Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more.

Israel’s “legitimacy” will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these: When and how will the recognition of Israel’s nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world’s largest open-air prison. The threat is the fast-growing global outrage at the abuse inflicted on Palestinians, commencing with the ethnic cleansing of 400-plus villages six decades ago.

Not since 1948 has this enclave of extremists mounted such a public relations offensive. Christian Zionist President Harry Truman trusted Jewish Zionist lobbyists when he solicited assurances that they would not become what they immediately became: a racist theocratic state with an expansionist agenda destined to create serial crises in the region.

The merciless global agenda pursued by Colonial Zionists is the single greatest threat to world peace, as confirmed yet again by Lieberman’s warning. As the primary remaining ally of these Jewish nationalists, the risks to the U.S. increase with each passing day as Tel Aviv works behind the scenes to catalyze yet another conflict.

This entangled alliance was destined to provoke resentments that would eventually endanger their super power ally and foremost arms provider. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the mass murder of 9-11, conceded that the motivation for that attack was to focus “the American people . . . on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people and America’s self-serving foreign policy that corrupts Arab governments and leads to further exploitation of the Arab Muslim people.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff warned Truman 61 years ago that this militant enclave meant to establish Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East. Familiar with the duplicity for which Israel has since become infamous, the Pentagon chiefs warned, “All stages of this program are equally sacred to the fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders.”

Nuclear-armed fanatics

With each passing year, Tel Aviv adds a new chapter to the agent provocateur handbook on How To Succeed as a Victim. Israel’s strategic success traces directly to its capacity to radicalize and enrage -- as those residing in the Occupied Territories endure a third generation of deprivation, degradation and periodic starvation. Thus the in-depth planning that preceded Israel’s brutal “defensive” assault on Gaza between Christmas 2008 and the inauguration of Barack Obama, who said nothing about the attack throughout its 28-day duration.

That silence continues even now after Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist, issued a report describing dozens of Israeli war crimes and evidence of crimes against humanity. In the lead-up to the report’s release, a U.S. president gave Tel Aviv a rhetorical gift when, in a U.N. speech, the nation’s first black president used the code phrase “Jewish state” as an implied endorsement of the apartheid policies of this racist enclave. Even Truman did not go that far. But then his administration was not as thoroughly staffed with Zionists and pro-Israelis.

In addition to killing some 1,400 Palestinians, one-third of them women and children, Israel destroyed the infrastructure of Gaza, including farmlands, factories and schools as well as its water supply and sanitation works. The facts in the Goldstone Report were further confirmed by “Breaking the Silence” -- the personal testimony by 30 members of the Israel Defense Forces who described a murderous policy meant to teach the people of Gaza a lesson for their support of Hamas, which came to power in 2006 elections that were universally appraised as free and fair.

As Israel’s protector and apologist, the U.S. bears the brunt of the anger as Israeli extremism continues to enrage Muslims and radicalize the Islamic body politic. A systematic assassination campaign ensured that Tel Aviv had “no one to talk to” except known collaborators with the occupation authorities in Tel Aviv and their arms suppliers in Washington. Meanwhile, the steady expansion of Israeli settlements made a Palestinian state impossible -- unless indigenous Arabs are happy to reside in an archipelago of isolated ghettos ringed by Israeli checkpoints.

To suggest that the U.S. is culpable only states the obvious. Yet Israeli extremism continues unabated even as Tel Aviv insists that its neighbors accept it as a “Jewish state” before its borders are fixed and resolution of the occupied territories is known. After six decades of nonstop deceit, Arab states are understandably reluctant to further appease this “state.” For Americans endangered by the behavior of Jewish fanatics, the lesson is uncomfortable but inescapable: we enabled this.

By our continued appeasement, Barack Obama is inviting another violent reaction to Israel’s serial provocations. By failing to endorse the Goldstone Report, our commander-in-chief is putting U.S. forces at risk. By implying that Israel is above the law, he only emboldens Tel Aviv. By suggesting that Israeli conduct is consistent with the values of a “Jewish state,” he endangers the broader Jewish community. That includes those moderate Jews who anticipated this extremist behavior when, in May 1948, Truman overruled the strategic objections of Secretary of State George C. Marshall and enabled this fanaticism by extending nation-state recognition.

Small in numbers but large in ambition, this extremist enclave had no choice but to wage war by way of deception. The most insidious deceit was targeted, from within, at its purported ally to induce the U.S. military to lead an invasion of Iraq for its Greater Israel strategy. Absent an Israeli strategy able to sustain serial crises, a long-deceived public will awaken to the common source of the fixed intelligence that led us into the last war -- and now seeks to induce the next.

As Americans awaken to how this duplicity proceeds in plain sight, they will see for themselves who and why. That knowledge is the threat that Tel Aviv most fears. As the facts become known, Israeli legitimacy will no longer be an issue. The only issue will be how best to disarm these extremists and how to hold accountable those lawmakers who enable this ongoing treason.