Haim Watzman Doing press for even the nicest Western secret internal security agency would be a job from hell. Even the best-intentioned, humanist secret security agents must do a lot of unpalatable things to keep the citizens of their countries safe and happy. So when I, an Israeli citizen, criticize the Israel Security Agency (which [...]

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Haim Watzman When Rabbi Benny Lau began his Shabbat HaGadol talk at south Jerusalem’s Ramban synagogue last Saturday afternoon, he said his lesson originated in anger and frustration. The climax came when he said, “If I were a young person today, I would abandon religion.” Shabbat HaGadol, the Great Sabbath that precedes Pesach, is traditionally [...]

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Haim Watzman “Just Egypt?” The chiseled-faced, bristle-haired field security sergeant, who looked every one of his nineteen years, fixed me with an intense, cold gaze. They practice that gaze in front of mirrors, I told myself, but my palms were sweating. It was early summer, 1987, and I’d received a brown envelope requesting that I [...]

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Haim Watzman To: His Excellency President Rufus T. Firefly From: His Notsogoodency Haim Watzman, Freedonian Ambassador to Israel As you will recall from my earlier report, this morning I was summoned urgently to the foreign ministry in The Capital That Must Not Be Named. (As you know, the ministry is actually located in Jerusalem, but [...]

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Haim Watzman I’m reading Rachel’s collected poems straight through for the first time. And being a translator (but not, I should emphasize, a poet), I can’t resist the temptation to try my hand at an English version of one. This is an ongoing project that I’ll be updating as I polish and improve it. I [...]

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Haim Watzman All too often, Israel’s supporters kill their cause with clichés. One of the most common and problematic of these clichés is the claim that Israel’s Arab citizens have always enjoyed full and equal rights because—and here’s the clincher—they vote for and sit in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. As Hillel Cohen shows in Good [...]

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Haim Watzman With thanks to my daughter Mizmor, who filmed and edited, I offer this preview of my new “Necessary Stories” program. It includes selections from four of the stories. For more on my speaking topics and availability, see my Speaking and Performance page. Am I really genetically smarter than my Sephardi wife? Find out [...]

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Haim Watzman Many of the comments on my post First Sheikh Jarrah, Then Baka?, here and at The Forward, constitute textbook examples of how the mere mention of Israel acts like a gravitational lens that bends the rays emanating from extreme Zionism and anti-Zionism until they merge into a single image. Let’s take, as an [...]

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Haim Watzman The most frightening piece in today’s Ha’aretz doesn’t appear on the newspaper’s website, in either Hebrew or English. It’s Gidi Weitz’s essay on how the police responded when a pal from his weekly soccer game got beaten up by some roughnecks who didn’t like where he’d parked his car. There was no police [...]

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Haim Watzman Leeor Kaufman’s Destiny Hills, screened at the Jerusalem film festival this week, documents the struggle of Mohammad of the al-Talalqa Bedouin tribe of the Negev to assert his right to live on his tribe’s ancestral land. In cinematic terms the film is impressively accomplished, and Mohammad, his wife, his four sons, and the [...]

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Haim Watzman There are many beautiful theories about how to bring Gilad Shalit home, but it’s an ugly fact that he now has been a captive for three years. And it’s an ugly fact that a series of Israeli governments have been unable to free him. Both diplomatic and military means have failed so far. [...]

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Gershom Gorenberg Is this all coincidence? Or is part of what’s been happening in the Middle East for the past two weeks a result of the U.S. president declaring that the conflict of civilizations is over? My new article in The American Prospect examines the evidence. Barack Obama spoke in Cairo two weeks ago. The [...]

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