When my wife and I were engaged to be married, I was serving my Regular Army service in the IDF. Except for a very rare telephone call (we lived on a kibbutz where the only phones were public or in the office) we communicated by postcards. Postcards that often arrived after I did due to the diligence of the military censors. Years later, although we were distances apart when I served in reserves, there was always cellphones. If...
In January 25, 2009 Bob Simons had this to say: “Palestinians … when they want to travel from one town to another, they have to submit to humiliating delays at checkpoints and roadblocks. There are more than 600 of them on the West Bank.” In April 22, 2012 he had this to say: “For all Palestinians, just leaving Bethlehem is a struggle. Getting to Jerusalem, only seven miles away, whether it’s to pray, go...
Some powerful insights from a man who sees reality in terms of generations and centuries. Rabbi Berl Wein, one of Judaism’s popular English language lecturers has an interesting assessment of whom the Internal enemies of Israeli society really are! There was once a fascinating commentary on life in the form of a comic strip called Pogo. One of its most telling captions to my memory was the paraphrasing of the famous line “We have...
Someone wrote a powerful book, describing a future world where the single authoritative voice of public opinion, public consciousness broadcast from the walls of every room human beings inhabited. A society where the very thought of Freedom of Thought (let alone speech) was heresy. When I first read the book, way back in the 1960′s, I thought it allegorical. It seemed to me that the author was describing a reality akin to Nazi Germany or Communist Soviet...
For the longest time I’ve listened to conversation of the deaf between the liberal Israeli Left and the Muslim world. It was so obvious to me that both sides were talking a different language, albiet using English words. I recently read an essay by Dror Eydar in Israel Hayom. Talk about an apology to Turkey comes under the category of a rational Western debate. In fact, in a liberal debate, an apology is perceived...
I’ll be honest. I really do not understand American politics. Still, I do read English (or at least the Canadian dialect) and do see things that I think I understand, and that occasionally impress me. The following excerpt caught my eye, specifically because I truly believe exactly the same accusation could be made against the Israeli Political Establishment.
Much was made of President Obama’s dismissal of the idea of American exceptionalism, when he noted that the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism, etc. No doubt Achilles believed in the latter, as Hector believed in Trojan exceptionalism. But in many ways there truly is no more exceptional a nation than modern Israel.
Over the almost forty years that I live in Israel, I’ve always sensed a kind of pity for the plight of my Arab neighbors. As Israel developed over these decades, villages and farms grew and displayed the obvious signs of development - good roads, street lighting etc. Over the same period, the Arab villages in areas previously controlled by Jordan, remained in relative darkness and with poor infrastructures. It was not because the Jewish state discriminated against...
When I was in high school, I has this deep-set belief that if people agreed with me, I must be doing something wrong. To make things really clear, it wasn’t so much because I considered myself a saint. I knew the difference between right and wrong and I can assure you that I knew that I was far from sainthood. No, the reason I believed this was simple. People, in my perception of humanity...
Postwar Jewish refugees left everything they had in Europe—no ‘right of return’ requested. There are some articles that are so to-the-point that I feel I have no choice but to add them to my personal little collection of intellectual gems. Secretly I’ll admit that I’m envious. I wish I had written them. Warren Koxzak’s article, “If the Jews had followed the Palestinian Path” is definitely one of them. Originally published in the online edition of the Wall Street...
