With pomp and circumstance the Jerusalem International Book Fair opens this Sunday. A closer look at the festival's programme shows the limits of what this book fair considers to be "international". Norway and Russia, Holland and Lithuania, Austria and France, Poland and Italy. Even Germany is all right nowadays. The European Book Fair it should have been called. The White Book Fair. Because, between you and me, the Arabs, the Blacks, the Chinese don't really know how to write. Theirs is not really a Culture. They didn't exactly produce an Anna Karenina, a Ulysses or a Faust.

Two articles in the recent issue of the US periodical, Dissent, set out to ridicule the utter folly and opportunism of the left in relating to its traditional enemy, Islamic fundamentalism. Since both articles are characteristic of complaints against the left by people who consider themselves parts of it, they deserve special attention. In the first article, "Jihadism of Fools", Fred Halliday documents the ugly and brutal role of various Islamist forces over the last 60 years in the vicious suppression of the left, including cases of mass murder against Communists and their allies. This record is adduced in order to warn against "those who seek to form any alliance however 'tactical', with Islamist movements and states." After reminding his readers of the enormous differences between the Islamist program and that of the left, he concludes that the left is simply deluding itself on this important question.

A person that dies, dies only once. But they make us die every month: live again, and die again over and over. Again, it happened to Aqil Talalqa today, when the Israeli government demolished his entire village for the third time in three months.

A report recently released by the Adva Center exposes flagrant discrimination in programs sponsored by the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor for new career training and internal training at factories. Adva researchers found that only one Arab woman out of 235 unemployed workers took part in internal training programs at factories in 2004.