Christopher Farah

Because of the film’s newfound relevance, its distributor, Rialto Pictures, is rereleasing the movie Friday at theaters in New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. Yacef now has a French publicist who guides eager members of the press under the gilded ceilings and gleaming chandeliers to his posh digs at New York’s Plaza Hotel. At 75, Yacef doesn’t look much different from the handsome, charismatic figure preserved in the grainy black and white film. It’s tough to reconcile the fact that this man, dressed in a black sports coat and turtleneck, armed with a warm smile and quick laugh, once helped kill French civilians on a daily basis.

While the film was not a documentary, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo didn’t use any professional actors to portray the Algerian rebels; instead he chose to use average Algerians, for whom the memory of winning independence, which finally happened in 1962, was still fresh and poignant. Many of the scenes were shot in the exact locations in which the original historical event occurred. The cinéma vérité style of Pontecorvo’s handheld camera makes it feel like you’re watching history. But it has been most widely praised for successfully capturing the complex moral dilemmas faced by both the occupiers and the occupied, who feel driven to terrorist acts. As critic Pauline Kael wrote, “‘The Battle of Algiers’ is probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people.”

So what does Yacef think of the terrorist tactics by Islamist militants today? He condemned much — in particular the Sept. 11 attacks — as blind hatred without a just cause. Yet on the subject of the attacks against American soldiers in Iraq, he seemed to waiver. When asked if the cause of Iraqi insurgents was just, Yacef at first said yes, then seemed to hesitate. He stated that he himself opposed Saddam, but complained that the process of transforming Iraq into a democracy ruled by Iraqis was taking too long, keeping the country plunged in chaos. In the end, Yacef’s sympathies seem to more naturally align with the insurgent force.

Salon spoke to Yacef, with the help of a translator, about how the film and his experiences are relevant to the U.S. involvement in Iraq today.

When you helped make this film, did you think “The Battle of Algiers” would be still be considered relevant 40 years later?

I never imagined the film would have this kind of resiliency and popularity 40 years later. When I made the film, I was sure that it would be a classic and last for a very, very long time. But now, 40 years later, for example with the Pentagon, the film has another aspect: It brings to light our war in Algeria with the war — and I’m going to call it a war — in Iraq. And it enables us to look at the two situations and see, are there things we can draw from the Algerian experience, mistakes or errors that were made.

What kinds of lessons do you think the United States should learn from the film?

It’s important to note that the war that took place in Algeria is not the same as what took place in Iraq. The reasons are different — although the real reason [for the U.S. occupation], I don’t know what it is. But there are lessons to be learned. For example, the Americans shouldn’t stay there for a long time. Because what will happen is, from a very small, small resistance, it will spread over time like an oil spill spreads, further and further. What will happen is that the Iraqis, the different groups, the Shiites, the Kurds, will end up uniting and developing a nationalistic attitude in order to get rid of the U.S., the outsider.

In Iraq now, the GI’s and the marines are very brave soldiers who have been trained to fight a real war as real soldiers — and now they’ve become police. The style of fighting is very different. This is what happened with us, in our country, with the French. General Jacques Massau — who is Colonel Mathieu in the movie — he commanded a very large army that was sent to the capital city, Algiers. He was in effect a policeman, and his army became an army of police. He was granted all special powers. They gradually engaged in activities like torture and murder, and these were things that over time created a feeling of malaise that led to the downfall of the Fourth Republic. Among the soldiers who were based there, there were many who were deserters, many who committed suicide. A great deal of the families of these soldiers were receiving letters at home that their sons had been killed there … If the United States stays in Iraq, this definitely may be what happens.

But at the same time, if the Americans leave, that would be a very dramatic thing for the Iraqi people. Then, as a civil war, the Iraqis would begin to kill each other. There would be thousands of deaths that way. My opinion is based on having fought for many years against 400,000 European occupiers in the country and 80,000 soldiers. I can tell you right now that if the army were to come into this room right now, I would be able to hide myself, and they wouldn’t find me. [Laughs.]

It isn’t often that someone who’s a part of history gets to reenact that historical event in film. How is it for you to watch the movie now?

When I see the film, I fall in love with it again — like a girl.

I put myself into the skin of an actor. It was a difference in acting in reality to acting in the film. But the director was there, and he made me act the way he wanted me to act. What I can assure you is that everything that took place in the film is something real that took place. And what I tried to insist on is that we use the same locales in the film. I’m in the film, but it was not my original intention to star in the film. But it was the director who asked me to be in the film. And one reason I agreed was because I wanted to make sure that no errors were committed.

I killed people. I did it for my country — in real life. Now, I can’t even kill a chicken. I’m another man.

At a blockade, you would come to a stop, and they would check you with metal detectors. So a bomb that was 10 or 15 kilograms, I was able to transform into a plastic bomb that was the size of a cigarette package, with a small battery. We would put it into a metal birdcage, and take the cages with us. When you passed through the checkpoints, they would see that the birdcage was made out of metal, and they let you by, with the bomb underneath in the cage. [Laughs.] I’m not going to tell you these things.

The success of the film is based on the fact that it shows the reality, and the reason why the Pentagon is interested in looking at this film is to see how did the French react, how did the French get out of Algeria. But the truth is that the French themselves never learned the lesson that can be drawn. For example, you have the French in Madagascar in ’47, then in Vietnam, in Morocco, in Tunisia. They never learned these lessons. Each time, it was like something new.

What about in the Arab world — now most of the colonial powers are gone, but there are still many dictatorships. Do you think things have really changed?

Not totally. There were countries that were almost 90 percent illiterate, meaning 10 or 15 percent were literate. It was this small percentage of the population, the literate population, who blew up the bombs. We were the people who were able to channel the rest of the population in that direction. In the case of all revolutions, there’s an evolution and a change in the mentality of some of the population. That can also lead to a conflict within the country, within the peoples within the country.

We can use France as an example. There was this sublime revolution of 1789 — liberty, fraternity and equality. The precursors of this revolution are the people who have prepared this revolution, for example Voltaire, Robespierre. In the end, these were all people who were decapitated by the revolution that they had created. I’m very happy to have my head on my shoulders — with a wound, of course. [He points to his right side.]

You mentioned your participation in bombing civilians. Those kinds of tactics have really influenced the Middle East. Do you think this is leading the Arab world in a good direction?

In some cases, it is useful. For example, in Algiers alone, there were 400,000 French civilians — and they had placed bombs long before the FNL detonated even one bomb. The colonists didn’t want Algeria to be independent. They had their own infrastructure in the country, almost like apartheid. They provoked us, and these colonialists — against the policy of the government in France — insisted that Algerians who had been arrested be executed. These colonial vigilantes would describe themselves as paratroopers. In military uniform, they would enter into houses and slit the throats of children. These were our enemies, more than the actual military. We offered them the chance to be part of one country, and people like Albert Camus were brought in to promote this idea, which the French colonialists refused to consider.

What took place was horrible. These were atrocities, but it was war — and attacks take place against civilians and against the military. What’s sad is that there were babies, children, young people, without arms and legs — they were cut off. This is the one thing that really saddens me. As for the rest, I consider myself a soldier without uniform.

I tried to make the film a very balanced film. It’s not like when the French make a film about the Germans, because when the French make a film about the Germans, the Germans are always the bad ones. For example, when the woman goes to place the bomb, you see the French baby eating the ice cream cone. I did this deliberately. I could have cut it, but I didn’t. I wanted to show violence on both sides, in different forms.

Now, for the Arab population, there’s really no reason for them to use terrorism. The real terrorism would be to go into the schools and begin to educate people and begin to bring them to a level of more scientific knowledge. You fight for something like this. They want to really apply a religion that’s different from the religion of Muhammad. For example, in Algeria in certain places, if you’re sitting in a chair and you’re eating with a fork, what you’re doing is considered to be against Islam. You’re the enemy of Islam. Because the Prophet Muhammad didn’t eat with a fork — you have to eat with your fingers! And now there’s terrorism in Algeria — a little — it’s been going on for about 10 years. And children of a few years old are being killed. Why? Why? For what reason? They are free, in a country that’s free. We shouldn’t have pity for these kinds of people, because these people are really destroyers. What they’re doing is not to defend a cause or the truth. If it was for a just cause, then yes. But just to go out and kill, to bring down two towers in New York, what’s the result?

In Iraq, are the bombings of the American soldiers just?

Yes. [Hesitates.] I would’ve given a lot of money and done a lot to get rid of Saddam. But where is the democracy? Arabs have never been democratic, only in a few countries.

[The allotted interview time ends, and Yacef and his entourage prepare to leave.]

But is that a problem of the Arabs or a problem of the West?

It’s a problem of the whole world. You have to learn to be democratic, developed over time. Somebody can’t just come over to you and say, “Now you have to be democratic.” It must be learned.

After finishing “Like the Red Panda,” and finding myself steadily sucked into the world of teenage protagonist and narrator Stella Parish, I’ve come to this conclusion: Yes, we do — sometimes. This happens to be one of those times.

Seigel’s humorous sense of the tribulations of high school — phony friends, bad-boy boyfriends, parents who just don’t understand — makes this an entertaining read, but many lesser books and films cover the same turf. “Like the Red Panda” succeeds because it transcends cliché. Seigel’s book is not teensploitation trash or a literary version of “Beverly Hills 90210.” If you read this expecting twisting soap-opera story lines, you’ll probably be disappointed.

Granted, Stella’s life is not entirely typical. She was adopted at the age of 11 by an emotionally distant couple, after her yuppie parents died at the same time of a drug overdose. Her only remaining family is a selfish, cynical grandfather who lives in an old-folks home — and whom she visits on weekends only because it gives her an excuse to miss synagogue with her adoptive parents, the Roths.

Now an academic overachiever on the verge of graduating and going to Princeton, Stella decides that the trappings of life — getting good grades, hollow interactions with friends and family, and a future that promises more of the same — hold no meaning for her anymore, so she begins to plan her suicide.

But the plot doesn’t drive this story as much as the simple power and honesty of Stella’s voice, rendered by Seigel with amazing precision, subtlety and a perfect current of self-deprecating understatement. Considering that Seigel is barely out of high school herself (well, OK, she’s 24), maybe that’s not so surprising. And similar voices — from Holden Caulfield to MTV’s Daria — dot our cultural landscape like SUVs in a strip-mall parking lot. In that sense, there’s nothing particularly unusual about Stella.

What Seigel does particularly well, however, is to make her character complex and three-dimensional enough to resist easy stereotyping. Stella is not just a walking cartoon, bitter and jaded, angry at the world for no good reason. At heart, she’s an idealist, someone who still cares very deeply for the people in her life, even those who’ve treated her badly. Like a recovering Catholic, she wants to believe there’s a purpose for everything, an underlying goodness that drives life; she’s just seen too much — too much loneliness, too much emptiness, too much pain — to allow her to have faith in something she instinctively knows does not exist.

This subtle interplay between hope and despair lends Stella a universality that’s appealing and likable, comfortable and familiar, capturing in the quirks of her personality all the contradictions that make the high school years both so overwhelming and so memorable. She has a fantastic eye for the kind of ridiculous hypocrisy that seems especially prevalent at the adolescent phase, when one first begins to rectify the dreams of youth with the realities of being an adult. But her selflessness and purity of intention allow us to care deeply about Stella, where other disillusioned types might come across merely as selfish and annoying.

Our care for Stella gives her ultimate intention — to kill herself after her graduation — that much more resonance. We admire her conviction and her resoluteness, but we cannot bear the thought of such a vibrant individual dying. And that’s exactly why “Like the Red Panda” rises above the triviality of a typical teen-angst anthem: By artfully evoking the despair, even the hopelessness, of such an endearing character, Seigel reaffirms our own private hope that maybe, after all, life does have meaning.

Our next pick: Drugs, aliens, random sex, a Cape Cod vacation and, strangest of all, a feckless middle-aged protagonist who won’t annoy you!

But thanks in part to the Internet, even as Kurds in Syria were experiencing the familiar helplessness of an oppressed minority, their kin throughout the rest of the world were able to fight back — mere hours after the unrest began. Through an increasingly sophisticated network of Kurdish Web sites, news of the clashes spread throughout the Kurdish diaspora to Kurdish population centers in Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada.

“Kurds everywhere were on the Internet following the situation,” says Nijyar Shemdin, the U.S. representative for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the political party currently governing much of northern Iraq. “Kurdish organizations everywhere began attacking embassies, organizing demonstrations. Before, this would have taken a long time.” [Editor's note: After the original publication of this story, Mr. Shemdin contacted Salon to note that he did not recall using the word "attacking" and to state that "While we believe in civil demonstrations to express our concerns and positions regarding certain political issues, we do not approve of violence nor terrorism."]

The American military presence in nearby Iraq undoubtedly had a deterrent effect on the zealous Syrian military, but did the public attention generated by the Internet also play a role? It’s impossible to say for sure. An active, unified diaspora and the watchful eye of foreign governments could strengthen the position of the millions of Kurds living in Turkey, Syria and Iran — aside from Iraq, the nations with the largest Kurdish populations. But outsiders generally have little direct influence on the day-to-day actions of authoritarian regimes.

This much, however, is certain: In countries like Syria where the media is state controlled and strictly regulated, outsider Web sites like that of the KRG help Kurds there see that life can be better, that they can have more rights and more self-determination, just like the Kurds in Iraq. “They see a live example of democracy working that all of Iraq and the region can follow,” says Shemdin.

And that, in turn, means that the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran are worried more than ever about the “Kurdish question.”

Cyber-gurus have long speculated that the Internet would lead to the creation of politically and culturally viable communities that defied traditional categories. Instead of being defined by a shared physical space, these communities would be defined by shared interests or common goals, with only Internet connections and computers linking the individuals. Historically disenfranchised groups like the Kurds — a people who have not ruled themselves in hundreds of years, instead living as minorities under other regimes — provide an intriguing test of the virtual-reality theory, a test that has real implications for a people whose tenuous political status demands a real solution.

The Internet has allowed Kurdish communities across the globe to connect in ways never before possible. So much so that new research suggests that these networks of ethnic nationalist Web sites have become “cyber-states” — nations created in cyberspace because of the lack of a nation in real space.

“This form of mass communication allows for the creation of a community without the need for a space, for a territory,” says Kari Neely, a doctoral student in Near Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, who is researching the impact of the Internet on ethnic minorities in the Middle East. “Cyberspace allows people to coalesce in a new kind of territory to maintain cultural traditions that might otherwise be threatened with extinction through assimilation, warfare and population displacement.”

Neely is quick to point out that this “new kind of territory” will never be able to replace the obvious benefits of possessing a shared physical territory. And other scholars caution that, even when used as a tool to affect situations on the ground, “virtual” nations have very real limitations. “Reality is in real space, not cyberspace,” says Amir Hassanpour, a professor at the University of Toronto who has written extensively about the effects of modern media on Kurdish nationalism. “In the case of Iraq, for example, the Internet may give Kurds some ability to promote ideas, but the reality is that the United States is an occupying force, the majority of people are Shiites, and Kurds are a minority.”

The historic minority status of the Kurds is part of what makes the idea of a Kurdish cyber-state so provocative. Although a Kurd, Saladin, is credited with having liberated much of the Arab world from Crusader rule in the Middle Ages, Kurds have long been a persecuted minority in the Middle East. The traditional (but internationally unrecognized) Kurdish homeland, Kurdistan, is on land divided by four nations, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Although Turkey has been carrying out a prominent military campaign against Kurdish nationalists for decades, Americans are probably most familiar with Iraqi crimes against the Kurds. Remember all those times you heard the Bush administration talk about Saddam gassing his own people? Those people were the Kurds.

That kind of persecution aided the creation of a large Kurdish diaspora throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas. It also meant that the Bush administration and the American occupation authority have had to handle an emerging Kurdish republic in northern Iraq with kid gloves. Although the Kurds have largely — and democratically — been managing their own affairs in Iraq since soon after the first Gulf War, America had to deny the Kurds’ request that they be allowed to establish their own independent nation following Saddam’s ouster. Turkey, Iran and Syria were terrified that this new Kurdistan would inspire their own Kurdish minorities to revolt, and the last thing the United States needs is more instability in the Middle East. Meaning that Kurds dreaming of a nation of their own can keep dreaming.

According to Neely, this gap between dreams and reality is exactly what Kurdish Web sites are trying to fill. “There’s an abundance of Web sites that have been established for and by these communities that include not only chat rooms and political forums, but minority literature — poems, short stories, novels, calls for original writings by community members — and even dating centers,” she says. “While the quality of the literary work being produced on the sites is certainly open to question, the point is that people use these sites to feel a connection to a larger community, a cyber-nation.”

What’s striking about the wide range of Kurdish Web sites is that so many of them attempt to provide a kind of one-stop shopping for Kurdish culture and nationalism. A Web site that happens to be operated by an American will not necessarily have content devoted to American literature, history and music. But many Kurdish sites link to all of the above — a history of the Kurds, samples of their literature and music, chat rooms, along with Kurdish news from all parts of the diaspora and “Kurdistan.” KurdTeens.com focuses on a younger audience, for example, but still connects people to all things Kurdish, for all ages.

“Other people say it is very nice to have your own country, so we try to create that feeling online,” says Bryar Fattah, a 20-year-old student who founded KurdTeens when he moved to Great Britain from Iraq in 2000. “We sometimes feel like each Web site is like a city from the Kurdish cities. Our virtual Kurdistan is not on the ground. It is in our minds.”

Some sites, including Kurdland.com, Kurdistan Net and KurdistanWeb practically sound like countries in their own right, while others such as Kurdish Media and the Kurdish Information Network have slightly less conspicuous names but perform the same kind of role.

“The site helps bring about a common bond in terms of language and cultural events,” says Dilan Roshani, an Iranian Kurdish engineer living in Great Britain who has operated KurdistanWeb since 1995. “The bond makes it easier for them to overcome a long history of Kurdish oppression and makes them feel a connection that no international border could give them.”

Neely says the “cyber-state” model can also apply to a host of other dispossessed peoples, particularly those with large diasporas — for example, the Druse, a religious minority; the Armenians, who have experienced an extensive diaspora and only recently received a territory of their own; and the Palestinians, who are part of the dominant Arab majority but who lack a state. A Web site such as the Electronic Intifada tries to represent, by definition, an electronic uprising, carrying the Palestinian struggle for a nation — nonviolently, through information, education and communication — to Palestinians beyond the West Bank and Gaza, helping to create a unified Palestinian community that extends from Europe, to America, to the Middle East.

The prototype for the Electronic Intifada was established on the Internet in September 1996, when Nigel Parry, who was in the West Bank, posted photos of a clash between Palestinians and Israelis. The photos reached Ali Abunimah, an ocean away. Parry, Abunimah and two others founded the Electronic Intifada soon afterward — even though the four never met in person until April of last year. “The first Palestinians I came into contact with who actually lived in Palestine were through listservs in the late 1990s,” says Abunimah, a writer who grew up in Great Britain and currently lives in Chicago. “It gave me an incredible, crucial sense of connection and community.”

But for all the feelings of community engendered by Kurdish, Palestinian or Armenian Web sites, can a cyber-Palestine ever rival a real Palestine, or a cyber-Kurdistan a real Kurdistan? The short answer is no, absolutely not.

Even the most popular Kurdish Web sites, which record several thousand unique visitors a day, don’t come close to connecting to the entire Kurdish population, numbering about 25 million, spread across the world. And while it is often a good tool for diaspora communities in Europe or America with easy access to computers, the Internet simply is not available for many of the Kurds living in small towns in ancestral Kurdistan.

And for those who do have Internet connections, a cyber-state may help people connect with each other, but it won’t keep them warm at night. After all, this is reality, not a scene from “The Matrix.” “You cannot take a plane and go to the Internet and live there,” says Shemdin, the Iraqi KRG’s American representative. “You can’t go home and visit relatives there or build a house there.”

But while a cyber-Kurdistan will not alleviate the need for a real Kurdistan, it may help realize one in the future. The disadvantages of a cyber-state — being ungrounded first and foremost — can be distinctly advantageous for ethnic minority communities and their nationalist movements.

“Cyberspace can provide a type of protected space for dangerous political views, minority viewpoints that aren’t legal in other settings,” Neely says. “I think this might be a reason for the numerous sites published in the Kurdish language. When a state bans something — like Turkey has done with the publication of Kurdish — then it can find a place outside the establishment.”

While simply maintaining the Kurdish language itself serves a nationalist goal — it’s difficult to establish a state politically if there’s no distinct culture to define it — many of the Web sites have explicit political content promoting a nationalist agenda. In countries such as Turkey, where Kurdish newspapers are banned, Kurds can learn about the progress of the nascent Kurdish republic in Iraq through the KRG Web site, which features not just news in depth but also descriptions of how the regional government works and biographies of all the elected officials — in other words, the basic building blocks of the democratic process.

“In the past, you couldn’t send a Kurdish paper to Iran or Turkey because of security checks,” says Hassanpour, the University of Toronto professor. “Subscribing to a Kurdish paper published in Holland meant I would go to jail as a secessionist. There can still be state surveillance of the Internet, of course, but in spite of this, Kurdish political parties have their own sites and people are free to propagate their politics.”

Shemdin says the KRG’s Web site has also helped curb the tide of Iraqi Kurds emigrating to Europe and America because they feared the domestic situation was too unstable. The site demonstrated to people that there was a consistent government presence, in addition to spreading news about increasing employment rates and improving health statistics, he says. “It helped create national unity by holding together society and preventing any more people from leaving.”

While access to these sites may be limited by Internet availability, Neely makes the point that even in real space, cultural and political institutions are almost never utilized by the entire population. Political elections in many countries, for example, fail to attract even a majority of the citizens, much less all of them. User statistics, particularly in places with limited access to computers, are vague at best.

“When I was in Syria I would see one person paying for an Internet connection while five of his friends would be standing behind him looking over his shoulder,” Neely says. “How can we get an accurate count of how many people are affected?”

Almost 15 years ago, satellite television first began the modern revolution in the Kurdish national consciousness. The Kurdish Satellite Channel, a station licensed by Britain, started broadcasting in Europe and the Middle East, causing fervent protests from the Turkish and Iranian governments. In Turkey, the army smashed satellite dishes to prevent people from seeing images of the Kurdish flag and map and from hearing the Kurdish national anthem. “I knew a family in Turkey,” Hassanpour says. “They never believed they’d be able to see Kurdish on television, but when they saw the shows, they changed their mind. They believed the Kurdish nation could exist.”

The growing cyber-state is creating a similar effect — with one crucial difference. Now Kurds all over the world aren’t just passively watching content, they’re creating their own, and they’re connecting directly with thousands of others like themselves. The impact of this burgeoning nation in cyberspace on the formation of an actual Kurdistan may one day be very real.

“News on a daily basis, blogs, and especially chat rooms are very popular, and most of the content is nationalistic, of course,” Hassanpour said. “Kurds from Iraq and Iran are communicating with each other in chat rooms — even people from small towns in Iran. I myself am very surprised.”

This phenomenon is reasonably well-known to public health professionals and those who have followed the epidemic closely. But with all these black people dying of AIDS in America — and with the world’s attention increasingly focused on the disastrous spread of the epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa — why is the American public at large so unaware of the depth of the problem? Why aren’t movies being made, actors making speeches, singers holding benefit concerts? Jacob Levenson’s new book, “The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America,” takes an important first step, documenting the history of the disease in the black community in a comprehensive and accessible way. Perhaps more important, it also dissects the nature of the silence that has hung over the black AIDS epidemic like a shroud.

This silence — within the media, the government, the medical establishment and the black community itself — has allowed the disease to fester among blacks, even as gay America has, to some extent, managed to contain it.

In trying to understand and expose the causes of this seemingly self-imposed ignorance, Levenson goes far beyond the story of a virus. Ultimately, this is not merely a book about AIDS. The people in this story don’t grapple just with the effects of the disease, the families it destroys, and the death it wreaks, but with all its implications. Over and over again, the book’s characters — scientists, political activists, mothers, fathers, children, victims — ask the question: Why?

Why does Rebecca Jackson, a young girl in rural Alabama, refuse to take her medicine, fail to show up at doctor’s appointments, even as AIDS steadily ravages her body? Why does her boyfriend refuse to be tested, even though they continue to have sex with each other?

Why does Dr. Mindy Fullilove, an AIDS advocate trained at Columbia University, encounter so much resistance from the medical and research establishment, as well as from the black community itself, to funding the only kinds of studies and outreach that can help her and other scientists treat the spread of this disease? Why have the neighborhoods where she and her generation of black Americans grew up deteriorated beyond recognition? Why are so many girls prostituting themselves for drugs — and so many boys who treat them as sexual property? How could things get so bad so quickly, so soon after the 1960s offered so much hope?

The search for answers to these human questions drives “The Secret Epidemic.” Through the stories of these characters — told delicately and yet powerfully, with a mastery of language, imagery and pacing surpassing that of many novels, let alone works of nonfiction — we engage much more profoundly with the issues that shape this epidemic than we ever could with a simple policy book.

The “secret” epidemic of the title is more than a disease — it’s an epidemic of crack cocaine and heroin, urban decay and disintegration, human and sexual depravity and, in the end, total hopelessness. Mostly, it’s an epidemic of failed communication, the failure of all involved parties — politicians, activists, clergy and average citizens, black and white — to articulate these problems in a way that, yes, goes beyond racism, but also goes beyond the stultifying language of political correctness and cultural relativism.

AIDS, Levenson argues, is simply the culmination of all these social diseases, the result of the cultural walls that exist between black and white America, walls that have only grown higher, thicker and stronger since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Levenson himself, as you may have guessed, is not black. While it’s not unheard of for a white author to write a probing analysis of black American sociology — Nicholas Lemann attempted this with “The Promised Land” and mostly succeeded — the taboo against open communication about race is so strong in this country that for Levenson to presume to write such a book seems like an affront to our sensibilities about the meaning of “black” and “white.” How dare he believe that he can understand what black people go through?

By telling the story through the eyes of those enmeshed in the struggle, Levenson avoids the patronizing tone that can invade the writings of an outsider about a sensitive topic. What’s more, by refusing to back down from addressing the most sensitive issues facing black America — AIDS, drug addiction, the hypocrisy of religious leaders, the decay of urban life — Levenson’s book begins to create the very language necessary to effect a meaningful change in how the races understand each other, and themselves. The kind of change that can give birth to the same level of public engagement that helped slow the spread of AIDS in the gay community. The kind of change that can provide the only real solution to the black AIDS epidemic, and to so many of our society’s other ills.

If “The Secret Epidemic” has a flaw, it is perhaps that it doesn’t feature Levenson prominently enough. He addresses his experience in writing the book briefly in the epilogue, but it would have been nice to see his perspective articulated directly elsewhere as well. Not because his personal story even approaches the drama of the lives presented in the book — his role in the black AIDS epidemic is peripheral — but because his position as an outsider straining to gain insight into a community that isn’t his own epitomizes the book’s central conflict.

Levenson spoke to Salon about the challenge of writing this book from an outsider’s vantage point and about the steps that the nation needs to take to address this crisis honestly.

There have been so many movies, programs and articles written about AIDS in America, and we’re starting to hear more about the horrible crisis in Africa. Yet there’s little sense that America is growing more aware of the AIDS epidemic among African-Americans. Why?

This is part of the weakness of the media. There was an explosion of stories about this from 1998 to 1999 or 2000, because the Congressional Black Caucus [made it an issue], with this framework that said, “Well, the epidemic has shifted to blacks from gays” — when it hadn’t really shifted, because it’s been disproportionately black from the beginning. But if you’re a newspaper, how do you capture this today? It’s not breaking news, so it’s not an easy thing to write about in the papers.

Then there’s this other issue. My sense is that a lot of the really great journalism and films made about AIDS and gay America were so riveting, and that, for all the suffering that gay America endured, they really advanced the issue of gay life and gay culture and rights. AIDS blew our assumptions about them out of the water and really brought them into the mainstream.

Part of the reason that happened was because gay men, and certainly gay men living with AIDS, wrote these books and wrote these plays. And in some ways, we expect these communities — in the culturally sensitive world we live in — to tell their stories, and then we can embrace them. The “other” is not supposed to come in and do the piece.

That worked in the gay community, but when you deal with communities that were literally falling apart, and an epidemic that was hitting people who weren’t necessarily educated, and throw on top of that the idea of all the shame and secrecy, we didn’t see the wealth of journalism and memoir and art come out of this epidemic in black America. Once you have that wealth of art, it gives the media traction to engage.

That said, it has been a failure of the media not to take some responsibility. It’s constantly amazing to me while I was writing that there was so much incredible material and no one has written this book. It’s almost absurd. Early on, I was this 25-year-old kid who stumbled into this almost by accident, 18 years into the epidemic, and to have numbers in front of you that say that over 100,000 black people have died of AIDS, it’s phenomenal that this book hasn’t been written six times over.

What kind of response has your book gotten from black readers?

The response I’ve gotten so far has been really great. The black people who’ve read the book have seemed really engaged by it. The people who read it felt very connected to the characters, and that I captured something about the experience, which to me was really gratifying.

The white people– [Laughs.] The response I’ve consistently gotten is, “Wow, I never would’ve thought I would’ve wanted to read this. Who wants to read another AIDS book?” Which is really honest. The truth is, I wouldn’t have wanted to read an AIDS book. I consider myself someone who has a public consciousness and is interested in public health and knew about AIDS, but quite frankly, I felt like I’d heard about AIDS and didn’t want to read another book about suffering and dying. The outcome seemed predictable.

But then reporting the book, I started out asking really basic questions, and I found that AIDS put the 25-year history of race and the lived experience of race into a really dramatic relief. I had this pastiche of fragments and moments and memories that were so powerful. That kind of unvarnished window into their experience was exciting and gripping for me, and I found that the white people who’ve read the book have really been drawn into that.

How did you get interested in the subject in the first place?

I was studying at the Columbia Journalism School and, through that, covering an education story in Harlem. A member of the PTA came up and said, “You want a real story, talk to all the kids whose parents are dying of AIDS.” My response was, “Wow– huh?”

Then I started to report it a little bit, and what I found was that AIDS has been disproportionately black since the moment the epidemic began. That was another “wow” moment. We’re 18 years into the AIDS epidemic, there have been thousands of stories written, plays, books, movies, and I haven’t really heard this. What happened here?

Then as I reported more, I realized that AIDS intersected with crack cocaine, heroin, the black church, the legacy of the civil rights movement, the American South, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the crumbling of Harlem and Oakland [Calif.]. These were things I had always been really confused by, interested in, but always had a hard time wrapping my mind around.

I had been dissatisfied with the culture of racial debate in this country — it felt very stilted and cautious. Too often it was either always peering backwards at the civil rights movement and these heroic figures and how we overcame 200 years of institutionalized racism, or else painting people in terms of their victimhood, or else, more often — with most of us, myself included — there was this sense of caution. As a white person I’m really not supposed to be thinking about or being critical of black people, or really engaging them in any kind of serious debate. And if I do, it’s a fairly dangerous road to traverse.

I’m about as white as they come. I’m glow-in-the-dark. And this question dogged me the whole way through: Why are you doing this? Why have you been interested in this subject? Have you been touched by this? Do you have a black friend?

But working on the book not only empowered me to engage with the black community in a way that felt honest and way freer than I ever felt before, it made me feel more comfortable talking to my white well-meaning, liberal friends about race in this open way, which for so long has felt really stilted and uncomfortable. What I found was that more than black people, white people were nervous about me writing this book. You know, “What are you getting at? What are you trying to say?” My agent said, “White people don’t get book contracts to write about blacks.”

How did you get the subjects of your book to trust you enough to really open up? And how did you find your own attitudes about race changing?

Even now I’m doing these readings and I’m on the radio and I’m talking about subjects like the black church, black sexuality, and the social breakdown of the black community, and I’m thinking, “My God, am I killing my career? Am I going to be crucified?”

I didn’t really know my head from my feet when I got into this topic. It was this huge, complicated thing that I couldn’t get my mind around. But I made two decisions. One was, I’m never going to even try to sound faintly black. I’m not going to try to ingratiate myself that way. But I’m also not going to censor myself. I’m not going to try to over-empathize and say, “I don’t know, I can’t imagine where you’re coming from, please just tell me.” I decided that in my interviews, I was going to ask whatever questions came to mind, no matter how critical or potentially explosive or racially sensitive they were. Bearing in mind that I would communicate them in sensitive, respectful ways.

About a year into my research, I was sitting with Bob Fullilove [one of the book's central characters], and he said, “Jacob, you don’t know this, but you’ve crossed the boundary, you speak the language, you talk like a black person.” And I was like, “Huh?” I sounded about as white as they come.

What we talked about was the fact that so often when black people talk to white people, they experience the white people being so overly cautious and running over what they’re thinking before they say, and self-censoring themselves. He agreed that being on the black end of that was very patronizing and not very trustworthy. When you speak to someone who’s holding back, it’s kind of unnerving — you feel like they’re privately judging you. From my end, as a white person, why would I ever want to be in a relationship with someone I really can’t say anything of substance to? By engaging in that way, what I got was serious engagement back.

Was there a difference in talking to someone like Bob, a professor, versus talking to someone like Sarah [another character], who has little experience dealing with whites?

In a way, not so much. That was something I had to overcome. Obviously me and Bob, you know — we’ve gone to the same schools, and he’s taught at some of my schools, so we’re speaking the same kind of economic and emotional language in some ways. But what I found was, with Sara or Desiree or other people I interviewed, when I assumed a level of emotional complexity with their experience, what I got was extremely sophisticated and powerful emotional material.

At the same time, for instance with Desiree, she’s coming out of this church world, and this life in Oakland that was totally different from mine — the fact that I engaged like that didn’t mean I was always right. In fact, you’re wrong a lot of the time. I don’t want to give the idea that I presumed all this insight and what I got was constant affirmation. But I was willing to be wrong, saying, “I don’t understand. You say the fact you were raped wasn’t a big deal, but explain to me why you didn’t react differently,” instead of just accepting her answers and saying, “Well, of course, she’s just so different than me. I just have to accept it and write it that way.” What I invited were serious answers. And what I got was insight.

How do you think this book would be different written by a black author?

I really would hesitate to presume how it would have been written by someone in the black community. What Mindy [Fullilove] told me from the beginning was, “I am saddled with a segregation consciousness. There are things I can’t see freshly.”

She said to me, “You’re going to be able to see this; you’re not saddled with so much stuff.” And that allowed me to in some ways engage very deeply but also keep some emotional distance. I didn’t carry the burden of the race on my shoulders. I’m not saying that every black person necessarily would have, and I definitely wouldn’t say that my perspective is better — it’s just different.

Yet any time an outsider writes about another community, you risk being patronizing. Did you encounter that problem?

I certainly think I’m up against that. I think that is going to set off alarms with people; it has all the way through. I think when people see my face and my name, some people are simply not going to read the book because of that. A friend of mine, when the book was being shopped, just by coincidence was living with an editor. She saw the book proposal on the table, and this editor was black, and she said, “This white boy is not going to be writing this book for me.”

You are going to get that. But what I’ve heard from black people — and this isn’t a scientific sample — is that there’s nothing patronizing in this book, nothing stereotypical. For me, I would’ve been bored out of my mind writing a book that was patronizing — which for me means reducing people to either to victimhood or elevating them to heroism, or simply reducing their story to one of AIDS and disease and suffering without painting them in some kind of complexity and really investigating them. To me, that investigation means respect.

One of the things I feel strongly about is that we need in this country to start engaging in serious and substantive ways with each other — blacks and whites and members of all groups. When we disengage, that’s when a huge segment of American society suddenly becomes invisible. Things like AIDS come out of that, things like crack cocaine and violence come out of that.

The chronology of the book ends in 2002. Since then, has the state of the epidemic improved?

It doesn’t seem to be so. The CDC has been estimating pretty consistently for the last few years that 40,000 people are getting infected annually, and pretty consistently the proportion that’s black has been increasing. I certainly think there have been major inroads made with heroin and needle-exchange programs in various communities. The amount of money, generally, that the Congressional Black Caucus has won for communities of color and AIDS has grown. And there are people on the ground who are doing incredible work and doing work to mobilize black America.

But what I’m more struck by is that after that initial burst of interest, the issue then faded from the public consciousness. It really doesn’t seem to be considered a national problem, but a problem for black America and black Americans to deal with, not something that you or I should be concerned about: We should feel bad, but it’s not our job to engage or think about it seriously.

But AIDS is really just the tip of this far more complex and rich iceberg. In some way AIDS is a dramatic symptom of a whole series of other forces that we’re not dealing with as a society. In that sense, AIDS has tremendous potential to open up discussion and conversation, in ways that will be painful but also exciting and freeing. AIDS doesn’t just intersect these issues, it crystallizes them. To see it just disappear from the consciousness is troubling. It feels not only like a public health tragedy but a missed opportunity.

People try to alert the country by saying the disease is threatening to break out of black America and it’s just a matter of time. But it’s really that the issues that intersect with the epidemic absolutely have broken out of black America. The story becomes about society as whole, a window into all these different problems and conditions that affect us all.

Of course, in a cheap sci-fi book, the main character’s name would have to be something that sounds like a new brand of antidepressant medication — and the story would be trite, gimmicky and shallow. Instead, “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” is a serious work of literature, written with a precision of language and a depth of feeling that doesn’t simply belie the book’s quirky premise, it transforms it, elevates it from what could have been just another clever idea to a profound meditation on life, love and the inevitability of growing old. This is similar, in a sense, to the way Nabokov’s “Lolita” not only captured the sickness and desperation of a grown man’s love for a little girl, but also transcended it, commenting on the perversion, the agony, that lies at the core of love itself.

Born in 1871 in San Francisco, Max is told at an early age by his mother, “Be what they think you are”; this advice and his medical condition doom him to an existence of constantly pretending to be someone, some age, that he’s not. The level of dissonance this causes is at first palpable — imagine having to tell people your mother is your younger sister, when in fact you’re not even a teenager — and then unbearable, when Max falls in love with Alice, a neighbor who is slightly younger than him, even though Max looks old enough to be her father.

The rest of his life — indeed, the book itself, written as a “memoir” when Max is a boy of 59 — is an ode to his love for Alice, the tale of his desperate, deceitful attempts to become a part of her life as he passes from one physical incarnation to the next. Of course, she can never know who he truly is. Imagine a middle-aged man trying to convince the teenage love of his life that he’s her age, that he isn’t just a creep. So Max lies. His challenge, then, and the only goal that gives his life meaning, is to continually mold himself to her life and her surroundings, satisfying her needs, even if his own — complete, honest intimacy with her — can never be satisfied.

“Max Tivoli” is, at its essence, a love story, not fantasy or science fiction. The themes are familiar: a love that can never be fulfilled, a passage of time that can never be stopped. But the originality of the plot makes these careworn motifs fresh and new. Greer’s near-flawless prose has the same effect. His text often reads like poetry; the cadence and imagery create feelings more than simply describe them. When Max, in the form of an older man, is sitting in the backyard next to the girl Alice, who knows nothing of his love, Greer writes: “I saw how the moon had dropped into her cup of coffee. It struggled there like a moth. Then I saw her lean forward, her mouth in a silent kiss, and as she blew on the furrowed surface to cool it, I saw the moon explode.” Even absent their context, the words communicate so much of Max’s passion, his excitement, his anguish.

If the book has one major flaw, it’s that Max’s emotion — constantly mournful, constantly lamenting the past, constantly focused on Alice — can be overpowering. As a faux-memoir, it only makes sense that the narrative tone of “Max Tivoli” remains consistent throughout the book. But at times the consistency borders almost on the static; Max’s love for Alice is so overwhelming, so nostalgic and sentimental, that his feelings for her at times lose their resonance, turning into a little more than a low, dull drone. To put it simply, for all the changing he does physically — growing younger even as he grows older — Max, as an emotional being, does not seem to change much at all.

That may be the whole point of the story, but making a point doesn’t always make for a good read. Even Humbert’s passion for Lolita, as relentless and unflinching as it is, is tempered with enough wry humor and delicious self-deprecation to keep his fanatical love from becoming mind-numbingly monotonous.

If this problem prevents “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” from being perfect, it does not stop it from being an excellent read. Plot twists and the unique premise keep us from getting bogged down in Max’s reticence. Greer teases us with Max’s identity, using the mystery of his past — and his present, as a “child” dutifully scribbling down his life story on notebook paper — to move the narrative along at an enjoyable clip. “Max Tivoli” is entertaining and engaging enough to rival any fun, lighthearted fantasy paperback, while also so poetic, and so powerful, that it should please the most particular literary critic.

Our next pick: An English corporate slimeball, his long-lost Mexican radical brother, and lots of other people collide at the 1999 Seattle street demonstrations

A decade and a half has gone by, and once again Morris is scandalizing Israel — but this time in a totally different way. Now, even as he releases an updated version of his book, he is defending what with brutal honesty he describes as the “ethnic cleansing” that brought the Jewish state into existence. In a recent interview with the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Morris not only justified the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel, but also said that then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion failed in his task by not expelling all Arabs from the nascent Jewish state: “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job.”

Morris went on to say that renewed expulsions of the Palestinians — those in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and even those who are Israeli citizens — could be “entirely reasonable” in circumstances that are “liable to be realized in five or 10 years.” Unwavering Arab hatred of Israel, he argued, meant that the best way to deal with the Palestinians for now is to “build something like a cage” for them (some would argue this is already happening with the ongoing construction of the so-called “separation wall.”) The Arab and Muslim world, in his eyes, consists of barbarians who don’t appreciate the value of human life, barbarians knocking on the gates of the civilized West.

Of course, anyone can make bold and inflammatory statements, and when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, many people do. What makes Morris’ statements seem so outrageous is that they are apparently not the words of a fanatic. They are the words of someone who has thought a great deal about his beliefs, someone who seems to be logical and rational, someone who was not only raised as a liberal, but who also still claims to hold leftist ideals and to vote for progressive Israeli politicians.

Morris does not retract anything he wrote in the original 1988 book. Indeed, the updated edition, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” (just published by Cambridge University Press) proves the Israelis to be even more culpable. Drawing on 300 pages of new material from recently declassified documents, Morris has found evidence of no less than 24 Israeli massacres of Palestinians, with the numbers of victims ranging from four or five to 70 to 100. The infamous massacre at Deir Yassein, Morris reports, was just one of many. He also reports a dozen cases of rape.

More crucially, Morris concludes that these atrocities did not occur in a vacuum: they were the result of a clearly understood policy, coming from Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, to expel or “transfer” Palestinians out of their ancestral land, land that was to become Israel. Explicit military orders were given in some cases to expel the populations of Palestinian villages. It’s true that Morris also finds documentation in Israeli archives of Arab orders to evacuate women and children, and at times men, from some villages, offering some support for the long-held Israeli position that the Palestinians simply left because Arab leaders told them to before the fighting began, promising that they would soon return after a great Arab victory. But if the book places some blame for the flight of the refugees on the Arab leadership, that blame is far outweighed by that born by the Israelis.

But despite these harrowing findings, Moris says he remains an unapologetic Zionist — indeed, he says he was always one, even in his first book, popular belief to the contrary. He never questioned the legitimacy of the founding of the state, blood-drenched and founded on ethnic cleansing though he acknowledged it was. Morris can be harshly critical of Israel, particularly its role as occupying power. In “Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-2001,” one of the best histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he wrote, “Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an ‘enlightened’ or ‘benign’ occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen. The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation.” Yet even as Morris challenges the Israeli establishment, he never questions its right to exist.

Do Morris’ extreme views reflect mainstream Israeli beliefs? Yes and no. Like many other Israeli liberals, Morris’ optimism about peace, and whether the Palestinians really wanted it, was shaken by the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000 — after the Oslo peace accords and the Camp David talks had convinced many that a resolution was at hand. With the collapse of the Camp David talks amid mutual acrimony and the escalation of violence, in particular the rise of suicide bombings within Israel, many Israeli peaceniks became disillusioned, feeling that they had found no true “partner for peace” in the Palestinians. Many Palestinians, on the other hand, argue that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, but that the terms offered by Israeli negotiators — and the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land that continued unabated throughout the Oslo period — showed that Israelis were the ones who weren’t ready for a just peace.

“You go to have coffee with your equally liberal friends, you talk peace and human rights and Palestinian independence, and if you are lucky the place blows up only after you leave,” says Tom Segev, an Israeli author who like Morris was dubbed a “new historian” for writing books that challenged the traditional Israeli version of history. “So you are frustrated and angry and, worst of all, you feel stupid. This is what terrorism does to free people and to free countries as well.”

Morris’ hawkish views started to come to light after the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out in 2000. In columns in the British paper the Guardian, Morris lambasted the Palestinian leaders, particularly Yasser Arafat, for their failure to sign a final-status agreement with Israel, and blaming the increasingly violent intifada (and Israel’s increasingly violent reprisals) on the Palestinian desire to destroy the Jewish state. Then came an interview between Morris and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak — whose offer Arafat rejected — in which Barak stated that culturally, Arabs just didn’t understand the principle of honesty. Conservative Jewish publications like Commentary began running stories about Morris’ apparent conversion to their side.

“Benny has always attracted controversy,” says Ian Black, the Guardian’s former Middle East correspondent, who also coauthored a book with Morris about the history of Israeli intelligence agencies. “He’s a controversialist and to some extent relishes it.”

Morris’s conversion may be more dramatic, and more agonizingly paradoxical because of his willingness to admit the bloodshed at the heart of the Zionist project, but it is representative of the change many Israelis have gone through in the last three years.

“Although his case is high-profile and very visible, the phenomenon is a broader one,” Black says. “It’s clear that Benny’s own revision of his views, a much more conservative twist in his own intellectual odyssey, is born of the disappointment, the disillusionment that there isn’t a viable partner on the Palestinian side. He’s fairly representative of a wider trend.”

Until the Haaretz interview two weeks ago, anyway. Although Morris had in other publications mentioned the idea of transfer (the euphemism generally used to mean the deportation of the Palestinian population out of the occupied territories), broaching such a taboo subject in one of Israel’s most popular newspapers set off a new wave of controversy. This time, it seemed, his comments went beyond the pale. Soon afterward, Haaretz printed dozens of letters from Jews and Arabs alike, almost universally condemning his comments.

When I tell Black, who hadn’t read the interview, about Morris’ comments, he exclaims, “I didn’t realize he had gone that far.” After reading the interview, Black e-mailed me this about his old friend: “I disagree strongly with the views expressed.”

“Basically I think Benny Morris flipped out as result of three years of terrorism,” says Segev. He added sympathetically, “Happens to many of us.”

Avi Shlaim, another of Israel’s “new historians” — and a post-Zionist who has publicly disagreed with Morris on several occasions — puts it in starker terms: “He is typical of the left in concluding that there is no Palestinian peace partner — but not in his call for transfer and racist views.”

When I speak by telephone to Morris himself, he doesn’t take back any of his earlier statements, although the language he uses is not as provocative as in the Haaretz interview. No talk of putting the Palestinians into “a cage,” for instance. He speaks briskly, but his tone generally remains even, his English accent (his parents emigrated from Britain) crisp and genteel.

But the contradictions in such an inherently contradictory man are immediately evident. In one sentence he calls for Israel’s unilateral dismantling of all the settlements, and an Israeli military withdrawal to the 1967 “Green Line.” In another, he suggests that Palestinians in 1948 should have left their homes voluntarily and moved to Jordan to found a state there. One is struck by his many broad generalizations about Arabs and Muslims, citing readings and surveys without ever mentioning in-depth conversations with real people, human beings, friends. Whether this is the result of shell shock or some other factor, Morris’ ideal world is clearly one of total separation from Arabs, and he insists that they have always wanted the exact same thing.

Most notable are Morris’ own feelings about how his views mesh with those of mainstream Israeli society, and the proof he offers that he should not be marginalized: “Most people who’ve called me and written me on e-mail have been favorable to extremely favorable, including left-wingers. They’ve gone out of their way to say, ‘You’ve said things we would never say, but we actually agree with most of everything.’”

After your first book was written in 1988, there was quite an uproar, especially among the Israeli establishment.

They didn’t like what I wrote. They thought it was anti-Zionist. They prevented me from getting a job in a university for many years. They were very angry, partly because if what I wrote was true, what they’d been writing over the years was untrue. But eventually the Israeli establishment accepted me in some way. I have a job in a university; my books are taught in all the universities and accepted more or less as dogma.

Over this period of 20 years, this period I’ve been injected into the Israeli establishment, the establishment has generally been drifting leftwards — it’s becoming more postmodern, post-Zionist. So I still am not accepted by a large number of scholars in the establishment today as well. Especially in my university, Ben-Gurion, there’s a whole host of postmodern scholars who dislike my writings, who have always disliked my writings, even before the year 2000. Even before my supposed switch. Even though I was writing about the nasty things that Jews had done to Arabs, they said that I wasn’t writing it in a condemnatory enough tone.

Does the conservative establishment treat you differently now?

Yes. They have at last come to realize that I am the Zionist I always said I was. That I believe in the existence of the Jewish state and its perpetuation.

How did that ostracism affect you over the years?

Oh, it’s made me a very bitter person. [Laughs.] I’m joking. In terms of my writings and in terms of my personality, I don’t think it’s had any great effect on me, no.

Did your approach to writing this newer version of the book change with your change in political views?

I’m not sure that my political views have changed. I think I’m still on the left in that I don’t want a “Greater Israel” — I want two states. I think the right solution here is two states for two people, along more or less the 1967 borders: We shouldn’t have the settlements there, we should uproot them; we shouldn’t have the army there; we should not be in occupation. They should have their capital in East Jerusalem; the city should be divided, and so on.

The problem is not in my beliefs, but that [the Palestinians] do not want that — that is the problem. They do want the West Bank, but only as a stage in their liberation of all Palestine. That’s the problem.

But I don’t think it has affected my historical writing. You’ll find some differences in the conclusion, which I think tries to put what happened in ’48 into a wider context of the whole conflict, which I didn’t really do in the original edition. But I don’t really think that you’ll find much changed in the substance of the book — except, as I say, more [Israeli] expulsions, more atrocities, and also more Arab orders for people to leave.

I agree that even in reading your first book you always presented yourself as a Zionist. But your recent statements have shocked many people on the left in Israel.

[Laughs.] Well, I probably like to be provocative; I suppose that’s why I started writing about such a subject to begin with. But as you say, I was always a Zionist. I think I say things a little more bluntly and certainly in a less politically correct manner than is acceptable in Israeli middle-class Ashkenazi academic circles. One doesn’t talk about the potential disloyalty of Israel’s Arabs. One doesn’t say that perhaps it would have been better had all of them crossed the Jordan, and then we could have had two states, and then perhaps there would have been more peace instead of less peace, and less suffering rather than more suffering in ’48. A lot of people on the left believe these things but don’t say them — you’re not supposed to say them. That’s what’s so shocking — not my opinions, but actually saying these things, which a lot of people do think.

What kinds of responses have you received, from friends, from family?

This intifada has opened people’s eyes to the depths of Arab hatred for Israel, and probably the inevitability of their desire for Israel’s ultimate destruction and replacement by a Muslim Arab state. I think people understand they were offered a two-state solution, a historic compromise. They rejected it. They went to the sword, which also includes awful terrorist elements, which really represents what they want.

A minority [of Israelis] disagrees [with me], and a small minority is extremely angry, especially Israeli Arabs, who think that the things I said might be considered racist. But I think the majority is with me.

Some have said that that kind of talk, whether it’s what people are thinking or not, will ultimately just provoke Arabs. It can be used as proof that Israel is a country that doesn’t really want to accept Arabs.

You may be right. People also spoke the same way about my book about the refugees. They said, “Well, it may be true that what happened, happened — there were massacres and expulsions — but you really shouldn’t say it, because it’s going to provoke Arabs and be uncomfortable for us in diplomatic forums and so on.” There are always arguments against people telling the truth, or saying things the way they actually see them. The same applies to this. I think it’s better that people face what I consider to be realities.

And the reality of Arab hatred and intransigence, and the ultimate desire to destroy us, is something Israelis must understand. It may change in a generation, but it’s not going to change tomorrow, and this is the way the Arabs think today under Arafat. I think Israelis must know this, must get used to this. And this may mean, down the road, new difficulties, new wars, and even perhaps an expulsion. People should face reality, or what I think is reality — and this is a problem for a lot of people.

But doesn’t it seem that there have been changes in the overall Arab mentality since 1948? For example, the recent Geneva accords, or the proposal initiated by the Saudis and approved by the Arab League. It seems they have left some real room for negotiation, even on the Palestinians’ ‘right of return.’

The Arab League said they would normalize their relations with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution — but they also insist on implementation of U.N. Resolution 194, from December 1948, which endorses the right of return of the refugees. This is something that Palestinians and the Arab states refuse to waive. They insist on it continuously. Even in the Geneva accords, which was signed by unofficial peaceniks on both fronts, they don’t waive the right of return. This is the great fear of Israelis, that this is the mechanism by which they want to undermine and dissolve the state of Israel. There are 4 million refugees out there; if they are allowed to return, piecemeal or all together, the state of Israel will no longer be a Jewish state. There will be an Arab majority here. Jews understand that this would be suicide.

You talked about the shift in the Arab attitudes over time, and there is something in that. Ultimately the vision of Ben-Gurion and [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky [a conservative Israeli leader] was that over the generations, faced with Israeli power, the Arabs would eventually succumb, in the sense of accepting the inevitable, accepting Israel’s existence. It’s true that Egypt made peace with Israel, and Jordan made peace with Israel, and Palestinians also entered the Oslo peace process. So in the 1990s, when I wrote “Righteous Victims” [a history of the Arab-Zionist conflict since the 19th century] it seemed to be bringing us towards ultimate Arab acceptance of Israel’s existence, and peace in the area. That’s what it looked like. What has happened since 2000 is that there has been a resurgence of Arab antagonism and unwillingness to make peace with Israel.

Now, it’s possible that Israel has also contributed to the growth [of Palestinian terrorism]. But that doesn’t eliminate the fact that these organizations, which want Israel’s demise — as bloody as possible, in fact — do have a commanding presence among the Palestinian public. There was progress in the late 1970s and the ’90s, but there has also been regression.

Why does that mean that there’s no hope for an ultimate resolution?

In this generation, I think that the Palestinians are not willing, deep in their hearts, to make peace with the Jewish state. They simply can’t accept that this is a just solution to what happened. They believe that the Jews are a robber state and have taken their land, with the support of America and Western Europe.

I’m willing to give it a try, leaving the territories, but I don’t really think it’ll work. I think we should give it a try for various moral and political reasons, but I don’t think it’s going to work, because I don’t think the Arabs are ready for such a division of the land and such a peace settlement. They’ll say, “Fine, we’ve got this part, let’s now get Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and so on.” Will they actually clamp down on their extremists and terrorists? They won’t. They haven’t done it until now. They won’t do it in the future.

The way you talk about the failure of Oslo suggests that it was doomed from the start, that the Palestinians just weren’t willing now to accept peace. Does Israel also share the blame for ensuring that Oslo failed — for example, because of the steady increase in Jewish settlements in the territories?

I don’t know if Israel did more than the Palestinians, or less. I think there probably were some Palestinians who were sincere during the 1990s, that they were willing to agree to a two-state solution, towards which Oslo was supposed to lead. I don’t think this is the case in the leadership, which means basically Arafat. Let’s be quite frank — Arafat kills or jails or distances anybody who objects to his policies on major issues. Arafat, the fount of power there, he was playing us along. I am certain of this. And I think what he set out to do in Oslo was to gain a state without actually accepting Israel alongside it. Not to give the imprimatur to that settlement. And that’s what happened when Barak said to him in 2000, “OK, this is the moment of decision, now you have to affix your signature to this and comply with the two-state solution.” Arafat basically said no. He rejected it.

Yet you’re arguing that the whole idea of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank was merely a steppingstone to conquering the whole territory of Israel. So why didn’t he sign?

That poses a dilemma. Because if this is true, why didn’t Arafat in 2000 take what was being offered by Barak and Clinton — take the West Bank and Gaza state? And then, once he had it, establish power in whatever way he could, and from there use it as a base against Israel for the next stage? One could ask that. It’s a legitimate question.

But the most important thing is that he would have had to put his signature, internationally, in front of everybody, to an agreement of this sort, accepting Israel’s existence. And no further claims. That was part of Barak’s demands. They could not claim anything — not refugees, nothing — after they signed the agreement. That was to be the end of the conflict. I think simply, constitutionally, he could not put his name to it, even though tactically he probably should have.

As you’ve mentioned, the Palestinian refugee issue is one of the most intractable problems facing negotiators. In your Haaretz interview, you said that perhaps Ben-Gurion had made a mistake by not expelling all Palestinians beyond the river Jordan. I have a hard time understanding how creating even more refugees would actually have helped Israel.

[Laughs.] Well, this is speculation. There’s no way of knowing how the future looks. What I’m saying is, if all the Palestinians had been pushed across the Jordan, or left voluntarily, and established a state in Jordan — a state of their own in territory which used to be the kingdom of Jordan, they would have had a state of their own. They would have had independence. They would have had a uniform population, more or less, a Palestinian Arab population. They wouldn’t have had to live under Jewish domination in any way. They would have felt better!

Now, you’re saying they might have continued the war afterwards, and maybe they would have. I’m not saying that there wouldn’t be a Hamas and an Islamic Jihad, to continue from the other side of the Jordan. But it’s still an easier and morally clearer war, for both sides, if the population were separated this way — on the one side there were Jews, and on the one side there were Arabs. What the war left behind is a large Arab minority [in Israel], which is potentially a fifth column, a large Arab population in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which we ended up taking over in 1967, which we can’t take over and we can’t throw up.

That would have required an enormous number of people to give up their rights to the land where they had been living for generations, to people who were coming in as outsiders–

They said that anyhow. I don’t know what would have happened. This is just speculation. I may be wrong, but as a historian, it looks to me as if Israel would have been a better place and the Palestinians would have lived better on the other side in their own state. The future would have looked better for everybody.

You speak of looking at things as a historian. But I was struck by your tendency in the Haaretz interview to make broad and sweeping generalizations. For example, you compared the Arab and Muslim world to the barbarians knocking at the gates of Rome, or the West. Why did you move from looking at things in a more complex way, case by case, to these broad declarations?

I think historians work on both levels. I think I’ve looked at things on a detailed, case-by-case, local level, with my work on the refugees, for example. But historians are also called upon occasionally to stop looking at the details on the map and start looking at the whole map. My take is that the world is entering a period that will be characterized by nonconventional warfare between the West, the Christian-Jewish West, and the Islamic world. I think there will be a lot of casualties in this world war. I think it will be a large-scale war in terms of casualties and in terms of the space that it covers.

I don’t know if it’s all of Islam, or all of the Arab states. In this sense you may be right, the generalization may not be in place. I think there is some sort of subtle struggle in the Muslim and Arab world between moderates and radicals, but I think that basically the radicals are setting the tone. And Islam in a sense is different from Western religions, in that it occupies people’s souls and translates into their politics. In the West, perhaps it was like that in the Middle Ages, and in Judaism, perhaps it was like that 2,000 years ago. But the Jews and Christians have thrown off religion as dictating their lives and their political and social beings. In Islam it’s not that way. It’s a major component of their identity, and their political identity. That’s why I’m not sure if the difference between radical Muslims and moderate Muslims is a realistic one.

It seems like when discussing 1948 and Israel’s creation — the displacement of the Palestinians, the massacres that took place by Israelis — that you’re able to rationalize these acts ultimately as being necessary, or excusable, for the sake of creating the nation. Yet when Arabs or Muslims today commit atrocities for a cause, you write them off as barbarians. Do you see any inconsistency there?

I don’t necessarily think so. Well, of course, if you’re talking about people who are trying to kill me, when someone is bombing you and your family at the present, it’s much more difficult for me to rationalize that than something that happened 50 years ago that was also done on behalf of my side. That’s on one level.

On another level, I believe transfer was necessary for the creation of the state of Israel, but there’s never any excuse for the massacres, the rapes — those were just war crimes. The transfer is what I think there was a necessity for. And, to put it into context, the massacres that were committed were relatively small. Only about 800 people killed — compared to what the Russians did to the Germans at Stalingrad, compared to what took place in Bosnia, that’s not that much.

At one time, you actually refused to serve in the territories. Why?

Because my feeling at the time was that the first intifada, the Arab rebellion in the West Bank, was a non-lethal rebellion. They used rocks and so on, but they didn’t shoot and they didn’t kill Israeli civilians in buses in Tel Aviv. They basically threw stones at soldiers, trying to shake off these soldiers that were occupying them. My sympathies were with the rebels. I thought the Arabs really meant what they said and they were out to liberate the West Bank and Gaza from military occupation. I thought that was just. And therefore, I refused to fight them.

What do you think of today’s refuseniks [Israelis who refuse to serve in the territories for ideological purposes]?

I don’t agree with them. I’m not going to march and shout [at them] and so on, but I think they are mistaken. I think they are projecting backwards to the thinking and motives of the Arabs which existed in 1988, which don’t exist today. I think the Arabs are after our state, and they are after our blood. I think anyone who doesn’t serve now is doing something wrong.