I KNEW he reminded me of somebody, but I couldn’t quite place it. Who was it who pounded his chest with such vigor?And then I remembered. It was the hero of a movie that was produced when I was 10 years old: King Kong. King Kong, the giant primate with the heart of gold, who … Read more
PERHAPS HE is lying all the time. Perhaps he is lying about being a liar. Perhaps he is cheating about being a cheat. Perhaps he is just posing as an impostor. Perhaps he has misled us all about his misleading. Perhaps he is a very shrewd manipulator, who has led us all into believing that … Read more
THE ARAB taxi driver who brought me to Ramallah had no trouble with the Israeli border posts. He just evaded them.Saves a lot of trouble. I was invited by Mahmood Abbas, the President of the Palestinian National Authority (as well as of the PLO and the Fatah movement) to take part in joint Palestinian-Israeli consultations … Read more
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 Luftwaffe?” When it was posted at one of the Royal Air Force bases, … Read more
WHAT REALLY got me was the applause. There they were sitting at the round table, the representatives of the entire world, applauding their own handiwork, the resolution they had just adopted unanimously. The Security Council, like the Knesset, is not used to applause or any other spontaneous outbursts. And yet they clapped their hands like … Read more
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. It sets a … Read more
AN INCREDIBLE piece of legislation is now being debated in Jerusalem. The country is busy with a settlement called Amona. There, deep in the occupied territories, a few dozen Jewish families have set up an illegal settlement – illegal even under Israeli law, not to mention international law. Trouble is, they did not take the … Read more
A DARK wave is submerging democracies all over the Western world. It started in Britain, a land we always saw as the mother of democracy, the homeland of a particularly sensible people. It voted in a plebiscite to leave the European Union, that landmark of human progress which arose out of the terrible ruins of … Read more
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 Jew who wants to take … Read more
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 original purpose was to ventilate the mosque, letting the hot air … Read more