Every Saturday afternoon, spot on 5 p.m., through the summer and into autumn, a squad of Jerusalem police clip-clopped on horseback past my house on Rehov Hanevi\’im, the Street of the Prophets.
Israel\’s ratification of the Wye agreement, calling for another 13-percent West Bank withdrawal in return for Palestinian security measures, was completed on Tuesday night when the Knesset endorsed the American-brokered deal by a vote of 75 to 19, with nine abstentions.
\”Binyamin Netanyahu is no longer the leader of the national camp,\” Aharon Domb, general secretary of the West Bank and Gaza Jewish settlers\’ council, said this week, with all the finality of a judge pronouncing sentence.
Getting to see Aida Suleiman is like playing chess with a temperamental computer. The first time I tried, she stood me up at the last minute because she had to deal with an emergency at a home for battered wives.
The most talked-about, perhaps the most feared, figure in Israeli politics this holiday season is neither a statesman nor a rabble-rouser. He is Yitzhak Kedouri, a frail, mystical Iraqi-born rabbi, barely able to speak or to walk unaided, whose widely distributed kabbalistic amulets are credited with swaying thousands of underprivileged Sephardic Jewish voters.
What the Israeli right likes to call \”the battle for the Land of Israel\” is in danger of turning into a war of the ultras, Arab extremists vs. Jewish extremists.
Gil Wiener, the husky soldier who dragged out the first survivor of the Nairobi bombing to be saved by the Israeli dog squad last weekend, is a 29-year-old architecture student working his way through college as a lifeguard at the Hebrew University swimming pool in Jerusalem.
Binyamin Netanyahu recently suffered the most wounding parliamentary defeat of his two-year premiership. It left the Likud leader more dependent than ever on the pro-settler right, which has threatened to bring him down if he hands any more of the occupied West Bank to Yasser Arafat.
Like the dog that did not bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, the most revealing Israeli declaration of the week may turn out to be the one that was not uttered.
Richard Strauss\’s opera \”Salome\” had its Israelipremière in Tel Aviv this month. Strauss, who died in 1949,served, however briefly, as a cultural official in Adolf Hitler\’s Nazi administration. The season, by the visiting Kirov Opera from St.Petersburg, was an unchallenged hit. Strauss has been forgiven,perhaps because he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and soon learned thefolly of his ways.
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