The long haul…

… It is hard being a columnist for eighteen years – here's how I got through it | Voices | The Independent. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… I didn’t come on to the paper a polemical Zionist. If I have sometimes sounded like one, that’s the paper’s fault. I’m not saying I cared nothing for Israel beforehand, but there was a new orthodoxy of anti-Zionism in the air and this paper inhaled its poisons freely. Had there been fewer anti-Zionists writing, and had their hostility to Israel been less a thing of myth and rhetoric, I might not have felt the call to buckle up as often as I did. But when I did buckle up, it was as a critic of their psychology, not their politics. The deep, self-deluding irrationality of hatred will always give itself away in language first.

Good for him.

Dave also sends along this by Patrick Kurp: `Essays Into Rather Than About'.