I'm exhausted, and so are most of the people I know. I worked pretty much every waking hour between July 12 and August 15, so of course I'm physically tired, but more than that I am spiritually drained.  I have more or less sorted out my thoughts and know what I want to write, but lack the energy to do so. Today I'm going to relax, and I'll try to write something tonight or tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are some links to keep you busy.

Gadi Taub

Gadi Taub, author of several books (including popular stories for children), one of Israel's best-known and most important social critics and possibly the only professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who rides a motorcycle to work, has started a blog. If you're looking for intelligent insider's analysis that deviates from the usual blah blah of the 60-plus talking heads on the nightly news, then Gadi's blog is definitely the place to visit.

Last week an article he wrote for Ynet, The Arrogance Behind the Radical Left, caused a lot of controversy around here. My friend Ilan, about whom I wrote here, wrote a response in Hebrew, which I'll try find time to translate and post later today. This week Gadi has an interesting piece in The New Republic (free registration). There are links to both articles on his blog and he intends to post new material on a regular basis.

More links:

Anat, who blogs at Israeli Mom, has started a forum called METalks for people of the Middle East to get to know one another and exchange views in a civil manner. Her online team includes an Iranian and a Lebanese, both of whom she met because of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. She describes her initiative in this post, excerpted below:

So, what is METalks.com about? I want it to be a platform to allow
people of the Middle East a place to interact and create some sort of
positive dialogue. The emphasis here is certainly on the positive. I
don't think we need yet another place where people will bicker, fight
and insult each other. I want a place where opinions can be expressed,
yet an overall respectful tone be maintained.

I also want to
bring together those voices of the Middle East that call for peace,
human rights, democracy and the associated values. Being an online
forum, I realize that we're going to have all kinds of people joining,
not all of them necessarily promoting those ideals, yet I hope that we
will be able to create a strong community where diverse opinions can be
heard, discussions can be held and yet a general line be maintained
promoting these ideas, at least by the site's staff and core posters.

Rinat Malkes is mentioned prominently in an article written by Assaf Carmel for Haaretz; Carmel describes the scene at Kibbutz Goshrim, right near Kiryat Shmona, where Israeli and foreign reporters gathered to cover the war. My favourite bit is:

Malkes…gives quite low marks to her
colleagues who have arrived here only recently: “Most of the foreign
reporters came here with a very low level of knowledge. The only thing
they know is that they are on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Beyond that,
they really are not au courant about the mess. Yesterday, for example,
I was speaking with a reporter from the Spanish newspaper El Pais and
what she said still grates on my ears. She said that she couldn't
understand why the Israelis can't sit still for a single minute without
killing anyone. This annoyed me both as an Israeli and as a journalist.
I tried to talk to her, but when I saw how much knowledge she lacked I
just stopped and walked away.”

Charles Malik, one of the contributors to the Lebanese Political Journal, has been writing up a storm of insightful analysis over the past week. I recommend starting with the piece he published on August 13 and then reading them in order to the most recent. Charles also asked me to publicize his call for home video clips of the war; he's posting them on his blog, using a new technology that's still in beta phase. There is a real shortage of videos from Israelis (hint hint).

Other stuff:

I was interviewed by phone on C-Span on August 10. Click here, scroll down to the August 10 show and click on “Washington Journal entire program” to view. It doesn't seem to work in Firefox, though.

The BBC's World Have Your Say solicited an email exchange between me and Rania El Masri, who teaches at Lebanon's University of Balamand. I'm not quite sure why I agreed to their request, since the question of “who won?” absolutely disgusts me (a); and because the request to participate came from the BBC's Arabic service, with whom I had a rather negative experience (b). You'll see from the tone of my letters that I was pretty irritated and exasperated that day. Let's hope the ceasefire lasts long enough for me to recover my emotional equilibrium.