The western world is listening to Israel with renewed interest in the wake of last week's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. However, the Israeli government and bureaucracy have chosen to take a muted public stance.
These atrocities are not directly or immediately connected with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And besides, there would probably be a strong temptation for Israeli representatives to say to the world: "We told you so." However, out-of-office politicians continue to speak their minds, their comments probably a good reflection of official Israeli thinking.
Former prime minister Mr Benjamin Netanyahu has a crisp phrase to describe the atrocities: "We received a wake-up call from hell." He told The Irish Times: "We either work to dismantle the entire terror network or it will dismantle us." By "us" he does not mean just Israel, but the entire civilised world. He warns there is worse to come. "This was just a harbinger of the future."
His prophecies cannot be taken lightly, since in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists, he wrote about subversives placing a nuclear bomb in the basement of. . .the World Trade Centre.
In the event, it was two hijacked aircraft. "They gave us, from their point of view, a premature warning." Whereas 5,000 lives may have been lost, he says an appropriate response from the international community could help save "millions of lives in the future and our whole civilisation".
Mr Netanyahu has hands-on experience of dealing with the terror phenomenon. In his military days he was a member, along with the man who succeeded him as prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak, of an Israeli special operations unit which successfully stormed a Sabena aircraft hijacked en route to Tel Aviv Airport in 1972.
Mr Netanyahu says those who carried out the recent US attacks represent "a virulent strain of Islam". Like the communists, he continues, their goal is world domination but although the communist goal was irrational, they generally behaved in a rational manner in a crisis, as shown by the conclusion to the Cuban missile stand-off and the Berlin airlift of 1948.
"These guys are the opposite," he says, describing them as "crazy" and "completely irrational". Their goal: "To destroy the US or bring it to its knees." They do not need rockets to convey their missiles to the target; as suicide bombers they are their own delivery system.
Although there was a link to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the motivation for the activities of this fanatical element of Islam was much broader. They did not hate America because of Israel, rather Israel was seen as an outpost of the free, libertine world power which was corrupting "the pure soul of Muslims". The solution was to "take out" the entire infrastructure of terrorism. One lesson was that "you don't make deals with terrorists". There should be no question of rejecting, say, Basque terrorists, but negotiating with Turkish ones.
"The fact that terrorist groups might spring out of particular grievances was not relevant because the fight against terrorism was the same as the fight against the Nazis. You did not care what the Nazis' grievances were."
I put it to him that the war against the Nazis was more straightforward since there was an identifiable enemy in a specific geographical area. Mr Netanyahu does not accept the distinction and lists the countries and groups he says are sustaining the terror network and, in some cases, building nuclear weapons: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Islamic jihad and, of course, the followers of Mr Osama bin Laden.
On the other side of the Israeli political divide, Mr Isaac Herzog was cabinet secretary to the Labour government headed by Mr Barak which ousted Mr Netanyahu. On this issue, his tune is not much different. "We believe that the Western world, Europe, the democracies, were unaware that there is a philosophy out there in certain regimes that sees the values of western civilisation as something to annihilate." The scale of the threat needs to be properly appreciated, Mr Herzog continues. "It is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is a whole regime of thought that has been bubbling and brewing for decades." The world would have to fight "a war without borders".
The Israeli response to similar attacks and atrocities in the past has often been criticised on human rights grounds. The riposte of Israeli representatives has been to ask how Western countries would react if suicide bombers were walking their streets.