Larry Derfner grew up in the U.S. and was prompted by a spirit of idealism to move to Israel. That’s my sense. Gershom Gorenberg found American society too materialistic, wanted more meaning from life; he moved to Israel too. Joel Greenberg is also a liberal writer who was called by Israel. Bradley Burston too. Bernard Avishai went from Canada, another good guy. Now these guys are mature, at the height of their understanding, and maybe it’s their time now, maybe they need to rediscover their youthful idealism and, if not come home, make a declaration about their adopted society? Just a thought. I think it would be powerful.
Here’s Derfner, from Robert Mackey’s column, The Lede (thx, Voskamp):
In an e-mail to The Lede on Tuesday, Mr. Derfner reflected:
“I knew that what I was writing was shocking, I wanted it to be shocking — that was my whole point, I thought that shocking the Israeli public, not by my little blog alone, but as a strategy for the Left — might shake people out of their paralysis. It was sort of a reckless, blind conviction — now I see that that’s one of the dangers, if not THE danger of a personal blog: no editor.”
In response to a question about whether he still believes that columnists and bloggers from one side of Israel’s political divide can influence readers who start on the other side, Mr. Derfner replied:
“I think when you write about such a long-standing, polarized subject as this, you can provoke people who disagree with you to think, but you’re not going to change a right-winger into a left-winger or vice versa — if you’re lucky you can pull a centrist or two to your side. Mainly you buck up your own team. But it’s not why you write. You write because you can’t help thinking, you write because you find something interesting and true — you want to change things, but that’s not your first goal — if it is, you should go into politics. The sad thing in Israel today is that even the politicians who oppose the occupation can’t change things.”
