The Boston Globe wants its Jewish readers to do penance. A contrite Jewish woman named Alice Rothchild published an op-ed sometime this past week, in the penitential mood, heaping the sins of normality (a people and a state that defend themselves against enemies sworn to their obliteration) on all of us--my reference to the "us" here alluding to her Jewish readers. No matter, except that the writer, so eager to vest the Palestinians with their own narrative, robs it from them by laying all the blame for the present and past turbulence on Israel.

In the Sunday Globe "Ideas" section (which was truly inspired when it was edited by TNR alumnus Alex Star), someone else--a real somebody (and I don't mean this sardonically)--has been summoned to wag his finger, too, at the Israelis at the end of their ten-day period of contrition and on the very eve of their Day of Atonement. And who has been mustered? Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University. Where else?...

...Back to Khalidi. His article, an excerpt from his new book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, is titled "Unwritten History." It makes the argument, stated in a large pull-quote, that "it is important to ascribe agency to the Palestinians, to avoid seeing them as helpless victims of forces greater than themselves--or as driven solely by self-destructive tendencies." But, in this 40 inches of type, he devotes barely ten to what the Palestinians did or failed to do on their own over the century of the conflict. Raising this question is a good thing to do...