I was thinking today of Rabbi Eliezer’s dictum in the Talmud: �Repent one day before your death.� When his disciples asked the obvious question: �How can one know the day of his death?� Rabbi Eliezer responded: �Then let him repent each day, lest he die tomorrow.�

That’s some sobering wisdom - grueling, but undeniably true.

In Israel, fingers are pointing in every direction. It’s hard to find anybody who is satisfied with the government’s response to Hezbollah’s aggression. Usually, when neither the Right nor the Left are satisfied, it means that a democratic government has taken all ideas into account. But that is not the case here. Here the criticism is so striking because it is not a criticism of a particular strategy gone awry, but of no strategy at all. Criticism of what appears to be bungling incompetence and confusion. To accuse an Israeli leader of a miscalculation is one thing, but to accuse an Israeli government of no calculation at all, of an utter lack of preparedness, of a lack of planning for what was not only possible, but almost inevitable, is to acknowledge a leadership in denial, elected by a populace in denial. And, indeed, fatigue and despair seemed to be the mood in the last election, which at a time of life-and-death decisions, nonetheless recorded by far the lowest voter turnout in Israel’s history. A friend agonizing over the election finally said to me “I think I’m just going to vote for Green Leaf [a one-issue party that wants to legalize pot]. If I have to live with this government, at least let me get stoned.”

It is grueling to think that tomorrow may be your last day. It makes demands on you. But it is the truth. It has consequences for all of us in varying degrees, but for soldiers on the frontline and civilians in a war zone, it is madness to pretend otherwise, suicidal to ignore the peril.

Yet Israelis seem to have been in collective denial since Oslo’s misadventure, where Israel itself legitimized terror against Israelis by pretending Arafat was a statesman, the PLO was a government, retreat was negotiation, surrender was strategy and a relentless campaign of suicide bombs was a peace process.

Denying their peril, they elected a government of opportunists presided over by a flunky whose major campaign promise was to uproot by force the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria - why? Because they represent the remaining sector of society which plays the role of Rabbi Eliezer, whose insistence on facing reality is just too tiring for the rest of society. Uprooting them, like Olmert’s metal batons crushing skulls of kids in Amonah, is cowardice and bullying; weakness pretending its brutality is strength.

Israelis have lived since the beginning in a state of war, a nation of unwilling combatants, desiring peace but surrounded by hundreds of millions who desire their destruction.

Remarkably, they’ve built a progressive society in which the arts, science and technology flourish. But for all that it still is a war zone. For Israelis, to want to forget that they all share a foxhole is a desperate desire; actually to forget is madness and suicide.

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