“Auschwitz borders” was a term coined by Israel’s UN representative, Abba Eban, in the wake of the Six Day War in 1967. He was referring to the terrifying narrowness of Israel’s middle, only 8 miles separating the Arab armies at the Jordanian border from the deep blue sea into which they had been promising for twenty years to drive the Jews.

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Now, Time magazine has come up with a new way to look at the same situation. “No place in Israel is more than 40 minutes from a stretch of sand” beach, explains Time’s Karl Vick. This is Time’s answer to the riddle posed on its cover this week (surrounded by a Star of David composed of daisies), “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.”

It turns out, those Yids are having so much fun in the sun that they couldn’t care less. The issue’s table of contents features a photo of a motley collection puffing away on who-knows-what in a hookah and watching the waves lap the Tel Aviv seafront. So what if four Israelis, including a pregnant woman, were mowed down in their car by terrorists last week, which — given the size of the respective populations — is equivalent to the slaughter of 200 Americans? Me, worry?

Vick finds miscellaneous Israelis to offer sound bites illustrating his thesis. The article’s modal figure, a real estate agent named “Eli,” says: “People in Israel . . . . don’t care if there is going to be war. They don’t care if there is going to be peace. They don’t care. They live in the day.”

No doubt it is this utter indifference to life, even their own lives, that prompts so many young Israelis to become suicide bombers, blowing themselves up in Palestinian markets, cafés, and buses. What? You haven’t noticed that story yet? Keep posted to Time: it’s probably already been assigned.

Never mind that this idea is absurd. It is no more absurd than what Time has just published. The large majority of Jewish Israelis and some of the non-Jewish ones serve in the army, and the men spend decades in the reserves. The bulk of Israeli families have one or more members likely to be called to duty in the event of war — and virtually everyone has had a friend, relative, or loved one counted among the casualties. So dearly is each soldier cherished that Israel has repeatedly swapped prisoners in ratios of hundreds or even thousands to one, sometimes in exchange only for the remains of a fallen warrior so he may be given a proper resting place.

The reality behind most of the quotes that Time used — a reality that it twisted into the diametric opposite of its actual meaning — is that Israelis care desperately about peace but have suffered too many disappointments. Seven years of the Oslo peace process culminated in Palestinian rejection of Israel’s offer of a final settlement at Camp David in 2000 and then of President Clinton’s bridging proposals half a year later at Taba. These rebuffs were punctuated by the second intifada, a wave of terror that claimed the lives of more than one thousand Israelis, equivalent — in proportion to population — to fifteen times the toll America lost on 9/11.

A second peace process, launched by President Bush in 2007 in Annapolis, ended in 2008 when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas brushed aside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of further concessions on borders, Jerusalem, even refugees. Meanwhile, Israel’s unilateral withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza were followed by rocket fire into Israeli kindergartens from groups espousing annihilation of Israel and death to all Jews. The result is that Israelis have grown cynical about the peace process not because they don’t care about peace but because they don’t believe the Palestinians do. For this they have an abundance of evidence, some of it in Palestinian opinion polls and electoral outcomes, and much of it written in Jewish blood.

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post shares Time’s malevolence toward the Jewish state, but both of these papers ran major features in the past week discussing whether Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could morph into a peacemaker.

This question is fatuous. All Israeli prime ministers have seized any opportunity for peace. The hawkish Menachem Begin ceded the Sinai for a peace treaty with Egypt and sought one with Lebanon as well. The even more hawkish Ariel Sharon ordered the Gaza withdrawal. The left-of-center hawk, Yitzhak Rabin, signed the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan and the Oslo agreements with the PLO, and Ehud Barak, a former military commander, pulled Israeli forces entirely out of Lebanon. The Israeli public’s yearning for peace is so strong that no leader, of whatever feather, can afford to spurn a chance for it.

In contrast, Arab publics have rarely supported peace and few of their rulers have espoused it. The exceptions have mostly been assassinated, notably Jordan’s first King Abdullah, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and Lebanon’s Bashir Gemayel.

Washington, DC, is a city that has seen many antiwar demonstrations, but when Middle Eastern leaders arrived for the start of the new peace process, they were greeted by an anti-peace demonstration. Something called the US Palestinian Community Network staged the protest under the banner: “Palestinians Say No to Negotiations: Palestine is Not for Sale!”

President Abbas, who presides over the West Bank, is clearly more a man of peace than his predecessor, Yasir Arafat, or than Hamas, the anti-Semitic terror group that rules Gaza. Is he ready to make a deal? Would he dare? And does he or the Palestinian Community Network represent Palestinian sentiment? These are the real questions, and not whether Israelis want peace, which only the blind or the bigoted could doubt.