Hebrew Speaking Criminals (1977)

Today's Golden Oldie is from 1977.

Chaim Nachman Bialik was Israel's great national poet. He lived in the pre-state era. The Hebrew speakers around him dreamed of an age in which a Hebrew-speaking state in the land of the Hebrews would be considered "normal". Bialik died in 1934. Fourteen years before the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.

Bialik is credited with saying “We will be a normal state when we have the first Hebrew prostitute, the first Hebrew thief and the first Hebrew policeman.”

I'm showing this Golden Oldie because the faces of Hebrew-Speaking criminals are now splashed across the front pages of our local Hebrew papers. We are in the midst of an about-to-explode Hebrew-speaking Israeli Mafia gang war on our streets. And Hebrew-speaking policemen are trying to quelch it.

The story in TIME begins...

"Tel Aviv gangster Ya'acov Alperon liked his violence up close and personal. He relied on his boxer's swift, sledgehammer fists and the blade of a knife to terrorize Tel Aviv's shopkeepers, brothel owners and drug dealers into paying protection money. But in the end, what finally got Alperon was that most impersonal of assassin's weapons: the car bomb." -more.

The irony of the whole mess is that Bialik would not be proud.

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