During World War II, when German bombers terrorized Britain, a small group of gallant airmen faced them every day. Their life expectancy was numbered in days. Once, a genius at the propaganda ministry devised a poster: "Who is afraid of the German...
Donald Trump has spat in my face. Not only in my own face, but in the faces of at least half the Israeli population. He has appointed a bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman to the job of US ambassador in Israel. This sounds like a bad joke. But it is brutal reality....
When my parents married in Germany, just before World War I, among the gifts was a document attesting that a tree had been planted in their name in Palestine. My father was an early Zionist. Popular Jewish humor in Germany at that time had it that "a Zionist is a...
The first mu`ezzin stood on the roof of the prophet Muhammad's home in Medina, during his exile from Mecca, and called the believers to prayer. He also walked along the streets, doing the same. When Islam became the established religion, minarets were built. Their...
I am writing this (may God forgive me) on Yom Kippur. Exactly 43 years ago, at this exact moment, the sirens sounded. We were sitting in the living room, looking out on one of Tel Aviv's main streets. The city was completely silent. No cars. No traffic of any kind. A...
Mahmoud Abbas was not present at my first meeting with Yasser Arafat during the siege of Beirut in the First Lebanon War. That was, it may be remembered, the first meeting ever between Arafat and an Israeli. Some months later, in January 1983, a meeting was set up...
Shimon Peres is a genius. A genius of impersonation. All his life he has worked on his public persona. The image replaced the man. Almost all the articles written about him since he fell ill are about the imagined person, not the real one. As the Americans like to...
Zionism was a revolutionary idea. It proposed that the "Jewish people" should create a new Jewish entity in the land of Palestine. The Zionist project was very successful indeed. By 1948 the embryo nation was strong enough to create a state. Israel was born....
Something strange happens to retired chiefs of the Israeli internal Security Service, Shin Bet. The service is by definition a central pillar of the Israeli occupation. It is admired by (Jewish) Israelis, feared by Palestinians, respected by security professionals...
On June 28, 1914, the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo, the main town of Bosnia, then an Austrian province. Three young Serbian inhabitants of Bosnia had decided to assassinate him, in order to achieve the attachment of Bosnia to...
