Israel, of course, faces many threats, some of them authentically existential. These threats, primarily the growing risks of unconventional terrorism and unconventional war, understandably preoccupy the concerns of Israel's political leaders and military planners. But there are also less obvious and less palpable threats that, in certain respects, are every bit as ominous and are assuredly interrelated. Among these, none is more serious than the steady national retreat from excellence and uniqueness, a retreat based largely on imitation and mimickry of popular culture in the United States.

For many states on this endangered planet, mediocrity is not a conscious choice. For a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with unyielding economic and systemic constraints, these states are simply consigned to mediocrity by circumstances largely beyond their control. What distinguishes Israel from these other mediocre states is that it has purposely chosen mediocrity, preferring an incremental pattern of social and political concessions to even the remotest search for victories. As for originality, in political arrangements, in military calculations, in non- technical academic investigations, it has become an embarrassment, one already swept into the ash bin of contemporary history, a burdensome impediment to an Israel that wants, above all else, to "fit in."

To a significant extent, the prior Government's "New Middle East" is the apt metaphor for Israel's self-inflicted mediocrity. Celebrating an Israel that now refuses to distinguish itself from the vast sea of surrounding ordinariness, this fashionably au courant image of a mediocre planet displays sharp discontinuity with mellennia of Jewish history, a history overstocked not only with martyrs, but also with those who were able to recognize national mediocrity as a slow form of Jewish death. For Israel, the "New Middle East" offers not only intolerable risks of war and terrorism (an observation obvious to all but the mediocre), but also the even more insidious risks of death by intentional underachievement and wilful self-dissolution.

On a planet where evil has become "banal," the origins of terrorism, war and genocide lie not in monstrous individuals, but in societies that positively despise the individual. In such societies, the mob is everything and a delirious collectivism is the unmistakable hallmark of national "progress." Surrounded by exactly such societies, all of which "fit in" by keeping Israel "out," the State of Israel has decided not to reject this terrible and terrifying mob, but to join it, to honor it, to take an absolute delight in its conscious suppression of individual human promise in favor of a presumed belonging and public acceptance. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Israel - the Jewish State that is now embarrassed by its past record of excellence, originality and difference - will soon disappear in the New Middle East. There can be no other fate for a retreating nation that sees in mediocrity the path to survival.
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