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For decades, Judith Miller covered the Middle East and Israel’s ties with Arab states for The New York Times; amid the rise of radical Islam, one Israeli leader grasped the threat early — starting with an unscheduled coffee in a New York hotel room
When I arrived in Egypt as The New York Times’ Cairo Bureau Chief in the early 1980’s, I never imagined that I would be spending so much time in Israel.
I had barely unpacked when I found myself on a plane to Tel Aviv, not to cover a story in Israel, but the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut, a terrorist attack that had killed 241 unsuspecting U.S. servicemen as they slept in their barracks.
Lebanon had cancelled flights into the country. So I flew to Israel instead and drove north through the night to Beirut from Israel, or “Dixie,” as Beirut-based correspondents then called Israel to avoid the scrutiny of the Arab intelligence officials who often tracked our conversations and meetings with representatives of what many Arab officials insisted on calling the “Zionist entity,” refusing to dignify the Jewish state with a name.
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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of City Journal and adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow her on Twitter here.