On solace – Avshalom Halutz in Haaretz:

‘Twenty-five years ago, Palestinian educator, political activist and mayor Nimer Murkus finally retired after decades in the public sphere. After many days reminiscing about the time that passed too fast and his life's work as a Palestinian leader and avid communist, he decided to put his memories into words.
His earliest memory was from age of 3 or 4, listening to his older sister sing about two Palestinian men who were executed by the British at Acre Prison. That was in Kafr Yasif, the ancient village in the Upper Galilee where Murkus was born in 1930; he would one day become mayor. It's also the place where he would die 83 years later.’

(…)

‘This week, the publication of the book in Hebrew (Haifa's Pardes Publishing) was celebrated with a special event at Hagada Hasmalit (The Left Bank), a social gathering space in Tel Aviv. On hand were family members, academics, representatives of the left-wing Hadash party and officials from the local branch of Germany's Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which partly financed the Hebrew edition.’

(…)

‘Reading the book in Hebrew during this dark period is a rare source of solace and hope. "When we read the book for the first time we discovered many things we didn't know about our father," Nasrin Murkus, the author's second daughter, told Haaretz.’

(…)

‘Nasrin Murkus also provides an incredible biographical detail: "My father writes about some of his students when he was a schoolteacher – Palestinian boys who were sent away with their families during the Nakba to Lebanon and returned to their villages secretly. One of them was the great poet Mahmoud Darwish.
"In the museum dedicated to him in Ramallah you can see a fourth-grade report card signed by my father, where he predicts a bright future for Darwish. When Darwish arrived for a short visit after the Oslo Accords, he came to our village to surprise my dad, whom he called 'my first-ever teacher.'"’

Read the article here.

The German-Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm emphasized a couple of days ago in Leipzig the importance of friendship, truth is not the enemy of friendship, Boehm stated, on the contrary.

I’m skeptical about friendship, but there are days that you have to overcome your own skepticism.