Can Netanyahu Make Peace With the Palestinians?

Just two months into his term, Netanyahu was under heavy pressure from President Obama to endorse the idea of a Palestinian state. The speech he was preparing to give at Bar-Ilan University would be a major policy address. For the better part of the afternoon, Megged and a second novelist he'd brought with him, David Grossman, suggested passages they'd written in advance, soaring prose about reaching out to the Arab world and ending the long conflict with the Palestinians. "I thought he should open with something dramatic, a big gesture," the 62-year-old Megged told me over coffee in Jerusalem one morning recently.

Megged has a complicated relationship with Netanyahu. They became friends a decade ago, after Netanyahu read one of his books and sent him a flattering note. Since then, Megged and his wife have regularly spent time with the Netanyahus. But the association appears to have hurt the novelist's career. Megged says many of his fellow writers, who tend toward the left politically, have shunned him. The left-leaning Haaretz newspaper stopped reviewing his books.

When Megged watched the speech on television the next day, he was dumbfounded. Netanyahu had failed to in-corporate a single phrase the writers had suggested (in a phone conversation, Grossman confirmed Megged's account). Though Netanyahu did give the idea of a Palestinian state a conditional nod, the tepid endorsement lacked the generosity of spirit the two novelists had hoped to inject in the text. Megged took it not only as a political affront but also a personal one. "I told my wife many times since then that he [Netanyahu] appreciated the courage it took on my part to go against the tide, but he himself is not that way."

Source: Newsweek |  Dan Ephron