Some of Israel’s enemies are easy to spot. They sport the 3-K’s (Kaffiyeh, Koran and Kalashnikov); cry ‘Allahu Akhbar!’ as they kill Jews and other infidels; think Hitler was a great guy but call Israelis “Nazis” all the while denying the Holocaust ever happened (go figure); vow to make all Israel’s Jews drink from the Mediterranean Sea; decry “the Jewish custom of using human blood to make matzot,” and just generally spew out antisemitism with every breath of exhaled air.

Others, notably journalists - at least the liberal majority of them - hide behind facades of respectability while criminally manipulating their audiences/readership. They laud their objectivity even as they embrace and promote the fraudulent “Palestinian” cause over Israel’s authentic one.

These self-acclaimed “elites” portray Israel as an apartheid state and its people as land-thieves, war criminals and human rights abusers.

Anyone with two cents worth of grey matter can identify the threats posed by these fiends: the former ache and work to destroy Israel through bloodshed; the latter grind it out around the clock to generate global hostility towards the Jewish nation.

Arguably, though, the men and women who signify as great a danger - and perhaps an even greater one - to Israel, are those the Israelis eagerly embrace as their best friends: people like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, George W. Bush, Nikolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair, ahem, the Pope, and as time could soon tell, though we can at least HOPE we are wrong, John McCain.

What makes these men a threat to Israel is their very friendliness or, more accurately, their desire to be “fair.”

Thus we had Sarkozy, the smilingly conservative French president, assuring Israeli President Shimon Peres Monday that France will always be Israel’s “true friend” and that he will continue to support Israel “anywhere.”

“The State of Israel’s right to exist securely is not debatable, and I believe that since the Holocaust the world bears the responsibility for this. I will continue to support Israel anywhere, as I did in my previous visits to Arab states,” he said.

According to Ynetnews, Sarkozy gushed all over Peres. And why not? He’s a nice guy - Sarkozy, I mean.

“It is a great honor for me to greet you here as the president of the State of Israel, but it is an even greater honor to greet you as Shimon Peres. I have a lot of respect for you and I view you as a symbol.”

Although he did not explain what exactly it was that Peres - the Oslo Architect - symbolized to him, the French leader didn’t hesitate to describe his excitement at seeing the Israeli flag waving on the Champs-Élysées. And he made sure Peres knew how “he worked uncompromisingly against antisemitic acts and did not hesitate to jail people who had burned Israeli flags or vandalized the Israeli Embassy.”

Surely no-one would call this man an enemy of Israel. Would they?

But notice what Sarkozy said to Peres behind closed doors, according to French presidential spokesman David Martinon, as quoted in The Jerusalem Post Tuesday.

“Israel’s security depends on a stop to the colonization [of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)].”

Sarkozy was building on what French Foreign Ministry spokesman Pascale Andreani had stated earlier in the day when she reiterated that France “condemns” continued “colonization” that could threaten the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Not that Sarkozy was directly threatening to stop being Israel’s “true friend.” But in his own words, “My conviction is clear: the best guarantee for Israel’s security is the creation of a modern, democratic and viable Palestinian state before the end of 2008.”

And here is the rub.

But instead of spelling it out - if I really need to - let me recount a few anecdotes.

In 1996, the year Israel celebrated 3000 years since King David made the city the capital of his kingdom, United States Vice President Al Gore came to Jerusalem and addressed a large audience of Jews in a Hebrew University sports stadium in honor of that occasion.

I happened to be there, and listened in wonderment as the special guest began his address by reading from the Hebrew Scriptures Ezekiel 37, the well-known passage of the dry bones that were reconstituted into physically whole, breathing beings.

Closing his Bible, Gore gazed out over the thousands of Jewish Israelis who were clinging to his every word, and told them in dramatically-measured tones that they, a regathered people in their reborn Jewish national home, spelled the fulfillment of this prophetic vision.

Jews around me wiped their eyes. Probably so did I. Thinking on Israel’s restoration readily moves me to tears.

But then, in his very next breath, Gore proceeded to explain why, after having finally returned to their beloved ancient homeland, and that out of the very valley of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the Jews now needed to give away half of that land to be used for the establishment of an Arab state.

Bill Clinton, who visited Israel four times as president, was wildly popular here. On one occasion, in a spurt of spirit, he even vowed that “if Iraq came across the Jordan River [to attack Israel] I would grab a rifle and get in the trench and fight and die.”

Some Israelis actually said they would vote for him if, on completing his second term in the White House, he decided to run for election as prime minister of Israel.

But Bill Clinton used his very popularity with the Israelis, and the trust they put in him, to push forward the Oslo Process and lay the groundwork for what would come next.

What came next was George W. Bush, another true friend of Israel who, in the aftermath of 9/11 drew lines in the sand that should have seen the US stand squarely with Israel on one side against Al-Qaeda and the PLO on the other.

Instead Bush became the first US president to reward the PLO’s decades of terrorism by openly endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state “side-by-side with Israel” - which really means with Israel reduced to half of the land and the other half turned into this 22nd Arab state.

So it has been with former British Prime Minister - now Quartet Special Envoy - Tony Blair.

So it is with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who plans to come to Israel on March 16 at the head of a high level delegation of ministers and on Tuesday received permission to address the Knesset in German - despite appeals from some in Israel that she not do so.

Friend Germany on Monday condemned Israel’s plan to build hundreds of new homes in Jerusalem and Samaria, saying this is “unacceptable [and] posing a potential danger to the peace process.”

German’s foreign ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said Merkel’s government urged Israel to refrain from building new settlements and to evacuate existing ones.

These Jewish communities on biblical Jewish lands, he said, undermine the creation of the Palestinian state foreseen by the international roadmap for Middle East peace. That a German would support the idea of rendering any territory juden-rein (Jew-free) is horrendous.

This is what is happening here: Warmly sincere world leaders seduce Israel with promises of undying friendship and support into relinquishing the cradle of Jewish nationhood; giving it to a people who remain committed - bound by their very religion - to using it as a springboard from which to destroy the sliver of Jewish national home that is left.

Let’s look just once more at Sarkozy’s words and deeds:

First he states clearly and firmly: “The State of Israel’s right to exist securely is not debatable, and I believe that since the Holocaust the world bears the responsibility for this.”

And then he states, just as unequivocally: “My conviction is clear: the best guarantee for Israel’s security is the creation of a modern, democratic and viable Palestinian state before the end of 2008.”

He can perform all the verbal acrobatics he likes, but given the unchanged realities on the ground, Sarkozy is gambling with the very right to exist he insists he believes Israel has.

As Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Sunday told visiting US envoy James Jones: “The creation of a Palestinian state is not the required answer to Israel’s security needs.”

And in the somber words of Shas Party leader Eli Yishai on March 3: “The country is facing an existential threat of a kind not seen in its history.”

That this is so is in no small way thanks to the efforts of Israel’s friendly foes - who smile and hug the Jews while pressuring them to “take risks for peace.”