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Books & Bookmen, Christopher Hitchens, March 1979:
Born of first-generation Zionist immigrants (sic) (Simon Louvish) had to spend many sweaty days in the occupied territories, discovering that not everybody regarded Israeli occupation as a boon. From this point he tracked back through his own family traditions, and his own native ideology, to find out about the Palestinian problem, a problem he had been trained to think did not exist. He writes with ease and irony, and does not spare himself the thought that his critique may be self-centered or irrelevant. ‘Jewish self-hate’ is the usual insult thrown at israeli dissidents, and some of them half-suspect that in their own cases it may be true. I think Louvish is genuine, though… As Louvish points out, other nationalities can oppose their own governments without endangering their own identity… Louvish’s book is really an attack on chauvinism, and a cry of disgust at its very existence among Jewish people who have themselves suffered so much as a result of it… Louvish realises there is an ‘original sin’ in Israel, that of the Palestinian refugees it created. He knows that there will be war until this debt is paid off… A reminder of the persistent Jewish radical tradition.
The Listener, John Naughton, 22 March 1979:
Formally uncomplicated and straightforward in its narrative structure, A Moment of Silence is depressing in the extreme. The brutal exigencies of the Israeli position and the harsh attitudes dictated by the need to survive are well articulated by his all-too-credible characters; the promised land seems now to promise only unending violence and terror. The Arabs and the Israelis come to resemble the partners in a doomed Irish marriage: denied the possibility of separation or peaceful coexistence, they are condemned to live manacled to one another, till death does them part.
From The Jewish Chronicle, March 1979:
In A Moment of Silence… Simon Louvish, a sabra (sic) living as a film-maker in London, shows autobiographically how a young Israeli can realise with a sudden shock that the Israelis apparently took their land from the Arabs, and can then proceed step by step to see Israeli ideology as a mixture of religious obscurantism and anti-Arab militarism. Easy enough to disagree with from start to finish, but a clear presentation of the Matzpen outlook.
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