Someone I’ve known for twenty years lives a couple of blocks away. I like him and run into him regularly in the neighborhood. He is not a partisan, he does not post about the Middle East, and he is not the sort of person who chants anything. The other day, he told me he respected my article in The Free Press, in which I said I’d leave my longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, if it stood behind a virulently antisemitic Palestinian novelist. Then, out of the blue, he asked me a question in the tone people use when they already assume the answer.
“Do you think there’s a genocide in Gaza?”
No, I told him. By every metric that matters — legal, historical, statistical — there is not.
He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just told you the earth is flat. Then he explained why I was wrong. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the Palestinian people. Everybody knows that.
That was the whole of it. Not a study, not a court ruling, not a casualty figure. Just a thing everybody knows. I have sp…
