One of the questions President Bush will face in the coming war against Iraq is what role is to be played by Israel. The Daily Telegraph got ahead of this story with a dispatch that also ran in yesterday’s New York Sun. In it, Alan Philps reported from Jerusalem that “Israel has told America that it will retaliate if attacked by Iraqi missiles during the promised American assault to remove Saddam Hussein. The decision means that Israel is likely to be a participant in the campaign, in contrast to the 1991 Gulf War, when it was restrained by pressure from Washington.” The dispatch goes on to say that Prime Minister Sharon had told President Bush that Israel would not stay on the sidelines the way it did the last time around.

All this puts us in mind of when there was a war against an earlier Axis. It was in 1940, and a Zionist newspaperman named Vladimir Jabotinsky wrote a book called “The Jewish War Front.” That book advanced, among others, the proposition that a Jewish army of 100,000 troops should be raised to fight on all the allied fronts “to prove,” as he put it, “just what some people would prefer to forget — that this is the Jews’ war as much as Britain’s, France’s and Poland’s.”

Between 1940 and today, of course, the Jews founded a country that has a democratic government of its own. At the moment, it has its hands full with fending off terrorist attacks from the Palestinian Arabs. From this distance, we wouldn’t presume to counsel it one way or another on how involved to be in the war against Saddam Hussein. But if the American aim in this war is to help the Iraqi people liberate themselves from Saddam Hussein, inviting full and unfettered Israeli participation would be a way for Mr. Bush to underscore the universal nature of the fight for freedom and to lay the groundwork for a future peace.

A failure to do this — indeed, a rejection of this proposition — was one of the profoundest errors of his father’s presidency. Recall that when Iraq started raining Scuds on the Jewish state, Israel sought to dispatch its warplanes against what Iraqi Scud sites it could find. To do so, it needed what were called IFF — for “identify friend or foe” — codes that would enable its aircraft to avoid being downed by American and allied fire. The Pentagon refused to make such codes available to Israel, for the Bush administration feared other, anti-Jewish countries within the Gulf War coalition, would object. No doubt one reason that Israel’s current government has announced its intention to retaliate is to avoid getting treated with the same patronization as greeted an earlier government of Israel in the earlier war.