Joan Didion’s sharp words about the ‘national unity’ discourse spawned by the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. echo in the peace-and-security discourse Israeli policy makers are creating
In an article published in January 2003, American writer and essayist Joan Didion, who died this past December 23, had words of praise for the Israeli media. Writing in The New York Review of Books about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she decried the shallowness of American discourse, which she saw as wallowing in hollow patriotism. She singled out Haaretz’s English-language website as a positive, counter-example of true patriotism that embodies a willingness for self-criticism, and elsewhere praised Israelis Avishai Margalit, a philosophy professor, and the late journalist and author Amos Elon. No similar rational discussion about Israel can be conducted in the United States, Didion wrote, because any criticism of Israel is immediately construed as being antisemitic.
