A friend from overseas sent me the recording of a song. An Arab song, with a soft Arab melody, sung by an Arab girls' choir, accompanied by a flute. It goes like this: Ahed / You are the promise and the glory / Standing as high as an olive tree / From the cradle to...
The closer Mahmoud Abbas gets to the end of his reign, the more extreme his language becomes. Recently he spoke about Donald Trump and uttered the words "May your house be destroyed". In Arabic this is a common curse, and sounds less extreme than in English....
The flood of corruption affairs that is now engulfing the Netanyahu family and its assistants and servitors does not seem to diminish his popularity among those who call themselves "the People". On the contrary, according to the opinion polls, the voters of...
I have a confession to make: I don't hate Binyamin Netanyahu. I don't hate Sara'le either. I generally don't hate people. With the sole exception of people who have betrayed the trust I put in them and tried to stick a knife in my back. Not more than three or four in...
Pity the almond tree, especially when it is in full bloom. The bloom of the almond is, in German, Mandelblüt. That is also the name of Israel's chief legal official, called "the Legal Advisor of the Government". The Legal Advisor is appointed by the...
When I first met Yasser Arafat in besieged Beirut, in the summer of 1982, Abu Mazen was not present. But when I met him again in Tunis, a few months later, he asked me to meet Abu Mazen, too. Abu Mazen, it transpired, was the Fatah leader in charge of Israeli matters....
No, I don't want to write about the affair of Ya'ir Netanyahu. I refuse adamantly. No force in the world will compel me to do so. Yet here I am, writing about Ya'ir, damn it. Can't resist. And perhaps it is really more than a matter of gossip. Perhaps it is something...
Nobody described the outbreak of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict better than the historian Isaac Deutscher. A man lives in a house that catches fire. To save his life, he jumps out of the window. He lands on a passer-by in the street below and injures him grievously....
Anyone proposing the death penalty is either a complete fool, an incorrigible cynic or mentally disturbed – or all of these. There is no effective therapy for any of these defects. I wouldn't even try. A fool would not understand the overwhelming evidence for...
For God's sake, are they crazy? They congregate in the marketplace, boys of 15, 16 years, take stones and throw them at our soldiers, who are armed to the teeth. The soldiers shoot, sometimes over their heads, sometimes straight at them. Every day there are wounded,...
