Over two days what Gingrich rightly calls the terrorists in Gaza fired maybe 20 projectiles all over the south. For a day (I think it was Friday) hundreds of thousands of Jews were ordered by civil defense authorities to stay within 15 seconds of a shelter.

Is this what Theodor Herzl had in mind? Hundreds of thousands of Jews in their home towns and villages who are limited in their physical movements because of homicidal Jew-haters fixing to murder them?

The other depressing news here was that of the Mugrabi Bridge to the Temple Mount being closed as it should be, but Bibi dares not build a new one because the Ishmaelites are threatening mass rioting in the Arab world if Israel proceeds with the project. The principle, of course, among the barbarians is that Israel has zero rights to make any changes in al-Quds.

Also disheartening was the news today that the Yisrael Beiteinu party may withdraw MK Anastasia Michaeli’s bill to squelch the PA systems on minarets that blast out their calls to prayer that irritate hundreds of thousands of Jews. The majority of Likud ministers oppose the bill in the name of religious freedom.

In other words, in Switzerland the Swiss can pass a law against minarets altogether but not in Israel. Israel, in the name of this religion of Islam, with its 1 billion plus adherents, 56 officially Islamic states and scores more countries with Muslim populations, must bow down to its dictates.

This is the equivalent of allowing since 1967 the Muslims to rule the Temple Mount and literally prevent Jews from praying there altogether. The imbalance in religious freedom on the Temple Mount is a shocking marker of Israel’s lack of self-respect.

One understands the fear in Netanyahu of mass Arab rioting in the volatile Arab states which could break out were Israel to build a new Mugrabi bridge, let alone re-write the rule book for sharing the Temple Mount. No prime minister wants to be held responsible for igniting a third intifada over the Temple Mount, which is precisely what Ariel Sharon did when he ignited the second in 2000.

But there has to be a limit to this self-abasement and retreat which in the long-run can bring on the very thing the self-abaser is trying to deter: even more aggression by one’s mortal enemies.

Israel must every day – as free peoples must fight to defend their freedom in every generation – Israel must every day make clear that Eretz Yisrael is the world’s one and only Jewish country and state and in it only the Jewish people will rule and decide what happens.

And that self-confident stance can begin with the Temple Mount and the building of a new bridge to it, despite the Hamitic menace emanating from our Arab neighbors…