Middle East | Middle East
Aug.16.2010
The present Israeli government seems to make a specialty of dropping the ball. The only thing the top ministers won’t drop is the buck. They’re very adept at passing that.Testimony last week revealed the lack of responsibility at the top of the Israeli government. Before a committee investigating a...
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Aug.04.2010
I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower...
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Aug.01.2010
JERUSALEM — Israelis like to point out that theirs is the only democracy in a Middle East otherwise dominated by repressive regimes. Given the performance of legislators in the parliamentary session that just ended here, you might be forgiven for asking: with democracy like this, who needs...
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Jul.23.2010
JERUSALEM — Palestinian negotiators said again this week they’d refuse to re-enter direct peace talks with Israel unless the current partial freeze on construction in Israeli settlements is extended when its term runs out in September.But as a report released this week by the Israeli human-rights...
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Jul.17.2010
JERUSALEM—If you asked about a moment that encapsulates the tragedy of the Israelis and Palestinians, there’d be no shortage of incidents, fatal and wrathful, from which to choose. This week, however, I’d point out an occasion that was less shocking but just as poignant.In a banquet hall of the...
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Jul.16.2010
World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with...
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Jul.15.2010
Cairo is a place we all know to some extent, even if only in the romantic images of the pyramids and the Sphinx. A short visit there is enough to make you wonder about how much of this teeming metropolis you really don’t know. No writer gets so deep as Sanna Negus under the skin of this ancient...
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Jun.27.2010
If you’ve ever slathered your skin in the healing, mineral-rich mud of the Dead Sea, you may want to stop reading now.More than 8 million gallons of sewage from East Jerusalem is pumped downhill to the Dead Sea, raw and untreated, every day. That’s not just a little icky for those of us who like to...
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Jun.20.2010
JERUSALEM — Time was anyone with an interest in the Middle East could be guaranteed a couple of books a year would be brought out by U.S. journalists based in the region. Now many of those correspondents are history, with news bureaus closing and those that remain cutting back. The new books...
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Jun.17.2010
The company you keep can put the culture around you in a new light, let you see it as you haven’t before.That’s true when I travel to different countries and discover that readers in Germany have a particular take on my Palestinian crime novels which differs from the way they look to Americans, for...
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