To be sure, as we witnessed in the closing days of Sharon’s "disengagement," a substantial fraction of Israel’s Jewish population still struggles heroically against the latest government plan to be unashamedly complicit in the country’s abject surrender. Refusing to believe that rewarding terrorists with Jewish lands is the path to peace, these authentic Jews understand that the official Palestinian maps of Israel are much more than vulgar propaganda. On these maps the emerging state of Palestine is NOT confined to Judea/Samaria (West Bank) and Gaza. Rather, this soon-to-be-born terror state, tied closely to both al-Qaeda and Hizbullah, is brazenly drawn to include ALL of Israel.

What is to be done? Can anything now be fashioned to rescue a polarized Jewish State that seems officially determined to embrace its own demolition? Or is it already too late? Paradoxically, Israel’s current leaders approach Jewish national demise not as a menace, but rather as a convenient form of secular redemption.

Fortunately, many Israelis have yet to surrender. Although the Sharon government is actually birthing another enemy state, these authentic Israelis strenuously resist the soulless ideology of "post-Zionism." Animated by more than the desolate wish to make Israel into America, these stubbornly faithful Israelis refuse to bring everlasting shame upon the memory of so many martyred Jews who now sleep in the dust.

But what can they do? Previously their efforts had been focused upon elections in Israel. To an extent, such a focus made perfect sense. After all, the electoral defeat of every prime minister after Oslo in 1993 was an obvious sine qua non for national survival.

But, just as clearly, "victory" at the polls was never sufficient. The problem of Israel’s survival lies not only in the obvious policy errors of several successive governments in Jerusalem, and in the substantially irreversible Oslo/Road Map/"Disengagement" harms already inflicted upon the battered Jewish nation, but also in something much more important. It lies in the heart of a nation that — not entirely, but still in very great measure — no longer believes in itself as a sincerely Jewish creation. Indeed, much that once mattered most for Israel, all that was once firm, resolute, sacred and incorruptible, has now withered, broken apart, gone to pieces. Small wonder, then, that there is no longer any air to breathe in the post-"disengagement" Third Temple Commonwealth, and that asphyxiation has become every Israeli government’s best idea of progress.

Tragically, Israel’s many Arab/Islamic enemies have something that Israel lacks, something palpable, something altogether vital. They believe in themselves. They believe in the promise of Islam. They understand time.

Israel, however, at least in its official government policies, believes strongly in unbelief. Worshipping only cliches and empty witticisms — especially when they are manufactured in Washington — it believes largely in what is small, material, transient and shallow. As a so-called Jewish State, Israel now believes in virtually anything, but itself. Above all, in what is manifestly the crowning irony of Israel’s extraordinary existential anti-achievements, it believes completely in its enemies.

Where the throne sits on mud, only mud can sit on the throne. To allow itself to survive, Israel will first have to transform itself. Otherwise, it will assuredly be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead also with that rusty death of machinery, more hideous even than the death of an individual person.

There is little time left for understanding. Amidst the eternal babble of politics, Israel can endure as a Jewish nation only where Israelis first learn to take themselves seriously as Jews. As long as it remains captivated by the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of mass society, Israel will continue to pluck its prime ministers from the flies of the herd and will continue to reveal impatience with any one who dares speak truth to power.

Let us be candid. Following the unforgivable crime of "disengagement," Israelis inhabit a tiny land of enormous spiritual emptiness and palpable mediocrity — a fantasy land of surface confidence, smug comforts, and wholly sham conventionality. It is a nation where the final arbiters of personal meaning are negotiated in shopping malls and where a great number of citizens have now traded Jewish faith and meaning for presumed opportunity in the shallow worlds of quick pleasure and petty commerce. Here, in the alleged land of Jewish learning, real wisdom is not merely rejected. It is despised.

How shall Israel endure? To begin, the deeply divided People of Israel must now pay close attention to their private states of anxiety, restlessness and despair. For all Israel, the time for "diplomatic settlement," "confidence building," "political compromise" and "peace agreements" is surely over. To listen, and therefore to survive, the individual Israeli must quickly rediscover life by conscious separation from the pitiable herd, by total detachment from contrived optimism, and — above all by coming face-to-face with the inexpressible prospect of death as a Jewish nation. In this knowing spirit of Third Temple Commonwealth impermanence, they may still learn that agony is infinitely more important than economics, that cries of pain are always more revealing than the expansion of celebrated technologies, that anguish ultimately counts for much more than imagined power and that Jewish tears always have far more substantial impact than official promises.

Article compliments of Profess Louis Rene Beres and "The Unity Coalition for Israel."