…In 1967 the international media in a very different climate vis-à-vis Israel celebrated little Israel’s amazing victory over its Arab neighbors. Israel’s survival and spectacular military prowess was like a cliff-hanger Hollywood movie in which the hero and heroine are snatched from the jaws of death at the lost moment.

The world was also in awe of the behavior of Israelis post-war. How decent they were to people who just the day before were shrieking Slaughter the Jews. In a word, Israel’s victory was celebrated.

Today, though, that Six-Day War is seen as an act of racist, fascist, imperialist aggression against the Palestinians. I am dumb-struck sometimes by some of the talk-backs on the Israeli sites by obvious, clinically anti-Jew nutjobs and how they programmatically accuse Israel of just walking into Palestine and stealing people’s land. It is this political cartoon-like shallowness that calls to mind the very first comment on the first verse in the Torah by the greatest commentator Rashi who lived in France in the 11th century. He asks why the Torah, which is primarily a book of laws for the Jews, opens with the creation of the Universe. And he says there will come a time when the nations will accuse the Jews of stealing the land from the Canaanites and Philistines and the answer is that G-d created the land and in his orchestration of history He decides who gets to live in it…