Results for “Old City of Jerusalem”

to adapt on the ground. And obviously pleased that we’d found a way to make the operation work. The Sinai mission marked a transition not just for me, but for others in Sayeret Matkal as well. Avraham Aranan finally left the unit he’d imagined, created and built. He became the h...

…sh community in Shiraz who had been jailed on patently absurd accusations of spying for the “Zionist régime.” Iran had told him no. Given its support for Hizbollah, and its serial diatribes about destroying the State of Israel, this was hardly a surprise. But it was a gesture non...

…eks did not need saying. But Ron said he wanted to show me something. Fishing into his wallet, he took out a carefully folded photograph. He had taken it in 1967, just six years earlier, to mark our Judaean trek. There we were. All nine of us. Young. Full of optimism. And probabl...

…ant he couldn’t go to Arafat with a retreat from our earlier ideas. “My negotiating team moved beyond my red lines,” I told him. The overnight talks were supposed to be non-binding and assumed that both sides would make a genuine attempt to get an agreement. “I can’t see any chan...

…rity argument for keeping several small hilltop outposts just north of the border. But I insisted not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating every detail of the planned pullout with UN cartographers on the...

The group had a chance to visit with Bashar Masri, the Nablus-born founder and CEO of Massar International, the Palestinian conglomerate financing a third of Rawabi. Massar and Qatar Diar, the real estate investment arm of the government of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, jointly...

when the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181 calling for dividing historic Palestine into two entities and for granting Jerusalem an international status

… visit. He wanted to discuss how we planned defend the area near the canal in the event of a repeat of the 1973 war. I told him everything we were doing in the brigade was aimed at ensuring flexibility. I had also been thinking about some of the broader issues relating to our def...

…its full potential have also made for a deadly cocktail for Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. Combined with the occasional holding of Palestinian tax revenue by the Israelis, the PA is finding it incredibly difficult to pay the tens of thousands of employees on its payroll. The rece...

/ BARAK / 99 By the end of November, I believed that the chances of a peace agreement with Arafat were so microscopic as to border on non-existent, and that my own prospects for retaining sufficient support to be an effective Prime Minister much beyond Clinton’s departure were n...

/ BARAK / 93 The request that had come across my desk a few days earlier need not have changed that. Even though Arik had failed, for now, to bring down the government, he was keen to make political capital from the collapse of Camp David. He now declared his intention to pay a...

…its full potential have also made for a deadly cocktail for Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. Combined with the occasional holding of Palestinian tax revenue by the Israelis, the PA is finding it incredibly difficult to pay the tens of thousands of employees on its payroll. The rece...

…magine that we each have parachutes, and we’re going to jump together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land safely we have to help each other... And if we don’t jump, many, many innocent people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah...

questions on the past and future of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. FP: What were your best and worst moments in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and what was the greatest missed opportunity? Saeb Erekat: Though I was not the chief negotiator at that moment, the connectio...

…ice took over, a mob attacked, burned and ransacked the site. They destroyed the Torah scrolls. A few hours later, our soldiers found the body of a rabbi from a nearby settlement. He had gone to survey the damage to the synagogue. That evening, I delivered an ultimatum: “If we d...