A weight lifted from my mind this week. I had been looking at awful pictures and reports of mayhem in Gaza, and agonising over the outpouring of commentary from apologists for one side or the other. On finishing William Sieghart's cracking column in sympathy with Hamas, I blamed Israel. On finishing Daniel Finkelstein's reasoned defence of Israel, I blamed Hamas. Hearing David Aaronovitch's argument that we move beyond blame, I inclined to this too.

But yesterday something snapped. Do I, I asked, have to have an opinion at all? The whole world is having opinions, and it doesn't seem to be helping.

Then, very faintly through the moral fog, something began to dawn. If we all decided not to think about the Middle East any more, would that actually make things there any worse? There's now a whole industry of Arab-Israeli-ologists; the conflict supports the careers of thousands of journalists, broadcasters and photographers, not to say Tony Blair's. Duos, troikas and quartets of European leaders, US emissaries, Anglican peacemakers and the like fly back and forth, issuing solemn statements... and I wonder whether the prodigious capital invested in the proposition that a story is desperately important may be subliminally egging both actors and audience to ramp it up further?

Is this dispute getting like the Corn Laws, or the Disestablishment of the Church of England, or the violent dispute in Gulliver's Travels over which end of the egg to crack - a bitter impasse whose potency future generations may struggle to explain? Objectively, how high does this conflict, in fact, stand in the grisly league table of world horrors? Would it be much worse if we weren't looking? Here's my personal new year resolution: to contribute by silence towards a larger silence.

One chair, five books

“Will you be a hard or a soft chair?” Mark Lawson asked me, disturbingly. He was presenting BBC Radio's Front Row on Monday evening. To my surprise I had been asked to be chairman of the judges who on the 27th of this month will choose the overall winner of the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book Awards this year. Whether I'll be a hard or soft chair I've no idea, but I do want to be a conscientious one, and so am reading all five books (winners of their separate categories) properly - no skimming, no skipping, no speed-reading - from cover to cover. A children's book by Michelle Magorian, Just Henry, and a first novel by Sadie Jones, The Outcast, have already provided about 1,300 pages.

And, do you know, it isn't a chore at all? For the first time in ages, I'm not tearing through, flicking pages, trying to extract the guts in time for a column or speech, or a review deadline.

Instead, and for the first time in decades, I'm just sauntering along, enjoying every sentence, even rereading bits I like. For the first time I'm properly following the plot. For the first time this is not a conversation between reader and author where one's in a rush and the other isn't. It's relaxing, enriching. This is how most people read for most of the time: I'm joining the unhurried audience for whom any good author writes, putting the right words in the right place, making phrases flow and believing it matters.

Thanks to the Jews

Helen Suzman, South Africa's veteran campaigner against apartheid, was one of the great women of her century. With her courteous blend of ferocity and moderation, she helped liberal whites and blacks, people like my family and friends, to keep the faith in Southern Africa for two generations. Her death recalls, too, something of which it's worth reminding ourselves, now opinion is so jagged over Jewish involvement in a part of the world that (see above) we're not going to mention.

The record, generous and brave, of South African Jews in white-dominated South Africa should never be forgotten. Much of the most stubborn white resistance to apartheid, and much of the most generous help in the fields of poverty and education, came from Jewish liberal South Africans. Most of the English-speaking half of the white population tended to go along with injustice; but not her, not the hundreds of brave Jewish activists against racism, and not rich families like the Oppenheimers, who helped to fund the multiracial school I attended in Swaziland.

Critics may point out that Ernest and Harry Oppenheimer made their mining fortunes in an exploitative economy. Fair point; but they spent it in enlightened ways. When it mattered, South African Jews were, quite disproportionately, prepared to stand up and be counted. Suzman towered above all of them.

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