On Radio 4's Start the Week this morning, Andrew Marr talked to Linda Grant about her new book on Israel, The People on the Street. You can listen again here - from 14 minutes in:
AM: What is the thing that you would most want to tell [people] about what Israel and Israelis are really like that they don't understand?LG: I think what I would tell them is that people in that country have an awful lot of family and historic baggage and it is those family and historic experiences which form the way they view the world; they don't form the way they view the world from reading the newspaper...
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LG: I think there's been a huge shift in Israeli society... in terms of the general public. The novelist David Grossman said to me, 'What we said in Peace Now 20 years ago, the Israeli public says today and Ariel Sharon will say in a year's time.'