Harari & Friends

Yuval Noah Harari gets a dinner invitation from Haaretz columnist Benny Ziffer, and look who's coming to dinner:

"After the election [in March], Sara Netanyahu thanked me profusely for defending her and invited me over for dinner. I thought that it would be better if they came to our house. The truth is that my culinary experience at the Prime Minister's residence was not very exciting... We set up a little buffet in the corner of the living room, and opened the windows and balcony doors wide. The security guards remained outside and even the street wasn't closed off. I also invited [writers] Eyal Megged and Zeruya Shalev who are mutual friends and to embellish the dinner party I invited Nehemia Shtrasler, Prof. Yigal Schwartz and his wife and Yuval Noah Harari and his partner. We had a lovely evening. It was enjoyable and interesting." ('I hate the Left!', Naami Lanski, israelhayom.com, 22/4/16)

It was. Benny's a great raconteur. Sample:

"I feel that the Left is disingenuous with the slogans it disseminates. 'Stop the occupation,' for example. That's not realistic. It's a bunch of bull. This week I went to [the Palestinian village of] Bil'in with my wife after we hadn't been there for a long time. You go past the checkpoint and you see Modin Ilit and Kiryat Sefer, which have expanded to the point of touching the neighboring Palestinian villages, and you see some of the villages, which used to be dirty, God-forsaken hell holes, thriving and flourishing... People go there to have their cars fixed at garages, to get dental work done at dental clinics. They opened a commercial center there. There are Jewish clients. Peaceful coexistence is an inevitable byproduct of all this occupation-shmoccupation stuff. Life is stronger than any occupation. The existing model actually works." (ibid)

As Benny said, "We had a lovely evening. It was enjoyable and interesting." Harari fitted in perfectly. The perfect embellishment.