First Sentence

"In the summer of 1994, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published a lengthy polemic by Aharon Meged entitled "The Israeli Urge to Suicide," in which the well-known novelist-a thoroughly acceptable and otherwise noncontroversial member of the small clique that constitutes Israel's cultural establishment-accused the nation's intellectual leadership, almost to a man, of conspiring to destroy the moral and historical basis for the Jewish state's existence, and with it the Jewish state itself."