Larry Derfner writes in the Jerusalem Post:

All the Islamic countries are afraid of Israel, and for good reason — because this country is much stronger than all of them put together. We do things to the Palestinians, to Syria, to Lebanon and, reportedly, to Iran that we would never let anyone do to us in a million years — and they can’t stop us. They are extremely reluctant to even try; our military power deters them.

So what more do we want from our enemies before we’ll stop screwing with them? Love? Recognition of the justice of the Zionist cause? An admission that they were wrong all these years and we were right?

If that’s what we’re waiting for, we came to the wrong neighborhood. If we’re going to go on intercepting ships until their sponsors accept our right to keep Gaza under lock and key, we’re going to be engaged in gunboat diplomacy for a long time. If we think we can rule the West Bank Palestinians until they give up even nonviolent resistance, fly spy planes over Lebanon until Hizbullah agrees that we have the right to bear arms but it doesn’t, and bomb enemy nuclear sites until the whole Middle East acknowledges Israel as its sole, rightful nuclear power, then our future here is untenable.

Maybe the United States and Russia can hold sway over their regions, maybe they can have spheres of influence, but a little Jewish state surrounded by 57 Muslim states cannot. Neither our enemies nor our friends will allow us to be a mini-empire, a hegemon, for long. That’s a recipe for escalating, never-ending conflict.

The new cry of gevalt around here is that Israel’s legitimacy is under worldwide attack — but the truth is that the West has accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish state since 1947, and nothing’s changed. As for the Muslim world, it never has and never will accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state — but it has accepted the hard fact of it since the Six Day War.

Between Israel’s legitimacy in the West and deterrent power in the Middle East, we have what we need to survive as a Jewish state within our rightful, democratic borders. But we can’t survive as the neighborhood bully.