IT IS the summer of 1941. Five youngsters – three young men and two young women – meet in a bar and spend a happy evening, flirting with each other, getting drunk, dancing forbidden foreign dances. They have grown up together in the same neighborhood of Berlin. It is a happy time. The war started … Read more
IT HAS always been a secret ambition of mine to have a bagatz ruling bearing my name. Bagatz is the Hebrew acronym for “High Court of Justice”, the Israeli equivalent of a constitutional court. It plays a very important role in Israeli public life. Having a ground-breaking Supreme Court decision named after you confers a … Read more
THIS IS a declaration of love. Three loves, actually.I love Achinoam Nini. I love her from afar. I have never met her. I love her for what she did a few weeks ago. The Israeli organization of composers and writers had awarded her a prize for Life Achievement. Though only 44 years old, she certainly … Read more
WHAT’S WRONG about the demand that the Palestinian leadership recognize Israel as the “Nation State of the Jewish People”? Well, practically everything. States recognize each other. They don’t have to recognize each other’s ideological character. A state is a reality. Ideologies belong to the abstract realm. When the United States recognized the Soviet Union in … Read more
PETE SEEGER touched my life only once. But what a touch. It was a few days before the 1967 Six-Day War. After almost three weeks of mounting tension, the war fever was nearing breaking point. I knew that the war was only days, perhaps hours, away. Dina Dinur, the wife of the Holocaust-writer K. Zetnik, … Read more
DURING THE last hundred years, Russia has undergone huge changes. At the beginning, it was ruled by the Czar, in an absolute monarchy with some democratic decorations, a “tyranny mitigated by inefficiency”. After the downfall of the Czar, a liberal and equally inefficient regime ruled for a few months, when it was overthrown by the … Read more
IN THE middle of the 70s, Ariel Sharon asked me to arrange something for him – a meeting with Yasser Arafat. A few days before, the Israeli media had discovered that I was in regular contact with the leadership of the PLO, which was listed at the time as a terrorist organization. I told Sharon … Read more
PERHAPS I am too stupid, but for the heck of me I cannot understand the sense of the Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. On the face of it, it seems like a clever trick by Binyamin Netanyahu to divert attention from the real issues. If so, the Palestinian leadership … Read more
A FORMER Israeli army Chief of Staff, a man of limited intelligence, was told that a certain individual was an atheist. “Yes,” he asked, “but a Jewish atheist or a Christian atheist?” Lenin, in his Swiss exile, once inquired about the party affiliation of a newly elected member of the Duma. “Oh, he is just … Read more
I HAVE just seen the new movie “Mandela”, and I am so full of impressions that I cannot abstain from writing them down. It is a very good film, with very good actors. But that’s not the main point. It is a very accurate film, depicting what actually happened in South Africa, and one cannot … Read more