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Our Strange Victory Over the Coronavirus: Quarantine Reflections

(This post was originally published in the Tel Aviv Review of Books in late May, after Israel all but declared victory over the coronavirus outbreak. By mid-July, Israel was up to around 1,500 new infections per day, amid talk of a new closure to stop the second wave.)    I knew that victory was near when my elderly neighbor sent a

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July 14, 2020
death row

My grandfather was a death row doctor – he tested LSD on Texas inmates

The following article was the result of several months of research and investigation in Huntsville, Houston, the Texas State Archives in Austin, and in a series of boxes of family keepsakes held by my aunts. The full article can be read here Eusebio Martinez was polite — even happy — as he entered the death chamber that August night in

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October 31, 2017
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My Gaza War

I rear-ended some settlers in a mini-van in the West Bank that afternoon, just before pulling into the settlement of Talmon for the funeral. There was no damage and we parted ways with a smile, joining the convoy snaking up to the ceremony. Hundreds of people were waiting in Talmon to bury 16-year-old Gil-Ad Shaer, murdered 18 days earlier on

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June 12, 2016

What’s heroism in the face of terror?

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The quiet that Israel had experienced for over a week was shattered by an attack on Sunday that was more pathetic than terrifying. Video of the attack in Rosh Ayin shows a 23-year-old Arab woman from Kafr Qassem awkwardly flailing around with a knife in hand, trying to find a victim before she is overcome by a group of bystanders. She did manage to lightly wound a woman from Kfar Saba who she stabbed in the shoulder, but her victim was […]

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Black lives matter? The closure of an infamous police brutality case

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The words of a bereaved mother can often pierce the heart, and this time was no different. Sitting in a Knesset committee hearing last week, Farnus Salamsa shouted “I’m burning!”, and told a senior police commander to shut her mouth and hear the pain of her loss and that of her children, who she said no longer sleep at night. Salamsa’s son Yosef committed suicide in July 2014, months after he was abused by the Israel Police during an arrest in

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A familiar tragedy

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  The landscape of Israel is so thick with memorials to fallen sons and daughters that you almost feel that if you stacked them all, you could build a staircase of marble, concrete, and metal far beyond the clouds. On Wednesday a new name was added to that list, when 19-year-old Border Police officer Hadar Cohen was killed in a terror attack at the Damascus Gate, just two months after she’d enlisted in the service. Another Israeli in uniform cut down

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About that Israeli suburban marijuana nightmare

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It reads like a real life suburban horror story, and the reaction has been in kind. Over the past week American immigrant Jay Engelmayer’s post on The Times of Israel about a police drug raid on his family’s Modi’in home has been shared more than 7,700 times. Along the way, it has been discussed by countless Anglos in Israel, who see it as an indictment of the brutality and lack of professionalism of the Israel Police, or, like Engelmayer, as almost

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Crime in the Arab sector: A sudden national priority that requires a nationwide effort

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The news that December morning broke with a bang, and for good reason. An Israeli gunned down in a vehicle strafed with automatic rifle fire near the seam line with the West Bank in southern Israel, with all signs pointing to another shooting attack in the “Lone Wolf Intifada”. Within minutes though, everyone could breathe a sigh of relief – it was a criminal shooting, part of a blood feud in the nearby Beduin village of Hura. Just Arabs killing Arabs,

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Scenes from the Tel Aviv terror attack (this time)

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Confusion seemed the order of the day in the minutes after a gunman had opened fire on a pub and a café on Dizengoff Friday afternoon, killing 2 and wounding 8 before vanishing without a trace. A rumor caught wind – from a reporter, maybe, or a random cop – that a suspect had been spotted a few blocks north on Nordau, and plainclothes cops with assault rifles started to give chase. It was then that something I’d never seen before happened

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My father in the Marines

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A bugler played Taps for my father a few minutes before he was lowered into the ground on a Friday afternoon last August. I hadn’t seen the bugler, standing at attention near the overpass on Hancock Lane, just beyond the tree line that separates the Jews from the Gentiles at the Austin Memorial Cemetery. It startled me when he began to play – maybe the most searing, beautiful tune I know – and all I could do was smile. That moment

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For all citizens, facing off against police is an uphill battle

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If you’ve seen the video of the assault, you may have found the penalty for the officer left something to be desired. Underage Jewish settlers who are resisting arrest but posing no threat are beaten repeatedly by a well-armed border policeman who seems to have no regard for the young age of the victims or the fact that it’s all being caught on video. The officer in this case, Mordechai Mehager, was sentenced in July to six months’ community service at

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Variants of Vigilantism

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It would be funnier if it wasn’t real life and the stakes weren’t so high: a vigilante who tried to lynch a terrorist is arrested by police and then set upon by a mob which now mistakes him for the attacker. That scene actually unfolded last Monday evening in Netanya, minutes after an attacker stabbed an elderly woman and was shot and subdued by police. The vigilante – who in trying to get to the terrorist scuffled with police – was

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After the knives are put away

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The uniforms and pistols make them look like police, but they aren’t cops. They’re members of the Tel Aviv municipal public order patrol – set up by the city this past year to deal with public disturbances, noise ordinance violations, and petty quality of life issues. After a terror attack in the city earlier this month and as the daily attacks known as the “Knife Intifada” continue across the country, the patrol members are now receiving firearms, to be force multipliers

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