Word: masada
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...Israeli Arab writer Attalah Mansour describes the Israelis' predicament with an Oriental image: ''Instead of stepping on the snake that threatened them, they swallowed it. Now they have to live with it, or die from it.'' Once when the columnist Stewart Alsop wrote that the Israelis have a ''Masada complex,'' a besieged mentality, preferring collective suicide to surrender, Prime Minister Golda Meir replied, ''It is true. We do have a Masada complex. We have a pogrom complex. We have a Hitler complex.'' Yehoshafat Harkabi, once the chief of Israeli military intelligence and now a professor of international relations...
...ignited in either Afghanistan ("too far away for us") or in Central America ("too far away for them"). The most probable place would be the Middle East. "But, you know, the Russians might be a little goosey about going in there because they could think, 'Those Israelis have a Masada complex.' Someone pushes the Israelis, the Israelis might just bomb the bastards...
...weekend in The Hague. "You make your own festival," says director Theo van den Hoek. Visitors can go pure with Chicago's spectacular pianist-singer Patricia Barber and trumpeter Dave Douglas, or leaven tradition with deep house, like Norwegian Bugge Wesseltoft, or with klezmer, like John Zorn's Electric Masada. If that's all too demanding, no problem: a full weekend's schedule can be crafted with the likes of Bonnie Raitt, Steve Winwood and Solomon Burke. No one's keeping score; the idea is to keep the beat...
Even his friends suggest a dark side. "Will Smith is Evander Holyfield, and Martin is Mike Tyson," says Steve White, a Martin writer and onetime Lawrence roommate. "I like Tyson; he'll do anything for you. But he's misunderstood." Jamie Masada, who runs the L.A. comedy club the Laugh Factory, saw a change in Lawrence as fame engulfed him: "The illusion got to his head. He came in with bodyguards, security people. Some people can handle it. But if you're not focused and strong, it can kill...
...cool reason and enlightened choice when he must. But who can say whether the realpolitik pressures of governance will override an ingrained skeptical and vigilant view of the Arab world that underpins Likud's siege mentality? Its fundamental belief, says political scientist Sprinzak, "is, 'We're still at Masada, much stronger, not as isolated, but still a Jewish island in a sea of hostile Arabs." Leaders who can assess their choices only in terms of preconceived, fixed notions, who refuse to benefit from experience, who reject contrary signs of a better course, says historian Tuchman, are the ones doomed...