After all, I found myself asking in return, two major Arab countries had made formal peace with Israel, the PLO had already recognised it and was pursuing a peace process with it, and several other Arab countries had trade and commercial relations with it. Arab intellectuals had made it a point of honour not to have any dealings with Israel, not to go there, not to meet with Israelis, and so on and so forth, but even they had been silent when, for instance, Egypt signed large deals selling natural gas to Israel and had maintained diplomatic relations with the Jewish state during frequent periods of Israeli repression against the Palestinians. In this young woman's understanding therefore, the opposite of conceding was supposed to be defiance, the act of defying, resisting and refusing to bend under the will of a power that one perceives as unjust and unreasonable. What I said in contrast was not only a matter of understanding them but also of understanding ourselves since our history was incomplete without consideration of Israel, what it represented in our lives, how it had done what it had, and so forth. There is simply no rational justification from an intellectual point of view of having a policy of ignorance, or using ignorance as a weapon in a struggle.
Ignorance is ignorance, no more and no less.
Always and in every case. I remained puzzled, dissatisfied with my groping answer and put off by the question which has remained with me until the present. But once again it has appeared to challenge me unexpectedly. Let me explain. Suddenly it became possible to see the relationships between public and private attitudes in the Arab world and to understand the connection between the young student's defiant ideas about what she considered to be concessions to Israel on the one hand and, on the other, the Palestinian leadership's abject and profligate generosity to American politicians who are in some measure directly responsible for the woes heaped upon the Palestinian people.