One of the most famous lines in German poetry is "Don't greet me under the lime trees." The Jewish-German poet Heinrich Heine asks his sweetheart not to embarrass him in public by greeting him in the main street of Berlin, which is called "Unter den...
So is Hezbollah a terrorist organization? Of course not. So why has the Arab League decided that they are? Because most of the league's member states are Sunni Muslims, while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization supporting Shiite Iran and Alawite (quasi-Shiite) Bashar...
He appeared out of nowhere. Literally. The Israeli Police needed a new commander. The last one had come to the end of his term of office, several senior officers had been accused of molesting their female subordinates, one had committed suicide after being accused of...
Right after the foundation of Israel, God appeared to David Ben-Gurion and told him: "You have done good by my people. Utter a wish and I shall grant it!" "I wish that Israel shall be Jewish, democratic and encompass all the country between the...
It is not easy to be an Arab in Israel. It is not easy to be a woman in Arab society. It is not easy to be an Arab in Israeli politics. And even less easy to be an Arab woman in the Knesset. Haneen Zuabi is all these together. Perhaps because of this she wears a...
So now we have another anti-Semite. Mazal Tov ("good luck") as we say in Hebrew. His name is Ban Ki-moon, and he is the Secretary General of the UN. In practice, the highest international official, a kind of World Prime Minister. He has dared to criticize...
As is well-known, Israel is a "Jewish and democratic state". That is its official designation. Well… As for Jewish, it's a new kind of Jewishness, a mutation. For 2000 years or so, Jews were known to be wise, clever, peace-loving, humane, progressive,...
The Israeli Ministry of Education has struck a book from students' reading lists. Big deal. Happens every day in Russia, China and Iran. But this was not a revolutionary work by a fire-eating rebel. It is a gentle novel by an appreciated female author, Dorit Rabinyan....
Two weeks ago, Benedict Anderson died. Or, as we say in Hebrew, "went to his world". Anderson, an Irishman born in China, educated in England, fluent in several South Asian languages, had a large influence on my intellectual world. I owe a lot to his most...
By now every Israeli has seen the TV clip several times – showing a 14-year old Arab girl being shot dead near the central market of Jewish Jerusalem. The story is well known: two sisters, 14 and 16 years old, have decided to attack Israelis. The clip, taken by...
