June 5, 2015

ISIS and the Tijuana Drug-Smuggling Tunnels

The United States faces a clear and present danger. It is not theoretical, it is actual. The pieces are in place. The relationships are established. The will and capability have been clearly demonstrated. And, if that’s not enough to keep you u...

September 10, 2014

'How does it feel to know you're killing innocent women and children?'

That was the question that the major network correspondent of a major network morning show popped as her first query out of the box, to a soldier in a 155 MM howitzer artillery battery, during the opening days of the Second Lebanon War, against ...

August 19, 2014

Speaking Truth to Crap

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 ta...

August 4, 2014

As We Redeploy

The second phase of the Israel Defense Force's "Operation Protective Edge" is complete. But make no mistake, this was Hamas's well-planned, well-financed, well-thought-out war. This was Hamas' offensive, painstakingly pu...

August 3, 2014

The end of innocence for Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz

There are numbers of well meaning people who, having seen the pictures of horror out of Gaza, have become unwitting, and I believe unwilling, useful innocents, of a murderous terrorist army that sacrifices the Palestinian people of Gaza on the altar ...

August 1, 2014

The Hamas Plan

Here is a picture that is making the rounds. I can't vouch for its authenticity. It purports to be the picture of a man who may or may not be the children's father, literally hanging them on what is reported to be his house in order to preven...

July 31, 2014

Time for Hamas's Hollywood Sympathizers to Snap out of It!

I love actors. Honestly -- that wasn't sarcasm. I started out as an actor before I began writing for a living. I shared my life with an actress who was/is a wonderful artist and woman. As they used to say about Jews And African Americans some of ...

July 30, 2014

Israel, Hamas, and Special Needs Children

Yesterday I wrote an article that ended with a suggestion to Hamas. The suggestion was, just stop trying to kill us, and be prepared to be amazed at how wonderful your lives will become. You say you want the siege lifted? The sanctions, which y...

July 29, 2014

In The Company of Heroes

I had the great privilege of accompanying Major General (Ret) Avigdor Kahalani to an artillery battalion, somewhere in the war zone. General Kahalani is one of Israel’s greatest war heroes, a veteran of the Six Day War, The Yom Kippur War and t...

July 28, 2014

The Humanitarian Pause -- Again

When I was a little kid, my brother, of blessed memory, who was six years older than me, took inordinate pleasure giving me what were then called “Noogies.”  He was unmerciful and unrelenting in his “Noogie” attacks ...

July 27, 2014

The Palestinian victims of Hamas

We have all seen the pictures of the horrible price the Palestinian people are paying because the terrorist army of Hamas seized power in Gaza in a bloody coup against not Israelis, but against their fellow Palestinians. They have turned civilian com...

July 25, 2014

We're Both From The Same Village

I spend the night last night with the family I met the day before. The ones I wrote about in an article called Why Israel Fights: Life on the Gaza Border. I met them yesterday and when I see them today I’m greeted not like the stranger who knoc...

July 24, 2014

Why Israel Fights: Life on the Gaza Border

Years ago in my misspent youth, as a film student at UCLA ,I saw a World War II documentary called “ Why We Fight.” So this is my go at it. But I’m not a good enough writer to do this one the way it ought to be done. I apologize for...

July 22, 2014

Hamas: leading their people to death

Ernest Hemingway had great advice for writers. “Write one true declarative sentence,” he said. “Then write another.” By that standard, Papa Hemingway would be proud indeed of Sami Abu Zuhri’s literary prowess. ...

July 21, 2014

To the last drop of the blood of others

The International Red Cross asked for a cease-fire in the Gaza conflict so the dead and wounded could be tended to, bodies removed, injured taken to hospital. Israel said yes to the cease-fire, and Hamas immediately violated it. Israel had hit ...

July 20, 2014

The Tunnel War

The IDF Military Spokesperson Unit announced that the Israel Defense Forces have uncovered thirteen tunnels with thirty-four access points to them across the Gaza Strip. To perhaps put a finer point on that, reliable civilian news outlets have stated...

July 18, 2014

The war Israel didn't want

AT contributor Dan Gordon, a captain in the Israel Defense Force reserves as well as a screenwriter, sends us a letter that is worth citing in its entirety on the current fighting in Gaza: I have been an Israeli soldier for over forty years, and n...

July 18, 2014

A tale of tunnels

The Government of the state of Israel has declared in the clearest possible manner that the purpose of the ground incursion which began last night and continues today, is  first of all to deal with the “ homicide tunnels” which the T...

June 29, 2011

Alice Walker Is Sailing in the Wrong Direction

Sometime within the next week or so the second, incredibly inaptly named "Freedom Flotilla" will set sail for Hamas-controlled Gaza in an attempt to break an Israel Naval quarantine whose purpose today is solely to prevent advanced weaponry from bein...

March 9, 2011

A Time for Soul Searching

At a recent meeting with American Jewish leaders, President Obama reportedly urged those in the room to speak to their friends and colleagues in Israel and to "search your souls" over Israel's seriousness about making peace.Periodic soul se...

February 4, 2011

In the Midst of the Egyptian Upheaval: The Elephants in the Room

As the Middle East is engulfed in a series of often violent pro-democracy demonstrations  and counter-demonstrations that have shattered the myth of stability in that region, there are a number of other myths which have been shattered as well --...

October 24, 2010

An Open Letter to Mike Leigh

Dear Mike,Although we don't know each other, our paths have crossed over the years, and we have numbers of friends in common. Recently, you were invited to be a guest lecturer at the Sam Spiegal Film School in Jerusalem, where for a number of ye...

May 3, 2009

The Man who may be Israel's next ambassador to the United States

Dr. Michael Oren is being touted as Israel's next ambassador to the U.S. He's taking a number of hits in the press. Some people have said he's too conservative, others that he's too liberal. He is undeniably one of the world's foremost historians on ...

February 27, 2009

Mubarak is the Only One Who Got it Right

It's been four weeks since I've been home from Israel and the fighting in Gaza. Three weeks since I turned in my helmet, body amour and M-16 and exchanged the olive drab fatigues for the jeans and a t-shirt which is my daily uniform in civilian life....

January 6, 2007

Transplanting the Heart of the Matter

It has become an axiomatic belief that solving the Israeli Palestinian conflict is central to resolving numerous other problems in the Middle East. That claim may or may not be an exaggerated one. But there is no doubt that certain aspects of the Isr...

November 2, 2006

No Viet Cong Followed Us Home, Al-Qaeda Will

"No Viet Cong ever called me nigger." That was the battle cry of my generation, or rather it was the retreat from battle cry of my generation. The great Mohamad Ali said it, and like so many other things he said, he was of course right about this on...

October 26, 2006

Who Betrayed Lebanon? And Who Watched it Happen?

In the vision of certain members of the press, Israel is a colonialist mass murderer, and the word terrorist does not exist without quotation marks surrounding it. Israelis are aggressors. Islamist terrorists, be they Palestinians or Iranian bac...

August 30, 2006

Soldiers, Dogs and Mosques

During the recent war launched by Hezb'allah against Israel I served as an escort officer with the IDF Military Spokesperson's Unit. In that role, Captain Doron Speilman and I on separate occasions hooked up Martin Fletcher of NBC News, and a separat...

August 27, 2006

Prelude to Apocalypse

Contrary to what is now the accepted wisdom in the media, Hezb'allah in its recent offensive against Israel neither 'badly bloodied the Israel Defense Force,' nor 'fought it to a standstill' in Southern Lebanon. In fact, the opposite is the case. By ...