End of a difficult month. The New Yorker Radio Hour, this morning, interviewed two personalities close to the conflict: Yonit Levi, an Israeli TV News anchor and Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian academic. What struck me was how David Reznick conducted the interview: speaking facts with the journalist and leaving the issues of history and ethics to the academic. Some would say that this is proper journalism. I believe that it is restrictive and misses an opportunity for each interviewee to be challenged and to challenge her/his own limitations or self-censorship, to the detriment of the listeners.

Unfortunately and in a weird sense, this reinforces my frustrations with this program. It lacks humanity and hides behind a well managed cynicism which itself lacks – should I dare? – humor. These absences I also sense in the musical piece used as the program radio-identifier (wannabe free jazz, it doesn’t offer any poetic, inventive space for mind liberation). At the New Yorker, humor belongs in the cartoons, poetry has its own page … Or it must be my French ignorance!

Anyhow, I observe that Sari Nusseibeh, the academic, still has hopes for the future. But only if the parties meet and dialogue. And this represents a vindication of my ‘It takes two to hope’, after, of course, Hannah Arendt’s own, (exact quote): ‘There will never be peace in the Middle East as long as Arabs and Jews do not sit down and negotiate together.’

[Please, may no one say that this proves Hannah Arendt’s opposition to the creation of the state of Israel, even her antisemitism! It would be false and calumnious. She actually supported the creation of a state conditionally, and was a renown critic of politics.]