Claire Messud has a short story in the New York Review of Books, set in Australia and the New Hebrides. I love the South Pacific. But I wonder how long before the NYRB takes up the leftwing responsibility of running, routinely and persistently, work like Messud's piece in the Boston Globe, reporting her recent visit to the Palestinian arts festival.
Notice the casual use of the word "apartheid," which would have been censored in an earlier day. This is further proof that slowly but surely, Israel's image is tanking in the U.S. press:
We got a very small taste of what it’s like to be Palestinian. Members of our group likened it to living under apartheid; to Orwell’s “1984’’; to Kafka. But none of these allusions fully conveys the disturbing psychological experiment currently perpetrated on Palestinians in the West Bank.
The Ramallah-based architect and writer Suad Amiry put it best when she explained that to be Palestinian now means never to feel at home, because you have no control over time or space. You can live a lifetime in one place and yet not master its geography: routes long-familiar will suddenly be blocked off by barriers or checkpoints; while open spaces in the middle-distance will sprout settlements almost overnight, vast urban conglomerations that change the landscape altogether. You can live a lifetime in one place and yet never know how long it takes to get anywhere: a mere 20-mile journey might consume a whole day, depending on the checkpoints and the whim of the soldiers you encounter. You might never get there at all: you could well be turned back.
And note that Messud shares the opinion of Mond Mishal in Gaza: We are a human experiment.
