Exactly right. It's not surprising that Israelis have become so expert at this. I'm generalizing here, but the national character exhibits a combination of cheerful, at times quite delusional optimism with turn-on-a-dime ruthless pragmatism that never fails to astonish me.

These are dark days, but don't count us out just yet. We don't know what's about to happen internally in Iran, and we don't know what tactics Israel has up her sleeve that she has no intention of discussing with journalists.

Or give the regime a pretext to force the people to rally together, or even simply to appear to do so, which is often enough for a credulous world. As M1919A4 said above, we are an extremely useful foil for our tyrannical enemies.

This is an extremely important point, and it has an instructive historical corollary: the nascent state of Israel, though outgunned, undersupported and understaffed in 1948, won the War of Independence in 1948 by employing just this kind of indirect approach. If you can't defeat your enemy with a full-on frontal assault, you cut his supply lines, cut his lines of communication, sabotage his systems, intimidate his brain trust, do everything possible to make the physical prosecution of the war difficult to impossible for the enemy. Above all, stay creative and hold onto the element of surprise; keep the enemy wrongfooted and on the defensive. If I can figure out how, I'll post some writing I did a while ago on Operation Horev (December 1948) in which the Israelis masterfully demonstrated these principles.

Nobody, my totally unscientific response to your question is a conjecture: that if you interviewed a cross section of Israelis, the majority would oppose a strike. The reasons are: 1) many Israelis (when pressed) are worried about the blowback from Iran (in the form not only of direct strikes from Iran itself but also in the form of a two-pronged assault at much closer quarters from Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the west [notwithstanding the bad blood right now between Iran and Hamas]); 2) there is a thread of hope that after Assad's fall, Hezbollah et al will be cut off at the knees, and the last thing we want to do right now is get in the way of either of those results; 3) there is a queasiness here toward collective punishment that's so deep in the Israeli psyche that it's institutionalized in the ethos of the Israeli army; and 4) there is an apprehension that as we are invariably blamed simply for defending ourselves, we will be consigning ourselves to permanent pariah status for taking such drastic offensive preemptive action. That's my guess.

Viator, the Syrian and Iraqi programs consisted of one site each. I point this out not to minimize the Israeli accomplishment in destroying them but to note that as impressive as those successes were, the Iranian logistical situation is not remotely analagous to them, and it's foolhardy in the extreme to extrapolate the results of a strike on Iranian facilities based on the results of the Syrian and Iraqi strikes. 

I have no more desire to live near a nuclear armed Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist or Twelver regime than you do. That being said, I refuse either to be chased out of town or worked into a lather of anxiety over the intentions of our neighbors, our leaders, or the leaders of our purported allies. I firmly believe Israel will not countenance another mass destruction of a Jewish population but also believe Israel will think long and hard before visiting mass destruction on any other population, no matter how psychopathic their leadership may be. Every attempt must be made to evict the cataclysmically dangerous Iranian leadership before mass carnage is rained down on the heads of a hostage Iranian population.

Paris, I think it will take Obama a good deal less than wiping out the Iranian nuclear program to win the election, alas. 

Viator, the targets in Iran are scattered over an enormous territory and the most sensitive are 200 feet underground. Whopper bunker busters would certainly help, but they will not wipe out the program, and Iran's inevitable retaliation against us would have to be taken into account. I'm with Rafi Eitan on this -- as long as the mullahs are in place, nobody's stopping them from getting their bomb; all anyone can do is delay it. The only way to make Iran a relatively safe neighbor is to change the regime. 

Hi, Peter. I read this piece this morning and actually snorted aloud when I hit that bit about our collective panic. It's dismaying to read something so patently out of touch with the reality of life here nestled within a piece that appears on most all other counts to be based on fact (to the extent that any article on this subject can be based on fact). It made me doubt everything else in the piece, which was disconcerting (Bergman is an extremely highly regarded journalist). 

On reflection, it's quite alarming that Bergman is perceiving a general panic, because that perception probably reflects the attitudes of the people in his circle -- and as they're mostly well-connected intelligence people, that's hardly reassuring. Down here among the tennis moms and other suburbanites, there is no panic at all. No one is discussing Iran much, and no one is discussing this article. For all the speculation, no one knows the reality of Israel's planning or the reality of Iran's decision-making; nor does anyone know how much of anything we read about is pure theater. No, we're not panicking. There really isn't much point.

Ursula, this is extremely interesting and impressive. Please keep us posted.

Lovely photo, too. 

Severely, thank you! I see you're a Wodehouse fan, so you're clearly a person of great taste and discernment. I'm honored by your praise.

Now, I'll bend to no man in my attitude toward celery, but confess that I didn't realize when I wrote the piece that there is a relationship between whiskey and Southern Comfort. That stuff is luscious.

Herewith, my friends, a defense of adverbs. You're clearly fellow travelers.

Felicia, Jews in Muslim lands have a long history of persecution, even in those countries where they felt at home for long periods. Algeria, for instance, had a Jewish community dating back to the first century. Most of the remaining Jewish population (many relocated to France after they were granted  citizenship in the 1960s) emigrated during the civil war in the 1990s, during which war was openly declared on all Algerian non-Muslims.

In Egypt, the community has suffered bombings, pogroms, expulsions and confiscations over many generations. During Suez, all Jewish Egyptians were declared enemies of the state. The small community that still existed in 1967 all but vanished when the Six-Day-War broke out -- the authorities took the male Jewish population en masse and either threw them out of the country or into prison.

Jews in other Muslim countries have found themselves subjected to show trials and summary public execution on top of the indignities of permanent mistrust and institutionalized discrimination. There are only a few Jews left in what was once a thriving community in Lebanon, and the last known Jew in Libya died in 2002.

The largest remaining Jewish population in Muslim lands is in Turkey.

DocJay, Christians inside sovereign Israel are mostly Arab, and I'm not aware of any instances of violence being visited upon them by Israeli Jews. There isn't a lot of mixing, but there is no discernible trend toward suspicion of Christian Arabs based on their religion. (Their religion is, if anything, a source of reassurance.) There certainly isn't any prohibition on religious practice or expression.
The only cases of intimidation I've heard about inside Israel are instances of Christian Arabs being victimized by Muslim Arabs. In Nazareth, for example, Muslims torched Christian stores in a dispute over the construction of a mosque very close to the Church of the Annunciation, a project to which some Christians objected.
Inside the Palestinian territories, life is increasingly anxious for Christians, particularly converts from Islam. And the persecution -- arrests on trumped up charges, boycotts by Muslims of Christian businesses, etc. -- are by no means exclusive to Gaza; cases are reported in the PA as well. In Gaza, though, where Hamas is complete control, the situation is much worse. There's a steady exodus of Christians, and it's an act of bravery to walk the streets of Gaza wearing a crucifix.

The Firefox problem is sorted. It's in a default font now (on Firefox only). If anyone cares to do a side-by-side comparison, open up the site on Firefox in one window and any other browser in another. I'd be interested to hear what people prefer.

And thank you, iWc and Charlotte! 

The font is not displaying properly on Firefox. If you have the option, please view the site on any other browser -- Safari, Chrome, Explorer. I've sent an email to Linotype, whose font it is, asking them to sort out the bug as soon as possible. Sorry, everyone.