Years ago I had a friendly discussion with Ariel Sharon. I told him: "I am first of all an Israeli. After that I am a Jew." He responded heatedly: "I am first of all a Jew, and only after that an Israeli!" That may look like an abstract debate. But...
One can look at events in Gaza through the left or through the right eye. One can condemn them as inhuman, cruel and mistaken, or justify them as necessary and unavoidable. But there is one adjective that is beyond question: They are stupid. If the late Barbara...
In the late 1980s, my secretary told me that the Deputy Chief of Staff wanted to see me. That was rather surprising. The army command was not on friendly terms with my paper, Haolam Hazeh. For dozens of years we had been officially boycotted by the army, after...
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, second in line to the British throne, visited Israel this week. He seems a likable person. He looked like a prince should look, did all the right things, said all the right things, and even ate a watermelon with our mayor on the...
After commenting on most of the episodes on the first Israeli Prime Ministers in Raviv Drucker's TV series The Captains, I must come back to the one whose episode I have not yet covered: Yitzhak Rabin. Let me state right from the beginning: I liked the man. He was a...
It's frightening. Unprincipled psychologists, in the service of a malignant regime, use sophisticated techniques in order to control the mind of a person from afar. The term "brainwashing" was born in 1950. It is a Chinese word ("xinao", literally...
Oh, Gaza. Strong as death is love. I loved Gaza. That is a play on words. The Biblical Song of Songs says that love is strong as death. Strong in Hebrew is Aza. Aza is also the Hebrew name of Gaza. I have spent many happy hours in Gaza. I had many friends there. From...
We all know the picture from the books and the movies: a gambler sits at the roulette table in a casino. He has luck. A lot of luck. In front of the gambler the pile of chips is growing. Higher and higher. Every spin of the roulette wheel adds to the heap. When the...
On Bloody Monday last week, when the number of Palestinian killed and wounded was rising by the hour, I asked myself: what would I have done if I had been a youngster of 15 in the Gaza Strip? My answer was, without hesitation: I would have stood near the border fence...
Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief. We don't...
