My heart goes out to Benjamin Netanyahu. With one cold, cruel stroke of the pen, the rulers of the world have taken away his most beloved toy – the apple of his eye and the joy of his heart, the rock of his existence and the source of his strength, and above all, the rock of his refuge and safe haven. Or in short, the Iranian bomb.

It seems as if this very day, or perhaps tomorrow, a spoke will be put in the wheel of the Iranian bomb, and it will be ripped from the headlines and from our consciousness for at least the next dozen years or even more. And for Bibi, what will happen now?

A discerning glance can already see the first signs of panic in him: repression, avoidance, a slight quiver in his hairdo, a stubborn insistence that nothing has happened and nothing has changed. But the terrible truth is taking shape. The bomb has gone. From now on, Netanyahu is like a baby that has lost its security blanket, or like one whose favorite teddy bear was thrown into the garbage – the one that warmed his heart during the long nights and infused him with calm and serenity during times of trouble and election campaigns.

In just another moment, the Prime Minister’s Bureau will be like a garden whose faithful scarecrow has been taken away – exposed to the piercing beak of gray reality, deprived of the daily annoyance of insects, stripped of a shield against the tribulations of his job and the botheration of boring routine. No more planning for a glorious commando operation; no more sowing of widespread, useful nuclear fears; no more fanning of heart-warming, blinding panic. No more Churchill! Heaven help us. Just housing, and the cost of living, and the budget, and the coalition, and corruption, and a whole world that insults and scorns and snipes at him.

It truly rends one’s heart.

But our hope has not yet been lost. If salvation doesn’t come from without, we will bring it from within, from ourselves. From the Jewish brain and its wiles. And here it is: As everyone already knows, the State of Israel – of course only according to strange foreign sources – has a respectable arsenal of atomic bombs that long since crossed the 200 mark. More than enough to destroy half the world.

It’s too much. We don’t need so many bombs. It’s true that the entire world is against us, but in the view of security experts (who are also sometimes strange and foreign), destroying a quarter of the world would suffice “to create deterrence,” as they are wont to say in the appropriate offices.

In other words, we have surplus bombs. And here, in these surplus bombs, lies the solution to Netanyahu’s distress. All he has to do is take one of those 200 bombs of ours (according to foreign sources), wrap it up nicely in gift wrapping and give it secretly, as an anonymous donation, to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

To anyone who fears the move might be discovered and embarrass us, don’t worry; nobody will notice the loss of one bomb out of 200. And even if a curious journalist does discover that one is missing, it’s not so terrible. As is the norm in such cases, Israel will grab the lowly guard on duty and cast him into purgatory the way one usually does with scapegoats, and that will settle the matter.

And thus, everyone will once again be happy. The Iranians, because they have the bomb. The world, because it reached an agreement with the Iranians. And of course Benjamin Netanyahu, who will once again be able to cling to the Iranian bomb, to frighten everyone around him with it and to dream at night about commando operations that will return him to the days of his youth. And when he’s alone at home, he’ll once again be able to stick a cigar in the corner of his mouth, stand in front of the mirror and declaim aloud: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, sweat and tears” (and for a change, this time, he’ll even be telling the truth).

And in fact, why deny it? Even I would be a bit calmer. The knowledge that at least one of those 200 bombs of ours had been put into slightly more judicious hands would give me a tiny smidgen of neurotic serenity.