Columnists

"(How do you advise women who want to be part of the system making changes in present-day Israel? What can you say to women who want to enter politics?) YD: They have to work within the party system — every party — and on the national level with other parties. It cannot be only an effort within the party. The power of women has to be expressed by sheer numbers. It must be mobilization — whether it’s academic or grassroots."

"We have not yet produced a universal literature in Israel, which doesn't detract from its quality...We are still in a localized phase, reflecting what is happening to us now, a mirror of reality."

"As I have become involved with the rights of all groups living in Israel, I’ve become more involved with women’s rights, too. Still, I think that women who are involved only in women’s rights are missing the point."

"We started as a society of immigrants; the Palestinians started as people on their land. They’ve expected their state to be delivered to them by outside forces; we had to do it ourselves, and so on down the line. There is no comparison, neither in the time element nor in the content. The point is that they are not going to wait for 2,000 years to have a homeland. Where they are now is where we were before, and the way we demanded and got our rights, they deserve just as much."

"Cases of corruption come and go; the public anger they generate is inevitably diluted by the slow pace at which the legal system delivers justice. All the while, the country stays wrapped in a near-permanent bulletproof vest, preparing for the next war even as we recover from the last one."

"we have a macho, male society which is not only engaged militarily but is dominated by male tradition religiously and sociologically...Women need to be represented in politics, in lobbying, need to try to achieve legislation. We need to get more women into politics and into the Knesset."

"I finished working, satisfied with my new role as a victim, feeling slightly sorry for myself, somehow heroic. I wasn't just anybody, I was a betrayed woman. (chapter 4)"

"Though the predominant ethos of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel has been enlightened — in both the liberal and socialist senses — large sections of the Israeli society, whether Jewish or Arab, are still strongly patriarchal in their social structure and traditional in their attitudes, with strong religious influences."

"For years, we have believed Israel to be a country whose vast military power is tempered by moral strength, supported by social solidarity and guided by well-balanced leadership. The recent war with Hezbollah shattered, at great cost, what was left of this belief. However, to my perhaps overly optimistic eyes, the war may have finally taught us — for the better — the limits of power. Just as a president and a Cabinet minister cannot resort to coercive persuasion when the charms they allegedly exercise fail to convince, so too the government and the military cannot continuously insist that where power has already failed more power will win."

"Yael Dayan was an activist who rejected her father’s fate and life’s choice and sought peace. She spent her life making the country a better place for women, queer folks, refugees, Palestinians, everyone. Yael Dayan’s life describes a country growing more alive, with the passing of decades and generations, to human rights."

"A new woman’s voice in the darkness belongs to Yael Dayan who seems recently to have undergone a feminist metamorphosis."

"All the intimacy in the world can't remove a slight sense of guilt when watching someone who isn't aware of being watched. (chapter 14)"

"I sat and looked at the familiar living room. A low coffee table, four armchairs and a sofa, embroidered cushions and a whitewashed wall with two original paintings and a few lithographs. Yet, as my eyes examined the objects, I felt strangely out of place. As if the past few weeks had been spent in limbo, as if I were waking up from anesthesia, coming back to life from a shelter. I realized the paradox. I had escaped the war by plunging into the horrors of it. The burnt limbs and faces, the amputees, the invalids, the dead, they became abstract in the nightly duty, and the sound of guns and shells, the diving of aircraft and the roar of tanks advancing-this reality was so far away-sounds overcome and numbed by the silence of hospital corridors. I knew a terrible event had taken place, but I didn't feel it. People died, but I didn't know them. We claimed a victory, but I didn't rejoice in it, and when we were defeated at the beginning, I wasn't frightened. As if I weren't really there. (chapter 8)"

"We have Yael Dayan and Shani Boianjiu to thank for bringing the Israeli woman soldier’s experiences to life for English readers."

"In her 2014 memoir, Dayan wrote that during her lifetime, she witnessed Israel transform from “a beloved, admired, victorious and just homeland, via an unbearable regression, to the dangerous sphere of ethno-theocratic messianic existence, which is so far removed from a peace- and justice-seeking society."

"...for me, doing means contributing, doing for others."

"I thought everything was fine in our country, because I thought everything was fine for me. But on my visits to the United States, I began to understand the oppression of women. And as I became more aware, I realized that feminism is a way of life. Feminism isn’t only about support for women; it’s about support for everyone who is victimized or marginalized. I accepted that way of life."

"(Do you think that, in general, the large portion of the occupied territories will be returned?) YD: Oh sure, excluding the territory around Jerusalem."

"Women lead the peace movement. They’ve definitely got positions of leadership there."

"The country woke up on October 24, 1973, a Wednesday, as if it were a wedding day. Cease-fire was expected at any moment, and the words, "The war is over," though not yet uttered by anybody, were ringing in every heart. (beginning of chapter 7)"

"We have an insane horde in Pakistan. These are strange people, who celebrate their own ruin."

"India's population is over one billion and Pakistan's population is 18 crore. In the event of a nuclear war, even if you inflict four times more casualties on India, there would be more than 20 crore people living in India. But, by then Pakistan will be finished."

"We have a bevy of uneducated people here in Pakistan. They don't know what is [an] atom bomb."

"I wonder whether our frameworks are more the hangups of our pre-liberal parents than we realise. In the patriarchal, restricted and desperately sexist world that came before, one can imagine that a woman without children may have been a object of concerned pity – because the old gendered denial of career paths, educational opportunities and independent incomes meant that beyond partnership and parenthood there weren't so many other fulfilling experiences for women on offer. Our biological destiny isn't to reproduce – remember? It's just to die, and find ways to meaningfully occupy our time before we do."

"You cannot be a Hindu fundamentalist. It does not mean anything .. .The concept of fundamentalism does not exist in Hinduism."

"Each Indian looks for God in his own way and worships one or several of the millions of deities who are the supposed reincarnation or expression of God, a Spirit or a Force. This has never led to a religious war. There have been communal clashes, but India has never had to face religious wars or crusades save those that were thrust on it from outside. The multiple revelation of the East has proved to be in many ways more advantageous than the single revelation of the West."

"The increasingly tired and rhetorical rituals of official commemorations that follow one another from year to year, instead of helping to make remembrance, fuel the molasses effect. Putting everything on the hagiography of the heroic anti-Mafia judge and nothing on those details of his last days of life that, taken one by one, say nothing. But which composed in the chronological mosaic help to understand much, if not everything. Namely, the political-terrorist nature of the Via D'Amelio massacre, with the peculiarities that distinguish it from that of Capaci in spite of the close consecutio temporum, and project it rather on what will happen many months later: the spring-summer 1993 bombs in Milan, Florence and Rome, and then the pax mafiosa that began with the failed (indeed, revoked) bombing of the capital's Olympic stadium, coinciding with the descent into the political arena of Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri, and continuing to the present day."

"The Constitution of the Italian Republic is far more advanced than Italy and us Italians: it is a smoking worn by a pig."

"Migrants are human ammunition used in a war bigger than us and them."

"A courageous dissident beyond xenophobic and fascist ideas, which in Italy would have landed him in jail for incitement to racism under the Mancino law."

"Personally, I am not prejudicially against wars, as long as wars have international legality, as long as they have an objective, this objective is verified, as long as they are the last resort, and above all as long as we do not play with words, that is, we do not fool people."

"In a second incident in Anjar, she played up the news that a Hanuman mandir [temple] had been broken and vandalized. I told her, "What are you up to? You are in Kutch which is a border district. There you are showing the attack and destruction of a mandir. Do you realize the implications of broadcasting such news? We haven’t yet recovered from the earthquake. Have you actually done proper investigation into the riots? Why are you lighting fires for us? Your news takes a few minutes to broadcast that such and such place is unprotected or a mandir has been vandalized. But it takes for me a few hours to move the police from one disturbed location to another since these incidents are breaking out in the most unexpected places.""

"In a changing India, gender finally does not exist only on the margins of public and political attention. It is now center-stage and we are demanding accountability and justice for all."

"If you’d asked me what it is like to be a woman in this profession 20-30 years ago, I would have said that gender doesn’t matter. But today, gender does matter. At every stage, you have to fight at least four or five times harder, and when you get success, there will be people who will try to punish you for your ambition, professionalism and competence."

"It was my endeavour that we restore peace at the earliest possible. If you look at the data you will see that in 72 hours we had put down the riots and brought the situation under control. But these TV channels kept on playing up the same incidents over and over again. At the time, Rajdeep [Sardesai] and Barkha [Dutt] were in the same channel NDTV. During those inflamed days, Barkha acted in the most irresponsible manner. Surat had not witnessed any communal killings, barring a few small incidents of clashes. However the bazaars were closed [as a precautionary measure]. Barkha stood amidst closed shops screaming "This is Surat’s diamond market, but there is not a single police man here.""

"I phoned Barkha and said, "Are you providing the address of this 'unprotected' bazaar to the rioting mobs? Are you inviting them to come and create trouble there by announcing that there is no police here so you can run amok safely?""

"When I was in my 20s, I covered the Kargil war from the frontline. I have grown up as the daughter of India’s first woman war correspondent. Before my mother died when I was 13, she would tell me how the newspaper she was working for did not agree to her going to the war front in 1965. So, she would take a couple of days off and go there with a notepad and a pen, and then start sending stories from there. Many years later, when I said that I wanted to cover the war, the organisation I was working for and the military said, “Absolutely not. We cannot have a woman at the war front"."

"Nine years ago I moved to Mexico City for a while to work at a public relations firm, helping them with their English-speaking clients."

"The disappearance or decrease in prayer formulas of classical terms indicating the supernatural and the meaning of Christian revelation, first of all that of grace, has favored both the secularization of the rite and of Catholic mentality. Hence few today believe that the liturgical texts serve the priest to talk to God; they evoke a script of which the priest is the director or leading actor, the vogue word of "modern" liturgists."

"The dog needs boundaries, I warned, as Odie clambered on to laps and snuggled at various feet, ensconced in the folds of a blanket. Then, like a stealthy invader, he crept up the stairs. And then one day, behold, he was on the big bed where we congregate for family time. I screeched and Odie jumped off. He tried again and I growled. But Odie can read vibes. He knew that the consensus view maintained that shoving an innocent dog off the communal bed was not the done thing."

"The ASRC [Asylum Seeker Resource Centre] needed a volunteer doctor and I said yes, thinking it would be easy work. In quick succession I saw a little boy with a broken arm, a distressed rape victim, a man with uncontrolled hypertension, and a woman with acute asthma, all of whom had been turned away from hospital. The nurse took the little boy to her doctor friend who would plaster his arm at home, and I rummaged through an old carton of supplies to find some antihypertensives and an inhaler. The rape victim fled, confirming that I was not the therapist she needed. I finished my first shift wistful for the controlled environment of my hospital but conflicted that it, and other hospitals, would deny care to sick patients."

""What kind of a doctor will you be?" "An able one, I hope." "I hope that you become a doctor who will engage with the problems of the world." For an 18-year-old medical student, this aspiration was as professorial as it was intangible. Why worry about global health when the muscles of the back and leg needed memorising? And how did reproductive rights matter when the exam involved peering down a microscope to identify bacteria?"

"I once wrote a report on the inequities I had witnessed on an elective rotation in my Indian home town. He spent hours refining it and encouraged me to aim high. Months later, I excitedly told him that my essay had been accepted for publication in the Lancet. "But wait, they want to remove the best bits," he frowned. A mention in the world’s most prestigious journal was enough for me but this prolific author had other ideas. "Tell the editor why your whole essay deserves to be published." I gasped at the prospect of committing premature career suicide, but he encouraged me to avoid the easy way out. "When you own your work, you signal your integrity." He was right. The Lancet eventually printed my essay in full and his pride outshone my relief. His lesson would accompany me throughout life, and we stayed in touch beyond medical school."

"The dog repays our love by being the only one to faithfully meet and greet us when we come home. Instead of mumbling something unintelligible without looking up from the TV remote, Odie skids and skates to the door, paying no heed to the risk of a fractured leg. His tail wags overtime as he makes cute guttural sounds and promptly rolls over for a belly scratch while holding out hope for a snack. It is impossible to resist anyone who takes such unalloyed pleasure at your presence and whose behaviour is not dictated by what happened at the office that day."

"I had returned from my Fulbright year at the University of Chicago, blessed with only the joys and none of the irritations of being pregnant with twins. Landing in Melbourne, I went for a routine ultrasound as a beaming, expectant parent. I came out a grieving patient. The twins were dying in utero, unsuspectedly and unobtrusively, from some rare condition that I had never heard of. Two days later, I was induced into labour to deliver the two little boys whom we would never see grow. Then I went home."

"It can be tricky but I try to put my patients' grief into perspective without being insensitive. It's extraordinary how many of them really appreciate knowing that I, and others, have seen thousands of people who are frightened, sad, philosophical, resigned, angry, brave and puzzled, sometimes all together, just like them. It doesn't diminish their own suffering but helps them peek into the library of human experiences that are catalogued by oncologists. It prompts many patients to say that they are lucky to feel as well as they do despite a life-threatening illness, which is a positive and helpful way of viewing the world. I will never know what kind of a doctor I might have become without the searing experience of being a patient. The twins would have been 10 soon. As I usher the next patient into my room to deliver bad news, I like to think that my loss was not entirely in vain."

"Every idea worth its name will get exploited. I am not saying it is good. But it is not something we need to stress on, as long as it doesn't appropriate the language of our struggle."

"Clearly, there has been no dip in the misdemeanor of men in all these years. There is still no difference between the man on the street and the man in the Supreme Court."

"一句话，技术是中性的，但技术的进步会让自在的世界更自在，集权的世界更加集权。"

"1984的作者预见到了专制的进步，却没有预见到技术的进步。"