Happy birthday, Israel

But after 60 years of embattled independence, the Jewish state is in more danger than ever before, writes David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post

Deliberate and grave, Leslie Hardman, the rabbi in our synagogue in Hendon, north‑west London, spoke in rich, mellifluous tones and always seemed utterly unflappable. From my 11-year-old point of view, he looked and sounded about as close to God as a mere mortal could.

So when, on the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, a distraught Hardman told us from the pulpit that Israel was under attack by Arab armies and was in real danger, we sat silenced and horrified.

I hadn't yet visited Israel; my first trip would come three years later, in 1976, and my permanent relocation a decade after that. But I had relatives there and was starting to appreciate how remarkable and precious it was.

My father's family had fled Germany for Britain in the late 1930s to avoid the Nazis, but millions of other Jews had found no means of escape. There had been no Israel. And now that belatedly revived Jewish state was apparently facing destruction.

The Israel of 1973 was gripped by the complacent misconception that the Arab world, devastated by defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967, would not dare to again confront it militarily. It had ignored even a warning of imminent assault from Jordan's King Hussein. So the Arab attack that Yom Kippur caught Israel by surprise. Hardman was right to sound so worried.

Israel managed to rally and avoid destruction in October 1973, just as, improbably, it had prevailed in previous wars going back to 1948 that aimed to stifle the modern attempt at Jewish sovereignty.

But while, since then, it has not had to fight a conventional war for survival, the state has not found peace either. It may be six decades since its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, proclaimed the UN-mandated establishment of Israel and declared its desire for normalised relations with all its Arab neighbours, but the threats it faces today are arguably the gravest with which it has had to grapple. Not long after it finishes celebrating its birthday, Israel's government may have to make the most dramatic decision any Israeli government has ever had to make – whether to use its air force to try to thwart Iran's nuclear programme.

The violent onslaught that began in 2000 is now increasingly inspired, funded and directed by the Islamist regime in Iran. In southern Lebanon, Hizbollah, essentially an Iranian army, has fought one war against Israel, in 2006, and rearmed in readiness for another. Under similar Iranian guidance, Hamas and Islamic Jihad rocket crews based in civilian neighbourhoods in the Gaza Strip – where Israel has conceded all territorial claims and removed all civilians and all military infrastructure – fire daily across the border at Israeli towns and villages, crowing when they kill and maim Israeli civilians and crying foul to the international community when Palestinian civilians are hit in return fire.

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.

Israel's preference has always been for international sanctions to dissuade Teheran. True, Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osiraq in 1981. But that was a surprise attack, on a single facility that had no defences, and Saddam was unable to rebuild and could not launch a devastating retaliation. None of those key factors applies in the case of Iran.

None the less, with the NIE report having slowed the sanctions effort, with the Bush administration unlikely to resort to military intervention in its final months, and with no certainty about the nature of the next US administration, Israel's leaders are agonising over whether the international community will yet act concertedly to deter Iran, or whether Israel will have to cope alone with this latest existential dilemma.

The danger may be less immediate than the eve-of-destruction scenario that brought my rabbi to his pulpit on Yom Kippur in 1973. But the potential for destruction is, if anything, more acute.

This time, though, Israel is only the first of the potential targets. Iran, the country that is fuelling the indoctrination of young Muslim minds the world over, the state sponsor of the kind of terrorism that saw British-raised Muslims blow up London's public transport system in 2005, already has missiles with the range to hit every town in Israel. But it is gradually bringing Europe and even America into range as well.

Apart from castigating and misrepresenting Israel in his UN speech last year, Ahmadinejad also took aim at the free world's "monopolistic powers" for what he called their abuses since the Second World War, urging them to "return from the path of arrogance and obedience to Satan" or face "the same calamities that befell the people of the distant past".

Israel marks its 60th anniversary facing a potent threat to its never-assured modern incarnation. But the entire free world has a direct, overwhelming stake in its survival.

The more widely this is internalised and becomes central to international policy-making, the better for all of us who, in contrast to the Iranian-inspired extremists with their self-described lust for death, relish the right to freedom and delight in the divine gift of life.

David Horovitz is the editor of The Jerusalem Post