The Guardian | Inside the bubble:
"Late last year, the award-winning novelist Linda Grant moved to Tel Aviv for four months. How could people bear to live there, she wanted to know, amid daily reports of violence, corruption and despair? What she discovered was a society in a state of profound denial - and the horrifying possibility that there may be no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict " .
This is truly terrible, I mean how on earth did a colonial settler state, conceived in Switzerland in the 1890s, based on an ethnic cleansing campaign mooted for fifty years before it actually began in earnest in November 1947 and maintained by an array of apartheid laws and relentless aggression to the natives and neighbours of Palestine, ever degenerate into "violence, corruption and despair"? Well in between the mealy mouthed hand-wringing we find that Linda has no solution for the problem in Palestine but she does identify the problem. It's the suicide bombings. Yes, those nasty atrocities that began about one hundred years after the Austrian Theodor Herzl "founded the Jewish state" and first floated the idea of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arabs to make way for the co-ethno-religionists of Linda Grant and me. (Mark Elf)
