Remember when we were young, in Tel Aviv? Were we beautiful like the kids at the Nova festival? Remember camping out in fields and parking lots all over the country? Weed covered in sand and only four types of beer at the bar? Kapulski and Spaghettim? Shotei HaNevua and Beit Habubot? Remember our wedding in Herzliya? Do you know where the video is? Remember thinking maybe they didn’t kill the three teens they kidnapped in 2014? The Breakfast Club? The Champa …
I woke up hungover in downtown Austin on Juneteenth 2002, three months before I moved to Israel for the first time. I called my pop from a payphone and waited for him across the street, at a park where a church was having a BBQ or a picnic. A nice older woman gave me an orange soda and offered me a plate, perhaps seeing what state I was in. I chugged the can and waited for my pop, but by the …
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 …
“Which one of y’all tweeted about the cookies?” The attorney posing the question looked down the corridor where I was sitting on a bench at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin working on my laptop. I raised my hand and apologetically took credit for the tweet. Jury deliberations had stretched for hours and the legal teams had left for dinner. The legal team for Alex Jones’ ex-wife Kelly had left cookies and brownies in some Tupperware on a bench and I’d tweeted – …
From InfoWars to CustodyWars – Covering the Alex Jones Trial Read More »
It was at a shitty pizza place in south Austin that I first realized sports dreams come true sometimes. I was 17 that afternoon in 1996, sitting at Double Dave’s on South Lamar with my best friend and his cousin, watching the unranked Longhorns beat #3 Nebraska in the first-ever Big XII championship. The 8-4 Horns were three touchdown underdogs against a Nebraska team that was undefeated in the peak of the Tom Osborne era, when they were every bit what …
I rear-ended some settlers in a mini-van in the West Bank that afternoon, just before pulling into the settlement of Talmon for the funeral. There was no damage and we parted ways with a smile, joining the convoy snaking up to the ceremony. Hundreds of people were waiting in Talmon to bury 16-year-old Gil-Ad Shaer, murdered 18 days earlier on June 12th along with teenagers Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrah, after they were kidnapped at a hitchhiking post in the West …
It’s startling sometimes the difference an hour or two can make. Wednesday went from a quiet morning with my infant daughter and not much happening in Israel, to a gunfight on the Egypt border between smugglers and IDF troops, and then, later in the day, a deadly attack in Jerusalem in which a Palestinian man rammed his car into passengers at a light rail stop, killing a 3-month-old girl and wounding 8 others. From that point on a familiar scene played …
Somebody’s dog won’t shut the fuck up, and some fool – let’s call him Amichai – keeps dropping in and out of the conference call, bringing things to a halt each time. Once a week or so the Israel Police hold a conference call with crime reporters from all the national outlets. It’s usually when a big story breaks, or before a gag order is lifted, and they want to make sure everybody has the police narrative and the chance to …
No one knows how long the bombs were stashed at the school, but it could have been weeks, maybe longer, that hundreds of kids passed through the school none the wiser. The weapons were stashed in a closet inside a classroom that hadn’t been used for some time. It was a serious haul: 13 mortar shells, three rifles, incendiary flares, and sacks filled with hundreds of rounds of .9mm ammunition. The arsenal was found in Abu Snan only a few …
Carmi Gillon is not impressed. Following a series of “Price Tag” attacks (acts of vandalism or violence directed at Arabs, often in response to Israeli government policy in the Palestinian Territories) within the Green Line, the former Shin Bet Chief said Israel could stop the attacks if the authorities really wanted to and that like the agency dealt with the Jewish underground when he was in charge, they could do the same if they just had the willpower. “We don’t …
On Price Tag attacks, tough talk and weak suggestions Read More »