I have great admiration for how President Joe Biden has used his empathy and physical presence in Israel to convince Israelis that they are not alone in their war against the barbaric Hamas, while also trying to reach out to moderate Palestinians. Biden, I know, tried really hard to get the Israeli leadership to pause in their rage and think three steps ahead — not only about how to get into the Gaza Strip to take down Hamas but also about how to get out — and how to do it with the least civilian casualties possible.

Although Biden expressed deep understanding of Israel’s moral and strategic dilemma, he pleaded with Israeli military and political leaders to learn from America’s rush to war after 9/11, which took our soldiers deep into the dead ends and dark alleys of unfamiliar cities and towns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials left Jerusalem feeling that although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands that an overreach in Gaza could set the whole neighborhood ablaze — and is probably the most cautious of Israel’s leaders today — his right-wing coalition partners are eager to fan the flames in the West Bank. Settlers there have killed at least seven Palestinian civilians in acts of revenge in the past week, and the Israeli military is even more hawkish than the prime minister now and is determined to deliver a blow to Hamas that the whole neighborhood will never forget. Meanwhile, Israel’s right-wing minister of finance is refusing to transfer tax money owed to the Palestinian Authority, sapping its ability to keep the West Bank under control, which it has done up to now.

Color me very worried. No, color me extremely worried.

Because in the first week of this war, the Supreme Leader of Iran and the leader of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, appeared to be keeping very tight control on their militiamen both on the border with Israel and in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But as the second week has gone on, U.S. officials have picked up increasing signs that both leaders may be considering letting their forces more aggressively attack Israeli targets, and maybe American targets if the United States intervenes.

Have no doubt: The possibility of a regionwide war that could draw the United States in is much greater today than it was a few days ago, senior U.S. officials told me. As I write on Thursday night, The New York Times is reporting that a U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. More missiles probably from pro-Iranian militias were fired at U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria and at Israel from Lebanon.

Israel is not likely to let Iran use its proxies to hit Israel without eventually firing a missile directly back at Tehran. If that happens, anything can happen. Israel is believed to have submarines in the Persian Gulf.

What makes the situation triply dangerous is even if Israel acts with herculean restraint to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza, it won’t matter. Think of what happened at Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital on Tuesday.

As Israeli columnist Nahum Barnea pointed out to me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, achieved more this past week with an apparently misfired rocket “than it achieved in all of its successful missile launches.”

How so? After that rocket failed and fell on the Palestinian hospital in Gaza, killing scores of people, Hamas and the PIJ rushed out and claimed — with no evidence — that Israel had deliberately bombed the hospital, setting streets ablaze across the Arab world. When Israel and the United States offered compelling evidence a few hours later that the PIJ accidentally hit the Gaza hospital with its own rocket, it was already too late. The Arab street was on fire and a meeting of Arab leaders with Biden was canceled.

Imagine what will happen when the first major Israeli invasion of Gaza begins in our wired world, linked by social networks and polluted with misinformation amplified by artificial intelligence. No wonder pro-American Arab leaders are beseeching Biden to beseech the Israelis to act in ways that leave them some space to continue to work with Israel.

That is why I believe that Israel would be much better off framing any Gaza operation as “Operation Save Our Hostages” — rather than “Operation End Hamas Once and for All” — and carry it out with surgical strikes and special forces that can still get the Hamas leadership, but also draw the brightest possible line between Palestinians in Gaza and the Hamas dictatorship.

Hamas has not only taken Israelis hostage; it has taken Palestinians in Gaza hostage as well. They did not have a vote in Hamas’ savage kidnapping of Israeli grandmothers and babies. Take a moment and listen to a Center for Peace Communications and Times of Israel series “Whispered in Gaza” from January — interviews with Palestinians in Gaza about what they really think of Hamas’ corrupt and despotic leadership. Israel has to respect and build on their views if it hopes to build anything sustainably positive in Gaza from this war.

But Israel today is in raw survival mode. We Americans can advise, but Israel is going to do what it is going to do.

Where I have a vote — just one — is in America. Biden, in his prime-time speech Thursday, vowed to ask Congress for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel to get through this war, along with an immediate injection of $100 million in new funding for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

I’m all for helping Israelis and Palestinian civilians at this time — but not without some very visible strings attached.

If Israel needs weapons to protect itself from Hamas and Hezbollah, by all means ship them. But in terms of broader economic aid for Israel, it should be provided only if Israel agrees not to build even one more settlement in the West Bank — zero, none, no more, not one more brick, not one more nail — outside the settlement blocs and the territory immediately around them, where most Jewish settlers are now clustered and which Israel is expected to retain in any two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Netanyahu’s coalition agreement actually vows to annex the whole of the West Bank.)

I am well aware that Hamas has been committed to eliminating the Jewish state since its inception — not because Israel has expanded settlements in the West Bank. But if Israel has any hope of nurturing a Palestinian leadership that could replace Hamas in Gaza in the long term and be an effective partner for a two-state solution, then the settlement project has to stop and it has to stop now.

As for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, it needs, as soon as possible, to elect or appoint a new leadership — one with the competence to build decent Palestinian institutions in a noncorrupt fashion that earns its people’s respect and legitimacy. The Palestinian Authority, which is ready to coexist with the Jewish state, needs to be able to actually win a free and fair election against Hamas in the West Bank or Gaza.

Without those two sets of conditions being met, there’s no future for moderation in this corner of the world, no chance of a sustainable peace and no chance of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia — no matter if Israel eliminates every single Hamas leader, foot soldier and rocketmaker or no matter how sympathetic one might be to the Palestinian cause.

The keystone of Netanyahu’s 15 years as prime minister has been strategically expanding settlements to prevent any prospect for a contiguous Palestinian state ever coming into being.

In doing so, the Israeli leader knowingly and blatantly acted against U.S. interests. He was willing to destabilize United States allies Jordan and Egypt to pursue more settlements. He was willing to risk America’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, if the pact meant halting settlements. He has shown no willingness yet to halt settlements to secure a historic breakthrough with Saudi Arabia.

Folks, Israel is a wealthy country today and money is fungible. For way too long, U.S. economic and military aid has allowed Netanyahu to have his cake and eat it too — to fund the insane settlement project, and maintain an advanced military, while not having to raise taxes on the whole Israeli public to pay for it all. While Israel got U.S. aid in one hand, the budget of its Ministry of Defense paid to build roads for settlers with the other hand. Uncle Sam’s wallet, indirectly, was the slush fund for Netanyahu’s politics.

So, no, we’re not telling Netanyahu what to do in Gaza — Israel is a sovereign country. We’re just going to tell him what we’re not going to do anymore — because we happen to be a sovereign country too.

The U.S. has been indirectly funding Israel’s slow-motion suicide — and I am not just talking settlements. Look at what Netanyahu did in June. To buy off the ultra-Orthodox parties he needs in his coalition to keep himself out of jail on corruption charges, Netanyahu’s government gave the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers “an unprecedented increment in allocations … including full funding of schools to not teach English, science and math,” explained Dan Ben-David, a macroeconomist who has focused on the interaction between Israel’s demography and education at Tel Aviv University, where he heads the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research. “This budgetary increment alone is more than Israel invests each year in higher education altogether — or 14 years of complete funding for the Technion, Israel’s MIT,” Ben-David said. “It is completely nuts.”

Bottom line: Netanyahu has a completely incoherent strategy right now — eliminate Hamas in Gaza while building more settlements in the West Bank that undermine the only decent long-term Palestinian alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, which Israel needs to safely leave Gaza.

If this is the season of war, it also has to be a season for answers about what happens the morning after. I am hardly the only one who wants to know. As Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari wrote in an essay last week in Haaretz about Netanyahu’s government: If it “does dream of exploiting victory to annex territories, forcefully redraw borderlines, expel populations, ignore rights, censor speech, realize messianic fantasies or turn Israel into a theocratic dictatorship — we need to know it now.”

Tom Friedman, who was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Louis Park, writes a column for the New York Times.

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Then & Now . . . and: The Permanent Family Record

After a considerable absence, we welcome back JIM FITZSIMONS of St. Paul: “Subject: Uncle Ralph Then & Now.

“A couple/few years ago, the Pioneer Press ran a special section in their Sunday paper. It was a retrospective featuring several photographs that had appeared in the paper over the decades.

“One photo was taken in June of 1942. It shows a group of very excited second-graders getting out of school to start their summer. My dad showed me the photo and asked if I recognized any of the kids in the picture.

“In the center of the photo, there’s a boy with what looks like a note pinned to his overalls, for his parents. (They did that then.) That boy is my dad’s older brother Ralph. He was about 8 years old.

“Ever since I saw it, I’ve wanted to get a picture of my Uncle Ralph, who is still alive, holding the photo.

“Last month, my younger brother got married, and all sorts of family members gathered to witness the grand event. My Uncle Ralph was among the people who attended the wedding. That meant I had the perfect opportunity to get the picture I wanted.

“And here I have to thank my cousin Jeannie, Uncle Ralph‘s daughter, because she had the brilliant idea of actually going to the school and taking the picture. I didn’t think of it. I wasn’t sure the school still existed.

“So, there he is as an excited 8-year-old set free from school for a whole summer. And then, at the ripe old age of 89, retracing those 81-year-old steps!

“Thank you, Jeannie, for the great idea!

“And thanks, BB, for letting me share!”

Our theater of seasons

WAYNE NELSON of Forest Lake reports: “The ground in Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, was covered in a carpet of beautiful fall colors.”

Dept. of Neat Stuff . . . Grandpa’s Statuary Division (Piggy Bank Subdivision)

GREGORY J. of Dayton’s Bluff: “Here is more of my Grandfather Leonello’s statuary. It is over 70 years old.

“These three particular statues are what is now known as carnival chalkware. It is a form of plaster statue that is hollow, usually brightly painted and was given away as prizes at carnivals and fairs in the olden days.

“Because carnival chalkware was hollow, it was often turned into a bank with the addition of a slot for coins. There was usually no way to get the coins out except to break the bank, so to speak. They were inexpensive, and none of them were exactly works of art, so smashing them to get the money out was no great loss and probably a lot of fun.

“Here are three variations on the piggy-bank theme. The first is a classic piggy bank with a whimsical face, colorful paint job and a coin slot on the top.

“Next up is a pig family, with Dad wearing a bow tie and all the pigs having long eyelashes. The coin slot is in the back.

“Finally we have a clown riding a pig. Maybe that is something clowns used to do. At least he appears to be a friendly clown who doesn’t mind having a coin slot cut into his back.

“I’m just guessing here, but I suspect the classic piggy bank could be my grandfather’s original design, but the other two must have been created from commercial molds — because identical versions of these, but with different paint schemes, can still be found today.”

The Permanent Fatherly/Daughterly Record . . . or: Fellow travelers

THE MIDDLE DAUGHTERLY: “In 1987, I graduated from college, and my father and I decided to take a trip through the American Southwest. It would be a chance for me to practice my driving and a chance for him to see Billy the Kid country. He’d been interested in the Old West since he was a child growing up in the North Country.

“We had a little blue Ford Fiesta and a couple of cassette tapes. We both liked country music, so I brought along the Judds. They were a mother/daughter singing team, so it seemed appropriate.

“We mostly listened to the radio, changing stations as a signal faded out. We were traveling south, and every mile made it easier to find country music on the dial. A song called ‘The House of Blue Lights’ was popular at the time. Whenever it came on the radio, Dad got excited. He would wait for the chorus to come around and then sing: ‘At the house, the house, the house of blue lights!’

“I laughed because I’d seen Bill Cosby do exactly the same thing on ‘The Cosby Show.’ My father used to refer to all sitcoms as ‘Father Gets Ripped Off.’ He felt they made a general practice of ridiculing fathers. I had to occasionally remind him that everything Bill Cosby did to embarrass his kids was something I’d seen him do.

“Our best innovation on the trip was ‘Change of topic.’ At 21, I was a little on the opinionated side. We would start arguing over some small thing, but our rule was that if the other person said ‘Change of topic,’ the first person had to drop the argument — not another word allowed. It worked like a charm. We drove from Minnesota to New Mexico and back without a harsh word.

“As a brand-new driver, I was OK on the wide and lonely roads but nervous in traffic. One terrible morning, we were driving out of a large city. Kansas City, I think. It seemed like there were eight lanes of traffic. I had a concrete barrier on my left and endless pickups and cattle trucks whizzing past on my right. I was terrified, but my father kept saying: ‘You’re doing great. Really great! No problems. Don’t worry.’ He told me it would take four years to get comfortable driving, and that proved to be exactly right.

“I got to balance the scales when we hit Raton Pass on the New Mexico/Colorado border. As we drove down through the Sangre de Cristo mountains, he kept crossing the centerline.

“‘Dad,’ I squealed. ‘Watch out!’

“My father steered back into our lane. ‘It’s the strangest thing,’ he said. ‘I can’t seem to keep it on the road.’

“’That’s because we’re driving down a mountain!’ I said. ‘You have to use your brakes!’

“’Oh, thank you,’ he said, and managed to keep it in the lane from then on.

“I was delighted to have something to twit him about, because he’s a very good driver. He is living the good life at a senior care facility now, but he kept his license all the way to age 92.”

Older Than Dirt

THE DORYMAN of Prescott, Wis.: “Subject: Bittersweet notice.

“You know you’re Older Than Dirt if your colonoscopy results state that because of your age, further procedures are not recommended.”

Accidents of mirth . . . Including: Know thyself!

RUSTY of St. Paul reports: “I had issues with my blouse one day this summer.

“This is one of those lightweight shirts that I use for camping and sun protection. It has a mesh ‘window’ across the back for ventilation, with a flap of material over it.

“One of the sleeves had been fed through the back window, either when I took it off last or from the washing machine. Even though I have a graduate degree in . . . science (!), it took me a minute to figure out why I was feeling like the Hunchback when I tried several times to feed my left arm/shoulder through the sleeve.

“Later I was eating oil-cured Moroccan olives (from Morelli’s; really good). I wanted to spit the pit out into my compost bin and whiffed on my spit, so the pit went down the front of my shirt. These olives are really oily, so as the pit rolled it left an oil stain (four of them) every time it contacted the shirt.

“The trifecta for the day: I was trimming a fairly tall hedge. It was very hot out, so I had the top two buttons open. I kept feeling something scratching my chest and tummy, and my shirt was billowing outward. I’m a big person, but not that big. As I reached up and leaned forward to trim, the trimmed branches were entering my shirt instead of falling to the ground!

“As I type this, I’m wearing a T-shirt: ‘Fool me once . . . .’”

Shirts happen

Red’s Offspring, north of St. Paul: “I want to thank the gentleman in the Roseville Perkins who graciously allowed me to read his shirt:

“’NATIONAL SARCASTIC SOCIETY

“‘As if we need your Support’”

Then & Now . . . Peace & War Division

KATHY S. of St. Paul: “Subject: May Peace Prevail.

“One of the joys of my retirement is the time I can spend watching educational programs, and news programs filmed in other countries. If I live at least 50 more years, I might actually learn enough Japanese to understand the snippets of Japanese I hear on NHK News. Or not.

“Today NHK News had a wonderful story about letters exchanged between Harold J. Bray, the last American survivor of the doomed U.S.S. Indianapolis, and Kunshiro Kiyozumi, the last survivor of the Japanese submarine that sank it. They were both read at a Memorial to the U.S.S. Indianapolis, whose sinking is a horror story suppressed by the U.S. Navy for many years. Its last mission was to carry parts for what became the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it is pure dumb luck that any of the American sailors on board survived to be rescued after four days in a sea full of sharks.

“Neither of these men expressed animosity toward the other. Mr. Bray said, in part: ‘There are no winners in a war. . . . Let us look forward to working together to build a better, safer world.’

“Mr. Kiyozumi answered, in part: ‘I am moved that . . . we can talk to each other as friends. I will continue making efforts to work for a peaceful world.’

“Among members of my generation, which went to war in Vietnam, are a number of veterans who have reached out to those we fought. I honor them, and other former combatants who now work to spread peace.

“Gosh knows we all need it!”

BAND NAME OF THE DAY: Break the Bank