I just got back from seeing Alan Dershowitz speak at Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas on behalf of the American Jewish Congress. There were 1400 people there and I think it is fair to say that Professor Dershowitz had a captive audience.

I didn't take notes and I can't relay everything he said in this space, but I will try to remember some of the points he made that I may not have heard before. I suggest you read his book The Case For Israel to get the basic gist about what he spoke about.

There are few university professors in the entire country who are willing to speak out on behalf of Israel and against divestment and other anti-Israel movements.

If anti-Israel sentiment wasn't fueled by anti-Semitism, why aren't they killing Israelis in France and Morocco and Turkey? They're killing local Jews.

You can be a strong supporter of Israel even if you only agree with 90 percent of what they do and not 100 percent.

You can disagree with the specific methods of fighting terrorism, but there can be no argument that the combination of walls/fences, security checkpoints and targeted killings seems to be working.

I'm not sure if this is the case, but he said that the parts of the security fence that are actually walls are built in areas where Palestinians were shooting at homes or is on land that is within Israel proper.

Jews have a right to live anywhere, including Hebron and other areas of the West Bank. That does not mean that for the sake of peace and saving lives that some of them, including Hebron, should be given up.

Israel is a vital ally to the U.S. today because of shared military knowledge and intelligence. The argument that we must support the Arab countries is bound to come to a close by the middle of the century as oil is either depleted or replaced by alternative fuels.

The question is not why the U.S. is an ally of Israel but why Norway, France, etc. are not.

On a lighter note he mentioned that he grew up as a Brooklyn Dodger fan in the same neighborhood as Sandy Koufax, Jackie Mason, and others. Since moving to Boston he has become a Red Sox fan and loves to wear a t-shirt that says "I love NY but I hate the Yankees". He also told the story of how he got an orthodox rabbi to do a "mi shebarach" for Jackie Robinson by giving him a fake name like Yaakov ben Robin (I actually didn't catch the last name).

Rabbi Bloch of Chabad then closed the event with a little d'var torah about the story of the spies who were sent by Moses into the land of Israel. When they came back, ten of them were afraid because there were giants in the land and "just as we appeared as grasshoppers in our own eyes, so did we appear to them". As a result G-d punished the entire generation for their lack of faith in his promise to them and they were destined to wander for 40 years and die in the desert without seeing the Holy Land. The message for today is that if we keep thinking of ourselves as second class citizens and not worthy of living in the Land of Israel, others will see us this way and it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy that we don't live there anymore.