Iron Dome has brought nothing new to the table, and it has not solved the inherent problems of a defense system based on missiles trying to intercept enemy rockets. Therefore the rejoicing and the preening in the wake of the test’s success hide the far bleaker truth.

The public relations campaign accompanying the test is full of deceptions and half-truths. It has ignored the flaws in the systems and has created illusions. This is because Iron Dome will not protect the communities directly surrounding Gaza nor, apparently, locales even further away from the Strip.

In likely scenarios of rocket fire on the home front, the stock of Iron Dome missiles is liable to run out way before the rocket barrages end. And in any case, because of the high cost of using Iron Dome for defense, the Palestinians in the south and Hezbollah in the north can defeat us at the bank, without even launching a single rocket.

To begin with, Iron Dome is not capable of protecting the “Gaza envelope” because of the Qassam rockets’ brief flying times. A Qassam makes its way from Beit Hanoun to Sderot in about 14 seconds. Iron Dome needs about 30 seconds to make an interception attempt.

That is – the system is not capable of protecting anything at a distance of less than four kilometers from the Gaza Strip.

This bitter truth was discovered in 2008 by cabinet ministers, who decided to fortify all the locales less than four and a half kilometers away from the Strip. This known fact did not deter the security establishment representatives from deluding the inhabitants of the “Gaza envelope” into thinking that the success of the Iron Dome test means protection for them.

But the problem is even worse. While the Qassams launched at Sderot were relatively slow, during the course of Operation Cast Lead Hamas was already launching third-generation Qassams, Grads and improved Grad models. These are three or four times faster than the earlier models.

A simple calculation reveals that in the face of this threat, Iron Dome’s minimum range has increased from four to 12 and perhaps even 16 kilometers.

Under such circumstances, Iron Dome will not be able to protect even Ashkelon.

Another deception spread by the media was the statement that henceforth the southern locales will be protected not only from Qassams but also from mortar shells, a claim that not even the developers of the system are making.

Nevertheless, when reporters and pundits hailed Iron Dome’s ability to intercept mortar shells, no one from the defense establishment bothered to correct them.

Another problem is the price of the interception. An Iron Dome missile will cost about $100,000; a Qassam costs several dozens of dollars. An attempt to prepare for the launching of thousands of rockets (as in the Second Lebanon War) entails an untenable cost in the south as well as the north – where the threat consists of about 40,000 rockets in Hezbollah’s hands.

Worse still is the plan to deploy another system developed by Rafael – Magic Wand. The price of one missile in this system will come to about $1 million.

The inhabitants of the western Negev, Kiryat Shmona and the Upper Galilee have to know the truth. They must not follow blindly the trumpet blasts of the media festival that has accompanied the successful test of Iron Dome. This dome is not going to protect them.

To confirm the medical diagnosis of the Egyptians’ over-emotionalism, the adventure reporter for Channel 2’s “Fact” program, Itai Engel, was dispatched to Egypt. He returned with exactly the diagnosis he had been seeking. The predictable title of Monday’s report on one of Israel’s most prestigious investigative programs was: “The Men Weep at Night.”

Engel went around to cafes and filmed “the Egyptian populace” getting excited and angry, moaning and smoking narghilehs. Naturally he did not interview a single Egyptian who wasn’t an anonymous “man in the street” or was not watching the match outside. He did not interview any of the millions of quiet, stay-at-homes who aren’t particularly interested in sports, nor any of the many people who denounced the outcry and accepted the defeat with sportsmanship in interviews in the Egyptian media.

It is becoming more and more evident that we, who see ourselves as an intelligent nation dwelling in the midst of a jungle of wild fools, need increasingly large doses of narcotics in order to maintain our faith in our superior intelligence vis-a-vis our firebrand neighbors. The drugs are provided regularly by “our Arab affairs correspondents,” who are in charge of bringing us shocking curiosities from the Islamic countries designed to depict them as semi-retarded. The greatest expert in this field is Zvi Yehezkeli of Channel 10, who has a regular slot for demonstrating his arrogance, even and especially when he is “praising” progress in some area or another, such as women’s rights.

In this respect, we are no different from any other nation. In order to maintain belief in one’s uniqueness, everyone needs an “other.” What isn’t taken into account is that the need to make a comparison is stupid. Because when a person says to himself, “Look how much smarter I am than so-and-so,” and relies on the other’s stupidity to prove his own intelligence, he comes off looking like a huge idiot himself. And in this respect, Israel’s stupidity cries out.

True, several Egyptian citizens who had the bad luck to be in Algeria at the time of the flare-up after the game fell victim to hooliganism, as did some Algerians in Egypt who paid bodily for the blow to the national prestige of the Land of the Nile. And true, the diplomatic tension between the two countries nearly reached the point of no return, so much so that the man of peace, Libyan leader Muammar Ghadhafi, a saint in his own right, was enlisted to smooth the ruffled feathers.

But let us compare that idiocy to the idiocy of the State of Israel when it believes its national prestige has been damaged. One example is enough: The official justification for launching Operation Cast Lead was that our prestige was damaged. The rationale, which quickly proved to be stupid, was that “no country would remain silent if rockets were being fired at it.” And the idiocy is that today, almost a year after the operation, we have been defeated in the field of international prestige (the Goldstone report), and we are being compelled to reconcile with Hamas, with the mediation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak – leader of that very country we consider the mother of all stupidity. And who can even count the number of casualties because of a stupid war for prestige?

Ergo, it turns out that it is much more rational to channel national frustrations onto the soccer field, with all the hooliganism this entails, and it is a lot more stupid, more expensive and more dangerous to channel such frustrations automatically onto the battlefield.

How amazing: The one who seemed to be irrational suddenly seems like the king of sanity alongside our nation. It is we – we – who are wearing the fool’s cap.