Well, I can tell you one thing: here’s one Israeli who’s NOT guilty of the most recent Arab slur.

The newest accusation launched by our cousins is that we’re training attack snakes to go after them. Like the "Palestinian Viper" pictured above.

Hey-hey! Don't worry about me on this one. I have no desire to get close enough to a thing-with-no-shoulders to even SEE the darn thing, let alone train it.

Nevertheless, the ever-creative newspaper of our alleged “peace partner” Fatah, published an account accusing us dastardly Israelis of training snakes to attack “innocent” farmers. (“Innocent” of what, one might ask. Farming, perhaps.)

According to a news report in Fatah’s Bethlehem news rag Ma’an, what happened was this: a snake bit a woman outside the Jewish city of Ariel. Right after inflicting the bite, local Arabs said, the snake "escaped” toward Ariel.

So obviously, any rational Arab would see the truth: the snake – like a homing pigeon – had been trained to go back to its Jewish master.

Left to my imagination, I’d guess that the snake was going home to collect his reward for a job well done. A live mouse, maybe? Some little thing to take the taste of Arab out of its mouth?

But that wasn’t all. It isn’t only snakes we are supposedly inflicting on our nearest neighbors. We are also dumping -- ah, merde – on their soil, to ruin it.

Understand, one of the problems of buying Arab produce is precisely that – we don’t know what they used to fertilize it, but we can guess. But maybe they think that Arab merde is good for growing plants, whereas Jewish merde is harmful? Probably.

Whatever. There’s no more evidence of the merde dumping than there is of the snake training.

Although I must say, they are getting pretty creative over there on the other side of the ideological divide. Not too long ago Hamas accused Israel of lacing bubble gum with aphrodisiacs and giving them to young Arab men “to corrupt them.”

You have to wonder why they would think that Israelis would want to increase the number of Arabs, wouldn’t you?

Then, too, there was the accusation of our having trained attack pigs. That was near Ariel, too, and also reported by the Ma’an newspaper. Our alleged crime then was that we released wild boars into the fields in order to destroy Arab plants and crops.

But understand this: in that area, both Israelis and Arabs are farming. Do they really think we could train wild pigs to eat and crap on Arab fields only?

And then there was last summer’s highlight, when Israelis were supposedly bringing “super rats” into the Old City of Jerusalem. Here’s what Fatah’s newspaper reported back then:

"[Israeli] settlers have been bringing chests filled with rats and releasing them in the Old City's [Arab] neighborhoods; they breed and have become a major curse... the [Arab] residents' efforts to counter this infestation have failed, especially since cats run away from these rats because of their size and ferocity... All of the conventional efforts to kill them have not succeeded, because they seem to be immune to poison and they breed in the sewers. It is known that this female rat gives birth seven times a year, each time giving birth to 20 babies, which compels Jerusalem's [Arabs] today to face the dangers of settlement and the infestation of rats..."

The day before, Al-Ayyam, a different newspaper, had reported:
"Large numbers of [Israeli] settlers have been bringing huge cages full of rats and releasing them onto the streets and alleys of the Old City... in order to turn the [Arab] residents' life into a living hell, forcing them to leave..."

So last summer we were using rats to attack, today it’s snakes. As Israel National News points out – tongue in cheek, I think:

“There is no scientific evidence indicating that rats or snakes can be trained as attack animals, or that either of the species can differentiate between Jews and Arabs.”

Now that I think about it, though, I do remember a certain wild bunny that braved the waters of a lake near Plains, Georgia, to attack then-President Jimmy Carter while he was out on a solo fishing trip.

Renenber? The bunny approached Carter’s boat, "hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared and making straight “for the President’s rowboat, news accounts said at the time.

Back then, I was pulling for the bunny. And now I guess I’m pulling for our trained snakes, pig, rats or whatever other form of wildlife we can harness.

That was the command, was it not, when we were given this land?

'Be fertile and become many. Fill the land and conquer it. Dominate the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every beast that walks the land.”

We’re doing our best.