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When I was asked to write a review of Terrorism and War, I agreed at once. Later I began to wonder how I could have agreed to take on such a staggering task without a second thought, without first reading the book.
After I read and was greatly impressed by the book, I couldn't get myself to sit down and write a review although the book was so informative, so intriguing, so well written, and also to a great extent cast light on human phenomena that are very difficult to explain and understand. I learned a great deal from the book and, as I read it, I felt that my thoughts about a subject I had never been able to understand, and had always thought no mortal could understand, were becoming more and more well ordered. Nonetheless, I found that writing about this important, special book had become unbearably, almost impossibly difficult for me. I felt bad about it, since I had promised to write the review and even to meet a deadline. I didn't meet it. I felt as if I were being terrorized from the inside, from a commitment I had undertaken and couldn't fulfill.
But how could this be? After all, I'm a person, a woman, who has lived her whole life in wars and, in recent years, even more difficult, under terrorism, terrorism that dictates our way of life from morning to morning, without, perhaps, anyone of us being able to say to himself, that's how it is, our lives are dictated and controlled for many, many years by terror and war. And when I refer to ‘our lives’, I mean the inner as well as the outer. Inner life - yes, anxieties, imagination, thoughts, the inner space, breathing space, the ability to hope, to believe, to plan and to find myself saying each time that planning is a sign and promise of long life. And when I say long life, I don't mean only for myself and those close to me, but for all of us, for our country, our neighbours, for the whole world. (And always, just to be on the safe side, I mutter ‘this crazy world’.) How can anyone live with the whole world (‘thi