By Bret Stephens May 6, 2016 From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting...
By Gal Beckerman Israel, like America, is an idea, not just a place. As a result, it has been subjected to much metaphorical thinking — it is a refuge, a beacon, a start-up company, an unlikely flower blooming in an unforgiving desert. Since the Middle East’s descent...
JERUSALEM—“We have two flowers and one oleander. We need a thistle.” Listening to the Israeli military frequencies when I was an infantryman nearly two decades ago, it was (and still is) possible to hear sentences like these, the bewildering cousins of sentences familiar to anyone...
Review: In ‘Pumpkinflowers,’ a New Style of Middle East Combat By Jennifer Senior, Books of the Times During the 1990s, Matti Friedman and his fellow Israeli soldiers fought in a string of conflicts that never collectively earned a name. These battles existed in historical parentheses, wedged between...
A bunch of events coming up in the U.S. and Canada following the publication of Pumpkinflowers on May 3: May 3, New York, 7pm: A discussion with the great journalist and editor David Samuels at the Manhattan JCC. Details here. May 4, New York, 6pm: A discussion...
A starred review of Pumpkinflowers from Publishers Weekly: Friedman, an Israeli journalist and writer, recounts the history of a hilltop bunker in southern Lebanon that was held by the Israeli army during the 1990s, beginning with the biography of a young soldier stationed there and transitioning into...
April 1, 2016 “Whoever did not see Jerusalem in its days of glory has not seen a beautiful city in his life,” the Talmud says of the days when Herod’s temple shone at the center of a city that symbolized the gateway to the divine. The world...
At a lonely army outpost in 1994, Israel was shown the difference between radicals and fanatics—and between soldiers and storytellers. But the West didn’t learn. This fall and winter have seen many of us here in Israel consuming a miserable kind of reality TV: blurry clips of young...
One Saturday night in late 1995, I was with a few other 18-year-olds at a kibbutz in northern Israel, watching a Hebrew B-movie called “Lemon Popsicle” on TV. Words began scrolling urgently at the bottom of the screen, a news flash: The prime minister, Yitzhak...
What my preschooler's taste in pop says about where the country is at The Israeli culture wars arrived in my kitchen a few months ago when I discovered that the cure for my daughter’s grumpy preschooler moods was a Hebrew dance hit called “Happiness Revolution.” The...