Letter to a Palestinian Neighbor

From Letter to a Palestinian Neighbor:

My journey into Palestinian Islam and Christianity, the faiths of my neighbors, was part of a much broader attempt among Israelis, begun during the first intifada, to understand your narrative, how the conflict looks through your eyes. Your society, on the other hand, has made virtually no effort to understand our narrative. Instead, you have developed what can be called a "culture of denial," that denies the most basic truths of the Jewish story.

According to this culture of denial, which is widespread not only among your people but throughout the Arab world, there was no Temple in Jerusalem, no ancient Jewish presence in the land, no Holocaust. Nowhere is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as popular as in the Arab world, which has also become the international center for Holocaust denial. The real problem, then, is not terrorism, which is only a symptom for a deeper affront: your assault on my history and identity, your refusal to allow me to define myself, which is a form of intellectual terror.