Bronner speaks

"The problem isn’t the son. It’s Bronner’s degree of identification with Israel. I kept looking at my watch waiting for him to say One Palestinian Name. Finally it came at about minute 45: university president Sari Nusseibeh. I’m pretty sure it was the first mention of any Palestinian he knows. The world according to Bronner is a Jewish one. There was the friend who invited him to an orthodox Westchester congregation. His writer friend in Israel who counseled him to tell Jewish audiences back here that Israel is an apartheid state (and to tell college audiences the opposite; Israeli dissimulation). There was a string of Israeli generals and officials’ names. Meridor, Ben Gurion, Barak, Netanyahu. And Michael Oren–favorably of course...He made all kinds of excuses for Israelis. He said that they killed civilians in Gaza because they warned people in Arabic over the telephone to leave their homes and then the next day they went into the neighborhood and if there were people still around, they assumed they were Hamas fighters. I wonder if he ever printed any of that defense of war crimes in the newspaper? He said the settlers were openly flouting the "moratorium" on building–has he told his readers that?–and he related the settlers’ story with empathy. "History is made by people who never stop, and these people never stop… They are not going to walk away just because someone declares a moratorium. … They have an almost erotic attachment to the land."" (thanks Brian and Marcy and 30 others)