About Rabin and Oslo. That's mostly a myth. Oslo was designed to put the occupation in the hands of a pliant Palestinian entity (Arafat's PLO) while th Israel's continued to divest Palestinians from their land and resources. The plan under Rabin was to cantonize the West Bank into manageable sections. Palestinians only had full autonomy in metropolitan areas--the areas that Israel wanted--those adjacent to settlements in rural areas remained under Israeli military control. Land continued to be confiscated, the settlements began to grow at double the rate of previous administrations. Though Likud leader Netanyahu was not on board for Oslo, and refused to honor many of the steps agreed to in the agreement, he did not deviate from the basic structure, or the rampant settlement expansion. By the time Ehud Barak stepped in to end teh Oslo process, with what he admits was a conscious provocation intended to provoke an uprising, the settlement population had doubled.

I was in Palestine at the end of Oslo and saw a lot of this for myself--at a time when Israelis and Palestinians were said to be nearer to a political solution than ever, most Palestinians couldn't count on getting to work because of Israeli controlled checkpoints. That is if they were lucky enough to have a job that did not involve building settlements.

Irene, I thought your conditions seemed uncommonly balanced on both sides. However, I wonder why there is such a big deal about Palestinians not recognizing Israel's right to exist. Aside from the politically loaded idea of whether Israel had a right to exist--that is, if Britain had a right to help Zionists install a republic within Palestine during its mandate--why does it matter if Palestinians accept the existance of Israel? What possible difference could it make? It would not mean that Palestinians renounced their own state's right to exist, would it? And I noticed that allowing Palestinians to create their own state was not included in your Israeli side of the list.

To begin with, of course, the word is meaningless and badly defined. But besides that, I just can't get over this remark, and the descriptions that follow it:

"Brown unforgivingly draws out the ways in which the fortunes of the women at its heart have been shaped by their inability to confidently articulate or carry out their own desires without falling victim to the whims of men."

But there are no examples of women "falling victims to the whims of men." They are, in fact, falling victim to their own whims. Such as:

"she simply allowed herself to get pregnant"

"she thinks, "she should be repulsed by this man, with his foul mouth and crude ambition and overflowing testosterone, but instead she found herself drawn to him ... She could picture it clearly: a throbbing engine between her legs, sitting behind this cocky man with her arms wrapped around him, holding on for dear life...she moves to Los Angeles with Bart."

"She bounced from one boy to the next and back, hooking up with each guy for a week or two, maybe a weekend, maybe just a night, before the next would swoop in."

These are all women consciously making choices, they are not falling prey to siren songs, but to their own (admittedly screwed up) judgement. Many men (many, many, many)who do treat women with respect and sincerity often wonder why women choose to be with men who treat them badly. The reviewers own inability to see the choices being made in the literary world, may shed some light on female culture's inherent self-destructiveness; they are not aware that they are making the choice to begin with.

I don't think any of the "anti-feminist", so called, comments were critiquing the book--who knows if it really is feminist (whatever that means)? I think the critique lay squarely against the review author's scrambled idea of what feminism is--seemingly a perspective that portrays women as victims of male oppression no matter what they choose to do. This is the biggest reason why feminism has been moribund since the seventies. After a short and engergetic debut, feminism, like many identity politics quickly settled into blaming and victimhood, rather than using the new political space to expand rights and social space and being pro-active in solving problems. I don't think anyone needs to be convinced that black men and women, and white women, and working class men, and gay men, and gay women, and Asians, and half-breeds, etc., all got the shaft in their own disparate way. The problem, it seems to me, has been that all of these movements were hijacked by priveledged members of these groups who had fewer needs and benefited more from the limited gains. After many of their needs were met, the ideology became an enabler for them. What would have happened if feminism and race and sexuality politics had gone after the economic and poltical structure at the heart of problems of prejudice--classicism, capitalism, patriachy (which hurts men, too)? We may never know.