Photo: Robert Rosenberg in Tel-Aviv.

Robert had created one of the first websites devoted to peace in the Middle East -- Ariga -- a year earlier, in 1995. He was a big fan of what I was doing to Netanyahu week after week, and the admiration was mutual.

In the third issue of BibiWATCH, I published this exchange:

Tres cool site -- your link will be added to Ariga -- and hope you can quote Ariga occasionally. -- Robert Rosenberg, Israel

Readers of BibiWATCH are encouraged to check out Robert's "Ariga" site; it's excellent.

Later, Robert would host BibiWATCH on the Ariga site -- for free.

We got together, sipped espresso in an outdoor cafe in his beloved Tel-Aviv, spent a weekend shmoozing at my kibbutz Ein Dor, and stayed in touch pretty regularly until I moved to London in 1998.

Robert pioneered the use of the new communications technology to further the most important cause of all -- peace. His untimely death from cancer at the age of 54 means that he will never see the realization of his dream of Jewish-Arab reconciliation.

Robert was a character. A former crime writer, he went on to write a number of crime novels based in Israel. By coincidence, I picked up one in New York in August -- one I hadn't yet read.

May his memory be blessed.