Never before have so many American Jews voiced concern over the course Israel's leaders are navigating for the Jewish state. In the background looms the question whether Israel is actually the most effective means for ensuring the Jewish people's continued existence. In the eyes of the few Jews who survived the Holocaust, the answer was obvious even before Israel became an independent state: Immigration to Palestine was considered essential not only for Zionist reasons but also for the protection of Jews from any future racist threat.

Although I have been an Israeli journalist for more than 50 years, I cannot explain why this confidence has been so badly undermined in recent years,nor can I determine whether such a development was inevitable. How has the state of Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Judah Leib Hacohen Maimon withered to the point that it has become the state of Ehud Olmert, Avigdor Lieberman and Rabbi Binyamin Elon?

It is too easy to say, "We are all guilty." That is the sort of answer you hear from those who do not feel any guilt whatsoever. With more than half of the Jewish people living today in Israel, not only is the Jewish state's future in great jeopardy, so is the entire Jewish people's very survival. The fact that there is no explanation for this process is nearly as important as the very existence of the process, because, in the rational world, the comprehension of the reasons for a phenomenon is the first step toward an attempt to change the situation. After a disaster that has befallen no other people on earth, the nations of the world gave us an opportunity that few, if any, nations in history have ever been granted: the chance to reestablish a state that was destroyed two millennia ago. Israel circa 2006 is what we have done with that opportunity.

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The Jewish people's existence is more important than that of the Jewish state. If Israel cannot ensure the Jewish people's survival - sometimes it seems to even impair that survival - a giant question-mark hovers over the very justification of its existence. Although it faces an Islamic nuclear threat and its government failed in a confrontation with only a few thousand Hezbollah fighters, Israel continues to place responsibility for its security in the hands of that same failed leadership and has thus lost any sense of responsibility for its citizens' survival. Furthermore, by adding a new minister responsible for strategic threats to the triumvirate that led this country during the second war in Lebanon, Israel is causing people to wonder whether it has lost its will to live.

The Jewish people is not a race, as the Nazis and their forerunners claimed. Quite the contrary, except for the American people, there is no other nation on earth that is so genetically mixed as the Jews. Judaism is defined by a common religion, a common history, immense creative energy in the sciences and arts, a capacity for contributing to the cultures of other nations, and, first and foremost, the skills of millions of Jews who regard themselves as members of this nation. If there is such a thing as a national mission, the desire to contribute to other nations is the Jewish mission. However, without the existence of Jewish individuals, there is no Jewish people and there is no Jewish mission.

There are signs - for example, the percentage of Israeli Jewish Nobel Prize winners or the number of works in Hebrew literature that have been translated into other languages - that, after nearly 60 years of statehood, Israel is beginning to help the Jewish people execute this mission. Of course, the continuation of the process is dependent upon this country's ability to ensure the survival of its Jewish citizens. The sole condition for the execution of the Jewish mission is not the existence of the Jewish people as a political or sociological concept, but rather the life and security of Jewish individuals in Israel and their ability to interact with their co-religionists in the world - scholars, philosophers and artists. Israel's ability to guarantee the Jewish individual's physical existence is the fundamental condition for everything related to the Jewish mission.

Thus, Israel's Jews must, first and foremost, determine their country's capacity for ensuring their physical survival. Regarding the Holocaust, Jews can cry out "Never again!"; however, a second Holocaust cannot be ruled out. Moreover, a close potential danger is far more serious than a distant potential one. An Iranian nuclear bomb is far more lethal than a few thousand neo-Nazis in eastern Germany or a small number of Islamic radicals in France and England, because the countries where they reside are becoming just as aware of the threat they pose as the Jewish neighbors of these neo-Nazis and Islamic radicals.

The above facts might make one ask, What are the signs that will force Jews to weigh where Jewish survival and the Jewish people's future are more threatened - America, Europe or Israel? When will we see Jews deciding, on the basis of this consideration, whether to immigrate to - or emigrate from - Israel? Is Israel on a collision course or is it still possible to navigate a new route?