By: Giulio Meotti

While Turkish President Erdogan and Pope Francis were in Rome complimenting each other on Jerusalem and the European Union was rolling out red carpets to Mahmoud Abbas, Israel was protecting the West.

This small state has hitherto prevented Iran from manufacturing the atomic bomb, it has ruined the nuclear plans of Saddam Hussein and Bashar el Assad thanks to two solitary bombings, it guards the security of Jordan that without Israel would collapse today like a cooked pear, it has  foiled attacks by ISIS on European civilian flights and we now discover that Egypt’s el Sisi has recently asked Israel to bomb ISIS’ posts in Sinai.

Israel today is the fireman of the Middle East. Imagine the region, from time to time, without Israel as the anti-Semites of the whole world dream of it. A Middle East of beheaders facing the Mediterranean, a Middle East of planes full of Westerners flying from Sharm el Sheikh and sinking in the Red Sea, a Middle East of a race to atomic weapons by dictatorships of all kinds, a Middle East of even more millions of refugees going to Europe. Tonight we will sleep more peacefully thanks to Israel.

What an extraordinary country is the Jewish State! Tension is rising and extensive military simulations are under way, with the participation of the US Army, in the event of a missile attack  Defense Minister Liberman has just warned that Israel will not allow images like those of 2006 to repeat themselves, when the citizens of Beirut were on the beach while the Israelis in Tel Aviv were in shelters.

Yet, this extraordinary little country has just been named the third most innovative in the world by the World Economic Forum. The others are all democracies that have known war 70 years ago, often succumbing to evil. How did Israel innovate despite the fact that it is a democracy at war since its creation? Brain, grit and the prospect of the imminent destruction.

In the air of Israel one breathes a kind of anxiety of happiness and creation that derives from the fragility of this extraordinary adventure. A miracle.

Israel does not have time to finish the announcement of the construction of a handful of houses in the post-1967 Judea and Samaria that the UN Security Council is already reunited against, that the European Commission already sent its official declaration about, that the editorials condemning the decision are already being printed and that the lists of products to be boycotted have already been drawn up.

In the last two weeks Israel has buried two Israeli rabbis, killed in cold blood by their “peace” partners, but the same condemnation of those houses has not been seen or heard for the murder of the Jews who live there.

Are we sure that the blood of the Jews is red, that they too have children and mothers, that after the Shoah they really regained their right to exist? I begin to doubt it. Every day we watch a streamed new episode of the series “Destroying Israel, a Jew at a time”. It is one of the most popular television productions in history.