In Cairo, Barack Obama laid out his vision for the new Middle East. Its particulars were not new, but the idea of a President genuinely committed to comprehensive regional peace was. Obama laid out the path towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It was, as Alex rightly put it, an incrementalist approach. There was no comprehensive solution; just an idea of what the first steps needed to be and a vision of the future.

The government in Jerusalem panicked. They were stuck between a popular American President they needed and their own conservative base. On Sunday night, speaking from Bar Ilan in Ramat Gan, one of the biggest conservative institutions in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu had a chance to respond to Obama’s historic Cairo speech.  Netanyahu embraced Obama’s vision of peace by extending his hand, his middle finger up. His big concession, the need for a Palestinian state, was something that every Israeli Prime Minister since…well, Netanyahu the first go round, had already acknowledged. In fact, Netanyahu’s great concession took Israel back to a more conservative place than it had been in a decade. The conditions Netanyahu laid down sent a clear message. There would be no serious peace talks and no Palestinian state.  As David Grossman wrote in his excellent peace in Haaretz, Netanyahu “did not lead Israel to a new future. He only collaborated with its old, familiar anxieties”. This, in itself, is not a surprise even if it was a disappointment. Netanyahu was never going to abandon the settlers. What was deeply dismaying however, was the positive response this speech got in Israel. Netanyahu’s popularity went up 16% after the speech. The erstwhile left wing Labor applauded a speech that they should have derided.

The idea that eventually both sides would get tired and eventually realise that peace was the only way forward has not come to fruition. Instead, we are moving backwards.  The Palestinians still seem bent on destroying Israel while complaining that Israel isn’t moving towards peace and Israel is more interested in excuses as to why it must confiscate more Palestinian land (“We can’t remove the settlements because of Iran, terrorism, and the rise in the price of shakshuka”).

So, what can Obama do? Obama must have been hoping that Netanyahu would reconstitute his government with Kadima (by staying mostly in the same place politically, Kadima has gone from centre -right, to centre, since its inception.)This didn’t happen and Netanyahu will now demand some Palestinian action in return for what he thinks was a large concession. (What the Palestinians can possibly offer after that speech eludes me.) What I think Obama will do is keep pressing gently on all sides. Little concession by little concession until something big happens-a Palestinian unity government, the fall of Likud, or something similar. Netanyahu has indicated that he will fight every incremental move towards genuine peace tooth and nail forcing Obama to use more political capital than he would like to accomplish very little. I still have some hope in Obama’s ability to force all sides towards some solution. However, I am a lot less hopeful after Netanyahu’s speech than I was a week ago.

Every composition of a book is in a way the autobiography of the author, even if the book is not really a book but a website and the work in question is the most technical of scholarly treatises. The author’s life story is hidden in invisible nuggets between the words, only discerned by the most astute readers. If the book puts forth a daring new hypothesis, as this one does, then it stands to reason that the voyage of discovery involved momentous events in the author’s own life, even if they were mainly cerebral. In this short forward, I wish to share with the reader a precious nugget in my voyage of discovery.

When I was 21 I killed Isaac. Oh not literally, I didn’t invent a time machine – that would have been really exciting. I discovered that the original Genesis narrative told a story in which the angel did not stop the knife from coming down but let it cut through Isaac’s tender flesh, severing his head and the narratival continuity between Abraham and Jacob. I sat the traditional seven days of mourning for Isaac who was no longer my father, and for Abraham whom I had disowned, and then gave a lecture / eulogy on it at the World Congress of Jewish Studies.

Part of any process of mourning is coming to terms with the event, trying to explain the mystery of death, and the hope of resurrection. In the case of Isaac, I was also desperate to understand Abraham’s motivations. I knew that I was traveling on well trod ground. If Kierkegaard hadn’t been able to figure out Abraham how could I hope to do so? 

On this website you shall find out. The “how” is quite technical and dare I say may seem a trifle humdrum to the non-biblicist – although I find it fascinating. The trick was attempting to relate the narrative to the Abraham story cycle in general. The story of Isaac’s sacrifice actually begins in Genesis 20 with Abraham and Sarah’s sojourn in Gerar, in which Abraham sells his wife to save his hide. In the original narrative which I isolated, I discovered that Sarah had not been saved by God and that the account implied sexual relations between her and Abimelech. The next chapter is an account of Isaac’s birth, but since Sarah had likely engaged in intercourse with Abimelech, Isaac’s paternity was in serious doubt. What did Abraham do to deserve this? Well it seems he hadn’t trusted God to keep him safe and instead had employed subterfuge, Furthermore it seemed likely from further inquiry into narratives belonging to the same source that this was an iniquity of the highest order, punishable by the perpetrator’s death, or perhaps by the death of his “son”? The more I thought about this, the more it seemed to make sense, it was extraordinarily brutal poetic justice, but it was just in a convoluted amoral sense, the product of Abraham’s mistrust in God would be the vehicle by which he would prove his trust in Him once more.

Isaac’s death also got me thinking about his resurrection. Who resurrected him and why, and critically – at least to me – why was I able to discover it? The answer to the first question is of course impossible to answer – notwithstanding intriguing attempts by scholars such as Bloom, Brisman, and Friedman, I believe that the names of most of the Bible’s authors are forever lost to us. I thus had to remain content with the famed scholarly siglum for this author: “J” I did a little better with my second question. J resurrected Isaac in order to create a coherent and cohesive historical account beginning with Adam, Noah and the three patriarchs and culminating with David. His bridge between Abraham and Jacob, constructed if you will with Isaac’s bones, was but one of the bridges he created between disparate traditions.
The answer to my final personal why, is best answered by a metaphor. Imagine the Bible as an urn, as a Bible critic, my teachers taught me how to shatter the urn, to fracture  the canonical text into tiny shards of text and tradition. We were much less adept at picking up the pieces and reconstructing the textual edifice.
One of the dominant paradigms of Pentateuchal criticism was and is the documentary hypothesis which posited four separate and independent documents fused together by a series of editors. My biggest problem with this hypothesis was its inability to provide me with anything whole. The reconstruction of the elusive documents was very incomplete, and our urn was glued together with scholarly fantasies through which the shrieking winds of empty words blew uninhibited. The aliennesss of the documentary hypothesis which posited an editorial process harsher and more invasive than any of the 20th century, to the textual traditions of the ancient near east and the respect they accorded the written word, led me to search for a paradigm more organic to the time and place in which the Bible was written.
The answer I found was a version of the supplementary hypothesis, which actually predated the documentary hypothesis, but ultimately lost out because of the sophistication of documentary arguments and the usual academic politics. The supplementary hypothesis at its most basic level suggests that the search for 3 or 4 different fragmentary documents is erroneous and that the editorial procedure was one of successive additions upon one original text, an organic procedure in a culture where the written word was respected, and revelation revered.
I searched for the original text and found it. I found it not because I wished to rebuild an imaginary urn, to heal the fractures of my shattered heart but simply because the text was present and waiting to be discovered. It is the source that tells us of Abraham’s sin and Isaac’s murder. It is coherent and complete and altogether a work of literary genius, it is E: The first book of God.
It was however, only the first stage – The first book of God was followed by, J: The book of Mercy, who resurrected Isaac and composed the first historiographical work of the Bible, then P: The book of Order, who added the bulk of the laws found in the Pentateuch to J’s historiographical work and so on and so forth. Each successive supplementation respected the received text and only added to it, the only erasures were accidental.

I had been kind of interested in men since my childhood. I grew up with this question and confusion and remained silent. There were no resources to refer to or to find the answer to who I was; even school advisors weren’t the right people to go to. As for speaking about these kind of things to your parents, never!

Their answer would be so obvious; it would either be a smack in the cheek or a religious speech. Neither of these would change the fact that I like men. They would start telling me that it is wrong according to religion and culture, and that you must grow up one day and get married to a girl, produce children, and do all sorts of other things. Basically to be a carbon copy of them.

According to the religion, by being gay you are committing an unforgivable sin. Even to have a thought of it is a sin. As for practicing it, if you ever have sex with another man you have committed a sin and must repent. If not, you must be executed. Repent and perform God’s will, or be executed for who you are.

According to Islam, by executing a gay man you are purifying him. By doing it, they are in fact doing a favour for you. Here is how you receive this favour: either by getting cut in half with a sword, getting thrown from a great height, getting burned alive, or getting stoned to death. Presented in terms of human rights and kindness, and then reduced to hanging with a rope around your neck until your heart stops beating.

Society does not accept homosexuality, and there is no word in Farsi for gay. The only word you can find is a swear word; if you ever mention it to someone you get punched. If you have a secret gay life and never demand your rights, you will be ok, but how long can you live like that and what sort of life is it?

As soon as you start living openly your trouble starts. First you get rejected by your family and society and then you lose your job and then more serious problems begin to start. A gay man has no rights in Iran. Gay people get harassed, mugged, raped or killed by ordinary people.

However, the main trouble comes from the authorities. As I have mentioned earlier, the death penalty is the future for a gay man who considers himself a human being and starts demanding his rights. By law, you need four men as witnesses to prove someone is gay. Either that or the accused has to confess four times. Yet science assists the Iranian authorities to prove the crime. They simply examine the accused and that is the end of the story. Depending on the judge, the punishment can be lashing or execution.

I always thought that I was born in a wrong place; Iran was not my home and I had to seek for myself a real home, a place of peace and tranquillity, a land which you can be yourself in, a land which belongs to god and no body claims ownership of it, a land which is ruled by humanity and nobody judges you because how you look or how you speak.

In a certain time for some circumstances I had to leave, the moment arrived and was the time to pack my stuff and leave everything behind.

Now I am in the UK seeking asylum for more than four years. I have been facing all sorts of problems: not because I am gay, because I am Iranian.

I have committed another sin and that’s being Iranian.

Being gay or being Iranian is god’s will. This causes problem in Iran and this causes problem in the UK.

After writing several other words, including ‘camel’ and ‘wingnut’, Joe was accepted at Oxford to read biology. After reading biology and other words, he beat the pants off of everyone else in his academic year, except Rebecca Smith. Don Joe then took up a PhD at Cambridge. His PhD thesis, read only by two bearded professors, did not receive the wide distribution he hoped for. However, he did become a Jewish doctor and that scores highly with the ladies.

Leaving science to become a corporate whore in LA, he has worked hard on making his accent even stronger, because that too scores highly with the ladies. He ought to get laid a lot more than he does. He’s not bitter though; not at all. As a cathartic backlash against the minutia of corporate America “What the f*** am I doing here? A guide to working for large corporations” has become his passion, obsession and several other fragrances. It represents a wry writer’s rants through the boardrooms, break-rooms and bathrooms of banal bureaus everywhere. Joe also has a delicious barbeque chicken pizza in the oven.

The easiest way to convince people you’re intelligent and well read is to add “And then there’s China” at the end of any conversation. Discussing world politics? And then there’s China. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault? And then there’s China. The only occasion when this doesn’t work is if you’re already discussing China. Everyone has to have an opinion on China; it’s dinner party law.

Understanding Chinese culture isn’t that difficult; indeed the Buddhist philosophy that underlies a lot of Chinese customs and business isn’t so different from the Jewish traditions that underlie world banking, Hollywood and the bagel industry. For example, in Buddhism your family will be respected if you have a lama in your family. Furthermore, Buddhists often approach lamas with their health problems, treating them like doctors. Everyone knows Jews love doctors.

To save you from having to read Confucius, Lao Tze and Mencius, here are the basics of what you need to know to do business in China:

1. If someone offers you a delicacy, politely refuse citing an allergy. When something is a delicacy it means that local people don’t eat it most of the time. There is a reason that Kentucky Fried Chicken is more popular than Kentucky Fried Jellyfish, Insect, and Mystery Meat. No one can be offended when you refuse on medical grounds. It’s far better than trying to grin at your host while you’re swallowing something’s foot.
2. Stop staring at the waitress.
3. When using a toothpick cover your mouth. If you really have to eat a delicacy cover your eyes, nose and after swallowing, your mouth.

I learnt these lessons the hard way, after a business trip to China that did little to advance my career. I moved out to Hong Kong for four months to look at investment opportunities in China; in the first week I joined a tour organized by an investment bank, giving analysts the chance to talk with the managers at Korean and Chinese companies.
Before I moved to Hong Kong I spent my last days in London pleading with doctor after doctor for the strongest conjunctivitis medication they had. They gave me various ointments, applied directly to the eye, which had the habit of leaving white globular residues dangling from my eyelashes.

The flight to Hong Kong was a disaster. Excess baggage costs were ₤39 per kilogram and I was no less than forty kilograms overweight: I hadn’t the time to ship my stuff because I had been at the doctor’s. Choking at the prospect of asking my company to reimburse the ₤1600 excess baggage claim, I found a shipping company in the airport that could send my extra bags at a fraction of the cost. The only drawback was that I wouldn’t receive the extra suitcases for another 10 days, long after I had joined the analyst trip. Beggars cannot be choosers, but they often cross national borders without much clothing. I had enough shirts in the one bag I could take but no socks or vests. Who cares? These can be bought cheaply enough in Hong Kong.

On the one day I had to settle into Hong Kong before joining the analysts in Korea I stocked up in Kowloon, the counterfeit capital of Hong Kong, on cheap socks and vests, which were fake Tommy Hilfiger. It wasn’t until the flight to Korea that I took one of the cheap vests out of its packaging: it smelt strongly of a fish-like chemical. Do I really have to face the CEOs of Asian companies smelling like a haddock, with globular eye-goo dribbling from my lashes?

Let me not forget to mention that my English bank, in its steadfast approach to beating bank card fraud, had locked my card immediately after I had used it in Hong Kong. Great: I’m now an odorous pauper with a bloodshot eye. Perhaps I should just go the whole hog and smear excrement on my gums.

The landing card for entering Korea asked whether I was carrying any fake goods. Do fish pee in the sea? Did they also pee on my undershirt? Yes and yes. So before the first flight was done I am bare-chested in the airplane toilet with a black biro scribbling on an unconvincing Tommy Hilfiger logo, turning it into a black square. Fortunately I made it through Korean customs without a hitch, which is just as well because the only Korean I know was taught to me by an ex-girlfriend: “hello” (anyung), “thank you” (kam-sah ham-nedah) and “do you want to die?” (chu-go leh?). Luckily, immigration lasted about as long as that relationship.

I spent the first days of the trip very hungry, until the bank unlocked my card. In all, these are not the ideal circumstances in which to meet the management of the sixth largest conglomerate of Korea. I can only begin to imagine what the managers I met thought: “Why they send us this boy who smells of fish, why he eat all our biscuits, and why he masturbate into his own eye?” None of these details made it onto my write up of the trip.

On the dreary, cold misery of a wet Wood Lane, Westfield looms, a soulless grey monolith; hard and dark and aesthetically redundant, a slab, on which the eye neither settles nor moves, towering to nothingness with no profound purpose whatever. A quick glide up an innocuous escalator, though, and the world changes: here is the death of God itself. 

It is impossible not to marvel at what we – each and every one of us – have achieved in this creation. A smug sense of superiority and self satisfaction becomes us as the eyes are drawn upwards, to the vast domes of this most beguiling of buildings. A cavernous wonder, here is a cathedral for the self; a magnificent complex of proscenia within which we are both the actors and the crowd, strutting and stopping, walking and watching as we admire ourselves admiring what we’ve become. This is you. And don’t you just know it.

The rolling waves of the ceiling – though such a prosaic term fails it badly – are an angular matrix of glass and white plastic; a white city proudly illuminated and toned by neon and brightness. Triangles form pentagons and pentagons bend to sleek contours as the cap to this hubristic extravagance rolls and washes away towards a horizon of Next and Prada. Craning necks, though devoid of pain or sensitivity, turn and twist, eyes on stalks, to anticipate what lies beyond, so far in the distance that it belongs to another time altogether. Vast and expansive, this arena grips the devoted crowds by the heart, numbing them of pain and joy, filling them instead with a sense of absolute faith.

Gliding along marble floors, bleached in the glowing tones of Hollywood lighting, cleansing faces of individual imperfections, an inauthentically beautiful herd drifts, each struck dumb by their own sense of place in this vast order. Shops roll past, gently shimmering with an iridescent hue. Glass and plastic, ever expanding, stretch out as far as the imagination will allow. This is us and it defies nature itself.

And no one’s buying anything. Instead they float by, propelled by the stupefying energy of the place, towards nothing in particular; the journey, it seems, is an end in itself. Except that we are already there – and we shall never, ever leave. Glazed eyes and stupid grins lead shells in aimless circles, ever onwards, as mouths gawp and speak and stutter. Shop names are emitted in open, reverential tones, as though they denoted distant realms of enchantment. “Where are you going?” “To Sony.” And a firm nod of acceptance. “Sony. Yes. I’ve heard a great deal”. Reassuring in its numbness; like Prozac, the highs and lows are sliced away, leaving nothing but cleansed healing. Drugged and drunken on the inebriating vastness of it all, the congregants’ collective soul is filled with a sense that everything is alright. No regret. No remorse. Whispy clouds over the soul, calmed to a plastic acceptance, like cheap perfume in a bright corridor.

We can’t believe our luck! This must be how it feels to win the lottery. Look, look! A Spanish villa by Niketown. Don’t ask why. Just accept it and glide on, on to the distant realms of Nandos and Debenhams. The biggest shopping centre In Europe (as though there were worlds besides this). Smug and content, we smile together, but happiness doesn’t come into it. We’ve been touched by the splendour of a material God, purged of our sins, though it wasn’t as hard as that sounds. Just that quick, escalated ascent .

Shapes and silhouettes streamline the space. Information banks replace guides. Touch screens supersede conversation. Aesthetically moulded plastics sit like portals to another world. Arachnid constructions of acrylic and light shine from plinths and pedestals, their purpose unknown. “I’m here”, they say, “now watch.” And you do. Indefinitely. No more squares or bumps, glitches or fault lines; matter is represented instead with perfect imperfections, smooth figures and symmetrically isolated patterns. Plant banks and money shops, railings and menus, rolling ceilings and lilted floors and glancing, vapid display cases all perfectly choreographed to wink and wave as you pass. This is where to belong. Where we all want to be. Where items aren’t bought but purchased and sales consumed as lifestyle choices. This is you, now, forever.

Quick. Let’s get the fuck out, while we still can. Stranded in the higher realms of the cathedral, a gallery overlooks a magnificent stretch of nothingness, but descent from enlightenment is not as easy as its opposite journey. A suicidal jump is considered, though one suspects it would end not with a crack but a swoosh, as I’m spirited away to a distant branch of Apple or Orange. There can be no death, where life is so contained.

But I do get out. And, like a miracle, others have escaped with me. And as I’m stung by the cold breath of the city air and coated in wet saliva of damp and chilling rain, I leave the cold slab behind me and stumble out into a noisy little shithole. And I thank God for poverty and depression, dark streets and fear and pain. I’m gladdened by the darkened corners of my life – because at least they hurt when I pinch them.