Israel

High Spies of the Mossad: Israeli Mystery Man Inspires New Strain of High-Grade Medical Marijuana

By / November 30, 2020

This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of High Times. It only dawned on me this week that I could upload it here with the PDF: High Spies of the Mossad The voice on the other end of Alex Barak‘s phone on the evening of July 14th 2003 asked about some used furniture Barak had put up for sale, after the bar and cafe he ran in central Tel Aviv went under after a couple of years in operation. Barak went downstairs, and moments later a …

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Israel’s most famous trap rapper and German condom spokesman ain’t done yet

By / December 1, 2020

This post originally appeared in the Times of Israel, read the full article here The biggest story in Israeli hip hop in 2018 was a vulgar, skinny, goofball rapper who made one viral video after another, racking up millions of views and drawing the ire of polite Israeli society. Dudu Faruk — famous for his hits “King David (Arak, Arak, Arak)” and “Black Belt (in smoking hookah)” — has, in less than 12 months, become something close to a household name, …

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After Pittsburgh, looking back at November 2016

By / December 1, 2020

An elderly Jewish man and a Jewish college professor almost got into a fistfight at a Kosher BBQ buffet dinner and I missed it. It was a few days after Trump was elected, and I was invited to attend a meeting of the “Jewish men’s club speakers’ series” held at the Austin JCC. After the meal, a Jewish history professor from UT gave a lecture on the “Rise and Decline of the American Presidency,” which had been planned months earlier, but …

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Frontline Reporting: My Coverage of the Eurovision 2016 Finals

By / November 30, 2020

One of Israel’s most famous haircuts – and also a singer – did not emerge victorious at the 2016 Eurovision contest in Sweden on Saturday night, but it wasn’t due to a lack of effort. Sparkling like he’d been attacked by a 12-year-old with a spray can of foam on Independence Day three nights earlier, he took to the stage with “Made of Stars,” a ballad that was either dark or uplifting, and packed with nonsense lines like “You ride a …

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Not your average Tel Aviv rally

By / November 30, 2020

In my experience, when people announce a protest against the IDF and the security establishment, it’s a small group of far leftists in Tel Aviv. They usually number in the dozens, maybe a bit more, and when the protest actually happens, it’s mostly the same faces from the time before. This week presented a much rarer spectacle though – a mass rally against the IDF, not organized by the far-left bloggers and activists of Tel Aviv, rather by uber-patriots, former MKs, …

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What’s heroism in the face of terror?

By / November 30, 2020

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

By / November 30, 2020

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

By / November 30, 2020

  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

By / November 30, 2020

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

By / December 1, 2020

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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