The problem with our public intellectuals today is that they are writing for readers who already exist, as they exist.

Unlike the ordinary journalist or enterprising scholar, she is writing for a reader she hopes to bring into being. She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.

The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch may be wound for tomorrow or today.

Bernard-Henri Lévy.

that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth.

The residents of Gaza are bombed by cutting edge F-16 fighter jets and drones, yet they do not have bomb shelters, and they have nowhere to flee. Israel's residents are bombed mostly by makeshift rockets, many of which have been intercepted by Iron Dome missiles. The majority of the population in Israel has access to shelters and can flee out of the rocket's range.

When all civilians are potential human shields, when each and every civilian can become a hostage of the enemy, then all enemy civilians become killable.

Again, the logic is clear. All civilians in Gaza are being held hostage by Hamas, which is considered a war crime and a gross violation of international law governing armed conflict.

they have to provide moral justification for their action in order to preserve their standing in the international arena;

Consequently, the permeation of war into cities inevitably transforms their inhabitants into potential human shields.

Zochrot has worked to remind Israelis of the Nakba by including trips to destroyed Palestinian villages, and hanging signs in Arabic and Hebrew over them, identifying these sites according to their pre-1948 Arabic names. Artists Without Walls, an ad hoc group of Israeli and Palestinian artists/activists, meanwhile, was formed in 2004 at the height of the construction of the Wall, deploying diverse forms of cultural activism to dismantle it and produce an alternative Israel/Palestine space.

B’Tselem has placed cameras in the hands of Palestinians who have recorded settlers’ abuses, images that have become a significant source of information for local and international media, its footage broadcast in major media networks.

Revisionist cinema forms a significant component of a changing Jewish-Israeli ideological landscape. (The] Documentaries… attempt to write an alternative history in a way that links past and present

but on another level, they form the core argument, as the visual documentation of agricultural landscapes and urban spaces, as well as public events and private scenes—all offer evidence of a vital Palestine that contradicts the idea of an “empty land.". . . 

For instance, digital symbols and pictures have been used, sometimes viciously, in European production so as to essentialize and vilify Islam, as in the case of the ]yllands-Posten cartoons discussed in Christiane Gruber's study.

In other words, / image can become perceived reality, and reality may turn out to be nothing but projected image, conflating both viewing systems into a cyclical circuit of ontological repartees.

I think it's a prescription for war.

West must do to continuewinning,