Dallas Cowboys’ radio voice offers criticism of Israeli leadership in war with Palestine

Brad Sham has visited Israel four times and prioritizes his Jewish faith, but these realities do not make him blind to the areas of fault over the crisis in the Middle East.

The veteran voice of the Dallas Cowboys is in his 70s, and is a voice of reason on what he calls “a layered topic” that has divided an increasing number of Americans. As if we needed more.

As the pro-Palestine protest movement across college campuses expands from Columbia in New York to USC in Los Angeles, to the University of Texas in Austin to the University of North Texas in Denton, Sham can only watch with skepticism, dread, sadness, and fear.

“This is a difficult thing for an American Jew to be in; that because of the conduct of the Israeli government we are affected,” Sham said Tuesday morning in a phone interview. “The American Jew is being affected by what (Israeli prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu is doing.

“A lot of my Jewish friends disagree with me, but Netanyahu is the biggest threat to the preservation of the state of Israel I’ve seen in my lifetime. That’s my opinion. His conduct on this [war with Palestine] has given all of the anti-semites in the world reason to think, ‘Maybe we’ve got them this time.’ Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.”

There is a rational view of this latest Middle East crisis, but those are seldom popular because “sensible” rarely moves the needle.

There is a way to be pro Israel, and not support Israeli’s leadership.

There is a way for an Israeli to recognize the plight of Palestinians who are in the middle of a tragic situation at the hands of their leadership, whose announced priority it is to eradicate Jewish people.

This is where Sham’s “layered topic” line begins to fit; exactly who started what and when is a multi-generational point of contention, and often a source of deep hatred. There are books, movies, documentaries, and podcasts that you can consume in an effort to understand “Israel Palestine;” it can be as confusing as it is depressing.

Sham sees ground zero for this latest tragedy as the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. According to the American Jewish Council, more than 1,200 people were killed in the terrorist attack, and Hamas took more than 230 Israelis and other foreign nationals as hostages.

Israel’s swift response against Hamas has become a global point of debate, anger, and protest. The response, which is now months long, has generated far more criticism than the original Hamas attack. It’s as if people are forgetting the brutality of that organized assault.

Israel’s counter attack has, according to a report by the health ministry of Gaza, killed approximately 35,000 Palestinians, and nearly 78,000 have been injured in this war.

“The Israeli government’s reaction has been way greater in scope and scale than it had to be, and the reason is that it benefits Netanyahu,” Sham said. “The war is being conducted by a five-man panel that he picked, and most of them hate each other.

“The great fallacy to all of this is that you have to choose. That you have to be one or the other. You can be pro-Israel, pro-Zionist and pro-Palestinian. You can be pro-Israel and anti-Israeli government.”

Anyone who has spent five minutes with Sham can attest this is a man who is passionate about a variety of topics. His faith, and its history, sit near the top.

There is genuine, humanist-rationality here that it would appear the protesters don’t want to entertain, or even acknowledge. Because there is a better-than-great chance the protesters all over America’s college campuses would earn a “C-minus” if they were taking “Israel - Palestine 101” as a three hour credit.

Sham has lived long enough to know that not only will these things happen, but they will happen again; he knows that so many people who take strident views about this topic don’t know much beyond a few images they see on Instagram reels, which may not even be real; five minutes worth of infotainment commentary; a handful of 85-character headlines.

“I was around when the [college] students protested the Vietnam war in the ‘60s, but that was not like this,” he said. “That was American students protesting the American government. That was relatively black-and-white. This isn’t.”