Happy Birthday, Israel....

David Horovitz, Editor of the Jerusalem Post, has a great article in the Daily Telegraph...

And so the positive momentum towards normalised relations has been reversed. It is a time when Arab moderates are being marginalised by Islamic extremists, and when Iran is championing the rebirth of the notion in hearts and minds across the region that Israel can be wiped out after all. Not by conventional warfare, in which Israel's tanks and fighter planes would have the advantage. And not solely through debilitating terrorism and traumatising missile attacks, but on two other fronts as well – via delegitimisation and the pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly last year, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad depicted Israel as Europe's apology to the Jews for the Holocaust, unjustly imposed on the blameless Palestinians. Far from being the alien, upstart entity suggested by Ahmadinejad, Israel is the only place where the Jews have ever been sovereign, the land they never willingly left, the country to which they always prayed to return. Its rebirth, far from an injustice, constitutes the belated righting of a historical wrong. But the revisionist effort to air-brush the Jews out of millennia of their own history resonates widely; in the UK, for instance, the malevolent misportrayal of Israel as an illegitimate colonial usurper has moved from the province of the far-Left inexorably towards the mainstream.

Now, barely a week goes by without Ahmadinejad or his compatriots castigating the fact of Israel's existence and vowing that its demise is imminent. Terrifyingly, Iran is also pursuing the means by which to achieve this goal.

Last winter's American National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) so narrowly defined a "nuclear weapons programme" as to create the false sense that Teheran had frozen its quest for a bomb. But American intelligence chiefs, like their Israeli and other international counterparts, believe the Islamic Republic is now a year or two at most from attaining that capability.

Some experts believe Iran is ultimately pragmatic and would be deterred from acting on its desire to wipe out Israel by the certainty of a devastating Israeli second strike. Leading Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis, by contrast, has argued that the concept of mutual assured destruction, rather than a deterrent, represents a veritable inducement to Teheran's apocalyptic regime.

For Israel, this regime in Teheran with that weaponry is unthinkable. Iran might actually use the bomb. It might supply it to a third party, hoping to evade a second-strike response. But even an Iran that did not press the button would place Israel under a shadow that would threaten to destroy it economically and psychologically.

Across the Middle East, every regime is watching the standoff. If Iran goes nuclear, it becomes a terrifying regional power at a stroke, armed with the military menace to underpin its avowed desire to export fundamentalist Islam. If it goes nuclear, others across the region will attempt to follow suit, to protect themselves.