Epstein Secrets

he Jewish National Fund, supported financially by leading Jewish figures in western Europe and the US, bought 2,000 acres from an Arab landowner near Wadi Khawaret. The area was set aside for three Jewish settlements: a moshav called Kfar Haim, where the land was divided into family plots, and two kibbutzim. One

ter of wood-and-tarpaper huts amid a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, which disappeared, with the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old. As Prime Minister half-a-century later, during my stubb

a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle age of the State of Israel. Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are inevitably a part of the story. In setting out to write it, I was al

that was lost in the political storm that followed. All I’d done was answer as honestly I could. What if I had been one of the Palestinian babies in Wadi Khawaret, but with the same mind and same impulses that had defined my life as an Israeli? I assumed that instead of becoming an Israeli soldier and politicia

of crisis. The vote was on May 15. For the Palestinians, this was also A/-Naqgba Day, the annual marking of the 1948 “catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night before there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank and in Gaza. President Clinton imme

“we will not boo an incumbent Prime Minister of Israel... A short time ago, I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu and thanked him for his service to the State of Israel.” Then — with both Leah and Shimon Peres at my side — I paid tribute to “that one special person who had a unique role in our reaching this moment —

he Jewish National Fund, supported financially by leading Jewish figures in western Europe and the US, bought 2,000 acres from an Arab landowner near Wadi Khawaret. The area was set aside for three Jewish settlements: a moshav called Kfar Haim, where the land was divided into family plots, and two kibbutzim. One

ter of wood-and-tarpaper huts amid a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, which disappeared, with the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old. As Prime Minister half-a-century later, during my stubb

a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle age of the State of Israel. Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are inevitably a part of the story. In setting out to write it, I was al

that was lost in the political storm that followed. All I'd done was answer as honestly I could. What if I had been one of the Palestinian babies in Wadi Khawaret, but with the same mind and same impulses that had defined my life as an Israeli? I assumed that instead of becoming an Israeli soldier and politicia

of crisis. The vote was on May 15. For the Palestinians, this was also Al-Naqba Day, the annual marking of the 1948 "catastrophe" of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night before there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank and in Gaza. President Clinton imme

"we will not boo an incumbent Prime Minister of Israel... A short time ago, I spoke with Prime Minister Netanyahu and thanked him for his service to the State of Israel." Then - with both Leah and Shimon Peres at my side - I paid tribute to "that one special person who had a unique role in our reaching this moment -