Piercing the Wall of Silence

I know it’s taking me way too long to write my dispatch from the West Bank. Sorry about that. I will post it shortly, I promise.
In the meantime, check out this blog from a Lebanese who calls himself The Perpetual Refugee. He is in Israel now, which is treasonous. But he’s there anyway. And he met my Israeli friend Lisa Goldman. He wrote about meeting her here, and she wrote about meeting him here.
Arabs and Israelis are talking to and linking each other in the blogosphere despite the reactionary laws against this kind of fraternizing behavior. (Israel has no such dumb laws.) Now they’re even meeting each other as friends in the real world.
My friend and former guest-blogger Lebanon.Profile recently discovered the Israeli blogosphere and wrote an amazing post on one of his blogs about what that was like. Don’t miss it.
You might, conceivably, read something like these blog entries in the Jerusalem Post or Haaretz. But you will not read anything like them in Beirut’s Daily Star. I love Lebanon dearly, I hate having to say this, and, hey, the Daily Star published one of my articles once. But unfortunately, that’s how it is.
UPDATE: Lebanon.Profile, my Lebanese friend in Beirut, writes:

Not knowing about “them” is the worst crime we can commit. It invalidates them as humans, as if they don’t even matter. They are Stalin’s faceless enemy, the rabid dog, the evil blood suckers whom it is righteous to kill.

Meanwhile, a knee-jerk academic in Britain refuses to read anything written by an Israeli. It burns! It burns us!