Congratulation! Israel has survived to celebrate its 60th birthday.

Today as always, the Antisemites know that in any conflict involving Jews, the Jews are guilty. The Arab Jihad against Israel is no exception – it is Israel’s fault.

You may have heard that in the early 1940s Germany methodically exterminated 6,000,000 European Jews. With typical Aryan efficiency the Germans rounded up most Jews in the territories of the Third Reich. The Jews were shipped to concentration camps and herded into ‘shower stalls’. Once the cyanide did its job, the lifeless bodies were burned in specially designed German ovens, to erase all signs of their existence.

Albert Einstein used to conduct what he called thought experiments to solve abstract problems in physics. Let’s conduct a thought experiment to gain insight into the Arab Israeli conflict and into the twisted minds of the Liberal elites that run the West.

Let’s imagine that in 1941 the Jews of the Buchenwald death camp, in the heart of Germany’s Weimar region, armed themselves and started raiding the neighborhood. What if they succeeded in capturing several German towns? The New York Times and CNN would have portrayed the ‘occupied towns’ as victims. Fox News would have declared neutrality while running vignettes on the suffering towns’ people. The world intelligentsia would have obsessed over the oppressed Weimarian and the UN would have passed resolutions demanding the withdrawal of the Jewish occupation armies.

For those of you who don’t get the analogy, Israel is Buchenwald; the 350 million Arabs that surround it are the Germans; the Palestinians are the towns’ people; and the Islamists are the Nazis. The New York Times, CNN and Fox make cameo appearances as themselves. As is almost always the case, the analogy is not perfect. Israel is the Jewish homeland while Buchenwald was just a concentration camp in Germany. Nonetheless, we find it illuminating.

On Israel’s sixtieth birthday, it saddens us to see that the Wall Street Journal needs numerical proof of the ‘goodness’ of the Jews.

But drilling down into the data, something interesting turned up. At the time, 1,296 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis – of whom a grand total of 37, or 2.8%, were female. By contrast, of the 496 Israelis killed by Palestinians (including 138 soldiers and policemen), there were 126 female fatalities, or 25%.

To be female is a fairly reliable indicator of being a noncombatant. Females are also half the population. If Israel had been guilty of indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, the ratio of male-to-female fatalities would not have been 35-1.

These are not complicated facts. Yet the effort to think them through is rarely made. Is it laziness? I think not, because the image of demonic Israel, presented in copiously footnoted and ingeniously mendacious books like “The Israel Lobby,” is the product of a great deal of effort.

Is it anti-Semitism? One dare not suggest it, since the standard by which anti-Jewish bigotry is judged today is considerably stricter than what is usually used in the face of allegations of racism, sexism or homophobia.

But whatever it is, the constant assault on Israel’s morality has had its effect. Beyond Hamas, beyond Hezbollah, beyond the competition between Jewish and Arab numbers west of the Jordan River and the ever-growing number of Iranian centrifuges spinning a nuclear future for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel is beset by the fear that, being unloved, it is unworthy. “The anti-Semite makes the Jew,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, as if Jewishness was something conferred rather than practiced.

A sibling notion, seemingly benign but insidious, is that Israel’s right to exist rests ultimately with the acquiescence of others, which in turn is a function of their perceptions. This is also known as “legitimacy.”

Perhaps not surprisingly for a state that was born of a U.N. resolution (which the U.N. has never since ceased trying to disavow), Israel has been uniquely mindful of how it is perceived. Yet a nation that constantly feels the need to demonstrate its right to exist, rather than simply assert it, puts itself to an endless test, which it may someday fail.

Then again, look at the headlines in the copy of the May 16, 1948, Palestine (later Jerusalem) Post, reproduced nearby. That was a nation in far greater peril than the one that exists today. For 60 years, it has survived mainly through courageous and improbable acts of assertion, yielding an unfolding set of realities that defied perception. It’s the only formula by which Israel’s next 60 years may be assured.