Everyone has the right to change his or her mind. Even Danny Tirzeh. Col. Tirzeh was responsible for planning the wall that "envelopes" Jerusalem – the one that cuts the city off from the West Bank in order to turn it into the United Capital of Israel for All...
Israel is a Zionist state. Everybody knows that. There is no (Jewish) politician in Israel who misses an opportunity to repeat this. Last week, when we celebrated the 62nd Independence Day, we were flooded by a deluge of patriotic speeches. Each of the Ciceros,...
"Hold me back!" is a part of Israeli folklore. It reminds us of our childhood. When a boy has a scuffle with a bigger and stronger boy, he pretends that he is going to attack him any moment and shouts to the spectators: "Hold me back, or I am going to...
In January 1077, King Henry IV walked to Canossa. He crossed the snow-covered Alps barefoot, wearing a penitent monk's hair shirt, and reached the North-Italian fortress in which the Vicar of God had found refuge. Pope Gregory VII had excommunicated him after a...
It is already a commonplace to say that people who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat their mistakes. Some 1,942 years ago, the Jews in the province called Palaestina launched a revolt against the Roman Empire. In retrospect, this looks like an act of...
Some weeks the news is dominated by a single word. This week's word was "timing." It's all a matter of timing. The government of Israel insulted the vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest "friends" of Israel (meaning:...
This week the Netanyahu government let off a stink bomb under the chair of Mahmoud Abbas. For months now, Abbas has angered the prime minister. He has refused to start "peace negotiations" while the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are...
Many important struggles in Israel are calling out to people of conscience. Among others (in random order): The struggle for preserving the environment and the future of the planet. The struggle for democracy against fascist trends. The struggle for human rights and...
The business is registered in the name of Binyamin Netanyahu. But the reality is different. Netanyahu has never been more than a slick patent-medicine salesman. That is a type that appears frequently in American Westerns and sells an elixir that is good for...
I tried to resist the temptation to tell the same classical Jewish joke a second time, but circumstances delivered a plausible excuse. Almost every Jew knows the sentence "Kill a Turk and rest." The whole story goes like this: In Czarist Russia, a Jewish boy...
