It seems you don’t know The Independent very well: with their usual stance on Middle East affairs, I doubt they have very many ‘nice educated readers in Golders Green’ (presuming you mean Jewish readers: Golders Green is a very mixed, multicultural area), if any at all.

And as for fiddling while Rome burns, there are more ways than one to put out a fire…

I adhere to all I stated previously, Matthew. If you step back and just take a look within your own article at whom you interviewed and the premise you imposed on selecting them for inclusion in that article, it all just underscores what I pointed out. In other words, the Palestininan that you quote and Israelis from that gay youth club have absolutely nothing in common except their biological sexuality. Not a single other commonality beyond that — so, yes as people who happen to each be gay, how they each see the world is indeed different, *but* the significant difference is their differing perceptions of each other and the different social, economic and yes political realities each is situated within. So, you may as well have as your basis for an article any two random straight people, any two random vegetarians, any two random dog lovers. In other words, not much of a basis. I think that point is also voiced in the great article you linked from Haneen, wherein she states in her own way that she really doesn’t want that part of her identity to be patronized and manipulated by people like the Israeli ambassador to Denmark.

As far as timeliness and relevance, well…if anyone needs “good luck” as you say with getting the editors of The Independent to be willing to give editorial space to those issues I suggested are more significant, perhaps you also allude to their underlying unwillingness not to offend their nice educated readers in Golders Green and diverge instead into red herring topics about gay social meccas in Tel Aviv? Yes, not every article about a place has to be about one or a limited number of issues or aspects on the ground there, but in my opinion when those major issues and aspects are front and foremost not only right in that geographic location but in discussion and concern on the world stage, then I’ll go on disagreeing about how appropriate it is to fiddle while Rome burns.

First, a heads-up about how newspapers work. I did not write the words “gay capital”, and would never have done so. The journalist writes the text: any headline you see, in any newspaper, anywhere in the world, is NOT the responsibility of the journalist. Headlines are written by editors (or sub-editors), without reference to the credited author. They are shaped to fit the space available, and are dreamt up by the editor to suit his/her ideas about what will draw readers in. If anyone had asked me I would have refused to allow the words ‘gay capital’ to run in print. Same as I would have made a different image choice. But nobody did. And nobody ever would.

So much for my choosing to write about a ‘safe’ topic under a ‘safe’ headline.

I don’t really understand what you say about other topics that I could (should?) have written about. Why are your topics any more “relevant [or] genuinely timely” than the topic I selected? Do they say any more about the country under discussion? The Palestinian-led topics you mention are all extremely valid – but they are other articles. Not every article about Sri Lanka needs to be about the tsunami; not every article about Texas needs to be about the justice system; not every article about Israel needs to be about the occupation. Other issues are at play.

I’d also like to challenge your idea that gay people – or, as you suggest, black people, dog lovers and others – do not see the world in different ways from each other, and from everybody else. I don’t find that proposition ridiculous at all.

In what sense is my article a “travel narrative”?

Then you expound at length about what I might have written about. Well, thanks very much, but this was a story tightly focused on gay and lesbian issues in Tel Aviv – if I’d written about the settlements, about rightwing attitudes to LGBT, about the wall, about the status of Palestinian Israelis, I’d need a heck of a lot more than 2,500 words! But don’t let me stop you: if you think they’re good subjects for the Independent Saturday magazine, you go ahead and pitch them, along with issues of social dominance and the myth of social tolerance in Israel. I’d be very happy to read the result.

Incidentally, on the issue of how Israel uses tolerance to validate its image, see this interview with Haneen Maikey.

But even if you leave all of that aside, then surely that killing in your clip about “gay capital Tel Aviv” should make you think twice about labelling quite so rapidly. And seeing Israel (or anywhere) through “gay eyes”? I mean, how about through “black eyes”, “yellow eyes”, “straight man’s eyes”, “people suffering from ADD eyes”, “dog lover’s eyes”? You see the point – it’s actually a ridiculous proposition in a way, and why it becomes dangerous as the premise for any writer to use to construct a travel narrative that can be honest about what’s going on. In fact, maybe that killing might have been more useful for you to continue an exploration about the “myth” of tolerance in certain societies that affect to be tolerant only to the degree that certain rules about dominance, political and military force are not challenged. There are so many avenues you might have researched or interviewed about that would probably not have been comfortable research or conversation but might have been more revealing. For instance, looking at the reality beyond the mask of big city life in Tel Aviv and finding out what attitudes like are among settlers towards gays? Settlements and settlers being the core constituency of the current government that allowed you into the country, after all. The notion of “tolerance” is often a very clever marketing ploy used adroitly by certain governments, certain elites and certain countries as a sort of sentimental draw to liberal travelers who think this is a valid reason for visiting certain places. In this instance, how ironically appropriate that Israel manages to go on creating a modern desert mirage that doesn’t have much to do at all with the hard facts on the ground.