“For the friendship of an Arab, I would give ten American friends.”

This is a book I return to when I want to immerse myself in the mind and culture of its protagonist, an Israeli secret agent, and in the visceral intertwining of feelings that agitate him, even towards Arabs. I find passages like this:

“I am not justifying myself. Arabs feel mortal hatred for us, and I do exactly what needs to be done. But this does not change the fact that for the friendship of an Arab, I would give ten American, English, or French friends. With a European, I can drink whiskey, do business, and come to the conclusion that Israel is, in reality, an appendage of Europe in the East. But with an Arab, I can go back to rolling among the clods of earth in the field, breathe the smell of the oven fueled with goat droppings, gather and chew savory, run towards the horizon and find my childhood there, and perhaps I can even find a meaning to my life – which is now without meaning – there where the hill of my childhood days is also located”
(“The Minotaur” by Benjamin Tammuz, 1980)