Israel never should have left Gaza the way that Ariel Sharon abruptly and foolishly did. He was too full of himself — in more ways than one — and became persuaded by hubris that he alone had the vision. Certainly no one in Israel seriously wanted Gaza, but Ehud Barak already had shown how myopic it would be to walk away unilaterally from a border region when he handed Southern Lebanon effectively to Hezbollah. So, to prove Einstein’s meme about insanity, Sharon did the exact same idiotic thing, and he left Israel with a royal mess on both sides.

(Ehud Olmert, a lower knave than even the other two, soon after wanted to do the same thing yet again in Judea-Samaria — even Einstein never had anticipated that abyss of insanity of doing the same thing a third time and expecting a different result — but Olmert first botched the Hezbollah War, got immediately bounced from office along with his incompetent Defense Minister Amir Peretz (the latter a union hack who had no business being Defense Minister but demanded the spot as a payoff for having his Labor Party vote with Olmer’s now-defunct Kadimah Party), and Olmert ended up in prison as a convicted crook. He is the kind of crook who, after being sent to jail and warned “Do Not Pass Go!” still would somehow manage to swipe $200 from “Free Parking.”)

So now Israel has Hezbollah on its north and Hamas on its south. Indeed, Israel would have Iran in Syria, too, but Bibi’s government would not abide it. Time will tell whether the political cynics nevertheless aim to oust Bibi, despite the security issues now on the table, over his foolishly accepting from one of his supporters cigars and champagne that did not bear the Trump Organization brand name. Anyway…

Stop. Think. (That puts you ahead of Bette Midler.) Ask: What exactly is going on at Israel’s Gaza border?

The answer: Arab Islamists who march like zombies to Hamas death-and-suicide commands have been gathering in the tens of thousands trying to break into the Jewish country, to tear down Israel’s border fence, shouting “Death to Israel.”

Uh, what exactly is Israel supposed to do? Does it not make sense for Israel to shoot them? Really?

If you had thirty drunks with knives and hatchets trying to break down your front door and penetrate into your house, what would you do? Call John Kerry? Call Bette Midler? Natalie Portman? No, you would do one of three things:

1. Kill yourself.
2. Call the cops at 9-1-1.
3. Start shooting at the crowd till the cops arrive.

That’s what Israel did. They chose not to kill themselves. So they got their cops, and they started shooting.

What would Erdogan do if 40,000 Kurds tried to break into Turkey and destroy Turkish sovereignty? What would Putin do if 40,000 people tried to break into the — well, come to think of it, no one ever tries to break into the Soviet Union or whatever nickname it goes by.

What would America do if 40,000 M13 gang members tried to break down the southern border and enter en masse?

You shoot them. You absolutely shoot them.

Look, if one or two people accidentally cross the border, so that’s a thing that happens. People make mistakes. Remember that Marine with the gun in his car who accidentally crossed into Mexico? And there was this time that our family were touring in southern New Mexico, and one of my daughters went strolling with another family member to check something out and inadvertently crossed the border into Mexico, which set off a classic comedy of errors because they did not have I.D. with them or whatever. And then they had to convince the Border Police that they were not Mexicans nor ISIS but two ambling, rambling, scrambling tourists who suddenly noticed that the signs suddenly stopped being in English and that street urchins were asking them for coins.

But when all 40,000 of your daughters announce that they all are converging with knives and rocks and tires on fire and will destroy your country, violate its borders, tear down its wall —honestly, the only thing you do is you shoot them. I truly cannot understand what the issue is. You shoot them. Of course you shoot them. What country would not shoot them?

Germany would not shoot them? China would not shoot them? England never shot anyone Irish? Or somewhere else in their empire from India to the Falklands?

But why couldn’t Israel just lob tear gas? You lob tear gas to break up a violent demonstration at Berkeley when dear Ben Shapiro comes to tell them that facts do not care about their feelings, or when someone in San Francisco spots a person using plastic straw to drink California-cancer Prop 65-certified coffee in a plastic bag. You drop leaflets to warn people who can read or who are curious to see pictures. But when 40,000 people gather together on your country’s Independence Day, declare that your Independence Day is their Catastrophe Day and that they now are going to straighten out the historical disappointment by seizing your country — why, of course: You just shoot them.

After all, why were these people gathered there? What were they seeking to do? Why were 40,000 of them, at the behest of Hamas with a nudge from Islamic Jihad, trying to surge through the border of Israel —

To learn Hebrew at discounted language classes?

To attend a Talmud class at a yeshiva?

To help nine other Jewish guys assemble a minyan (prayer quorum) to recite a Psalm of David?

To ask Bibi to share some of those cigars and champagne?

To see whether Jared Kushner came to Israel this time with a yarmulka in his pocket?

Come on. They came with violence. They came to destroy Israel. More than ninety percent of those killed now have been identified as known Hamas leaders, agitators, members or as affiliates of Islamic Jihad. They fly these kites that they set on fire, hoping to float them over the fence and start fires in Israeli farms across the border.

You shoot them. Of course you shoot them. Every country shoots them. And you shoot until they recognize that Israel is a country, not a kosher deli, and it has laws and borders and an army. And no one else does this to any other country, and no other country deals with this nonsense. No one else charges a border like this, except as part of a war, like Nazis marching into Stalinist Russia or Russians marching into Nazi Germany or France and England and Germany killing each other during World War I and World War II or France and England killing each other during all those wars in the Middle Ages that make for such good Shakespeare plays and soliloquies. Israel is not UC Berkeley or some effete dump hole like Swarthmore College, where undergraduate Jew-haters on campus gather to destroy the Jewish People and terminate the State of Israel by announcing that they are boycotting Sabra Hummus until the end of Spring Term finals (except when they need midnight snacks while studying and fear eating simple carbohydrates or food that is not gluten-free).

Hamas has been given so many hundreds of millions from the suckers and chumps in Europe and elsewhere, not to mention via the Obama-Kerry Cash Payola to Iran. They use the money for cement and steel to build underground murder tunnels instead of building hospitals, schools, apartment buildings. They put it into war, not peace. So the locals have nothing, are miserable, jealously see Jews across the border living like real people do in the world where people spend money on stuff like food and clothes and kids’ education instead of murder tunnels. And they want in.

Thank G-d they are not on our border. Imagine if they saw how we live in America, and if we had to deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad as the governments on our borders. That would be some NAFTA to renegotiate.

But, really, there is only one way that any country would deal intelligently with such a thing: You shoot them. Otherwise, if you do it like Bette Midler and John Kerry and Natalie Portman, and you bring people to sing “You’ve Got a Friend” and “Hello, Dolly!” soon you end up with a hundred thousand trying to break in, then a million, then two million people determined to destroy your country.

There is no other way. You shoot them. Of course you shoot them. Everyone knows this. You learn it in elementary school, in Civics class: “Remember these three important life lessons every day, children: (i) to brush your teeth, (ii) to drink your milk, and (iii) never to gather 40,000 people with knives and burning tires, trying to rip apart another country’s border fence and to destroy that country… because, if you do it… they are going to shoot you.”

Everyone knows this.

So let the Israelis go back to celebrating the next new embassy in Jerusalem — now it is Guatemala— with Honduras and Paraguay to come. And maybe thereafter Romania and the Czech Republic. And thank Trump. For moving the embassy that Clinton said he would move but lied. And Bush lied. And Obama lied.

And thank Trump for killing the Iran Deal, which Obama never dared to present to the United States Senate for proper treaty ratification, an embarrassment negotiated by amateurs who allowed the Mullahs to continue building and augmenting their ballistic missiles and to increase their spreading murder throughout the world unchecked and with impunity. And thank Trump maybe for getting the North Korean Doughboy off the nuclear warpath, which is good for Samsung and Kia, and for people who buy their products, and for Japan and for Hawaii, and maybe also takes a critical nuclear player out of Iran’s orbit. And, while at it, thank Trump for tax cuts and for nipping some of Obamacare out and for getting tough on trade and for bringing in Mike Pompeo to be Secretary of State and John Bolton to be National Security Advisor. And for Justice Gorsuch and for the federal appellate judges and district judges he has named.

One begins to realize that Trump is not suffering from dementia but is crazy like a fox. Dementia, rather, is a condition more closely associated with declaring Natalie Portman the Nobel Laureate of the Jewish People because she happened to be born in Israel and did not leave until she was three years old, then went on to marry some French ballet dancer. Now, if Einstein were alive today, even his mind would not be able to fathom that level of madness in trying to redefine insanity.

One regrets that President Trump does not have more consistent class and character on the personal level because, if he did, he really would be en route to a spot on Mount Rushmore. Instead, he is Trump. So we take the bitter with the tweet, and we learn to love him for his flaws. Because the guy keeps his promises with remarkable consistency, still wants to build the wall — and we all just know he is going to get some or most of it done if he has to build it himself — and has not stopped trying to drain the swamp. To that, he now has a cherished place in Jewish history among a people who not only remember every Lord Balfour and Harry Truman but even remember people like Kings Cyrus and Darius of Biblical times who simply gave the Jews a break. For that, he will be remembered by Christians of faith, by Jews of faith.

And how fortunate that it is not Hillary and her dregs now pontificating from the White House, but instead a great President who named a great United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, to deliver the message that Israel is in the right. And finally it is time to look Erdogan in the eye, to recognize publicly and formally the Turkish genocide of Armenians, the brutal and vicious historic Turkish pox that was the Armenian Holocaust of 1915.