Obama just commanded Israel to facilitate a 1967-borders-state for the Palestinians including Hamas – without an end-of-conflict situation for Israel.

Outgoing Israeli National Security Council chairman Prof. Uzi Arad deserves our appreciation. Principled yet pragmatic, and a true professional expert on foreign, diplomatic and defense policy, he has provided brainpower to Israel’s leaders for almost 40 years.

An insidious new mythology is being advanced which replaces the Iranian threat with the “Israeli threat” to Middle East stability. This has the scent of incitement against, and demonization of, Israel. Political attention must be redirected to the place it most urgently belongs: the Iranian contagion that is inflaming the region.

Here is a hard-to-believe and ludicrous revelation: Tiny and much-besmirched Israel is the 31st highest dues-paying country — out of 192 member countries — at the UN! Israel remits over $40 million annually, which is more than 160 other nations pay. Reasonable or absurd?

Erdogan has accused Israel of war crimes, walked out on its president, and backed Israel’s sworn enemies. So Israel hazed his ambassador a bit by giving him a cheap seat. Shocking!

The newfangled “shelf agreement” concept, which served as the basis for the Olmert government’s negotiation with the Palestinians, was strategically illogical and tactically ill-considered. Israel must not again go this route.

For seven years, Sderot residents feared they had been abandoned by a feckless government and an inattentive public. They wanted to know that people cared. Mordechai Elbaz, a third generation Sderot plumber (pictured with me), had his backyard plumbing supplies warehouse blown to smithereens by a Kassam rocket a few hours before my visit.

The neglect of Sderot – the Israeli town that borders the Gaza Strip and was under seven years of bombardment from Gaza — is a metaphor for the ebbing away of a caring Jewish-Zionist society, and a symbol of the recklessness that passes for Israeli security policy.

One of Israel’s leading feminists, Prof. Dafna Izraeli passed away in February 2003. She had broad shoulders, a powerful sense of morality, and the courage to adopt independent positions – even if those were at odds with her feminist and liberal convictions.

Out to save Israel from itself, no amount of Palestinian malfeasance and corruption really bothers Siegman.