But more important is the fact that there’s nowhere like Israel’s madcap political arena to accentuate the knucklehead anarchic antics of the jerks-of-all-trades (as yesteryear’s screwballs dubbed themselves). With them around there’s never a dull moment. They keep unsettling all and sundry, themselves foremost.

Stepping into Moe’s shoes is Binyamin Netanyahu even though he doesn’t sport a soup bowl haircut and even if he hasn’t exactly been poking at politicos’ eyes, whacking sidekicks with skillets and crunching the noses of cronies with neurotic, hyperactive zest.

But though deficient in Moe’s bully brass, Bibi is nonetheless the uncontested leader of the new threesome and their belated bond has only confirmed and boosted his primacy like never before. For better or worse, Bibi is recognized both near and far as the (for now) indisputable boss. He looks in charge, at the top of his game and unbeatable. But could he be in for nasty surprises?

Tied to him by a symbiotic fraternal attachment is Ehud Barak, playing the petulant, unpredictable and smugly self-satisfied Curly. It doesn’t matter that Barak doesn’t shave his head. He commands plenty of other attributes to qualify him for the role of the rotund buffoon, not least his pretentious parading as a key player in seeming oblivion of the fact that he has entirely lost his political power base. That in itself makes Barak as obviously unmindful of his ridiculousness as the originator of the trademark chuckle, underscored by the inevitable: “Nyuk, nyuk.”

Then comes the one non-brother, the add-on stooge – Shaul Mofaz-come-lately in the role of pensive Larry. True, Mofaz hasn’t quite mastered his alter ego’s puppy-dog look, but he does try awfully hard to impress us as sincere and deep. And Mofaz is every bit the nebbish bungler that Larry invariably was.

When Ariel Sharon broke away from the Likud to found Kadima, Mofaz in a righteous upstanding pose, sent out letters to all party central committee members assuring them that he won’t take the expedient course because “you don’t leave home.” But before the mailman managed to deliver the envelopes, Mofaz expediently left home.

That was just the first in a long list of mishaps, the latest of which included winning Kadima’s top slot only to be dragged against his will, his bravado notwithstanding, to new elections too soon. He next called Netanyahu a liar and vowed vehemently never to enter a Bibi-led coalition. So what if, as we were reading his lips, Mofaz deftly performed an about-face and linked his fortunes to those of Bibi and Barak?

It was better than going it alone on the campaign trail and slipping on the proverbial banana-peel-to-end-all-banana-peels. The ensuing embarrassment would have been far more mortifying than even the unkindest sight gag in the meanest of burlesques. Like Larry, Mofaz opted to play it safe and submissive. But for how long?

The one sure thing about the Stooges is that in their universe nothing is for sure, nothing can be taken at face value and nothing can be taken for granted. Therefore it’s advisable not to bet on this new team staying united and operating in the harmony they may exude for the short haul. The wild-eyed knife-jugglers are waiting in the wings, sharpening their blades.

Now that Bibi has saved them from the voters’ wrath and given them a stay of execution, the hotshots in Mofaz’s rogues’ gallery aren’t running as scared as they did before the grand coalition deal was announced. Without a trace of contrition or humility, they now announce that their goodwill is conditional, that Bibi must meet their timetables, and perform as per their direction or they will pull the rug from under him.

Forgotten is the dispensable detail that they were headed for an Election Day disaster while Netanyahu was the unmistakable front-runner. It’s not that they can bring Netanyahu down, but they can wear him down, besmirch and badmouth him with expertise unsurpassed outside Kadima. Knocking Bibi will become the new test for political pluck among the Kadima blusterers.

Bibi may well rue the pact he struck. He may well come out hobbled and battered and he’s “soitenly” not as irrepressible as Moe was. Odds are he won’t be the same by the time his new partners are through with him.

Their frequent flip-flops don’t recommend them for trustworthiness. Indeed those who lied in the past are likely to do so again. The ease with which they defended their zigzag into the coalition foreshadows the ease with which they’ll proffer excuses for trashing it – whether or not they actually leave. It’s easy to stay inside the coalition while posturing in the mantle of the sanctimonious opposition ideologue.

All the while, Mofaz might not only benefit from a breather, he may emerge rehabilitated (to say nothing of the image enhancement which Labor’s Shelly Yacimovich is sure to derive).

The bad press which greeted the trio’s premiere will only further motivate Mofaz to second guess Bibi at every opportunity, malign him at every turn and generally undermine him. His experience at saying one thing and switching to its direct opposite without batting an eyelid is practically peerless.

Moreover, he’s prone to doing it so senselessly that he cannot be expected to be reined in by coolheaded assessments. The more censorious commentators have a go at Mofaz, the greater will be his inclination to curry their favor, which will be really bad news for Bibi.

Therefore, it matters much that the talking heads now talk about a replicated “stinking maneuver.” This despite the fact that their comparison with the 1990 precedent just doesn’t hold water.

Three years pre-Oslo, in 1990 – when Israel was governed by the second unity coalition under Yitzhak Shamir – then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres behaved like a law onto himself. Already then (and not for the first time) he furtively engaged in unauthorized freelance negotiations. He pursued covert assignations with Jordan behind Shamir’s back, in violation of every conceivable democratic principle.

When Shamir rejected Peres’s ultimatum (hatched with the notorious James Baker), Peres plotted to topple Shamir’s government, which he did. To Peres’s exasperation, however, he subsequently failed to put together a substitute coalition. Yitzhak Rabin, who branded Peres “an unrelenting underminer,” dubbed this “the stinking maneuver.”

The stinking maneuver of 22-years-ago constituted an elaborate scheme to deconstruct a national unity coalition. To apply the same catchphrase to the construction of a national unity coalition is more than misleading. It’s deliberate demagoguery.

Besides, it’s instructive to recall that back in the day our Left-dominated media cheered Peres on and deprecatingly rejected Rabin’s disapproval of the stench. Nothing was too foul to oust a Likud leader – then and now.

That’s why the press has resurrected Rabin’s harsh headline for the Peres sabotage. It’s not because another stinking maneuver was perpetrated but because nothing a Likud leader does can please most news analysts (unless, like Sharon, the Likud leader grievously injures the Likud). The criterion isn’t whether a coalition is formed or dismantled, but whether or not the Likud is harmed.

The Left, which now decries the sudden swerve away from early elections, griped endlessly about these very projected elections because the polls unanimously predicted a Netanyahu landslide. The bottom line beneath the multi-layered left-wing hypocrisy is that whoever teams up with Netanyahu is bound to be whacked by hostile opinion-molders.

Mofaz is well aware of this. His image is important to him and he will defend it by making Bibi’s life hell – now that Kadima no longer fears an inconvenient Knesset campaign.

Thus it’s doubtful that lasting political peace was secured by sheltering Mofaz from the electoral storm. If anything, Netanyahu will now be subjected to much graver pressure from within his cabinet (in addition to Barak’s) to sacrifice vital national interests to coax Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiations table.

Netanyahu’s coalition partners at home will lean hard on him to deposit a hefty down payment just to get talks going. Similar extortion will be applied almost on every policy front – domestic, diplomatic and defense-oriented.

The upshot is that the coalition itself will become the future sparring ground. We will all in all probability witness farcical hijinks in the hallowed name of peace and democracy.

Sullen-faced Mofaz/Larry will scramble our brains, while supercilious Barak/Curly will chortle prodigiously with characteristic Stoogian self-congratulation. And, in a reversal of roles, Bibi’s/Moe’s shins will this time be kicked, his nose tweaked and his head continuously bopped.

All the while Bibi’s newfound coalition partners will shout the old stooge adaptation of the solidarity slogan (first sounded by Moe, Curly and Larry in their 1935 flick, Restless Knights): “All for one! One for all! Every man for himself!”

Just substitute “terrorist” for the “Fascist” or “Nazi” in Orwell’s text.

We have no way of telling whether said text was perused by Zeev Degani, current principal of Gymnasia Herzliya (the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium, or in its Hebrew moniker, HaGymnasia HaIvrit Herzliya). If he didn’t read this particular Orwell essay in the Partisan Review, Degani should.

Peace-propagandists, Orwell noted therein, “evade quite obvious objections” with “propaganda-tricks” which include “pooh-poohing the actual record of Fascism,” while “systematically exaggerating” alleged “Fascizing processes” within Allied ranks.

Orwell was intrigued by the “psychological processes by which pacifists who started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism.”

“Even those who don’t,” he wrote, “imagine that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German Army by lying on one’s back” and they shun “discussion of what the world would actually be like if the Axis dominated it.”

Sound familiar? It should.

We have too many peace-propagandists among us who cunningly skew our reality and dodge discussion of the ramifications of their recommendations. Degani is one and he is influential beyond his pro forma position.

Degani recently told Channel 2 interviewers that the fault for all that provokes ballyhooed local tongue-clicking is Israel’s resort to force: “A nation which employs violence for years against another nation shouldn’t think that the violence only remains in the neighbor’s field. It comes back to us. We are now at one of the peaks of the enhancement and reinforcement of violence which radiates outward and returns inward.”

In this quintessential encapsulation of left-wing conceit, Degani professed to know instantly and smugly who to blame for loutish manifestations on our society’s margins.

He harbored no doubts.

By the criteria of his pedagogic omniscience, everything untoward – from teen rowdies disrupting the Cameri Theater’s performance of Ghetto to football hooliganism – emanates from “occupation.” Regardless of sanctimonious linguistic obfuscation, the ultimate logic of Degani’s analysis leads to the denigration of Jewish self-defense.

According to Degani’s facile outline, everything is neatly black and white, with no complexities, subtleties or suggestions of soft shading. Israel is the villainous ogre and the Arabs under its hobnailed boot are the randomly terrorized victims.

It’s a simplistic formula sure to impress juvenile minds placed under Degani’s charge. Therein lies the danger of his crude, one-dimensional distortion. There’s no depth, no background, no history, no whys and wherefores, no hint of justification for anything. It’s sloganism at its shallowest.

Degani gives voice to anti-Israel propaganda, even though he’s sure to indignantly deny this. He teaches his susceptible pupils to see Israel as its enemies portray it. In our region that’s a recipe for self-destruction no matter how ornately and pretentiously garnished with human-rights palaver.

Yet worse than the affectation of virtue, is the plain fact that Degani is wrong (or perhaps demagogically misleading). Disrespectful and disorderly behavior in our midst doesn’t arise from those segments of Israel’s population of whom Degani most disapproves. There’s no infestation of oafish and boorish outcroppings where ideology, tradition and values are high on the scale of priorities.

The thugs who couldn’t contain themselves at the theater didn’t come from the national-religious school system, for instance. But a disproportionate number of volunteers for IDF combat officers’ training and for crack commando units do hail from that environment. Fewer and fewer come from the milieu favored by Degani.

Conceivably the excessive political correctness of the Degani-model school breeds nihilism. Indeed, in 2010 Degani refused to allow IDF officers into Gymnasia Herzliya in the framework of a program geared to stress the importance of “significant military service.”

The results of Degani-like indoctrination aren’t difficult to detect. In one Tel Aviv school ceremony, around the time of Degani’s barring of the officers, students adamantly refused to sing the lyrics to “I Have No Other Country.” Their ties to this country are by inference tenuous and conditional.

Tel Aviv’s educational institutions have descended very far from those of the city’s visionary beginnings and subsequent trailblazing.

Tel Aviv sprang up around Gymnasia Herzliya. Its building was the first public structure erected in 1909 on the shifting sands that would become the first Zionist urban creation. The Gymnasia was Tel Aviv’s central hub. It was founded four years earlier in Jaffa, dedicated to the premise that all subjects can be taught in Hebrew. It served for decades as a magnet for Jewish youth and as the embodiment of Zionist fervor.

But as per the old adage, it appears sadly that Gymnasia Herzliya’s old age shames its youth.

One would have assumed that given the unique circumstances of its birth, this school’s successive stewards would be particularly cognizant of the historic duty entrusted temporarily in their hands.

Instead of posturing as postmodern guardians of other people’s consciences, they ought to remember that the only reason Gymnasia Herzliya ever took off from its ultra-humble beginnings was an insatiable hunger for Jewish nationalism, as distinct from today’s universalist zeitgeist.

Dr. Yehuda-Leib Metman-Cohen and his wife, Fania, founded the school in their own narrow two-room flat off a winding dark and dank alley near today’s Clock Tower in Turkish-ruled Jaffa. Following the then-predominant European pattern, their secondary school accepted pupils aged nine to 19 and offered a nine-year program.

Fania, the author of the country’s first-ever Hebrew arithmetic textbook, taught math while stirring the pots in her makeshift kitchenette and peeling onions. After class, both husband and wife washed down the floors each day.

The original teaching staff of four and student body of 17 soon mushroomed. The Gymnasia especially flourished after its relocation to Tel Aviv. Jewish parents the world over sent their offspring to receive Zionist education in “the first Hebrew city.”

It took nerve and verve to forge ahead with an all-Hebrew curriculum when no modern teaching material existed in Hebrew. Everything had to be fashioned from scratch.

“There was an ecstasy of creativity and pioneering that gripped both children and teachers,” recalled the late Dr. Baruch Ben-Yehuda who was enrolled in the school in 1906 and stayed with it for most of his life, studying there, teaching, becoming an inspiring principal and then president. I interviewed him in 1975, when Gymnasia Herzliya celebrated its 70th birthday.

“Everything we did was revolutionary and we were flushed with the importance of our every accomplishment. Our kids roamed the length and breadth of the county, venturing to neglected far-flung corners to form a bond with Israel’s past and present. This school stood in the vanguard of the Jewish national revival and partook in all our national battles. If Mikve Yisrael epitomized the tie with land, Herzliya epitomized the tie with our nationhood and culture,” Ben-Yehuda argued.

He went on: “There’s no major Zionist ideological movement whose activity cannot be traced to Gymnasia Herzliya. Our students also figured in the practical side of the Zionist endeavor. They guarded Tel Aviv when the Ottoman Turks expelled all its residents in WWI. Our students and graduates – like Eliyahu Golomb and Dov Hoz – were among the founders and driving forces of the Hagana. Many in this school took part in Lehi and IZL underground struggles. Our alumni underpinned Israel’s independence and self-defense.

“Our students fought in the ranks of the Jewish Brigade in WWII and set the IDF in motion. We produced outstanding scientists like Prof. Yuval Ne’eman and national poets like Natan Alterman. A great spirit hovered over this institution – the spirit of a national rebirth,” Ben-Yehuda summed up. “This was a miniature Jewish state – the embryo Israel full of dreamers and fighters. If I seek one word to describe Gymnasia Herzliya it’s patriotism.”

The then-novel passion for Hebrew appears to have nowadays been replaced with a penchant for Orwellian Newspeak, produced prodigiously by Israeli Doublethinkers.

Their misuse of the word “occupation” inculcates in the listener’s ear the notion that Israelis willfully, with no provocation, crossed the blessed Green Line one sunny June morning in 1967, snuffled out Palestinian sovereignty (nonexistent though it was) and sadistically subjugated the ancient Palestinian nation (invented only lately).

Heaven forefend we mention that the territory in question isn’t foreign but directly contiguous to our incredibly narrow-waisted state – an integral part of our ancestral homeland – yet we hadn’t taken it until forced to defend ourselves against attempted genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The prattle in latter-day Gymnasia Herzliya about how “occupation corrupts” advocates relinquishment by Israel of its deterrent potential, making instead do with containing would-be annihilators and reacting to their initiatives.

Yet by not utilizing the capabilities we possess, by not opting for decisive victories and by acquiescing to prolonged conflicts of attrition, we embolden our implacable foes to introduce deadlier means and escalate terror. Half-hearted responses invigorate enemy resolve and increase noncombatant casualties and suffering.

That was Orwell’s observation precisely. Despots, he concluded, “can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.” Ramallah’s and Gaza’s death-mongers fear physical force. They want Israelis to flee. Israelis who preach withdrawal and protest intermittent IDF actions, help fulfill the enemy’s wishes.

Degani and fellow holier-than-thou peace-pontificators are our present-day counterparts to the antiwar activists of Orwell’s day.

Orwell regarded them as “objectively pro- Fascist. This is elementary commonsense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.”

Wilde’s dictum might go a long way to accounting for Dagan’s and Diskin’s otherwise inscrutable gabbiness, which might be no more than the product of an apparently uncontrollable urge to generate headlines. This may be in keeping with a local penchant alluded to by the colloquial Hebrew catchphrase for volubility: larutz lesaper lakhevreh. It roughly translates to “run and tell your friends.”

But that may be no more than an intricate ruse they want us to fall for. Their hypothetical nothing-is-what-it-seems hoax could be in keeping with the Hebrew semi-slang idiom hafuch al hafuch – literally “opposite on opposite”– i.e. not what you expect, the opposite of what you assume, creating an impression that’s the opposite of what immediately looks likely.

Both the above pearls of our insular culture may contain some relevance to putting Dagan’s and Diskin’s spasms of loquaciousness into some semblance of context.

It may well be that both our former top guns are giving vent to run-of-the-mill run-and-tell inclinations so pervasive in our minuscule milieu. Most our ex-generals and other security services higher-ups find it hard to find themselves out of the loop.

Our undersized arena bursts with an overabundance of posturing Napoleonic knock-offs – cocky military types and prolific know-it-alls – who presume to exclusively possess what it takes to dictate Israel’s agenda.

Hubris, testosterone, bigheadedness, braggadocio and whatnot impel them to make noise hot on the heels of their formal retirement. Paraphrasing Descartes, their motto appears to be “I babble, therefore I am.”

But the “opposite-on-opposite” scenario is far more appealing. Indeed, it’s downright comforting to believe that Diskin and Dagan are sophisticated performers in a carefully scripted plotline aimed at swaying the whole world to accept the authenticity of the very facade against which they ostensibly squeal at the top of their lungs. In other words, rather than hawk sour grapes, they’re in actual fact altruistic actors.

It would be reassuring to trust that these two aren’t cast in the mold of assorted self-important omniscients who proliferate in our puny provincial pond, where they’re prone to shoot off their mouths in the informal contest for which proverbial rooster crows loudest.

It’s nice to imagine that the proclivity to prattle is part of a grand cunning scheme, a clever disinformation ploy to obfuscate, leave the enemy wondering, guessing and unsure, to throw the whole watching world into a tizzy, to convince all and sundry that we’re led by a trigger-happy lot.

The convoluted subtext is that, if not somehow placated, we might nuke the neighborhood. This image could be essential to induce fellow democracies to comprehend that something effective had better be done about Iran because we’re losing patience with the international community’s dalliance. The West’s inaction is liable to force us to step into the breach ourselves.

Dagan and Diskin, obviously no novices in sly stratagems, would be the wiliest choice to persuade the world to get on Iran’s case because otherwise the field would be left to Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, whom both ex-chiefs assiduously build up as a demented and dangerous pair.

In crafty collusion, the two Ds hype the scary factor of Bibi and Barak (the two Bs).

The supposed subterfuge might not be outlandishly implausible, on condition we accept the premise that real life can be as elaborately tricky as espionage yarns. Why else, we may be tempted to ask, would the Ds choose this especially sensitive juncture for their frenzied verbal regurgitation?

By the scales of conspiracy theory devotees this cannot be accidental timing. The Ds, moreover, were until recently the guardians of our deepest national secrets. It’s more than a little unexpected for them, of all ex-hotshots, to blab in order to carp.

Otherwise, how are they better than Anat Kamm? For those who forgot, she’s serving time for having duplicated 2,200 documents, while she worked in the OC Central Command’s office as a young conscript, hiding her haul, hanging on to it long after her discharge and finally handing it all over to Ha’aretz reporter Uri Blau who absconded with it.

True, the Ds didn’t have to fiddle with computer files. But spilling the beans is spilling the beans, the modus operandi notwithstanding. Even staffers in private business firms must sign undertakings not to tattle about confidential company data after their employment has ended.

However, like Kamm, the Ds glory in the pose of courageous whistle-blowers desperately defending the public’s right to know. Here too pseudo-moral narcissism is lauded by this country’s domineering left-leaning media as the epitome of politically correct bon ton.

Not only did the Ds, like Kamm, thumb their noses at their most minimal obligations, but their cheerleaders now tell us that, like her, they did so out of conviction that they know best what’s best for us.

Yet do they know better? Did they discover Gilad Schalit’s whereabouts for five years right under their noses? Did they foresee a smidgen of the upheaval misnamed as the Arab Spring? Their list of failures or not-quite-successes is too long to inspire uncritical adulation.

We could kiss our national interests goodbye if each member of our defense hierarchy – regardless of status – were to decide that he/she is empowered to determine national policies and/or subvert endeavors not to his/her liking. That may be precisely what assorted varieties of leftist anarchists fervently desire. Their goal is to destabilize, even abolish, all authority. To that end, the Ds, like Kamm a couple of years ago, are an absolute boon.

The spinmeisters embraced Kamm as a youthful idealist purportedly entitled to impose upon Israel’s democratic collective what she deemed appropriate. These very spinmeisters now genuflect to the Ds’ professed professionalism.

They wouldn’t gripe without reason, we’re told. But why did the Ds conceal their mistrust of the Bs for so long? If they were certain that we entrusted our government into inept hands, why didn’t they alert us earlier? Why did they keep working with incompetents for so long? Why did they seek extended tenures and why did they accept them?

Why didn’t they resign in protest in real time, which would have been the honorable move to make?

To grumble from the sidelines is too much like what many of us do in Friday evening gossip and fix-the-world sessions. The Ds shouldn’t be automatically absolved of all ulterior motives. They provided no proof, only innuendo. The fact that the insinuations in question came from ex-big wheels hardly renders them infallible.

The Ds don’t know anything more than their erstwhile bosses. The Ds had already briefed the Bs on whatever intelligence they gathered. If the two twosomes are indeed at loggerheads, it can only be over differing analyses of said information. Here the Ds’ opinion isn’t necessarily superior. It’s an opinion.

This is where things get dicey. Do the Ds really imply that their opinion deserves to override that of members of a democratically elected government? If so, they’re in effect suggesting that spymasters should by right and rank call the shots or at least instruct the voters how to cast their ballots. How will the Ds react if Netanyahu is reelected?

The Ds’ conceit, to resort to understatement, smells bad. The tendentious commentators and talking heads who avidly boost the Ds need to think about the ramifications of backing security chiefs over elected representatives.

Beyond this issue of elementary civic hygiene looms the Iranian menace. If the tantalizing “opposite-on-opposite” twist of spy fiction hasn’t bizarrely manifested in this particular tawdry episode, then Dagan and Diskin are actually pushing us into a military conflict with Iran – the very conflict against which they rail.

One of Netanyahu’s and Barak’s most incontrovertible achievements is denting the indifference abroad to Iran’s machinations. To no small measure this was pulled off via the threat of an Israeli preemptive strike. Winning the ear of the US and the EU is utterly indispensable at this point.

Only concerted international action can replace an Israeli attack. The international community will do nothing if it doubts our assessments regarding Tehran or our determination to foil the ayatollahs.

The Ds’ irresponsible nattering weakens Israel’s cause overseas and thereby undermines the likelihood that Iran’s nuclear project can be defused without use of force. The Ds’ superfluous chatter jeopardizes the international coalition against Iran, demoralizes Israelis and emboldens Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

Do acclaimed experts like the Ds fail to understand this? Or has frustrated ambition and cynicism blinded their judgment?

If so, it’s time for us all to pay heed to two more of Wilde’s peerless aphorisms: “Ambition is the last refuge of failure” and “a cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Just below that spontaneous hand-inscribed historic annotation, appears the first criminal entry ever in sovereign Israel’s annals. It documents the capture of a thief. He stole a book, perchance pointing to preferences peculiar to the People of the Book.

Several hours later, the first ship docked in the new state. It began its journey furtively five days earlier in Marseilles when Israel was still under British rule. Its 300 young passengers were outfitted with fake IDs, forged at the Hagana “laboratory” in France.

But the Teti would claim special distinction – it became simultaneously the last “illegal” aliya boat and the first legal one. The counterfeit visas proved superfluous. The vessel proudly hoisted the Israeli flag as the new day dawned. Because it was the Sabbath, the newcomers were issued their new country’s entry permits only at sundown.

With such seemingly ordinary bureaucratic yet emotionally charged tasks, the Jewish state adeptly began the business of self-determination. In time that would be presented to world opinion as inherently sinful. By its very brazen determination to be born, it would be asserted, Israel had displaced the Palestinians, condemning them to miserable refugee subsistence.

According to the Arab narrative, Jewish independence, in and of itself, constitutes aggressive belligerence. Incredibly, this perception sank sinister roots. It takes stronger hold abroad now than it did 64 years ago. We may speculate why. We may point to two millennia of merciless anti-Jewish hate-mongering on religious and other mundanely lucrative grounds. But whatever the motive, our legitimacy, alone among the nations, is undermined assiduously.

Expediently forgotten is the fact that never, not for a single solitary day, were Israelis allowed to savor the elation of their newfound freedom. Behind the aforementioned two matter-of-fact exemplars of sovereignty, a frightening reality festered malevolently.

Israel’s birth was legally ordained via the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. Two states – Jewish and Arab – were to be established between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Jews cheered the patchy territorial crazy-quilt they were accorded, existentially untenable though it was, and proceeded to meet all UN prerequisites for independence. The Arabs vehemently rejected the offer of a Palestinian state and, in vituperative defiance of the UN, set out to destroy the embryonic Jewish state rather than construct one of their own.

On Israel’s first day, Arab League secretary-general Abdul-Rahman Azzam Pasha, articulated Arab priorities. Sending forth seven Arab armies to slay the newborn “Zionist entity,” he declared: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” The Arab agenda and intentions were unmistakable. New Israel’s citizens harbored no misconceptions.

The Arabs had already violently opposed the Jewish community which existed in this country pre-WWII and which was ripe for statehood before the Holocaust. The “Great Arab Revolt” of 1936-39 – fomented by the still-revered Haj Amin al-Husseini and financed by Nazi Germany – merely delayed Jewish independence. The Arabs denied asylum here to desperate Jewish escapees from Hitler’s hell. Thereby they doomed these refugees to death. The blood of numerous Holocaust victims indelibly stains Arab hands.

But that’s not all. Husseini, in the role of pan-Arab prime minister, spent the war years in Berlin, where he hobnobbed with Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, et al. He broadcast Nazi propaganda, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue of any Jews, even children, during the Holocaust.

The Arabs of this country were avidly pro-Nazi, saluted each other with Heil Hitler, flaunted the swastika, hoarded arms, harbored German spies and planned to heartily welcome Rommel’s invading Afrika Korps.

The war that the entire Arab world launched against newborn Israel, three years post-Holocaust, was explicitly geared to complete Hitler’s unfinished mission. Not only was there no attempt to camouflage this genocidal goal, but it was broadcast boastfully for all to hear and be intimidated. Clearly Israeli independence was fraught with the most extreme and tangible danger.

Hence no fanfare could conceivably accompany the official inauguration of the state, and with good reason. Independence was to be proclaimed at 4:00 p.m. on the 5th of the Hebrew month of Iyar, which in 1948 fell on May 14. The venue – Tel Aviv Museum’s tiny auditorium on 16 Rothschild Boulevard, in what previously was the home of the city’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff – was no one’s top choice. Jerusalem was besieged, while Tel Aviv’s Habima Theater was ruled out precisely because it was bigger and could accommodate more participants.

Even a marginally larger affair was reckoned undesirable for fear that publicity about when and where the Jewish state’s birth is slated to be announced would invite Egyptian air strikes. It was, therefore, thought advisable to keep everything hush-hush, make do with fewer honorary guests and cram them all into a minuscule hall (although the secrecy was quickly breached anyhow, in keeping with local proclivities).

The invitation (including a request to keep it confidential) was mimeographed and sent unsigned. The declaration itself was placed for safekeeping in a bank’s basement vault, lest it be destroyed by enemy bombardments. These indeed came, just hours afterward, at daybreak (of May 15, 1948).

As Israel’s masses danced in the streets on the night that followed the declaration of independence, Abdullah I, King of Transjordan (this brainchild of British imperialism now parades under the moniker of Jordan) positioned himself dramatically at the center of Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River. At the stroke of midnight, he pulled his ornate gilded pistol from its holster, held it up in the air and fired to signal the start of the Arab invasion. Its aim was to ethnically cleanse the land – or as it was then phrased non-too-diplomatically, to “throw the Jews into the sea.”

Israel’s thwarting of the genocide plotted against its people is now presented as a premeditated Israeli-instigated ethnic cleansing of Arabs. The capacity of the human mind to tolerate falsification cannot apparently be underestimated.

The battle plans called on the Jordanian-led Arab Legion, the Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese to converge on the Jezreel Valley and from there move in a concerted offensive on Haifa. The Egyptians were assigned to take Tel Aviv from the south, with Yemeni and Saudi participation. But hubris caused deviations. Abdullah coveted Jerusalem and the Syrians focused on the Jordan Valley.

Still, the Arab generals who drew up the blueprints for neonatal Israel’s annihilation figured it would take two weeks to complete the job, deviations notwithstanding. They had compelling reason for optimism.

The infant state, assaulted ferociously from every direction and furiously fighting for its very life, possessed no resources or military hardware. Its population of 600,000 also comprised the old, the infirm and the very young – all hardly combat-worthy.

But these noncombatants nevertheless became the enemy’s primary targets. For three days, from May 15, Tel Aviv was mercilessly bombed by the Egyptian Air Force. Spitfires swooped down on the very section of Tel Aviv, where the Teti was moored. The first aerial pounding lasted three days. Its worst came on May 18 when the central bus terminal was bombarded, killing 41 civilians in only that one incident, wounding hundreds of others, inflicting severe damage in the heart of town and even hitting Tel Aviv’s beloved attraction – its one double-decker bus.

The Egyptian planes were back two days later. They would hound Tel Aviv well into late July. Fifty Tel Avivians were killed between July 13 and 16. Hadassah Hospital was among the targets, as were queues of shoppers – housewives and children. Even the Red Cross complained about “indiscriminate bombing of non-military targets.”

Hot on the heels of independence, the makeshift Israel Air Force challenged Egyptian pilots for supremacy of the skies. This, despite the fact that the IAF was assembled from an improvised mishmash of light civilian aircraft requisitioned from or contributed by their owners and precariously adapted for military purposes.

A curious assortment of outmoded and surplus WWII planes – as well as prewar antiques – were additionally acquired, mostly from Czechoslovakia. Israel’s air fleet was more than anything powered by ingenuity and sheer pluck – like the rest of the IDF.

Because its ragtag army stood its ground, despite the worst of odds, Israel is today accused of the crime of surviving and is portrayed as a menacing ogre for having dared to come into the world rather than surrender.

But it wasn’t without a terrifying price. Besides the hundreds of Tel Aviv’s casualties, the entire country bled profusely. The Old City of Jerusalem fell to Abdullah’s legionnaires on May 29 (the 1967 Israeli reversal of the Jordanian conquest is now dubbed “occupation”). The attempts to open the bottleneck blockade on the road to Jerusalem at Latrun loomed as young Israel’s most painful failure of the War of Independence.

The British had turned their hilltop Taggart Fort at the crucial Latrun junction to the Arabs who used it to besiege Jerusalem with an eye to emptying West Jerusalem too of its Jews.

When the War of Independence was finally over a year-and-a-half later, Israel mourned 6,000 dead, a full one-percent of the fledgling state’s population. But perhaps the most tragic sacrifice – alas, hardly atypical for that era – was epitomized by the Teti’s passengers. Many of them gave their lives for their country just one week after arriving on that fateful first day of independence.

The next morning they made their way to the encampment at Tel Aviv’s Kiryat Meir (at the end of today’s Zeitlin Street) where they enlisted in the IDF. Most – fresh off the boat, with Holocaust horrors still fresh in their minds – ended up in the Alexandroni Brigade and Division 7, which were dispatched to Latrun. The battlefield training they received consisted of a few instructions, generally incoherent to them, on the way to the front line.

Can the world offer a sympathetic hearing to a group that claims divine rights to annihilate an entire nation? Apparently so.

Hamas is increasingly indulged by self-acclaimed forward-thinkers who might not relish being reminded that the Hamas Charter’s first section opens with the blunt assertion that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”

And lest anyone pooh-pooh this, Hamas anchors its Jew-revulsion in the Koran: “Ignominy shall be their [the Jews’] portion wheresoever they are found…. They have incurred anger from their Lord, and wretchedness is laid upon them…. They disbelieved the revelations of Allah, and slew the Prophets wrongfully… They were rebellious and transgressed.” (Surat Al-Imran III, verses 109-111)

This is no trifling lip-service which Western postmodernists so blithely belittle. Dissidence is deemed as heresy in Muslim dominions and heresy exacts pitiless retribution, as the Hamas Charter indeed warns: “Whoever denigrates the Hamas movement’s worth, or avoids supporting it, or is so blind as to dismiss its role, is challenging Fate itself. Whoever closes his eyes from seeing the facts, whether intentionally or not, will wake up to find himself overtaken by events, and will find no excuses to justify his position.”

Hamas isn’t about amicable accommodation. It “strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

Moreover, calling itself a “humane movement,” Hamas stipulates that “safety and security can only prevail under the shadow of Islam… Members of other religions must desist from struggling against Islam… for if they were to gain the upper hand, fighting, torture and uprooting would follow.”

Clearly it’s Hamas’s way or the highway.

But few Obama administration stalwarts or EU pontificators will let Hamas’s own covenant prevent them from making nice to Allah’s fearsome warriors. It’s the hottest trend sweeping through the West’s chic “non-judgmental” classes.

It’s a pattern which replicates itself. The international community can’t wait to whitewash, exonerate, find extenuating excuses for and otherwise legitimize Arab terrorists, lessen their culpability, conceal their ideology, make light of their record, explain away their sins and in general gloss over their proven malice.

It began with Fatah and had now, incredibly, moved on to Hamas. The process is similar. The terrorists’ prime victim (Israel) is demonized to provide pretexts for targeting it and to create a pervasive premise whereby the victim deserves any and all misfortunes. Concomitantly, the terrorists begin to carry out some of their more repugnant operations under other names and covers.

This enables them to feign innocence, when it so suits them, and appear to all and sundry as nothing less than the actual moderating forces in the arena, as quasi-good guys, as suitable interlocutors and as overall deserving of understanding.

Some of the worst Fatah atrocities were perpetrated over the years under mutating monikers that took the heat off the chief conspirators. These embedded in the popular mind surrogate nasties like Tanzim or al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, to say nothing of associate PLO gangs that shared some of the dirty load and helped obfuscate the guilt.

Hamas has gained prodigious expertise in pulling off the same sort of brazen deception. It occasionally slaughters under different guises and on other occasions it merely allows associates to carry out hits.

These associates – like Islamic Jihad – are fully tolerated and allowed a free hand. When Hamas doesn’t stomach any particular faction, there’s no mistaking its terrifying animus. Gaza’s ultra-extreme Salafists had tasted it on more than one occasion in ferocious raids and executions which didn’t spare wives, children or elderly parents. Salafist mosques weren’t accorded the status of sacrosanct sanctuaries, either.

Therefore, when Islamic Jihad barrages southern Israel for days on end with assorted missiles, mortars and whatnot, there’s no escaping the conclusion that it had obtained Hamas’s green light to do so.

The sham allows Hamas to parade as at least semi-reasonable. It allows assorted self-professed good souls the world over (along with their eager leftist echoes inside Israel) to agitate openly for a rethink on Hamas, for conferring respectability upon it, for treating it as a bona fide negotiating partner, for trying to cut deals with it, for seeking coexistence with Gaza’s warlords.

Poignant hand-wringing about Gaza’s fictitious humanitarian plight was from the outset geared to generate compassion for Hamastan. Hence Israel’s defensive blockade to foil gunrunning to the Strip was censured as a brutal siege against helpless civilians trapped in a virtual concentration camp.

This falsehood is recycled as an axiomatic truth and human rights advocates have become the staunchest defenders of fanatics who disdain the very sentimental broadmindedness they exploit to bamboozle polite Western society.

The address by a Hamas emissary at a function facilitated by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva last month was but a recent example of creeping acceptance of Hamas internationally. The UNHRC, of course, embodies the cynical skewing of august values and the deliberate deformation of rights-based discourse. But penchants for sugarcoating Hamas extend beyond this discredited forum.

Chocolate-box Switzerland, where the UNHRC is ensconced, is a cogent case in point. Last January a Hamas delegation visited Geneva to attend a session of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which purportedly fosters dialogue between parliaments in a bid to promote “peace and cooperation among peoples” and “the firm establishment of representative democracy.”

Invoking its hallowed neutrality, Switzerland doesn’t list Hamas as a terrorist organization and accordingly admitted its hotshots without any reservation.

Also on Hamas’s Swiss itinerary was a university conference organized by the Droit Pour Tous (Right for all) NGO to mark Operation Cast Lead’s third anniversary. Mushir al- Masri, who represented Hamas, insisted that “Hamas never attacks civilians.”

Thereafter, Masri and his cohort Khamis al-Najjar chummily hobnobbed with Swiss politicians in the capital, Bern.

Masri described his talks as geared to stress “the need for openness and positive engagement with Hamas by Switzerland and European countries, because Hamas is open to Europe.”

His junket to Switzerland coincided with reports of contacts between Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal and Swiss Mideast envoy Jean-Daniel Ruch in the framework of efforts to “normalize relations with European governments.”

“Switzerland has regular contacts with Hamas which stem from its traditional policy of dialogue, in particular over conflict resolution, respect for human rights and international humanitarian law,” asserted Swiss Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Carole Wälti.

Such sanctimony raises two possibilities. Perhaps Switzerland (along with plenty of other European states, exhibiting varying degrees of disingenuousness) knows what Hamas is but just doesn’t really give a hoot. A kinder alternative is that the Swiss don’t quite know what Hamas preaches (or don’t wish to burden their selective conscience with excess information – as per precedents from Third Reich days about other genocidal harangues).

That said, it’s easy to gain enlightenment. Anyone who peruses Hamas’s own charter won’t encounter a conspicuous predisposition for compromise. Palestine, declares Hamas, “has been an Islamic Wakf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it. No Arab country nor the aggregate of all Arab countries, and no Arab king or president nor all of them in the aggregate, have that right.”

There’s more: “So-called peaceful solutions, and international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion.”

The Charter’s unequivocal position is that “there is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by Jihad.”

Anyone familiar with Mein Kampf will discover kindred insinuations about the insidious forces of “International Judaism.” Jews, avers the Hamas Charter, citing the infamous fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof, are the instigators of all strife on this planet: “There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.”

Get a load of Hamas historiography: Jews “stood behind the French and Communist revolutions and behind most all revolutions…. They also used money to establish clandestine organizations… to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith, etc. All of them are destructive spying organizations.”

Nobody, contends the Hamas Charter, disputes that Jews “stood behind WWI, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate… and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization. They also stood behind WWII…. They inspired the establishment of the UN and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.”

Lavishing liberal love on Gaza won’t do the trick because Hamas is leery of do-gooders who come with “publicity and movies, curricula of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage.”

Of more immediate concern is the Charter’s reminder to “every Muslim that when the Jews occupied Holy Jerusalem in 1967 and stood at the doorstep of the blessed Aksa Mosque, they shouted with joy: ‘Muhammad is dead, he left daughters behind.’”

Sounds nuts? You didn’t cheer Muhammad’s demise in ’67? You don’t know anybody who did so at the Temple Mount? You can’t imagine any Jew chanting such bizarre claptrap upon returning to the Jewish Holiest of Holies? You suspect this must be a loony gag?

And what’s all this about daughters?

What strike us as demented ravings constitute calumny and incitement that tug hard at cultural chords deep inside Hamastan. But precisely because we’re so utterly baffled by them, they underscore the gaping psychological and intellectual chasms which most likely cannot be bridged no matter how much we try to suck up to Gaza’s Muslim Brotherhood offshoot.

The Hamas Charter’s own bottom-line for the above inscrutable gibberish about Muhammad’s daughters leaves no room for doubt: “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.”

Need any more be said?

The famed novelist, feted as the conscience of Russia, received dozens such letters urging him to speak out against the slaughters – then a seminal trauma in Jewish annals. The Holocaust was decades away. Nobody 109 years ago could imagine anything more bloodcurdling than the horrors of Kishinev.

But not everyone was moved – not even a renowned humanitarian like Tolstoy.
Not only did he not speak out, but he resented the entreaties.

He replied to one Jewish correspondent only, Emanuel Grigorievich Linietzky, to whom he caustically complained about being pestered. Tolstoy then blamed the Czar’s government, absolving the masses who bashed the skulls of babies, gouged children’s eyes, raped their mothers and sisters, eviscerated them, beheaded men and boys, quartered and mutilated them and looted all they could carry.

We hear much the same throughout Europe at each memorial to the Holocaust.

The upgraded, systemized, gargantuan-scale German sequel to Kishinev was by all accounts committed by unidentified extraterrestrials called Nazis. All the others, Germans included, were their victims.

But Tolstoy foreshadowed an even more sinister inclination that would fully and hideously burst upon our scene a century and more after the Kishinev devastation. The great author and icon of compassion exhorted Russia’s shaken Jews to behave better.

The implication was that the Jews were somehow guilty, needed to improve themselves and achieve higher virtue in order to merit better treatment.

And so wrote Tolstoy to Emanuel Grigorievich: “The Jews must, for their own good, conduct themselves by the universal principle of ‘do onto others as you would have them do to you.’ They must resist the government nonviolently…by living lives of grace, which precludes not only violence against others, but also the partaking in acts of violence.”

Given the background of Eastern Europe’s downtrodden Jewry, such ’turn-the-other-cheek’ sermons appear chillingly pitiless (to say the least) because all the Jews had been doing was turning the other cheek. Taken in a broader context, Tolstoy argued against Jewish self-defense before any self-defense was actually attempted. Jews, Tolstoy in effect said, share culpability for their tribulations, must suffer quietly and cannot rise to protect themselves.

Sound familiar? It ought to. It’s exactly what we keep hearing today from current preachers of goodwill, literary or otherwise. The more things change the more they sickeningly stay the same.

Enter Günter Grass. Germany’s Nobel laureate for literature has just warned the world about the danger which the Jewish state poses to global peace and warned that little Israel is out to no less than exterminate the Iranian people, all 80 million of them. It doesn’t matter that we – including even the loopiest left-wingers on the outermost fringes of our political spectrum – know that this is utter drivel.

The last thing on any Israeli’s mind is annihilating Iranians. We only want to make sure that they don’t nuke our tiny uber-vulnerable national home.

Too much to ask? When it comes to Jews, anything is apparently too much.

This is particularly pertinent for us in the springtime of the year, when we collectively remember the six million who perished in the very Holocaust in which Grass, by his own candid admission, was an enthusiastic accomplice.

But his stained personal history clearly constitutes no incentive to discreet reticence on his part. Like many Europeans, Grass has lost all shame and the disappearance of shame is the new bon ton among like-minded genteel Jew-haters.

It’s politically incorrect to even accuse Grass of thinly disguised anti-Semitism. That instantly turns him into the muzzled good-guy and us into loathsome Jews seeking to silence yet another legitimate critic of Israel with their doomsday weapon – charges of anti-Semitism. Moreover, any remote reference to the Holocaust is sure to elicit howls of derision.

This diabolical yet prevalent deformation of perceptions confers on all anti-Semites the freedom to slander, while denying Jews the right to call a spade a spade.

It’s a foolproof arrangement. Jew-revulsion now masquerades behind acutely inflammatory anti- Israel and pro-Arab propaganda, whose disseminators inevitably deny anti-Semitic motives. Their favorite ploy is to present Israel-bashing as just deserts for the Jewish state’s policies.

Post-Holocaust circumspection has bred cleverly camouflaged anti-Semitism – not less dangerous or less in-your-face but more cunning and deceptive.

Most contemporary anti-Semites are remarkably practiced in accompanying their invective with instant disclaimers – by now an expected part of the pattern.

Grass is extraordinarily true to form.

Indeed, he already gets star-billing on a host of Judeophobic websites, which celebrate him as yet another upstanding and righteous critic of Israel, an honorable observer pilloried as an anti-Semite in order to suppress his heartfelt outcry.

Thus Grass becomes the ultimate robbed Cossack in a rationalized German adaptation of the infamous Russian tradition. Anti-Semites – whether they specialized in mere pogroms or outright Holocausts – habitually portrayed themselves as the aggrieved side.

Robbed Cossack Grass actually volunteered for the barbarous Waffen-SS (branded a “criminal organization” at the Nuremberg Trials). But what of it?

He has put it all behind him, wiped his own slate clean and now feels empowered to launch anti-Jewish diatribes at will. Professing to have propelled himself to a loftier leftist plane, he can reproach the Jews and, like Tolstoy before him, demand they do nothing to defend themselves.

If they do, they become, in Grass’s idiom, “the greatest danger to the world.” It’s Israel that threatens Iran and not vice versa. By his criteria, our forebears threatened Egypt’s pharaohs, the Amalekites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, Haman’s Persians, Greeks, Romans, Crusader marauders, Muslim conquistadors, Spanish inquisitors, Chmielnicki’s Ukrainian mass-murderers, Russian pogromchiks, to say nothing of the Germans, whose fuehrer always screamed hysterically about the danger posed to the world by “the forces of International Judaism,” compelling him to formulate a “final solution” to their problem.

Fallacies of the sort which spawned the worst tragedies that befell our nation are still promulgated passionately today. An unbroken chain of lies links the hounding of Jews throughout the ages, rendering flagrant fabrications, like Grass’s, ever pertinent.

With mounting disbelief we witness world callousness toward the Jewish state that arose against all odds from the ashes of that great Holocaust conflagration. It’s beyond our grasp that we are vilified while supposed advocates of justice and seekers of peace cosset Arab/Muslim torchbearers of Nazi genocide.

We can’t comprehend the hypocrisy. We can’t understand how assorted glitterati and literati perennially postulate that those who strive to continue what the Nazis failed to finish are actually the “victims’ victims.” Europe loves to regard Israelis as victimizers and sympathize with “victimized” Arabs/Iranians/Muslims.

It’s nothing less than mind-blowing that the children of murderers, sadists, collaborators, bureaucrats, robbers, those who didn’t see, those who didn’t want to know, those who saw and knew but didn’t act – all now profess to occupy the moral high ground. They now preach to the children of the slain, gassed, burned, shot, buried-alive, starved, tortured, degraded, dehumanized, enslaved, dispossessed, bereaved and orphaned.

How can the moral onus be shifted onto the victims’ progeny? Easily – if the Holocaust is viewed as a crime without perpetrators. No occupied country colluded in rounding up and deporting its Jews. None produced greedy plunderers and collaborators. The occupiers themselves were a mythical extinct band of no distinct ethnicity, known generically as Nazis, who methodically hunted hidden Jewish babies.

In our topsy-turvy existence nothing is unthinkable. And so descendants of history’s worst-guys parade as good-guys, while descendants of the most downtrodden are considered as still woefully deficient of decency.

A German friend, Josef H, notes that official reactions in his country to Grass’s diatribe “were 99% negative.” Nevertheless, he writes, “I admit that I very rarely meet people who feel that they have to stand up for Israel when Israeli-Palestinian problems are mentioned. So I normally abstain from using the word ‘Israel’ in any conversation in order not to set fire to explosive material.”

Josef asked a member of his own extended family what he thought of the Grass imbroglio. The relative, Josef relates, “a really decent, reliable, honest man, generally following Christian principles… answered, without thinking twice about it: ‘Grass is right.’”

Such is the climate of opinion around him that Josef requested I not reveal his surname. Significantly, to his mind, Grass echoes his fervent Nazi past, deeply rooted in his psyche.

Grass isn’t the only Nobel literature laureate of such a mind-set. Some, like Britain’s Rudyard Kipling, didn’t even wax indignant pro forma when accused of anti-Semitism. Kipling unflinchingly blamed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution on an “international Jewish plot.” In 1919 he backed the publication in the UK of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In 1920, Kipling agreed only conditionally to read proofs of the memoirs of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) prepublication, vowing to return them if he finds them “pro-Yid.”

Kipling dismissed Einstein’s general theory of relativity as a component of a comprehensive Jewish conspiracy to destabilize world order.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t so. It doesn’t matter that every Jew knows there’s no Jewish world-domination conspiracy. What matters is that the Kiplings and their ilk expressed the zeitgeist of their day, just as Grass now does – regardless of whether his country’s establishment sanctions his opinion.

The fashionable, respectable anti-Semitism of European intellectual salons in the early 20th century made the Nazi persecutions of Jews palatable. The fashionable, respectable anti-Israelism of European intellectual salons in the early 21st century makes Ahmedinejad’s calls for our extinction palatable.

And above all hovers Tolstoy’s sanctimonious spirit which hints that our misconduct is the root cause of our misfortune.

Some supercilious sorts don’t even seem to try too hard – like American President Barack Obama, given to remarkable and repetitive chattiness when he’s precariously near open microphones. He is so accident-prone, in fact, that we’re forced to deduce that he personifies that most rare of hybrids – the schlemiel and schlimazel rolled into one.

Yiddish clearly distinguishes between the two categories of klutziness. The schlimazel is the one on whom soup is spilled, while the schlemiel is the one who spills it. The uncommon confluence of bad luck and clumsiness leaves one and the same character suffering embarrassment while serving as the instrument of his own embarrassment.

It’s bad enough that Obama chooses to make nice to foreign headliners and disclose to them defeatist strategies – the sort he cultivates secretly and most certainly shouldn’t want exposed to all and sundry. However, if the penchant to resort to such manipulative candor cannot be overcome, it should – one would think – be best practiced behind closed doors.

Obama’s predilection to prattle in the vicinity of plugged-in sound equipment can either denote extraordinary overconfidence and a smug presumption of invulnerability or it’s indicative of exceptional foolhardiness.

Whatever it is, Obama is serially careless.

Thus last November he chitchatted chummily with French President Nicolas Sarkozy during the G20 summit in Cannes. “I can’t stand him. He’s a liar,” a chagrined Sarkozy blurted in reference to the man both of them love to loath – Israel’s own PM, Binyamin Netanyahu. Word is that Sarkozy’s feathers were ruffled because Bibi didn’t credit him with Gilad Schalit’s release.

Pointedly, Obama not only failed to defend Netanyahu but actually expressed unreserved agreement with his cantankerous interlocutor. “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you,” Obama bellyached.

The trouble was that this frank articulation of unambiguous aversion towards Israel’s democratically elected head of government – a staunch ally of America – was inadvertently broadcast to journalists covering the event.

One would imagine that after his on-mic misadventure, Obama would be unable to again pull off the pretence of impartiality. Nonetheless, he audaciously did just that and welcomed Netanyahu to Washington recently as his forever bosom buddy. The approaching campaign season softens animus – or seems to. Accordingly, Obama spares no effort to convince his Jewish electorate that he’s not halfway as sinister as some say.

But when a politician loses fear of amplifiers and visible recording paraphernalia, all sorts of things are bound to spill out. And so at another international conference (the Seoul Nuclear Security Summit last week) Obama hobnobbed with another leader (outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev) when that darn mic was (unbeknownst to him) switched on.

Thus unawares, Obama exhorted not only the Russian honchos but also the whole listening world not to fall for his electioneering blarney. His subtext was that he’s obliged to say one thing pre-election to hustle votes, but that afterwards, if he secures his second term, he’ll do another thing entirely.

This is how it went:

Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this can be solved but it’s important for him [Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”

Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…”

Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”

The Obama-Medvedev banter wasn’t Israel-centered. It revolved around America’s planned anti-ballistic shield for Europe (mostly against Iranian attack). But Obama’s predilection for deception should disconcert us too because likely the same sort of double-dealing is now practiced in regard to our life-and-death perils.

Obama unabashedly establishes that what he promises now isn’t how he’d conduct himself on his final term, when the dread of the electorate is lifted from his shoulders. It’s not like we didn’t infer this, but Obama’s admission must intensify our intuitive insights. He indisputably plots his course exactly as we suspect.

Privately – with all the calculated conniving that implies – Obama relayed a message to Medvedev’s patron, Russia’s once-and-future boss Vladimir Putin, that greater “flexibility” vis-à-vis Kremlin opposition to American missile defenses will follow Obama’s reinstatement in the White House. Post-election (when Obama has nothing to lose), he’d be free to cut a deal with the Russians that would be deadly to his pre-election interests.

Once he’s impervious to voter-backlash, Obama in effect suggests to his Muscovite counterpart, he’d be prepared to please the Russians even if he thereby displeases the American people. But he needs a period of grace because the Americans he undertakes to bamboozle are also the very ones whom he’ll have to persuade to reelect him.

The purported leader of the Free World no less than offers the most powerful first-hand corroboration of his fecklessness to his prime geopolitical adversaries. Mind you, ex-KGB hotshot Putin wasn’t born yesterday.
In 2009 Obama terminated the missile- defense system for the Poles and Czechs. Obamaesque goodwill, though, went unrequited. Russia helped build Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr, stymies anti-Iran sanctions and underpins Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

That said, Obama’s latest cozying up to Medvedev represents a whole new twist on appeasement. There’s no getting away from the fact that Obama appealed for Putin’s forbearance in order to help him win reelection. Putin’s payoff would come when second- term President Obama accedes to his demands.

What Medvedev was asked to tip Putin about wasn’t supposed to be shared with American voters or overseas allies. From Obama’s words it emerges that he considered it essential that his capitulation to Russian pressure against missile defense development be kept under wraps – for now. Voters, hence, have every right to ask whether there are other surprises Obama might spring if reelected.

In that vein, Jewish voters (those who still care) need to ask whether Obama is being straight with them in his palaver on the Mideast, both as regards Iranian nuke ambitions and Palestinian cynical stonewalling.

Obama’s pro-Arab/pro-Muslim predilections mustn’t escape the scrutiny of American Jews, no matter how knee-jerk liberal most of them invariably are. If Obama – as the latest flap in Seoul signaled – isn’t shooting straight with the American public in general, odds that he deliberately deludes his Jewish supporters.

Worse than the incredible recklessness of making risky (if not altogether unethical) pitches while wearing a microphone, is the blithe manner in which Obama strove to brush the slipup aside. His flippancy all but screams out that he holds his plebian voters in thinly disguised contempt.

Even more distressing is the fact that he appears to have succeeded in laughing away the incident, as if it constituted no more than an actually endearing indiscretion involving pesky electronic gadgetry. He somehow managed to paper over the shocking content of his overheard conversation – conspiring with an inimical foreign rival behind the backs of his own voters, with an eye to duping these voters.

Hardly much can be more serious than that and potentially more politically disastrous. Still, Obama comes off as immune to what would quash the prospects of other incumbents. Lack of honesty with the voting public – especially when so glaringly exposed – should by logic be catastrophic to his reelection cause. And yet the fallout is barely perceptible, as if Americans refrain from dwelling on the ramifications of clandestine “flexibility” with Russian autocrats.

It’s no joke when the leader of the world’s sole remaining superpower proposes to placate a hardnosed pushy competitor who aspires to regain his country’s erstwhile superpower status. It’s worse when electoral advantage is linked to playing fast and loose with basic security. It’s worst when the president himself is unmistakably heard peddling this shady transaction.

These aren’t tendentious leaks from unnamed sources. What was unintentionally imparted to us is as credible as can be precisely because it wasn’t intended for our ears. Truth surfaces when arrogant jabberers let their guard down, feeling free to expound on hidden agendas – expediently hidden for very ulterior motives.

Without much ado, Putin was told that his irresponsible record will be rewarded by more gratuitous pliability from Obama. America’s allies everywhere must now be wary in the utmost extreme – and principally so Israel, which is the most threatened and loyal of the allies and in the vanguard of them all. Should Obama win his “last election,” we’ll all have lots to worry about.

No amount of post-gaffe lightheartedness on Obama’s part should be allowed to downscale our alarm about his possible reelection.

Jews have every reason to be leery of a second Obama term, after he’ll have waged his last campaign, as he himself stressed. Obama’s lack of candor regarding Israel has been demonstrated all too often. The above-quoted badmouthing of Netanyahu at Cannes is only one of numerous examples.

And we must always bear in mind that what we overhear by coincidence is surely a negligible fragment of worse utterances to which we never become privy. What the open mic divulges is but an infinitesimal indication of what’s said out of our earshot. But that fortuitous tiny tidbit is a fortunate omen because forewarned is forearmed.

We better hope this omen robs us of peace of mind – for the sake of our own self-preservation. All bets should now be off because Obama plainly doesn’t deserve the benefit of our doubt. Indeed, considering shenanigans such as those he broached to Medvedev, doubt becomes nothing less than mandatory.

Medvedev assured Obama: “I stand with you.” His endorsement, though, must elicit the precise opposite from us. In the wise words of playwright Tennessee Williams, “We have to distrust…. It is our only defense against betrayal.”

Rare are the violent clashes from which all sides emerge positively cheery. But the latest exchange of fire with Gaza was just such an atypical conflict. When the smoke cleared, both combatants came away upbeat and sure their respective enemy was taught a painful lesson.

We are near-giddy with gladness over the technological wonders of our Iron Dome anti-missile missiles, while the Gazans are hoarse with victory whoops because they managed to fire off as many rockets as they did. We effusively congratulate ourselves because no major catastrophes were wrought on our side of the border. Nevertheless, the Gazans know that had we truly won, they wouldn’t be left standing and able to spark another conflagration at another time.

What does all the sound and fury signify in real terms? Most likely that no lessons at all were taught, that no one was punished and that in all probability we once more critically misread the signs. It’s as if somewhere along the line we’ve managed to lose sight of what constitutes triumph in our peculiar immediate environment. According to Mideastern conventions, the absence of incontrovertibly humiliating vanquishment denotes a degree of victory.

This local logic mustn’t be dismissed out of hand.

In the Gazan view our aim should have been to entirely disable them from striking again. Since we didn’t accomplish this, they won and we lost. To underscore their contentions they made sure to fire the last salvo – after the ceasefire for which they ironically begged. Thus they had the apparent last word, imparting the impression that they were capable of pummeling us more, if only they wanted to.

It almost doesn’t matter that we reject this interpretation of reality. If they consider themselves undefeated, then for all intents and purposes they indeed weren’t defeated.

Likewise, it’s hardly relevant that we never launched a wide-ranging campaign to crush all Gazan capacity for belligerence. In Gazan eyes if we could crush them, we would have. The very fact that we didn’t set out to do so attests to weakness on our part and to a deterrent strength on theirs.

However, Gazans too misread the situation. It’s not that we’re too weak to take them on, but that we’re scared of winning. This is something that they plainly can’t get their heads around. Nobody in the Mideast can comprehend cerebral convolutions like ours.

Lamentably, Israel has turned itself into the unhappy real-life equivalent of the unnerved athletes in yesteryear’s uniquely effective episode of TV’s animated Batman series. Aptly entitled “Fear of Victory,” this classic features the recurrent villain Scarecrow, who slips star sportsmen an adrenalin-activated fear-toxin. As they gear themselves up for competition, they get scared of winning. Scarecrow then bets against them, sure that, despite these champions’ legendary abilities and proven experience, they cannot succeed.

Fear has come to dominate Israel’s zeitgeist ever since Oslo – perhaps itself born of the fear to defend our interests, if need be, in defiance of a world that keeps turning against us. Our two relatively recent largest-scale confrontations –The Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead- illustrate the fiascos which fear-engendered inhibition produces.

In both campaigns, Israel patently hadn’t achieved much of anything. Israel (under Ehud Olmert’s lead) demonstrated impressive firepower but failure of will to follow through successfully enough to inflict instantly recognizable defeat on the enemy and amend the bad situation which forced us into the battlefield to begin with.

Things look abysmal even without factoring in the merciless diplomatic trashing and disastrous image-tarnishing to which Israel was subjected. When the deafening din died down, the enemy survived upright and ready to fight another day. We didn’t eradicate or even significantly reduce its rocket arsenals.

The same was the outcome of this month’s hostilities in the South. Though battered and bruised, Gazans were the ones who strove to dictate terms and impose their will on Israel and not vice versa.

For a whole host of sad reasons, we’re intimidated about going the whole hog and actually trying to rout our adversaries. They’re not blind to the paradox that the more hi-tech, scientifically advanced and militarily-sophisticated Israel becomes, the weaker its resolve. In the psychological combat zone, the Arabs make mincemeat of us – time and again.

And so, while Iron Dome may have saved lives in the short haul, in essence it epitomizes our trepidations of a showdown. Reliance upon defensive measures – no matter how cutting-edge – encapsulates hesitation to fight. This hesitation deepens precisely because Iron Dome is undeniably the stunning technological feat it’s reputed to be.

It makes the dithering tolerable and longer-lasting. The inevitable can be postponed if in the meanwhile Iron Dome neutralizes most rockets fired at Israeli civilians and luck spares us in the remaining instances.

If Israelis as far north as Gedera stay under cover, our forces can avoid actual contact with the enemy. Taking Gaza on by remote control isn’t only more sanitized; it’s less risky. The downside is that jihadists of whichever affiliation across the Green Line are emboldened, while we grow increasingly leery of the real battlefield.

Content as we are with the Iron Dome, the most a defensive posture can achieve is a return to the status quo ante. It means that for a given duration the bigger and more distant urban targets inside Israel will enjoy conditional respites from Gaza’s launching pads, whereas the areas adjacent to the border will continue to be subjected to daily doses of mortar attacks and occasional Kassam rockets – unremitting terror which we euphemistically dub a “trickle.”

That’s the “normal” state of affairs to which we incredibly acquiesce and to which the international community remains chillingly indifferent.

It’s nothing new. It was so when the Iron Dome was still in the realm of science fiction. Then too we sought a variety of defensive cure-alls. Among them were concrete cubes. These were all the rage right after we disengaged from Gaza.

As ever, folly breeds peril and Ashkelon, which pre-disengagement was out of Kassam range, had been rendered vulnerable thanks to the ruthless uprooting of settlements at the edge of the northern Gaza Strip (nobody then dared predict the rocketing of Beersheba, Ashdod, Yavne or Kiryat Gat).

The Gaza-perimeter settlements were set up to deliberately form physical barriers between the Strip and Ashkelon’s outskirts which contain some of Israel’s most sensitive targets (among them the Rutenberg Power Station, the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, huge fuel storage facilities, a major desalination plant and plenty more).

But the infallible autocrats who sold us the disengagement bill of goods threw that logic to the wind, as they did the logic of holding onto the Philadelphi Corridor to prevent the arming of Gaza to its carnivorous teeth. The antidote came in the shape of prefab fortifications of assorted sizes.

Concrete desks, for example, were the product of deadpan earnest IDF innovative brainstorming. These were proposed as a safety feature for unreinforced classrooms. Pupils were directed to cower underneath the novel constructions whenever Gazans unleashed tokens of their appreciation for Israel’s unilateral withdrawal.

This wasn’t all. In anticipation of the very tangible benefits of disengagement, our civil-defense experts promoted a project to install large concrete cubes all around Sderot streets to offer the citizenry shelter in case Gazans failed to interpret our conciliatory overtures as we intended. The local citizenry was instructed to run to these unsightly structures and hide within them whenever they heard rockets coming.

In hindsight, and in comparison to the Iron Dome’s astounding exploits, these low-tech post-disengagement solutions seem primitive. But on closer examination we must concede that their basic concept is identical to the Iron Dome – i.e. passive protection.

And passive protection begets paralysis. It’s not enough to express gratification that no rocket crashed into a schoolyard full of kids. Despite the Iron Dome, schools were hit and only the fact that their pupils were shielded at home prevented carnage.

This is the sporadic scenario. With each flare-up, life stops throughout Israel’s South. Hardly anyone goes to work or school or any place else. A full third of the country lingers in suspended animation for as long as Gaza decrees. This in itself buoys Gazan morale.

Even the fact that they force us to reduce available Iron Dome stockpiles should delight them. They might not cause casualties but they wreak economic havoc.

Yes, the syrupy slogan is that no price is too high to save lives, which – considered strictly on the moral plane – is indisputable. However, we need to keep in mind that it costs peanuts to manufacture a Kassam and that Gaza’s arsenals boast untold thousands of these crude versions of Nazi V-1 and V-2 rockets (all murderously indiscriminate). The upgraded Katyushas called Grads are supplied gratis, compliments of Iran.

In contrast, each Iron Dome interception costs $100,000. Since Iron Dome batteries cover a comparatively small area each, many more than now deployed are needed. The missiles themselves take a long time to be produced and there can never be enough of them to take down every contraption hoarded in Gaza.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that many communities under Kassam threat are too close to the border for sufficient warning time. The Iron Dome system requires 15 seconds to identify an incoming Kassam. Yet these projectiles can (and have in the past) slammed down after being airborne for shorter intervals. The Iron Dome, furthermore, doesn’t offer protection against mortars.

With their own earthy good-sense commoners throughout Israel’s South recognize that the best defense is offense and that good offense isn’t shelling vacant lots, eliminating the odd miscreant, and generally trying not to get IDF hands too dirty, so as not to offend sanctimonious European sensibilities.

They know that the only way to defend is to win and that you win by breaking the enemy’s spirit and will to fight.

We’ve got to conquer our fear of winning because neither Iron Dome nor Batman will rescue us from the Scarecrow of our own making.

Pent-up angst is vented via macabre gallows humor which presupposes that our dreadful end is inevitable, that by summertime we’d be flattened by Iranian rockets. We paint ourselves as pitiable pawns in the hands of trigger-happy leaders, as wretched victims of the unrestrained hubris and folly of demented higher-ups.

To hear some of what’s proffered by left-wing gurus and commentators, we’re now living though a terrifying real-life reenactment of Dr.Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Stanley Kubrik’s 1964 black comedy spotlighted a loony general who ignites a nuclear apocalypse that a coterie of bungling politicians and frantic generals fail to stop.

Cast as the gung-ho paranoids who push for a first-strike to break the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) stalemate are of course PM Binyamin Netanyahu and anyone else who dares insist that Israel must help itself if no other choice is left.

Those who fear Iranian nukes are deemed deranged. In contrast, those in our midst who have learned to stop worrying and love the Iranian bomb are acclaimed as prudence personified.

Indeed, there’s a plethora of political benefits to be accrued from pooh-poohing the Iranian threat. To begin with, Netanyahu’s unremitting adversaries have homed in on yet another pretext to wallop him – his alleged unhinged obsession about an insignificant explosive device that we could easily be reeducated to live with.

Beyond that beckon greater opportunities to deepen defeatist dispositions. Our truly doctrinaire leftists – as distinct from Israel’s pragmatist and activist founding fathers – have never approved of successful Jewish nationalism. Israel’s deterrent capabilities were always anathema to those who have made it their mission to take us down a few pegs and shrink us back to what they regard as more befitting proportions.

Hence it almost gladdens certain hearts to see doomsday weapons in the hands of an implacable enemy. There can be no better antidote to what’s perceived in certain quarters as Israeli arrogance.

There’s sneering pleasure to be derived from witnessing cocky Zionists dwarfed and put in their place. Besides, postmodern moral-relativists discern no differences among assorted possessors of The Bomb. Our democracy, they aver, is no better than the ayatollahs’ theocracy. Their resolve to wipe us off the map is no worse than our resolve to survive.

Seen thus, it might not be so awful if Ahmedinejad adds a few atomic warheads to his arsenal.

It’s much like the unstinting tolerance evinced by yesteryear’s leftists toward Soviet nuclear stockpiles. Their motto back then was “better red than dead.” In other words, accept defeat without struggle. Moreover, further down the line it might be rationalized that not only is it better to be defeated than to die, but that it’s better to be defeated than to be victorious.

In this vein, novelist David Grossman – appointed by his promoters as guardian of our collective conscience – warned against a preemptive Israeli strike in a recent front-page Ha’aretz op-ed. He argued that “it is better for Israel to reconcile itself, even with gnashing of teeth, to a nuclear Iran.”

“It is forbidden for Israel to attack Iran,” Grossman reasons omnisciently, because “there’s no way to determine with certainty that Iran will attack Israel if it possessed nuclear weapons.” The subtext: Israeli self-defense is illegitimate before a nuclear mushroom rises over the incinerated Dan Region. Of course, by then it would be way too late, but why quibble.

The gist of the Grossmanian logic is that Netanyahu is cynically hyping the Iranian danger – particularly by resorting to Holocaust allusions – and that he might in the end unleash a horrific Iranian vendetta upon us. “Does any man,” Grossman rhetorically asks, “have the right to sentence so many to death only in the name of fear of an eventuality which might never occur?”

Grossman, of course, will never admit to preying on our fears but he will unhesitatingly accuse Netanyahu of unconscionably scaremongering. All the while, the powers-that-be in Tehran recommend vociferously that Israel be wiped off the map. It’s left up to us to decide whether to take them at their word and believe their genocidal bluster, or dismiss it as inconsequential ranting for domestic consumption.

Grossman would balk at historical comparisons, at our observations that we had seen it all before, been there and paid in oceans of blood for dismissing the blunt tirades of other tyrants. But the incontestable fact is that human nature doesn’t change over the generations, only specific circumstances take on different forms. At heart, we chronically prefer the serenity of today over security tomorrow.

It’s not a cliché. It’s the truth. Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace for our time” was genuinely applauded on his return from Munich in 1938 – first by grateful crowds, then by the House of Commons and subsequently by every British newspaper.

Winston Churchill, who dared swim against the tidal wave of public opinion, growled: “I believe we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat.” That didn’t win him adherents. Churchill was heftily booed down. Why? Were the masses stupid? No, they were just like us, concerned about the here and now.

The seeds of World War II germinated on the ostensibly sane and safe middle-ground. Caution facilitated the global cataclysm. Quintessentially judicious and practical Neville Chamberlain was the then-iconic high-priest of responsibility. In his gentlemanly manner, he was the consummate champion of cop-out. It wasn’t a personal failing or an idiosyncrasy. He wasn’t pursuing a private agenda that eventually collapsed catastrophically.

Chamberlain popularly reflected his nation’s zeitgeist. Most Britons wanted to disengage. That’s why middle-Britons en masse supported the 1934-35 Peace Ballot.

It was promoted by Lord Robert Cecil who won the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize for this inanity. Some 500,000 canvassers went door-to-door to poll ordinary folk on whether they’re for peace and against war – as manipulative as asking who’s for healing and against pain (or who’s for Grossman’s moderation and against extremism).

With no terms or conditions stipulated, “peace” won by a whopping 10,500,000 votes to a mere 750,000. This gauge of the public’s mood was anything but harmless. The Peace Ballot made London’s deterrence ring hollow, because despite its inherent bias, it encouraged appeasement. It made Europe’s ensuing bloodbath inevitable, having assured Hitler that – much as the Brits abhorred him – the last thing they wanted was to fight.

There’s every chance that word of Grossman’s perceptions, and similar prattles by plenty of others, has reached Ahmedinejad and emboldened him. But let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that this isn’t the case, that analogies to pre-WWII appeasement are spurious and that we wouldn’t be nuked if we take Grossman’s advice and learn to put up with the Iranian bomb.

What then? Nothing to worry about?

Hardly. At the very least Iranian nukes would turn all Israelis into hostages of the very ayatollahs who keep preaching for our extermination. Although unparalleled on the horrific-hazard-scale, even undetonated Iranian nukes are somewhat akin to Gaza’s and South Lebanon’s missile caches. In both cases millions of Israelis are held to ransom via the amassed firepower of Islamic zealots who try to call the shots and stymie our self-defense on pain of punishment.

While the world’s opinion-molders bewailed the blockade on Gaza, they turned a blind eye to its engorged rocket hoards. With equal perfidy, the international community ignored its own obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and allowed Hezbollah to rearm monstrously.

A nuclear threat of course is way more sinister. For one thing, it’ll trigger a regional nuclear arms race. Saudi Arabia is already showing interest, a fact which should send shivers down all spines everywhere, considering the oil-glutted kingdom’s instability and the fact that al-Qaida’s villains, including the 9/11 perpetrators, mostly emerged from the Saudi hatchery.

Secondary nuclear proliferation to a whole host of terror outfits is an unavoidable complication to boot. Assorted “dirty bombs” in the hands of Allah’s warriors will leave nobody invulnerable.

Extortion opportunities would become limitless. We could be blackmailed with varying degrees of nuclear hell if we don’t set loose every last convicted terrorist; if we don’t surrender Jerusalem; if we don’t allow Israel to be inundated with millions of hostile Arabs calling themselves descendants of refugees; if we don’t retreat into suicidal borders as delineated by would-be annihilators; if we don’t all dive into the deep blue sea and dutifully disappear beneath its waves.

Food for thought for a nation that released over 1,000 terrorists for one kidnapped solider.

And more tidbits to chew over – what would have happened if back in 1981 Menachem Begin had suddenly seen a Grossmanesque light, got cold feet and decided to desist from the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor? How would we have fared a decade later, in the First Gulf War, if the Iraqi tyrant had the bomb? How would the rest of the world have coped?

In all, the “balance of terror” to which the Left readily acquiesces is no great shakes. There are too many shady characters and shoddy ideologies in our neighborhood to instill even a modicum of confidence in any rational stewardship next door of weapons of mass destruction.

That said, ignoring bad bombs in bad hands while hoping for the best might not be the best modus operandi for preserving life and limb – to say nothing of preserving that familiar old roof over our head.

It’s easy to ridicule and it’s easy to resort to smears in the Dr. Strangelove idiom, but fearing Iran’s bomb and seeking to preempt it may be way saner than learning to love it. Needless to stress, the sanest thing of all is just to babble a whole lot less.

With that in mind, it’d be especially instructive for us to recall one of her eyewitness accounts which is most pertinent to our own circumstances.

It was published nearly six years ago – in April 2006, only a few months after we disengaged from Gaza.

Colvin tossed the truth about our self-bamboozlement directly in our faces. This perhaps was why that specific item generated near-zero resonance among us. Why focus on the unpleasant even if it’s the straightforward bottom line with profound implications for our possible future follow- up follies?

If there’s anything we dislike, it’s to be confronted with evidence of our own inexcusable imbecility.

Colvin unceremoniously gave us the facts. It was left up to us to draw conclusions which our establishment and Left-dominated media scoffed at. Therefore, Colvin’s singularly unpalatable feature never made our headlines back in the day.

That in itself poses something of a riddle. One would expect our agenda-driven press to lap up her material, because Colvin was never remotely renowned for being a lover of Zion.

Having gone where few men dared and promoted herself as dedicated to chronicling war’s worst, she covered conflicts in Kosovo, East Timor, Chechnya and Sri Lanka, where she lost an eye. In March 2006 she boldly ventured a tad beyond the reinstated Green Line to see what became of Morag, one of the spirited settlements razed by Ariel Sharon and sidekicks – Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni et al.

“Four green flags of the extremist Palestinian party Hamas were flying last week at the gate of a military training camp built on the ruins of Morag,” she opened. “Inside the camp recruits from the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, ran mock attacks over dunes covered in dry grass. One of them stopped to launch a rocket-propelled grenade.”

Colvin stressed that “the base is no makeshift encampment. A telecommunication tower rises from a dune; loudspeakers broadcast from masts… the stones from the old homes have been painted white and used to make guardhouses. Even the settlement’s gate has been cannibalized; now it swings to Toyota pick-up trucks bringing more armed men in uniform.”

A senior al-Qassam honcho who showed Colvin around explained to her that his outfit’s deadly aims vis-à-vis Israel haven’t changed one iota since Hamas’s electoral victory.

The insolence of the unnamed hotshot quoted by Colvin was underscored at exactly that same time by then-Palestinian Authority foreign minister Mahmoud a-Zahar of Hamas (during the Hamas-Fatah partnership).

In an interview with China’s Xinhua News Agency, conducted just when Colvin toured the ruins of Morag, a-Zahar waxed ecstatic about “dreams of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall of my Gaza house which would not have a trace of Israel on it.” He exultantly gloried in the “dream to have our independent state on all Palestine… This dream will become real one day. I am certain of this because there is no place for the state of Israel in this land.”

Official Israel and its retreat-advocating mouthpieces ignored a-Zahar, but he elaborated his comments in Lebanon’s Al-Mustaqbal newspaper. The most the Hamas regime can grant Israel, he intoned just as Colvin filed her report, is a “temporary cessation of hostilities,” in which “the Zionist entity would be countenanced temporarily but gradually be pushed into narrower confines. Borders can only be provisional,” because “there’s no place on earth for the state of Israel.”

The very same a-Zahar was instrumental in negotiating yet another cease-fire a few days ago.

Colvin might not have realized how in sync her Hamas guide was with his bosses, but she obviously didn’t misinterpret the mood in what became of Morag. After what she observed and heard, Colvin reckoned that “Israelis contemplating the evacuation of West Bank settlements will shiver at the discovery that al-Qassam fighters now live and train on the ruins of a place that was home to 37 Jewish families.”

That, however, is where she got it all wrong.

Reasonable folks would indeed be shaken to the core and rebuff those who uprooted the most dedicated of their compatriots in order to facilitate genocidal preparations against the entire national aggregate.

But Colvin misjudged us. It’s not that our nonchalance is born of extraordinary courage in the face of adversity. Instead it’s the product of denial of adversity. We pretend we’ve nothing to worry about except for the price of cottage cheese and, more recently, of a commonplace chocolate-covered candy bar.

Those who sway Israel’s public sentiment sanction our featherbrained fixation on the trivial. It serves their purposes that we not dwell on the existential dangers that loom ominously from every direction. It’s better to preoccupy our petty plebeian minds with gobbledygook.

Still, to be fair, it’s not only us. Colvin’s coverage from Morag made no waves anyplace in the world. This should surely show us that a correspondent’s output is rarely treated on its merit and certainly not in light of the reality it might unmask. Correspondents are far less influential than myth would have it. They either go with the flow or are washed up.

It’s not veracity which counts but whether what’s exposed meshes with the trends dictated to news consumers. If the designers of popular political fashion are inimical to Israel – or just apathetic about our minimal safety – they’ll keep the masses’ eyes wide shut even when assorted Colvins present opportunities to enlighten them.

Conversely, when the Colvins of the world barely enhance common knowledge, as in the Syrian slaughter narrative, their truisms are sanctimoniously and unstintingly reverberated – if they suit the zeitgeist.

That said, careless inattentiveness is foremost our sin. Foreigners are hardly likely to bother about what predominantly imperils Israel. That’s apart from the issue of fundamental morality. Our fellow democracies keep prodding us to risk our very survival in return for ephemeral verbiage (in the best case) and often not even that.

They pressure us arrogantly and condescendingly as if they do in actual fact know what’s best. All the while, it’s no skin off their noses if dire consequences from their non-too-friendly advice befall us.

The Iranian nukes-in-the-making are a trenchant case in point. For much of the free world a nuclear Iran is an inconvenience. Better it wasn’t so. Nevertheless, the real fly in the international community’s ointment isn’t a potential genocidal strike on Israel but a preemptive strike by Israel.

Hence the world’s energies are homed in on stopping those troublemaking Jews from upsetting everyone else’s equanimity.

For some, like US President Barack Obama, a deceptive calm is way preferable to shattering the illusion. With an election campaign around the corner, Obama has reluctantly put out the welcome mat for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. His seeming civility is quite a departure from March 2010. Then, with no campaign to mitigate his unmistakable aversion, Obama heaped unprecedented protocol-abuse on Netanyahu, going so far as to summarily walk out on him mid-conversation in order to “have dinner.”

But two years later, we get a rhetorical ramp-up against Iran to soften the sit-tight admonition against Israel. The ostensible show of camaraderie isn’t merely geared to hoodwinking Jewish voters. Diplomatic dawdling is essential for Obama to curtail oil-price hikes ahead of Election Day (November 6) – even if this eventually kills Israelis. Our life-or-death interests take a back seat to his political interests.

It’s not that we’re trigger happy to hit Iran (we’d suffer the vindictive backlash) but that the window of opportunity is narrow. Obama’s political calendar precludes timely preventative action. Obama’s demand is plainly that we subordinate our sovereignty to his reelection schedule. The cruel choice is either lose Obama’s backing (even if it’s merely nominal) or forfeit our self-reliance.

No syrupy speechifying can cover this up.

It’s our self-preservation on the line, as distinct from that of any professed well-wisher overseas. We cannot afford to fall for the insincerity lavished upon us – when expedient – by Obama or anyone else.

The disingenuous counsel liberally dispensed by talking heads and scribblers here and abroad mustn’t distract us from this realization. Opinions are drummed up not because of their objective unassailability but because of vested interests. This is as basic now as it was when Colvin visited Morag.

We don’t hear all the news. We get a glimpse of what those with media clout choose to play up. They chose not to play up Colvin’s report. Our media aids and abets our escapist penchants. Colvin received no proper hearing in the country that surrendered Morag to cold-blooded mass murderers.

Hence it took countless rocket barrages, ambushes, mega-scale gunrunning and violent clashes to impress average Israelis with the truth – decidedly in defiance of opinion-molders whose latest line is to suggest that Hamas is a tolerable interlocutor, despite explicitly preaching for our absolute obliteration.

They must be laughing out loud in Gaza – just like they were during Colvin’s stopover. It was coincidentally just then that Hamas chieftain Khaled Mashaal stated in a Lebanese TV interview that “Israel lacks the stamina to withstand a protracted struggle.”

“Were Israel strong, it wouldn’t withdraw,” Mashaal explained. “But Israel did withdraw and speaks of more pullbacks. Israel is in deep crisis. It cannot defeat the Palestinians nor break their spirit.”

This is the morale-boosting message Israel sends its foes whenever it dithers and dallies on Iran or when it accedes to the premise that it must cede strategic assets to still-viable enemies.

Unbeaten armies don’t give up vital holdings, especially in an unconcluded war. That’s how conventional logic operates. Even Mashaal’s logic. You can’t fault him for not figuring us out.

You can’t fault Colvin either. Her assumptions about what should have sent shivers down our spines were based on the norm. Israelis, though, are an anomaly. No one else like us in the world.