By happenstance, just when Muammar Gaddafi staged his recent Muslim-supremacy spectacle (significantly) in Rome, Israeli actors refused to stage anything in well-within-national-consensus Ariel. On the face of it these events were unrelated.

Neither did the resounding refusal from Ramallah to even vaguely recognize Israel as a legitimate Jewish state seem linked to the in-house boycotts promulgated by those showbiz poseurs and their literati cheerleaders.

The Gaddafi extravaganza was all but overlooked by our media as a no-account eccentricity. The Ramallah reiteration of immutable nay-saying was mentioned in passing as an almost acceptable, incontestable fact of life. The out-of-left-field onslaught on Ariel, however, was ballyhooed by leftist scribblers and talking heads as heralding the moral imperative of further shrinking (anyhow precariously tiny) Israel.

Those who ignore or downplay the news from Rome and Ramallah, yet amplify the anti-Ariel offensive, obscure the fundamental connection. The aforementioned are all jigsaw pieces in the same puzzle. The removal of any piece leaves a gaping void which renders the picture meaningless. Separating and isolating constituent elements distorts the context. The upshot is that, systematically blinkered, we’re left defenseless.

LET’S TRY to piece together the puzzle despite the assiduous efforts of our enlightened pseudo-intellectual cliques to limit our vision to scattered fragments.

Libyan strongman Gaddafi did in Rome what would have instigated barbaric lynching and savage rioting in Tripoli, to say nothing of Mecca. Gaddafi arrived at one of Christendom’s iconic centers, literally near the Vatican’s doorstep, to throw a “convert-to-Islam” party to which he invited hundreds of top-model wannabes, who were handsomely recompensed for their attendance.

He proclaimed that Christianity was “an inconsequential religion” and that Jesus himself was Muslim.

The details don’t matter. What matters is that Gaddafi assumed he could come to a pivotal Christian capital and thumb his nose at the locals, as if they have no sensitivities or, if they do, that these sensitivities are misplaced and hence don’t count.

Gaddafi’s impudence betrays anything but the pluralistic ethos espoused so ardently by postmodern Western ideologues. Gaddafi shares none of our moral relativism.

He’ll never argue that all beliefs are of equal value. In his world there’s only one exclusive, exclusionist and overriding truth – his own. He says so openly, in our face. The fact that we refuse to listen is willful self-delusion.

Gaddafi’s oddball flamboyance shouldn’t distract us. He’s not the exception to the Muslim rule. He’s its authentic voice, his preposterous pomposity notwithstanding.

Gaddafi isn’t the only Arab headliner with undisguised designs to subjugate us all to his creed. Others assert the same only with less fanfare. We prefer to pay no heed to any of Islam’s boosters, whether their message is delivered with flourish or with matter-of-fact resolve.

THERE’S NO Gaddafi-like grandiosity in the performance style of Doha-based Egyptian-born Yusuf al- Qaradawi, head of the World Council of Muslim Clerics, a supreme authority in the Sunni world and one of Islam’s most popular and influential luminaries. His Al Jazeera program Shari’a and Life made him a household preacher in the Arabic-speaking world.

A self-proclaimed moderate, he only condones suicide bombings against Israelis (of all genders and ages – even unborn fetuses), maintaining that there are no innocent noncombatants among them. Indeed many of his conservative coreligionists have condemned Qaradawi in fiery oratory for being too soft on the West.

But is the ultra-popular theologian any more tolerant than Gaddafi? Enjoying Qatari hospitality, Qaradawi declares that “Islam is poised to take over the world. The harbinger of Islamic triumph will be the conquest of Rumia [a.k.a. Rome]. Islam will return to Europe as the victorious conqueror, after having been twice ousted from it.”

In Qaradawi’s eyes, as in Gaddafi’s, there’s only one perfect faith.

It’s only historic justice that Islam vanquish all other religions. Against this backdrop, perhaps it’s Gaddafi who is the moderate, as for now he merely seeks to advance Islam via a chosen audience of bribed beauties rather than a full-blown jihad.

Needless to say, whatever goes for Rome applies a thousand-fold to Jerusalem. To quote Qaradawi again, “Jews who claim that they have a long history in what they call Israel are liars. The Arabs, on the other hand, were present in Palestine since the days of the Jebusites and the Canaanites, 30 centuries before Christ. Before the advent of Islam, there were no Jews in Palestine. The Jews’ claim to al-Buraq [the Western Wall] dates back only to recent times.”

It’s not only ancient history Qaradawi rewrites. In a 2009 sermon on Al Jazeera he explained why the Holocaust occurred (while simultaneously diminishing its proportions): “Throughout history, Allah had imposed people upon the Jews who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things Hitler did to them – even though the Jews exaggerate this – Allah managed to put the Jews in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, next time the Jews will be punished at the hands of the believers.”

Qaradawi’s message is threefold: The Jews got their just deserts, they weren’t punished as much as they allege and another Holocaust should be visited upon them – this time, he hopes, it will be perpetrated by Muslims.

THIS ISN’T incidental esoterica. These are commonplace perceptions throughout the Arab/Muslim world, and most especially in the twin fiefdoms of Ramallah and Gaza. Such views aren’t the far-out preserve of a handful of fanatics. These are the messages sounded too often to count in mosques – even within Israel. Moreover, these messages are broadcast on official TV throughout the reputedly moderate PA.

But these aren’t idiosyncratic quirks in an exclusively religious idiom either. They’re the broad unquestioned postulates that underlie all Palestinian positions. They’re taken for granted and hallowed as self-evident even in Ramallah’s more secular quarters.

No self-respecting Palestinian politician, leastways not one who desires to stay alive, would dare dispute Yasser Arafat’s contention that the Jews have no connection to and no history in this land and that no Jewish temple ever existed in Jerusalem.

Concomitantly, Holocaust denial is curiously combined with blaming on Jews whatever belittled bloodletting is sometimes grudgingly acknowledged in some select Palestinian narratives. For this mishmash motif we need go no further than the doctoral dissertation PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas submitted to the People’s Friendship University of Moscow and never retracted.

What we have to contend with, reluctant though we are to admit it, are threats – explicit and implicit – of another Holocaust. No less. It would serve us all to recall that Arabs and Muslims under the leadership of still-revered Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini were avid Nazi collaborators during the original Holocaust.

It would particularly serve our outwardly artier compatriots to realize that they embolden enemies who don’t merely oppose Jewish presence in Ariel, but in Tel Aviv no less. Life-preserving awareness is indispensable for all Israelis, including puffed-up thespians and homegrown guardians of other people’s consciences.

A couple of weeks ago Kathy, my fellow alumna of New York’s High School of Music and Art (renamed the LaGuardia High School for the Arts), sent me an update on a column I devoted (some two years back) to our much-belated reunion. The next day roughly the same information appeared in The Jerusalem Post, datelined Miramar, Florida. A quick Google showed it was widely reported.

The gist was that Adnan el-Shukrijumah has apparently become al-Qaida’s new head of global operations, in charge of plotting new attacks. This promotion puts him in direct contact with Osama bin Laden. This is the highest any American ever rose in al-Qaida ranks.
How does this pertain to Kathy? Shukrijumah was her neighbor, but no one would heed her warnings in real time.

Indeed, even after Shukrijumah went on the lam, she tried almost desperately to convince me that something bad was happening next door to the house which generations of Kathy’s Irish family had occupied since it was built in 1912.

Eventually, it was passed down to her. She and her husband raised three kids in the same two-story, redbrick dwelling on a leafy, cozy and quiet Brooklyn residential street. Both Kathy and her father grew up there and neither knew any other home. Their story wasn’t unique among the house-proud Irish of that neighborhood, where property tended to stay in the family and where things never changed too radically.

But no more. Not only are Kathy’s sons and daughter no longer nearby, but she describes them as having “escaped.”

Kathy’s birthplace is now a mini-Pakistan/Bangladesh, replete with bearded men sporting all manner of Muslim headgear and long flowing tunics, as well as heavily swathed women, some even veiled.

The corner of Kathy’s block is dominated by an oversized green sign, identifying the low-slung building beneath it as Masjid Nur al-Islam (the Light of Islam Mosque) and announcing that “only Allah is worthy of worship and Muhammad is his LAST prophet.”

Christians are urged to “turn to the Koran” if they are “genuinely faithful to Jesus.”

Like the few remaining non-Muslim homes on the street, Kathy’s is distinguished by a huge American flag that flutters demonstratively in the manicured front yard, accompanied by a large cross on the door and an assortment of patriotic/jingoistic banners. According to Kathy’s apologetics at the time, “making a statement is about all we can do. They aren’t delighted to see our flag wave. This is enemy territory.”

She felt besieged and, to prove she wasn’t paranoid, Kathy began amassing a dossier on the masjid, the imam who ran it and his followers. She insisted they weren’t innocent practitioners of American religious freedom.

She smelled something sinister, yet was painfully aware that she would be branded either unhinged or bigoted.

Her research, however, seems to indicate otherwise.

UNTIL THE mid-1990s, Masjid Nur al-Islam’s imam was the late Egyptian-educated Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, who later relocated to Florida. He was initially dispatched by the Saudis as a Wahhabi missionary in 1985 and financed by them thereafter. His disciple Clement Rodney Hampton- El, an explosives specialist, possibly helped assemble the bomb detonated in the 1993 World Trade Center attack. He was convicted of plotting to blow up the UN, FBI headquarters and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels.

Gulshair acted as interpreter for Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh” now serving life for the first WTC bombing, conspiring to use explosives at other NYC landmarks and colluding to assassinate US politicians.

Nabbed mastermind of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, fingered Gulshair’s eldest son, Saudi-born Adnan, as having been designated by al-Qaida and personally vetted by Bin Laden to lead new terror assaults and serve as successor to 9/11 pilot Mohammed Atta, with whom Adnan was connected.

The FBI now deduces that Adnan had taken over Mohammed’s position, designing and approving terror plots as well as screening new recruits. After two other top confederates were killed, the terrorist who grew in Brooklyn became Mohammed’s sole de facto successor.

Adnan received flight training and is dubbed “Jaffar the pilot.” He was likewise linked to “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla, Hamas and al-Qaida fund-raiser Adham Hassoun and terrorist Imran Mandhai (convicted of conspiring to bomb the National Guard armory, South Florida electrical substations, Jewish-owned businesses and community centers and Mount Rushmore).

Criminal charges were filed against Adnan. He was named in a federal indictment as conspirator in the plot to bomb New York’s subways in 2009. In the framework of a worldwide manhunt, the FBI offers $5 million for information leading to the capture of Kathy’s ex-neighbor.

Adnan’s brother Nabil, incidentally, uploaded to his Web page an image of Jerusalem ablaze with the caption: “Al Kuds, we are coming.”

None of this serves to persuade our uniformly ultra-liberal chums from yesteryear’s M&A that Kathy’s misgivings were warranted. Former classmates and friends see her as irremediably politically incorrect, on the wrong side of the argument, if not altogether a reprehensible Islamophobe enemy of human rights and of the hallowed ACLU way.

THE FACT that she now vehemently opposes the construction of the Cordoba House mosque/Muslim center, a hop and a skip from Ground Zero, hasn’t added to her popularity.

“It’s very déjà vu, except that the proportions and the gall are enormously more colossal neat the Manhattan landmark. In our case there was no outcry. Nobody paid attention to a no-account commercial property in a forgotten section of middle-class Brooklyn. The high-and-mighty didn’t care that it was overtaken by extreme Islamists.

“Our lives were turned upside down. The newcomers weren’t required to integrate and show sensitivity to the natives. Live-and-let-live didn’t apply to them.

“For years the mosque had been calling the faithful to prayers via rooftop loudspeakers five times daily – including pre-dawn,” Kathy recounts. “When we complained, the authorities regarded us, not them, as the disruptive element.”

Everything was couched in terms of freedom of worship.

Kathy and her neighbors argued that “this isn’t about civil rights. Something was going on there, but no one listened until it was too late.”

For Kathy the projected Muslim complex at 45-51 Park Place is “another installment in the same sad saga – again fraudulently couched in religious-freedom gobbledygook.”

Kathy is leery of the imam behind the Cordoba House plans, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who speaks of a “Shari’a- compliant America.”

After 9/11 Rauf opined that “the United States’ policies were an accessory to the crime that happened… In the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”

Pointedly, Rauf refused to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization.

“What message does using the name Cordoba send?” asks Kathy. “The first city conquered by Muslims in Spain conjures visions of Muslim expansionism, triumph and gloating. It’s like turning Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia into a mosque, like constructing mosques on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, like blowing up majestic Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. The issue isn’t our tolerance but their intolerance.”

Among my more esoteric possessions is an English-language translation of a forgotten volume, People and Portraits: A Tragic Cycle, published in 1966. It was authored by artist Georges (Yuri) Annenkov, innovator of grand scale settings for gargantuan Soviet parades and street extravaganzas. In 1921 he painted Lenin’s official portrait. Three years later, after Lenin had been dispatched to the great politburo in the sky, Annenkov was put to work illustrating books about the departed communist icon and was given access to his papers at Moscow’s Lenin Institute.

Annenkov claimed he had copied some of Lenin’s handwritten notes, including the following gem: “To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie’s aim. The whole world’s capitalists and their governments, as they pant to win the Soviet market, will close their eyes to the above-mentioned reality and will thus transform themselves into men who are deaf, dumb and blind … They will toil to prepare their own suicide.”

Essentially Lenin expounded on the theme of the “useful idiot,” ascribed variously both to him and to Stalin. Whether or not either of them actually coined the phrase, it entered the political lexicon to describe Soviet sympathizers in the West, who despite being ardent – if naïve – boosters of the communist cause, were in fact held in contempt by the very Bolsheviks who cynically exploited them.

THE USSR is gone, but not the useful idiots. Their latterday duplicates still support malevolent causes via gullible attempts to supposedly be a force for good. The progeny of old-time communists, along with fashionable new-recruit sidekicks, still willingly submit to manipulation by an unseen though powerful world force, characterized by radical political correctness and spouting human-rights slogans. Despite the moral superiority they claim, they’re in fact useful idiots in the service of political movements – from outright anarchists to jihadist terror-mongers.

They possess greater clout than the 20th century’s original useful fools ever achieved. They set the tone in the mass media and academia. They are the trendsetters who determine what’s acceptable and respectable. They mold minds. Anything they like is bon ton. Whatever they disapprove of is verboten.

Israel isn’t sanely immune to useful-idiot shenanigans. It’s in fact one of the most afflicted of democracies.

It only takes a visit to the Beit Berl Art College’s Tel Aviv gallery to come to grips with the skewing of our cultural environment. There, a particularly pugnacious exhibit, named “Evet” (after the nickname given to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman by Tzahi Hanegbi), specializes in unabashed character assassination under the guise of freedom of artistic expression.

It’s more than doubtful that anti-Lieberman animus so animated the 23 student-participants that their churlish masterpieces constitute irrepressible spontaneous outpourings of genuine emotional stirrings. More likely, the outrage against Lieberman (at no immediate instigation) was orchestrated and the works were commissioned from impressionable and pressurable students on condition that they smear the targeted victim. The unanimity of sentiment is too much to take at face value. Not only is there nothing vaguely kind to Lieberman, there’s nothing remotely neutral.

One piece of unexceptional sculpture portrays Lieberman as a pig. Crude photomontages turn him into a demonic skull-nosed ogre with pockmarked features and flame-filled eyes.

Elsewhere cutouts of Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Moshe Ya’alon declare (in German): “Ich bin ein Lieberman.” The invitation itself was printed in Gothic font to impart Nazi associations.

A video features a sadomasochistic sex scene in which the male wields a whip labeled Lieberman, while the flogged female grotesquely regurgitates Lieberman quotes.

Whether one is Lieberman’s fan or his political foe, this is the last venue to seek even a hint of artistic sophistication. Present abundantly is unadulterated hate. It’s all eerily on par with the “organized loathing” in George Orwell’s 1984. Big Brother’s arch antagonist was reviled regularly on the official “telescreen” daily “Two Minutes of Hate” feature, till his very image evoked hisses and reactions of “mingled fear and disgust.”

This is what this exhibit is geared to evoke. The self-satisfied artistes and aspiring-artistes (for whom this is likely the apex of their exposure hitherto) doubtlessly exude glee. Yet in a country obsessed with castigating incitement, the Beit Berl provocation goes remarkably unopposed. It’s indeed lauded as a testament to our liberality and a forum for an authentic groundswell of popular protest (even if meticulously choreographed by a cliquey art establishment parading incongruously as nonconformist).

At the other end of our political spectrum, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira’s 2009 book Torat Hamelech (The King’s Torah) spawned an ongoing criminal investigation by the police Serious and International Crimes Squad (no less). Copies of the publication were confiscated. In all, it constitutes a learned religious treatise on rules of engagement in wartime, arguing (heaven forefend) that in the heat of conflict non-Jews may be killed. Influential rabbis who dared endorse the book were summoned for interrogation and their refusal to heed said summons sent our constabulary (which faces no greater challenges) into a tizzy.

Whether one is a fan of the rabbi or his foe, it needs to be asked why his freedom of expression is any less than that of the Evet exhibitors.

But the question is rhetorical. Leftist useful idiots are the darlings of opinion-shapers. Rabbi Shapira is their utter anathema. It’s different strokes for different folks.

That’s why no eyebrows were raised by the confiscation of an obscure booklet and why no artsy celebrities dared mumble something against the useful-idiot uniformity of Beit Berl’s gallery. It doesn’t pay to take the useful idiots on. They can make or break careers. It’s prudent to remain on their good side.

YEARS AGO I was treated to a personal demonstration of why so much local creative zeal meanders leftward to the useful idiot domain. I was a young political reporter, when a then-mighty Labor politician remarked that he had heard I painted. After I confirmed the rumor, he offered me a generous year’s stipend (from the Histadrut, then not yet bankrupt) that would enable me to fill my canvasses without financial worry.
I hastily turned him down, inquiring acidly how he knew my art had any merit. The politician replied that I needn’t concern myself about that, as exhibitions and “friendly publicity” would be arranged for me. Colleagues later told me I was a prime non-useful idiot. I rejected a dream deal which “The Party” offered only to “people in which it was interested.”

In the wake of my artistic hara-kiri, I discovered that this is how one enters Israel’s intellectual inner sanctum. You either go with the flow or are ostracized. The implied bottom line is that if you’re with us, we will stand by you all the way. But if you aren’t, you’re against us.

While he remained in Russia, Yuri Annenkov knew the rote.

Memory is a chain that weakens and kinks with every added link, or generation. In a few decades the legendary of a region is only its most stubborn opinions, right or wrong. The truth may have been crushed by accumulative errors.
– California historian William Lawton Wright, 1961

Kfar Darom was crushed five years ago – on August 18, 2005, to be exact. That day, its population of 400 – among them bereaved families of five Kfar Darom inhabitants murdered in terror attacks and others maimed in these same incidents (like the three Cohen family children whose legs were blown off while they were seated in their school bus) – were forcefully ejected from their homes.

The IDF later razed these homes to the ground. Kfar Darom’s synagogue was subsequently despoiled and demolished by gleeful Gazans. Physically, the community was ruthlessly crushed by the accumulative errors of the 2005 disengagement.

Kfar Darom’s truth was crushed by the accumulative error that callously defamed it as an “illegitimate settlement” on usurped Gazan land, one that Israel would be better off without. Stubborn opinion-molders imperiously perpetuate this narrative.

This was Kfar Darom’s third crushing. But the first two blows were dealt by enemies who were eventually, even if belatedly, repulsed. Twice Kfar Darom came back to life.

Sadly its chances of recovering from the third blow, the mercilessly fatal one inflicted by a seemingly friendly force, appear nil. With the passage of time and the addition of new links to the chain of history, memories of Kfar Darom are already fading from most Israeli minds, save those with the “most stubborn opinions.”

KFAR DAROM shared much in common with such legends of the Zionist endeavor as Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim and Kfar Etzion. All the aforementioned succumbed to invading Arab forces during the vicious existential war imposed on the newborn Jewish state in 1948. All were eventually won back, all resettled and reclaimed from the utter ruin to which unbridled hate had reduced them.

The first to fall, and perhaps the most emotively remembered, was Kfar Etzion on the Jerusalem-Hebron road. Its area was purchased by Jews in 1927 but the small settlement founded there was devastated in the 1929 murderous Arab pogroms, which also eradicated Hebron’s ancient Jewish community. The settlement was resurrected in 1932 and named Kfar Etzion for the orange grower who owned the holding. It was redestroyed in the bloody Arab insurgency of 1936. The JNF restored it in 1943 when it became a religious (Hapoel Hamizrahi) kibbutz.

Kfar Etzion was defeated on May 14 – the day Israel declared its independence. Its captured defenders were cold-bloodedly massacred.

Next in the tragic chronology came Yad Mordechai, bordering the edge of today’s Gaza Strip, named after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising’s heroic leader Mordechai Anilewicz. The Hashomer Hatza’ir kibbutz straddled the strategic invasion route by which the Egyptian army strove to penetrate all the way to Tel Aviv. It was therefore pounded with the full might and ferocity of the Egyptian army. A small besieged band with scant light weaponry held back tanks, artillery and infantry regiments, but finally on May 23, after a six-day battle in which 24 defenders were killed, Yad Mordechai was overwhelmed. Its survivors escaped under the cover of darkness.

The story of more northerly Nitzanim is similar.

Founded by Ha’oved Hatzioni on JNF land, it too took the brunt of Egyptian attacks. Again it was a persevering resistance of the few against the many until the Egyptians overpowered the defenders on June 8. There were casualties, POWs, MIAs, atrocities, sadistically mutilated corpses and ghastly gang rapes.

Kfar Darom held out the longest but its plight was identical and every bit as hopeless. Its western Negev plot was acquired by citrus farmer Tuvia Miller in 1930.

His groves were ravaged repeatedly during the 1936-39 Arab riots. In 1945 the JNF bought him out and Kfar Darom was established as another Hapoel Hamizrahi kibbutz. It was named after a Talmudical-period village in the vicinity.

Kfar Darom too constituted an obstacle on the Egyptian penetration path into the Coastal Plain, inviting brutal battering and interminable shelling.

A major offensive on May 10 was thwarted at close range by besieged pioneers, none of whom emerged unhurt. Seventy Egyptian dead were left behind and Kfar Darom’s incredible stand became legend. A relief convoy, which barely broke through on May 15, only made things worse. Its men, many of them injured, were entrapped in the blockaded kibbutz as well. The few leftover provisions now had to stretch further. Nevertheless – outnumbered, hungry, thirsty and bleeding – the defenders foiled another large-scale Egyptian onslaught that very day.

Kfar Darom hung on by sheer grit for two months.

There was no way to evacuate the wounded, relieve any beleaguered fighters, deliver ammunition or replenish severely dwindling supplies.

Attempts to parachute food failed. Another rescue convoy was ambushed and managed to sneak out only eight days later with some walking-wounded and women. Before sunrise on July 8 the remaining defenders clandestinely retreated along with stretcher-borne wounded, their few guns and two Torah scrolls.

There was an epilogue, however.

Six months after Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim fell, the IDF liberated them. The same happened to Kfar Etzion and Kfar Darom – but after a 19-year delay. The Six Day War returned both to Jewish hands.

All four once-lost settlements were lovingly revived.

In 1970, at the avid prodding of then-PM Golda Meir, Nahal pioneers were sent to the ruins of old Kfar Darom, which lay desolate. The Gazans never rebuilt them and never settled there. In 1988 then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin turned the Nahal outpost into a civilian village.

Nobody nowadays would imagine ceding Yad Mordechai or Nitzanim. By historical happenstance only, their earlier liberation placed them within the Green Line. Nonetheless, this confers on them no greater intrinsic legitimacy than on the unfortunate Kfar Darom.

Even beyond-the-Green-Line Kfar Etzion got luckier.

For now, the vast majority of Israelis consider it sacrilege to even suggest giving up Kfar Etzion. Its bloodletting and courage still remain part of our national lore.

But phoenix-like Kfar Darom – twice destroyed and twice arisen from its ashes – was heartlessly surrendered.

It wasn’t because of battlefield disasters but because an Israeli government decided, though hardly coerced, to unilaterally sacrifice it. That’s all which differentiates Kfar Darom from Kfar Etzion (also liberated from Arab occupation in 1967) or from Yad Mordechai and Nitzanim (fellow victims of genocidal Egyptian aggression).

What has the sacrifice of Kfar Darom proven? Only that trendy defeatist dogma considers Jewish losses irretrievable, while Arab losses are inherently reversible and mandate a return to Square-One.

Jews are portable. They can never legitimately regain territory forcibly wrested from them. If they do, they’ll be branded unlawful occupiers. This is something for all the good folks in Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim and Kfar Etzion to lose sleep over.

We have no tangible proof that the White House had indeed applied brutal pressure on poor Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority’s teeter-tottering Ramallah half. This remains unsubstantiated. American officials haven’t confirmed news reports and derivative innuendo from both Israeli and Palestinian sources. But if we set aside our skepticism and assume, for argument’s sake, that Obama and crew did indeed twist Abbas’s arms, we ought to be outraged.

The very notion of dragging an unwilling interlocutor to the negotiating table should be unthinkable, certainly no cause for glee among Israelis.

This is akin to a shotgun wedding. However, it’s even less likely to lead to harmony than forced nuptials are to result in matrimonial bliss. We’ve been there, seen this.

TEN YEARS ago Bill Clinton had dragged a kicking and screaming Yasser Arafat to Camp David, where he also leaned on then-PM Ehud Barak to make egregious offers to reward Arafat for his “cooperation.”

To the amazement of both American and Israeli wishful-thinkers, Arafat spurned the outstretched hand and Israel’s mad magnanimity.

Unlike the Americans and Israelis, Arafat wasn’t out to end the dispute. That was the last thing on his priorities list. Indeed right at the top of said list was perpetuating and escalating the dispute. No sooner did the Camp David powwow flop, than Arafat unleashed his premeditated second intifada.

Violence raged and claimed lives in an unremitting bloodbath until Israel did the “non-peaceful” thing and launched Operation Defensive Shield.

Arafat was a super-icon, not only locally but throughout the Arab world. Abbas precariously survives by virtue of the protection accorded him by the very Israel he compulsively demonizes whenever speaking in Arabic. It’s folly to expect pathetic Abbas to deliver what revered Arafat couldn’t. Making concessions to Abbas is no different from making concessions to an effigy of our own creation.

Arafat feared being branded a traitor if he relinquished the right to overrun Israel with the progeny of supposed refugees and if he recognized the legitimacy of a Jewish state in what is claimed as exclusive Arab dominion. Whatever was untenable for Arafat is ten times worse for his ineffectual successor.

But not only would coercing Abbas prove counterproductive; it’s a perilous precedent which sooner than later would be turned against Israel.

Let’s assume, again for argument’s sake, that Abbas grudgingly “relents” and proceeds to engage in direct contacts with the vilified Netanyahu. Abbas will thereby score popularity points worldwide and probably also secure concessions for just agreeing to palaver – like continuing the freeze on Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. It’ll cost us to make him look pretty. We lose twice: by enhancing Abbas’s image and paying his price.

And after we cleverly manage to bamboozle ourselves, the pressure will be turned on us – way more ruthlessly than on Abbas. The construction freeze could become a permanent fixture with no advantage gained on our part but with spiraling disadvantages from here on.

Israeli leaders must step back from the immediate agenda of ingratiating themselves with Obama. Promoting negotiations with an unwilling peace-partner to the be-all and end-all is shortsighted and risky. Israeli leaders capable of perceiving the bigger picture ought to fume – in public, for the whole wide world to hear – against coercive interference from outsider busybodies, whoever they may be. Israeli leaders ought to speak up for Abbas’s right to decide, without pressure, whether or not to negotiate.

ISRAELI LEADERS ought to stand tall both for our sovereignty and for the sovereignty of any Arab interlocutor. No outsider possesses the right to impose anything on any of us. This will not only serve us well and eventually deflect pressure from Israel too, but it’s the ethical stand to take. Moreover, it may preempt deception. It may forestall situations in which the Arab side garners PR points because it seems to be accommodating but in fact does precisely the reverse of what it broadcasts.

The bottom-line result will anyhow be the same, whether Abbas is coerced into a talkathon or whether he is allowed to avoid the ordeal. No peace will emerge in any case – not from an Obama-led sequel to Clinton’s Camp David extravaganza and not from a continued Abbas refusal to meet face-to-face.

You can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. You can pull Abbas to a conference room somewhere but you can’t make him sign on the dotted line and, more so, you can’t make him deliver.

All that Obama would accomplish would be to destabilize Ramallah’s honcho. Abbas will be put in the same quandary as Arafat was by Clinton.

Perhaps he’ll have to redeem himself by triggering the Third Intifada.

If he doesn’t, Hamas will seize the initiative to make political hay. The enticement to undermine the remnants of Abbas’s position and sabotage any restarted “peace” process, will reinvigorate Hamas’s lust for blood. That, in turn, will oblige Abbas’s own hotheads in Fatah’s Aksa Brigades and their like to prove to Hamas that they can spill no less Jewish blood. The competition will be on for the glory of who can inflict more pain on Israel.

Either way, meddling from abroad will stir a mammoth hornet’s nest here. When rank amateurs try their hand at dabbling where they can only cause damage, the fiasco is inevitable.

Obama’s Mideast record proves this incontrovertibly.

Anything this Midas-antithesis touched turned out disastrously.

His obsequiousness to the Arab/Muslim world hardly stimulated greater moderation. The opposite is true (i.e., Turkey). Obama’s sucking up to Arabs/Muslims and iciness toward Israel failed to impress Iran, Syria, Syrian lackey Lebanon, etc.

Even in Gaza and Ramallah, he’s mocked as a nonentity.

The Mideast’s bad boys don’t fear Obama.

At most they see him as a feeble sissy. If anything, radicalism in Arab/Muslim spheres only swelled in the year since Obama’s landmark Cairo speech.

A victim of his own mystique, Obama pretentiously cast himself in the mold of some of America’s greatest statesmen of yesteryear, but there’s nothing concrete to show for all the posturing.

Obama talks the talk grandly but fails to walk the walk. He’s clueless about this region.

He convinced himself that honeyed blandishments will send seduced Arab/Muslim autocrats into his arms. This was never going to happen. Obama conjectured – objectionably – that Israelis are wary of him because of his middle-name. The truth is that more than Israelis are put off, Arabs didn’t fall for the American President’s Arab moniker.

Obama doesn’t get it. But this only makes this tenderfoot’s intervention all the more dangerous.

He’d do both Israelis and Arabs a favor to treat us as adults who can handle our own business – if we want to. That is our choice to make.

The best all buttinskys everywhere can do is to keep their noses out of our life-and-death tribulations.

It’s almost surreal to witness the White House resident and his European counterparts fall all over themselves in recharged alacrity for the “two-state solution.”

Do they even remotely believe their own words? Or do they just make obligatory sounds to satisfy the requisites of some bizarre rite?

It’s a tad of a stretch to trust that it hadn’t dawned on any of them that the last thing Palestinians want is a Palestinian state dwelling in idyllic coexistence alongside a secure, accepted and recognized Israel. Honchos in both Ramallah and Gaza may expediently exploit the two-state slogan, but they never truly espoused the cause of two-state harmony.

All the while, though, the two-state mantra is fervently chanted by statesmen everywhere, eager to put in their two cents and repeat precisely what everyone else has been declaiming for years with the same seeming conviction and the ever-invigorated note of urgency. Global movers and shakers never tire of the worn old refrain, which they elevate to Gospel-like sanctity, with each futile reiteration.

This has all the hallmarks of the birth of yet another great extensively proselytized Mideastern religion. The idol worshiped by all and sundry is the two-state deity. Though its teachings aren’t feasible in the here-and-now, anyone who dares hint at skepticism is instantly pronounced a vile heretic. Dissenters are pilloried by the imperious clerics and impressionable disciples of the new international ecclesiastical assembly. The high absolutist authority tolerates no deviation from its unassailable dogma – the cramming of two adjoining states into the narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the Med.

This doctrinal article of faith envisions a perfect, all-encompassing solution to a problem that masses everywhere have been conditioned to focus upon, to the exclusion of all else that plagues humanity – the plight (supposed) of the (previously never-known) Palestinian people. With frequent reminders, the two-state premise gains priority in indoctrinated psyches. Memory is reinforced with each tendentious news report until the preaching becomes an axiomatic unassailable precept.

The new idol’s promised salvation is now unquestioned, obvious and overpowering. It’s a universal force. Two states are the way to go. High priests of the two-state sacrament must be revered and obeyed.

Anyone marked as marginally unenthusiastic faces the fire and brimstone of indignant censure. Foot-draggers, to say nothing of opponents, become the arch-adversaries. Compelling them to bow down before the two-state idol emboldens and validates the faithful. If they can coerce, they must be right.

TAKE THE case of Binyamin Netanyahu. For a long time, and valiantly against the odds, he poked holes in the burgeoning two-state creed. He became the doubters’ leader. Simultaneously, the pressure upon him grew unbearable. We don’t know if he buckled or cleverly tried to play for time, but he at last proclaimed his newfound devotion to the two-state divinity. Exasperatingly, however, his popularity overseas wasn’t thereby enhanced. He remains mistrusted, portrayed at best as an agent of delay if not altogether an intransigent holdout.

The enticement to crush the Israeli side’s perceived noncompliance is still powerful. Yet while all eyes are on Netanyahu, no one pays attention to the two latifundia of the split Palestinian Authority – Fatahland and Hamastan.

Mahmoud Abbas, figurehead chief of the former, is commonly perceived as the good guy, having won warm benedictions from zealous two-state theologians and from straggler new-believer Netanyahu. The Hamas bunch, now much less frowned upon, increasingly secures legitimacy and sympathy as champion of the oppressed underdogs.

But what ardent two-state devotees incredibly lose sight of is that both PA segments undermine the very two-state solution concocted to appease them. Netanyahu acquiesced to indirect talks for a while and froze all Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem to deny Abbas pretexts for not talking. Abbas nevertheless managed to scuttle George Mitchell’s mediation while ingeniously succeeding to paint Israel as obstructionist.
Though the Arab League gave Abbas the yellow light to resume direct contacts with Israel, his preconditions leave little doubt: Abbas is far from interested in furthering the two-state option. Among other demands, Abbas insists that the upcoming negotiations’ starting point be Ehud Olmert’s egregious offers – ironically the very ones Abbas rejected when Olmert proposed them. It’s as if Abbas fails to recognize that Olmert is out of power, that Israelis elected another government on another platform.

There’s no way Abbas doesn’t grasp that this is a nonstarter. Hence we must assume that his preposterous precondition is an intentional spanner in the works.

Next, Abbas demands that the outcome of the negotiations be fixed before they begin. He wants Israel to guarantee a return to the 1949 armistice lines, including in Jerusalem. He refuses any compromise, especially over territories he doesn’t control. He brazenly denied having agreed to “let the Jews keep” the Western Wall.

Since he knows he cannot prevent Hamas domination on the hilly terrain directly overlooking the soft underbelly that is Israel’s densest population center, Abbas knows the 1949 lines mean Israel’s suicide. This is a machine-busting super-spanner.

Another spanner is prior Israeli consent to the deployment of international forces along the border after Israel withdraws. Given our long sad experience with foreign “peace-keepers,” this is a prescription for Israeli paralysis. Abbas is out to make sure that Israel would be unable to defend its citizenry from terrorist predations unleashed literally next door. He deliberately flings monster-monkey wrenches (unless he sincerely supposes Israelis will obligingly slit their own throats).

Had he really yearned for the Palestinian state hallowed by the rest of the world, he’d keep his hands off the wrenches. But these aren’t conditions for talks; they are excuses for sabotaging talks.

Abbas is terrified of the two-state solution, just as his predecessor Yasser Arafat was and for the same reasons. He knows he’d have to declare the conflict ended and essentially forgo the “right” to inundate Israel with millions of hostile Arabs. He knows assorted Arab/Muslim autocrats would lose no time to brand him a traitor and that Hamas would rake in immeasurable political profit.

To boot, things are pretty nifty for him under the Israeli umbrella. Abbas’s mini-bailiwick gets greater cash donations from abroad than does big hard-luck Egypt. The IDF safeguards Abbas and his Fatah minions and the economy is booming. Does Abbas really want the Jews to disappear, while Lebanon and Syria unload millions of “refugees” upon him?

Even Hamas resorts to similar logic. Its mouthpieces shuddered at Avigdor Lieberman’s calls for a final disengagement from Gaza. Hamas falsely screams about continued Israeli occupation (although Israel fully vacated the Strip in 2005). In actual fact Hamas craves the “occupation” status quo. Why lose its ploy, give up a good deal and Israeli shekels?

It doesn’t take divine revelation to see this. But the world’s fanatic followers of the two-state faith can’t give up a good thing either.

In his 1984 book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Czech author Milan Kundera philosophized that “kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession.

The first tear says: ‘How nice to see children running on the grass!’ The second tear says: ‘How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Transported to today’s Israel, the one transfixed by the Schalit family’s pressure-mobilization extravaganza, Kundera’s definition may be paraphrased as ”how nice to be moved by the Schalits’ plight.”
The second variation would be: “How nice to be moved together with all our other trendy compatriots by the Schalits’ plight.”

A measure of the syrupy kitsch may be sampled from crooner Aviv Geffen’s Ma’ariv op-ed. Calling Hamas hostage Gilad Schalit a “butterfly of wars,” Geffen addresses Binyamin Netanyahu: “What fun it is that Avner is beside you.”

School-aged Avner is the younger Netanyahu son.
Geffen omits to mention that Avner’s older brother, Ya’ir, is in active IDF service, something Aviv himself assiduously avoided. He threatened to commit suicide if drafted, crows about it and avidly promotes dodging.

Far-left icon Aviv endorses whatever weakens Israel.
Thus this Dayan-clan scion asks: “What if Avner, not Gilad, were the bargaining chip?” Geffen avoids mentioning quite whose “bargaining chip” Gilad is, as if Netanyahu holds Gilad captive.

Aviv proclaims that “it’s owed us to sit some hot afternoon, see Gilad return and shed the heavy tear stuck in our eyes for four years.” Kundera’s kitschy tear is lightweight in comparison to Aviv’s, who preaches that “there’s no price for one living soul, for one worrying mother.”

GEFFEN ISN’T the only showbiz celeb out to score publicity points. Shlomo Artzi’s pride-and-joy, Ben, who also pursues a singing career and participated in the Schalits’ march, makes no bones about having skipped that formative Israeli rite of passage – the IDF stint.
Shlomo, who performed in the Schalits’ recent happening, urged us in his own op-ed, in Yediot Aharonot, to let the Schalits “appeal to that place in our hearts where there’s no debate of cost and effect.”

We should numb our minds and clamor for capitulation in the name of melodramatic mawkishness.

In 1985, Geula Cohen hotly opposed the looming mega-release of convicted terrorists – 1,150, including some of the worst mass-murderers in Israel’s prisons (like Kozo Okamoto, perpetrator of 1972’s infamous airport massacre). In return, Israel was to get three soldiers abducted and held by terror linchpin Ahmed Jibril.

A reporter provocatively asked if Cohen’s position would remain as unrelenting were her own son captured by fanatic villains.
She didn’t flinch: “Of course it wouldn’t. As a mother no price would be too high for my child’s life. I’d shout so, but in the same breath appeal to the government not to listen to a single word I utter.”

The scale of priorities of a hostage’s parents is obviously – and understandably – warped by anguish. Their world shrinks, encompassing only their overpowering personal tragedy. They naturally focus on the fate and face of one beloved missing individual.
They aren’t burdened with agonizing complex calculations for long-term collective good. But national leaders who avoid doing the most comprehensive arithmetic are recklessly remiss.

Until 1985 Israelis expected their governments to courageously choose between future detriment and immediate sacrifice. It was never a painless call to make – not when dozens of children were held in Ma’alot’s schoolhouse, not when entire families were cornered in their homes, not when guests were trapped in Tel Aviv’s Savoy Hotel, not when Sabena passengers were hijacked or other air travelers taken to Entebbe (where Netanyahu’s own brother fell), not when Olympic athletes were attacked in Munich or when a busload of holiday- makers was commandeered on the Coastal Road.

Israeli leaders and the general public were unswerving in their resolve to resist tempting facile solutions.
At the time, even the international community – which already then lost no opportunity to demonize Israel – grudgingly admired Israeli pluck.

We were unique in an otherwise backbone-deficient world until Yitzhak Rabin encountered Miriam Groff of Holon. She was mother to Private Yoskeh, snatched in September 1982.

Miriam made defense minister Rabin’s life a misery.
She hounded him, organized demonstrations, happenings, performances, anything. Finally the national unity government under Shimon Peres contracted the ignominious transaction that liberated Yoskeh in May 1985, but flung open the floodgates to a deluge that still engulfs us.

Groff legitimized failure of nerve and increased enemy leverage by helping it to emotionally manipulate soft-hearted Jews, who – unlike Arabs – traditionally value saving lives above all else.

In their book Intifada, Ehud Ya’ari and the late Ze’ev Schiff determined that “over a third of all freed Jibrildeal convicts renewed terrorist activity within a year. The rest joined shortly after the first intifada’s eruption… in time Jibril bragged, justly, that his deal sowed the intifada’s seeds.”

The upheaval Yoskeh’s mom triggered caused Israelis to shun the territories and conditioned psyches for Oslo, which subsequently brought us exploding buses, the unilateral flight from Lebanon, the second intifada, Oslo’s derivative disengagement, the Second Lebanon War, Operation Cast Lead, nearly 2,000 dead Israelis and thousands maimed, bereaved and orphaned.

Notorious Hamas progenitor Ahmed Yassin was first released under the Jibril deal. Yassin had “no blood on his hands” then, but before his 1989 re-arrest he founded Hamas and commissioned the abduction/murder of two IDF soldiers (who unlike Yoskeh were expendable).

Another Jibril alumnus, Jihad al-Amarin, founded, post-release, the (Fatah-affiliated) Aksa Brigades’ Gaza branch and killed six soldiers – also apparently less vital national assets than Yoskeh.

All too many Israelis failed to survive other ensuing gratuitous terrorist releases. Miriam secured Yoskeh’s freedom at a cost too awful to tally.

Though distasteful, the undeniable truth is that distraught parents can become potent weapons in the abductors’ psychological warfare arsenal. Groff came across as grotesquely shrill, yet the dovish media avidly abetted her, just as it today cheers the Schalits – seemingly more decorous, perhaps owing to diminished societal taboos.

The Schalits’ Miriam Groff follow-up act could potentially unleash a calamity of Jibril fiasco proportions, boost the profitability of kidnappings, up the Hamas ransom ante, reduce Israeli justice to utter mockery and teach terrorists that they can butcher Jews with impunity. Eventually Israeli soldiers might be loath to risk life and limb to apprehend wanted miscreants because it’s only a matter of time before these mortal foes are out the revolving door again.

Any of us might become their future victims.

Ilan Sa’adon and Avi Sasportas (slain on Yassin’s instructions) also had devoted parents. Asher Zaguri, Ron Lavi, Moshe Peled, Matan Biderman, Rotem Shani and Ala Kabishi, whose blood stains Amarin’s hands, had adoring mothers and fathers. They too served their nation in uniform.

This is the dilemma Geula Cohen cautioned against.

Parents may consider only their own offspring. Elected governments, sworn to serve us all and (hopefully) mindful that kitsch can kill, must look after all the children of Israel.

To protect her we’ll call her Nadra.

She hails from a large Sharon-region Arab town and used to be as modern, fashion-conscious and hip as my daughter. The two met while working in one of the nearby shopping malls. It was a few years ago. Nadra always did the Saturday shifts because, as a Muslim, she saved the employer legal headaches. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement and Nadra was paid double-time.

We knew her in jeans, cute tank-tops and assorted eye-catching coiffeurs.

Over time Nadra opened up to my daughter and revealed that her parents, ostensibly not traditional and certainly not Islamic zealots, had found a prospective husband for her in Jordan and were planning to marry her off there.

Nadra was beside herself. She didn’t want to go because “when I leave my town, I’m a free human being in Israel.

My life in Jordan would be nothing like it is here. I’d have to change all my habits, my appearance and become meek and obedient. I would die inside.”

Eventually both girls meandered elsewhere.

One day, as we left the supermarket, someone called our names. It was Nadra. We barely recognized her.

Despite the July swelter and stifling humidity, Nadra was swathed in a hijab, the scarf that envelopes Muslim women’s heads – ears included – tightly wraps their necks and reaches down to the shoulders.

Nadra brought us up to speed. She avoided the Jordanian match and convinced her parents to agree to the boy next door, hardly a religious sort and as free a spirit then as she was. It started out well.

Before we had a chance to remark about her obviously constricting and uncomfortable headdress, she – half-apologetically and half-embarrassed – pointed to the layers of cloth that seemed to choke her in the baking sun.

“They got me. They caught up with me,” she intoned with a wry, wan smile.

At the beginning her husband was taunted about letting his wife parade about “promiscuously, like a Jewess.”

Then they called her a whore each time she walked down the main drag. She was harassed on the bus. Both she and her husband were threatened with physical violence. The straw that broke their backs were escalating jeers, sneers and bullying suffered by her nieces and nephews in school and even by her tiny children in kindergarten and at the playground.

“I was marked as a fallen woman. Even if I wanted to fight, I couldn’t bring shame on my whole family. My parents’ business was sinking into ruin because of me. So I gave in. I’m suffocated by the hijab, while my husband, father and brothers breathe free and stay cool… I hate this but I am scared,” she confessed.

“I can’t believe this is Israel, where women live like women do in the West. I used to take the hijab off out of town, but my neighbors come here too. They’re all over the place. People see me. Tongues wag.”

NADRA DIDN’T stick around for long.

Overheated, she rushed to her car and turned on the air-conditioning. She said she had to hurry home lest her husband get angry. Her relatively egalitarian marriage is no longer what it was: “My husband is emboldened by my forced submission to the hijab. My humiliation is male-power at work and he’s inspired.
He’s not devout but he’s bossy. I’ve lost status and, if I know what’s good for me, I’d better be respectful and dutiful now.”

As her parting shot Nadra added that her one consolation is that “it’s not as bad as it can be. At least I have a car and am allowed to drive, which is better than in Saudi Arabia. But it’ll get worse here too. The niqab is coming.

It’s slowly being enforced all around my neighborhood.”

For those unfamiliar with Nadra’s vernacular, the niqab is Arabic for mask and denotes a veil which covers a woman’s face. The half-niqab is tied around the face in combination with the hijab and leaves the eyes and part of forehead visible. The full-niqab covers the entire head, leaving only narrow eye-slits. A variation of the full-niqab is a tent-like length of cloth that covers the entire body, similar to what’s known in the West by the Afghani name of burqa.

Full-niqabs are increasingly noticeable throughout Israel. We’re beginning to see them even in mixed cities like Lod and Jaffa, where the women add elbow-length gloves (in mid-summer) to hide any possible patch of skin.

The niqab is making its gradual debut in various Sharon-area malls and central thoroughfares.

Nadra is right. It’s likely to spread. It’s above all a political statement. Not too many decades back, Arab men were distinguished by the keffiyeh, while non-rural Arab women dressed progressively more in European modes. With Hamas’s ascendancy, however, the hijab became a national/religious identity symbol.

This militant vogue may have started off as a conscious thumbing of the nose at the country’s Jews, but from there it was a quick transition to the coercion that Nadra described. Not all Israeli-Arab women are as forward-thinking as Nadra, nor feel as oppressed as she does, but many are just as intimidated.

I thought of Nadra after the French parliament’s lower house last week overwhelmingly approved a ban on burqa-style veils and related facial coverings in all public places. The French legislation is also aimed at husbands and fathers.

Anyone convicted of coercing women to don restrictive garb risks a year in prison and a fine, with both penalties doubled if the victim is a minor.

The Belgians beat the French by two-and-a-half months when they prohibited wearing any attire in public which prevents facial recognition. Violating this code can mean imprisonment and fines. Neither the niqab or burqa are mentioned specifically, but Muslim migrants were incensed. Ski-masks do not proliferate on European streets, niqabs and burqas do.

The Dutch are preparing their own assault on the veil. Something similar is pending here too. MK Marina Solodkin (Kadima) last week submitted a private member’s bill to the Knesset which essentially copies the Belgian law.

Can it pass here? Hardly for certain and certainly not with the French and Belgian alacrity. Moreover, our Supreme Court will quash it quicker than it’s enacted.

Local holier-than-thou penchants and incurable politically correct proclivities are geared up for the onslaught. Leftwing opinion-molders lost no time to deride Solodkin’s security concerns (terrorists can hide under burqas). Few remember that such apparel allowed Hitler’s collaborator, Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, to flee in World War II and reach Berlin, where he recruited Muslims to the SS. But our left-wingers don’t really give a damn.

Self-appointed guardians of our collective conscience already get too much of a kick pillorying Solodkin in the name of human rights, Nadra’s rights be damned.

You just gotta feel for poor Barack Obama, so misunderstood, so misquoted, so taken out of context. And it so keeps on happening. Over and over. It almost smacks of a malicious design to misrepresent. Take the latest instance, for instance.

There was Obama’s own hand-picked (first African- American) NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, telling Al Jazeera that Obama himself stressed to him that henceforth NASA’s principal goals are to encourage children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science… and math and engineering.”

Here we ought to remind ourselves that NASA is the acronym for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, lumbered with such mundane uninspiring chores as space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research. Obama is evidently out to alter emphases. But when Bolden spelled it out, White House and NASA spokespersons rushed to explain that nothing is exactly what it seems. Improving relations with Muslim countries, they averred, is NASA’s mission, though it needn’t be counted as its “foremost responsibility.” Appearances plainly supersede substance. No fault is found with the fact that “outreach to Muslims” at all features on NASA’s to-do list, as long as it’s not perceived as the top item on said list.

Often, as in this case, Obama gets away with skewing the agenda of the world’s sole superpower. His fervent fans acclaim any oddball initiative as sophisticated pluralism and moral-relativist broad-mindedness. For regular folks, the preposterousness Obama promotes is so egregious they cannot imagine any of it is for real.

The reasonable inclination is to brush off assorted Obama administration absurdities as meaningless chatter, overblown nonsense or tendentious reporting. NASA’s outreach to Muslims is readily dismissed as a one-off bit of trivial blandishment meant to make nice and soothe the savage by pretending he’s really a savant.

Except that Bolden didn’t misspeak and his utterance was no one-off. On February 16, the same Bolden told engineering students in Orlando, Florida that Obama specifically instructed him to “find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries.”

THE CONSISTENCY is disquieting. But it doesn’t end here. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect is timing.

The Al Jazeera interview was conducted during Bolden’s Mideast visit to mark the one-year anniversary of Obama’s address to Muslim nations in Cairo.

Obviously not only is Obama not retroactively embarrassed by his fawning performance in Egypt, he considers it a cultural/diplomatic milestone, a momentous historical event whose anniversary is worth hyping via yet more sucking up, this time by a proxy sycophant.

Bottom line: Bolden’s babble wasn’t an inadvertent slipup but deliberate reaffirmation of a basic policy priority. However, since Obama’s pro-Muslim predilections might not be popular with the electorate, it serves his purposes to lull non-Muslims into complacency. Hence Obama’s mouthpieces laugh away Bolden’s interview as much ado about nothing, which shouldn’t be taken seriously at face value. In the words of Yip Harburg’s old 1933 Broadway classic:

“…it’s only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make believe
If you believed in me.”

Obama indeed demands carte blanche trust. News consumers in the world’s democracies aren’t supposed to dwell on things which clearly aren’t what they look like to the lesser minds of political skeptics, especially those uncool regressive sorts who don’t subscribe or submit to Obamaesque weltanschauung.

Hence, with cynical aforethought, the invariable pattern of pandering to Muslims must occasionally be blurred, belittled and/or altogether expediently denied. The same applies to the reverse side of the distinctly pro-Muslim coin – the unambiguous antipathy to Israel. Sometimes it’s blatantly brandished, especially when Obama seeks to wow the Muslim world – as he did with that Cairo speech, with bowing obsequiously to the Saudi potentate or with sending Bolden to celebrate and amplify the original flattery.

Accordingly, Obama’s aversion to Israel was unmistakable in the merciless protocol abuse heaped on Binyamin Netanyahu during his earlier White House visit last March. Protocol, after all, is by definition etiquette ceremoniously on display to impart an impression. Lack thereof is just as telling.

But while the humiliation of Israel’s top executive may have pleased the Arab world, it might have been a tad excessive ahead of America’s crucial midterm elections.

Therefore, in the worst Obama tradition, the barefaced affront was followed up by disingenuous obfuscation, by – again – asserting that things aren’t what they seem. All and sundry, Israelis included, are required not to rely on their cognition because after all:

“…it’s only a canvas sky

Hanging over a muslin tree

But it wouldn’t be make believe

If you believed in me.”

TO PREEMPT electoral backlash, the stage setting was calculatingly upgraded for Netanyahu’s subsequent July visit. He was even ushered in through the front door this time and offered light refreshment. This time Obama didn’t snub Netanyahu by walking out to have dinner with the family. By way of damage control there were photo-ops, a joint press conference, best-friend posturing, a girly Sara and Michelle chitchat and syrupy statements of support for tiny beleaguered Israel, as well as expected lip service for our right to defend ourselves. Whoop-ti-do.

Doubtlessly the saccharine footage will be replayed ad nauseam before Jewish audiences in the run-up to polling day to mitigate possible previous PR harm and win back support from some (presumed non-doctrinaire) Jewish liberals who, maybe, might no longer be as blindingly mesmerized by Obama’s messianic radicalism. Considering Bibi’s obliging cooperation, Barack’s stratagem may pay off.

The near loathing demonstrated by Obama toward Netanyahu last time around wasn’t a negligible lapse of good manners. And it wasn’t miraculously replaced overnight by a magnificent meeting of the minds. Everything remains as it was, but Obama’s aim is to make it seem that the rift never existed or, alternatively, that he healed it phenomenally.

The operative verb is “seem.” No real change had to have taken place, only to appear that it had.

American Jews (those who still care) need to ask themselves whether they aren’t falling for a false façade yet again. Israelis need to focus on what our PM undertook to pay for the window dressing. What concessions that risk our lives and risk our children’s futures were made to win Obama’s ostensible hospitality?

We must not underestimate the importance of these questions. It’s imperative to suspect the sincerity of a president for whom NASA is an agency charged with stroking Muslim egos. Do we entrust our fate to a master-showman who treats this as

“…a Barnum and Bailey world
Just as phony as it can be?”

Do we unreservedly put our faith in someone who cloyingly assures us that
“…it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me?”

Do we really want to believe in him?

When one of the world’s more influential economists, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, took pains on his recent visit here to dissociate himself personally from Israel’s obvious odiousness, I was hardly surprised. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what in Israeli statecraft incurred Krugman’s displeasure, but his annoyance seemed de rigueur.

Why? Because Krugman sounded so much like my own blood relations in Obamaland. It was from them that I gained incipient insight into Israel’s isolation – even within the Jewish context.

It began to dawn on me during the worst years of the second intifada, when buses here blew up, supermarkets were dangerous places, fast-food eateries became frequent targets and just going out meant you might be putting your life on the line. Most of my American family – comfortable, self-satisfied, assimilated and resplendent in impeccable liberal credentials – didn’t appear much perturbed about our well-being. Concerned inquiries usually came from non-Jewish friends.

But the very same kin were aghast to discover before the last American presidential election that we didn’t share their ebullient enthusiasm for Barack Obama. Indeed I quickly concluded that, even when severely goaded, it’s best not to exercise my freedom of speech. We, the uncool and benightedly reactionary Israeli branch of the clan, were anyhow already frowned upon, disapproved of and exceedingly close to familial excommunication.

I kept uncharacteristically mum when a once-favorite cousin fulminated in unambiguous rebuke: “You people liked Nixon. He was good for you but he was awful for us.”

I couldn’t decide whether she only addressed her provincial Israeli relatives or perhaps all Israelis collectively, but I was reminded of the Passover Haggada’s emblematic Wicked Son.

He’s the one who intones: “What is this service to you?” In other words, he detaches himself from the Jewish collective, relishing in the role of an objective observer, who standoffishly passes judgment on fellow Jews rather than identifying with them.

A younger cousin of mine glories in this role.

He got into Facebook fisticuffs with my daughter over his support for the Mavi Marmara thugs. My daughter retorted that not living here, in our shoes, and hardly knowing what he’s talking about, he mustn’t dispense unsolicited advice whose consequences he won’t have to bear. But the cousin immodestly insisted that he bases his opinions on “a good upbringing, years of education and a natural high level of judgment” (which presumably we lack).

Not living in Israel, he added, “is a conscious choice I make so as not to fall in line with the national psychosis Israelis suffer from, the psychosis that prevents many Israelis from rationally engaging in the world.”

After advising us to read and heed The New York Times, he went on to wish Israelis “liberation from oppression, both foreign and domestic, and from internal bonds created by historically justified but fundamentally self-destructive fears.”

EVINCING THE same smugness as my various cousins, Krugman probably agrees, though as a very fussed-over guest in our insular little land it would be a tad impolite to say so. Still, it’s inevitable that, having patted us on the back (for our economic resilience), he’d follow it up with a kick in the pants.

To maintain his reputation in the radical halls of American academe and left-leaning media (he is a New York Times columnist), Krugman must cleanse himself of anything which might hint at sympathy for a state that the more successful and affluent American Jews tend to consider a bothersome burden.

This isn’t calculatingly cynical. It’s almost knee-jerk.

Hence Krugman had to stress that his presence in Israel shouldn’t be taken as “an uncritical endorsement of everything the Israeli government does” and that “there is a lot that troubles” him about Israel’s “policy, both domestic and in the region.”

His Jewishness evidently entitles him to give us a piece of his mind because, like “many American Jews,” he’s troubled “in the way you are troubled when someone you love is behaving in a self-destructive way.”

Krugman then warned us against “a lot of people on the other side of the US spectrum who have a vision of the real America that does not include people like me and therefore does not ultimately include people like you either…. They may for tactical reasons endorse whatever the current Israeli government does, but in the end they are not on your side and in the end sometimes critical friends are.”

This is where it does get disingenuous. Jews, who haughtily disdain Jewish interests, resort to shared Jewish genes to caution us against conservative non-Jews, who support us warmly. Those who, like my cousin, lament Israel’s “fundamentally self-destructive fears,” play the anti-Semitic card when it suits them. Krugman intimated that the unidentified “people on the other side of the US spectrum” hate him and us for who we are.

Nevertheless, I’d rather take my chances with “the other side” than with Krugman and many of my ultra-“progressive” cousins. During most of Zionism’s history, it must be admitted, Zionists (and later Israelis) weren’t by-and-large American Jewry’s bon ton.

Save for an extraordinary honeymoon following the Six Day War, we impeded the American dream of certain Jews. If a terrible fate befalls us, “Jewish-Americans” will recall Krugman’s admonition that we “trouble” them. They’d congratulate themselves for not having, in my cousin’s words, succumbed to our “psychosis.” They’d perhaps shed compulsory tears, as they did for Europe’s butchered Jews post-Holocaust, but we mustn’t count on a massive portion of America’s Jewish mass – no more than Europe’s Jews could before and during World War II.

The Jewish-owned New York Times, by which my cousins swear and where Krugman publishes opeds, typifies that segment of US Jewry. During all of World War II it saw fit to publish only two lead editorials on Jewish issues. One, on January 22, 1942, was an acerbic attack on demands for all-Jewish military units under British auspices (which were eventually created as the Jewish Brigade). While the extermination of Jews continued unabated, the Times’s indignation was spent on preventing the formation of “a Zionist army.”

In February 1942 the rickety illegal immigrant ship Struma sank after the British refused to let refugees from Hitler’s hell enter this country. All but one of its 768 passengers perished.

The Times accorded it four bland paragraphs on an inside page. The New York Post and The Washington Post judged the horror deserved editorial condemnation.

Contrast that with the Times’s earlier frontpage treatment for the capsizing of another “illegal” vessel, the Patria, whose tragedy was caused by a miscalculated Hagana attempt to disable the ship’s engines so the British couldn’t remove it from Haifa Port.

The Times’s scale of values was unmistakable – a story that embarrassed the Zionists won pride of place; the one that highlighted Jewish misfortune and embarrassed Zionism’s foes was downplayed.

It’s still oppressively so nowadays.

The second of two parts.

There was a rapturous turkey trot in old Turkey the other day. Led by President Abdullah Gul, the Turks and their guests jumped for joy and did their springy one-step to celebrate Israel’s obvious ostracism.

“This is a clear manifestation of how Israel isolated itself,” Gul, who chaired the summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, exulted. Twenty-one of CICA’s member-states (with the single exception of Israel) “deeply deplored” its interception of the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara.

In unwavering unison, such gracious paradigms of international fair-mindedness and evenhandedness as Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Bashar Assad of Syria and Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan – as well as Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and PA figurehead Mahmoud Abbas – all “expressed their grave concern and condemnation for the actions undertaken by Israel” and denounced its “blatant violation” of international law.

Reveling in ostensible rectitude, Putin warned: “We can’t allow a new flame to flare up in the Middle East.” Gul laid righteous indignation on thick by announcing: “It is impossible for us to forgive the bloodshed.”

Similar spectacles are reenacted on some scale or another almost around the globe. No self-respecting city, campus or festival can resist garnering glory by whacking Israel. It’s a grand batter-Israel bash and a hit show wherever it’s staged. The plotline uncannily resembles that of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s now-classic 1956 tragicomedy The Visit.

The allegorical setting is the hard-luck town of Guellen (guelle in German means soggy excrement) to which much-married native-daughter Claire Zachanassian returns, now an elderly bizarre multibillionaire. Guellen sorely needs a cash transfusion, but Claire quickly clarifies that her generosity has strings attached. She’ll bestow great affluence on Guellen’s denizens if they only put to death the lover she claims jilted her in her youth. At first the townsfolk refuse to kill Alfred Ill, now the respected general-store proprietor. But Claire knows – precisely as do the real world’s cynical oil-rich Arab/Muslim master manipulators – that everything is for sale, supposed virtue foremost.

Claire’s predictions are soon borne out. One by one Ill’s neighbors abandon him in a grotesque display of hypocrisy. Despite their alacrity to appease and profit, they continue to posture as morally upright – like members of the international community vis-a-vis Israel – and blame the victim for a monstrously magnified set of “unforgivable” sins.

In no time Ill becomes the object of intense revulsion, regarded as the source of all that ails Guellen. The townspeople refuse to forgive Ill for the collective suffering he “caused” them. There are no bounds to the lengths they’ll go to rationalize and justify their greed.

Sounds familiar to us defamed and demonized Israelis?

GUELLEN’S INITIALLY principled mayor is the very one who swings public opinion against Ill and in the end offers him a gun so that he may spare everyone angst and end it all “peacefully.” When Ill seeks succor from the priest he discovers that the “man of God” too has sold his soul.

The policeman – akin perhaps to international peacekeepers in our own mind-blowing saga – refuses to protect Ill, denying that he is in any jeopardy at all. He hurls invective at him and traps Ill in the auditorium, there to be slaughtered.

The town’s doctor, one of Guellen’s better sorts, eventually collaborates in the murder and, in his professional capacity, determines that Ill died of a “heart attack.”

Perhaps the most stinging betrayal is that of the “humanitarian” schoolmaster, the archetypal well-intentioned intellectual, who holds on to his values longer than the others – a bit like America in our case. He had attempted to intercede with Claire and then to expose her villainy. Eventually he tells Ill that his neighbors all turned into predators, who cannot be opposed personally by one educator.

Presumably poor hounded Ill could at least rely on his own family, like we Israelis assume we can rely on our Jewish brethren out there in the world’s big real-life Guellens. But both Israelis and Alfred discover otherwise.

Among the ranks of our brethren abroad are indifferent, well-off Jews who don’t want to be bothered with our niggling, never-ending travails. Worse yet are trendy sophisticated ultraliberals for whom Israel has become an embarrassing burden. Apathy and/or antipathy toward Israel can accrue assorted potential rewards for estranged Jewish types overseas. So it was for Ill’s kin. His son Karl and daughter Ottilie, both originally unemployed, attain inexplicable prosperity.

Bottom line: Israel is indeed isolated but that’s only because it’s cast as the Alfred Ill of the worldwide farcical extravaganza. We’re alone only because Arab/Muslim clout and wealth successfully bribe, corrupt and brainwash bona fide democracies and apparently free-thinking journalists into voluntary, even avid complicity in the attempted delegitimization of Israel. Longer-term genocidal plots needn’t be explicitly admitted and proclaimed, but the groundwork for mass murder is being methodically prepared.

THAT SAID, we needn’t consider ourselves as heading deterministically for Ill’s bitter end. Nothing is preordained. Our self-preservation hinges on not obscuring the realization that our detractors are the duplicitous self-serving equivalents of Guellen’s avaricious inhabitants. It’s crucial that we understand that we are vilified and targeted as part of a scheme as sinister as that which led to Ill’s premeditated slaying.

We can prevent our own tragic demise by deviating consciously from Ill’s path. Although his nice-guy demeanor went unappreciated by the voracious chorus that bayed for his blood, Ill accepted his fate. He forgave his family and submitted meekly to the death sentence maliciously meted out to him.

We mustn’t submit to slander by outright enemies like Ahmadinejad or Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but neither must we respectfully bow down to the judgments of the Barack Obamas, Nicolas Sarkozys or Putins who undercut our survival prospects. It’s up to us not to be Ill. The antidote to the Ill-effect is remaining convinced of our inner truth.

In our case a dose of Dürrenmatt ought to be followed up by a morsel from our own poet Natan Alterman. A founder of the Land of Israel Movement, Alterman was acutely pained by the fact that (already in his day) doubts began to be cast on the legitimacy of Israel’s existential struggle, portraying it as the aggressor and dismissing Jewish claims to the Jewish homeland. To him these were dark omens portending a Jewish mental aberration that could precipitate Israel’s downfall.

After his death in 1970 several unpublished works were discovered in his literary estate. The most evocative of these poems, “Then Satan Said” (which I translated), became his heavy-hearted, somber last legacy.

There Alterman conjured an allegorical evil stratagem in which:

…Satan then said:
How do I overcome
This besieged one?
He has courage
And talent,
And implements of war
And resourcefulness.
…only this shall I do,
I’ll dull his mind
And cause him to forget
The justice of his cause.

This is the first of a two-part series.

Unbelievably the anniversary of Hamas’s hegemony in the Gaza Strip came and went with scant critical appraisal anywhere. The Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, which took over Gaza in a spasm of violence during June 2007, now appears an acceptable regional fixture. Nobody demands even a modicum of good behavior from it. Hamastan gets such pampering press that it seemingly cannot set a foot wrong.

At first the international Quartet (US, EU, UN and Russia) mildly hiccupped with reluctant disapproval, not so much for Israel’s sake but out of concern that its darling Mahmoud Abbas, figurehead president of the rival Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, might lose ground. Formally the above guardians of global propriety request that Hamas recognize Israel, forswear terror and acquiesce to previous Israel-PA deals. But in reality they itch to backtrack.

Their pretext is alleviating what’s depicted as Gaza’s heart-wrenching humanitarian crisis. Disinformation that serves cynical purposes quickly forms an axiomatic premise. It matters diddly, therefore, that no humanitarian crisis grips Gaza. If the Quartet and willing media accomplices claim something with sufficient alacrity and frequency, it becomes fact.

Willy-nilly this has triggered a curious momentum. In three years, during which Hamastan functioned as an Iranian terror outpost as well as imposed an Iranian-like theocratic tyranny on Gazans, it incongruously gained legitimacy and sympathy throughout the liberal West. Its sins and excesses are invariably blamed on Israeli “occupation,” although the last Israeli exited the Strip in August 2005.

Concomitantly, Israel’s legitimacy has steadily eroded throughout the West. The two dynamics are intrinsically interconnected.

Hence from Hamastan’s vantage point, it had proved itself a sterling success. Nothing it does seems to incur particular odium. Moreover, everything it does seems to make Israel stink more. That leaves Israel serially and cripplingly hobbled, while Hamas can do pretty much as it pleases with impunity.

Not a bad deal – especially when we keep in mind that fanatical Hamas hasn’t budged from its charter, which calls for Israel’s utter destruction and its replacement with an Islamic theocracy. At the same time Israel has made concession after concession. So why are we getting the bad rap?

Perhaps partly because of our inclination to give a little ground and buy time and goodwill. With each concession we appear to admit wrongdoing. We paint ourselves as villains who expediently promise to commit a little less villainy. It’s one thing when a disingenuous world defames us; it’s quite another when we even look like we’re buying into that defamation.

ACCORDING TO anecdote, George Bernard Shaw once asked an attractive socialite whether she’d sleep with him for a million pounds. After she answered in the affirmative, he offered her a mere 10 shillings. Outraged, she railed: “What do you take me for? A prostitute?”

Shaw reputedly replied: “We’ve already determined that. We’re just haggling over the price.”

When Binyamin Netanyahu agrees to a Palestinian state inside Israel’s national cradle and adjacent to its soft underbelly, when he freezes Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and lately when he alleviates the blockade on Hamastan, he establishes the principle that his principles are for sale and all that’s left is to fix the conditions.

This isn’t clever “moderation.” In any case moderation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It may work in certain circumstances but bomb in others. Moderation isn’t even necessarily synonymous with pragmatism.

And pragmatism isn’t always wise and mustn’t be confused with levelheadedness. History is replete with examples of catastrophic and cowardly choices paraded as pragmatic. All too often the road to disaster is paved with pragmatic considerations. Conversely, sometimes bold and nonconformist responses prove in retrospect to have been actually pragmatic. Hawkish Winston Churchill was realistic on the eve of World War II, while popular dove Neville Chamberlain was the dupe.

Pragmatism is akin to focusing on specific potholes in our national path rather than sometimes lifting our eyes from the ground to scan the horizon, survey the sweep of the land and behold the full track ahead. Pragmatism is getting bogged down in details and neglecting the whole. It’s quibbling about issues and forgetting the basics.

And so, despite our efforts to ingratiate ourselves, it’s not Hamas which is treated as a pariah and which becomes increasingly isolated. Israel is.

For all intents and purposes Hamastan is a fully-fledged bona fide state. More and more of the international community’s pompous pontificators promote outright negotiations with it as an upstanding partner. Foreign leaders know there’s no dire humanitarian calamity in Gaza and hence, when they demand Israel lift its blockade, they essentially campaign for an unlimited influx of military fortification materiel and rocketry into Gaza, precisely what they allowed into south Lebanon in insolent contravention of UN Resolution 1701.

Their peace prattle is sure to make the next bloody war inevitable. But international duplicity parading as diplomacy is nothing new. In 1967 nobody in the White House could find the 1957 document spelling out US assurances that Egypt wouldn’t obstruct the Tiran Straits again. American infidelity made the Six Day War unavoidable. Washington could have preempted that showdown and its derivative “occupation.”

Remember US undertakings not to deal with the PLO? Count on Barack Obama to just as cynically overlook more recent proscriptions against powwowing with Hamas. His administration has removed the term “terrorist” from America’s official lexicon. The corollary is that Israel’s emphasis on its enemies’ terrorist proclivities rather than on Jewish rights is wasted breath. It only serves to magnify the inimical trendy perception that we’re in the wrong and that those who would annihilate us are desperate insurgents against injustice.
Instead of being reduced to prostitute status, we’re better off going back to basics, proclaiming loud and clear that the Arabs only conjured Palestinian nationality to stake rival claims to ours. If the world misrepresents this bloody dispute as being about a Palestinian state, we must protest that it’s really about denying the right of a Jewish state to exist. Otherwise, to please our critics, we concede the Palestinian argument.

We gain as much respect via ignominious compromises as did the woman whose asking price George Bernard Shaw attempted to lower. As soon as we turn our existential struggle into something that resembles negotiations about the prostitute’s remuneration, we forfeit everything because promises made to a prostitute are never kept. No one owes her a thing.

The assumption is that everything she does is illicit, that at most she can expect a little condescending pity mixed with disgust, that she resides outside normative society and cannot expect what others perceive as their natural due. Most of all, she can be endlessly pushed around and her prices pushed down. Just like Israel.

Salami-slicing, a familiar if infamous ploy, has long been a favorite of assorted shysters whether in business, party politics or geopolitical machinations. It wasn’t invented by the Arabs in their tactically mutating but strategically consistent war against the Jewish state. That said, the Arabs are matchless masters at deploying the deceit, whereas delusional broad-minded Jews voluntarily cast themselves as the ultimate dupes.

In a recent Tack I wrote that “while Israel serially drew back from its positions… Arab orientations during all that time hadn’t budged a fraction of a millimeter. Their only modifications were tactical. Instead of eradicating Israel in one fell swoop (which they didn’t do only because they couldn’t), they settled on slicing Israel’s salami bit by bit to deprive it of strategic depth, render it more vulnerable to predations and erode it by demonization and demoralization. The basic premise remains that at most the existence of the unwanted ‘Zionist entity’ is admitted temporarily de facto, that this entity must shrink and that Arabs have a right to deluge it.”

I was surprised – taken aback, more accurately – by the reams of mail this one paragraph generated. What seems obvious to folks with even a modest measure of historical memory cannot clearly be taken for granted in our postmodern times. Many readers vehemently demanded corroborative information. For some in this day and age, the terminology itself appeared esoteric.

It therefore becomes necessary to explain that the essence of salami-slicing in the figurative sense is small, seemingly innocuous and disconnected actions which, taken in isolation from each other, seem inconsequential. Embezzlers, thieves and con artists, for instance, are adept at shaving off apparently paltry amounts in regularly repeated transactions. Initially nobody notices the minor losses. Over time, however, these accumulate to considerable sums.

IN POLITICS, the salami technique was nefariously used by the Soviets to install communist regimes in post-World War II Eastern Europe. The new overlords started dominating the politics of countries under their control slice by slice, until the entire sausage was devoured. The salami indeed entered our political lexicon courtesy of Hungary’s Stalinist puppet Matyas Rakosi who referred to the means employed by his party in the late 1940s as szalámitaktika – salami tactics. Rakosi maneuvered his opposition to slice off its rightist flank and then its center. Soon only communist collaborators remained.

It’s therefore particularly enlightening to realize that it was none other than the Soviets, in this case via their Romanian proxies, who intensively instructed Yasser Arafat and his henchmen throughout the 1970s in the indisputable benefits of calculated salami-slicing.

In his 1987 book Red Horizons, ex-chief of Romania’s Securitate (secret services) Ion Mihai Pacepa exposes in detail the Moscow-sponsored conspiracy to ingratiate Arafat with the West and “promote him from terrorist to statesman.”

Pacepa was personally instrumental in reinventing Arafat and the so-called Palestinian struggle as de rigueur revolutionary.

In 1978 Pacepa became the highest-ranking Soviet-bloc defector ever. The Americans spent three years debriefing him, so plentiful and valuable was his data. Inter alia Pacepa revealed that Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu was entrusted by the Kremlin with face-lifting Arafat’s image and inculcating in him “more palatable tactics.”

Ceausescu also arranged a monthly stipend of $200,000 for Arafat, helping him amass more than $300 million (when the dollar was incomparably mightier) in Swiss stashes.

Page after intriguing Red Horizons page is crammed with Ceausescu’s exhortations to his protégé to “pretend to break with terrorism. The West would love it… Pretend over and over… It’s like cocaine… The West may even become addicted to you and your PLO.”

How prophetic.

Ceausescu offered Arafat respectability “to erase with one stroke all American pretexts for isolating you, brother… What I want from you is help to show that I’m the only one with influence over you.”

By manipulating Arafat, Ceausescu sought to bolster his own image as an indispensable mediator. He aimed to earn himself favored status in Europe and America, and even a Nobel Prize.

Not that Arafat was easy to convince. Even perceived moderation could tarnish his patriotic credentials. Ceausescu reassured him: “You can keep as many operatives as you want, so long as they aren’t publicly connected with your name. They could mount endless operations around the world, while your name and ‘government’ remain pristine and unspoiled, ready for negotiation.”

Pacepa carefully uncovers the elaborate deception honed in Bucharest and executed with meticulous malice. What makes it credible is that it’s not post factum disclosure, padded with hindsight wisdom. His tip-offs about the premeditated perfidy saw print six years pre-Oslo.

Pacepa recounts Arafat’s earliest successes in marketing his supposedly reformed persona. First Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt were conned. Arafat learned to slice the salami expertly by the time Shimon Peres shoved Israel under the PLO blade at Oslo, crowning Arafat’s sinister pose with success beyond his dreams.

Most astounding of all is the fact that Arafat took little trouble to disguise his aims. Already in his May 10, 1994 address to Muslims in South Africa, Arafat proudly crowed that Oslo was a ruse, like the fraudulent seventh century Kureish truce to lull the defiant Jewish tribe into complacency until the opportunity for attack presented itself and the insubordinate Jews were slaughtered.

IF THAT wasn’t an obvious enough salami-slicing recipe, things were more unmistakably spelled out on January 30, 1996 (well into the Oslo fiasco), when the much-lamented “prince of peace” addressed Arab diplomats in Stockholm. The Nobel Peace laureate judged that the “peace process” must inevitably result in Israel’s downfall.

“We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem,” Arafat exulted. “Peres and Beilin already promised us half of Jerusalem.”

According to Arafat, Israel’s collapse hinged on “PLO efforts to split Israel psychologically into two camps… We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a pure Palestinian state. We’ll make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and a massive influx of Arabs.”

In other words, Arafat promised to slice the salami. His cultivated assistant/understudy was Mahmoud Abbas, who now dons Arafat’s mantle in Ramallah and like him dishes up salami slices to a ravenous world, while posturing simultaneously as the pitiable underdog and the valiant altruist.

There was never much resonance to Pacepa’s revelations about the origins of the Palestinian stratagem. Even pre-Barack Obama the international community didn’t care to know. In the ultra-radicalized Obama era, salami-slicing is elevated to a sanctioned sacrament.

It’s therefore more important than ever for the shrinking ranks of individuals with still-healthy suspicions of overly skillful salami-slicers to recall that Pacepa – who dealt with more than one man’s share of unsavory characters – considered Arafat the dirtiest rogue he encountered, “lying in every sentence and denying what he promised the day before.”

In time, Pacepa stressed, he “felt a compulsion to take a shower whenever kissed by Arafat, or even after just shaking his hand.”

A relative of his, a philosophy professor who currently teaches in China, won’t hear of visiting Israel due to its “flagrant human rights violations.”

But aren’t Beijing’s abuses, pressed my Internet interlocutor, far more off-putting?

China, retorted the professor, “clearly imposes capital punishment according to the law. Hence any reasonable person must arrive at the conclusion that China is a Rechtsstaat” – a state of justice. Not so Israel, judges the professor. “What law anywhere permits bombardment of Hamas training camps? Israel therefore is a Räuberland” – robbers’ land. The professor stresses that he wouldn’t even dignify Israel with the title of “state.”

It didn’t end there. My friend wondered whether double standards, demonization and delegitimization of Israel don’t attest to anti-Semitism (as per Natan Sharansky’s three-D test). The professor stood his ground: “If you want to know why anti-Semitism is resurfacing, ask all those people who had lost money and whose living standards were lowered. You will then hear names like Goldman-Sachs and Lehman Brothers and you will know why.”

The Jewish collective is clearly held liable for the conduct of individuals. It matters nothing that publicly traded companies like Lehman’s and Goldman’s haven’t been necessarily or exclusively Jewish-run for years. Non-Jewish names like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley obviously trigger no hostility.

My friend recently attended a family birthday party where one of the guests, a retired German judge, opined that “you can’t make peace with a Jew.”

Plain and simple with no reservations or elucidations. His flat-out ruling went unchallenged by any of the celebrants. It was axiomatic.

Those among us who still strive to pretend that Jew-revulsion isn’t a formative factor out there may dismiss these as irrelevant anecdotes. But they aren’t. They are crucial facts of life which many Israelis and Jews prefer to repress.

It’s more comforting to make believe that we don’t face bottomless blind hate which we cannot moderate. It’s distressing to recognize that underlying animus (even when camouflaged and rationalized) poisons minds and tilts the scales forcefully against Israel in the kangaroo court of world opinion.

It’s disagreeable to realize that de rigueur Israel-bashing has unleashed latent predilections which, despite their transitory apparent abeyance, festered beneath the floorboards of human decency. They aren’t really suppressed even in a country like Germany, where minimal introspection and circumspection (not just on the official level) may be expected.

Admitting that the cards are stacked against us, that there’s little we can do to make ourselves better liked, goes against the ancient Jewish instinct to ingratiate ourselves. We want the world to appreciate the real us – virtuous, liberal and altruistic to a fault.

It’s reassuring to assume, even if misguidedly, that everything hinges on our improving our behavior. That imparts a semblance of control. The reverse awareness, even though eminently accurate, is agonizing. It implies lack of control.

It tells us that even our best conduct can’t change the way we’re perceived. We cannot face-lift our image. We can explain ourselves till we’re hoarse and employ the most ostensibly effective and sophisticated PR, but it won’t make an iota of a difference. We’ll end up convincing ourselves, preaching to the choir and not getting so much as a polite hearing abroad.

THAT’S WHAT happened in the Gaza-bound flotilla’s case. We couldn’t emerge smelling sweet no matter how things were handled. Our hankering after good press is essentially what emboldened the Mavi Marmara terrorists to resort to homicidal violence against our commandos. We willingly fell for the illusory façade of “aid ships” ferrying pacifist, “Kumbaya”-crooning philanthropists.

We fell for their mendacious mantras because we desired to show restraint and to regard the Mavi Marmara’s Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood passengers in the same amiable light that their propaganda radiated throughout Europe and in America’s “progressive” enclaves. We wanted to be just as loved in those same quarters. We declined to delve into why terror mongers are endeared and why we, who seek to defend ourselves, are so vilified.

Refusing to look unpleasant truth squarely in the face, we sent naval units to a violent encounter armed with paint-ball guns. The shipboard Hamas-boosters promised nothing but passive noncompliance and we chose not to remember that even when Arabs blow up fast food eateries and lob rockets into a sleepy outlying town, they manipulatively resort to “human rights” and “resistance” terminology.

If anything, we were guilty only of wishful thinking. It’s therefore especially galling that Israel’s most ardent promoters of such wishful thinking and self-deception are our loudest Monday-morning quarterbacks, the ones who most vehemently let us know (in retrospect, of course) which moves the government should have made. Their hindsight, as always, is remarkably flawless.

But self-flagellation is fundamentally futile. There is no way Israel could have won or could win the world’s sympathy. In the recesses of too many minds within the supposedly enlightened international community dwells the notion that Jews are inherently to blame for whatever befalls them. It’s nothing new. It’s unrelated to any policy practiced by any Israeli government. It predates Israel.

It can be monstrous.

In 1858 Bologna the Papal Police burst into the Mortara home and abducted the Jewish family’s six-year-old son, Edgardo. The pretext was that sometime during his infancy, Edgardo’s nanny surreptitiously baptized him. The Vatican remained impervious to the widespread outcry and the distraught family’s entreaties. Pope Pius IX “adopted” the child and kept him cloistered in a monastery. Edgardo was never returned. In time he was ordained a priest and dispatched to proselytize Jews.

Yet Pius IX managed to blame the Jews for the outrage. He maintained the parents could have Edgardo back instantly, if only they would convert. When they refused, Pius cleansed his hands: Obstinate Jews inflict pain on themselves. All the Mortaras had to do was give in.

The identical message resonates today. Obstinate Israel inflicts pain. All it needs to do is voluntarily capitulate. Otherwise, it will be pilloried.

My late father used to say: “We will be condemned whatever we do, but to be condemned for nothing is stupid. We ought to at least earn the inevitable censure, deserve it just a bit.”

The sooner we come to grips with this reality – unlovely as it is – the better for our national psyche. We have to do what’s good for us and not view ourselves through lenses tinted by the prevalent likes of the above-mentioned professor and judge.

Suicide can be individual or collective. In either manifestation it can share similar attributes and arise from parallel psychological anomalies. It can be perversely popular.

In early 20th-century Vienna, for example, a spate of high-profile suicides triggered a pseudo-romantic fad. There seemed to be something dashing in taking one’s own life in a grand gesture that apparently made a statement. Pivotal in sensationalizing the fashion was 23-year-old philosopher Otto Weininger who shot himself in 1903 in the same hotel room where Beethoven died (presumably to enhance the dramatic effect).

Weininger’s intense auto-anti-Semitism loomed large among his motivations. Born Jewish, he converted to Christianity in his last year but obviously found no salvation. His book Geschlecht und Charakter (Gender and Character) testifies to boundless self-loathing. Weininger lambastes modernity as “Jewish” and asserts that ”women and Jews are pimps; their goal is to make man guilty. Our era is not only the most Jewish, but also the most feminine of eras” which “no longer has a single great artist, a single great philosopher. It has the least originality and the biggest hunt for originality.”

Moreover, Weininger makes hair-raising “anthropological observations,” even embracing notions that “Jewish hair… points to the Negro, and the completely Chinese or Malaysian skull shapes, which one so often finds among the Jews – who frequently have a yellow complexion – point to partly Mongolian blood.” Harrowing stuff.

Unsurprisingly Weininger’s most ardent posthumous fans were the Nazis, foremost Hitler himself who reportedly said he “had only encountered one decent Jew, Otto Weininger, who killed himself when he realized that the Jew thrives on contaminating the authentic folk bloodlines of others.”

Weininger’s suicide was regarded by Third Reich ideologues as the only “honorable” way for a Jew to cleanse the world of his existence.

Repulsive as this undeniably is, it’s hardly irrelevant. The noxious Weininger syndrome still afflicts certain Jews. The mental aberration Weininger took to extremes is still being taken to extremes by his torchbearers. But there’s one very significant difference. Latter-day Weiningers look out quite nicely for their own well-being. Their self-abhorrence is channeled onto the Jewish collective. They promote national Jewish suicide, not their own personal demise.

A CASE in point is Noam Chomsky who, despite his pristine Hebrew forename, misses no opportunity to castigate the Jewish state and idolize its most fanatic and implacable foes (most recently Hizbullah chieftain Hassan Nasrallah).

Trailing behind Chomsky is a whole ragtag retinue of homegrown Israeli ultra-leftist professors, authors, filmmakers and self-congratulating artistes, who profit quite handsomely by undermining and demonizing the rest of us – pro forma their compatriots, but in reality the objects of their expediently projected self-detestation.

Some “new historians” and serial provocateurs have achieved renown. These international celebrities, who gain fame and fortune by trashing their own country and people, have avid audiences overseas, where delegitimization of Israel is eagerly lapped up and where tradition has conditioned minds to anti-Jewish bias (to put it mildly).

Toeing the line of self-hating Jews/Israelis who had reaped success from aversion to their own kind are wannabes who persistently pursue comparable glory. Dror Feiler is one. His latest antic was organizing the supposedly humanitarian flotilla to break the supposedly inhumane Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Feiler never mentioned the facts that Israel regularly (and quite dementedly) supplies Gaza with goods, electricity, fuel and water, whereas Gaza uses its resources to subjugate its masses and stockpile weapons of mass destruction.

Feiler either justifies or omits from discourse Gaza’s many and flagrant sins. He grotesquely exaggerates Israeli responses and willfully wrests them out of all context. Feiler delights in painting Israel as intrinsically and irredeemably evil. He’s chummy with Swedish reporter Donald Bostrom who accused Israel of deliberately killing Palestinians to facilitate illicit organ-harvesting. Don’t look for Jewish empathy or a soft spot for the old homeland in Dror. That would contradict his upbringing. That’s not where he comes from.

He’s a loyal unquestioning chip off the old block – his mother, Pnina Feiler, who spent a lifetime championing Palestinian causes and defaming Israel with relish. She hails from Yad Hanna, Israel’s sole communist kibbutz. It was named in 1950 after heroic World War II parachutist Hanna Szenes, whose memory and legacy have of late been targeted by artsy left-wing iconoclasts. Self-sacrifice for a Jewish cause and Zionist dedication had become unbearable in their enlightened milieu.

Among other groups, Pnina Feiler was active in the pro-Arab Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (in her professional capacity as a nurse). In May 2001, after Arabs sadistically bashed the skulls of two hooky-playing schoolboys near Tekoa, PHR-Israel’s founder, psychiatrist Ruchama Marton, reacted angrily toward the underage victims. “The settlers,” she seethed, “raise little monsters.”

That’s the moral wellspring from which Dror drank. That’s the intellectual and ideological pool in which he waded and where he learned that pools of Jewish blood form an aesthetic background against which to highlight the glorified features of Hanadi Jaradat, who blew herself up next to a baby in her buggy at Haifa’s Maxim Restaurant in 2003 (murdering 21, among them three generations of two separate families).

A few months post-atrocity, Dror, a naturalized Swedish citizen, and his Scandinavian wife created the Stockholm-exhibited “work of art” that presented Jaradat as “Snow White” sailing in a red-liquid lake. The image goaded Israel’s enraged then-ambassador Zvi Mazel to sabotage it.

Dror exuded the same artistic orientation which had earlier inspired a gloating art show in Nablus featuring bloodied pizza slices and a baby stroller inside a model of Jerusalem’s Sbarro eatery after the 2001 terrorist blast (which killed 15 innocents, including nine children and five members of a single family). Nevertheless, Dror enjoyed unstinting succor and friendly publicity. His sanctified suicide bomber starred boldly in giant advertising posters all around greater Stockholm.

The text which accompanied Dror’s masterpiece argued that Jaradat’s homicidal ardor was kindled by grief over a brother and cousin the Israelis slew. Swedes, like other supercilious Europeans, love Jews who – like Dror – love their enemies. Jews are required to show compassion toward those who, with genocidal malice aforethought, still keep trying to annihilate them. Jews are sentenced to solitary confinement on the moral high ground, where no other nation is remotely expected to go. Jews are obliged to turn the other cheek. Jews have no right to avenge.

So when Dror Feiler now postures as a humanitarian, we need to remember that he also rationalizes the zeal for blowing us up to smithereens. That makes him even less ethically tolerable than Weininger, who merely fired a bullet into his own private chest.

Both Weininger and Feiler boosted pernicious Judeophobic propaganda. Both gave comfort and ostensible vindication to their people’s enemies, yet Weininger only took his self-hate to its logical conclusions personally. Thus, warped as he doubtlessly was, he emerges more moral than Dror Feiler, in so far as the word moral is at all applicable here.

It was sweet solace for the soul to learn that some on the entrenched Left still retain a smidgeon of hankering for the Zionist fold. It was comforting to conclude that maybe the more progressive self-appointed guardians of other people’s consciences have noticed, albeit belatedly, that they had strayed too close to the loony fringe. So it was with genuine joy that many of us received the news of initiatives to purportedly back away from postmodern/post-Zionist excesses and return to the patriotic middle ground that was historically the solid power base of this country’s Labor-Left.

We sincerely yearned to applaud the renascent National Left (Smol Leumi), not least because our entire body politic must be able to count on two responsible mainstream mainstay alternatives. It must be able to count on alternatives which place Israeli security and self-preservation above all trendy inclinations and which do not observe our reality through deliberately distortive enemy lenses.

But then came the pitifully under-attended but grossly over-hyped rally in Jerusalem which let the mangy cat out of the bag. These Peace Now/Labor/Meretz activists weren’t changing course. Like classic front-organizations, they just wanted to hoodwink us and get us to believe they were. The goal was to convince the Zionist majority that the Left is its sole true expression. The idea was to parade leftist dogmas as indispensable Zionist creeds.

Subtext: If you don’t adhere to the Left’s latest ideological transmutations, you are perforce ejected from the Zionist camp. These supposedly Zionist leftists weren’t joining the Zionist majority; they were out to transform that majority in their image. Anyone who dissents from their compulsory definition of Zionism – a far cry from Berl Katznelson, David Ben-Gurion and even Meir Ya’ari and Ya’acov Hazan – is pilloried as a heretic.

Hence they carried banners proclaiming that “Zionists don’t settle” and demanded “Zionism without occupation.”

The clinchers were placards urging: “Barack Obama please force peace on us.” How delightfully obsequious. But it’s more than simply submissive. The call for coercion, which average Israelis intuitively consider inimical to our existential interests, betrays a more sinister agenda.

With ploys eerily reminiscent of George Orwell’s “Negative Utopia” of 1984, left-wing opinion-molders engage in subtle forms of brainwashing. Whatever they champion is gospel. Their postulates become infallible doctrine, which they condition the masses not to examine by any yardstick for objective validity.

Downplaying, deriding and denigrating opposing convictions, and denying them resonance, they then portray their own viewpoints as the majority’s article of faith. They haughtily posture as democracy’s spokespersons and contend that their opponents can never be right.

AND JUST as in Orwell’s world, where the concept of reality-based truth is abolished, anyone the perception-manipulators consign to marginal status must be insane, settlers and their supporters foremost.

Just look at the Newspeak, which Israeli Doublethink has produced. Here is a glossary of sample standby slogans and much-mouthed mantras:

The sane majority – i.e. Peace Now et al. All who disagree are perforce numerically inferior and of no account, election results notwithstanding. As is their custom, bona fide radicals, though sanctimoniously preaching democracy, automatically depict all dissenters as democracy’s foes, pronouncing them weird if not altogether a demented menace. Electoral triumphs by said “mad minority” constitute outrages against Orwellian Goodthink. Such upsets, however, lend no legitimacy to ideological rivals and only increase the impetus to overcome them.

Enough with occupation – inculcates in the listener’s mind the notion that Israelis willfully, with no provocation, crossed the blessed Green Line one sunny June morning in 1967, snuffed out Palestinian sovereignty (nonexistent though it was) and sadistically subjugated the ancient Palestinian nation (which never existed before the advent of Zionism). It omits to 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.

Occupation corrupts – it does indeed, if the occupier a priori relinquishes his deterrent potential, making do instead with containing his adversaries and reacting to their initiatives. Occupiers who don’t utilize the force they possess, don’t opt for quick victories and acquiesce to prolonged conflicts of attrition, embolden their antagonists to introduce deadlier means and escalate terror. Halfhearted responses invigorate enemy resolve and increase noncombatant casualties and suffering.

Territories are a liability – only for Israelis. All other nations regressively regard territories as assets, which none ever voluntarily ceded. Cheerfully divesting ourselves of strategic depth (compromise in Newspeak) renders us more vulnerable and allows our enemies to import more sophisticated, more accurate, more destructive and longer-range weaponry. When our survival instincts eventually kick in, bloody warfare would ensue as a direct consequence of moves to unload the liability.

Territories for peace – promotes the theory that peace must be purchased and that Palestinians are fighting for independence on a delineated parcel of real estate. It strenuously obscures the fact that, more than they hanker for their own state, they yearn to destroy ours.

There’s no military solution – this defeatist refrain promotes shirking responsibility and justifying the cop-out of appeasement at a time when the powers-that-be haven’t done their utmost to thwart existential threats and safeguard the populace.

The limitations of power – seeks to convince the citizenry that after pinpoint targeting, low intensity response and selective surgical strikes fail to impress the enemy, there’s nothing left to do. Getting down and dirty is out of the question, as is acknowledging that we’re at war and not pursuing societally ostracized and isolated criminal bands.

You make peace with enemies – applies only to Israelis, who are expected to deviate from precedent and deny history. Elsewhere treaties are signed with defeated enemies who dread their adversary’s might more than they identify its weakness. History is replete with examples of peace contracted with enemies, but only after they were unequivocally vanquished and the fight taken out of them.

Nobody ever made long-lasting peace with a side that continued to battle and press irredentist demands. Shady dubious deals with tyrannies never work – remember Chamberlain’s Munich disgrace and the Ribbentrop-Molotov fiasco. Such gambles bring bloodshed, not peace.

THESE ARE facts incontrovertibly borne out by human experience throughout the ages. With brazen absolutism, however, Doublethink-purveyors seek to persuade Israelis that historical norm and factual truth signify that aggressors deserve another chance on square one and that peace is always made with still-potent ever-implacable enemies.

But why bother with facts? In “the labyrinthine world of Doublethink” the end goal is to get folks not just to say the opposite of what they think but to think the opposite of what’s tangibly obvious, to surrender intellectual integrity and cease distinguishing between common sense and nonsense.

Doublethink, Orwell elucidates, is “reality control.” The “lie that is passed into history becomes the truth” because “whoever controls the present controls the past.” This matters hugely, since “whoever controls the past controls the future.”

The above is a direct quote from an address by prime minister Golda Meir to the Knesset on May 26, 1970, 40 years minus-five-days ago. The insistence on direct talks was cardinal for Israeli leaders before and since the above statement. A succession of foreign emissaries and politicos came and went, but Israel consistently recoiled from the notion of go-betweens and shuttle diplomacy.

The principle of direct talks steadfastly guided even the misguided progenitors of the Oslo folly – until the advent of Binyamin Netanyahu’s current term.

Decades of making one existentially risky concession after another existentially risky concession – of erasing one declaratively indelible red line after another, of drawing new “red lines” but deleting these in turn – have certainly paid off. We have gained so indubitably much. We’re so ahead of the starting line. At the beginning we wouldn’t hear of indirect negotiations. After we had yielded so much ground, we are at long overdue last engaged in – indirect negotiations. It was all really worth it. We’ve come a long way, Bibi!

TO BE fair, it’s not all his fault. Netanyahu inherited an unenviable legacy. The Osloites stealthily ushered another Arab Palestinian state into the original territory once designated as Palestine, some 80 percent of which is already Arab (even if it parades under the wholly artificial name of Jordan). This negated Golda’s stance that “Israel and Jordan were the two state-successors to the British Mandate. There is no room for a third… A Palestinian state between us and Jordan can only become a base to make it even more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.”

Ehud Barak, in his catastrophic stint as premier, established the ever-insidious model of total withdrawal back to the 1949 armistice lines. More recently Ehud Olmert, Barak’s challenger for the dubious distinction of worst-ever prime minister, additionally reinforced Barak’s precedent. This, coupled with Washington’s most antagonistic administration ever, left Netanyahu in dire circumstances and with powerful incentives to just please the hectoring censorious chorus out there.

Giving in is the easy thing to do. But true patriots, like Golda, summoned intestinal fortitude to avoid alluring facile solutions. If the experience of the past 40 years has taught us any lesson, it’s that buying time via “painful concessions” doesn’t work. Concessions become self-evidently the new square-one for ensuing haggling rounds.

History suffers no vacuums. Every retreat spawns yet another retreat, triggering a negative dynamic. Oslo elicited universal acceptance of a third state in original Palestine (the second Arab one), which forced Israel into increasingly defensive negotiating postures, culminating in Barak’s capitulation. Ariel Sharon subsequently expelled Jews and razed 25 veteran thriving settlements. Then, on paper, Olmert ceded most remaining settlements. The security fence was essentially moved to 1949’s Green Line.

Next (and this, significantly under Netanyahu) Israel froze Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, implying in effect that it too acknowledges the settlements’ illegitimacy. But that still didn’t suffice. Each concession breeds another and thus Jerusalem was targeted and Jewish residence came under fire in a city which boasted a very massive Jewish majority since the first census was taken there early in the 19th century.

Bargaining, which we assumed was about agreed boundaries within territories we were forced to take in 1967, turned out to be about the 1949 line of exhaustion demarcated to end the War of Independence imposed on us. Beyond that lies an older Arab claim for the 1947 UN partition lines which Arabs rejected violently, thereby sparking that War of Independence. And before that raged the antebellum debate about whether any Jewish state ought to exist, which is what sparked that violent Arab opposition in 1947.

The same animus still foments Arab refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or to forgo the “right” to inundate that Jewish state with untold millions of hostile Arabs who’ll destroy its continued existence as a Jewish state.

WHILE ISRAEL serially drew back from its positions to appease America and/or to coax Arabs into some modicum of accommodation, Arab orientations during all that time hadn’t budged a fraction of a millimeter. Their only modifications were tactical. Instead of eradicating Israel in one fell swoop (which they didn’t do only because they couldn’t), they settled on slicing Israel’s salami bit by bit to deprive it of strategic depth, render it more vulnerable to predations and erode it by demonization and demoralization. The basic premise remains that at most the existence of the unwanted “Zionist entity” is admitted temporarily de facto, that this entity must shrink and that Arabs have a right to deluge it.

Whenever we concede even a theoretical point, we imbue Arab obstructionism with an aura of righteous respectability in the (kangaroo) court of world opinion. We irreversibly undermine our own case.

That’s why it’s taken for granted internationally that Israel must be squeezed into the 1949 lines. Global discourse now dwells on whether there’s at all any justification for a Jewish state.

We have indeed come a long way – backward. By rushing recklessly headlong to resolve a conflict not of our making, we ended up returning to its very origins – the aspiration to eradicate the Jewish state.

As Golda stressed: “There is no obstacle to peace except for the Arab persistence in denying Israel’s very right to exist. Arab refusal to acquiesce in our existence in the Middle East, alongside the Arab states, abides. The only way to peace is through a change in that recalcitrance.”

It would further serve us to memorize what was emphasized at the Palestinian national assembly in July 1968: “Our basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. We are not concerned with what happened in June 1967 or with eliminating the consequences of the June war. The Palestinian revolution’s basic concern is uprooting the Zionist entity.”

This, finally, takes us back to Golda’s May 26, 1970 speech: “The refusal to talk to us directly is damning evidence of the unwillingness of the Arab leaders to be reconciled with the very being of Israel.”

It was true then. The latest “proximity talks” underscore just how true it remains, especially when the supposed honest broker is taking sides.

Have we anything to show for four decades of regression from principles to which Golda adhered tenaciously? Not much if we judge by the fact that we’re now reduced to willingly enmeshing ourselves in the very trap we throughout wisely avoided.

When Napoleon aspired to establish a renascent state in Palestine, it was unquestionably to be a Jewish state. He had no doubt whose ancestral land this was, with whom it’s associated and who were the only people who ever made it a distinct sovereign unit.

Addressing Jews as the “rightful heirs of Palestine,” Napoleon announced he was fighting to avenge “the almost 2000-year-old ignominy imposed upon you; and, while time and circumstances would seem to be least favorable to a restatement of your claims or even to their expression – and indeed compellingly advocate their complete abandonment – France offers you at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel’s patrimony!”

BUT WHEN the current French head of state speaks of the rightful heirs of Palestine, he means Arabs – descendants of foreign conquistadors or of itinerant latecomer migrants from the entire Mideast – who have only in recent decades discovered the European-minted moniker of Palestine (mispronounced as Filastin). Nicolas Sarkozy wants Arab sovereignty established here posthaste, without any pesky pedantry about Jewish rights, not even about bothersome Jewish self-defense.

Sarkozy fails to mention that the Arab state he fancies on Israel’s eastern flank, will leave Israel’s soft underbelly – its densest population center – exposed and that the Jewish state’s narrow waistline would shrink to nine untenable miles. Minor quibbles like Jewish survival mustn’t interfere with automatic compliance with his grand scheme.

Sarkozy moreover is petulant and demonstratively impatient. His will must be done and done now. He, after all, is a superior purveyor of wisdom who must be dutifully acknowledged as such with no hesitation or deviation.

When obedience isn’t immediate or sufficient, Sarkozy is understandably piqued. That’s why he lashed out at Israel’s prime minister for being too slow on the uptake. “I’m disappointed with him,” Sarkozy reportedly said. “Despite the friendship, sympathy and commitment we have toward Israel, we still can’t accept this foot-dragging. I don’t understand where [Binyamin] Netanyahu is going or what he wants.”

Herein lies the crux. Sarkozy isn’t just making imperious demands; he is issuing his diktats as a friend. Professed friends presume they possess moral authority to put their protégés in their place. Righteous rebuke from friends is meant to sting far more than chiding from unfriendly sorts.

He’s not the only apparent pal to have taken the liberty to lecture to us. So has the most popular Italian of them all – Silvio Berlusconi. In all other matters Berlusconi relishes flaunting his nonconformity. On occasion, Rome’s enfant terrible even broke ranks with the prevailing European bon ton and sided with Israel. This afforded us – unloved and lonely in a hostile world – rare moments of comfort. But these were fleeting. When our bosom buddy desired acceptance by his European peers, the first eccentricity he was willing to forgo was consideration for Israel’s unique travails.

Something of the sort probably motivates Sarkozy. Even the most in-your-face idiosyncratic politicos need to shore up their power bases. Sarkozy is no exception. One way to suck up to his detractors is by expressing exasperation with inexplicable Israeli insubordination. No better way exists to regain admission to the cozy club of popular sanctimony.

WHAT INDISPUTABLY unites all shades of opinion in France – including the liberal do-gooders and Muslim agitators – is excoriation of Israel. Muslims obviously have their agenda. Arrogant censure of Israel, though, enables the ethnic French to downplay jihadist dangers in their midst and delude themselves that socioeconomic palliatives are the prescribed cure-alls.

By joining this composite chorus Sarkozy instantly becomes one of the bunch, rather than a discordant oddity.

In today’s France, this makes heaps of political sense. The country’s second largest city, Marseilles, is one-third Muslim. More mosques have been inaugurated in France since 1970 than churches in the entire 20th century plus the first decade of the 21st. There’s no official tally of Muslims in France. Some speak of 12 percent. But this is likely an ultraconservative estimate. What’s certain is that the Maghrebins – legal or otherwise – don’t espouse the egalitarian ideals introduced by Napoleon to a very illiberal Europe.

What most French know but decline to own up to is that while their burgeoning Muslim communities demand fairness, they don’t appreciate decency nor respect their hosts’ multiculturalism and moderation. They exploit Western freedoms but don’t espouse them. They don’t wish to integrate but to transform Europe in their image.

France’s Muslim multitudes demand their cut of what another culture produced and accommodation by that culture to the point of inhibiting its own norms in deference to those imposed by Islam. They not only perceive that as plausible but as their inherent right. Considering their own societies’ exclusionism, expansionism, volatility, violence and xenophobia, that’s a curious – almost unnatural – expectation. Were the shoe on the other foot, Muslims would hardly exude the spirit of pluralistic liberalism.

THE HOUSE next door to mine was for a while rented by a family of immigrants from France. They said their greatest pleasure here is being able to send their children to school. When the four youngsters attended French public school, they were set upon by Muslim classmates. After transferring to Jewish schools, they were beaten by Muslims waiting outside the schoolyard to attack Jewish pupils. Wearing a skullcap was to invite physical punishment. Here, they can indulge in the luxury without fear for their safety.

That’s why on the streets all around my neighborhood so much French can be heard now. For more and more French Jews, Israel is a haven, as envisioned by classical Zionism. It’s that elementary security which Netanyahu cannot afford to imperil and sacrifice willy-nilly – not even to Sarkozy’s caprice. That is what’s at stake.
What Sarkozy peevishly characterizes as “foot-dragging” is anything but unreasonable. To behave any differently would be the unreasonable thing to do. This isn’t a frivolous European parlor game. Carelessness with the country’s existential interests would be unconscionable and the consequences deadly and irreversible.

Even in inherently different times and circumstances, Napoleon grasped the essence of Jewish self-preservation issues – to say nothing of our rights in our homeland. He urged Jews to seize “the moment, which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of civic rights among the populations of the world which had been shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years – your political existence as a nation among the nations.”
Sarkozy now bids us to subjugate these to his whims.

Time to quit quibbling. No pedantic hairsplitting can mitigate the evidence: The Obama administration cynically links Iran to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The premise is simple and chilling. If Israel wants a last-minute, last-ditch, quasi-credible American move to keep Iran from obtaining nukes, it must pay the piper by making hefty concessions to the sham paraded as the Palestinian Authority. Boiled down to its bare essence, the White House diktat means that Israel can maybe extricate itself from existential Iranian threats by submitting itself to existential Iranian-proxy threats.

Had Barack Obama ever read Shalom Aleichem’s autobiography he’d have encountered the author’s harrowing recollection of the story his grandfather told him about “the bird-Jew.” That was how the grandfather referred to Noah, a pious innkeeper who lived in constant dread of the gentile village squire. Trembling, Noah headed for the manor to renew his lease. His timing was off, because the courtyard was full of festive guests ready to go hunting.

The squire, in a jovial mood, agreed to renew the lease if Noah would climb the stable roof and pretend to be a bird, so he could shoot him. Fearful of angering the nobleman, the worst consequence the Jew could imagine, Noah obsequiously did his bidding. He went up and, as ordered, bent forward, flung his arms sideways and assumed a birdlike pose. At that point the squire fired and Noah fell, as any slain bird would.

Although realizing he was about to be put to death anyway, the bird-Jew played along with his executioner, still absurdly terrified of what might happen if he didn’t. Obama is the proverbial squire in our own tale, casting Israel as the latter-day bird-Jew.

Israel is now squarely in Obama’s gun sights. It’s blamed for all Mideast ills. Obama, after all, is the high priest of the political theology of American/Western guilt. Israel embodies Western culpability. If Obama preaches American penance vis-à-vis Arabs/Muslims, Israel obviously must atone in more than words for the sins he ascribes to it.

It’s in this context that we ought to examine Gen. David Petraeus’s statement last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee. More than hinting that Israel puts American lives at risk, he wrote that the Arab-Israeli “conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of US favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples” of the region “and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbullah and Hamas.”

The subtext is unavoidable: Neutralize the Israeli irritant and all will be hunky-dory.

The latest stooge in the Obama fool’s errand to assuage Muslim animus is the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones. He told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that “one of the ways Iran exerts influence in the Middle East is by exploiting the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. Advancing peace would… help prevent Iran from cynically shifting attention away from its failures to meet its obligations.”

Dutifully following their boss’s lead, both Tweedledum and Tweedledee know whom to fault. And said boss, while painting himself as Israel’s loyal ally, insisted at a recent press conference that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “a vital national security interest of the United States.” For those who failed to get his point, Obama honed it: The conflict is “costing us significantly in terms of blood and treasure.”

PATRIOTIC AMERICANS are now told insidiously that by not bowing down to Obama’s ultimatums Israel jeopardizes the lives of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. When depicting a pacified Mideast as a “vital national security interest” that must be secured, the “peeved” Obama puts Israel on notice that he will shove a solution down its intransigent throat.

The nature of his cure is determined by his diagnosis, which in turn is colored by his perception of democracy’s foes as frustrated potential friends. In Obama’s universe, it’s the West’s haughty insensitivity which sparks Arab/Muslim hostility. Islamic expansionism and exclusionism aren’t problems but cultural assets for America. Consequently democratic Israel must sacrifice its self-preservation to facilitate appeasement of Muslims sworn to annihilate the Jewish state.

Obama’s radical worldview places the onus on the victim. Its corollary contention is that were the aggressor’s grievances redressed, all would be hunky-dory.

The great American silent majority may not be fully aware of Obama’s dangerous undertones. Many of his Jewish voters willfully prefer not to understand. They’d rather not admit liability for their political folly – a common psychological shortcoming.

So we Israelis are left alone. It’s up to us not to be bamboozled.

While the current US administration calls the shots, there is no Israeli-American alliance we can remotely count on. Obama will do nothing whatever to even diminish the danger of an Iranian nuclear threat against Israel. Otherwise he wouldn’t have frittered valuable time for more than a year, twiddling his thumbs. The sanctions Obama proposes are preposterously useless anyhow and further diluting them to win Chinese and Russian acquiescence would make them altogether laughable. China and Russia, let’s not forget, are Iran’s principal enablers. Obama knows this.

Had Obama wanted to effectively deal with Iran’s rogue regime, he’d need no allies. America could have unilaterally declared stringent sanctions, imposed them on prime trading partners and enforced an air-and-sea blockade that few would have dared breach. No military attack would be required.

But that’s not Obama’s agenda. We must suspect that he desires a nuclear Iran to render Israel more vulnerable, pitiably dependent and pliable, thereby facilitating his envisioned great rapprochement with the Muslim world.

Obama’s endgame is to debilitate, demoralize and destabilize Israel. All he offers Israelis is a choice of how his inimical goal will be achieved. This may be via allowing Iran the weaponry with which to intimidate Israel or by shrinking Israel into the Auschwitz borders (as ultra-dove Abba Eban called the 1949 armistice lines into which Obama schemes to squeeze us).

We can avoid Iranian nukes by opting for the Auschwitz borders or we can avoid the Auschwitz borders but be bullied by Iranian nukes. The unspoken signal from Washington is: Either way, you’re dead. Yet we are somehow supposed to refrain from saying so lest we upset Obama even more.

Our steadfast striving not to incur more wrath makes just about as much sense as it did for the two Jews in the following variation on the bird-Jew theme. These Jews faced a firing squad. One of them cursed the executioner who offered him a blindfold. The other was horrified and exclaimed in trepidation: “Why are you making him angry? You’re going to get us killed!”

Quite like them is Martin Luther King’s eldest son and namesake.

Ordinarily we couldn’t care less about them. But they came to our region, participated in propaganda forums and dispensed advice on how to overcome villainous Israel “nonviolently.” Arun was the trailblazer. He appeared here in 2004. Rajmohan and MLK III followed in his footsteps this month.

Inherited intuition and keen virtuous vision apparently led Arun to quickly conclude that Arabs are victims of racism, that what the Jews subject them to is “10 times worse than apartheid.” Presumably he had carefully weighed, measured and compared quantities of abuse and damage. Jews, he observed, were “dehumanizing” Palestinians, “grinding them to dust” and imprisoning them “within walls of hate.”

Adding insult to injury two years ago in an op-ed entitled “Jewish identity can’t depend on violence,” Arun asserted that “Israel and the Jews are the biggest players” in the “culture of violence that is eventually going to destroy humanity.”

By way of apology, he later explained that “Jewish identity in the past had been locked into the Holocaust experience,” which is “a very good example of how a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends.”

FAST-FORWARD to Rajmohan. Three weeks ago he shared with Palestinian mouthpieces his “deep depression” over “scenes of repression” he witnessed “in Palestinian lands,” adding that the security fence, settlements and bypass roads were “more horrific than what” he “imagined before visiting Palestine.”

The Israeli government, Rajmohan concluded, “treats Palestinians as second-class citizens and robs their land.”

Enter MLK III. Unsurprisingly he too identifies Israel as the malice to be defeated, albeit nonviolently. After advising young Israelis to dodge the draft, he blithely equated between the campaigns for equality his father led and the Arab war against Israel. Bil’in and Ni’lin stone-throwers remind him of sit-ins in the Deep South, where peaceful demonstrators “were arrested and beaten, but the struggle created an opportunity for them to live and work. The segregation ended eventually.”

He further likened boycotts against Israeli universities and products to what his father advocated half a century ago: “Black people boycotted buses, and the bus companies eventually gave in… When economy is everything, if people choose this type of resistance, there is power and success.”

Get it? Israel is the latter-day equivalent of the notorious KKK. None of this drivel is new. Had it originated from the lips of an unknown, it would hardly merit attention. But MLK III claims his father’s mantle and preaches compassion and nonviolence. His bogus civil rights prattle buttresses Arab pretexts to delegitimize Israel’s survival. His inane analogies inspire bloodshed, not coexistence.

Because of their surname, Arun’s and Rajmohan’s instant analyses and overnight Mideast expertise gain worldwide currency. Every lie they repeat, presumably with the noble force of the ancestral humanitarian icon, can be refuted. But this isn’t about facts. In all likelihood the cousins capitalize crassly on granddad’s hallowed reputation. However, the off-chance that they are sincerely the Mahatma’s devoted disciples offers little consolation.

Jews have particular reason not to be bamboozled by the Gandhi mystique. Chilling callousness hides behind the mask of the revered ascetic’s much-touted sanctity.

IN 1938 – several days after Kristallnacht – the great guardian of human conscience found nothing better to do than publish an open letter to Europe’s Jews in which he urged them to embrace the very passivity that would eventually lead six million to annihilation. With hard-heartedness in the guise of benevolence and all-seeing wisdom, Gandhi opined that despite the ferocious evil winds ominously raging around them, Jews should stay put where fate left them.

Palestine, he decreed omnisciently, “is Arab. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.” If he were a Jew in Germany, the great guru expounded, “I would claim Germany as my home… I would challenge the German to shoot me and cast me in the dungeon… and for doing this, I should not wait for fellow Jews to join me in civil disobedience but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example.”

In Mahatma Gandhi’s defense it should be stressed that he didn’t single Jews out. He had equally asinine advice for invaded Czechs and attacked Brits. Indeed, had anyone listened to him, this would be a very different world today. There would be no Jews to encroach on Arab bliss and German would be the planet’s lingua franca. Third World moralizers like Gandhi’s grandsons would be enslaved and silenced. Unbound by the niceties of the British Raj, the Third Reich wouldn’t abide any civil disobedience.

Incorrigible Gandhi groupies, mesmerized hagiographers and intellectually indolent peaceniks sought to pooh-pooh this as well-meaning naiveté and idealism, expressed prior to the cataclysm of World War II and the industrialized genocide of the Holocaust.

But an amazingly indifferent and unrepentant Mahatma himself quashed the above excuses. In 1946, after the unprecedented then-recent horrors became known, the righteous pacifist showed that he had learned absolutely nothing. Worse yet, he didn’t really care.

“The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he volunteered to his biographer Louis Fisher. Alternatively, “they should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.”

Not quite believing his ears, Fisher tried to make sure and asked: “You mean the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” Unmoved, Gandhi judged that “yes, that would have been heroism.”

After brief reflection, he added: “The Jews had been killed anyway and might as well have died significantly.”

Bottom line, Gandhi wanted us martyred. We insubordinate people refused to die. Not having availed ourselves of his counsel, we lost his sympathy.

If his offspring, whether or not impelled by filial piety, come peddling the same worn advice and love of extinct Jews, then they’ll probably also fail to find many buyers among obstinate Israelis, who cling to life in impudent defiance of the descendents of European murderers, collaborators and/or robbers, and of their avid Arab allies and terrorist Nazi torchbearers.

As for MLK III, he should recall that his father called Israel (on March 25, 1968, mere days before his assassination) “one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.”

When a black Harvard student deprecated Zionism, King retorted: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews; you are talking anti-Semitism.”

The malaise her pseudo-intellectual narcissism mirrors can obviously be least afforded in beleaguered Israel, but it’s not only endemic here.

Moreover, it’s lauded as the epitome of politically correct bon ton not only by this country’s homegrown left-leaning media.

True, Israel can also least afford the damage inflicted by left-wing popularized misrepresentations – far more pervasive here than anywhere else due to the incomparable dominance of local leftist opinion-molders, who are particularly aggressive in the Kamm case. After all, they are covering their exposed rear ends.

And for this purpose it suits them to parade Kamm as a selfless journalist, standing her ground courageously in desperate defense of freedom of information. This, their basic contention, already constitutes a gross cock-and-bull narrative. One must either be mulishly gullible or uninformed in the extreme to consider Kamm a crusading journalist and portray her offense as inspired by allegiance to journalistic ethics.

OF LATE Kamm found employment as a gossip purveyor on an Internet site.

It’s quite a stretch to consider the 23-year-old philosophy student a professional in the forefront of investigative reporting. Besides, she broke the law long before her Website connection. She wasn’t remotely in journalism when, as a young conscript, she worked in the OC Central Command’s office, duplicated 2,200 documents, hid her haul and hung on to it long after her 2007 discharge.

That she later postured as a newswoman cannot retroactively justify her larceny. Would Kamm’s thievery be reckoned more reprehensible had she earned her living at a supermarket check-out counter?

Kamm basically emptied everything in her commander’s computer. She wasn’t selective. She didn’t home in on a particular issue (which would have been bad enough). Unlike a whistleblower, which she claims to be, Kamm snatched everything indiscriminately. That was an unmitigated breach of her oath.

Like every recruit, Kamm swore “to maintain loyalty to the State of Israel, its laws and legally authorized government, to accept without condition or reservation the discipline of the Israel Defense Forces, to obey all orders and instructions by authorized commanders and to devote all my energies and even sacrifice my life in the defense of the homeland and the freedom of Israel.”

Not only did Kamm thumb her nose at all the above, her cheerleaders now tell us that she did so out of conviction that she knew best what is better for us.

We could kiss our entire national defense good-bye if each and every soldier would do likewise with no guideline but his/her own youthful hubris. If each soldier were to decide that he/she is empowered to determine national policies and/or subvert endeavors not to his/her liking, the IDF would essentially have to shut down. So would any military hierarchy anywhere.

That may be precisely what assorted varieties of leftist anarchists fervently desire. Their goal is to destabilize, even abolish all authority.

To that end, Kamm achieved a glorious feat by swiping Israel’s most guarded military secrets.

IT MATTERS little that Kamm didn’t pass the contraband to outright enemy agents but handed it over to like-minded news-merchants – Uri Blau and his Ha’aretz confederates. All that matters is that she held on to material she shouldn’t have purloined and transmitted it to others who had no business getting it. The touchiest IDF documents – including detailed battle plans that literally put lives at risk – thereby fell into unauthorized hands. In Blau’s custody, and with Ha’aretz abetting him, they might have ended up anywhere.

Espionage’s bottom line is obtaining confidential information without permission from the legal proprietors of said information. That the secrets reached Blau’s possession, rather than Hamas’s, is no consolation. Top secrets on the loose can wreak havoc.

Secrets can be blown not only via the slipping of concealed microfilms to shady agents in secluded corners as per spy fiction. Careless blabber or reckless publication are treasure troves for enemy intelligence analysts.

This is why Americans were cautioned incessantly during WWII that “loose lips sink ships.” They do. It doesn’t help the casualties to know that they were backstabbed in the name of a high-minded cause.

Kamm betrayed the inordinate trust placed in her and released secrets that can help the enemy kill Israelis. For that she must pay. She would pay heavily in any of the shining sterling democracies whose pen-pushers now gloatingly lecture to us and compare Israel to Iran and North Korea. Neither the American military nor any European army – in countries no way existentially threatened like Israel – would for a minute countenance what Kamm did. See how mercilessly the US keeps punishing Jonathan Pollard, who never compromised American lives.

Nor should the claim that Kamm wasn’t motivated by antagonism but by altruism sway us. Some of the worst offenses were committed in the service of political creeds. The famous Cambridge Four – Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt – were all fueled by ideology. So were a string of fellow-travelers and “useful fools,” including Mordechai Vanunu and the still-mysterious Israel Beer, who assumed they were entitled to impose upon Israel’s democratic collective what they deem overridingly moral. Kamm’s innocent little girl looks don’t make her an innocent little girl.

Nor do Blau’s studied nonconformist looks make his hoarding of illicit material forgivable. Ha’aretz’s depiction of Blau as a martyr to safeguarding source-confidentiality cannot be more ludicrous. Indeed, were it not for Blau’s slapdash revelations and pretentiousness, Kamm’s role in supplying him with classified information would have never been discovered.

Rather than keep her secret, Blau, his editor and publisher all served Kamm’s head on a newspaper-lined platter. Ha’aretz’s former editor Hanoch Marmari said as much.

When the spin is stripped of sanctimonious malarkey, we’re left with an insolent soldier who considered herself licensed to steal and unconscionably endanger fellow soldiers. She may have been exploited by the unscrupulous media, but her offense wasn’t about freedom of the press.

This should get us thinking long and hard about what skewed values steer significant segments of our media. Kamm’s most avid boosters shrilly decry the reluctance of some IDF soldiers to uproot dedicated brethren from their homes. Sometimes, to hear leftists hectoring, obeying orders is the be-all and end-all. Suddenly, though, they aver that sabotage of IDF operations is admirably principled.
Were Kamm, heaven forefend, a teenaged (even preteen) settler who dared hoist a homemade placard at a sit-in, she’d be dragged, roughed-up, jailed and demonized. Kamm is under house arrest and coddled by commentators.

But this isn’t a matter of disloyalty being in the eye of the beholder.

Right-wingers want to strengthen the Jewish state rather than battle fellow Jews. That is radically not the agenda of Kamm and comrades.

I had become a frequent family guest, was affectionately called Sarah’le and pampered more like a favorite daughter than a news-reporter. Originally I met Yechezkel at his workplace, the Tel Aviv municipality’s paymaster department. He had founded the Prisoners of Zion Association and among my beats was the then-climaxing aliya struggle in the then-extant USSR.

The Pulerevitches are both long gone now. Yechezkel had the kindliest face and eyes that forever twinkled with a smile. His wife Ella filled another tea-glass nestled inside a dainty silver holder and pushed toward me more cookies in a china dish she rested on a crocheted doily. In his impeccably erudite Hebrew, laced with traces of Litvak intonation, Yechezkel inquired where my immediate family was on the very day Israel was born.

Sighing, he remarked that he can’t say for sure what he did on that pivotal 1948 day except that he spent it in forced labor as a logger in a Siberian prison camp in the subarctic taiga forests. But that’s also how he spent the other days of that period and he couldn’t tell them apart.

He had been at one camp or another since 1941. At the time of his arrest for the crime of Zionism he was the de facto head of Betar (the Revisionist youth movement) in Lithuania. That made him equal in status to Menachem Begin, Poland’s Betar head, who was likewise sent by the Soviets to the gulag. Begin, though, was released a year later, while Pulerevitch spent 17 years in camps and exile.

Yechezkel couldn’t specify when he learned of the Jewish state’s birth: “Prison and the taiga know no dates. Days aren’t individually distinguished and labeled. Time is marked only by the seasons of the year. But I did have my own Independence Day. For folks with calendars it was probably another date, but calendars weren’t part of my reality. The inner subjective reality of the inmate is deeper and more powerful than that of the outside world, and for me the day on which I discovered that a Jewish state had come to exist became my Independence Day.”

THE TAIGA snows had already begun melting, and a mysterious hermit, who lived nearby, entered the camp attired in bearskins and accompanied by dogs. He was a trapper, Pulerevitch explained, and was permitted to visit and nurse ill prisoners. “Some months earlier he restored me to life when I was at death’s door. We called him Robinson Crusoe and the unfamiliar name convinced the guards he was Jewish. They taunted him and the hermit retorted that he was pure Russian but that had he been Jewish, he’d now have a country of his own. When he last went to trade furs, he heard that the Jews declared independence. He added that he prefers not to go to Israel because it has no taiga and the Arabs invaded it.”

At the news, Pulerevitch recounted, “I let out a cry which nearly tore my chest.” Ella, herself exiled with their young son to a Siberian hamlet, soon confirmed the news when she wrote him they had a Mazal Tov coming as “Srulik (Yiddish diminutive for Yisrael) has come into the world.”

In the following months, Pulerevitch collected snippets of information and proceeded to piece from them a composite conceptualization of the war in Eretz Yisrael. “One day the wind blew in a torn bit of newspaper. It contained an account of a struggle to the last man by one of the Negev settlements. I hid the scrap of paper and reread it each night until I fell asleep, weeping and lamenting the fate that kept me from fighting for Israel.”

Surprisingly he had managed to construct an accurate enough picture of the situation, “apart from the fact that I never realized that seven Arab armies had attacked Israel.”

Ironically Pulerevitch found out about the Holocaust only after he had already heard of the establishment of the Jewish state. “One day Lithuanian prisoners were brought in, among them one from my home city of Kovno. Mockingly, but in graphic detail, he described his service in Nazi murder units that had shot Jews into open ditches. Ecstasy over Israel and boundless grief over the greatest of Jewish tragedies gripped me at one and the same time,” he recalled.

Only in the late 1950s did Pulerevitch and his family finally return to Kovno, but they were forbidden to stray beyond the city limits. They immediately applied to leave for Israel but were flatly turned down.

In 1964 Pulerevitch read that the Danish Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag, who was expected in Moscow, would be visiting Israel first. In a hastily dispatched letter to a relative in Tel Aviv Pulerevitch inserted a cryptic Hebrew message further obscured by Yiddish spelling. He instructed the relative, that should she not understand his text, “the boy from Brest-Litovsk” would translate it for her. That “boy” was Begin.

Begin indeed instantly got the point, met with Krag and urged him to bring up Pulerevitch’s case at the Kremlin. Next year the Soviets let the family go.

BY THAT time Pulerevitch’s only son, Shabi Maor, was a physician. His name is the Hebrew acronym for Shlomo Ben-Yosef, the first underground fighter executed by the British. While serving in the IDF, Shabi heard of a shortage of doctors in the navy. He volunteered for duty and became the submarine fleet’s medical officer. Shabi was on board the ill-fated Dakar when it went down in January 1968 – one month before his wedding.

Shabi’s portrait dominated the Pulerevitch front room. The bookshelf beneath it was laden with the many volumes of poetry and prose Yechezkel authored under the literary pseudonym of Avi-Shabi Maor (Shabi Maor’s father).

“The image of the old hermit, who declared Israel’s independence for me on my own special unrecorded date, will remain indelibly imprinted in my heart. He not only gave me back my life but he was also the harbinger of the happiest and most important tidings I was ever to receive in my life,” Pulerevitch summed up.

“In my mind’s eye I can still see him disappearing into the woods on his way back to his cabin. As he went, I stood there shouting: ‘Eliyahu Hanavi! Eliyahu Hanavi!’ It was my own private Independence Day and the hermit was my Prophet Elijah bringing me news of the redemption.”

“And what about the Holocaust you perpetrated against the Palestinians?”

Dwarfing and distorting the Holocaust serves our enemies – from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (who earned a PhD in Moscow for a dissertation which denied the Holocaust and simultaneously blamed it on Zionists).
This is the common Arab warp of history. It goes entirely unchallenged in the Arab/Muslim milieu and is fast becoming axiomatic in Europe and among the so-called progressives who proliferate in America’s media and campuses.

Their assorted misrepresentations omit to mention that the very word genocide was coined post-Holocaust specifically to describe what was plotted against the Jewish people. Eventually the term was devalued and used in reference to any bloody combat, though Europe’s Jews were never a combatant side and instigated no aggression against Germany. Not even the remotest casus belli existed against them.

THE NAZI-ERA annals of those with only tenuous Jewish links – such as the once-great Wittgenstein clan of Austria – paradoxically illustrate how unparalleled the Holocaust was, how distinct from even the worst massacres of recent history which are fallaciously compared to it and used to diminish its terrifying uniqueness.

This is particularly odd given the fact that the Wittgensteins weren’t Jewish according to any Jewish criteria, that none perished in any of Germany’s industrialized death facilities and that some Wittgenstein scions fought with distinction in the Wehrmacht. Unlike the struggling Jewish masses, the Wittgensteins were among the wealthiest members of the prewar European upper crust. They were intellectually brilliant and exceptionally eccentric by any yardstick. They could plainly afford to be.

The powerful and prominent Viennese Wittgensteins are today perhaps most renowned for their youngest son Ludwig, considered one of the greatest 20th-century philosophers, and for his brother Paul, who gained international fame as a concert pianist despite having lost his right arm fighting for Austria in World War I.

Yet precisely because they were so atypical and so far removed from the Jewish experience, the upheaval that was visited upon them by the Third Reich serves to demonstrate what set the genocide against the Jews apart from atrocities like the slaughter of Armenians in 1915, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge purges or Rwanda’s tribal carnage.

All the above were episodes of grisly mass murder, but they were, first and foremost, the product of sporadic unleashed barbarism, rather than of methodical and meticulous premeditation, kick-started by systematically executed designs to deprive its victims of their dignity. World War II’s great bloodletting was ushered in years earlier via preliminary bureaucratic strictures. It was hardly a sudden spurt of violent passion. It wasn’t an unpredictable war crime. It wasn’t vengeance on a belligerent adversary. Neither the Jews in general nor the Wittgensteins in particular were by any stretch of the imagination Germany’s foes.

Yet the Wittgensteins, practicing Christians for three generations, were reduced post-Anschluss to frantic attempts – chronicled grippingly in Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein – to secure for themselves at least the dubious mischling (half-breed) status in the hope that they would be therefore entitled to reduced oppression.

For that status only two Jewish grandparents were tolerated. The Wittgensteins’ maternal grandmother was incontrovertibly of non-Jewish extraction but not so their three other grandparents. The only way out was to assert that their paternal grandfather, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein (born Hirsch Moses Meyer), was sired in an illicit affair his mother supposedly had with a scoundrel German aristocrat. Better a German bastard than a respectable Jew.

The desperate Wittgensteins had to appeal to the Reich Agency for Genealogical Research, which raked in profits from processing thousands of “Aryanization” requests from distraught quasi-Jews. Waugh calls it “a symptom of craziness… that in June 1938 the future security of one man, his daughters, siblings, his nephews, nieces and cousins all hung in the balance, all dependent upon who had slept with whom way back in January 1802.”

In the end the Wittgensteins were pronounced volljuden (full Jews). The absurdity was compounded in the case of Paul’s two little daughters by the same Catholic mother. The offspring of an extramarital relationship between a Jew and an Aryan born after July 31, 1936 was automatically classified a full Jew. That applied to Paul’s younger child Johanna, born in 1937. Her sister Elizabeth, however, less than two years older, was listed a half-breed.

As volljuden, the Wittgensteins were ripe for robbery. Paul was hounded in intricate plots to surrender the fortune he had secreted in Switzerland or harm would come to his two fatuous elderly sisters who stayed in Vienna and became hostages. The Nazis pursued Paul all the way to his ultimate refuge in New York.

THE CONVOLUTED details constitute a thriller in themselves but more than all else they show how painstakingly the road to Auschwitz was paved, how the final solution targeted all Jews trapped in the Nazi net, steadily stripping them first of their self-respect, accomplishments, livelihood, possessions and then of the breath of life itself.

This was done to no other group – not even to gypsies, some of whom were persecuted but others left alone. It was haphazard. Much depended on way of life, even on place of residence. But ancestry wasn’t an instant irreversible death sentence. Only with Jews it was.

Only presumed Jews could be marked for annihilation because of “tainted” lineage. Only with suspected Jews could a toddler’s birth date offer a potential stay of execution or mandate execution for the crime of having been born. In the end, reprieve was denied even to those initially considered fortunate enough to achieve half-breed status or boast the more advantageous birthday.

For Jews their life’s choices were irrelevant. Even social climbers who betrayed the Jewish collective, who turned their backs on Jewish heritage and haughtily despised fellow Jews, weren’t spared thereby. Nothing could save anyone deemed too Jewish to live.

Most appalling of all, this wasn’t merely officialdom’s ruthless edict. The population cheered. Waugh describes the gloating attendant to discoveries that certain socialites were, alas, half-juden. That was the true measure of the horror – there was nothing an individual could do about undesirable ancestors. Jewish impurities in the family tree destined one for destruction. That was decisive for any Jew, even for the last hidden baby and even for the Wittgensteins, who strove their mightiest to deny that mortifying Jewish connection.

There are no equivalents for this, not that the producers of Cousins would be swayed by any of the above. Historic accuracy hardly concerns hate-mongers or lesser Holocaust-banalizers. Truth is strictly verboten where today’s symptom of craziness is endemic.

Though unpleasant and untactful, de Gaulle was at least honest, which is more than can be said for Barack Obama.

It doesn’t take a paranoid conspiracy-theory promoter to speculate that the pressure brought to bear by the US president on Israel has little to do with furthering the peace process. Obama’s pressure in fact contradicts the cause of peace. It’s no conjecture to argue that it has everything to do with attempting to diminish Israel, shoving it into a corner, intensifying the ostracism to which it’s subjected and making it more of an international pariah than it already is.

Why?

Because that would weaken and demoralize Israel to such an extent that it would become putty in Obama’s hands. He could then appease the Arab world at its expense.

Along that line too we may conclude that Obama, having wasted more than a year’s worth of invaluable time, doesn’t really intend to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. He certainly doesn’t want Israel to preempt that probability either. He prefers it helpless, threatened and frightened.

Why?

Because then it would be putty in his hands and he’d presumably earn the undying gratitude of the Arab/Muslim world.

That’s why, rather than engage in dialogue, Obama spoils for a fight – all the while professing to be our best friend. And we credulously repeat his assurance and use it as a cogent rationalization for why we mustn’t displease him. Who can afford to upset a devoted friend? Especially when friends are so rare.

IT ALL calls to mind an old Plains Indian admonition that “what looks true by the glow of the camp fire isn’t always true in sunlight.”

Native Americans, after all, learned from bitter experience to mistrust the compassionate posture of the Great Father in Washington and his treaty promises.

Our own tribal myth, often repeated around our proverbial camp fire, persistently portrays various White House residents as trusted friends, who presume to know better than we what’s best for us. Thus Obama presses for benevolent eugenics – needless to say for our own good – when insisting we forthwith freeze all construction and effectively end natural growth in what he calls settlements, including significant swaths of Jerusalem. No greater problems plague the world than Jewish babies.

This hardly began with the 1,600 Ramat Shlomo apartments. Already months ago, Obama’s radical ideologues looked exceeding askance on blueprints for a new hotel and shopping center near the Old City. They’re into the nitty-gritty of daily metropolitan minutiae. They know the devil is in the details and no detail, no matter how outwardly trivial, escapes their scrupulous attention. They’ll relentlessly breathe down our supposedly sovereign neck and show us who’s boss – friendly like.

But who are we to quibble and second-guess? Our best friends may indeed be shrewd beyond our inferior comprehension. Or it might be that what looks like friendship isn’t what it seems.

If we examine the history of Israeli-American relations in the non-distorting sunlight, we may conclude that the US consistently deprived Israel of victory, indirectly encouraged Arab attacks, instigated terrorism and gave incentive to Arab intransigence. What’s euphemistically labeled a “peace process” was always the process to divest Israel of vital strategic assets. Israeli governments in effect never negotiated with Arab interlocutors without intervention by America.

Way back in 1948, despite Harry Truman’s hesitant de facto recognition of newborn Israel, America’s arms embargo emboldened Arab invaders. When Dwight Eisenhower forced Israel out of the Sinai in 1957, he promised to keep the Tiran Straits open. Gamal Abdel Nasser blockaded them a decade later, but America reneged on its assurances, signaling Egypt that its aggression would be tolerated. Had the US honored its undertaking, there would have been no Six Day War and no “occupation” for Washington to urgently seek to end.

The US-brokered 1970 Israeli-Egyptian truce hinged on American guarantees that no heavy weaponry would be advanced. On the cease-fire’s first night, however, the Egyptians moved dozens of anti-aircraft missiles to the Suez Canal’s bank, facilitating the eventual launch of the Yom Kippur War. American silence was deafening. At the end of the 1973 war, the US saved the surrounded Egyptian Third Army from surrender, thereby robbing Israel of incontestable triumph.

Recurrently imposed cease-fires – whenever Israel begins inflicting pain on the terrorists – fit the above pattern.

Ronald Reagan frequently noted that without Israel the Soviets would have occupied Saudi oil fields. This, though, never prevented Washington from trying to squeeze Israel back into the precarious June 4, 1967, lines.

But what about American assistance? Contrary to popular lore, the equivalent of what Israel contributed to the US immeasurably surpasses, even in monetary terms, the sum total of what America gave Israel from the 1970s on (prior to that we got nothing, yet miraculously managed to thrive). America enjoyed access to Israeli intelligence, including information on Soviet weaponry, battlefield tryouts for American military hardware, their innovative improvement, etc.

Moreover, American aid costs us big time and 75 percent of it must be spent stateside. It coerces Israel to consume American-manufactured goods – from arms to uniforms. These can be produced locally. The fact that they aren’t contributes to unemployment here and stunts research and development. America’s new-generation fighter planes are so exorbitantly priced that it’s no longer prudent to buy them. Yet what’s the alternative? Our reduction to vassal-state status was completed when the US vetoed the Israeli-made Lavi fighter-jet and exports by our defense and aviation industries.

LAST SUMMER the Pentagon nixed Israel Aerospace Industries participation in a tender to supply military aircraft to India. Israel is essentially ordered to withdraw from whichever tender US firms also compete in or face the consequences of jeopardizing the “special bond.” Israel was forced to prefer Boeing to Airbus and retract higher import tariffs on large cars. Hillary even badgered Bibi to allow seven containers of American carp into Israel customs-free. Our gefilte fish is Washington’s business.

America has its own interests, however misguided, and Obama takes to extremes the underlying premise that Israel is a pain in the backside. When Israeli leaders obsequiously suck up, they allow dim and flaring camp fire illumination to obstruct this reality. They duplicate their predecessors’ flagrant fundamental misconceptions to Israel’s detriment.

It’s not that we have better friends than America. We don’t. In fact, we have no friends. De Gaulle’s harsh truth should guide our policymakers and be enunciated loudly and fearlessly. Pseudo-friends can be only comforting and useful occasionally, on condition that we maintain suspicious vigilance, as another bit of Native American folk wisdom advises.

It enjoins: “Beware the friend who covers you with his wings, only to injure you with his beak.”

Truth is often an unwelcome guest. Truth can be unpopular. Truth can disconcert. Truth can be bad for business. Truth can be counterproductive for certain reputations – even for the reputation of professionals whose status is ostensibly derived from their dedication to seeking truth.

Truth can be denied even when solidly backed by history. In our postmodern moral-relativist environment no truths exist, only self-serving narratives, claims and counterclaims. Hence truth can be spurned as a biased assertion aimed at furthering someone’s narrow interests. This is all the more insidious because it’s so fashionable.

It’s simplistic to dismiss any fact as an expedient and calculated misrepresentation. This isn’t just intellectual indolence. It’s also intellectual anarchy. Everything can be willy-nilly turned upside down. With nothing rooted to actual sequences of events, liars are liberated. Falsehoods are granted equal standing with truth. Frequently they even gain ascendency and are paraded as unquestionable. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

MY ABOVE ruminations were inspired by twin events. An opinion piece I wrote for an Australian newspaper elicited a deluge of noxious e-mails sent to my private mailbox. In these, my ancestors and I were dispatched to the lowest levels of hell and my offspring and I were threatened with torture and death.

Yet somehow worse, because it didn’t come from the loony fringe, was a very polite letter sent by a highly respectable German magazine editor to an acquaintance (also German) who suggested the periodical print his translated version of my column “A good cop goes to Auschwitz” (January 20). The column revisited the World War II avid Arab collaboration with the Nazis (in the wake of MK Muhammad Barakei’s provocative participation at the Auschwitz liberation memorial).

It was flatly rejected on the grounds that it’s “too pro-Israel” and “too massively partisan.” The editor judged it unsuitable, saying it raises “the specter of chauvinism” (in its original sense of ultra-nationalism, before it was hijacked by gender polemics).

The rejection is no big deal. This wasn’t my idea in the first place. The rationale for the rejection, though, is anything but insignificant. The original text cataloged Arab collusion with the Nazis – from prewar through postwar years. Listed were established facts, easily verifiable (many amply backed by photos and evidence from both the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials).

Decades ago none of this was esoteric. In time, however, political correctness rendered any reference to Arab pro-Nazi militancy uncool. It became obfuscated, almost forgotten.

Even Israeli schools no longer teach about the Hitler-Himmler-Eichmann crony, Berlin-resident, self-styled pan-Arab prime minister Haj Amin el-Husseini. This British-appointed mufti of Jerusalem ended up an internationally wanted war criminal.

In the aftermath of the very Holocaust which Arabs supported and abetted – when this country’s Jews were forced to fight for their survival against the Arab genocidal invasion of 1948 – the same above-named mufti imported against newborn Israel volunteers from remnants of Bosnian Waffen SS regiments he recruited to bolster Hitler. They vowed to finish Hitler’s job here.

This remains ever relevant. Even deceased, the mufti is still vastly revered among Arab masses. Ongoing Arab/Muslim aversion to any Holocaust mention, coupled with Holocaust distortion, is notorious (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example). The Arabs’ Jew-hatred predated the Jewish state and “occupation” calumnies. Without antecedents to today’s events, we get sucked into the deception that Israel’s birth and subsequent “territorial conquests” are the roots of all evil.

Expunging the past twists, disjoints and isolates bits of history out of all context, thereby obscuring the fact that Arabs didn’t instigate the Mideast conflict to win Palestinian self-determination but to prevent Jewish self-determination. Such truth-warps facilitate brainwashing.

ONE WOULD suppose that a brief tip-of-the-iceberg exposé of the Arabs’ Nazi penchants should be of particular interest to Germans who don’t know nearly enough of how their forebears perpetrated genocide, with whose help and whose cheers.

The convenient mythology of German victimhood leads many to portray Holocaust atrocities as a disagreeable occurrence, about which nobody knew and for which nobody is culpable. This laundered version of history reduces the Holocaust to a crime without readily identifiable perpetrators – an alien band of no distinct ethnicity, known generically as Nazis.

Sanitized historiography portrays Germany as yet another pitiably occupied nation. The Allies “liberated” – not vanquished – it. Too many Germans bellyache about their suffering and avoid acknowledging that without millions of ardent followers and enthusiastic accomplices, no regime could have sadistically slaughtered multitudes.

With blitzkrieg intensity, bloodstained Germany transformed itself into spotless, progressive New Germany, which goes out of its way to proclaim bigheartedness and beneficence. For Germans collectively World War II’s calculated, systemized, industrialized bloodletting constituted something akin to reform school. Dutiful Germans recited their lessons, did their homework, sat for their exams and graduated with honors. What more can be demanded of them? They paid their dues. They emerged edified from the cataclysm.

By their yardstick, Jews didn’t equally purify themselves nor rise to Germany’s ethical standards, overcome the distasteful past as elegantly as Europeans, surmount residual unpleasantness and let bygones be bygones. Hence, even Germans feel free to carp about Israeli self-defense and urge Israel’s return to the Auschwitz borders (as dovish Abba Eban dubbed the 1949 armistice lines). The underlying impression is that Jewish sovereignty is perversely a Nazi legacy, that Germany is consequently responsible, albeit indirectly, for Arab grievances.

This meshes with Muslim canards that the Holocaust’s ultimate victims are Palestinian Arabs, whom a manipulated and guilt-tripped West burdened with the pariah Jewish state. As a result, unfortunate Arabs, despite their self-professed blamelessness, paid for Europe’s alleged sin. This has become so de rigueur in Europe that to challenge it is to go against the grain of conventional wisdom.

This is what the magazine editor was loath to do. Why court superfluous controversy and open oneself and one’s publication to accusations of – heaven forefend – siding with Israel? The editor openly cites this as his overriding apprehension.

Therefore, he won’t publish material he deems non-objective. Yet why expect an Israeli writer to be from the UN? Are such demands ever made of Arab commentators? It’s somehow accepted that Arabs/Muslims are entitled to righteous rage. Those Israelis not shunned in the media and on campuses abroad are predominantly left-wing trashers of their own country. Israel-bashing Israelis are celebrated as impartial; those who argue Israel’s case are denied resonance.

This bears grim implications for Israel’s ability to win the PR war. Foremost, Israelis must do what’s best for Israel regardless of image damage. Image repair is nearly impossible. Israel is hard put to secure world sympathy if pro-Israeli voices are unheard because they are, alas, pro-Israeli.

Presumably, Israeli apologetics must be diluted by pro-Arab lip service to achieve quasi-legitimacy and avoid being castigated as one-sided. Even straightforward unimpeachable information (such as Husseini’s wartime Berlin address) isn’t exempt from the taboo on “Israeli chauvinism” – and all in the name of evenhandedness.

So who says you can’t accurately predict the future? admittedly, clairvoyance isn’t realistic in all circumstances, but in some instances not to sense what’s about to occur is to willfully avoid reality. In given situations what threatens to unfold is obvious.

So it was when Shimon Peres campaigned for the presidency in 2007.

I wrote then: “How Peres would exploit presidential office, given his past predilections, boggles the mind. A Peres presidency would be  invitation to intrigue. It’s safe to assume he wouldn’t make do with a figurehead role, but would hyperactively preside over a parallel government and spawn an unimaginable surfeit of inventive visions, plans and proposals. Their common denominator would be the increasing Palestinization of this land and dangerous compromising of what Golda Meir called ‘the Jewish national interest.’”

There was plenty over the past few years to vindicate this forecast, but the most recent reports of Peres’s extracurricular activities are the clincher.

GET A load of the following samples from Haaretz (which fully approves of the president’s hijinks).

“Talks have recently been under way to arrange a summit meeting in Rome this April between President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The talks have reportedly been carried out without the involvement or even the knowledge of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Abbas has persistently refused to meet.”

Sounds familiar? Deja vu? The same old MO?

There’s more:

“The person behind the summit drive is Uri Savir, president of the Peres Center for Peace, who was one of the architects of the Oslo  Accords and served as director-general of the Foreign Ministry when Peres was foreign minister.”

And more:

“Beit Hanassi never informed anyone in the Prime Minister’s Bureau about the proposed summit. And when Netanyahu’s staff finally learned of it from the Italian media reports, they were furious over Peres’s failure to inform them.”

Worse yet, Peres didn’t bother to quite deny stepping outside formal bounds. His spokesman merely said that “for now” Peres has “no plans to travel to Italy.” Presumably things might change.

But even that’s not all: “Peres, who is working overtime as super-foreign minister… has held private talks recently with political figures, in which he is pushing, as only he knows how, for the co-option of Kadima into the government to enhance Netanyahu’s diplomatic maneuverability.”

Why? For weeks now, according to another Haaretz report, Peres “has been making statements to the effect that Netanyahu cannot advance the peace process with the present coalition government controlled by the right wing.” Get it? Peres opposes the composition of a legally-constituted government. He actively seeks to change the legitimate status quo.

He dynamically ingrains the impression of a two-pronged government. He represents the high-minded, forward-thinking variant, whereas its counterpart is both benighted and inept. Netanyahu’s government isn’t distinctly pro-peace (if not worse), whereas Peres’s is on the side of the angels and has their sanction to present Netanyahu with faits accomplis.

After all, Peres is a dab hand at engineering facts. Long before his own presidency and Netanyahu’s premiership, Peres pursued furtive assignations during the tenures of two premiers. Covertly, behind the backs of both, he conspired in violation of every conceivable democratic principle.

THREE YEARS pre-Oslo, in 1990, when the country was governed by the second unity coalition under Yitzhak Shamir, Peres (already then not for the first time) engaged in unauthorized freelance negotiations.

When Shamir rejected Peres’s ultimatum (hatched with the infamous James Baker), Peres plotted to bring down 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.”

Ironically, when Rabin later won the premiership, recidivist Peres sidetracked him too, as he did Shamir. The difference was that Shamir fired Peres, whereas Rabin fell for the Osloite chimera.

Almost 2,000 Israelis were murdered, and thousands maimed for life. Stretches of historical homeland were relinquished and strategic assets surrendered to genocidal enemies, whom Peres imported here by the tens of thousands from Tunis as per the Oslo Accords.

Some 150,000 hostile Arabs were added into Israel’s population to further “family reunions” under Oslo. Those who made egregious  concessions to still-implacable foes dramatically exacerbated the country’s demographic distress, the very one which purportedly served as their pretext for the Osloite machination in the first place.

Peres’s “New Middle East,” Oslo subterfuge and derivative Nobel Peace Prize earned him prodigious accolades from chic international cheerleaders. Yet here, in the sands of the reprobate Mideast, Oslo caused Arab aspirations to replace Israel and the delegitimization of its very existence to be tolerated as never previously in the valued venues of Peres’s social conquests.

Peres conferred respectability upon Fatah and ushered in Hamas rampages. In pre-Oslo days there was less call for targeted strikes, roadblocks, security fences and suchlike image-tarnishing measures. There was more peace prior to Peres’s peace.

More than anyone else, Netanyahu ought to be keenly aware of this. Where Peres is concerned, unremitting vigilance is of paramount importance. No one has the right to be surprised. Peres’s irrepressible tinkering is every bit as predictable as were the unmitigated debacles of Peres’s pet Oslo project and of all its defeatist direct offshoots.

JUST AS foreseeable was that the unilateral 2000 escape from Lebanon would invigorate Arab hostility, that the unilateral withdrawal from Gush Katif would embolden terror as never before and facilitate Gaza’s takeover by the most extreme of fanatics. No powers of prophesy were needed to figure out that constant relinquishment of previously held negotiating positions, and unceasing retreats from hitherto consensual “red lines,” would bring war closer and render accommodation more distant.

All these were as eminently inevitable as are Peres’s compulsory meddling, uncontainable glory-seeking, obsessive love of the limelight and infatuation with center stage.

All the above paid off handsomely. No other Israeli can boast Peres’s celebrity in the world’s long-established and ever-expanding haunts of anti-Israeli bon-ton. Much as they revile us there, they are likely to applaud him.

Peres is the indubitable darling of the world’s trendiest and most beautiful headliners. How diametrically opposed the affection showered upon him is to pejoratives like “hard-line,” “intransigent” or “inflexible” that always accompanied Golda’s name (though she hardly
headed a government which Peres could have described as right-wing).

Years ago Golda explained to me why she was so unloved internationally. “It’s so easy to win the world’s love,” she observed. “Just do as they wish. If you don’t, they’ll hate you.”

She shrugged: “What can I do? The world isn’t enamored of the Jewish national cause. The more you insist on Jewish interests, the less popular you’ll be and vice versa.”

Unlike her nemesis Peres, Golda preferred to be hated and diagnosed as hopelessly afflicted with “the Masada complex.”

Apparently they were converted to the view that everything boils down to who was here first, who left all the place names of all this country’s towns and villages (including those which conquistador Arabs took over), who embedded this unlikely location in world consciousness and rendered it a cultural/religious byword in the farthest climes, whose national cradle this was, the hub of whose beliefs and aspirations this arid little territorial tract had been from time immemorial.

The Arabs, obviously, haven’t become overnight lovers of Zion. But despite their unabated enmity to the Zionist project – Israel – they commandeer Zionism’s logic and Zionism’s case and put these to their own use with a set of preposterous counterclaims that go spectacularly unchallenged in our postmodern existence. With moral-relativists throwing history to the wind, any absurdity can be propagated with colossal impudence and impunity.

The latest example was just furnished in the Knesset by Israeli-Arab MK Taleb a-Sanaa (Ta’al-Ra’am). In a plenum debate he embraced the premise that the land belongs to its earliest claimants: “You say that Abraham purchased Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, but the man who sold it to him was a Palestinian Arab. Consequently, we were here first and Hebron is eternally ours.”

Thereby a-Sanaa made a huge leap from traditional Arab portrayals of Abraham as an Arab. A-Sanaa now categorizes him as the Israelites’ father and stakes Arab claims on real-estate vendor Ephron the Hittite (although the mosque which Arabs constructed over the second-holiest Jewish shrine is called the Ibrahimi Mosque – Ibrahim being the Arabic pronunciation for the Hebrew Avraham).

THIS ISN’T an irrelevant frivolous footnote. A-Sanaa isn’t the first Arab to reinvent the past to suit current interests. Indeed, this is a long-established vogue. Way before the homicidal agitation of British-appointed Jerusalem mufti Haj Amin el-Husseini, it was a widespread Arab sport to hurl human excrement from atop the Temple Mount at Jews praying below. But Husseini decided to usurp the wall’s sanctity for Islam, decreeing it to be the hitching-post where Muhammad tethered his super-steed al-Buraq. That presumably overrode and erased all Jewish associations to the site.

The insistence of Jews to keep praying at the remnant of their Holiest of Holies, despite mounting Arab violence, eventually gave birth to Husseini’s hysterical incitement charging Jewish takeover attempts of al-Aksa Mosque. His shrill provocation culminated in the 1929 countrywide “slaughter-the-Jews” campaign, most notorious for the Hebron massacre that disrupted many centuries of continuous Jewish presence in town.

It’s there that Arabs now riot because updated incitement tells them that the inclusion of the Cave of the Patriarchs in the list of to-be-preserved Jewish national heritage sites will compromise their freedom of worship.

The irony is that Arab notions of freedom don’t extend to others. Exactly a hundred years ago Izhak Ben-Zvi (in time Israel’s second president) and his wife Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi hiked to Hebron. Each described, in separate books, how they were barred from the cave.

Ben-Zvi wrote: “The entrance to the Patriarchs’ Cave was prohibited to non-Muslims… Jews were allowed to climb no higher than the seventh step in the courtyard. Only brave-hearted Jewish women dared enter, masquerading in Arab garb and their faces veiled according to Arab custom.”

Rachel recalled: “Hebron’s Jewish women would sometimes infiltrate the cave veiled and costumed like Arabs. Only by stealth could they pray at our forefathers’ tombs. When Hebron’s Arab fanaticism escalated, Jews were forbidden even to glance into the cave… Hate spewed from the Arab guards’ eyes and from Arab worshipers who brushed against us on their way in. We arrived at the steps and stood silent. I refused to climb the seven permitted stairs. The insult was too searing.”

So much for Arab pluralism and tolerance. Actually, the Arabs don’t demand liberality of us. They want it all and they want us out, as they did when their forebears descended on hapless Jews’ homes over 80 years ago and hideously hacked innocents to death.

WERE ISRAELIS to unconditionally submit to ever-mutating Arab historiography, then all attachments to the Western Wall and Mount of Olives would have to be abjectly relinquished. By the wisdom of revised Arab chronicles, the Obama administration’s penchant for appeasement, UNESCO and other UN organs, it behooves us to obey. Hence Jerusalem isn’t one whit different from Hebron or Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem, another designated heritage site.

The latest Arab attempt to expunge Jewish connections is the contention that rather than Rachel’s, the tomb is of Bilal Ibn-Rabah, an African slave and Muhammad’s muezzin. The problem is that Damascus’s Bab Saghir Cemetery has dibs on what’s said to be Bilal’s grave.

All this underscores two simultaneous trends: the confiscation of Jewish history and the adoption of counterfeit pre-Abrahamic Canaanite identities. Under Yasser Arafat it became fashionable to fabricate supposed Canaanite ceremonies and ordain Canaanites as Palestinians (though, already by biblical testimony, Canaanites assimilated among Israelites, while the Palestine moniker was minted by Romans over a millennium thereafter).

Arafat insisted to Bill Clinton at Camp David that no Jewish temple ever existed. This is now official PA mantra. PA headliner cleric Sheikh Tayseer Tamimi proclaims repeatedly that “Jerusalem had always only been an Arab and Islamic city.” The Cave of the Patriarchs, he declared, “is a pure mosque, which Jewish presence defiles. Jews have no right to pray there, much less claim any bond to Hebron – an Arab city for 5,000 years… All Palestine is holy Muslim soil. Jews are foreign interlopers.”

Back in 1950 poet Natan Alterman penned a tongue-in-cheek reply to a near-identical proclamation (“Palestine is an Arab country and always was. Foreigners have no part in it.”) Entitled “An Arab Land,” Alterman’s verses appeared on the Labor daily Davar’s front page. By replacing biblical Hebrew names with Arabic adaptations, Alterman appeared to amplify the spirit of progressive Arab scholarship. I translated it two decades ago:

A clear night. Treetops shiver,
Vibrating the view with an airy whisper.
From above, Arab evening stars
Sparkle over an Arab land.

The stars wink and flicker
And bestow their quivering glitter
Upon the tranquil city Al-Kuds
In which once reigned King Daoud.

And from there they gaze and witness
The city of El Halil in the distance.
The city of Father Ibrahim’s tomb,
Ibrahim who begat Is’hak.

And then the clever rays so fast
Rush the golden glow to cast
Where the waters of the river El Urdun flow,
Where Ya’acub once did go.

A clear night. With an airy wink
The stars legitimately blink
Over the mountains of an Arab land
Which Mussa from afar beheld.

FOR average Israelis, members of the silent majority (as distinct from the country’s chattering cliquey elite), the false-passports brouhaha abroad is just another sideshow in the international community’s theatre of the absurd.

In this global burlesque, everything can be turned upside down. The lie is granted equal standing with truth, and flagrant canards frequently gain the ascendancy and are paraded as fact. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

In this environment of intellectual anarchy, Israel’s existential struggle stands no chance of being granted anything vaguely resembling a fair hearing.

The case of terror kingpin Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is instructive. After his body was discovered in a Dubai hotel, his own son, Abdel-Rauf, bragged on TV that the late lamented ”fought the Jews, hit the Jews, kidnapped and killed Israelis. He outfitted and dispatched suicide-bombers.” That evidently made him an object for admiration. Killing Jews is a noble objective, one to take pride in, to revere.

Mabhouh co-founded the Hamas military wing and Hamas declared war on Israel. He was a self-confessed murderer.

Last year he boasted on

al-Jazeera about his personal culpability in the separate 1989 kidnap-murders of Israeli soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon.

He crowed about smuggling into Gaza thousands of Iranian-made missiles for the sole purpose of making the lives of Israeli civilians hellish in the country’s heartland, including Tel Aviv.

So when Israelis point to Mabhouh’s gory record, it isn’t just their biased say-so. It’s hardly an unsubstantiated assertion, an excuse to justify assassination.

Accustomed and resigned as Israelis are to the world’s double standards, they nevertheless watch with renewed amazement as Mabhouh’s suspected killers are placed on Interpol’s wanted list, where Mabhouh himself never appeared – soaked with blood as his hands were. Has anyone, incidentally, bothered inquiring which passport Mabhouh was travelling under and why he was allowed to enter Dubai on a gun-running mission?

The hullabaloo about secret agents using fake passports is just a very telling footnote to the larger travesty. To begin with, none of the supposedly offended countries possesses credible proof of Israeli involvement, though it’s easy to point fingers at Israel because from its perspective Mabhouh was an implacable foe. But so he was, too, to certain Palestinian factions and perhaps to some Iranian contacts (two alleged assassins escaped by boat to Iran, after all).

But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that it was Israel’s Mossad that got its man. Even so, isn’t the righteous hand-wringing about passport-forging a tad excessive and more than a little hypocritical? Is there honestly a single country whose intelligence operatives don’t resort to using less-than-genuine documents?

Or is it that given sets of rules apply for all nations, but others are imposed on beleaguered, existentially threatened Israel? Give us all a break, please.

The British, French, Irish, Germans and Australians all know in their heart-of-hearts that there is no real cause to fear that the tradecraft employed in this assassination (assuming the cloak-and-dagger tales are true) jeopardises any one of their nationals. The terror syndicates, which increasingly menace Westerners anywhere, need no pretexts. They have no trouble fabricating provocations.

The only reason for Israel’s fellow democracies to harp on the purported insult to their hallowed papers is to curry favour with the terror-sponsors and bask in the warm ambience of the Israel-bashing fraternity. This presumably accords them some temporary anti-aggression insurance.

The illusion may be sweet, but weren’t Australians targeted in the Bali atrocity without an Israeli link? If anything, we are in the same boat rather than on opposing sides. It behoves Western democracies not to lose sight of the fact there are instances in which ends do justify means.

Adolf Eichmann was apprehended in Argentina and taken to Israel by means that weren’t quite orthodox. Yet wasn’t it justice? Had Osama bin Laden been bumped off in Dubai, would the outcry have been as vehement?

Overlooking the crime and focusing on technical, legalistic niceties attests to a skewed moral compass, indeed, to outright moral impoverishment. It signals to Israelis that their blood is cheaper than passport-paper. It signals acceptance by the West of lopsided Arab logic whereby Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews, and to do so in the most sadistically inventive ways, while the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil and deserving of punishment.

The counterfeit passport kerfuffle underscores the fact that the international community appears to deny Israel any possible measure in aid of its self-preservation. Campaigns like Defensive Shield, the Lebanon war or Cast Lead are decried for ”lack of proportionality”.

However, there is censure even for pinpointed targeting such as perhaps the Mabhouh caper was.

Another case in point is the recent Nablus killing (in an exchange of fire during an attempted arrest) of the three ambushers who had earlier slain Israeli civilian Meir Avshalom Chai in a drive-by shooting. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate by world conventional wisdom, described them as ”ruthlessly executed martyrs”. Even the trials and convictions of murderers such as Marwan Barghouti are portrayed overseas as illegitimate. There plainly is just nothing Israel may do to secure itself. Even the most legalistically scrupulous remedies are repudiated.

Since it’s less than likely that the International Criminal Court or the UN Human Rights Council would have indicted Mabhouh for violating Israelis’ basic human right to life, what then is left to Israelis? Are they to submit to the precept Jews must die and have no right to resist? That this is their lot? That is too much to expect of anyone, even Jews.

Israel’s left-wing elite, cliquey opinion-makers, self-serving trend-setters and bon-ton groupies glory in posturing as anti-establishment nonconformists.

Their premise that Jews must always pay is perhaps the root symptom of the Jewish nation’s abnormality and inability to behave like other sovereign nations. Nowhere is there another country whose citizens ponder daily what more to offer their foes, what they can cede to appease and how to curry a little favor abroad.

The need to pay for our right to live is a uniquely Jewish syndrome. We alone bear an onus to justify what’s a self-evident, inalienable right to any other people. Our obsession to analyze things from our enemies’ perspective and understand them is simply unparalleled.

That said, most Israeli leftists are hardly hostile anti-Zionists. They are just a lot like Irving Fisher – among the forerunners of the modern breed of celebrity gurus. The self-confident star-economist’s most famous prediction – in October 1929 – was that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” But literally several days later, alas, reality confoundedly interfered with his rosy forecast and financial markets uncooperatively crashed.

Was the oracle of Wall Street a smidge contrite? Heck no. For long months Fisher (non-Jewish despite his name) clung to his optimistic orientation. The Great Depression’s misery notwithstanding, he assured despairing investors that recovery was just around the corner.

Today, when psychologists discuss the cognitive malfunctions and logical fallacies collectively known as wishful thinking, Fisher is almost inevitably cited as a prime example of one whose deductions weren’t based on evidence or sound analysis but on what he desired.

AN EXAMPLE closer to home is the alacrity of Israel’s more progressive souls to cede strategic assets to ever-implacable enemies, in the hope of thereby mitigating Arab fanatical fervor to obliterate the Jewish state.

Sweet delusion allures in whichever direction they look – not just vis-à-vis increasingly ferocious foes outside our insecure state, but also inside it. Israeli Arabs, Fisher-clones contend, are loyal citizens whose peeves are essentially socioeconomic. Unstinting appeasement, cash outlays and solicitous ego-massages will satisfy them. Anyhow local left-wingers assert that Israeli Arab disaffection is Israel’s fault.

They perceive nothing untoward in providing financial underpinning for outfits like Adalah, whose purported purpose is upholding the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens. A few years back, Adalah drafted a proposed constitution for this country. The central theme promulgated by this notable grantee of Jewish generosity was redefining the state not as Jewish but as “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” – all euphemisms cherished by liberal opinion worldwide, thus rendering them simultaneously seductive and deceptive.

The Adalah outline remarkably resembled what the supposedly suspended PLO Charter touted for decades – replacing Israel with a so-called democratic state. The PLO Charter too employed seemingly “democratic” enticements, while in effect demanding Israel’s destruction. The only difference is that the PLO professed intent to spread its “democracy” throughout “western Palestine” (including all of Israel), while Adalah takes the establishment of a Palestinian state for granted and therefore exclusively targets Israeli jurisdiction inside the pre-1967 borders. Adalah pointedly demands that the puny within-the-Green-Line residue no longer constitute a Jewish state.

Adalah wants Israel’s (Jewish) Law of Return abolished; Israel’s national anthem, flag and emblem changed; all land claimed to have been confiscated from Arabs “fully restored”; ratification of (Arab) refugees’ “right of return”; reinstating “uprooted” Israeli Arabs in “their” villages; recognition of Beduin property rights over all they insist they own; and “reverse discrimination” to compensate Israeli Arabs “for the systematic discrimination against them.”

Moreover, Adalah’s constitution obliges Israel to officially apologize for “the injustice which Israel’s creation had caused the Palestinian nation.” There’s no hint of the rejection by Palestinians of every single compromise ever proposed to them, including the 1947 UN Partition Plan – regardless of how adverse the conditions of those compromises were for Jews. There’s no mention of the genocidal war Palestinians launched to prevent the Partition Plan’s implementation, as well as of the concerted 1948 Arab invasion of newborn Israel.

AS THE “constitution” authors maintain, it represents “the broad mainstream Arab-Israeli position.” Similar motifs were promoted by the Mossawa Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel and The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee. Their much-hyped manifestos demand a return to villages abandoned in 1948, administrative Arab-sector autonomy, separate representation for Israeli Arabs in international forums, Arab veto power on major Israeli legislative/executive decisions, the elimination of Jewish state symbols and an end to Jewish immigration.

There are barely any discernible differences between Adalah’s “constitution” and the “Haifa Covenant,” mostly composed by the Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research. As Adalah openly admits, many of its members participated in compiling the Haifa Covenant, which Adalah endorses as an “expression of the political and social empowerment of Arabs in Israel.”

The affinity shouldn’t surprise anyone. Adalah, Mada al-Carmel, Mossawa and The Higher Arab Monitoring Committee’s subcommittees all feed in the same trough – the New Israel Fund.

Its oft-repeated rationale is that we don’t need to support every single thing these organizations say, but we should support their right to say it.

A tad disingenuous? Duh!

It’s one thing to tolerate provocation – even sedition – but it’s quite another to bankroll agitation for the eradication of Israel’s Jewish character via a binational concoction. The subtext goal of too many beneficiaries of left-wing largesse is to end Jewish independence and turn the clock back to pre-1948.

Worse yet, these are the Arab sector’s relatively temperate voices. What they don’t proclaim explicitly is spelled out by the leader of Israel’s Islamic Movement (Northern Branch), Raed Salah, who hectored on more than one occasion that “the Zionist existence is in itself an act of war against Arabs.”

Adalah, incidentally, has consistently defended Salah for years. Its bottom line is unmistakable: The Jewish state is illegitimate and hence subversion against it is inherently legitimate.

In rare circumstances Adalah doctrines actually managed to scare Jewish peacenik intellectuals. In 2006, for instance, these peaceniks belatedly admitted the failure of years of Israel Democracy Institute-sponsored dialogues with presumed fellow moderates from the Israeli Arab community. The latter wouldn’t countenance the most minimal recognition of the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The published protocols of the prolonged futile deliberations – entitled Whose Land Is It? – make disheartening if not chilling reading.

Jewish left-wing participants were disconcerted when their goodwill was ungraciously rebuffed, but their shock expectedly dissipated. Our inveterate doves quickly resumed willful misrepresentation of existential threats as civil rights issues, as per politically correct etiquette.

The guardians of our collective conscience – our enlightened Fisher-clones – prefer to perch themselves on the “permanently high plateau.”

Fisher did eventually fall from his prosperous upland, but he lost only his personal fortune and academic reputation. His postmortems of what went wrong exuded hindsight wisdom. The collapse that threatens Israel, however, is horrendously more final than insolvency, with no comebacks or meaningful retrospection likely.

Terrorist arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s son, Abdel-Rauf, stood teary-eyed before TV interviewers and lavished praise on his deceased father. He bragged that the late lamented, who was discovered dead in Dubai, “fought the Jews, hit the Jews, kidnapped and killed Israelis. He outfitted and dispatched suicide bombers.” That evidently made him an object for admiration, a source of honor and a claim to fame. Killing Jews is a noble objective, one to take pride in, to revere.

So when we Israelis point to Mabhouh’s gory record, it isn’t just our biased say-so. It’s hardly an unsubstantiated allegation, a pretext to justify assassination. His own son concedes this, indeed he crows about it as the paramount tribute he can pay his father.

And it isn’t a mournful son’s subjective or self-serving aggrandizement either. Hamas issued an official statement celebrating its latest shahid (martyr). Prominent in the Hamas-compiled catalog of Mabhouh glories are the 1989 abduction-murders of IDF soldiers Avi Sasportas and Ilan Sa’adon.

By the boastful admission of both his kin and organization, Mabhouh’s hands were bloodstained. Hence, by the Arabs’ own rules of engagement, he was liable for reprisal. The principal code governing these rules is dam butlab dam (blood begets blood).

Because of this core premise Hamas now vows to wreak the most horrific vengeance on Israel, actual proof of Israeli culpability for Mabhouh’s demise being entirely immaterial. All Israelis are therefore fair game. This is the elementary protocol of the blood feud.

But here’s where we encounter our enemies’ cynical lopsided logic. By their own rules – assuming for argument’s sake that we submit ourselves to them – we should be perceived just as entitled as they to hunt down and kill whoever killed our own. Yet our retribution is condemned a priori as illegitimate. The right to avenge Mabhouh’s death is unchallenged, whereas the right to avenge Mabhouh’s victims is categorically denied. What is valid, in fact a sacred duty for one side, is intolerable and entirely villainous for the other.

The underlying assertion is that Mabhouh’s acts were virtuous and sanctioned by absolute supernal will. Unlike our own, Arab society is unbothered by the pluralistic niceties of postmodern moral relativism. Allah is exclusively on their side and they are the only interpreters of his wishes. This isn’t only Hamas ideology. The Palestinian Media Watch disseminated the text of the January 29 sermon on PATV, under the auspices of our supposed peace-partner Mahmoud Abbas.

It called on all Muslims to remember that “the Jews are the Jews! The Jews are the Jews! Even if donkeys would cease to bray, dogs cease to bark, wolves cease to howl and snakes to bite, the Jews would not cease to harbor hatred towards Muslims. The Prophet said that if two Jews would be alone with a Muslim, they would think only of killing him… The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them…’” There is a whole loathsome lot more, but the basis is clear: the murder of Jews is divinely decreed.

In other words, Mabhouh acted morally. Those who opposed him are immoral. By this precept Jews must die and have no right to resist. That is their lot. Not only do they possess no right to avenge, they possess no right to self-defense, to fight at all. Their very existence is a provocation, a casus belli.

THIS IS key to understanding today’s Mideast. As in yesteryear, so in the 21st century it’s axiomatic that Arabs have the right to inflict incalculable harm on Jews – and to do so in the most sadistically inventive ways – but the Jews’ attempts to deflect such blows are evil, outrageous and deserving of merciless punishment.

Failure to admit how selective Arab rules of warfare are precludes making sense of anything in our region and dooms to failure any so-called peace drives and mediation initiatives. The tragedy is that not only is the fundamental asymmetry between Jewish and Arab mind-sets not comprehended abroad, but there’s no inclination to even consider it.

Worse yet – the Arabs’ skewed standards are commonly accepted overseas. Hence the outcry whenever Israel does anything in aid of its self-preservation. Large-scale campaigns like Defensive Shield, the Lebanon War or Cast Lead are decried for “lack or proportionality.” However, there was censure even for pinpointed targeting such as the recent Nablus killing (in an exchange of fire during an attempted arrest) of the three ambushers who had earlier slain Meir Avshalom Chai in a drive-by shooting. Abbas described them as “ruthlessly executed martyrs.” Even the trials and convictions of murderers like Marwan Barghouti are portrayed as illegitimate. There plainly is just nothing Israel may do to secure itself. Even the most legalistically scrupulous remedies are repudiated.

The Goldstone Report is part and parcel of ongoing efforts to paralyze and disallow Israeli self-defense. The mud now slung at Israel is intended to intimidate use of force in future.

It’s nothing new. This isn’t the product of what’s castigated as occupation and/or the shortage of suicidal concessions on Israel’s part to appease Arab/Muslim appetites. Jewish self-defense, in its most rudimentary and literal sense, was anathema way before the Jewish state’s birth and subsequent cheeky survival.

In his milestone, still ever-relevant 1943 book The Forgotten Ally, Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre Van Paassen quotes his own interview with the British Mandate’s acting high commissioner Harry Luke during the countrywide Arab rioting of 1929 (most notorious for the Hebron massacre). Van Paassen told Luke: “You arrested first and foremost, in every case I investigated, the Jews who successfully defended themselves. You arrested 50 Jews in Haifa at the moment they defended themselves heroically against the attack of a mob of some 2,000 runners-amok… yesterday I saw a man brought into Jerusalem by the mounted police and recognized in him an older settler from the neighborhood of Lifta, the owner of a small canning factory who had been in this country for more than 50 years – a real pioneer. I visited this man in jail. His name is Isaac Brozen… He was arrested after he had barricaded himself in his factory… Arabs from Lifta raped and massacred his old wife and two daughters and set fire to his house across the roadway.”

Luke, like Goldstone eight decades later, argued that he was only looking out for Jews. Brozen, and the many others Van Paassen listed, were merely “placed in protective custody for their own good.” The interviewer countered: “but they were in chains and in solitary confinement… Mr. Brozen was loaded down under chains… chains on his hands and chains on his feet, old Turkish chains at that…”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. “Impartial” Brits once sought to foil Jewish defense with chains. Now “impartial” Goldstone tries to foil Jewish defense with different, no less restrictive shackles.

Two extraordinary recent events seem entirely unrelated, but they are in actual fact no less than peas in the same proverbial pod. US President Barack Obama of “yes we can” fame confessed that he can’t (impose instant peace on us). A concurrent shock was delivered by reports of the possible (premature?) demise of lovable Nessie – the maybe monster that has made Loch Ness one of the UK’s top tourist attractions. Though ostensibly far-fetched, the connection between the two news bombshells is inexorable.

Obama owned up that his diktat (which he calls “peace” and which he superciliously supposed he could inflict upon us overnight) has so far failed to reinvent the Mideast. Obama, of course, blames Israelis and Arabs equally (for the sake of hallowed postmodernist evenhandedness).

It matters diddly that the most unlikely government in Israel offered concessions that likelier governments had earlier refused to contemplate. It equally matters diddly that the Palestinians under Mahmoud Abbas’s fictional leadership regressed to more intractable positions than they had ever held in all previous negotiation rounds with previous Israeli governments.

Staggeringly, the White House resident has handed out identical demerits regardless of Israel’s compromise of vital interests and Palestinian intransigence on what was beforehand never insisted upon. No differentiation between compliance and obstructionism.

But while Obama spent the past year discovering that “this is just really hard” (we told him so), he evinces remarkable never-say-die spirit. Ever-valiant Obama vows to press ahead with the apparently ever-viable (contrary to all empirical evidence) two-state solution. Despite all clinical indications, Obama maintains that his phantom peace yet lives.

JUST LIKE Nessie. Some fantasies are just hard to give up. Scotland’s Nessie captivated probably as many imaginations as the Himalayan Yeti, America’s elusive Bigfoot and those small-statured, big-eyed, silver-green visitors from galaxies far, far away. Photographers aplenty claim to have immortalized blurry outlines of spaceships and hazy silhouettes of the timid earthling cryptids.

Nessie-mania dates back to 1933, which means that she’s getting on in years. Of late her appearances are becoming comparatively rare. This has led some believers to conjecture that their Nessie may have gone the way of all flesh. That’s better than doubting that she ever existed and that their favorite fable is slowly losing its appeal. The very speculation that Nessie had surfaced her last intolerably distressed her more dedicated enthusiasts.

But hope mustn’t be lost. Members of the Official Loch Ness Fan Club now happily counter the doom-and-gloom of naysayers with what they deem “a credible” sighting. Nessie, they crow, exists and not as an out-of-sight decomposing corpse. Not only is she real, she is also immortal – for now at least and for very good practical reasons. Lots of folks make their living off her. They have a vested interest in keeping her alive. They can’t afford a drop in tourist numbers. Nessie is too good a moneymaker to let go of.

As our own region proves time and again, myths can be lucrative, self-perpetuating and more compelling than unpleasant truth. The myth of an Israeli-Arab peace, like Nessie, is too good a moneymaker to let go of. Lots of folks make their living off it. They have a vested interest in keeping it alive, the consequences be damned.

NGOs worldwide rake in profits from their tireless “peace efforts.” What would they do without that little awful Jewish state? They churn out position papers, formulate proposals, produce damning documentaries to expose Israeli villainy, mold de rigueur opinions, raise funds for Hamas saints, dispatch activists and demonstrators against us, attract attention with assorted boycotts and initiate arrest warrants against our defenders and elected representatives. It’s a veritable industry and its business is booming.

So are its local subsidiaries. Miscellaneous left-wing outfits within Israel mushroom and thrive on handouts from foreign self-professed do-gooders. The inflow of cash buys friends, influences people and facilitates the takeover of airtime and tabloid pages. By dominating the media they dominate public discourse. They change mind-sets.

Whereas once Israelis understood that Palestinian nationhood is an artificial tactical concoction, they now embrace it. Whereas once Israelis were intent on keeping essential swaths of land we were forced to return to in 1967, we now try to work out swaps that will leave our genocidal enemies with no less than 100 percent of what may – maybe – satisfy them.

The problem is that the international peace conglomerate concentrates its attentions on Israelis, who had already changed tack. No energy is expended to change Arab minds, perhaps because that’s a non-starter.

This in itself is key to understanding why Obama “misjudged” the situation and, in his own words, “raised expectations too high.”

The premise that guides him and the peace industry, in which he’s a high roller, always entailed browbeating Israel and sweet-talking the Arabs. Hence the brutal demands that Israel cease all settlement construction (as if peace here blossomed all over before said construction) and that it dismantle roadblocks (though they help block terrorist attacks and bolster security, presumably prerequisites for any deal). Hence also Obama’s fawning Cairo speech, geared to win over Muslim/Arab cooperation with saccharine-saturated honey.

That’s exactly the recipe for how not to succeed in making peace. Indeed the very impressive expansion of the world peace cartel’s big business predetermined its failure – because it was so hard on anyway-soft Israel and so soft on the immutably hard Arabs. It thereby brashly and foolishly violated the ancient bargaining traditions of the Levantine bazaar.

Leaning hard on Israel is the last thing that would dent the Arab hard line. Why should the Arabs cede a single nuance of a point, when they see Israel retreat from one “impassable” red line to the next one, scribbled posthaste right behind? The more peace pressure is applied on Israel, the more unattainable peace is bound to become.

The more Israelis, overwhelmed by peace offensives from home and abroad, make goodwill gestures and try to close the gap on existential “core issues,” the greater the gap is sure to grow. An Arab vendor doesn’t lower the price when he realizes you’re willing to fork out more. It’s elementary, Obama.

The more conciliatory Israel is, the more hectoring the global anti-Israel peace chorus. The more understanding Obama displays for Abbas, the less Arab incentive there is to reach accord. Right now Israelis want a Palestinian state more than the Arabs do. All Arabs are after is justifying their inflexibility and utterly delegitimizing our existence, state and self-preservation.

So even if the twin fabrications of Mideast peace and a Palestinian state temporarily seemed as irresistibly fetching as a faint reflection of a fuzzy Nessie, too many devotees cannot admit that their two-state chimera may be dead. Like diehard members of the Loch Ness Fan Club, so diehard peaceniks claim to still spot signs of life. Long live Nessie. Long live peace.

Arab-Muslim attitudes to the Holocaust are manifold, cunningly complex and often ostensibly contradictory. But these apparent incongruities are predominantly tactical. The endgame is how to best combat the remnants of Europe’s destroyed Jewry and their descendants in Israel. The common denominator for the diverse ploys is an underlying hypocrisy that allows Holocaust-justification, Holocaust-denial and cynical Holocaust-exploitation to thrive simultaneously in Arab discourse.

MK Ahmed Tibi (Ra’am-Ta’al), whose parliamentary salary is paid by you and me, not infrequently invokes the old canard that the Holocaust’s true victims were Palestinian Arabs, whom a guilt-ridden West saddled with the unwanted Jewish state. In other words, hapless Arabs paid Europe’s penalty despite their self-proclaimed innocence. Tibi, incidentally, who loses no opportunity to undermine anything of potential advantage to the Jewish state (even acceptance to the OECD), was just voted the most popular politician in Israel’s Arab sector. This was the uniform finding of the three leading Israeli-Arab papers: Panorama, Kul al-Arab and a-Sinara.

The second most popular Israeli-Arab politician, according to all three polls, is Hadash MK Muhammad Barakei, who created a stir with his decision to join the Knesset delegation to the Auschwitz liberation memorial ceremony.

Tibi and Barakei often play bad cop and good cop, respectively. Both, as a preliminary measure to dismantling Israel, wish to replace the Jewish state with “a state-for-all-its-citizens.” Both reject its national anthem, flag, emblem and Declaration of Independence.

Tibi is generally rowdier. As Yasser Arafat’s sidekick, he once headed a delegation of hundreds of Israeli-Arabs to Ramallah, where they shrilly chanted “a million shahids [martyrs] will march on Jerusalem,” and “we will open al-Aksa’s gates with the shahids’ blood.”

Barakei prefers the politically correct context. His most recent antic, on the eve of the Auschwitz journey, was to walk out of a Yad Vashem symposium because he objected to a lecturer who noted that today Arab and Muslim societies – along with leftist movements and hard-line communists in the erstwhile Soviet bloc – are tainted with Judeophobia. Out to impress us with his care and compassion, Barakei pulled his stunt in the name of “opposition to Holocaust trivialization.” The solicitous good cop seeks to silence the truth for unadulterated memory’s sake.

His fellow Arabs spent decades mightily striving to obfuscate the truth and curry favor with whoever may find harangues about genocide unsavory. They present themselves not as heirs of Nazism’s virulent collaborators but as resistance fighters. Concomitantly they manage to tarnish Jews as Nazis. It’s a massive undertaking, satanic and successful. As Goebbels’s devout disciples, they implement his big-lie theory and find the world all-too-receptive, if not altogether keen to imbibe the perfidy.

BARAKEI IS hardly original. Back in 1983 Yasser Arafat proposed to lay a wreath at the Warsaw Ghetto monument. We may quite safely assume that Arafat never intended to pay homage to the ghetto’s desperate and very Zionist heroes, who fought a hopeless fight because they had no safe haven, state or army of their own. Arafat was out to score PR points, while mocking the Jewish tragedy and national resurgence. He strove to dissociate the Jew from Zion and portray himself as the spiritual successor of the ghetto heroes, doing battle with latter-day Nazis. The survivors and their descendants, obviously, were cast in the role of evil incarnate.

It was the most diabolical contrivance since the UN equated Zionism with racism.

The same twisted logic that could condemn the national liberation of the most downtrodden people on earth could cynically confer the title of “freedom fighters” on those who aim to destroy the national home of those who endured the Holocaust and of their children.

Barakei merely follows in his mentor’s footsteps. By appearing to identify with Auschwitz’s victims, he implies an analogy between them and Palestinians. He schemes to usurp the most enormous Jewish loss to advance its anti-Jewish sequel.

For this purpose Barakei must dodge the question of why the Arab world sheltered so many Nazi war criminals, including the infamous Alois Brunner. He must avoid the fact that Arab hostility to embryonic Israel predated World War II. He is motivated to obscure the inextricable link between Arab aspirations then and now.

Fraudulent narratives facilitate the cover-up of the direct connection between undying Arab enmity to the Jewish national renaissance and Hitler’s final solution to the Jewish problem. Barakei cannot admit that the Arabs were among the first to latch on to Nazi ideology. Undisguised fascist parties proliferated prewar among them – from Syria’s Nationalist Socialists headed by Anton Sa’ada to Ahmed Hussein’s Young Egypt. They were anything but blameless bystanders, which is why their Holocaust record remains ever-relevant.

Local Arabs eagerly awaited Rommel’s conquest of this country. They hoarded arms, openly rehearsed maneuvers to assist the Afrika Korps, harbored German paratroopers, spied and greeted each other with “Heil Hitler” and Nazi salutes. Palestinian newborns were given names like Hitler, Eichmann or Rommel.

Their still-revered leader Haj Amin el-Husseini was a fervent Nazi. His 1936-39 terrorist bloodletting, then-unprecedented, was financed by Hitler. Husseini spent the war years in Berlin as the fuehrer’s personal guest, convened with him and the two reached a perfect meeting of the minds on the Jewish question.

Husseini – as “prime minister” of a pan-Arab government formed in the German capital – was lodged in a confiscated Zionist Hebrew school on Klopstockstrasse and awarded the equivalent of $10,000 a month (when the dollar was almighty) by the German Foreign Ministry. The sum was more than matched by the SS from its sonderfund (funds robbed from Jews). Himmler organized guided tours for Husseini in Auschwitz, and Husseini plotted a Mideastern extermination-camp near Nablus.

He was put in charge of Nazi propaganda to Arabs and Muslims and recruited Bosnians to torture, brutalize and concentrate Balkan Jews for death transports, much as Ukrainians did such dirty work elsewhere.

Himmler introduced Husseini to Eichmann and the two got along famously. This is backed by ample documentation from both the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials.

At the end of 1942, Eichmann ordered 10,000 Jewish children sent from Poland to Theresienstadt. The Red Cross offered to trade German civilians for them. Husseini got wind of the plan and protested vehemently to Himmler, warning that “little Jews grow to become big Jews.” The deal was scuttled.

Husseini personally foiled any deal on the Holocaust’s last-minute victims. His direct intervention was felt in every attempted negotiation on Hungary’s Jews in 1944. He sealed their fate. They perished at the very end of World War II in the very Auschwitz where Barakei sanctimoniously chose to playact and thereby mask his milieu’s still-unaltered propensities and purposes.

His tack is exceedingly more effective and sophisticated than his predecessors’ fiery oratory about finishing what Hitler began. Yet Arab objectives haven’t changed. The rhetoric has merely become more refined and conducive to winning friends and influencing people.

Those to be tempted or whacked into submission are clearly the brutish troublesome beasts which must be disciplined – one way or another.

Therefore, when US President Barack Obama’s special Mideast envoy fails to object to carrot-and-stick speak – and even bothers to specify one stick’s characteristics – he implies that he’s in charge, while we, threatened with a severe whack on the rump, are his asses.

So forget the nitty-gritty of George Mitchell’s January 7 gibber-jabber in the PBS interview with Charlie Rose about withdrawing loan guarantees if we Israelis don’t obey pronto. Plenty of ink has been spilled on whether this constituted a serious signal. The point has been honed that we don’t desperately depend on said guarantees, that Israel repays all its debts dutifully and that it can get along just fine, thank you, without Washington’s grudging favor.

That’s almost the lesser issue.

What ought to get our goat is Mitchell’s attitude – and by extension that of the White House resident who appointed him. It wasn’t the reference to a possible anti-Israel stick which made Rose’s interview with Mitchell outrageous. It was the hubris and presumptuousness it exuded. Both interviewer and interviewee radiated supercilious smugness and ostensible omniscience. Both the professed honest broker and the opinionated talking head haughtily, almost frivolously, reduced us to the lowly status of obdurate pack animals.

To be sure, it was Rose, patronizingly sounding the voice of impatient reason – intermittently even chiding Mitchell for not getting the pesky chore of contracting a Mideast peace out of the way quickly and imperiously enough – who first mentioned carrots and sticks. But Mitchell could have refused to resort to the offensive terminology. The fact that he didn’t – and that he went so far as to hypothesize about the likely stick with which he might smack Israel, but conspicuously noting nothing with which the Palestinians might be thumped – speaks volumes in itself.

SO DID the air of lighthearted camaraderie and lightweight banter throughout the one-on-one. At some points it became surreal. Clued-in viewers had to wonder whether the mutually ego-massaging chums actually believed what escaped their lips or whether they merely pretended to.

Take Mitchell’s portrayal of the PA’s PM: “an impressive person, Salam Fayyad, who is trying to build, from the ground up, the institutions of governance that will be able to govern effectively on day-one of the Palestinian state.” Rose cheerfully chimed in: “They also call that bottom up.” On cue, an agreeable Mitchell contentedly poured on more syrup: “Bottom up, top down.” Yep, we get it, the Ramallah bunch is on the side of the angels.

Mitchell then proceeded to lay it on even thicker: “Now, obviously, we have great respect for President [Mahmoud] Abbas. We think he and Prime Minister Fayyad represent strong and effective leadership for the Palestinian people and are the ones that we think are going to produce a Palestinian state.”

Who is Mitchell kidding? If he doesn’t understand that Abbas is a virtual leader and that both he and his clique are neither respected nor trusted by anyone in the Middle East, then we are dealing with willful delusion.

Mitchell gets lots more cloyingly sweet: The Palestinian “security forces are outstanding by any measure… Palestinians have taken very significant steps. Until the last couple of years, the principle problem from their side was the absence of security… that was the Israelis’ angle: ‘We don’t have a partner; they’re not doing anything about the terrorists and the violence.’ Now you have a government that is doing something, very actively, aggressively, successfully, as even the Israelis acknowledge.”

That upbeat assessment doubtlessly impresses Avshalom Meir Chai’s bereaved widow and seven children. He was shot in the head on Route 57 near Shavei Shomron, after Israel obligingly removed a checkpoint close to Tulkarm as a “goodwill gesture” to appease Mitchell. Later IDF troops clashed with and killed three of the murderers during an attempt to detain them. Abbas’s “outstanding” forces never tried to apprehend these snipers. Moreover, Abbas soon shamelessly glorified them on PATV as “martyrs executed cold-bloodedly by Israeli forces in Nablus.” So much for promoting the spirit of peace and coexistence.

By ignoring this, Mitchell doesn’t just innocuously look on the bright side. He masks reality and abets falsehood. Mitchell boosts an inciter who exalts drive-by shooters. They hailed from Abbas’s Fatah faction. If Abbas can’t even control his own splinter, what can rationally be expected of him? To distort the truth that Judea and Samaria’s relative calm is the IDF’s handiwork is to disseminate lies. To demand the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints which curtail attacks is to undermine security, not enhance it.

GET A load of the following exchange. It begins with Mitchell waxing ecstatic over Obama’s alacrity to rid mankind of our conflict once and for all: “This president began 48 hours after taking office. He appointed me to this position two days after he was sworn in as president. You know what he said to me? He said, I want you to go over there tonight. I said, Mr. President, I’ve got a wife and kids, I don’t have any clothes with me. I have to go home and tell them I’m going to leave. I had to go home for a day just to get ready to go. He was anxious from the first to get into it.”

Rose: Okay, but tell me, do you think things – since the moment he said that to you and the moment that you prepare next week to be back there – things are better or worse?

Mitchell: Oh, they’re much better.

Well, you could have fooled us. Mitchell’s assertion, though, fits snugly into the interview’s clipped judgmentalisms, worthy of a righteous 1930s Hollywood cops-and-robbers flick. Mitchell, for instance, noted that Israel annexed east Jerusalem and treats it as an integral part of the state. To this Rose retorted: “So you’re going to let them go ahead even though no one recognized the annexation.”

Our complex context, the genocide plotted against us for over a century, are all simplistically condensed and superficially redefined as an irksome kink that requires a quick-fix. At best equal blame is artificially apportioned to both sides. Our tribulations are boiled down to tiresome bellyaching that must with great urgency be overcome.

Israel’s very inability to risk the Jewish state’s continued existence for the sake of facile cliches paradoxically facilitates its demonization. When our struggle for survival ends up trivialized and kitschified, the remedy is clear: Get the darned donkey under control with one stick or another.

It was by way of a consolation prize that he decided to support an appeal to the Supreme Court by combat soldiers and bereaved families against Israeli-Arab director Muhammad Bakri for his slanderous 2002 film Jenin, Jenin. Mazuz’s announced intention to attend the hearing was meant to sweeten the pill of his refusal to indict Bakri for libel, as the Central Region District Court suggested he should in 2008.

For those who don’t recall, here’s a brief recap: Directly after the 2002 Pessah Seder carnage at Netanya’s Park Hotel, the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield, which spawned whopping falsehoods about war crimes by soldiers in Jenin. Bakri’s pseudo-documentary was instrumental in propagating these falsehoods. After our ever-solicitous Supreme Court unanimously permitted local cinematheque screenings of Bakri’s creation in 2003, soldiers and families of fallen fighters sued him for libel. The district court accepted thatJenin, Jenin was defamatory, but argued that the state, not individuals, should take legal action. Mazuz refuses to prosecute on behalf of the state, though he has magnanimously offered to side with the plaintiffs in their appeal against the lower court ruling.

The upshot is that the aggrieved soldiers, who put their lives on the line for us all – along with the kin of those soldiers who indeed gave their lives in Jenin – are turned into veritable footballs. The district judge and Mazuz agree that Jenin, Jenin is nothing but a smear job. Yet while the former insists this isn’t a matter of private grievances, the latter maintains it can only be litigated as a private complaint.

AND SO the football is kicked back to the very same Supreme Court which had already sanctioned the travesty, despite also noting that it’s a pack of lies. In all likelihood, then, Bakri has nothing to fear from our champions of justice. As H.L. Mencken remarked long ago: “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels.”

To fathom the preposterousness of the situation, imagine a locally produced, full-length documentary which equates Jews with filthy rats scurrying from sewers to spread disease, infest their surroundings and overrun the world. One might plausibly expect that the Israeli public, save for exceptionally avant-garde post-Zionists, would be outraged. It’s safe to assume that the Israel Film Board would object to its screening. It’s a sure bet that the producer would seek succor from the Jewish state’s Supreme Court.

Sadly, it’s also a dead certainty that the highest echelons of Israeli jurisprudence would obligingly help in the hallowed name of freedom of expression – as they did with Bakri and his cinematic calumny in 2003.

NO, BAKRI didn’t produce the above-alluded-to Eternal Jew. That scurrilous celluloid contamination was the personal pet project of Josef Goebbels in 1940 Germany. But if Goebbels’s offering were of present-day vintage, our judicial system would doubtless not have stood in his way. It would have stressed that it’s up to us viewers to make our choices.

In the best of all worlds, it’d be so. But given the imperfections of our existence, Goebbels accurately deduced that “the essence of propaganda consists of winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape it.”

Bakri is a devoted disciple of the Third Reich’s brainwashing master. In his purported documentation of the massacre-that-never-was, Bakri employs his Nazi mentor’s techniques, like juxtaposing disconnected clips. He weaves in shots of IDF tanks on the move. In the following frames lots of civilians lie motionless on the same road. They look dead, viciously run over. It’s as stage-managed a hoax as Goebbels’s vermin on the loose. No less revolting. No less effective. Bakri transported Nazism’s proverbial rats to Jenin.

Clueless audiences aren’t likely to ponder whether the absence of physical evidence calls into question Bakri’s assertions that a hospital was deliberately shelled or children mercilessly executed. In fact, these are cynical figments of Bakri’s libelous imagination, in the worst Goebbels tradition.

ALL THAT was irrelevant for our esteemed Supreme Court justices more than six years ago, and is unlikely to move today’s Supreme Court panel. A host of legalistic mumbo-jumbo will explain why maligning must be countenanced, and why it’s up to filmgoers to ferret out the truth, even if truth isn’t coolest in their relativist milieu.

While the justices first quibbled about Jenin Jenin, another widely acclaimed IDF-bashing “documentary,” Ford Transit, directed by Nazareth-born Hany Abu-Assad, earned the Jerusalem Film Festival’s “Freedom Spirit” award and accolades from the American Sundance, Canadian Hotdocs and Dutch IDFA festivals. No doubt its demonizing portrayal of Israeli villainy at military roadblocks is probably what made it so de rigueur.

Neither prizes nor praise were withdrawn when it emerged that the ostensibly genuine driver, whose sordid story of mistreatment at Jewish hands constitutes the central theme, was an actor hired to play a scripted role. The scene in which he’s brutally beaten by a soldier was performed per the director’s meticulous instructions.

This was nevertheless marketed as a documentary and, as in Bakri’s case, viewers weren’t likely to investigate – no more than Goebbels’s moviegoers were prone to probe the rodent-Jew analogy. That’s what makes malicious hate productions so dangerous and so ideal a tool both for yesteryear’s Nazis and their fanatical Mideastern torchbearers. That’s what makes the complicity of those who condone such fraud all the more alarming.

DIRECTOR YIGAL Burstein suggested years back that the cogent issue isn’t veracity but “only whether the film works and sways the audience.” Goebbels would wholeheartedly concur. So would Bakri. The dreadful shame of it is that our Supreme Court – evidently unable to pass up any opportunity for potshots at self-preservation, common sense and the tattered remains of the public’s trust in its judgment – upholds the right to disseminate malevolent vilification, amplify enmity, justify terrorism and invite bloodshed.

Perhaps Mencken was reasonable to remark that “a judge is a law student who marks his own exam papers.” Such “students” deserve a private showing of The Eternal Jew, which concludes with the Fuehrer’s spine-chilling prediction to the Reichstag that “if the Jews succeed once more in starting a world war, it will be the end of world Jewry.”

That was the inflammatory purpose of the odious Goebbels-sponsored film – to prepare the ground for mass murder by convincing international opinion and potential perpetrators that Jews bring the most radical of punishments upon themselves.

That was Goebbels’s point, and Abu-Asad’s, and Bakri’s

Nearly a decade ago the IDF banned residents of settlements like Dolev and Talmon from using the highway that bypasses Beitunya – a village near Ramallah with quite a murderous record. The second intifada raged then and the defense establishment reckoned that, for their own safety, it would be better for Jews not to make their way to Jerusalem via a route adjacent to hostile hamlets. The joker in the pack is that the road in question is a detour ordained directly after the advent of Osloite bliss to deliberately keep Jews from chafing against their new “peace partners.”

The long and the short of it is that the road constructed to protect Jews from terrorist predations was closed to Jews – to protect them from terrorist predations. Some 6,000 residents of the Binyamin region’s westerly section were therefore forced to get to Jerusalem by travelling in the opposite direction. What should have been a half-hour car ride was prolonged to at least an hour-and-a-half. Instead of going eastward, they were forced to travel west and then south via a convoluted course to Modi’in, from whence they enter Route 443 and, at long last, turn east toward the capital. A 10-kilometer drive was effectively quadrupled.

NONE OF the promises to construct a shortcut to 443 were kept. The partially begun project was transformed into yet another no-Jews-allowed road to alleviate pressure on local Arabs, the very ones who menace Dolev Jews. At long last, with no relief in sight, the latter petitioned the Jewish state’s High Court to allow them to use the same road as their Arab neighbors. The state’s position was that this would constitute “grave danger” and that, despite the undeniable inconvenience, Jews must circumvent the thoroughfare barred to them.

This time the court cheerfully chimed in with the IDF tune and judged that while Jewish drivers are indeed put out, the damage to them is “proportional.” Nobody quite explained by which criteria said proportions were determined, but the verdict claimed that for the sake of the Jewish plaintiffs’ self-preservation they must head for 443 to reach Jerusalem on a traffic artery unmenaced by Arab snipers, fire-bombers, stone-throwers and ambushers.

It seemed sensible. The court came off as solicitous and compassionately intent on saving Jewish lives. But not for very long. The court subsequently accepted the petition of Arab residents from villages flanking Route 443. They demanded that restrictions on their access to the route be lifted because they were inconvenienced. The fact that the restrictions were imposed because of lethal terror attacks on 443 motorists from these very villagers was downplayed. IDF warnings about the “grave dangers” which opening the road would provoke were disregarded. Two of three justices ruled that the quality of the villagers’ lives was “disproportionately” disrupted and had to be rectified, the danger notwithstanding. Again, definitions of what constitutes “disproportion” were absent.

WHAT IS, however, indisputable is that Dolev residents are incomparably more inconvenienced. Still, obviously one group’s lesser inconvenience carries more political weight than another’s greater inconvenience. Yet this is more than an unfortunate case of bias and double standards.

The court’s very veracity, sincerity and integrity are called into question. Its ostensible concern for the settlers’ well-being has been exposed as bogus. Thereby are erased even the last ragtag remnants of faith in the High Court’s judicial impartiality, which perhaps somehow precariously survived in the hearts of the more trusting sorts among us.

How come? Because despite ruling that it’s unsafe for Dolev residents to use the same road as their Arab neighbors, the highest court in our land now forces these very same Dolev residents to share another road – 443 – with equally bloody-minded Arabs. Get it? Mixed traffic near Beitunya is a legal no-no, but mixed traffic on 443 is a legal imperative. The very Jewish petitioners, whom the court prevents from travelling the short way to Jerusalem lest they encounter Arab terrorists, are compelled to encounter Arab terrorists on the preposterous – but “proportionate” – tortuous detour the justices oblige them to take.

Were our proverbial Lady Justice indeed truly blindfolded and genuinely uninfluenced by assorted leftist postmodern agendas – to which, alas, most of our justices are both personally and politically predisposed – then the above travesty would be highly improbable. In a more equitable legal climate any such parody of justice would be inherently indefensible.

But our Lady Justice dons a sheer blindfold for show only. The justice it dispenses isn’t evenhanded. Any assessment cannot but confirm that in the Dolev case the High Court preferred the convenience of Arabs. Likewise in the 443 case the court preferred the convenience of Arabs.

In the Dolev case Jewish security was the pretext for inconveniencing Jews. In the 443 that cover was blown and the sham exposed, because here Jewish safety concerns were overruled – both regarding all Jewish drivers and passengers but, most specifically and gallingly, regarding the very Dolev residents whom the court pretended earlier to protect.

THIS MAY be ascribed to the court’s auto-anti-Semitism, to its ultra-liberalism, to an elitist clique grotesquely unrepresentative of the people and serially alienated from them, to a mind-set hijacked by the political fringe, to suicidally skewed political correctness, to justices who subordinate the existential interests of the population they were sworn to serve to those of unabashedly genocidal enemies.

Some truth may reside in all above hypotheses, but there’s no refuting the fact that from the outset of Aharon Barak’s term as court president, and continuing now under Dorit Beinisch, the court portrays Israeli beyond-the-Green-Line presence as “belligerent occupation.” That’s the premise upon which all its decisions are based.

It’s a far cry from the perception of Barak’s predecessor, Meir Shamgar, who noted that there never were borders between Israel and the hitherto nonexistent Palestinian state. Moreover, Israel possesses valid claims to areas beyond the 1949 armistice lines, making them in fact “administered” rather than “occupied” territories. The differentiation legitimizes Israeli presence in what after all is the cradle of Jewish nationhood.

The inclination to behave like aloof EU adjudicators and view the Jewish return to the Jewish heartland as “belligerent occupation” is our Supreme Court’s original sin. All its ensuing assaults on common sense spring from that.

It’s essentially a psychological state in which defeat is the foregone conclusion, anticipated as inevitable and accepted without significant resistance. Thus Kadima MK Nahman Shai pontificated in a radio interview that “Israel has no choice but to pay the price Hamas demanded for Gilad Schalit” and if more abductions are thereby engendered, “we’ll have to pay then too. That is our lot.”

To be sure, Israeli defeatists aren’t all cut from the same cloth. Some, especially on the ideological Left’s fringes, promote anything that weakens the state. Their espousal of capitulation to Hamas over Schalit’s kidnapping wasn’t inspired by concern for his welfare but by desire to further dent Israel’s armor. Hence they portray settlements as, heaven forefend, compromising the country’s Jewish majority. Yet they simultaneously clamor against new citizenship legislation geared to prevent the wholesale importation of hostile Arabs under the guise of family reunions, as occurred in Oslo’s wake when some 150,000 Arabs were willy-nilly added to the population. That transpired without arousing any outcry from the Left, which, at opportune occasions, wrings its hands in despair over the purportedly perilous Jewish demographics.

Since the more hypocritical ideological defeatists hold inordinate sway in the media, they also perforce mold opinions, forge zeitgeist and orchestrate political crusades. They inspire widespread defeatism compounded by the citizenry’s intellectual indolence. Their demoralizing spin is that there’s no sense to struggle and sacrifice because the fight will anyhow be lost. The inescapable by-products are erosion of faith in the cause and the pervasive perception of all headliners as corrupt and unworthy. “They’re all the same” is the oft-heard catchphrase.

IRONICALLY, THIS cynicism failed to foil the most cunning abuse against our most fundamental existential interests. The public let Ariel Sharon – striving to extricate himself from whopping legal entanglements – cheat his voters with an abrupt volte-face, renege on the referendum he initiated, crush his opponents with political steamrollers and propagate patently false prophesies about the bounties of disengagement.

The Ehud Olmert-Tzipi Livni duo had ample opportunity to change course but seemed fettered to the folly and indeed plotted more of the same.

Binyamin Netanyahu, despite promising redirection, imposed the most draconian settlement freeze ever. It hardly improved Israel’s image but will create a hell of a stink if or when it’s thawed.

The dynamics of defeatism were best exposed by Ehud Barak’s ex-foreign minister, ultra-dove Shlomo Ben-Ami. In an extensive monologue entitled “The Day the Peace Died”(Ha’aretz, September 14, 2001), Ben-Ami spellbindingly dissected Barak’s 2000-2001 near-desperate peace-drive that began in Stockholm, continued at Camp David and expired ignominiously in Taba. Not to forget, 2000 was highlighted by the unilateral retreat/escape from South Lebanon and by within-Green-Line riots.

The decade’s tone was set: Barak’s egregious territorial generosity undercut all future Israeli bargaining positions. Subsequently Sharon’s unilateral disengagement emboldened terror to the point of imposing Hamas hegemony on Gaza. Instead of super-icon Yasser Arafat, our current interlocutors are Ramallah’s virtual-leader Mahmoud Abbas and his clique, trusted and respected by nobody in the Mideast apart from a select band of Israelis calling the shots even in Netanyahu’s coalition and serially addicted to making nice to genocidal foes.

THESE ARE the same defeatists who masterminded the haggling of 2000. When it was over, Ben-Ami retroactively understood that Israel “operated under misguided conceptions about the other side’s intentions… Oslo constituted a mega-camouflage behind which Arafat exerted political pressure and employed varying measures of terror to undermine the very notion of a two-state solution.”

While Israel kept retreating from one “red line” to another, eventually agreeing to cede almost anything the Palestinians insisted upon, including much of Jerusalem and its holiest of holies, Ben-Ami noted, “never at any point did the Palestinians so much as draft any counterproposals.”

That, he belatedly concluded, “was the crux of the matter. The Israeli side forever finds itself in a dilemma: Either we quit because this bunch is unwilling to suggest anything, or we manage one more concession, one more kvetch. At the end, however, even the most moderate person arrives at a point in which he admits that the other side has no endgame. Kvetch after kvetch but they’re never satisfied. It never ends.”

With painstaking detail Ben-Ami listed each and every kvetch, each and every vital position from which Barak and his team were reluctantly pushed by the intractable Palestinians. Even as Israeli negotiators sacrificed Jerusalem, the Palestinians “weren’t ready for as much as allowing a face-saving formulation for Israel.”

A senior American go-between opined to Ben-Ami that “all the Palestinians want is to humiliate you.” They even degradingly rejected a last shameful Israeli entreaty for “subterranean sovereignty underneath the Temple Mount, denying we have any right whatsoever there.” When Ben-Ami was willing to make do with Palestinian “undertakings not to dig on the Mount, because it’s holy to Jews, they adamantly refused to tolerate any mention of any sanctity anyplace for Jews.”

WHAT DISTRESSED Ben-Ami most “wasn’t just their refusal but how they refused – with total contempt. They were dismissive and arrogant toward us… They weren’t willing to make even an emotional or symbolic conciliatory gesture. In the deepest sense, they were loath to acknowledge that we have any claim here.”

Camp David eventually flopped, according to Ben-Ami, because “the Palestinians refused to give us any inkling about where their demands would terminate. Our impression was that they constantly sought to drag us into a black hole of another concession and another, without there being anything like a discernible finish line.”

Ben-Ami’s unavoidable conclusion was that “more than the Palestinians want their own state, they want to condemn ours… They always leave loose ends… to keep viable the option that at some future point someone would pull these ends and unravel the Jewish state.”

That said, like fellow leftists, Ben-Ami even then couldn’t bring himself to fully renounce his demonstrably untenable ideological creed. But though still professing devotion to his smitten idols, he nevertheless cautioned against “ignoring what was revealed to us: Palestinian and Islamic positions that defy our very right to exist. We mustn’t continue the kvetch culture which might culminate in our suicide… We must cease relinquishing Jewish and Israeli patriotism. We must understand that we aren’t always guilty. We must learn to say, ‘Till here and no farther.’ If the other side aims to destroy even this nucleus, we must steadfastly defend it.”

In other words, Ben-Ami cautioned against defeatism early in the decade, before the disengagement that monstrously magnified all of Barak’s blunders and then some. But nobody paid heed.

No wonder Rahat Lokum, that delectable Istanbuli confection marketed since the 19th century as Turkish Delight, conquered Europe without any resistance. If anything, there was willing cheerful surrender to the jelly-like starchy cubes, flavored with rose water and nuts and liberally dusted with icing sugar. There’s an unquestionable exotic whiff to these pale-pink mouthfuls, accentuated by repeated suggestions that they are an addictive pleasure (to which, for instance, the untrustworthy Edmund succumbs in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe).

The soft candy is almost emblematic of the land in which it originated. Of all the world’s Muslim powers, Turkey appears the most accessible. A negligible corner of it even protrudes into what’s arbitrarily defined as Europe. The founder of its post-World War I republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, seemed to transform the abolished Ottoman sultanate with political, cultural, social, economic and legal reforms. Despite the occasional resort to military coups to protect its threatened secular quasi-democracy, Turkey became a NATO stalwart and for decades held radical Islam at bay.

It’s enticing to relish this political confection, smacking with traces of alien seduction, even if excessive indulgence guarantees indigestion.

Bigger players on the international arena have very realpolitik motives to suck up to Turkey. For Israel the attraction is overpowering. An outcast in its neighborhood, Israel yearns for Muslim friends. It fell headlong for the vision of the region’s non-Arabs banding together in a comradeship of self-preservation. This made particular sense in the heyday of nationalist pan-Arabism. It was bound to erode as jihadist fervor supplanted nationalist zeal, and Arabs could theoretically welcome Iran and Turkey into their club rather than shun their coreligionists as rank outsiders.

We know the way Iran went. We lost what we trusted was a bosom ally in Teheran. But Turkey, obstinately maintained in our midst by both academics and intelligence pundits, is a whole other story because its eyes are set westward and it covets EU membership.

It’s sweet supposition, like Turkish delight and addictive too.

THEREFROM SPRANG the sugar-coated “strategic alliance” with Ankara, in the framework of which Israel supplied Turkey with sophisticated weaponry, among other security-oriented and less-publicized services. The wishful thinking was that even 2002′s electoral victory of a religious Muslim party won’t impel Turkey to follow in Iran’s footsteps. Turkey after all is a strategic ally.

That, at least, was what we sweetly whispered to ourselves. It was comforting, like Turkish Delight – until Turkey vetoed Israeli participation in a joint NATO drill within its borders.

That slap-in-the-face evidently stunned our powers-that-be, who professed “sudden shock” at the “unexpected” turn of events. Nevertheless chatty know-it-all experts continued pouring heaps of sugar on the surprisingly bitter lokum.

But Turkey lost no opportunity to hector that we’d have to go cold-turkey on Turkish Delight. It demonstratively hypes its new-found fellowship with Iran and Syria. Its head honchos routinely unleash virulent anti-Israel invective. Turkish state-run TV broadcast a libelous anti-Israeli drama, Ayrilik, which portrayed IDF soldiers callously shooting Arab children, among other bogus homicidal atrocities. Turkish Delight is now unpalatable.

But cold turkey wasn’t unavoidable. This shouldn’t have been a startling upset. Even given our self-delusion and insatiable hunger for syrupy companionship in a hostile environment, we make a predictably worsening situation a whole lot worse by abject fawning. Turkey’s Islamic leadership plays us for suckers while spurning our misplaced affections.

The most egregious errors were made by prime minister Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. It boggles the mind, but this duo single-handedly promoted Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the role of a regional super-statesman when initially choosing him, of all unlikely facilitators, to mediate between Israel and Syria.

Intermediaries are altogether a bad idea because inevitably their personal egos get entangled in their mission. Should Israel hesitate to risk its vital interests, despite any go-between’s ambition-driven whims, his prestige might be wounded. This is precisely the disaster we keep courting with Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and it’s the self-inflicted disaster we should have dodged like the dickens with that renowned lover-of-Zion, Erdogan.

Instead of exposing Bashar Assad’s duplicity, Olmert-Livni managed to legitimize him as a “peace partner” and they allowed Erdogan to portray Operation Cast Lead as a personal affront. Erdogan persistently claims he was on the very verge of a breakthrough to restart negotiations with Syria, only just then Israel went and ruined it all by breaching his trust and inconsiderately attacking Gaza. It became all about him and he took umbrage.

The fat was already irretrievably in the fire before Erdogan insolently scolded the dumbstruck Shimon Peres in Davos last January, before the effusively chummy Turkish and Syrian foreign ministers signed military and non-military cooperation treaties in Aleppo recently, before Erdogan hobnobbed with Ahmadinejad and lauded him as “doubtlessly our friend,” before Erdogan outrageously charged that Avigdor Lieberman schemes to nuke Gaza.

There was never sense in unnecessarily involving Turkey in the misguided mediation gambit. Olmert-Livni should have realized that Turkey is hardly a neutral bystander. They blundered spectacularly. Why, however, replicate their fundamental bungle, as Ben-Eliezer obsequiously does? Erdogan is hell-bent on regaining his peace-broker stature and he’d love to mollify Damascus, still embroiled in assorted disputes with Ankara. But need Israel boost Erdogan?

The preposterous upshot of Israeli lust for lokum is that Turkey, of all nations, tongue-lashes us for mass murdering innocents. Ironically, while we never did the evil deed, Turkey’s record is atrocious.

It’s high time we indeed go cold turkey on Turkish delight. Why not answer Erdogan in his own idiom? Why not counter his lies with incontrovertible historical truths? Why, for starters, not quit our unsavory habit of regularly helping Ankara overcome proposed US congressional resolutions on the Armenian genocide?

We could elaborate on Turkey’s first Armenian massacre of 1890 (100,000-200,000 dead); Turkey’s subsequent mega-massacres of 1915 in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished in a series of bloodbaths and forced marches of uprooted civilians in Syria’s direction; the World War I slaughter of tens of thousands of Assyrians in Turkey’s southeast; the ethnic cleansing, aerial bombardments and other operations that cost Kurds untold thousands of lives throughout the 20th century and beyond and still deny them the sovereignty they deserve (eminently more than Palestinians); and finally the 1975 invasion and continued occupation of northern Cyprus (which incredibly fails to bother the international community).

What are we afraid of? Losing our Turkish Delight fix? There are no more Turkish Delights on offer. Those which still tempt us exist only in the fevered imaginations of incurable junkies, like Ben-Eliezer.

Mr. Diggs, originally of Omaha, Nebraska, made his none-too-impressive living as a circus magician. For promotional purposes he painted the OZ logo boldly on the hot-air balloon he used for some of his none-too-impressive tricks.

His fortunes dramatically improved after said balloon once drifted to the Emerald City. There, this otherwise ordinary con artist found himself worshiped by the naïve denizens as the all-knowing Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Incredibly they hung on to the presumed supreme sorcerer’s every word, and he did his utmost to sustain the myth.

Just like former US President William Jefferson Clinton (born Blythe), originally of Hope, Arkansas. Whenever hot air ferries this political magician over to our backwater, the natives incredibly hang on to his every word, inane and hackneyed as it may be. This possibly is the last spot on Earth in which he is still worshipped as a great wizard and he laps it up. Seeming to do his darnedest to enlighten his benighted fans, he in fact does his utmost to sustain the myth.

DURING HIS latest speechifying extravaganza, Slick Willie (as fellow Arkansans called him) pontificated when memorializing Yitzhak Rabin: “Had he not lost his life on that terrible November night, within three years we would have had a comprehensive agreement for peace in the Middle East.”

No kidding.

It’s a stretch to believe the wizard was sincere. He must have at least dimly recalled that the Oslo pipedream had revealed itself a haunting nightmare. Packed passenger buses were blown up and what Rabin euphemistically dubbed “victims of peace” were slaughtered in our streets.

There are more than a few indications that Rabin himself was already growing increasingly edgy and unsure. The great historical irony is that he may have been assassinated on the verge of awakening from the hypnotic Osloite delusion. Rabin resolutely opined against a Palestinian state, the re-division of Jerusalem and ceding the Jordan valley. There can be no certainly that by 1998 he’d have marched dutifully down the path outlined for him by Shimon Peres and Clinton. It’s all moot. It’s conjecture.

It can be argued just as cogently that Rabin read the adverse polls and understood he’d lose the next election if he didn’t correct his course. Clinton’s assertion is as trustworthy as the claims Diggs of Omaha made for the snake oil and patent elixirs he peddled at county fairs.

All post-Rabin Israeli premiers toed the Oslo line and offered concessions, some of the sort Rabin bluntly opposed. Peres exploited his few months as caretaker to cede Judea and Samaria cities. Israelis paid in blood for Peres’s recklessness, which had to be undone – following the Park Hotel carnage – via 2002′s Operation Defensive Shield and the security fence.

Although given the voters’ mandate to veer away from Oslo, Netanyahu didn’t during his 1996-99 tenure. His successor, Laborite Ehud Barak, was Clinton’s darling. Clinton actively helped him defeat Netanyahu. Clinton did for Barak what few American presidents ever dared openly do even for their most promising foreign protégés.

The none-too-impressive then-White House resident pulled out all stops in his unabashed intervention in Israel’s domestic politics, boosting Barak in a fashion unseen since the CIA’s blatant interference in Italy’s post-WWII election. Brashly Clinton didn’t even bother to cover up his tracks but dispatched his own spin doctors, private pollsters and campaign strategists to get Barak elected.

After Barak’s 1999 win, the Wizard of Hope could hardly contain his glee. On the eve of Barak’s first visit as PM, Clinton quipped that he’s “as excited as a kid awaiting a new toy.” It was pretty demeaning to look upon the leader of an allied sovereign state as a plaything, but Clinton greeted with pomp and circumstance a guest whose election constituted his personal triumph. The American president made Barak’s political battle his own. Hence it’s more than a tad disingenuous to now suggest that Clinton could count on no Israeli leader after Rabin.

Yet wonder of wonders – even Clinton’s chummy favorite couldn’t manage to salvage peace from the Oslo disaster.

Not that Barak hadn’t tried. Not that Clinton didn’t prod him at Camp David and then desperately at Taba. Not that Barak didn’t offer for sale almost everything – even Judaism’s Holiest of Holies. But Arafat violently spurned Barak’s egregious generosity and kindled the 2000 intifada.

IN A recent Jericho conference PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat divulged that at Camp David Clinton entreated Arafat, “as a believer,” to acknowledge a Jewish bond to Jerusalem and admit the great Jewish temple once stood where al-Aksa mosque was subsequently constructed. Arafat remained adamant: “I will never recognize that any temple existed. If we don’t liberate Jerusalem from Jewish presence now, there will be those who will do so in five years, or ten, even a hundred, if that’s what it takes.”

It’s this ongoing and unabating Arab intransigence which foiled and keeps foiling all attempts to broker peace. Moreover, this intransigence is evident regarding all contentious issues, not merely Jerusalem. While Israel has made risky concession after risky concession, the Palestinians simply haven’t budged from their starting standpoint.

Yet meddling sorcerers like Clinton manage to make it appear that Israelis are culpable. Clinton serially imparts the false impression that Israeli leaders – both before and after Rabin – just didn’t seek peace enough. He underscores this by preaching that Israelis must make peace because “you cannot get a divorce and move to another planet.” He scares us that “Palestinians have more babies” and, therefore, “if you want to be a democracy and a Jewish state you have to cut a deal.”

Besides this being our business and none of his, the abiding implication of the omniscient kibitzer’s admonitions is that the problem begins and ends with Israeli attitudes. “You need to get this done and you do have partners,” judges the infallible wonderful wizard.

This is fake, as fake as O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D’s powers.

Baum’s wizard is of course eventually exposed, while Clinton is adulated by our homegrown munchkins as if he has every right to talk down, reprove and lecture to us. Furthermore, unlike Baum’s bumbling fraud, Clinton is no ne’er-do-well. He globetrots, earning upwards of $200,000 per appearance. Everywhere he profitably declaims precisely those timeworn stereotypic cliches his moneyed hosts expect to hear. Same here.

I had to confess my abysmal failure to be wowed. I gave Friedman’s supposedly seminal column less than passing attention and couldn’t see what the hoopla was about. Friedman is a veteran Jewish Israel-basher, whose career was constructed on his “personal crisis” of disillusionment with the Jewish state. Trashing Israel, after all, is his proven stock-in-trade. So what if Friedman figures there’s “no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency” to our peace process, “not even a sense of importance anymore”? Big deal. Whoopty-do!

“The Americans are fed up with Bibi. They’ll hang him out to dry and ditch the peace process,” the media-hotshot retorted with noticeable exasperation.

“What peace process?” I snapped back. “It’s a sham. There never was any process to achieve real coexistence, only a pretext to weaken Israel. Some ‘useful-fool’ Israelis play along for political expedience and others are intimidated to adopt the agenda,” I argued. “Please let Washington quit trying to make us more vulnerable. By all means let them leave us alone.”

That said, I wasn’t optimistic: “It’s too good to be true. What have we got to go on? Friedman? Since when does he call the shots?”

My influential colleague was flabbergasted: “Friedman reflects Obama’s mood. This is a stern warning for us. At the very least Friedman will sway Obama and then we’ll see where that gets us.”

I ACHED to ask which side my famous interlocutor rooted for and whether he gave voice to left-wing wishful thinking, but I controlled myself.

If I hadn’t, I’d have pointed out that rather than calm things, international intermediaries and less-than-honest brokers fan the flames. The greater the overseas intervention, the deeper the impasse. Israelis and Palestinians had met regularly, on a weekly basis, to chew the fat pre-Obama. Miraculously the settlements were no “obstacle to dialogue.”

After Obama reinvented the wheel, the settlements became a bête noire and all contacts were discontinued. Palestinians are nobody’s fools. If Obama promises to be a “friendly facilitator,” responsive to their aspirations, why should they compromise, especially when they expect Israel to be coerced into more and more concessions and demonized to boot? They need only wait patiently.

They anyhow never sought accommodation. Their aim is to undo Israel’s Six Day War victory and cram Israel back behind the untenable Green Line. Ironically, however, after 1949 the Arabs spent nearly two decades in relentless efforts to violently erase said Green Line, without mention of a Palestinian state. That triggered the 1967 war, which created new territorial facts – worse for the Arabs from their perspective. Thus arose their now-intense nostalgia for the Green Line they once abhorred with such bloody vengeance.

The Green Line, a.k.a. the 1949 armistice line, was created because the Arabs adamantly and aggressively sought to obliterate the previous line they rejected – the 1947 partition line that gave Jews a precarious, crazy-quilt of a ministate. The Arabs attacked tiny newborn, ill-armed Israel with the object of shoving its Jews beyond the shoreline, into the waters of the bottomless blue sea.

When, against the odds, Israel’s Jews managed to survive and push the
invaders past the 1947 line to the quasi-more-defensible 1949 Green Line, the Arabs developed an insatiable hankering for the just-lost 1947 line. It was suddenly regarded as embodying the epitome of international legality, just as the later-rejected 1949 line would gain unimaginable legitimacy.

The Arabs always evince uncanny fondness for the lines their belligerence just rubbed out. The trouble is that they succeed to brazenly market their fantastic fabrications to an international community all-too-eager to be duped.

But the Arabs aren’t after a mere time warp to blissful 1949. That was precisely what both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert offered them, only to be rudely rebuffed. Nevertheless, Palestinians incredibly manage to continue posing as the aggrieved underdogs seeking restoration of the status quo ante. They could’ve had it all, were they willing to only pro forma relinquish their goal of eventually eliminating the Jewish state. But the ultimate objective of their piecemeal strategy isn’t discussed, just the two-state recipe for the return of “usurped land.”

THIS ISN’T an Arab innovation. Historians label it irredentism. It originated with the 19th-century Italian national movement for the annexation of territories then under Austrian rule – Italia Irredenta (unredeemed Italy). The term is since applied by extension to unsavory nationalist agitation whereby one country claims stretches of another’s territory as property belonging to it. Hitler insisted that Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland was Germania Irredenta – his “last demand in Europe.”

The border region’s German inhabitants, he persuaded a world all-too-eager to be duped, deserve self-rule. Germans cannot live as a minority anywhere (just as Arabs can’t).

Hitler’s next move was to portray Sudeten Germans as oppressed. He staged a circus of provocation charging the “perfidious Czechs” with terrorizing Sudeten women and children and murdering innocent villagers. Sounds familiar? Just substitute Arabs for Germans, Israelis for Czechs and Palestinians for Sudetens.

Six months after appeasing democracies let Germany have the Sudetenland, Hitler took all of Czechoslovakia. His “last demand” wasn’t final after all. “I saw our enemies in Munich,” he later recalled his 1938 powwow with Neville Chamberlain, “they are little worms.”

Israel’s cardinal sin is refusing to surrender without a shot like Czechoslovakia. But retreating to the Green Line would be akin to ceding Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia, though, only yielded when overwhelmed by superior forces. Israel faces no military defeat. Some of its politicos merely lost the will to win.

In 1945, after 350,000 Czechoslovak casualties, the Czechs expelled millions of indigenous Germans from the liberated Sudetenland. The UN doesn’t deem it occupied territory. It doesn’t confer perpetual refugee status on the transferred Germans. Rightly, they’re regarded as having brought their comeuppance on themselves. They had it coming. Aggressors should pay for their crimes, and must expect no restitution, much less reward for their hostility. The world pretty much agreed on that in Germany’s case.

Hence, Germania Irredenta is today a lost cause, not a viable realistic option. Not so Arabia Irrendenta. Different strokes for different folks.

Israelis need to remember that many meddlers and/or professed do-gooders only reluctantly tolerate Israel, want it cut down to size and squeezed back into what dovish Abba Eban dubbed “the Auschwitz lines.”

Tom Friedman, let’s not forget, called Israel “Yad Vashem with an air force.”

Just hear all that pretentious poppycock spouted at us by world opinion (as ever, resonated shrilly by our own left wing). According to trendy conventional wisdom, the Palestinian Authority’s scarecrow – Mahmoud Abbas – can do no wrong. At the same time, the Israelis who keep him from keeling over can do no right. Simple isn’t it?

Abbas was universally lauded for purity of heart and purpose when he first ascended Yasser Arafat’s vacated throne in 2004. After his recently announced retirement, Abbas is piteously beseeched to please reconsider. As per pompous Western pundits, the scarecrow shakily ensconced in Ramallah is our last viable hope for peace. The scarecrow must be saved. Without him the sky is sure to come crashing down.

And who instilled all that dejection and gloom in our upstanding scarecrow? Who is responsible for his desperation, for the I-can-go-on-no-longer melancholy? Only one answer exists: intransigent settlement-building, concord-stifling, conquistador Israel.

BUT BEFORE we subscribe to the international community’s premise of Israeli culpability for all that goes awry (and plenty does), there are four critical questions to ponder: Does Abbas deserve his good-guy credentials? Why has he proven such an abysmal failure? Who truly undermined him? And is he worth saving?

1. Is Abbas really righteous? Holocaust-denier Abbas is indisputably a more urbane version of Arafat, with better PR-sense and a closer shave (not that Arafat in his day wasn’t adulated as the harbinger of optimism and harmony). True, Abbas sings Arafat’s song, but, oh, how much more genteel the rendition!

Abbas has no use for Arafat’s in-your-face hysterical chants. He’d never send us to drink from Gaza’s sea nor openly exhort millions to march on Jerusalem. His style is slyer than that. To paraphrase Roberta Flack’s 1973 hit, mild-mannered Abbas is “killing us softly with his words.”

His repertoire consists of the same reliable old Arafat standbys – back to the 1949 armistice lines, Jerusalem is Arab Palestine’s capital, no antiterrorist campaign, no end to incitement and no relinquishment of the right to inundate the Jewish state with hostile Arabs.

But Abbas does offer compromise. While he insists the Western Wall be placed under exclusive Muslim control, he magnanimously agrees to permit small numbers of Jews to pray at a limited section thereof under conditions stipulated in 1930 by the Mandate’s post-Hebron-massacre Shaw Commission (which forbade the blowing of the shofar). Abbas pledges to generously allow us to reassume our once-lowly status. Big of him.

2. Who impeded Abbas’s success? In point of fact Abbas didn’t really stand a reasonable chance to begin with. He was pretty much bound to flop. He cannot pull his own public toward an accommodation with Israel. It’s not a matter of conciliatory forces overcoming fanatics. The Arab street consistently, since 1920, seems controlled by an inexorable self-destruct mechanism compelling it to follow the most extreme available option. Perceived moderates are cravenly defensive and are neutralized to no small measure by their own machinations. They themselves fan the flames of zealotry. Rather than dispute radical narratives, they echo them as means to winning popularity.

It all boils down to a contest between run-of-the-mill hard-liners and even more unyielding hard-liners. No truly painful concessions are even remotely contemplated in Ramallah.

No body of opinion dares depart from entrenched revilement of the “Zionist entity.” All libel and demonize Israel. To the extent that variant views exist, they are only cosmetic and superficial. The debate is make-believe, not about substance but about which anti-Israel tactics are preferable.

Entirely missing from the Palestinian equation is a peace camp, one which need not embrace Israel – as some Israelis do the Palestinians – but a party which thoroughly reevaluates the regression, damage and suffering that Palestinian-instigated violence has over the generations inflicted upon Palestinian society itself. Such sobering reassessment is primarily the Palestinian interest – for their own sake and not for the love of us.

Sadly, however, it appears the taboo on sincere reconciliation with Israel as a Jewish state with a moral right to continue existing in this region is too powerful for any aspiring Palestinian politician to break. Not a word is heard across the Green Line about genuine unequivocal acceptance of Israel. At most there is reluctant readiness for a limited truce so long as Israel basically capitulates to every last Arab precondition.

Abbas is entrapped in his own mendacious rhetoric and in the very uncompromising consensus he actively helps construct. He was therefore even powerless to please US President Barack Obama by postponing the showdown on the Goldstone report.

3. What rendered Abbas so disconsolate? According to the prevalent liberal legend, his spirit was crushed because all settlement growth – the microscopic traces thereof that can at all still be vaguely detected – wasn’t forthwith frozen for good. Israel’s inability to fulfill his wish obediently and Obama’s inability to twist Israel’s arms instantly and excruciatingly was more than Abbas could withstand.

Really?

Perhaps Abbas’s travails have less to do with Israel and everything to do with Obama’s egregious misreading of a region that fails to conform to progressive Harvard texts? Obama essentially forced Abbas to call the January 24 election. American democracy loves elections, but in the undemocratic Muslim galaxy they spell nothing but trouble (Afghanistan being merely one palpable example). When George W. Bush pressured Abbas to hold the 2006 election, he set off a disastrous chain-reaction that propelled Hamas to power in Gaza.

No future PA electoral result would be legitimized by Hamas but is likely to trigger a power struggle that could lose Abbas the remainder of his latifundia. There is no way the scarecrow Israel artificially props up as its peace partner can survive another American-imposed election.

Abbas knows that his sole source of security in Ramallah is the IDF. He cannot endure without Israel, yet he cannot appear to be in its debt. He cannot shirk the Hamas threat and he cannot in reality stand up to it. He cannot do without America’s embrace but it also breaks his ribs. It’s all pretty disheartening, but settlements have nothing to do with Abbas’s bind. Settlements are nothing but his pretext.

4. Is Abbas indispensable? Just about as much as the scarecrow is in the vegetable patch. He doesn’t do much, but some gardeners swear by their handcrafted creation. The scarecrow, to be sure, contributes to the ambiance with his undeniable whimsical decorative value, which is more than can be said for Abbas. To declare the Ramallah scarecrow an interlocutor is to elevate the useless relic to the status of a daunting delusion. To offer life-risking concessions to the haggard effigy is nothing but stupid and dangerous.

This was true even before our state was born, before we could be painted as an ogre imperialist Goliath, when we were history’s most helpless underdogs. The world hardly empathized with us then either.

Exactly on this date 65 years ago – November 6, 1944 – two young Lehi fighters, 19-year-old Eliahu Hakim of Haifa and 22-year-old Tel Avivian Eliahu Beit-Zuri, assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, first Baron Moyne, in Cairo. He was the British minister resident in the Middle East. While the Holocaust was still ongoing, world opinion managed to expend more outrage on the two Eliahus, as they came to be known, than it did on their victim’s appalling record.

The Labor-led Zionist establishment in pre-state Israel lost no time or vehemence in denouncing the assassination and launching what came to be dubbed the saison (the “hunting season” in which Lehi and Irgun members were pursued and turned over to the British). On November 20, 1944 David Ben-Gurion addressed the Histadrut convention and ordered the expulsion of “all Revisionists from all workplaces – be they in an office, factory or grove… the same goes for students in higher or secondary education, or any other school.”

YET, INCREDIBLE as it sounds – given the strident anti-Israel incitement of Cairo’s current state-run media under Hosni Mubarak’s aegis – the Eliahus evoked widespread sympathy among Egyptians. Students demonstrated for them in the streets and rallied against sentencing them to death. Prominent Egyptian lawyers volunteered to represent them, adhered to the political defense decreed by the Eliahus and avidly espoused their nationalist Jewish sentiments.

Hakim set the tone: “We are the accusers at this trial. We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represented of murdering hundreds of thousands of our brethren and usurping our homeland… Where is the law that would hold them answerable for their crimes? Though absent from the books, it is engraved in our hearts. Hence we had no alternative but to take justice into our own hands.”

Like him, Beit-Zuri told the court: “Thousands of my people drowned in a sea of blood and tears. Nevertheless the British captain denied them haven. He stood on his deck and watched with equanimity how my people drown. And if, despite all, some managed to reach the boat and hang on to its sides, he – the British skipper – shoved them back down to make sure they sink into the abyss… For us, resident in our homeland, who witness all this, only one choice exists – surrender or fight. We choose to fight.”

Lord Moyne had blood on his hands. He was personally responsible for inducing the Turks to tug the unseaworthy makeshift immigrant ship Struma - a pitiful rusty sardine-can of an antiquated Danube River barge – from Istanbul harbor on February 24, 1942. He thereby condemned nearly 800 Jewish refugees on board (including 103 children and babies) to a certain death. The disabled Struma was left paralyzed, without a motor, provisions or a drop of fuel, to drift precariously on the Black Sea. The Soviet torpedo that later struck it inadvertently was nothing but a coup de grace.

But there was more. On May 15, 1944 Budapest Jew Joel Brand was dispatched to Turkey by Adolf Eichmann (probably at Heinrich Himmler’s behest) to propose exchanging a million Hungarian Jews for 10,000 trucks. It may well have been a cruel subterfuge, but the British treated the unfortunate Brand unconscionably. He was deceived, arrested and taken to Cairo where he was imprisoned for four-and-a-half months.

In his 1958 autobiography Advocate for the Dead, Brand described being interrogated by a British official, who he later learned was Lord Moyne himself. When told that the lives of as many as a million Jews might be at stake, Moyne retorted: “‘What shall I do with those million Jews?’ I couldn’t bear to listen to him any further,” Brand recounts. “I got up. If there’s no place for us on this Earth, then Jews are forced into the gas chambers.” At the 1961 Eichmann trial Brand repeated, under oath, his contention that the above dastardly remark was uttered by none other than Lord Moyne.

With the British pulling vassal Egypt’s strings and agitating for capital punishment, the Eliahus stood no chance. They were sentenced to die by hanging. Hakim mounted the gallows first on March 22, 1945, singing “Hatikva” to his last breath. Beit-Zuri did the same half an hour later. Haider-Pasha, director-general of Egyptian prisons, who witnessed the executions, commented: “Today I saw two young lions die.”

But despite the political purge, which the assassination facilitated, the Eliahus didn’t remain vilified villains. Mainstream consensus is ever-mutable. The imperiously imposed axioms of the powers-that-be were eventually set aside.

Already in 1962, none other than Ben-Gurion wrote Lehi veteran Geula Cohen: “I bow down my head in awe and esteem for the heroic deaths of the two Eliahus in Cairo.”

THEN CAME the post-Yom Kippur War negotiations with Egypt, when Israel officially requested the two Eliahus’ remains. On June 26, 1975 they were accorded a state funeral in Jerusalem. On hand were prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, foreign minister Yigal Allon and other Labor stalwarts, some of them, like Rabin (as distinct from Allon), keen saison collaborators.

More than three decades after the executions, the British government seethed with fury. The Foreign Office, via British ambassador Sir Bernhard Ledwidge, shrilly protested “that an act of terrorism should be honored this way.” The Rabin government rebuffed the petulant complaints. However, it stopped short of arguing that instead of demanding censure and collective contrition from Israelis for the assassination, London might express contrition for its policy of denying asylum to those who desperately tried to flee Hitler’s hell.

After all, 1975 wasn’t a good year. We weren’t popular then, as we aren’t now. Israel was indeed close to its current pariah status. It was shortly before the UN (ironically then headed by Nazi Kurt Waldheim) equated Zionism with racism (on November 10, 1975). Jerusalem didn’t relish incurring more wrath.

Like now. The UN, EU, Barack Obama’s US, all dislike us (to put it mildly) but, as the two Eliahus’ epilogue illustrates, ill winds blow over if we keep calm and don’t forget the fundamental justice of our cause. No need for us to lose our head because we fear inclement conditions.

“It’s unclear to me why we’re holding these Palestinians – the ones we call ‘terrorists’ – instead of releasing everybody from the outset, without any link to a deal for Schalit,” Yonath opined in an Army Radio interview. Her incisive scientific logic continued: “It’s in our power to change the present situation. When one is incarcerated for years, friends and family around him grow angry. That’s how we create terrorists…. If no terrorists sat in our prisons, nobody would abduct Israelis to effect their release. By holding terrorists, we give the other side an appetite to launch kidnapping operations. Once we no longer imprison terrorists, they’d have no reason to kidnap.”

If taken seriously, the implications of the above babble are staggering. It’s akin to suggesting that the surefire crime stopper is to empty all prisons, halt all law enforcement activities, desist from arresting, prosecuting, sentencing and punishing miscreants – no matter how heinous their felonies. A free-for-all will safeguard our freedoms.

FOR A state like ours – the only one worldwide overtly threatened with genocide – the implications are altogether scary. They plainly mandate we stop defending ourselves.

If, as Yonath contends, hopelessness is the mother of conflict, then it might well be asked why well-off British-born youths of Pakistani extraction chose to detonate themselves at a beachfront Tel Aviv club. Were they so hopeless in the Labor-led UK that they decided to take it out on us?

If, according to Yonath, violence is triggered by sending murderers to prison, how is it that Arab massacres began many decades before we gained sovereignty and attendant authority to apprehend anyone?

How did Jews nettle Palestinian idol Haj Amin al-Husseini to induce him to join Hitler in Nazi Berlin and became an active accomplice in the “final solution?”

Does Yonath believe the masterminds of the Park Hotel, Sbarro Pizzeria, Maxim Restaurant and many more suicide bombings deserve no reckoning? Would she let off scot-free executioners, like those who shot (at point-blank, one-by-one) expectant mother Tali Hatuel and her four tiny daughters (as well as the fetus she carried to nearly full-term)?

If even legal action is illegitimate, how do we safeguard ourselves? By surrendering?

The so-called political right and center fear vocalizing their indignation, lest they thereby amplify Yonath’s delegitimation of Israeli self-preservation. The embarrassment caused by so honored an Israeli echoing enemy rhetoric is too bitter a pill. Even our ever-voluble left-of-center crowd seems embarrassed. There’s no exultant crowing, no “we told you so.”

Yonath isn’t even on the fringes of our consensus. Unbeknownst to most Israelis, who hadn’t heard of her until the Nobel committee lifted her from anonymity, she is one of Uri Avnery’s loyal sidekicks, a true disciple, even a quasi-protégée.

Read what he himself wrote: “Our table celebrated with Ada Yonath. This ‘table’ just had its 50th anniversary. It started by accident in California, the café established at the time by Abie Nathan, who later became famous as the Peace Pilot. Afterward, we met for many years at the legendary artists’ café Cassit.” Then “the table wandered to several other places and became known as the ‘Cassit exiles’ table.” The “House of Lords,” one newspaper nicknamed it.

“The habitués of the table come from different walks of life. There is a former director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, several senior journalists, a linguist and Bible expert, a film producer, a professor of medicine, a psychiatrist, a town planner, an industrialist, a translator of literature, a radio program producer. And a scientist.” The latter is Yonath.

AVNERY CONTENDS that “the table is not political. But all its habitués tend, as it so happens, to lean toward the Left. For years, Ada Yonath has been our candidate for the Nobel Prize. I recount all this not only in order to boast about the fact that Ada ‘belongs to us.’”

In radio interviews, Avnery was downright fatherly and called Yonath “our Ada’le.” He couldn’t stop boasting that she indeed “belongs to us.” In this context it’s instructive to note that Avnery asserted in a recent op-ed that Schalit wasn’t kidnapped, that he’s a POW, that Israeli government propaganda claims otherwise to foil a swap, that it’s wrong to classify “Palestinian candidates for release” as “terrorists with blood on their hands, criminals beyond the law, lowly murderers.” Doesn’t Ada’le sound like her mentor?

Said mentor, it needs be stressed, had long ago crossed the lines – physically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. He identifies with the enemy and subscribes to its perspective. Nevertheless, Avnery parades as the preeminent freethinking Israeli and is the darling of Israel-bashers for doing their dirty work. He’s incidentally the single most popular Israeli in his native Germany.

As soon as Israel’s government isolated Yasser Arafat in 2002, Avnery rushed to Ramallah to be at his side. He vowed to protect the ra’is with his very body – not for the first time either. Back in July 1982, Avnery sneaked into Beirut mid-war to hobnob with imperiled Arafat. Post-Oslo the imported PLO chieftain expressed his gratitude during his triumphant first public appearance in Gaza by seating Avnery right next to him on the podium.

Avnery’s mischief doesn’t stop here. He uses Israel’s maligned image – the one he actively tarnishes – as proof of its depravity and villainy. It’s the slanderer’s classic pattern: First he thoroughly demonizes his target, then points to the demon of his creation as justifying his wrath.

Avnery causes far more harm than most Israelis, who had long written him off, imagine. He pulls strings behind the scenes. He’s the ventriloquist, now projecting his voice through the lips of his beloved Ada’le. As a Nobel laureate, she can massively magnify the message that we should dismiss Arab death threats as innocuous, like some of Germany’s Jews did when they initially pooh-poohed Hitler as an excessively grotesque loudmouth.

Luckily Helmut Ostermann’s parents did at some point become alarmed enough to flee to this country (despite vehement Arab opposition that refugee Jews like them be granted asylum here). That’s how little Helmut got to survive, evolve into Uri Avnery and counsel future Jewish generations not to take undiminished Arab threats at face value, to regard them as mere benign bluster, to trust that exhortations to spill our blood aren’t bloody-minded, that they should be pooh-poohed as grotesque loudmouth excesses.

Plainly, I didn’t understand what the word condemnation meant, nor had any notion about Orwellian doublespeak, international hypocrisy or diplomatic duplicity. I simply noticed that when things go well for Jews, they get condemned.

That made condemnation sound like a good thing. Each condemnation became akin to a trophy or a victory medal for letting our tormentors have it.

More years than I care to admit later – after I had learned the definition of long strange words and became aware of the real dangers inherent in a tarnished national image – I still can’t entirely fault my juvenile interpretation of grown-up events.

EVEN THE Goldstone report fits so well into my kindergarten-age perceptions. When rockets were rained on Sderot and environs for nearly a decade, Israelis were obviously faring badly. Yet so long as Israelis were victimized by Arabs, the rest of the world said nothing. Our weakness and our pain seemed to excite no reaction, indeed draw no notice, as if they occurred in a sealed vacuum.

However, as soon as the victims defended themselves, albeit belatedly, a tempest was stirred. The entire world’s attention was suddenly riveted on little old us and the condemnations – familiar, strident and ever-hectoring – came, fast and furious as they had during all the decades of Israel’s existence and even prior to Jewish independence. Only a show of Israeli deterrence brought Goldstone here. His very interest in us must indicate that we had done something worthy in our self-interest.

No surprise here, only the expected turn of events, as if an unstoppable natural phenomenon. However, just as unsurprising and a whole lot sadder is the fact that so many among us – including in the ostensible political mainstream, like Kadima MK Nachman Shai – feel obliged to play along with Goldstone and the misnamed UN Human Rights Council which dispatched him at the behest of such intrinsically progressive states as Syria, Somalia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

They feel a need to explain ourselves to them and atone for our self-defense. If Goldstone demands a tribunal to try our soldiers for the offense of combating the deliberate targeting of our noncombatants, then they’ll subscribe to his premise and agitate for an inquiry. This notion – the latest de rigueur rallying cry – is underwritten vigorously by former minister Amnon Rubinstein, minister-wannabe Prof. Uriel Reichman and a slew of trendsetters (including Ha’aretz).

Perhaps their intentions are laudable. They’re out to prove, via an inquiry chaired by a “neutral” American jurist or such Israeli champions of every left-wing cause as former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, that we’re a just society which earnestly probes itself and that at most our transgressions are minor and unpremeditated. Thereby we shall cleanse our hands before the entire accusing critical world.

The fundamental flaw in their reasoning is that the accusing critical world isn’t fair and balanced in its accusations and criticism. It indulgently dismisses intentional Arab belligerence against Israeli civilians yet censures the counteraction, in which inadvertently civilians on the other side may get hurt. If anything, their injury is hardly avoidable because they function as human shields for some of the darkest forces operating in today’s world.

WILL SUCH hostile hardly objective observers be wowed by our famed judicial liberality? They weren’t in the past. In fact Goldstone patently wasn’t. He accused Israel’s postmodern ultra-morally relativist courts of discrimination against Arabs and their supporters.

This is a fight that make-nice maneuvers just can’t win. But they can lose us an awful lot. Any inquiry commission, constituted under whatever official aegis, will hold lengthy daily sessions delving into the minutest minutiae of Israeli military campaigns in the best traditions of our foot-dragging, pedantic, compulsively hair-splitting judiciary. Its procedure-laden hearings will be plodding and interminable and the general public won’t bother to decipher their intricate legalistic esotericisms.

What will, nevertheless, be imparted to news-consumers worldwide is that Israel is in the dock, that even it somehow admits wrongdoing, which it had been shamed and coerced into examining.

This won’t be a whole lot different from the vague impressions implanted into inattentive news-consumers who may have caught the tail end of an item on attempts to have Israel’s defense minister arrested for war crimes in Britain. Never mind that the charges were pressed by the lawyer who represented the terrorists who shot ambassador Shlomo Argov in 1982 and who now represents Sudan’s genocidal regime. What will be dimly remembered is that Israel’s higher-ups are tainted and were let off because of diplomatic immunity like South Africa’s erstwhile apartheid leaders. That was the aim of the complaint in the first place. The defamers coveted commotion rather than concrete victory.

An Israeli inquiry into Cast Lead will serve identical purposes. The very likely leaks from the testimony and the sarcastic hard-hitting interrogation of the most altruistic soldiers will accentuate impressions of Israeli sinfulness. These will provide occasional damning headlines.

If, when this PR disaster eventually concludes, the commission will wag a finger at some negligible aspect of something, that will become the international bottom line. In the (unlikely) event that the commission would exonerate Israel unequivocally, its findings will be ignored by foreign news purveyors and pooh-poohed as a whitewash.

Meanwhile, IDF morale will be dealt another blow. Combat troops risk their lives only to be later summoned to what has become a routine ritual – quibbling questioning from judgmental second-guessers and dour Monday-morning quarterbacks. In time this, more than all else we do to unhinge the defense forces on which our continued existence depends, will emasculate our military.

We’re already frighteningly close to the self-stymieing situation in which almost every officer needs a battery of lawyers. IDF upper echelons already expend too much energy on accounting for past actions rather than preparing for the confrontations-to-come. This isn’t just an irritating inconvenience; it can lead to a distorted focus and exact dreadful cost in tomorrow’s war.

This of course is precisely what our enemies and their emissaries (like Goldstone) crave. It’s certainly not what Shai, Rubinstein and Reichman want. This, though, is what can come of the short-sighted desire to abide by rules our antagonists decree.

The above well-meaning gentlemen need to ask themselves whether we can really lift our collective face through self-mutilation. Should we at all hanker after any image-improvement predicated on weakening our standing and intimidating our security-providers? Wouldn’t we do better to just earn more condemnations instead?

Perhaps my preschool logic did dictate the obvious: Condemnations are commendable because they invariably accompany our successes.

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When it comes to our next-door neighbors of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, however, Gide’s characterization may be judged as grossly over-generous.

The current Hashemite monarch, Abdullah II, speaks in such ostensibly high-minded tones that to the uninitiated his pontifications sound sincere, indeed heartfelt. Even when his pompous preaching lacks the remotest connection to the most elementary truth, he manages to affect the appearance of innocent virtue. His ever-present subtext is that if his altruistic advice isn’t heeded, all hell will break loose. Abdullah markets himself as our touchstone, not merely for what’s proper but also for what keeps us a hair’s-breadth away from calamity.

Nevertheless, only just-landed Martians can assume that seemingly saintly Abdullah lies with sincerity. Take the following quote from the Jordan Times (October 7):

“His Majesty King Abdullah instructed the government to work immediately and effectively to intensify political action in the international arena to highlight the seriousness and illegitimacy of Israeli violations against al Aksa Mosque and Jerusalem.… The King called on the international community to shoulder its responsibilities and take an immediate and firm position to stop all unilateral Israeli measures in Jerusalem and to put an end to Israeli violations of international laws and charters pertaining to holy sites.… The King noted that preserving Jerusalem and protecting it is a Hashemite and Jordanian priority and Jordan will never stop exerting all efforts to realize that objective.”

If Abdullah is even a fraction as righteous and well-meaning as he’d like us to believe, he knows there were no “Israeli violations against al Aksa Mosque.”

He knows the latest unrest in Jerusalem began with Arabs attacking visitors they mistook for Jewish worshipers at the holiest season of the Jewish year. He couldn’t be so naive and out of touch as to be unaware of rock arsenals, wheelbarrows-full inside mosque compounds, prepared for stoning Jewish congregants at the Western Wall from atop the Temple Mount directly above.
He couldn’t be so uninformed as to be ignorant of noxious incitement to violence within the mosques. There’s no way Abdullah doesn’t know he’s lying through his teeth when chiming in with the very fanatic flame-fanners who would cheerfully assassinate him.

Abdullah may have his cynical cowardly reasons to practice deceit, but in this case the hypocrisy is so in-your-face that he cannot even be assumed to be lying with sincerity, a-la Gide’s prototype.

Abdullah paid prodigious homage to his lineage’s role in “preserving and protecting the holy sites of Jerusalem.” That perforce implies at least a modicum of historical insight on his part.
It’s therefore only fair to infer his familiarity with the nature of the Hashemite guardianship of Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967 – the one he pro forma aspires to resurrect and emulate, in whose name he now intones and from whose legacy he claims to derive his moral authority.

TO BEGIN with, Jordan (then Transjordan, limited to the Jordan’s east bank) entered and occupied Jerusalem illegally. According to the UN Partition Plan, Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to comprise a “corpus separatum,” an international zone, this despite the fact that Jerusalem boasted an undeniable Jewish majority going back at least to the beginning of the 19th century (there were no censuses beforehand). But organized Christianity couldn’t abide the affront of Jewish dominion in the Holy City.

The Arabs, with the Hashemites liberally at the vanguard, couldn’t even abide the notion of “neutral governance” of Jerusalem, just as the very idea of Jewish sovereignty – even in an untenable hodge-podge miniature toehold – was abhorrent to them. Seven Arab armies invaded newborn Israel in unison to eradicate it. That was the context in which the Jordanian Legion occupied Jerusalem’s Old City, expelled its ancient Jewish community and lay siege to West Jerusalem with an eye to starving it into surrender.

None of this elicited audible squawks from the international community. Nor did what ensued under subsequent Hashemite custody. Holier-than-thou Hashemites defied the UN demand for a demilitarized Jerusalem and turned it into an armed camp, bristling with artillery, mines and sniper positions.

The armistice agreement, which ended the 1948-49 Arab aggression (Israel’s War of Independence), obliged Jordan to allow Jewish access to Jerusalem’s sacred sites. The Jordanians, who now shed crocodile tears about nonexistent restrictions on Muslims in Jerusalem, callously breached their solemn undertakings. The international community again maintained unanimous composure, without a murmur of protest about Hashemite duplicity.

During 19 years of brutal Hashemite occupation in Jerusalem, no Jewish worship was possible at the Western Wall or elsewhere, formal international commitments notwithstanding. Foreign visa applicants even had to prove they weren’t Jewish lest a forbidden Jewish foot reach Judaism’s holiest site.

But that was the least of Hashemite transgressions. Even by the worst medieval precedents, Jordan’s deliberate devastation of Jewish sites was unpardonable. Fifty-eight synagogues in Jerusalem’s historic Jewish Quarter – made judenrein by the Hashemites – were destroyed or defiled, some used as cowsheds, stables or public latrines. Many were razed to the ground.

The ancient incomparable Jewish pantheon that is the 3,000-year-old Mount of Olives cemetery was sadistically despoiled. Over 75% of its tombstones were ripped out and used to construct anything from pavements to army barracks and even communal urinals – the ultimate humiliation and desecration.

This wasn’t mere vandalism, nor even just an outpouring of unbridled hate. This was maximal ethnic cleansing, purposely calculated to purge Jerusalem of its Jewish past and pretend it was never anything but Arab.

Half-British Abdullah, incidentally, relishes portraying himself not only as champion of supposedly oppressed yet ever-tolerant Muslims, but also of Christians who, he asserts, likewise get a raw deal from evil Israelis. It would therefore be enlightening to recall that under those exemplary 19 years of Hashemite rule, Jerusalem’s Christians hardly prospered.

Their numbers plummeted from 25,000 in 1948 to some 10,000 in 1967. Christian institutions were forbidden to expand and prohibited from real estate purchases in greater Jerusalem. Christian schools were coerced to teach the Koran alongside the New Testament. There could be no Christian instruction without Islamic indoctrination.

That is Abdullah’s paradigm of liberality, fraternity and mutually respectful coexistence. Instead of taking Abdullah’s sanctimonious homilies at face value – or even as the sort of “sincere lies” Gide ascribed to commonplace hypocrites – all people of goodwill ought to retort with a loud: “look who’s talking!”

Maddeningly, however, the 19-year savage illegality perpetrated by Abdullah’s family is now perceived by a disingenuous world as the legality that must be restored. Arab conquest and barbarism must be rewarded and recognized as the status quo ante, according to the skewed scales of global justice.

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That’s a whopping assumption, though.

Ban-the-Bomb appeared a praiseworthy cause at its cold-war 1950s inception. No doubt lots of fine folks genuinely trusted they were doing their best for mankind and life on earth. Not many suspected right off that they were played for suckers, that no authentic grassroots anti-nuke outcry was possible behind the Iron Curtain, that the endgame was to weaken western deterrent – and guess who wanted that to happen?

In time, anti-bomb fervor subsided, but not deep within the anti-establishment subculture inhabited, among others, by Barack Obama and assorted diehard radical cronies. In the name of that ideal of old, US President Obama pretentiously chaired the UN Security Council session which re-ignited the vision of nuclear disarmament. Yet again, intentions may have been noble.

Nevertheless the niggling question is whom are sponsors of the renewed Security Council morality-drive out to weaken? Some argue that high-minded pontification is but a thinly veiled campaign against the burgeoning, very potent Iranian nuclear threat.

But since this was obliquely left for the vast and varied UN membership to interpret according to entrenched self-serving predispositions, then anything goes. And it will. You can bet your bottom shekel that the resultant anti-nuclear ardor will be nothing like what it may seem or like what certain manipulators would like to make others believe that it seems.

PARDON THE jaded perception. Less starry-eyed, admittedly more world-weary observers saw it all before. Déjà vu. Most aspirations ceremoniously ballyhooed in august international forums sound commendable and honorable. Yet inescapably these virtuous standards will be applied to one country exclusively – little Israel.

The Human Rights Council, until recently infamous as the Human Rights Commission, concentrates all its energies on painting Israel as the planet’s great repressive ogre. It was the HRC which commissioned the recent farcical Goldstone Report at the benign behest of such liberal paradigms as Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

The UN after all once equated Zionism with racism. That was when it was headed by former Nazi Kurt Waldheim. It routinely singled Israel out for an exemplary set of unique restrictions. Israel alone is prohibited from responding to overt terrorist aggression. Decades before operations Defensive Shield and Cast Lead, all retaliatory raids of the Fifties and Sixties were identically condemned.

Unlike any country, Israel is obliged to fight – if at all – according to incongruent asymmetrical pacifist rules. Israel may not resort to weaponry allowed or overlooked in the case of other states. All hell breaks loose if “collateral damage” is incurred in any Israeli action, although Israel faces enemies given to hiding behind their women’s skirts and tots’ t-shirts. Schools, hospitals and the like are used as rocket launching pads against Israeli civilians. But Israeli civilians are expected to take it on the chin and not disturb the world’s peace with interminable Jewish whines.

Israel’s security fence, erected to hamper suicide-bombers, is raucously vilified in the name of freedom of movement. Yet this laudable principle isn’t requisite for other UN members. Numerous governments fortify their borders via barriers of all sorts to obstruct the influx of economic migrants and foreign gatecrashers. It’s quite acceptable for the US, to say nothing of Spain whose need to bar entry into Spanish Sahara goes unchallenged. Nobody minds that European Spain still has territory in Africa, which it still refuses to cede.

Spain, mind you, is hardly alone. Plenty of UN members, from the US, UK, Russia, Turkey and China – to name just one handful – occupy the territory of others without incurring extraordinary wrath or even a negligible demerit. Plenty establish settlements on usurped lands – the above handful comes to mind again, but not only it. Worldwide, untold millions of noncombatants were evicted, indeed entire ethnic populations. None of the dispossessors are expected to accept dislodged enemies or even innocuous refugees back. No way will Poles, Czechs and other Europeans take back expelled Germans (and rightly so). What’s done is done.

Except in Israel’s case. Israel is unique. Israel must abet its own extinction via inundation by millions of hostile Arabs, whose own belligerent forebears caused their displacement to begin with. Israel is the one testing ground for all disingenuous ethical experiments bombastically launched by the international community.

China may occupy Tibet with no ill-consequence. China has no justification for subjugating Tibet. It’s land-lust and nothing but. Israel of course is weighed on different scales. Merely nine miles wide – enclosed by temporary armistice lines rather than recognized borders – Israel was forced into war in 1967 in order to avoid annihilation. It regained territory which was partly Jewish-owned and Jewish-inhabited just 19 years earlier and all of which constitutes its homeland.

THIS IS no faraway conquest motivated by greed and coercive realpolitik. If Israel cedes lowly hills overlooking its densest population center, one airport and exposed highways, it’s a goner. Yet this is precisely what the international community, including professed friends, stridently clamors for.

China crowded out native Tibetans with Chinese settlers immeasurably outnumbering Israel’s entire population, but their removal isn’t a precondition for much of anything. Chinese settlement construction isn’t even called that, as wasn’t the Russian counterpart in the Baltics. We won’t even get into the thorny subjects of the US or Britain (still in the Falklands, just a hop and a skip from Whitehall). Different strokes for different settlers.

Therefore, expect that eventually nuclear disarmament promoters will focus their sanctimonious zeal only on Israel – ever the global touchstone/scapegoat. The rallying cry will resound from all continents: Israel first. Nuclear disarmament’s endgame will be to weaken Israel’s deterrent and guess who wants that to happen?

This won’t be the primary acknowledged goal for all countries. That said, no country plans to disarm but the “family of nations” will demand Israel disarm. There will be no distinction between nations which covet WMDs for openly hyped genocidal purposes and diminutive Israel – the only nation against which genocidal plots are currently hatched.

If tiny vulnerable Israel fails to cooperate, all nuke-stockpiling nations will posture resplendent in their self-righteousness and castigate it as the villain. Nothing new. For two millennia Christian Europe sermonized about turning the other cheek but invariably did the absolute reverse. It now demands the Jewish state abide by Christian precepts that obviously didn’t ever bind Europe. Islam is altogether exempt because its motto is din Mohammad besayeff (Mohammad’s law by the sword).

It’s simply a matter of time – not much time, either – before the vision of a nuclear-free world is reduced to an ultimatum for a nuclear-free Israel. The mantra will be “Ban the Bomb.” Its none-too-subtle subtext will be “Ban Israel’s Bomb.”

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You can hardly blame Obama. Most folks are prisoners of their upbringing. They cannot escape the mind-set that took shape in their youth. Breaking through the bounds of early instruction/indoctrination requires a plucky character. Even then, intellectual integrity doesn’t always overcome the expediency of exploiting superficial truisms and old associations for ulterior motives and political ends.

It’s hard to judge precisely into which subcategory Obama fits. Does he simply lack the knack to unfetter himself from what was inculcated into him, or does he by now merely use platitudes and affiliations to further personal vested interests?

But whether it’s conformity or cynicism (or a convenient combination of both), the bottom line is that Obama seems to expect all global arena players to abide by Harvard conventions – to broad-mindedly tolerate adversarial viewpoints, to submit a priori that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other, and to effectively prefer ostensible Third-World underdogs with a peeve.

My country, Obama was taught at Harvard, isn’t necessarily more right, democracy isn’t necessarily democratic or superior, and belligerents can be soothed with sufficient sympathy, flattery and concessions. Obama’s tour de force at Cairo University epitomized the ethos of post-hippie-era Harvard.

EVERY BIT as crucially formative was the enlightenment gained by Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax (Edward Frederick Lindley Wood), at aristocratic Christ Church, Oxford. Halifax would go on to become one of the prime architects of appeasement. After hobnobbing with Hitler, Goering and Goebbels in 1937, Halifax noted in his diary that “although there was much in the Nazi system that profoundly offended British opinion, I was not blind to what he [Hitler] had done for Germany, and to the achievement from his point of view of keeping communism out of his country.” Hitler’s feat involved banning the Communist Party and banishing its leaders and accused members to concentration camps.

Halifax signaled Hitler that German designs on Austria, chunks of Czechoslovakia and Poland weren’t altogether illegitimate in British eyes, so long as German territorial expansion was “peaceful.” And Halifax, of course, proclaimed unwavering faith in Hitler’s professions of peace. Old attitudes die hard. Once reputations are staked on policies, no matter how misconstrued, it’s not easy to acknowledge error.

Only after the Axis bully began misbehaving with particular impudence following 1938′s Munich pact did Halifax finally figure out that this wasn’t quite cricket. But to his credit Halifax did agonize, even if belatedly, and he did draw some extremely cogent conclusions. “I often think how much easier the world would have been to manage,” he mused, “if Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini had been at Oxford.”

Indubitably.

We’ve no way of telling if Obama had already reached the stage in which he laments the fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wasn’t, like himself, imbued with the liberal spirit at Harvard Law. However, our hope isn’t lost. In future Obama may yet rant, in Halifax’s immortal idiom, that the world would have been so much easier to manage had Ahmadinejad not enrolled in Iran’s University of Science (where he led the “students” who in 1979 attacked the US Embassy in Teheran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days).

In the fullness of time Obama may likely deduce that the Palestinian state he so fervently yearns for would have been a snap to establish had Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh imbibed progressive values at Harvard too. Had that been the case, dealing with them would then have been indubitably straightforward and unproblematic.

BUT AS inconsiderate fate would have it, Abbas’s alma mater was the People’s Friendship University in then-communist Moscow (where he wrote a PhD dissertation denying the Holocaust, a fact of which political correctness prohibits discussion nowadays, but one that creates a tangible ideological bond between Ramallah and Teheran). Haniyeh’s jihadist zeal was forged at that great repository of humanism, the Islamic University of Gaza.

One might expect that Obama’s hypotheses would evaporate into their thin-air principal component in view of Abbas’s incompatibility with notions of democratic accountability, rudimentary responsibility and credible reliability. Likewise one might expect that Obama’s schemes to reward Haniyeh’s terrorist ardor with gratuitous gifts would be stymied by the proven catastrophic consequences of emboldening fanatic hate-mongers.

But multipurpose delusions endure. So far Obama won’t admit that he practices appeasement, yet he seems to assert that there just isn’t enough of it.

The entire international coterie of baddies is delighted. Nothing suits it better than a leader of the free world who so dutifully complies with Harvard rules. So what if he assumes that they would too. Let him. They’ll do as they please, undeterred because he’s Harvard-bound to consider their perspective.

Israel, though, is ineligible for similar indulgent thoughtfulness (perhaps because its prime minister graduated from MIT). In other words, Israel is slated to pay the price of Obama’s bigheartedness toward our region’s Muslim warlords. The basic premise is that Israel gives and the PA gets, that Israel makes conciliatory concessions and the PA reluctantly consents to accept the proceeds, that the onus for quelling the chaos isn’t on the merchants of mass-murder but on Israel.

The fundamental doctrine of appeasement is the axiomatic given. Obama’s Harvard-honed conviction is that Israel is somehow morally culpable for Arab blood lust and is therefore charged with decreasing Arab displeasure. The conception of rogue regimes as harboring reasonable grievances that can be mitigated or redressed remains as integral to appeasement’s rationale as the good guys’ reluctance to fight.

Reasonable grievances then and now – i.e. Sudeten and Palestinian “occupation” canards – are indistinguishable. Obama clearly has swallowed the claim that the Mideast conflict isn’t about Arab aspirations to eradicate the Jewish state but about creating a Palestinian state. Never mind that before 1967, when “Palestinian” territories in question were under Arab rule, Palestinian self-determination remarkably wasn’t an issue. It was subsequently raised as an irredentist ruse to wrest land from Jewish control. Same as German irredentism in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler successfully convinced enlightened Europe that the Czechs were cruel occupiers of the Sudetenland and ruthless subjugators of its ethnic Germans. Vulnerable Czechoslovakia, struggling for survival, was portrayed as the intransigent troublemaker.

Nothing substantive changed from the grotesque pre-World War II defeatism of decent democracies. On September 27, 1938 Halifax’s boss, Chamberlain, opined: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”

Near death Chamberlain still insisted that the fault wasn’t with appeasement: “Everything would have worked out OK if Hitler hadn’t lied to me” – which presumably he wouldn’t have had Hitler operated by Oxfordian fair-play codes.

Ahmadinejad, Allah forfend, is likewise every bit as unbothered by Harvard precepts.

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Seeking peace in our time and in our land has often been likened to seeking friendly little green men in the outermost cosmos. The probability of finding what you’re looking for is infinitesimally negligible in both cases. Yet Yossi won’t let disheartening odds dampen his enthusiasm. Same goes for stunning past failures.

So what if the Oslo he concocted behind the backs of Israel’s elected government unequivocally manifested itself as a gargantuan flop, as have his Geneva Initiative and his political aspirations (the Meretz he led until recently was trounced in the last elections). Beilin won’t let staggering setbacks get in the way of grand designs.

IN THE 1950s prominent social psychologist Leon Festinger, progenitor of the Cognitive Dissonance theory, focused on the obsessive rejection of tangible reality by fanatic followers of fantasy. He studied a small cult that awaited the imminent arrival of aliens from another galaxy. They calculated dates and prepared meticulously for the great event – which never materialized. Yet members of the flying saucer cult didn’t relinquish their faith in “Guardians” from outer space and their promises for a new universe.

This led Festinger to observe in his ground-breaking 1956 book When Prophecy Fails that the collapse of prophecies disseminated by cults “often has the opposite effect from what the average person might expect. The cult following gets stronger and the members even more convinced of the truth of their actions and beliefs.”

Israel’s homegrown peace cult is proof positive.

Buoyed by his blunders, fearless Beilin hasn’t given up on the Geneva washout. Valiantly insisting it’s still a viable option, he last week ceremoniously announced the publication of a 400-page, most-detailed-yet version of the “grassroots” recipe for peace he first inflicted upon us in 2003. Shimon Peres, Yossi’s patron of old, received an advance copy of the updated Geneva Initiative. So has Hillary Clinton (in the hope she’d get Washington to impose it on the vast majority of Israelis who clearly rejected the original) and all EU’s movers and shakers (in the hope they’d egg Hillary to do their bidding).

The fact that nobody authorized him to represent Israel, haggle on its behalf and determine its future is of no hindrance to Beilin. He’s done it previously. In August 1993 the then-deputy foreign minister pulled off a similar stunt in the Norwegian capital. He later pitched the Osloite concoction to his boss, Peres, who proceeded to convince then-PM Yitzhak Rabin that the Palestinians had undergone a strategic metamorphosis.

With much fanfare and self-congratulation the clandestine deal was unveiled to the citizenry as a glorious fait accompli. The intelligence community didn’t raise a ruckus, the intellectual elites celebrated and the obstinate opponents were lumped with Hamas as “enemies of peace.”

Eventually, however, Nobel prizes notwithstanding, the strategic metamorphosis was revealed as nothing but a marketable version of the old Arab phased plan for Israel’s destruction, rendered feasible via the invaluable complicity of duped Israelis.

This is what comes of lack of accountability and failure to demand reckoning. We’re now in the midst of our annual neurotic Yom Kippur self-flagellation orgy, wherein we commemorate the 1973 war. This faultfinding frenzy, however, only accentuates the dearth of probes into Beilin’s Oslo fiasco.

There are no academic studies, investigative reports or exposés about how our national leadership was bamboozled into crowning Arafat the prince of peace, importing him and 50,000 henchmen from Tunis and arming them. This gratuitous debacle is of unprecedented proportions. It’s still ongoing, unresolved and with no happy end in sight. It’s far from being behind us.

NONETHELESS, ACADEMICIANS and media hotshots refrain from pointing fingers at the enlightened bunglers who brought us Oslo, because they’re all chums in the same progressive fraternity of radical postmodernist flying-saucer devotees.

A decade after Oslo literally bombed, an undeterred Beilin promoted its Geneva spin-off to demonstrate that, contrary to overwhelming empirical evidence, we do have interlocutors with whom to chew the fat. Substantiating Festinger’s conclusions, Beilin went on the offensive to redeem his incontrovertible flop, to show Israel’s benighted masses how right he is – even if it kills them.

He is still at it. In the coming year, the resurrected Geneva’s boosters plan seminars on each of the 13 intractable irritations which keep peace away, among them Jerusalem, security, water, the PA economy and refugees. A cult convocation is already scheduled this October in Prague to palaver there about our H2O-shortage here. A much-ballyhooed junket to pleasing faraway climes never hurt any space cadet.

The Beilinites claim to have formulated quick fixes for all outstanding pesky problems. Geneva’s logic is facile: Israel gives, the Arabs take and linguistic artifice obfuscates the rest. There will, for example, be no Palestinian army, but there will be a “strong Palestinian security force.” Additionally, “an international force” will protect Palestine – presumably from Jewish predations. It’ll also be in charge of our Holiest of Holies. Nothing to worry about.

The only fly in the ointment is Beilin’s admission that there’s still no solution to the refugee problem. That’s a tad disconcerting because in 2003 he contended that the Palestinians had effectively relinquished the “right of return” – i.e., the scheme to eradicate Israel via a hostile takeover. Could the flying saucer have been a no-show? Did it fail to swoop down and tie loose ends?

But preposterousness hardly renders the Geneva sequel harmless. Beilin’s alternative to credible Israeli self-defense is nothing to scoff at. His operative premise is that even if today’s government won’t take the bait (for now), tomorrow’s might. Beilin tenaciously marks the starting point for future bargaining. He sets the stage for the next disaster. Enter the flying saucers ferrying yet another contingent of extraterrestrial harbingers of the New Middle East.

As Festinger noted: “A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … presented with evidence – unequivocal and undeniable evidence – that his belief is wrong, he will emerge not only unshaken but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed he may even evince new fervor about convincing and converting others to his view.”

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Fonda is so fond of us that she insists our face remain as dirty, demonic and denigrated as she and her avidly mud-slinging chums (like Danny Glover, presumably our friend by association) deem appropriate for us. Truth may be detrimental to their ends, which obviously justify any and all means.

FOR THESE ends Israel needs to remain besmirched and blackened. And that was why fond Fonda, comrade Glover and more than 50 other petition signatories (among them various indispensable useful-fool Israelis) had such a bone to pick with the Toronto festival, itself hardly a Lovers-of-Zion shindig by any measure.

It featured a bunch of films about Tel Aviv, many of which conform to the popular Israeli genre of self-deprecating, pro-Arab flicks scripted for the explicit purpose of winning acceptance and accolades from Fonda and her ideological likes overseas. Sucking up to the Fondas of this world, it’s widely believed in our provincial backwoods, is the only way for an ambitious Israeli academic/artiste/author/moviemaker to carve out a career and bask in the ambiance of moneyed Israel-bashing liberal patrons.

How deliciously ironic then that Fonda – albeit indirectly and inadvertently – punishes precisely those Israeli producers who obsequiously fawn to please just her sorts. Their radicalism and/or brownnosing make no difference. This effectively parallels two millennia of Jewish experience with assorted Judeophobes – including those who had cut no slack for urbane “Germans of the Mosaic persuasion.”

Toronto’s festival, according to the Jane-brand of spurious historiography, omitted to stress that “Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps.”

Uncool as it may be, according to George Orwell “speaking the truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act.” Fonda should appreciate revolutionary acts. In her younger years, when she bombastically boosted Huey Newton and the Black Panthers, she insisted that “revolution is an act of love. We are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood.”

So let’s get on with the revolutionary act of telling the truth. Habitual knee-jerk detractors, who disdain historical references, please note that Fonda and crew were those who launched us on this foray into that past.

RECENTLY I wrote of almost forgotten Tel Aviv founder Yosef-Eliahu Chelouche, a native of Jaffa, scion of a Jewish family from North Africa (kosher presumably for Third World ennoblers) and a notable political dove till Arab bloodlust disillusioned him. In his 1931 memoirs, long before Tel Aviv became the vast Zionist empire’s icon, Yosef-Eliahu described those 12 desolate windswept acres of wasteland purchased for a hefty sum in 1909 for Ahuzat Bayit (as the embryonic city was called). They were hardly occupied by Arab villages as Fonda and friends aver.

Yosef-Eliahu recalled them as “a sea of sand, a barren desert with powdery yellow mountains and hills, where jackals howled.” Beyond Jaffa’s decaying narrow alleyways stretched an undulating shadeless wilderness. It was a horrendous, almost impassable and seemingly interminable tract, without landmarks or signs of habitation.

From its inception Ahuzat Bayit was traversed by a boulevard – not because it was a preplanned aesthetic feature. Tel Aviv would rise on pyramidal mounds with unstable continuously shifting slipfaces. These were pronounced unsuitable for construction. To level off the area, teams of pioneers used wheelbarrows to move tons of sand from the highest points and deposit them in the gullies bellow. The deepest ditch cut across Ahuzat Bayit exactly where Sderot Rothschild now stretches. Filled with so much soft sand, it was judged unsafe to support structures. Instead it was covered with topsoil and lined with trees. If anything, Tel Aviv was reclaimed from an empty strip of desert.

Elementary intellectual integrity should oblige Fonda and her retinue of our “best friends” to recall that Jaffa was also a pivotal early 20th-century Jewish hub. If anyone was forcibly dislodged therefrom, Jaffa’s Jews were; 1921′s unprovoked five-day Jaffa-generated Arab riots, in which 49 Jews were massacred (among them leading Jewish literati, including left-wing Yosef Haim Brenner) and more than 150 wounded, effectively brought down the curtain on Jaffa’s Jewish community and boosted adjacent Tel Aviv as a separate, independent, viable, modern and thriving alternative entity.

The carnage filled 12-year-old Tel Aviv with tents and makeshift sheds to shelter Jewish refugees fleeing the Jaffa bloodbath before even self-proclaimed anti-imperialists of the Fonda-mold could conjure up supposed Jewish provocation for Arab butchery.

As to the 1948 escapades of Jaffans on the eve of Israeli independence, I will summon my own mother’s testimony. The minaret of Jaffa’s Turkish-constructed Hassan Bek Mosque, for instance, was used by Arab snipers to take frequent potshots at passersby on the adjacent streets of Tel Aviv. For Jane’s attention, that was before we could conceivably be accused of becoming conquistador ogres.

My mother often recalled the mortal risk entailed in crossing the street to the corner grocery. She was nearly shot on her way to the dentist. One afternoon, her landlord, Mr. Braun, buttonholed her at the entrance to his apartment house on 7 Rehov Aharonson. Standing in the doorway he lectured her sternly about the foolhardiness of her sorties outdoors. Just then a bullet whistled by. Mr. Braun fell dead at my mother’s feet.

Odds are Jane doesn’t know about Mr. Braun. But she should educate herself about Hassan Bek’s snipers, who didn’t care about the identity of their numerous random victims. It helps Jane’s predatory propaganda not to mention them, to pretend that Jaffa didn’t aggressively and continuously attack Tel Aviv, that peaceable Jaffans were dispossessed arbitrarily in villainous circumstances devoid of context.

In a world of cosmopolitan detachment, Jane’s propaganda works. Toronto Festival codirector Cameron Bailey half-apologetically conceded “that Tel Aviv is not a simple choice and the city remains contested ground.” But if even Tel Aviv is “contested ground,” if even its legitimacy is questionable, what are we to say about Israel as a whole?

So much for all those insincerely avowed two-state syrupy sentiments.

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But not all birthdays are sweet at 16. Some stick painfully in the craw. Sometimes what grew up before our very eyes is nothing less than a teenage nightmare, certainly nothing to rejoice about.

Such is the pitiless pseudo-peace conceived clandestinely in Oslo, imposed undemocratically on hapless Israelis and launched festively on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993.
Worst of all, this misshapen 16-year-old grotesque has changed our circumstances forever. The cataclysmic chain reaction it set off rages still. Thus far nobody has possessed the pluck to snuff the monstrosity. Even those who once pronounced it dead, like Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, now make nice and vow to nurture it.

NEARLY NINE years ago, when campaigning for seeming superhawk Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu declared that “Oslo is dead. The Palestinians quashed the deal they themselves signed.” On that occasion he set three conditions for restarting talks: “an absolute cease-fire, a fundamental revamp of the message broadcast by the Palestinian leadership to its people, and testing these conditions over a prolonged period – not just two or three weeks.”

He stressed that “no real coexistence can emerge from a situation in which Palestinians speak war and Israelis speak peace. Only after thorough and unambiguous overhauls of Palestinian intentions and behavior can we return to a clean negotiating table.”

In actual fact, however, rather than being unceremoniously disposed of and buried, the Oslo ghoul mushroomed hideously from atrocity to atrocity. After two intifadas, nearly 2,000 Israeli dead, the attendant betrayal and folly of disengagement, the Hamas takeover of Gaza (which resulted from disengagement) and an ever-burgeoning series of egregious Israeli concessions (all of which the Palestinians disdainfully rebuffed), it can be confidently concluded that our geopolitical situation has never been this bad.

We mechanically move, as if mesmerized, from debilitating delusion to devastating weakness.
Given everything that transpired, it’s hard to recall how much better things were in the summer of 1993, before the Oslo newborn was underhandedly unleashed on unsuspecting us.

The first intifada had been quelled. The PLO was down and out, crumbling and deprecated even in the Arab milieu. Yasser Arafat and 50,000 of his henchmen hadn’t yet been imported here to set up their corrupt latifundia. The Palestinian state was a chimera. “Family reunions” hadn’t yet added 150,000 Arabs to Israel’s population.

Our deterrent was unshaken. Israel controlled all terror breeding grounds from south Lebanon to Gaza and all Judea and Samaria nooks. Islamofascist suicide bombings and unilateral Israeli retreats weren’t the vogue. No sane overseas democracy considered a full Israeli withdrawal to the untenable 1949 armistice lines a feasible realistic probability. No foreign government seriously assumed that halting all settlement construction is an acceptable proposition for Israel. None presented settlements as the conflict’s underlying root-evil.

Israel’s very right to exist wasn’t challenged in respectable society. Israeli academics weren’t ostracized as they are these days. Campuses worldwide weren’t off-limits to pro-Israel opinion. Israel wasn’t lustily demonized in what appear to be pluralist liberal environments. The Jewish state wasn’t the universally reviled pariah. To be sure, it was never the international community’s favorite child, but nothing approached the current isolation, venom and delegitimization.

A READER identified only as Ariadne responded to my Tack on the organ-snatching canard in Sweden by extolling that country’s religious tolerance (as if Jews are merely a religious sect): “You can be Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan or have no religion at all. All we care about is if you are good people. We do dislike bombs and white phosphorous used on innocent people, and we don’t like countries that can’t take criticism for their actions.”

Behind the facade of broad-mindedness and denial of bias are insinuations that we aren’t “good people.” Ariadne accepts as gospel charges that we fight dirty, that our enemies are “innocent people” and that our objection to blood libel makes us a country “that can’t take criticism.”

In Ariadne’s above few sentences is encapsulated Western Europe’s widespread anti-Israel discourse and much of what we are likewise likely to hear in supposedly erudite American university communities. It almost doesn’t matter what Israel does or how it behaves. It has a priori been accused, judged and resoundingly found guilty with abhorrence unparalleled since the omnipresent anti-Semitic ambiance of the 1930s.

We have indeed come very far from pre-Oslo days; and it was steeply downhill all the time and all the way. Concomitantly, emboldened Palestinians rose to bask in bountiful limelight on the international stage. Those blood-soaked spates of mass homicide that assorted Palestinians sponsor only uplift them farther. Even the initially shunned Hamas is gaining recognition and sympathy.

The dejecting bottom line is that the most extreme Arab terrorist outfit, spouting the most outspoken genocidal hate, cannot set a foot wrong. Even the softest, most yielding Israeli administration – i.e. Ehud Barak’s, Ariel Sharon’s or Ehud Olmert’s – cannot set a foot right, according to damning world opinion. Oslo put the Palestinians on a win-win course and Israel on a lose-lose track.

Every Israeli pullback only escalated terror, which perforce triggered Israeli self-defense, which in the end served to tarnish our reputation even more. Every Israeli concession, even if merely proposed and eventually spitefully refused, only whetted Arab appetites for more. The more that was squeezed from Israel’s eminently squeezable leaders, the more unsustainable our security status became. Yet even ultra-minimalist Israeli red lines – effectively adhering to what the exceptionally dovish Abba Eban dubbed “the Auschwitz borders” – are castigated as proof of Israeli intransigence.

The international community doesn’t denounce all-or-nothing PA rejectionism. It doesn’t question the premise that the PA’s honorable sole aim is to gain self-determination side-by-side with the Jewish state and that it sincerely strives for a historic-territorial reconciliation with Zionist Israel, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

This Oslo-generated dynamic is the most compelling disincentive for the Palestinians to compromise. They see US President Barack Obama’s unrelenting pressure on Israel even vis-a-vis Jerusalem and they see nothing but a steady erosion of Israel’s positions. Even Netanyahu now hums a different tune, acquiesces to a Palestinian state (albeit with preconditions which are, alas, destined for oblivion) and de facto freezes Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria.

He may argue that it’s temporary and tactical. Yet nothing in this land is more permanent than the temporary. Moreover, all the clever tactical maneuvers Oslo inspired over 16 ghastly maddening years only drove Israel into a deeper, stickier, stinkier morass.

What an unhappy birthday, a bitter 16th.

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