Before I slope off to drink the best iced coffee in the world–take a long, tall, heatproof glass, pour in a bit of condensed milk and a ton of crushed ice,
add strong, freshly brewed black coffee, stir, enjoy–here’s a link to
this profile of A B Yehoshua in The Independent, (via Moorish Girl):
Yehoshua’s most recent novel, not yet published in English, is The Mission of the Human-Resource Man. It’s set in the dark context of the Israel- Palestinian conflict and centres on the death of a foreign woman worker in a suicide bombing. He wanted to confront a specific problem, familiar to anyone who has watched the amazingly rapid clean-up operation after a suicide attack. That is the tendency to find it difficult, almost to the point of “suppression”, to commemorate the civilians killed in such attacks.
“We have a tradition of honouring the soldiers who are victims,” he says. “But the people killed in the first [suicide] attacks sitting in a café or in a bus or going to the supermarket – they were not heroes.” Israelis as well as Palestinians became “almost indifferent. The slogan was to return to normality, and it is even death without a possibility of revenge because the terrorist was killed with his victim.”
nilanjana s roy 
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