Michael Bauer has the best story about the looming Iran-Israel-America war. It’s about his two sons.

The weekend is coming, and the Israeli author’s sons are arguing about who should get to use the family car.

KINSELLA: Israelis not worried about military confrontation between Israel, Iran and U.S. Back to video

“I need the car on Friday,” says Bauer’s eldest son.

“No, I’ll need the car on Friday,” says his younger son, “unless there’ll be a war, and then I won’t need the car.” The older brother agrees: If there’s a war with Iran, he won’t really need the car, either.

The sold-out crowd at Beth Sholom Synagogue laugh. They’ve gathered on a cold Tuesday night to listen to Bauer, an engaging bestselling author, who teaches visiting Parliamentarians, politicians and others about the history of the Middle East during well-attended hikes through the wilderness.

Bauer continues, laughing himself. “The whole conversation was about who is gonna get the car,” he says, shaking his neatly-barbered head. “That’s what it is like (in Israel) right now. People are discussing the war as a technical issue, and it’s a bit weird.”

He continues. “There is a lot of trust in our (military) systems and the technology in the Iron Dome. That’s a lot of strength. And if you look at our list of enemies over the last two years, each one of them was defeated badly,” he says, referring to Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. Israelis, he says, are therefore not worried in the slightest about the — possible? likely? inevitable? — military confrontation between Israel, Iran and the United States.

But Bauer frowns. “There’s one battlefield we’ve completely lost, however,” he says. “And it’s the hearts and minds of young people all over the world.” (As the author of a just-released book on that subject, The Hidden Hand, I can say Bauer’s right.)

Possible war almost an inconvenience

Apart from that grim fact, Bauer says, the Middle East has changed dramatically since he last came to Canada to speak to the One Family Fund — an important Canadian charity that provides long-term emotional and financial support to those (whether Jewish, Muslim, Druze or Christian) who have lost a family member to a terror attack in Israel. In the year that has gone by, he says, Israel — always strong — has grown even stronger, militarily and regionally.

Thus, his sons see the possible outbreak of war as almost an inconvenience. And not a calamitous and existential event.

Israel is a military superpower, now, and that is part of the reason for the relative calm there. But another reason, Bauer says, is Iran: The dictatorial Islamic state is a shadow of its former self. “They are a struggling, weak entity on the other side of the Persian Gulf,” says Bauer. “We in Israel still want the Iranian people to have the best country they can possibly have — to have a successful democracy, or whatever works for them.”

Bauer declines to make predictions about what the immediate future holds — to this writer’s disappointment, because a return to Israel with the American Middle East Press Association in early March may get cancelled by an outbreak of war.

He shrugs and says he doesn’t know if war is likely. “I have no idea,” he says, looking like he indeed has an “idea” or two. “I don’t know.”

What he does know, he says, is Iran’s objective. The ayatollahs don’t rank the utter destruction of the Jewish state as No. 1 on their wish list — although they do, in fact, want it utterly destroyed.

No, Bauer says, the Islamic extremists who control Iran want a caliphate — that is, an Islamic dictatorship led by a caliph, who is regarded as a political and religious successor to the Prophet Muhammad. A state based entirely on Islamic law — with no democracy, no modernism, and no equality for women, LGBTQ people or anyone else, really.

Michael Bauer concludes. “Are they going to attack? Are we? The Iranian response depends on what will allow them to keep power and then establish regional hegemony (and) nuclear power. That’s what we’re all thinking about now in Israel.”

That, yes. And who gets the car on Friday night?

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