The decisive factor in next week’s election — and the reason for Benjamin Netanyahu’s durability — is a repressed memory. By Matti Friedman JERUSALEM — When trying to understand Israel’s election on Sept. 17, the second in the space of six months, you can easily get lost in the details — corruption charges, coalition wrangling, bickering between left and right. But the best explainer might …

The Department of Lost Spies: How Israel brings its missing soldiers home By Matti Friedman The Globe & Mail, March 8, 2019  [Nissim Attiyeh, left, who was caught and killed in Dec. 1947. Another Arab Section spy, Yakuba Cohen, right in the uniform of an Arab militiaman, circa 1944. Palmach Museum, Tel Aviv.] * On the morning of Dec. 22, 1947, …

JERUSALEM — Late on the night of Nov. 11, Hamas soldiers in southern Gaza stopped a van near the town of Khan Yunis. Inside were a group of Arabic-speaking men and women who said they were aid workers. The soldiers were suspicious. When the passengers understood that they couldn’t talk their way out, they dropped the pretense and drew guns. …

JERUSALEM — If you are reading this, you’ve most likely seen much about “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in the pages of this newspaper and of every other important newspaper in the West. That phrase contains a few important assumptions. That the conflict is between two actors, Israelis and Palestinians. That it could be resolved by those two actors, and particularly by …

Yad Vashem is both a memorial of a genocide, and a tool of Israeli realpolitik. By Matti Friedman, New York Times  Op-Ed Section JERUSALEM — The quiet campus of Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial and museum, sits atop a wooded hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem, removed from the rush of the city. It can feel like a secluded shrine, …

It takes four times as long as the new high-speed rail. I take it anyway. JERUSALEM — Last month, the first section of a new high-speed rail line opened in Israel. When it’s fully operational a few months from now, passengers will board fire-engine-red carriages in Tel Aviv and be whisked on electrified track over the country’s longest bridge, then …

Ramadan Dabash doesn’t care if you call him a collaborator. JERUSALEM — Western observers interested in Jerusalem can be forgiven for thinking the most politically significant building in this city is a low limestone edifice featuring American flags and Marines — the embassy opened in May by the Trump administration to international fanfare and criticism. But anyone attentive to the …

Published Dec. 15, 2017 The Ties That Bind Jerusalem Different religions have their own holy sites in Jerusalem, the city where I’ve spent my entire adult life. The place I believe to be among the most important, however, is a grubby swath of garages, welding shops and furniture stores known as the Talpiot industrial zone. The zone is sacred to …

In war, the battle today is less on the ground than on social media Dec. 14, 2017 In the 1990s, I served as an infantryman at an obscure Israeli outpost in southern Lebanon whose claim to fame was a curious incident one Saturday morning in 1994: A Hezbollah team assaulted the hilltop base, surprised the garrison, planted a flag and …

JERUSALEM — My most unsettling neighbors here in Jerusalem are Indians: Afzal Hussein Shah, Chulam Muhammad, Mansub Ali. They occupy a lot on a street near my home. You pass No. 22, then No. 24, but instead of No. 26 you find a rectangle of grass and rosemary shrubs. Engraved on two memorial stones are the names I mentioned, along …