(JNS) About 30 years ago, I ran into an old BBC colleague while on a reporting trip in the Balkans. After spending an evening drinking in a local bar with a few other journalists, we walked back to the hotel where we were both staying. A bizarre conversation ensued.
My colleague told me he had been spending a lot of time in Jerusalem, a city I knew well because my father lived there. I asked him where he stayed when in town.
He looked at me askance, as if the answer was so obvious that there was no need for me to have asked the question. “At the American Colony, of course!” he exclaimed, referring to the handsome Palestinian-run hotel in eastern Jerusalem. Then he told me that whenever he landed in Tel Aviv, he couldn’t wait to get to the hotel, as he would now be among Palestinians and not Israelis.
He said all this knowing that I was Jewish. His tone, moreover, was not hostile or challenging. To him, this was evidently just common sense, unarguable and not...
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