Since the night of the Israeli election on 22 January I have been avoiding Israeli news. It wasn’t exactly something I decided to do: perhaps it was just my immune system protecting me from the flood of commentators and the endless repetition of words like ‘hope’, ‘change’, ‘future’ and ‘the new politics’. I escaped straightaway to the websites of the BBC and the Guardian and found myself suspiciously interested in the drivers caught in the snow on British motorways. Lucky them, I thought.

LRB 21 February 2013 | PDF Download