That's The Way The Pals. Are

From an interview with novelist Eyal Megged, illustrating the political bias of the interviewer, Maya Sela, and the self-obnubilation thinking of a representative of Israel's cultural elite:

Apropos Palestinians, what is going to become of us?

"I see a binational beach. That is what will be. I welcome it. I am completely binational."

How will we be binational? We are totally racist.

"So the time has come for us to be taught a lesson. We are going to be punished for that. We have become so inured and merciless and void of compassion, and do what we do not want done to us, that we deserve a harsh punishment. This scene restores my spirit. This is Hebraism, it's Levantine, and I am not afraid of either."

Your pal Bibi doesn't think that.

"I am not responsible for him."

You were in agreement with him for a while.

"I was in agreement with him during the period of the folly of evacuating Gush Katif [the Israeli settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip], for which I could see no point or purpose. Now, finally, I have found an organization, which I have joined, called the Israeli Peace Initiative [Hebrew: Yisrael Yozemet]. Even at the height of my rightward deviation, when I heard about the Arab peace initiative [of 2002], I thought we had to accept it, that it was a historic proposal. People from my generation know how much we knocked on those doors. It can't be ignored, and now suddenly there is an organization that is going for the Arab initiative. Not with the Palestinians - I don't trust them. You can't achieve anything with them." 

Why is that? 

"Because that is how they are. Neither they nor we get anywhere, for all kinds of reasons, maybe of mentality. We had a conference within the framework of the Parallel States Project, which I think is a marvelous invention that at core proposed two parallel states in the whole area from the sea to the Jordan River. It was a Swedish initiative of meetings between Israelis and Palestinians. In the last conference, the initiative was presented in Sweden. Then the Palestinians took the stage and started to cry again about what was being done to them, and I, in a polite and restrained state, lost it. I said, 'When are you going to be done with this propaganda? Everyone is fed up with it. I too could say things and make people here shed tears. Wasn't my wife's knee smashed in a terrorist act? We have to put that behind us. We came to propose something. Why are you out to win points?'"

And the Arabs are perhaps thinking that's the way the Jews are.