only solution to this problem is the formation of two blocks, one left and one right, to slug it out for supremacy. If Livni had accepted Yachimovich’s offer and had become her number two, and if Lapid had followed suit, this would have been a possibility. As things stand, all she has done is take votes from Labour and Yesh Atid, while the right-wing majority remains unthreatened. Given the circumstances Israel currently finds itself, circumstances which have been made significantly worse by the government’s inept response to the Palestinians’ statehood bid in the UN, this is inexcusable.