I've been home from participating in Operation Protective Edge for about a week. I am in uniform no more, though I still wear my dog tags in solidarity with my brothers in arms, who, like all citizens of Israel, await the outcome of cease-fire talks in Cairo. Because we never wanted this war.  It was forced upon us by Hamas.  The current cease-fire is set to expire Monday at Midnight Israel time. Hamas has repeatedly rejected and/or violated each past cease-fire, so no one knows what will happen with this one.

I admit to being a bit cranky. 

I don't think it's PTSD, though I've been to too many funerals, had a few too many close calls with rockets and mortars, had people with whom I'd celebrated the night before be killed the next day, seen chunks of the skull of a sixteen year old blown off by shrapnel from a mortar round I successfully dodged, only through luck and the grace of a loving G-d, who, I choose to believe, still has some  use for me on the planet. 

The song "Fire and Rain" is playing on the local oldies station and I think to myself, " Oh James, you Sweet Hippie Child, you haven't seen anything," 

You haven't been in a shelter during a rocket attack trying to comfort a little girl with nothing but the BS of an adult trying to comfort a child in a rocket attack, who knows better. You haven't seen people race for cover knowing they have only seven seconds before risking being blown apart. You haven't met people who've had to lock themselves in a so called safe room, while only a few hundred meters away a dozen terrorists, armed with anti tank missiles that could incinerate their home, machine guns, grenades, thousands of rounds of ammunition and hand cuffs, with which to take them prisoner and drag them through terrorist tunnels, into underground cells, are on the prowl, and they, this sweet family in a locked room, know that they are their targets. They will live or die in the next hour, depending upon the skill and bravery of eighteen and nineteen year old boys and girls, who are willing to lay down their lives, not to promulgate any occupation, nor subjugate another people, but to protect their homes and families, and on this particular day, some of those kids will do just that. They will lay down their lives to protect this family and others like them. The terrorists' secret "Divine Victory Plan" to kill, maim and take hostage, Israeli men women and children will be foiled and there will be new funerals of nineteen year olds who've given their lives to save the lives of that family huddled together behind a locked door in their home. And you think you've seen Fire and Rain, James?

Since I'm back I've become appalled by the lack of journalistic integrity I've seen in some coverage, and the sheer ignorance in the coverage of others.

I like listening to NPR on weekends. They have a comedy game show called "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me." I'm driving from a friend's house and searching for it on the radio and an NPR news cast comes on. It's about Gaza, so reflexively, like all Israelis, I turn the sound up. Are we at war? Are rockets falling again? The reporter comes on. She has well modulated, upper crust British Public School pronunciation, as she describes the plight of Palestinian Fisherman in Gaza who now have a five hundred meter limit placed on their fishing activities by the Israeli Navy in the wake of the recent war. She describes it as if it is some cold hearted, at the very least, collective punishment of innocent Gazan Fisherman.

I mean how cruel can these Zionist oppressors of the downtrodden Gazan fishermen be?

We're talking fishermen here!

Peter was a Fisherman. Jesus preached on the shores of  the Sea of Galilee...to Fishermen! Just like these poor Palestinian Fishermen whom the Israelis cruelly limit to fishing only five hundred meters from shore!

Nazis!

I can almost see a new site to match "Jesus at the Checkpoint," which tries to say if Jesus of Nazereth were alive today he would be a poor Palestinian, harassed by Roman-like, Jewish, Nazi soldiers at checkpoints in the West Bank. Jesus would be, were he alive today, separated from his neighbors by "The Apartheid Wall"! 

Never mind that the checkpoints were a response to, and preventative measure against, the suicide bombers who claimed a thousand Israeli lives, who blew up women and children in pizza parlors and Passover Seders.

As for the so-called " Apartheid Wall," it is a security fence, only three percent of which is a thirty foot high wall. And why is there even three percent which is a thirty foot high wall? Because for years Palestinian terrorists from Kalkiliya and Tul Karem would shoot at cars on the Trans-Israel highway and kill Israelis. And by the way, since the barrier has been there, it's stopped  almost a hundred percent of the suicide attacks. Period.

It's not Apartheid you bozo! It's self-preservation! 

Twenty percent of Israel's population are Arabs, many of whom define themselves as Palestinian. They sit on our Supreme Court, which recently sent a former Israeli president and a former Israeli Prime Minister to Jail. They study and teach in our universities, serve in our military, are doctors and nurses in our hospitals, and enjoy the protection of the least corrupt, most liberal judiciary in the entire Middle East. Indeed no Arab country affords them the rights they have as citizens of Israel. Does that sound like Apartheid to you? I'll tell you what sounds like Apartheid. It is the fact that virtually every Palestinian leader has said that not one Jew will remain in a Palestinian state once it is created. In other words Judenrein. Jew-Free. Hitler's wet dream

But I digress. 

Pardon the rant. I said I was cranky. Back to the poor Gazan fishermen who can't fish beyond a five hundred meter limit imposed by the Israeli Navy during the current war. What this Brit twit of an Oxbridge reporter fails to mention is that Hamas terrorists attempted to stage a water-borne terrorist attack on Zikkim beach near the Israeli city of Ashkelon. Happily, they were engaged and killed by some more 19-year-old Israeli kids willing to lay down their lives to protect the Israeli civilian farmers at Kibbutz Zikkim, where the terrorists were headed. That's why there's a five hundred meter restriction! Because Hamas terrorists, posing as poor Gazan fisherman, indeed, tried to carry out a terrorist attack against our civilians. Gazan  fisherman are paying the price for Hamas terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. But the Oxbridge modulated tones never mention that. They just sadly intone her name, and solemnly bear witness to yet  another  Israeli act of  tyranny. 

Gimme a break!

Do your homework you twit. Keep your prejudice, if you like, in the melodrama you wrote in your head before you ever even got there, but provide at least a little bit of context. Whattaya say?

All of which brings me to Jon Voight.

Mr. Voight recently penned an open letter to Javier Bardem and his equally talented wife, Penelope Cruz, for signing an open letter condemning Israel as a war criminal without once mentioning the name, let alone the deeds of Hamas. Mr. Voight took them to task and recounted Israel's history in a workman-like fashion, hoping to educate them, and his readers, regarding the facts leading up to the current conflict. 

Mr. Voight has thus, recently been taken to task himself, by a member of Academia who has chosen to identify with the downtrodden, put-upon, maligned and much misunderstood freedom fighters of Hamas. 

He has done so by taking his stand against the capitalist, pig, oppressors of the Palestinian masses, namely the dreaded Zionists. 

He flaunts his academic credentials to poor Mr. Voight, a mere actor, and present the true facts and myths surrounding Israel, even going so far as to cite like-minded Jewish and Israeli academics, in order to enlighten the aforementioned, and hopelessly naive Mr. Voight.  He, after all, has written and edited books specializing on (his grammar, not mine) the history and contemporary realities of Israel, Zionism and Palestine. The conclusion which the professor has drawn is that the United States and Israel are to blame "for the suffering Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people."  And to ice that academic cake, and bolster his argument to irrefutable heights, which, no mere actor could ever hope to scale, he quotes that leading expert on all things Middle Eastern, none other than John Leibowitz!

 Oh...what's the matter ? You never heard of John Leibowitz? 

That's because this particular proud Jewish comic, unlike guys named Seinfeld, Sandler, and Stiller, felt he couldn't make it merely on his talent. I mean, who ever heard of a Jewish Comedian? So he Anglicized himself into becoming a homey of the Oxbridge Patron Saint of Palestinian Fisherman, and thus, was born again as, Jon Stewart.

I like Jon Stewart.

I think Jon Stewart's a funny guy.

I think he's so funny, in fact, he could even have made it even if his name was Leibowitz.

But I'd no more depend on his analysis of the current conflict in the Middle East, than I would consult with Dr. Pepper about a medical condition. Dr. Pepper's a heck of a soft drink. But by Doctors, he's no doctor.

So this is not an open letter to this bozo of new left chic Academia. But it is a refutation of the same talking points raised by his fellow travelers seeking to delegitimize Israel's very right to exist as the sovereign nation state of the Jewish people. First of all, what you have to understand is, the very notion of a sovereign Jewish state, within any borders, is anathema to this crowd. They live in an enlightened, post-nationalistic mindset, where the only people in the Middle East entitled to be nationalists, in fact, are those who wish to establish, not a nation, but a Caliphate.

Regarding the birth of Israel in 1948, Mr. Voight rightly cites it having come about as a result of Israel's acceptance of the 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arab League and the Palestinians, represented by their revered leader Haj Amin Al Husseini, rejected the partition plan and the establishment of any Jewish State within any borders, and as Mr. Voight pointed out, Israel was subsequently "attacked by five surrounding Arab countries committed to driving them into the sea,"

The professor counters that poor Mr. Voight has been taken in by a Zionist myth. "This is a distortion of the actual history, which saw Zionism arrive on the soil of a Palestine that was already in the midst of its own modernization." The Zionists, he states, deployed "the conquest of labor" and then "the conquest of the land" to increasingly powerful effect once the British conquered Palestine in 1917" 

I have heard this particular talking point from various radical left  professors who have almost inexplicably cast their lot with misogynistic, gay hating, democracy hating, female genital mutilating, child bride abusing, murderous thug terrorists! I am a child of the left. I attended my first civil rights march at the age of ten. My first presidential campaign was for Jack Kennedy and my second was for Bobby. You can still find my blog supporting Barack Obama's first election on the Huffington Post. To have people who proclaim that they are for the universal rights of man, for equality of the sexes, for peace and justice, side with Hamas terrorists and claim their superiority over a Western democracy like Israel, makes me want to puke at the very perversity of the notion.

As the saying goes, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

So what exactly was this "soil of a Palestine…already in the midst of its own modernization" when Zionisim arrived?  Well let's quote someone who was there, on that very soil a mere fifteen years before Zionism arrived. Mark Twain toured the Holy Land in 1867.  Zionism arrived in 1882. What was the soil that Twain, no slouch of a social observer he, saw and described in his book, Innocents Abroad?

In describing the Valley of Jezreel, he states, "There is not a solitary village throughout it's whole extent -- not thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings." 

I mention the Valley of Jezreel in particular, because that's where I was partially raised, went to high school, from whence I went into the army, where I was married, where I taught high school and farmed and wrote and where my first born son, of blessed memory, was born.  I know the Valley of Jezreel as well as I know any place on earth. It is the breadbasket of Israel, home to some of the most successful and stunning agriculture on earth. It is alive and bustling with farming villages, schools, colleges, high tech industry, and agriculture R&D that is the envy of the world. It abounds in forests, each tree of which was bought and paid for by Jews around the world, as was the land itself, which was stolen from not one Palestinian, because it was worthless and desolate and sold at inflated prices to the Jews who were so insane they paid handsomely for barren soil, which they turned into paradise through..."the conquest of Labor"!

There was a time when leftists actually praised labor!  But this was Jewish labor. Jews working with their hands in backbreaking labor and I am old enough to have actually known that founding generation, and their love of that land which was as bare and desolate as when Twain first visited.  They made it bloom through "the conquest of labor." Unlike these pious Academic poseurs, they engaged in backbreaking work to plant forests and create thriving agricultural villages. They were idealistic young students who displaced no one in their "conquest of the land," which any enlightened progressive today should realize was carried out by the oldest and most effective ecological society in the world, The Jewish National Fund, which saw to it that Israel was the only nation on earth to enter the twenty-first century with more trees than it had in the century before. And you creeps dare to distort that into some kind of crime!

Here's is Twain's description of the Galilee before the arrival of Zionism: "These un peopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines...; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum, this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms...A desolation here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action." That was the Galilee then. Visit it today and be amazed at "the pomp of life and action" all of which was brought in through the conquest of labor of the Zionist Jews literally reclaiming the land from the desert it had become.

Regarding Israel's acceptance of the 1947 UN partition plan and the Arab/ Palestinian rejection of same, the professor states, "The Zionist leadership ‘accepted’ the terms of the 1947 Partition Plan. In reality, they had little intention of actually fulfilling them, and over the next year, through inter communal conflict and then all out war, three quarters of a million Palestinians were permanently forced from their homes,"

Again the intellectual dishonesty by a supposed academic is simply staggering.

Here are the facts:

There never was a state of Palestine. Never. Not once in history. Prior to WW I, what is called Palestine, which comprised Israel of today, Gaza, Judea and Samaria and all of Jordan, comprised a sleepy backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans sided with the Germans, In WW I, and for those who don't remember, they lost the war. The League of Nations, forerunner of the UN, broke up the old Ottoman empire and at the San Remo Conference of 1921, passed a resolution "In favor of the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people…." The resolution went on to state. "Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine, and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country..." the resolution went on to appoint Britain to have a mandate over Palestine, which "shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions  as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.... The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control and Government of any foreign power." 

That last point is particularly important because Britain, in contravention of its duties as a mandatory power, lopped off the bulk of the territory and created out of whole cloth, with 70% of what was to have been the Jewish National home, a Palestinian Arab country, and called it Transjordan, which today is known simply as Jordan. But under international law it was to have been part of "The Jewish National Home"!

In 1936, following Arab massacres of ancient Jewish communities in Hebron and Safed, the British appointed the Peel Commission, which offered to partition the 30% of remaining land into two states; one Jewish and one Arab. Two thirds of the state would have gone to the Palestinian Arabs and one third to the Jews.  The Palestinian Jews accepted the plan and the Arabs, who called themselves Arabs, and not Palestinians, again led by Haj Amin Al Husseini, rejected it. The Jews accepted this tiny enclave for one reason. It was 1937 and they knew what was about to happen to the Jews of Germany and Europe. When Hitler wanted to rid Europe of its Jews, not one country in the world would take them in and they literally went up in the smoke and ash of the crematoria of Hitler's death camps. Had Israel been born, even in it's Lilliputian form in 1937, six million Jews and all their descendants would have been alive today. 

But, say the esteemed academic supporters and enablers of Hamas and their ilk, that just proves their point. The Palestinians had no part in the Holocaust, and yet they were made to pay the price by accepting into their midst the European survivors of European mass murder, that had nothing to do with them.

Really? Really?

Here are the facts, yet again, troublesome as I know they are.

When Britain went to war against Nazi Germany, the Jews of Palestine rushed to enlist in the British Army and eventually formed the Jewish Brigade which, together with its predecessor Jewish Palestinian units, fought valiantly in North Africa and in Europe, and played their part in the defeat of Nazi Germany.

And where was Haj Amin Al Husseini, the revered leader, indeed founder, (and uncle of Yasser Arafat) of the Palestinian Arab National Movement?  

He was Hitler's poodle in Berlin. 

So don't peddle this revisionist crap that the Palestinians had no part in the extermination of European Jewry and Nazi war crimes, because their leader Haj Amin Al Husseini sure as hell did!

He met with Mussolini and Himmler and Eichman and Hitler himself.

He joined the Nazi war effort by helping recruit Muslim units under German SS command that were responsible for mass murders in Croatia and Hungary. 

Indeed Yugoslavia sought to have Haj Amin Al Husseini indicted for war crimes for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslims, who participated in mass murders of Jews and others in Central Europe. In 1944, on Radio Berlin, Haj Amin Al Husseini, the father of the Palestinian National movement said, "Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them! This pleases God, history and religion!"

He issued a statement saying, “Those lands suffering under the British and Bolshevik yoke impatiently await the moment when the Axis powers will emerge victorious. We must dedicate ourselves to unceasing struggle against Britain, that dungeon of peoples."

That's what the leader of the Palestinian Arabs was doing when my foster father and the other members of His Majesty's Jewish Brigade were fighting and defeating the Nazis in Europe.

As to the 1948 War of Liberation, far from being invaded by five surrounding Arab countries determined to make the Mediterranean red with the blood of the Jews, the professor claims that the Arab forces were minimal and badly trained and equipped, and were sent to prevent themselves from looking like collaborators, and to prevent their rival, Haj Amin Al Husseini, "from establishing a state". 

Wait a second! Did this Bozo just say the Arab armies invaded the nascent state of Israel to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state?

You bet. That's what he said. The Arabs, not the Israelis, prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state. 

Egypt conquered Gaza and annexed it, without giving its inhabitants benefit of Egyptian citizenship. 

Jordan annexed the West Bank and all the Palestinians there became Jordanian citizens. And by the way, no one at the time suggested ever turning those lands into a Palestinian state. At those times when they referred to occupied territory, they were talking about, and Hamas still talks about, Tel Aviv!

As to how badly trained and equipped the poor five invading Arab armies were...no less an expert than General George Marshall, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during WWII and President Truman's most trusted advisor, said that if the Jews declared independence they would be wiped out within two weeks. And he was right to think so. The "poorly equipped" Egyptians had a 10,000 man armored column less than an hour and a half drive from Tel Aviv. There was not one Israeli soldier between them and Israel's largest city. On the next morning they would drive into Tel Aviv and the two thousand year old dream of a Jewish state would be over. And what did those colonialist, imperialist, pig, Zionists have, with which to fight that 10,000 man armored column? 

They had four Czech-built ME 109 fighter planes which had been smuggled into Israel in pieces, re assembled in hangars, had never been test flown, had never had their weapons test fired, possessed neither avionics nor radios so the pilots had to communicate with each other with hand signals, and for aeronautical charts had Palestine Auto Club road maps and boy scout compasses glued to the dashboards.

I know because I am privileged to know the man who led the attack of those four ME109s. He refers to me as his younger brother and it is one of the greatest honors of my life to be counted as his friend. His name is Lou Lenart. He and his three other pilots were told that the fate of the Jewish state rested on their shoulders. They were to take off and stop that armored column. If they failed, Israel was dead. Lou pulled out onto the tarmac, looked behind him at the three other planes and saw the entire Israeli Air Force. 

But they did it. 

They stopped the Egyptian column dead in its tracks and bought Israel the time it needed to survive.

Of the four pilots, they suffered fifty percent casualties on their first mission.

In Israel's war of Liberation in 1948 it lost one percent of its population killed. That would be the equivalent of America losing three million killed in one year. America has lost a little over one percent of that number in ten years of combat and they say America is “war weary.”  What do you think Israel was?

Finally, these mouthpieces for terrorist thugs, wrapping themselves in the robes of Academia, claim that it was Israel that started this current war, and not Hamas.

But that's quite simply a lie. 

And we know it's a lie because Hamas did not start digging those thirty two terrorist attack tunnels when Israel started it's aerial campaign against them.  Those tunnels were an offensive weapon which was to have handed Hamas their "shock and awe," their 911 moment that would have brought Israel to its knees. They began digging those tunnels five years ago with the cement and steel they stole from their own people, with the cement and steel that was meant to rebuild Gaza, to build schools and hospitals and prenatal clinics. And instead they used it to build terrorist attack tunnels under Israel's internationally recognized 1967 border, aimed exclusively against Israeli civilians, whom they would have murdered, maimed and taken hostage by the dozens. This was their offense, planned and executed at the time of their choosing. But following their doctrine of carrying out terrorist attacks and then claiming the mantle of victimhood, with so called academics as their mouth pieces and enablers, they had to make it look like it was a response to Israeli aggression. So they publicly ordered the kidnap murder of three Israeli schoolboys on their way home from school. 

And Israel didn't fire a shot into Gaza. They just engaged in a campaign to round up Hamas terrorists in Judea and Samaria, where the boys had been kidnapped and killed. 

Then Hamas started firing rockets at Israel and Israel said repeatedly, “Calm will be answered with Calm."

They must have thought to themselves, " What's a guy got to do to start a war with these Jews?" 

Then they upped their rocket attacks to a hundred a day and Israel still said "calm will be answered with calm" while they began their aerial campaign. 

Finally a ceasefire was to have taken affect. 

Israel accepted it.

Hamas rejected it by launching a major rocket barrage, and then the first of six terrorist tunnel attacks, and that's when Israel had no choice but to respond with a ground invasion to take out what was indeed an existential threat. 

Of the 1800 Palestinians killed in this conflict, 1600 of them would be alive today if Hamas had only accepted the cease-fire Israel accepted immediately and unconditionally. 

But as I said, they weren't interested in a cease-fire.

This was their war and they thought they could win it. 

And don't you buy the crap so-called academics are peddling, that Hamas was the duly democratically elected government of Gaza. Hamas took power, not in an election, but in a bloody coup, machine gunning their fellow Palestinians, blindfolding, binding and throwing them off of multi story buildings. They have terrorized their own people, not only Israel. Their people, indeed, live under the yoke of occupation, but not by Israel, by Hamas. 

And as for the apologists and enablers of Hamas, who contribute to the misery of Palestinians and Israelis alike, while sitting in their club chairs in the faculty lounge, may I suggest that from now on they speak only through the orifice which Mr. Voight has so eloquently enlarged for them, since what they are peddling is pure, unadulterated crap.