(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
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
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
When the full details of the Bar Noar case are cleared for publication, probably sooner rather than later, it will be one of the strangest and most lurid crime cases written in Israel in years. Surprising and terribly tragic, the current police case against the three main suspects and an LGBT activist involved in the story runs counter, though maybe not entirely, to what many assumed was a hate crime against the community. In the almost four years since Nir Katz, …
Minutes after reports that shots were fired in a small Beersheba bank branch on Monday, wide swaths of the Israeli media had already ID’d the suspects: two young men from Rahat, a Beduin city of around 50,000 people, some 15 miles outside of town. Within a half hour or so, a southern district police spokesman stated that the shooter was a resident of the city, a 40-year-old Jewish man, and that he apparently acted alone. As the day progressed, a picture …
“Tell me, do the Israelis still care about the Alperons? They’re nobodies now, nobody thinks of them anymore,”, the courtroom security guard with a large white knit kippa said to a row of photographers in a corridor at the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court last Friday morning. Downstairs, mob princes Dror and Omer Alperon and a friend of theirs named Daniel Gedidian waited to be brought in for their remand extension on charges of attacking detectives who came to their Herzliya home …
A young Israeli man lurked after a teenage girl walking home in the Yemenite Quarter close to midnight Saturday. As the girl made her way up the stairwell of her apartment building on Hakovshim street the man pounced on her and a struggle ensued. The woman began to scream, awakening her mother, who came to the stairwell, causing the would-be rapist to flee into the night, police said. Speaking to a Tel Aviv police spokesman about an entirely different subject Sunday …
This could have been a scene straight out of North Korea, or at least that’s what a few of the crime reporters present said. What should have been an event to honor Tel Aviv’s cops had become a love-in for Israel Police Commissioner Yohanan Danino. Before Israel’s top cop took to the podium, three cherubic little children clad in Tel Aviv Police t-shirts beamed towards the crowd of some 300 uniformed police. “Who’s the most handsome cop? The commissioner!” one child …
The Pyongyang District Police and the Tel Aviv press walkout Read More »
“You see that guy, something’s wrong with that guy,” said “Ronen” a detective from the Lev Tel Aviv police station during a ride-around I went on for a couple hours last week as part of a story on the strangely legal and highly potent drugs sold at Tel Aviv kiosks. “Why? Is it the hat?” I asked, savoring the rare opportunity to be on the other end of the police gaze. “No, it’s how he’s walking. He’s walking but not going …
Not quite friends – riding around with Tel Aviv police detectives Read More »
A rat the size of a well-fed house cat sent a female reporter from Army Radio dashing across Fein Street one night earlier this week in the heart of the Central Bus Station neighborhood, Tel Aviv’s basin of junkies, homeless African migrants, and bottom-rung prostitutes. The brush with the rodent was one of the few moments of excitement during a tour organized by police for crime reporters, all of whom have been to the area time and time again. The …
I first got a pager in 1995. I was 16, and there was little need for me to have one. Occasionally I’d get a page, 911 at the end if it was important, and then hustle to the nearest pay phone to make a call. If I was being honest, probably 9 out of 10 pages were from my dad. Fifteen years later, I got a pager again, but this time, owing to the efficiency of The Jerusalem Post, I have …
Did you come to see the house that was hit by the rocket?” asked a little Ethiopian-Israeli boy. “The whole world’s already been here,” The child ran off to play soccer in a run-down courtyard nearby and I continued to the site of the attack that claimed the lives of three Israelis two weeks earlier.