1982 was a critical time for the authors of all four of these books. It was the year of Ariel Sharon's most sanguinary foreign venture, which ended in massacre, failure, and a measure of disgrace. For the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, it was the year 'the Land of Israel' died in Lebanon, while for him personally it aroused feelings of alienation, the sense of being an exile in his own land. For Thomas Friedman, a Jewish American journalist, the refugee camp atrocities produced 'something of a personal crisis' and tore away 'every illusion' he had 'ever held about the Jewish state'. And for Robert Fisk, who no longer had illusions about that or anything else, it was a year in which he escaped death a score of times and lived to produce some of the most memorable journalism of the decade.

LRB 5 April 1990 | PDF Download