search
Abraham Rabinovich
Abraham Rabinovich
Denis Michael Rohan sits inside a bulletproof glass box at his trial for setting fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque, at Binyanei Hauma convention center, Jerusalem, October 7, 1969. (Fritz Cohen/GPO)
August 23, 2019, 2:30 am
How an Australian sheepshearer’s al-Aqsa arson nearly torched Middle East peace
On August 23, 1969, kibbutz volunteer Denis Rohan listened to the voices in his head and started a fire on the Temple Mount, nearly igniting a regional war
By Abraham Rabinovich
Israeli soldiers at the Syrian ceasefire line in the Golan Heights are seen, October 31, 1973, after sudden cold, rain and fog hit them. Female soldier is radio operator Zehava Mizrachi. Other soldiers are unidentified. (AP Photo)
September 18, 2018, 10:40 am
The Yom Kippur War: When Israel’s Arabs didn’t rise up
At a traffic circle near Nazareth, I saw tables with soft drinks, sandwiches, cakes — set up for the troops. There were scenes like this nationwide, but here the women were Arabs
By Abraham Rabinovich
Israeli missile boat flotilla on maneuvers. (Israel Government Press Office)
April 17, 2018, 10:13 am
How Israel became a naval startup nation with the famous boats of Cherbourg
When a young journalist had a startling hunch about Israel’s military capacity, a lot of persistence persuaded the navy to go to great (secret) lengths to help him verify it
By Abraham Rabinovich
An Israeli tank crosses the Suez Canal (Israel Defense Forces Archive)
September 29, 2017, 10:23 am
Reversal of fortune: How the IDF turned the Yom Kippur War around
In this excerpt from his newly updated book, Abraham Rabinovich shows how a plea for help from Syria’s Assad to Egypt’s Sadat opened the way to Israel’s crossing of the Suez Canal
By Abraham Rabinovich
Abraham Rabinovich (center) on Temple Mount, 1967 (photo credit: author's photo)
May 24, 2017, 4:15 pm
An American in war-torn Jerusalem witnesses the battle for the Temple Mount
Fifty years ago, in the days leading up to the Six Day War, a plucky young journalist from Long Island flew to Israel on his first self-imposed war assignment. Here’s what he saw
By Abraham Rabinovich
Abraham Rabinovich
May 31, 2016, 5:52 pm
Abraham Rabinovich
The Yom Kippur case for army intel
Bennett’s demands for military briefings recall a catastrophic day when Israeli cabinet ministers sat in the dark
Brig. Gen. (ret.) Shalom Harari (photo credit: YouTube)
December 21, 2014, 10:58 pm
700 troops could have died retaking Gaza, ex-general says
Former senior IDF official says Hamas wanted to draw soldiers into central Gaza’s maze of tunnels
By Abraham Rabinovich and TOI staff
Illustrative photo of an ultra-Orthodox man yelling as he walks in Mea Shearim where police were breaking up a protest using water canon. The protest, in August 1996, was by local ultra-Orthodox residents seeking to close a main road in the area to traffic on Shabbat. (Photo credit: Nati Shohat Flash90)
October 3, 2014, 8:40 pm
The police spy who found his ‘brothers’ in Mea Shearim
Veteran reporter Abraham Rabinovich’s new ebook ‘Jerusalem on Earth’ deals with the evolution of the city in the decades after the 1967 Six Day War. This exclusive excerpt tells the story of a young cop, Hanan, who was sent undercover into the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood in the early 1970s, posing as a non-Orthodox Jew seeking to ‘return’ to religion, in order to penetrate a militant fringe group. The way Hanan was treated, and the impact the experience had on him, offers lessons of lasting value amid our relentless intra-Jewish frictions
By Abraham Rabinovich
Abraham Rabinovich
April 7, 2014, 1:37 pm
Abraham Rabinovich
Wake up and smell the sleaze
The Holyland verdict is a call to activists and journalists to wage war on the country’s rampant corruption
Prime minister Golda Meir and defense minister Moshe Dayan meeting with troops on the Golan Heights, on November 21, 1973. (Ron Frenkel/GPO)
September 12, 2013, 12:28 pm
Three years too late, Golda Meir understood how war could have been avoided
The grandmother who led Israel at the time of the 1973 war made a series of instinctive, correct decisions as the battle broke out, writes historian Abraham Rabinovich, but she’d missed a chance in 1970 to prevent it
By Abraham Rabinovich
Mordechai Gur (seated, with black curly hair) and his troops survey the Old City before launching their attack, May 1967. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA/Mazel123)
May 20, 2012, 7:13 am
‘Be ready to break into the Old City’
The fateful June 5, 1967, order to paratroop commander Mordechai Gur ‘just slipped out,’ author Abraham Rabinovich recalls in this excerpt from his landmark book, ‘The Battle for Jerusalem’
By Abraham Rabinovich
Load More
Join us!
A message from the Editor of Times of Israel
David Horovitz

For as little as $6 a month, you can help support our independent journalism — and enjoy special benefits and status as a Times of Israel Community member!

The Times of Israel covers one of the most complicated, and contentious, parts of the world. Determined to keep readers fully informed and enable them to form and flesh out their own opinions, The Times of Israel has gradually established itself as the leading source of independent and fair-minded journalism on Israel, the region and the Jewish world.

We've achieved this by investing ever-greater resources in our journalism while keeping all of the content on our site free.

Unlike many other news sites, we have not put up a paywall. But we would like to invite readers who can afford to do so, and for whom The Times of Israel has become important, to help support our journalism by joining The Times of Israel Community. Join now and for as little as $6 a month you can both help ensure our ongoing investment in quality journalism, and enjoy special status and benefits as a Times of Israel Community member.

Join our community Sign in to stop seeing this