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13 Hours in Cairo

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
September 15, 2011

Over the weekend, Israel’s embassy in Cairo—symbol of its most precious and most precarious alliance—was stormed and ransacked by angry thousands. Six Israeli guards could have found themselves at the mob’s hands were it not for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desperate diplomacy, the U.S. ambassador’s persistence, a timely intervention by President Obama—and the doggedness of Israel’s ambassador, Yitzhak Levanon. Today in Tablet Magazine, in his first U.S. interview, Judith Miller talks to Levanon and learns firsthand the details of the most harrowing 13 hours of his life, including the embassy staff’s being spirited away on the same plane that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Israel, and Netanyahu’s pledge to a guard named Jonathan to call his family if he was killed.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.