Given the relative obscurity of the “Hartford Courant”, it must have taken someone doing some real digging to turn up the anti-Israel screed the Gazette published by the self-identified Jewish historian Warren Goldstein (“Not in My Name!”, August 6, 2006). This is odd, since over the years it has been almost impossible to get the Gazette to publish excellent and more balanced op eds referred to it on Israel and the Middle East by well-known scholars and journalists writing in major papers and magazines (Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz, Wall St. Journal, New Republic, National Post, New York Sun, etc.).

Like many left-wing Jewish critics of Israel, Mr. Goldstein trades on his name to establish his bona fides (he “goes to the Web-site of Reform Judaism”, he claims Judaism has been “reduced to political cheerleading”, he invokes the “god [sic--not “God” or G-d”] of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”, he urges “Jewish congregations” to pressure government to make “real peace”, and so on.)

But what we get is “the same old same old”—Israel is accused of “recklessly killing civilians”, has “effectively declared Lebanon a free-fire zone”, its “propaganda machine” works through” Jewish organizations”. He wants to reject the supposed “pall over debate about Israel” in Jewish circles, and advises “Jewish congregations” to get their government “to ceas[e] blanket support for Israel” and get Condoleeza Rice to end a policy “baptized in the blood of civilians”.

It seems to have escaped Mr. Goldstein that Israel indeed withdrew from both Lebanon and Gaza (let alone, years ago, from all of the Sinai) despite ongoing Arab aggression, or that the current war began when Jewish soldiers were unilaterally and without provocation killed and kidnapped on Israeli soil by Hamas and Hezbollah.

It is nice to learn that he “shed[s]s no tears” for Hamas and Hezbollah, and that he is even ready to see his way clear to “some form of Israeli response”. What, one wonders, would he advise? Without specifying, he immediately invokes precisely what has repeatedly failed, again and again, in the past—“an international police force to patrol southern Lebanon, disarm Hezbollah [!!] and keep Israel in its borders” [but of course, UNIFIL has been, and still is, in Lebanon, to no avail, and Israel was, and still is, in its borders].

Mr. Goldstein, despite his name, is, clearly, no Zionist. He either rejects, or is unaware, of the Zionist vision both of the legitimacy of Israel’s existence in its ancestral Biblical homeland, and of its teaching that the Jewish people can, ultimately, rely—like any other nation—only on its own resources for its self-defence.

Further, despite his “Jewish” identity, he is unaware of how Israel, precisely as a Jewish state, implements Jewish ethics and seeks to protect innocent civilians, even as it defends itself against unending terrorism and aggression by terrorists shamelessly and in contravention of international law and the rules of war using civilians and hospitals as cover.

Today, Israel endangers its own soldiers and airmen by warning civilians of impending attacks, announcing its actions in advance by leaflets, news bulletins, and even by telephone calls. Indeed, the same Gazette carrying Mr. Goldstein’s propaganda also notes, in a news article, Israel’s decision to use troops to assault a Hezbollah command-post in Tyre, instead of a safer air attack, in order “to avoid harming families on other floors of the five-story building”. Nor does the world media, so quick to denounce Israel, but not terrorists using civilians as human shields, carry the video of Katyusha rockets being fired from Qana shortly before the Israeli attack there.

As an historian, he is also unaware that such unrequited Jew-hating aggression goes back to the pre-state Palestinian Yishuv, or community, in the 1920s, and continued repeatedly into and after the Israel’s UN-approved Declaration of Independence in 1948. It began long before any so-called Arab land was “occupied”—the terrorist PLO, after all, was established to destroy Israel in 1964—well before Arab aggression resulted in the lands lost in the 1967 war.)

It is indeed a dirty war, Mr. Goldstein, one carried against Israel today by Iranian- and Syrian-backed and armed Islamist terrorists dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, and not because of “the occupation”—what, exactly, in Gaza and Lebanon, is occupied?—but because it is a Jewish state, the very existence of which cannot be tolerated in a region which must be exclusively Islamic.

In this sense, Mr. Goldstein, although you are sadly oblivious to it, the war is indeed being carried out “in your name”.