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BETTER TIMES ARE NOT slow in coming. The massive defeat of five Muslim armies and the Iranian theocrats who planned the war does not immediately turn the Muslim lion into a Jew-loving lamb. But the plan Yigal worked on while Pinky and his generals prepared the counterattack removes the lion’s claws, and teeth.

And balls.

To Yigal, a student of history, it might have appeared that charity following victory would accomplish more than brutal vengeance. The examples are classic, well known, and an article of faith in every Western doctoral course in international relations. After World War I, the victors so emasculated the vanquished enemy that Germany’s obsessive dedication to revenge brought forth a second, even more horrific world conflict. Learning from this, after the fall of the Axis powers in World War II, the West took a more humane tack, actively assisting Germany, Italy, and Japan to rebuild, in the process creating three long-lived democracies so opposed to war that their armies became mere miniatures of what they had been, purposeless by design and in posture merely defensive.

Yigal rejects this model.

As he tells Judy the night of the first day of the counterattack, “After the Second World War, the West was dealing with the West. The victors and the vanquished shared a common secular civilization, so compassion made sense. Here we are dealing with people whose worldview does not accommodate other religions, and who approach the secular as even worse.”

“They’re our neighbors.”

“Geographically,” Yigal says. “But if your neighbor’s very essence, his every urge, is to destroy you because you are different, then the only way to deal with this is to disarm him, reduce him to impotence, and then simply ignore him. For a thousand years, the Muslims stewed in their own enforced ignorance—this after centuries of being the light of the world. Do you know how many Western books were translated into Arabic from 900 AD to today? A thousand. It’s the same number Greece translates from other languages in one year. Our neighbors are intent that Islam rule the world, and they wish the world to look like them. That being the case, I don’t care what they wish for. I don’t care if my neighbor hates me. I care only to make sure he is disarmed. What is their weapon? Oil. With oil, we gave them strength.”

“But that’s geography again, isn’t it? You can’t take away their oil. They’re sitting on it.”

“Honey,” Yigal says, “just watch me.”