Both your parents are Holocaust survivors. How has this influenced your views of Israel?
My parents were strong supporters of the Soviet Union because they believed – rightly – that it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazis. They looked at the world through the prism of the Nazi holocaust. When Israel aligned with the US early in the Cold War, my parents came to loathe Israel. But it did not figure in my upbringing.
You have been quoted as saying that the 1982 war in Lebanon ended your indifference to the Middle East’s troubles. What was it about that particular event that forced a reaction?
In the course of Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon, it killed 15-20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians. The war climaxed in the Sabra-Shatila massacre, but that was only a small blip on the real screen. Once I got involved, I began to read a lot on the subject and wrote my doctoral thesis on Zionism. Unfortunately, the conflict never found a resolution, so I couldn’t in good conscience extricate myself from it.
