Joel Chasnoff is twenty-four years old, an American, and the graduate of an Ivy League university. But when his career as a stand-up comic fails to get off the ground, Chasnoff decides it's time for a serious change of pace. Leaving behind his amenity-laden Brooklyn apartment for a plane ticket to Israel, Joel trades in the comforts of being a stereotypical American Jewish male for an Uzi, dog tags (with his name misspelled), and serious mental and physical abuse at the hands of the Israeli Army.

This prescient narrative reveals how crumbling Mideast relations dashed the promise of peace and fostered the terrorist movement. Norman Spector — previous Canadian ambassador to Israel — documents how the inability to gain peace in the Mideast has caused death and destruction far outside Israel and the contested Palestinian lands, with the ominous promise of more to come. Based on his firsthand experiences with the major players and events, from the Rabin assassination through 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan, Spector analyzes how the same forces and beliefs that led to the downward spiral in relations between Israelis and Palestinians spawned the bombing of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.