Something colossal happened last Thursday morning  - something inconceivable for the rational mind. At Pi Glilot, Israel fell victim to a barbaric act of war of cataclysmic proportions. Enemy forces staged a well-planned, well-informed attack on a strategic target. They planted a bomb, and after waiting until the proper moment for maximum impact, detonated the device.

Their plan and intention was to kill thousands who would burn to death in the massive fireball their bomb would ignite. Nearby security installations would be incinerated. Motorists would be trapped during Tel Aviv's infamous morning traffic jam with no means of escape as the busiest highway junction in the country became a mass graveyard.

The name Ramat Aviv Gimel, which as one of Tel Aviv's most affluent neighborhoods conjures up images of nouveau riche extravagance, would forevermore, according to the plan, call to mind pictures of destruction entire families wiped out, and a nation sitting on the ground in sackcloth and torn shirts in shock and mourning.

Only a fluke the fact that the bomb was planted on a diesel fuel rather than gasoline tanker prevented the catastrophe.

And as The Jerusalem Post's Matthew Gutman writes in today's paper, the Pi Glilot fuel depot is far from an isolated target. The country is jam-packed with sensitive facilities and vital resources that can be targeted.

Since the attack, our politicians and bureaucrats have taken to finger-pointing and mutual recriminations regarding who was remiss in taking the necessary precautions that could have prevented this heinous attack. The government and the courts have decided that for the duration, Pi Glilot is to remain closed.

Similar to the intense post-Pi Glilot discussions taking place regarding the breaches in security at the fuel depot and other sensitive installations is the current debate in the US over whether it could have been possible to prevent the September 11 attacks.

Today, it is the FBI that is under scrutiny. After it became known that in at least two separate instances last summer, the FBI chose not to follow up reports from field offices relating to suspicious Arabs enrolled in flight schools, FBI Director Robert Mueller was forced this week to accede to mounting criticism.

On Wednesday, Mueller recanted earlier statements to the effect that the FBI could not have foreseen or prevented September 11, and in a candid admission he stated, "I cannot say for sure that there wasn't a possibility we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers."

The truth is, it is not as simple as blaming the FBI for shoddy analysis and threat assessment or blaming our government for failing to close the Pi Glilot facility years ago. Neither the FBI nor Pi Glilot have operated in a vacuum. Over the past decade, the specter of today's terrorist war against both Israel and the US has been clear for all to see.

The fact that the World Trade Center was a target for a terrorist offensive was obvious, since Islamic terrorists first attacked it on February 26, 1993. The fact that terrorists were planning to attack US targets with hijacked planes was known since 1995, when the US stumbled upon Abdel Hakim Murad, an accomplice of the World Trade center bombers, in Manila. According to Seymour Hersh in the current issue of The New Yorker, he told US intelligence officials that "he had earned his pilot's license in an American flight school and had been planning to seize a small plane, fill it with explosives, and fly it into CIA headquarters."

Here, the fact that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat views terrorism as a tool for advancing his demands was similarly self-evident. While Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in an interview with Israel Radio yesterday, continued to play down the difference between Palestinian terrorism before the Oslo process and since the Oslo process, the raw numbers prove his contention that the two are the same to be patently untrue.

Although Palestinian terrorism has been a thorn in our side since the establishment of the Zionist Yishuv in the late 19th century, there has been nothing run of the mill about the terrorism Israel has suffered since Oslo. Whereas from 1978-1993, Israel suffered 254 fatalities from Palestinian terror, in the first five years of Oslo, from 1993-1998, Israel suffered 279 fatalities. Suicide bombers only became a regular feature in 1994.

And yet, throughout the 1990s, as the threat and actuality of Islamic and Palestinian nationalist terrorism against the US and Israel became more and more tangible, both nations repeatedly failed to address the source of their vulnerability. And that source is not primarily, as the current debate in both countries would have it, the failure to take proper precautions at home.

The source of both nations' vulnerability to mega-terrorist attacks like September 11 and Pi Glilot is the terrorists who plan and carry out these attacks and the societies and states that give license and support for their actions and plans. Of course, it is imperative to take all possible measures to protect ourselves on the home front, but even the most elaborate measures will fall short if the source of the problem is left to fester and grow.

After September 11, US President George W. Bush set out a two-pronged plan for defeating terrorist forces. On the one hand, he set up the Office for Homeland Security, responsible for coordinating all domestic measures for thwarting terrorist attacks on US soil. On the other hand, he went to war in Afghanistan and has sent additional troops out to places as far flung as Georgia and the Philippines to assist other governments in routing out their terrorists. Bush understood that to successfully meet the threat of terrorism, a nation needs to both secure itself and destroy its enemy's ability to operate.

Since last Thursday's miraculously averted catastrophe, nary a word has been spoken here about the Palestinian terrorists who carried out the attack on Pi Glilot. These hardened professionals implemented a well-planned, well-executed mission that presumably took months of planning. They had to track fuel tankers, and learn their routes and refueling procedures. They needed to identify a tanker that regularly parked overnight in an unsecured location. They needed to find an observation point from which they could watch undetected as "their" tanker entered the fuel depot and, surrounded by eight others, filled its tank. Today, these unknown, devastatingly dangerous enemies are, undoubtedly, sitting comfortably in their bases - private homes, PA security offices - going over their notes, learning from their mistakes, and plotting their next moves.

This clear and present danger to the lives of all Israelis and Israeli installations can only be neutralized if our enemies now operating out of PA-ruled areas are destroyed militarily. Doing so, however, requires political will, the same political will which has been palpably absent since September 13, 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin shook hands with Arafat to the cheers of the American president on the White House lawn.

CIA Director George Tenet, who is set to arrive here today to set a course of reform in the PA security forces, was instrumental in training these same forces during the decade of delirium which was the 1990s. He brought PA security forces to CIA training bases and taught them the arts of counterterrorist warfare, arts which they have used to such advantage in perpetrating acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians. Rather than following through on Bush's strategy for denying terrorists the ability to operate, Tenet is set to enhance this ability.

Similarly, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon exposed his lack of political will to destroy our enemies' ability to make war against us when he chided Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz at the security cabinet meeting on Wednesday for insisting that it would "be an historic mistake" if Israel does not expel Arafat, the field marshal of the Palestinian terrorist forces.

Today, as the US once again becomes embroiled in European and Arab plans for resuscitating Arafat's PA and setting timetables for final-status talks, Washington seems to have put its war against terrorism on the back burner. Iraq is on hold. The Saudis, far from being investigated for their role in supporting terrorism against the US, are being touted as peacemakers.

Likewise, Israel's government, perhaps due to US pressure, is refusing to take concerted action against the PA, which continues to equip suicide bombers and harbor terrorists who plot cataclysmic attacks.

The connection between the "peace process" and inaction against terrorism is too glaring to ignore. In the 1990s, with both the US and Israel under the tantalizing spell of the Oslo process, Osama bin Laden and his cohorts on the one side and Arafat and his cronies on the other were able to build up their offensive capabilities unhindered. So, too, today a week after Pi Glilot and eight months after September 11 both governments are dissipating their anti-terrorist energies in deflecting blame for their failure to prevent attacks, rather than destroying terrorist bases to prevent future offensives.

The peace process is indeed a powerful potion. So powerful that it has become the principal weapon of the enemies of the US and Israel in preventing the two democracies from taking the military measures necessary to enable true peace to be achieved.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Americans this week have been swamped with dire pronouncements by their leaders warning that additional terrorist attacks on US soil are a foregone conclusion. From Vice President Richard Cheney to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Americans this week were told it is only a question of time before they will again experience mass murder similar in scale to the September 11 attacks.

Also this week it surfaced that on March 27, the very day the Arab League convened in Beirut to discuss the much touted Saudi "peace plan," a clandestine conference of leading al-Qaida, Hizbullah, and Hamas operatives took place in the Lebanese capital.

Given this confluence of discoveries and warnings, one could have reasonably expected that the State Department's annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, released on Tuesday, would be a no-holds barred explication of the threats posed by terrorist organizations and their sponsors against which the US is currently at war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell himself gave cause to believe the report would meet this expectation when, in releasing the document, he announced, "This report, mandated by Congress, is the 22nd such annual report to chronicle in grim detail the lethal threat that terrorism casts over the globe."

Sadly, at least with regards to Palestinian terrorism against Israel, the report is a painful disappointment. Far from detailed, and a football field shy of the truth, it paints a muted, almost apologetic picture of Palestinian terrorism. So far from accurate is the version of events that one is given pause to consider whether the State Department is committed to playing a helpful role in winning the war against terrorism.

An examination of the report must first begin with its reporting on terrorist attacks. Its "Chronology of Significant Terrorist Incidents, 2001" lists all terrorist incidents that occurred worldwide during 2001 that the department deems "significant." According to the report, "An International Terrorist Incident is judged significant if it results in loss of life or serious injury to persons, abduction or kidnapping of persons, major property damage, and/or is an act or attempted act that could reasonably be expected to create the conditions noted."

As Aaron Lerner of Independent Media Review Analysis news service notes, the chronology contains only nine incidents of Palestinian terrorism against Israel in all of 2001. It is far from clear how the State Department chose which attacks to mention. Some of the nine took place within Israel's pre-1967 borders, and others took place outside of them. Some were large-scale massacres, while others were isolated drive-by shootings. The most likely explanation is that the State Department considered significant only attacks in which non-Israelis were killed or wounded, as in all but one of the nine, foreign nationals were among the victims.

While not included in the department's own definition, a determination that the only "significant" terrorist incidents are those which involve harm to non-citizens of the state in which the acts are perpetrated could perhaps be defended if it were applied across the board. But going over the list, it is clear that this is not the case. The State Department provides relatively detailed accounts of 37 terrorist incidents in India, none of which involved any non-Indian victims.

Thankfully, the massacres at the Dolphinarium discotheque and Sbarro restaurant make the list. The Dolphinarium massacre apparently warranted note because among the 21 victims was Sergei Pancheskov of Ukraine. Similarly, Sbarro presumably receives notice because among the 15 dead were two American citizens and five members of the Schijveschuurder family, who held dual Israeli-Dutch citizenship (although the State Department mentions only that they were Dutch). Again this is unclear, because the report fails to mention that another victim of the Sbarro attack was a tourist from Brazil.

The Foreign Ministry, which lists victims murdered in terrorist attacks since the start of the Palestinian terrorist war on its Web site, counts 95 terrorist attacks in 2001 that resulted in 191 fatalities. The total death toll from attacks noted by the State Department is 56.

Among the 86 terrorist attacks and 146 victims the State Department deemed insignificant were the assassination of tourism minister Rehavam Ze'evi on October 17; the massacre of 15 (including one Philippine national) on an Egged bus in Haifa on December 2; the murder of 10 Israelis in an attack on a Dan bus outside of Emmanuel on December 12; the March 26 murder of 10-month-old Shalhevet Pass, gunned down by sniper fire while being wheeled in her baby carriage at a playground in Hebron; or the murder of five and wounding of 100 Israelis blown up by a Palestinian terrorist outside a shopping mall in Netanya on May 18 to name just a few examples.

Then there's the problem of characterizing Palestinian terrorism. Although the Aksa Martyrs Brigades made the list of foreign terrorist organizations, the report claims that sources of external aid to the group are unknown. This even though Israel provided documentary evidence to the State Department proving that Yasser Arafat personally authorized payment to the group; that the brigades are indistinguishable from Tanzim and work closely, if not seamlessly, with Tawfik Tirawi's General Intelligence Service in the West Bank; and that members of Arafat's security forces double as members of the Aksa Brigades.

As regards Tanzim, in the country report concerning Israel and the PA, the State Department claims that Tanzim "is made up of small and loosely organized cells of militants drawn from the street-level membership of Fatah." Here too, the State Department ignores the facts. The fact is that Tanzim itself has claimed that Arafat is the organization's supreme leader and that Marwan Barghouti, the head of Fatah in the West Bank, is its field commander. Israel, again, has provided documentary evidence proving conclusively that Arafat siphoned funds from the PA budget, to the tune of $200,000 per month, to each of the Tanzim regional commanders in the West Bank.

When questioned about the documents provided to the US government by Israel, Ambassador Francis Taylor, the State Department's coordinator for counter-terrorism, stated, "We don't have any question about the authenticity of the documents provided by the Israeli government. We are continuing to study those documents and to draw our own conclusions about what they mean."

Clearly, the documents meant nothing for those who wrote and approved the State Department's 2001 report.

The terrorism report also notes and to a certain degree draws conclusions about international links among terrorist organizations and between these organizations and states that support their actions. Yet somehow, when it comes to state support for terrorism against Israel, no conclusions are drawn. For instance, there's the problem with arms smuggling. While the State Department applauds Egypt's actions in combating terrorism, it makes no mention of the rampant arms smuggling taking place along the Egyptian border with the Gaza Strip. Very rarely does a week go by without an IDF announcement about another tunnel for arms smuggling at Rafah being exposed and destroyed. Only this past week, the IDF exposed a massive tunnel, complete with electric lighting and a telephone cable connecting Palestinian Rafah with Egyptian Rafah. The Egyptian government has done nothing to stop this illicit flow of arms, and on several occasions Egyptian soldiers have fired on IDF troops patrolling the international border.

Further, the report contains bizarre accounts of Israel's capture of the Santorini and Karine A weapons ships. Of the Santorini capture, the report states, "In early May, the Damascus based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) tried to smuggle weapons into Gaza aboard the Santorini." While no doubt an accurate description, the report makes no mention of the fact that the arms were destined for PA forces.

The account of the Karine A capture is even more incomprehensible. Given that the interdiction occurred in January 2002, the State Department was not obliged to make mention of the episode at all, but since it did, one could expect for it to do so accurately. And yet, here too, underplay was the order of the day. According to the report, "In January 2002, Israeli forces boarded the vessel Karine A in the Red Sea and uncovered nearly 50 tons of Iranian arms, including Katyusha missiles, apparently bound for militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip."

Apparently? The captain of the ship, Omar Achawi, was the deputy commander of the PA's Naval Police. Its crew was Palestinian. The commander received his orders from Arafat directly, and the entire operation was reportedly agreed upon last May when Achawi accompanied Fuad Shubaki and Arafat to Russia and met secretly with Iranians, while Arafat met with President Vladimir Putin.

President George W. Bush himself implicated Arafat directly. Briefing reporters after meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on February 7, the president said in response to a question about maintaining contact with Arafat, "Mr. Arafat has heard my message... that he must do everything in his power to reduce terrorist attacks on Israel. And that at one point in time, he was indicating to us that he was going to do so, and then all of the sudden a ship loaded with explosives shows up that most of the world believes he was involved with." "Most of the world" apparently does not include the State Department.

Saudi support for Palestinian terrorism is similarly downplayed and distorted. While Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayaf personally set up a fund paying the families of dead terrorists $5,333 each after September 11, the State Department limits its characterization of Saudi support for Hamas to funding from "private benefactors in Saudi Arabia."

This past week, terror warnings caused traffic halts on the Brooklyn Bridge, as New Yorkers were forced to wait until police investigated a "suspicious package." New York police officers came over here to learn from the Israel Police how to deal with suicide attacks in population centers. Since September 11, the fact that the forces attacking Israel and the US are one and the same has become obvious. The State Department terrorism report's whitewash of this reality jeopardizes the ability of both nations to destroy this threat to their countries and citizens.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Speaking to the Likud central committee on Sunday night, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said any discussion of Palestinian statehood "is dangerous to the State of Israel and will prematurely increase the pressures on it."

Given the international fallout from the Likud's stinging rejection of the prime minister's view restatements of support for Palestinian independence by Washington, Brussels, et al, as well as the Labor Party's full-throated advocacy of the cause of Palestine, it is possible that Sharon was right, although it is unclear what is different about the "international community's" support for Palestinian statehood this week than its support for it last week.

Yet even if discussing the issue at the central committee may have been impolitic, the question of whether setting up a Palestinian state serves the interests of the State of Israel is far from immaterial.

In his own remarks before the committee, Sharon's rival, Binyamin Netanyahu, argued that the conferral of statehood on the Palestinian Authority is dangerous to Israel, because the moment the Palestinians are granted sovereignty, Israel will have no control over whether Palestine is militarized or demilitarized.

Netanyahu is on the right track, even if he may not have chosen the most appropriate occasion to air his views. But even he misses the point. The PLO, as a member of the Arab League, is already a party to a military alliance. The absence of Palestinian sovereignty has not prevented Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from cooperating militarily with Egypt, Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Iraq, or Saudi Arabia. And it has not prevented the EU and the US from training PA forces.

The Palestinians continue to arm themselves with everything they can get their hands on. They have schooled their children in the language of jihad and produced another generation of terrorists. All this they have done without recognized sovereignty.

In other words, from a military perspective, it is doubtful whether de jure Palestinian statehood is significantly more dangerous than the de facto statehood that exists today. The problem is not whether Palestinian state is recognized, but Palestinian empowerment in general.

Proponents of Palestinian statehood on Israel's political Left have promised the establishment of such a state will solve all of our diplomatic, security, and demographic problems. In spite of almost 20 months of Palestinian war against us, these arguments still have allure and therefore demand careful analysis.

Diplomatically, it is unclear what advantage would accrue to Israel by conceding a priori that it accepts and even supports Palestinian statehood. Oslo was based on the strategic assumption that the adoption of a conciliatory stance would benefit Israel diplomatically.

Yet, since Oslo began, even when Israel was most forthcoming, the process itself constricted our diplomatic and policy prerogatives rendering us more vulnerable diplomatically than ever before.

Under the Rabin and Peres governments, for example, Israel was internationally condemned for the decision to pave bypass roads in Judea and Samaria, even though doing so did not constitute a breach of the accords. Similarly, the policy of denying Palestinians entry has been consistently and roundly condemned, although the measures are wholly legal and permitted in the framework of the accords.

And of course, the very notion that appeasing Palestinian aspirations would bring about international acceptance of Israel was literally blown to smithereens after Arafat reacted to Ehud Barak's unprecedented offers at Camp David by going to war. Rather than taking Israel's side, the international community has reacted to this situation by increasing its diplomatic isolation. Indeed, even the Bush administration, which is so outspokenly sympathetic, last November became the first US administration to openly support Palestinian statehood. Israeli openness and flexibility toward the Palestinians, far from bringing openness and diplomatic acceptance, have consistently fostered only greater diplomatic weakness and international isolation.

The security arguments for Palestinian statehood are equally open to question. One argument claims that granting the Palestinians sovereignty will satisfy their political yearnings and therefore they will live in peace. Perhaps. But why then has Arafat used the territories already granted him as a launch pad for attacks? And why has he stated repeatedly that he will use any further territory granted for the same purpose?

At the same time, we are also told that Arafat's aspirations are unimportant. Israel will simply build a fence and the Palestinians will effectively vanish. But this, too, can't be right. Israel also has a fence along its border with Lebanon. It has not prevented cross-border shootings, incursions, and rocket attacks. A fence only keeps out those who don't wish to enter in the first place, and the Palestinians wish to enter even more than Hizbullah.

This Palestinian desire brings us to the demographic problem. From Yitzhak Rabin to Yossi Beilin to Haim Ramon, the Left has argued that the real reason to give the Palestinians control over territory west of the Jordan and to grant them statehood is to prevent them from overrunning Israel. It was, for instance, Rabin's repeated contention that holding on to 3.5 million Arabs in the territories would make it impossible for Israel to maintain its identity as a Jewish, democratic state. Forecasts claim that, by 2020, there will be an equal number of Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan River.

But this also fails to convince. While it is no doubt true that annexation of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip would present a demographic problem, it does not follow that Palestinian statehood is the answer.

Establishing a Palestinian state does nothing to change the patterns of population growth. In fact, Israel's Arab population and the Palestinian population in the territories have seen their largest increase since the implementation of the Oslo Accords. More than 100,000 Arabs have made their way inside the Green Line, and it is projected that more than 100,000 more have entered the PA.

Establishing a Palestinian state that would presumably control its immigration policy would only exacerbate this trend, for dramatic increases in Palestinian population will cause a steep rise in pressure on Israel to allow these new Palestinians to enter for work, then marriage, then family reunification. And even if Israel were to shut its borders with a high fence as promised, overcrowding in Palestine will only serve to exacerbate its irredentist tendencies, thus again increasing the likelihood of further terrorist onslaughts.

The single-minded advocacy of Palestinian statehood as a mode of neutralizing this threat has prevented successive Israeli governments from actually coming up with more workable and effective plans to reverse demographic trends. This week, the Interior Ministry decided to ban family reunification for West Bank and Gaza residents. This decision, which one hopes Ramon applauds, is one way to reverse the trend. Other plans, such as encouraging lower birthrates and increasing Jewish immigration, have never been seriously discussed.

The conclusion that emerges from this brief exploration of the issue is twofold. On the one hand, contrary to Netanyahu's claim, it is not de jure statehood, but unbridled empowerment and legitimization of the Palestinians' irredentist aspirations that pose a threat. On the other hand, further empowerment of the Palestinians, which independence would undoubtedly cause, far from advancing Israel's diplomatic, security and demographic interests, works only to their detriment, while blind advocacy of such empowerment prevents us from discussing more effective and simpler ways to advance those selfsame goals.

Putting a happy, if inaccurate, face on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s visit with US President George W. Bush, a “high-ranking source” told journalists on Sharon’s plane the US agrees with Israel that reform of the Palestinian Authority is a precondition for renewing the peace process.

Almost simultaneously, US Secretary of State Colin Powell refuted this claim. In a press briefing with British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, the secretary said that, in the meetings with Sharon, “We’ve talked about the need to see reform within the Palestinian Authority… but we didn’t get into any detailed discussions [about] what might be a precondition for something else.”

The truth is, it doesn’t matter anyway. For even if the Americans had agreed to condition talks on reform as the Israeli source claimed, the Palestinians they hope will replace Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat – Muhammad Dahlan, Muhammad Rashid, and Saeb Erekat – will bring no change. Not only has Dahlan, the Preventive Security Service chief in Gaza, done nothing to combat terrorism in his area of responsibility, his organization has been directly responsible for terrorism against Israelis. The attack against the schoolbus from Kfar Darom in November 2000, which killed three adults and maimed 4 children, for instance, was carried out by his deputy.

As for combating corruption, Rashid, now touted as the future financial boss, is the present financial boss. Aside from Arafat, who empowered him with total prerogative over all PA finances, there is no one in the PA more responsible for its corruption and lack of financial transparency than Rashid.

Saeb Erekat, the diplomatic dynamo of the trio, is a glaring example of the rift between the PA leadership and the Palestinian people. Few Palestinians are known so well abroad yet pull so little weight at home as Erekat. In short, the planned replacement team will simply bring more of the same – more terrorism, more corruption, and more diplomatic paralysis. And of course, according to Powell, its ascent to leadership is not a condition for restarting negotiations.

General crowing about reforming the PA aside, the only action item that came directly from Sharon’s visit in Washington was Bush’s announcement that he is sending CIA Director George Tenet back here next week to “help rebuild a security force in Palestine that will fight terror, that will bring some stability to the region.” Powell assured journalists that Tuesday night’s massacre in Rishon Lezion will in no way delay Tenet’s mission.

Sadly, the clear, inescapable message emanating this week from Washington is that pro forma condemnations of mass murder of Israeli civilians aside, terrorism against Israel pays off. Kill Jews, and your security forces will be strengthened. Call for millions of martyrs to march to Jerusalem, and your removal from power and reform of your terrorist proto-state will not be preconditions for renewed negotiations or further Israeli concessions.

In his photo opportunity with the prime minister, the president repeatedly extolled the Saudi regime. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Bush said, is “the man who laid out the vision for peace.” Here, too, the president signaled that there is no price to pay for aiding and abetting terrorism. After all, the Saudi Crown Prince discusses his vision of a rump Jewish state which, once bereft of defensible borders, will be recognized by the Arab League, while also paying families of dead bombers $5,340 each and transferring tens of millions of dollars to Hamas and Islamic Jihad to fund continued terrorism against Israel.

Bush did not limit his remarks to the need to rebuild Palestinian security forces; he also managed to hint that he sees justification for suicide bombers. Sitting next to Sharon, just half an hour after the deadly attack in Rishon Lezion, Bush noted, “I deeply hurt when there is a lack of hope for moms and dads of anybody – Palestinian moms and dads – it bothers me. It bothers me to think there are some whose children are so hopeless they’re willing to commit suicide.”

Bush had nothing to say of the Palestinian media and school system that teaches children to channel their hopelessness into acts of mass murder. He had not a word to say about the hopelessness of the hundreds of newly orphaned Israeli children whose parents were murdered by these children of Palestine.

This situation is appalling and alarming. It is appalling, because the clear line now emanating from the White House is the same as that emanating from the UN and the EU – namely, Israel is expendable. While Israel is a staunch, unwavering US ally fighting the same enemies the US fights in its war on terrorism, while Israel serves as a forward base for the free world in its struggle against rogue regimes hell bent on achieving the capabilities to attack the US and Europe with weapons of mass destruction, attacks against Israel are tolerated, even understood and justified.

The president’s clear message that he has chosen the Saudis over Israel is alarming because the US administration is the only ally Israel has. Israel has no diplomatic recourse anywhere else in the world. The UN is an organ devoted to undermining Israel’s right to exist. The EU is a body devoted to selling Israel out to curry favor with the Arab world. Asian countries, while happy to buy weapons systems from Israel, have no dog in this fight.

How did Sharon react to the administration’s new policy toward Israel? With the only weapon at Israel’s disposal – the truth. To the administration’s expressed admiration for the Saudi dictatorship, Sharon said he would be happy to invite the Saudis to participate in a peace conference once they stop supporting terrorism. Sharon dispatched Education Minister Limor Livnat to lay down the evidence that the visionary leadership of Saudi Arabia is a prime force for terrorism against Israel and for strengthening the most radical elements in a radicalized Palestinian society.

To the administration’s insistence that Israel must accept the US plan to reconstitute the war-fighting capabilities of Arafat and his lieutenants, Sharon responded by explaining that Arafat is a terrorist and the PA a terrorist entity. To back him up, Sharon sent Minister-without-Portfolio Dan Naveh out in front of the cameras to lay down the documentary evidence that Arafat and his lieutenants are directly responsible for mass murder of Israeli civilians; for forcing their Palestinian subjects to act as human shields for terrorists; and for using EU funds to finance war crimes against Israel.

The truth is, of course, highly inconvenient. Accepting the fact that the Israeli-Arab conflict is in fact the Arab conflict with Israel means facing up to Saudi lies and changing the way Saudi Arabia is treated in spite of its oil wealth. Understanding that the Palestinian Authority and the regimes that support it fight Israel not to build a Palestinian state but to destroy the Jewish state, means that one needs to think long and hard about the nature of Palestinian nationalism. It is so much easier and quicker to speak of the “hopelessness” of mass murderers.

Ignoring reality is easier than accepting the truth and the Palestinians and their supporters, by using terrorism instead of regular armies to fight Israel, make doing so seem almost moral. In his remarks on Wednesday, Powell laid bare this phenomenon when he said, “Every time one of these events [massacres of Israelis] happens, it takes us off the course we were on for a while.” Israelis know, and when it happens to them the Americans know, that terrorism is not simply “one of these events,” but a strategic threat to their very existence. The problem is that by targeting civilians rather than soldiers, by hiding behind civilians rather than protecting them, terrorists make it difficult for democracies to explain or accept that they are fighting a war, and that a total war for their destruction is being waged against them. After all, on Tuesday only 15 people were killed, and during the bloody month of March, only 130 people were killed. Israel’s army remains intact. Over the past 20 months, enemy forces have destroyed only two tanks.

The Palestinian method to destroy Israel (i.e. to liberate Palestine) is to use terrorism to make life unbearable for Israelis. And life is unbearable today. Not only is our economy falling apart as Israelis risk their lives to buy shoes or join friends for a cup of coffee less and less, but today we know that we cannot even sleep securely in our own beds, as the Palestinians have taken to breaking into our homes to shoot us while we and our children are asleep.

This is a sustained, coordinated, pre-planned war and Israel is forced to fight it with both hands strapped behind its back, because the international community refuses to acknowledge reality.

Sharon promised that while in Washington he would lay out “the most detailed peace plan” ever developed. As expected, he didn’t really have anything new to say, but not, apparently, because he lacks a vision for a peaceful Middle East. Rather, in the current climate, where the administration has chosen to turn its back on reality in favor of the repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed policy of appeasement toward the Arabs and pressure on Israel adopted by the last eight administrations, all he can do is tell the truth.

The IDF is now poised to launch an operation against the terrorist infrastructures in the Gaza Strip that will probably take a few weeks if not longer to complete. Given the US’s new stand, we can safely assume that pressure that has already begun not to do anything “irrevocable” to Arafat and his terror bases will reach a fever pitch after 48-72 hours of fighting. Israel will plow through for a week or two, and the US and the EU will then proceed to rebuild within months the terror infrastructure the IDF manages to destroy.

Come July, August, the Palestinians will have reconstituted their strength. Israelis will again be murdered by the dozens on a daily basis, the IDF will be unleashed again by the government and then curbed by international pressure. The carnage, the targeting of civilians by the Palestinians, and the targeting of military commanders by the Israelis will be referred to by the world as “tragic events” and “cycles of violence,” and Israelis will continue to die.

Ariel Sharon through all of this will continue to tell the truth and take what measures he can to protect as much as possible the lives of Israelis so expendable to the high-minded diplomats. The carnage will end only when the Bush administration finally sets aside these diplomatic delusions and opens its eyes to the truth that will never disappear.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Wednesday’s New York Times led with the banner headline, “New Strategy Set by US and Saudis for Mideast Crisis.” The article cited administration sources, explaining that the outcome of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s visit to US President George W. Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, was a “division of labor” between the two.

The Saudis are to deliver Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to the negotiating table, and Bush is to deliver Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, starting at their meeting on Monday. The endgame, according to the article, is the establishment of a PLO state along the lines set out by president Bill Clinton in December 2000.

The Clinton proposal, which was declared null and void by the Bush administration early last year, envisioned the establishment of a Palestinian state in about 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, all of the Gaza Strip, east Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, and the Halutza dunes inside pre-1967 Israel.

The Clinton proposal also gave legitimacy to the Palestinian demand for a “right of return,” allowing for the immigration of several thousand in the framework of family reunification.

If the Times’ report is true, (and the Times seems to have a knack for forcing events to follow its stories), it can be said that the Bush administration is quite simply following in the footsteps of all US administrations since Dwight Eisenhower’s – allowing Israel to beat Arab aggression militarily, but forcing it to lose the war politically.

So it was in 1956, when Eisenhower forced David Ben-Gurion to beat a speedy retreat from the Sinai and Gaza at the end of the Suez campaign. The president justified the uncompromising demand by promising Israel that if the Egyptians were again to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the US would send its navy to reopen the waterway by force. In 1967, when Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the straits, president Lyndon Johnson begged off, forcing Israel to stand alone.

After the Six Day War, which should have led to a complete political reshuffling of the region, the US again protected Israel’s neighbors.

Adopting UN Security Council Resolution 242, the US again dragged Israel along by extolling the resolution’s balance – conquered land would be returned to the aggressors, but not all of it, for Israel would be allowed to retain all territory necessary to ensure it had “defensible” borders.

Promises aside, since the Carter administration, the US has accepted the Arab misinterpretation of 242 – that Israel is required to return all the lands it conquered.

In 1973, the US administration was again on hand, wresting the Egyptians from the jowls of defeat. Henry Kissinger prevented Israel from destroying Egypt’s Third Army, allowed the Egyptians to escape with honor and thus enabled the creation of the current Egyptian myth – that Israel lost that war.

The Ford and Carter administrations strongly pressured Israel to sign away the Sinai in exchange for peaceful ties with Egypt, which after 23 years have yet to materialize, although Egypt, rearmed with American assistance, now poses a military threat unimaginable in the past.

In Lebanon in 1982, the Reagan administration stepped in to save a routed Arafat. The Americans paved the way for his escape with his troops from Beirut to Tunis, free to fight another day. In the meantime, the US forced Israel to withdraw from much of Lebanon and allowed the Syrian army to remain.

And in the Gulf war, the first Bush administration not only prevented Israel from achieving political advantage, it prohibited Israel even from defending itself against unprovoked Iraqi ballistic missile attacks. After isolating Israel from the coalition, the administration proceeded to force its democratic ally to the negotiating table to discuss the transfer territory to the Arabs. When the negotiations failed to bear fruit, the administration meddled in the 1992 elections to assist in the victory of the more forthcoming Labor Party.

Although the Clinton administration served in a decade unscathed by large-scale war, but marked by an increase in rogue states’ audacity and terrorist attacks on US targets, Clinton consistently urged Israel to accept Palestinian terrorism and insisted on turning a blind eye to blatant PA breaches of its commitments to Israel.

The Clinton administration’s addiction to pressuring Israel to accept Arab aggression under the guise of peacemaking led to unprecedented meddling in Israel’s internal politics. The end result could be seen in the twin pictures of Clinton impertinently announcing his peace plan after his successor had already been elected, and Madeleine Albright chasing after Arafat outside the US Embassy in Paris in a vain attempt to get him to return to the negotiating table he had just overturned.

The refusal of successive administrations to locate the US Embassy in Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, is not simply an indignity, but another example of how the US has consistently prevented Israel from gaining any political advantage from its military victories against Arab aggression.

Why has the US treated Israel so shabbily? Mainly because it can get away with it. After all, Israel has no other diplomatic outlet, given that the American people is not as cynical as the State Department.

Throughout this history, the US has justified denying its democratic ally the fruits of its military victories against despotic aggressors “in the interests of peace.” This policy has never brought peace, nor has it engendered stability. Rather, just as feeding the beast acts not to placate it but to strengthen it, so US placation of the Arab world at Israel’s expense has legitimized Arab rejection of Israel.

Never having to worry about losing irrevocably in their wars against Israel, rogue states like Syria, Iraq, and Iran ostentatiously build up non-conventional capabilities to destroy Israel. For their part, supposedly moderate regimes, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are free to inspire as much anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment as they wish, knowing there will never be a serious price to pay, even if this hatred foments a war they will lose.

Today Bush, perhaps to a degree even greater than his predecessors, has sole power to determine which side will emerge victorious from the current Palestinian terrorist war against Israel. And what would a much maligned and dreaded Israeli political victory over the current terrorist war look like? 

First and foremost, it would see Arafat’s physical disappearance from the scene and the dismantling of his Palestinian Authority as a political and military organization. Just as in Afghanistan today and hopefully in Iraq in the near future, the US has and will set up friendly, quasi-democratic governments, so Israel, or the US, would set up a new Palestinian government, committed to coexistence with Israel and the provision of political and economic freedom to the Palestinian people. Although sovereignty would not be promised, the chances of sovereignty being achieved, naturally and peacefully, would be greatly enhanced if the Palestinian people is allowed to develop democratic institutions and economic prosperity.

There is nothing wrong, immoral, imperialistic, or even anti-Palestinian about this plan. In fact, it would allow the Palestinians the opportunity to reconstitute their civil society after eight years of living under a corrupt dictatorship, which impoverished and subjugated them and told them to value murder more than life.

The only thing wrong with this plan is that it allows Israel to win this war politically.

In seemingly siding with the Saudis over Israel, the Bush administration has opted for the status quo, even though the status quo has failed repeatedly. On September 11, the US was attacked by the consequences of the status quo. Decades of hatred of the US, fuelled by despotic, US-backed regimes, which have seen the value of US guarantees as successive administrations have sold Israel out to Arab pressure, empowered al-Qaida to strike.

The belief that today, the US is again preventing Israel from defeating the PA, has made Arafat stronger than he ever was before. It should have been clear by now that the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel, supported by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, together with al-Qaida’s war against the US – backed by the same governments – have rendered the status quo not only destined to failure, but also dangerous to US interests.

Given the almost schizophrenic nature of the US administration’s Middle East policies, it is still anybody’s guess what Bush will decide to do. One thing is certain though: For the US to be able to win its war on Islamic terrorism, Israel must be allowed to win its war on Palestinian terrorism, both militarily and politically.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post