Yitzhak Laor

Paul Lawrence Rose (Letters, 25 March) tries to make himself clearer by saying that he wants to confine Wagner’s banning ‘only to Israel’. Then he goes on: ‘I took pains at a meeting of the New York Wagner Society … to emphasise that I was in favour of performing Wagner outside Israel.’ What a pain. Had this not been a symptom of a much vaster political phenomenon, I wouldn’t have bothered...

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....

Judith Butler’s point (LRB, 21 August) can be narrowed to a single question addressed to Israeli and Jewish advocates abroad: where is the line that you will not cross in step with the state of Israel? At what point does Israel’s war stop automatically being ‘my war’? Had this question been asked of so-called liberals some ten years ago, they would have had to draw their line by now, when apartheid...

The one-state solution returns, riding on the backs of Israelis and Palestinians, who cannot solve their problems. Both Virginia Tilley (LRB, 6 November) and Tony Judt (in the New York Review of Books) acknowledge that it is about time Israelis grew up and accustomed themselves to the notion that the 19th century is over: nationalism is out, and citizenship is not ethnic, nor should it be. The trouble...

I guess Ralph Seliger attended the 15 May rally in Tel Aviv (Letters, 24 June). Otherwise he wouldn't invoke Yossi Beilin's speech to counter my claim that the Zionist left does not criticise the IDF. He must have noticed that Beilin did not condemn even General Yom Tov Samya, who on the same stage called for the liquidation of Arafat. Nor could Seliger have missed the brutal attack on the large group...