Somewhere Out in Tiza Nabi

Secret service shenanigans in the desert north of Jerusalem.

Somewhere out in tiza nabi

Beyond the highway junction Rimonim Colonel Yossi Ben-Yutzmach waits in the lobby of the Desert Mirage Inn They didn’t call him Slow Joe for nothing It took him forever to find this place And he’s going out of his mind waiting For his contact to show his face

Captain Eran Schverheit steps out from behind a lamppost where he lived up to his nickname Slim Jim He spots the Colonel standing in a crowd of ghosts and silently moves up to him He says Joe! I don’t believe it! You’re the guy I’m supposed to meet? I haven’t seen you in years! So Slow Joe and Slim Jim walk out into the street While behind them the building disappears

Crazy Eddie the Syrian sidles up to the pair And makes the two an offer they can’t refuse You know his prices are insane but they’re always fair Well he paid them ten sheks each for their shoes Now the two dorks from the Shin Bet are left barefoot in the sand with only a bottle of schnapps to their name Of course Joe is too slow to even understand That the microfilm in Jim’s heel was why he came

Eddie slips across the border to Flatbush Giggling at the success of his scheme While back in tiza nabi Jim kicks his own tush And Joe is lost somewhere in a dream He says Man I can’t believe that sap took us for a fool Buying all our secrets for a dime Joe says no man everything is cool I had it in my pupik all the time

Meanwhile back in Brooklyn Eddie makes a pit stop to examine the precious cargo that he stole Opening the false heel it blows its top Leaving Eddie’s head with an extra hole Shrugging his shoulders he throws away the shoe And heads off to Smiling Jack’s for a drink And if you believe this story is true Then mister you ought to see a shrink!

Tiza Nabi … אי שם בארץ

“Tiza Nabi” is Israeli military slang for “the middle of f*king nowhere.” It is derived from the Arabic tiz al-nabi*, “the Prophet’s crack.” (Use with caution around the easily inflamed.)

I’ll describe the origins of this song the way I introduce it on stage: “In the late 1980s I was doing my obligatory stint in the Israel Defense Forces. I was stationed at a base a half hour’s drive north of Jerusalem. Another half an hour east of my base, passing through several Arab villages, you would get to this crossroads where you would see nothing but dust devils and tumbleweeds. So deserted that not even the local Bedouins would go there.

“Meantime, back in the USA, a legendary retail-electronics mogul, known for his over-the-top TV ads, went missing after inflating the prices of his nonexistent stock, then taking the money and disappearing. Nobody knew where the hell he went. For all intents and purposes, he had vanished.

“But when I would travel east on the road from my base, and get to that dusty crossroads, there were no Israelis, no ‘palestinians,’ no nothing, no nobody! … But I could swear I saw Crazy Eddie out there skipping along through the desert between the mirages and the tumbleweeds.

“This here is a song about that close encounter.”

And the music came to be late one night not long before that, as I tried falling asleep in a hotel room near the beach in Ashkelon, with Tom Waits on the radio melding with the Mizrahi band playing outside my window.

Several years later, once I had put my first band together at the Jersey Shore, this song became a regular part of our setlist. We played it in clubs all over the area and it became a favorite, for a short time at least, among regulars at T-Birds and The Saint in Asbury Park. Later on it was released on the album There’s A Voice by REALITY SHOCK, and rereleased on my *Boardwalk Mystic* collection in 2015.

— Lyrics and commentary © The Hesh Inc. Originally published between 2016–2025.