But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question—the “elephant in the room,” according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary after Hamas’s 7 October assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions.
Friedländer weaves together profound reflections on a national history in which he has been an active participant. He describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, “There is no Palestinian people.” For Friedländer, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He argues that despite the continuing bloodshed, a two-state solution remains the only long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.