Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz summed up the awful realities that are playing out in the Mideast with the apt expression, “The masquerade ball is over.” By which it was meant that the explosive events of recent days have stripped away a good many grotesque false faces, among them the sham in the world’s appeasement-at-any-cost circles that “diplomatic solutions” will someday calm the Middle East’s homicidal Islamic gangsters.

Hamas and Hezbollah are what they are, masks gone. War is what they want, implacably, the both of them. Israel, pushed too far, at last has no choice but to accommodate them. War is what Hamas and Hezbollah get.

And so from north and south, Hamas and Hezbollah each cross Israel’s borders to murder and kidnap, and join in an unholy compact, their mission purely and simply to annihilate the state of Israel.

Particularly given the Israeli military’s admirable restraint under fire — the counterattacks in Gaza and Lebanon have been surgically precise, carefully calculated to hold down civilian damage to the barest minimums — there is around the globe somewhat less blustering condemnation of Israeli “aggression” than is customarily heard whenever Israel lifts a finger in self-defense.

The air and sea blockade of Lebanon is “contrary to international humanitarian law,” bleats the European Union, but that’s about the extent of it for now, there being relatively few world leaders who are willing to agree that terrorists have every moral and ethical right to make cross-border raids and take soldiers as hostages.

No, even those camps that are not necessarily among Israel’s most loyal supporters recognize that Hamas and Hezbollah have brought down firestorms on their heads strictly through their own provocations, and essentially pointless ones at that, testimony to nothing much more than obsessed evil. There can be no reasonable dialogues with them, and any continued pretense that such are possible is finally only foolish folly.

And so off come the masks in Gaza, where it is plain that the bloodthirsty Hamas leadership is far more concerned with wiping Israel off the map than in forming a functioning Palestinian state in the territory ceded to them by Israel.

Off come the masks as well in Lebanon, which has done precious little to disband the armies of Hezbollah gunmen that roam unchecked — as even Saudi Arabia the other night acknowledged — and which now suffers for this conspiratorial inattention with a bombed-out airport, thus severely affecting commerce and tourism.

And off come the masks in — well, put it on the table for what it is. Till now it has been impolite to say this out loud to Iran and Syria: You’re next. But Israel, standing in the debris of what used to be the masquerade ball, is very close to saying exactly that.