The 60s were a continuation of the 50s much more than people realized. Certainly in some countries, like Britain, there was still a culture of deference, whereas in the 70s we really are in a time of angry transition. The generation that came into young adulthood in the 70s couldn't find jobs; that wasn't true in my generation. They entered a time when two depressing things hit them both at the same time.

I don't believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.

It does irritate me when I am described as a controversialist and commentator on Israel.

Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.

The people whose necks hurt when I write about the Middle East tend to live in Brooklyn or Boca Raton: the kind of Zionist who pays another man to live in Israel for him. I have nothing but contempt for such people.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.