TEL AVIV — I first met Col. Erran Morad 25 years ago. Well, sort of.

Morad is the fictional brainchild of Sacha Baron Cohen, the famous prankster and comedian, who has been stirring controversy with his new show “Who Is America?” The colonel, one of several of Mr. Cohen’s new alter egos, is an ultra-macho ex-Mossad agent who travels around the United States duping Israel-loving conservatives into embarrassing themselves, for example by pulling down their pants to fight terrorists.

So of course I didn’t meet the real Morad. But I met a Morad. Or someone resembling him.

My wife and I were young Israeli volunteers in a small North American Jewish community. One day, we got an invitation to a lecture by a retired Israeli military officer. He was in America trying to boost Israel’s image. And his tools were his thick Israeli accent, his brash manner, and his captivatingly dry observations. “You know,” the retired lieutenant colonel told his crowd of mostly elderly Canadian Jews, “we could throw all the Arabs into the Jordan. But the world won’t let.” I assume he meant Jordan the country, not Jordan the river, but who knows.

This lieutenant colonel became a part of my family’s folklore to this day. We use his phrase as an absurd excuse for our simple failures. “I truly tried to convince the pigeons to get off the balcony,” I might say to my wife, “but the world won’t let.”

We found so much humor in our Morad (and in case you wonder, yes, I do remember his real name) because he seemed outdated even then, in the mid-1990s. Like an effigy from the ’50s or maybe the ’60s, back when Israel was still thought of as a land of camels and Uzis. But we weren’t that country any more two decades ago — and we are certainly not that country today. Today, the military is not as dominant in Israel’s culture as it used to be, and Israel is more Westernized, more capitalist, more focused on trade and high-tech innovation, and less rugged, than it was in its early years. Morad is a caricature of our past, not our present.