Yitzhak Laor

Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita’am.

Hatred played a major role in the election campaign. That part of the Left which called for an end to the Occupation failed: compassion didn’t seem to fit. If there was any compassion to be felt it was for Sharon. The people, the masses, the poor, were called on to defend him from ‘leftist incitement’.

Diary: General Boogey’s War

Yitzhak Laor, 3 October 2002

Another veil will fall over what happens beyond the hills, ten minutes from my relatively safe home, while there, under the non-reported non-event of a curfew, a nation is incarcerated and preparing for the worst.

After Jenin: Israel’s Imago

Yitzhak Laor, 9 May 2002

What has the war between us and the Palestinians been about? About the Israeli attempt to slice what’s left of Palestine into four cantons, by building ‘separation roads’, new settlements and checkpoints. The rest is killing, terror, curfew, house demolitions and propaganda. Palestinian children live in fear and despair, their parents humiliated in front of them. Palestinian...

Letter

11 September

4 October 2001

I've been thinking a lot about Marjorie Perloff's gardener. Does Mr Vargas always call Marjorie by her first name, or only when she tells him about those leftists in Europe? Does she always ask his opinion on political matters? Does she ask his opinion in other contexts? If this is the first time she has asked for his political views, then something good did happen in America following 11 September....

The best thing about Amos Oz’s novel in verse is almost untranslatable: his Hebrew poetry is too dense for any European language to convey. The musicality and rhythm are impressive, and Oz’s mastery of free indirect speech allows him to effect a continuous movement between his narrator and his characters. Free indirect speech plays a major role in modern Hebrew prose, partly...

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