Lying on a hill not 400 yards from two terrorists who were firing indiscriminately on the local Jewish civilians behind us, it should have been simple. It’s you or them, on top of which you are … more

This week one of modern Israel’s greatest war heroes, Yanosh ben Gal, was laid to rest in the military cemetery in Givat Shaul. To honor his memory, this story is excerpted from a 2011 … more

The radio squawked with commands. I took out my pen and pad out to write down a list of code words for map locations that I would need to translate into coordinates for our impromptu mission. This … more

Recently, the media reported that two days before his execution, Adolph Eichmann penned a letter to then-President Yitzchak Ben-Zvi begging for clemency. Facing his imminent death by hanging (the … more

In April of 1988 I was called up for my first reserve duty, a few months after the first intifada exploded. We were stationed for a month in a nasty little place called Jebalya, a Palestinian … more

At 6:22 am on Oct. 23, 1983, a member of the Islamic Jihad got into his 19 ton yellow Mercedes Benz truck on an otherwise normal day, and headed for Beirut International airport, where the 24th … more

It had been a really long day, at the end of a really long week. We were in the middle of infantry officers’ training course and we had spent the week learning and practicing maneuvers in the … more

Rav Nosson Tzvi Finkel z”tzl, the famed rosh yeshiva of the Mir, once asked a small group of businessmen what they thought was the most important lesson of the Holocaust. “Never … more

Someone recently sent me this story about Moe Berg, the strangest Jew ever to play baseball: When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans … more

The thundering sounds of artillery fire echoed through the valleys beneath the Golan Heights and across the Sea of Galilee. All along the northern border with Syria, civilians were huddled in their … more