When traveling with one’s children to Israel, a place that we Jews consider our national homeland, it is impossible not to want to make the experience a meaningful one. We want so much for them to absorb the historical, geographical, cultural and religious significance of the place in such a short period of time that we are prone to conduct the trip like a forced march, and about as much fun. Add to that the immutable law of nature to the effect that adolescents are simply not predisposed to sharing their dad’s interest in, well, anything, and you have a potential disaster on your hands.

Fortunately, by luck or design, we struck just the right balance between education and experience, and in the process created what I hope will be lifelong memories for each of us.

But the last trip to Israel that I am thinking about just now is the next one. For tonight I leave for Tel Aviv again, this time with my oldest son, who is 15.  I know from experience now that with the right tour guide in place and with the various friends and loved ones that we plan to visit, we will find the right formula for making this trip memorable for Joseph and me.

That is not what worries me.

What worries me is the faint though persistent feeling that this could be my last trip to Eretz Avoseinu, the Land of our Fathers. This doesn’t rise to the level of a premonition, and has nothing to do with fears concerning my own ability or fitness to travel in the future. But the nature and frequency of recent events beginning with the unilateral disengagement from Gush Kativ and other Gaza communities two summers ago right through the publication of the Baker-Hamilton ISG Report a few weeks ago at least raises the question of Israel’s survival.

The Gaza disengagement in August of last year was a bitter experience, and not just because it pitted Jew against Jew. For many of us it represented the end of the period of idealism mixed with hard-headed pragmatism during which the generation of the founders of the State of Israel led the country since its founding.  What replaced it is an era of self-delusion, self-doubt and self-dealing epitomized by the Kadima governments of Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.  Even many among those who didn’t support the unilateral decision to withdraw from Gaza engaged in the fantasy that doing so might remove an impediment to peace with the Palestinians.

Such self-delusion on the part of ordinary citizens of a society is understandable, and even admirable.  Jews especially are a peace-loving people, and the tendency to indulge in the fantasy that our enemies love peace also is natural.  But we expected more than fantasy from Sharon, the great defender of the Israeli people, a hero of the War of Independence in 1948, the maverick general who cut off the Egyptian Third Army to win the Sinai campaign in 1973, the political force behind the Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful) settlement movement, the warrior who survived political disgrace and worldwide ostracism to become Israel’s prime minister at a critical time in its history, the man who said:

"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Judean) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them."

Worse still, it became apparent that Sharon may have undertaken the Gaza plan not out of a genuine desire for peace, but as a means of appeasing the media and political elements whose investigations into alleged Sharon family corruption threatened to destroy him.  In any event, Israeli's left Gaza, and soon the Palestinian's showed their gratitude by turning it into a training ground for terrorists and a launching pad for attacks against Israel.

In the wake of the stroke that sidelined Sharon soon after Gaza, Ehud Olmert strode onto the scene pledging to carry the Kadima banner of unilateral withdrawal into Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). That policy was rendered fatuous within months by the terror rocket campaign waged by Hezbollah and its patrons from territory once controlled, then voluntarily ceded, by Israel, and yet Olmert clings to it still.  Putting aside for a moment Olmert’s disengenousness at the start of the Lebanon War (re-read his “National Moment of Truth” speech of July 17^th) and his incompetence in conducting it, it is his evident detachment from reality that quickens the pulse. How else to explain his continued devotion to the notion of territorial give-aways while our enemies in Lebanon and in Gaza use already relinquished lands as a staging ground for terror campaigns against Israelis in Israel “proper”?

Despite the success on the part of the U.S. in holding the wolves of the U.N. and the E.U. at bay long enough for Israel to finish off Hezbollah last summer, Olmert and his crew dithered, replacing action with bluster. And as a result Israel has a new enemy across the northern border, UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force which, as Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post points out, has “done everything in its power to defend Hezbollah and undermine Israel’s national security.” According to Ms. Glick UNIFIL has bullied and badgered the weak Olmert government into removing the Israeli navy from the Lebanese coast and the IAF from Lebanese airspace while allowing Hezbollah to reassert control over border towns in southern Lebanon.

These actions by the European-dominated UNIFIL are of a piece with the wilfull failure of the European force in Gaza to stop the flow of weapons smuggled from Egypt into Gaza through the border terminal at Rafah. These events and many others reveal a European community openly hostile to Israel’s presence in the Middle East, and for Olmert to rely on these countries to fight Israel’s enemies is not just delusional, but a disgrace.

Well, so what if the Europeans won’t or can’t protect Israel? (Hell, they won’t even protect themselves). At least its not “Israel Alone,” to paraphrase the title of Mark Steyn’s new book. Or so it seemed until the Baker-Hamilton fiasco came out a few weeks ago. The core recommendation, and almost the only “thou shalt” of the report of the Iraq Study Group, is to pressure Israel into accomodating its Islamist enemies by giving up more land in return for empty promises.  If the ISG report represents elite thinking among the American political and diplomatic class (as we know it does among the elite media), the U.S. commitment to Israel’s securty is hardly rock solid. At least not solid as Iraq (is concerned). Even if the Bush administration doen’t subscribe to the Baker-Hamilton view that Jewish lives are trade-able if American interests warrant, it is not inconceivable that some future administration will.

In short, with its old external enemies emboldened and, according to Daniel Pipes, with new, internal enemies rising among its Muslim Arab citizens, Israel finds itself increasingly isolated by Europe and shaken by the embrace by many in Washington of the Baker-Hamilton Final Solution.

Even under these dire conditions I would worry little about Israel’s future if it were led by men and women of courage who see as their primary duty safeguarding the security of their state and defense of their citizens, whose words of national purpose are genuine and whose perception of events are grounded in reality, who are confident in their role as leaders of the Jewish people, who believe in the destiny of the Jewish nation and who grasp the nature of our enemies and the danger they pose.