Sublime

THE RAID ON QIBYA also marked the beginning of the public—and controversial—career of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s daring and brilliant military commander. Sharon would prove difficult to label.

Djemal Pasha, who had recently been appointed as Ottoman commander of the Egyptian front, made his anti-Zionist stance eminently clear just a few weeks after the Ottomans entered the war. He disbanded a Turkish-loyalist Jewish defense organization, which had been founded by labor leaders Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi; he closed down the Zionist ne

an effort to control this violence, the British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini the grand mufti of Jerusalem, the spiritual and effectively political leader of the Muslims in Palestine.6 The hope was that by centralizing the religious and political power in one man, whom the British thought they could control, they could limit the passions of the mo

Instead of thanks,” said Peres, “we got bombs.”4 He moved Israel’s elections up by six months, confident that Israelis, repulsed by the Right’s assassination of Rabin, would elect him to lead the country. Indeed, polls showed him with a significant lead over his rival, Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party.

wrote a bestselling book about his experience, Radical, and coauthored another, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, with Sam Harris. He is a lion of human transformation, and I am proud to call him a friend.

Where conventional Arab armies and terrorists had failed to achieve their goal of destroying Israel, BDS aimed to succeed by devastating Israel’s economy and isolating its citizens internationally.

a player on the international stage, and was quickly cultivating national, political, and cultural traditions. Many challenges undoubtedly lay ahead, but nineteen years after its founding, Israel had fared far better than anyone might have dared imagine when the United Nations had voted in November 1947 to create a Jewish state.

But then, after the 1993 Oslo Accords, Washington began viewing East Jerusalem as the potential capital of a future Palestinian state.