From a friend who’s been living in Israel for a while in response to today’s column :

Subject: Good column today There’s another delightful irony in this whole mess which touches on your concluding thought about how inhospitable the culture of “Palestine” is to western political ideas. I’ve found it to be the case that those who are most dedicated to the cause of “Palestine” tend to actually be the most ignorant of Arab/Palestinian culture. Ignorant probably isn’t the right word – self-deluded is better. These are the people who view themselves as being the genuine multiculturalist citizens of the world, liberated from the chains of ethnocentrism, and all the rest. These guys take African dance class in college, and take it very seriously. Because it’s African. And I’m sure they do feel that they are seeking true understanding and solidarity with the plight of peoples they believe have been victimized by the West. I ran into so many of these characters in Israel, hanging out in the coffee shops enjoying the free wifi and laid-back lifestyle of a western country while they get their authentic activist street cred agitating for the plight of a group of people they have only ever know in textbooks and on CNN, a group of people who would literally murder them if they actually had the balls to go to Jenin or Nablus or Gaza City. (Saul Bellow called this phenomenon “moral tourism.”) These people have built up in their own minds a massively prejudicial conception of who the Palestinians really are, a conception wrapped around their desire for “solidarity” with a group of noble oppressed people, rather than any real knowledge of the Arabs. In this way, those who have most vigorously denounced Orientalism have ended up today as the only true remaining Orientalists.