“Do you know why you’re the one who does all the operations? Because you never ask for written orders. Everyone else wants explicit clarifications. But … you just do it,” Moshe Dayan said to Ariel Sharon half a century ago, explaining why the two young officers got on so well. The comment also hints at […]
Gershom Gorenberg
Gershom Gorenberg is a senior correspondent for the Prospect. His most recent book is War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East. Follow him on Twitter @GershomG.
Posted inDispatches
The Israel Deal
Iraq, it’s true, isn’t precisely Vietnam: Vietnam is hellishly hot and humid, whereas Iraq is infernally hot and dry; Americans aren’t dying as quickly in Iraq as they did in Nam; the justifications used to pull the United States into Iraq have proven false even more quickly than the arguments for fighting in Southeast Asia […]
Posted inDispatches
Road Nap
Here’s the conventional wisdom, stated at a sadly conventional Israeli news event: “With respect to Israel, [George W.] Bush has been one of the best presidents we have ever had.” The speaker was James Tisch, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The venue was Jerusalem’s Keren Hayesod Street on the […]
Posted inFeatures
The Terror Trap
The four men, veterans of a grim business, had only grim words. Former heads of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security service entrusted with fighting terrorism, they gathered to tell Israel’s largest newspaper that the Sharon government was failing completely in its war on terrorism. The problem, said Ami Ayalon, who headed the elite, secretive […]
Posted inFeatures
Road Map to Grand Apartheid?
Jerusalem — The best way to understand just how Ariel Sharon plans to crumple and fold the road map to Israeli-Palestinian peace is to get out on the roads of the West Bank. Drive east from Jerusalem. Pass the stone-faced apartment buildings of Ma’aleh Adumim, a suburb of 25,000 that is the largest single Israeli […]
Posted inArticle
Lebanon Redux?
JERUSALEM — It was Sunday night, four days into the war, the night that everyone but Americans first saw footage of U.S. prisoners of war in Iraqi hands. “Bush’s war is getting tangled up,” said the TV anchor on the country’s most popular prime-time news show. “America is sinking deeper in the Iraqi quagmire.” That […]
Posted inFeatures
More Years in the Desert
JERUSALEM — I ran into the Labor party politician at a bar mitzvah celebration, a few days after the election in which the Israeli left suffered its worst-ever defeat. “Celebration” is a euphemism. The bar mitzvah boy was the son of a left-wing activist; most of the guests belonged to the same political camp, and […]
Posted inFeatures
Gen. Election
In the lobby of the Jerusalem Convention Center, glossy campaign leaflets of wannabe Knesset members carpeted the floor. Activists flowed from the hall where the Labor Party’s newly chosen leader, Amram Mitzna, had pledged to order Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip upon becoming prime minister. The party convention was ending unexpectedly early, as Mitzna’s […]
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In Israel’s Interest?
More than 15,000 Israelis lined up on a single day to get new government-issue gas masks, the daily newspaper Ha’aretz reported Sept. 18. On the same page: Israel’s Defense Ministry was seeking an advance on next year’s budget to speed gas-mask production, inoculation of hospital staffers for smallpox was about to begin and Interior Minister […]
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Book Review:
The Left Behind series By Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins. Tyndale House Publishing, $14.99 each Nicolae Carpathia, the man who turned the United Nations into a one-world government with himself as dictator, has just decided on genocide. In his palace in New Babylon, capital of the world, Carpathia — alias the Antichrist — barks instructions […]