Jonathan Vincent’s Reviews > The Slopes Of Lebanon > Status Update

There are already elements of near intimacy in the hostile relations between us and them, including similarities that are peculiar, frightening, and sometimes almost ridiculous.

Contrary to the sentimental, romantic cliché, poets do not handle words as a lover handles bouquets. They treat words the way a bacteriologist treats germs. As a result of their work and their intimate, microscopic contact with language and its implications, they are sometimes able to detect disease or the threat of an epidemic before others do.

Tell me to whom you look for moral endorsement, and I will tell you who you are.

How can we live and not die? If we can compromise, we will live, but if we behave like fanatics, we will die. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn.

It will always be easier for the Israel Defense Forces to break the backbone of the tiny Palestinian state than to break the backbone of an eight-year-old Palestinian stone thrower.

(This is his angry, shouting at the right phase)

Sometimes it seems that Israel is willing to suffer a deep internal rift that may destroy the willingness of half its citizenry to fight, rather than tolerate a two-state solution.

This is a war between Israel and the Arab world (which includes the Palestinians).


This is from 1988, it's interesting to me that this opinion was still mainstream then. I guess it makes sense- the Yom Kippur War had only been 15 years before and Israel had only normalized relations with Egypt a few years before. Crazy how fast things have shifted.

It is almost certain that one day Palestine and Trans-Jordan will be a single nation whose territory will be five or six times greater than Israel. If, in the meantime, Palestine feels crowded, let it present some territorial demands to the kingdom of Jordan, where two-thirds of the population is Palestinian and there is plenty of empty land.


This book is a time capsule sometimes.

It is always fascinating to see how people set out on a journey through space when, in fact, they want to journey through time- or the opposite: They travel through time when they really ache for other places.

But the root of the controversy has remained with us from those past days down to the present, and will into the future: Is a nation surrounded by enemies permitted to engage in anything, including acts conventionally defined as war crimes, in order to overcome its enemies? Do despicable, criminal methods of warfare employed by the enemy justify the use of despicable, criminal methods of warfare by us in return?