‘It’s a necessity that the Middle East fears us’

Micah Goodman is done being nice and even-handed. He became a best-selling philosopher by telling Israelis that the Palestinians needed more freedom. He said if the West Bank had better roads and an airport and more land and fewer checkpoints, relations between Israelis and Palestinians would improve. There was a way through the stalemate, if only people worked together. But now he wants war.

‘It’s a necessity that the Middle East fears us’, Goodman says, calling from Jerusalem. ‘That Hezbollah gets a panic attack when it pronounces the word Israel. That in Iran they have a panic attack from the thought of a military interaction with Israel.’ I met Goodman once before in Jerusalem in 2021. When he talks, his hands and fingers conduct, curl, jab and wave about, but his eyes rest on you. Goodman sometimes sounds like a preacher.

In 2017, the old Micah Goodman published Catch-67, about a kinder way of dealing with the Palestinians.