With the government's backing off yesterday from its demand for international monitoring of the NIS 200 million it has agreed to transfer to the Palestinian Authority, we see the first concrete consequence of the IAF strike on Hamas military chief Salah Shehadeh in Gaza which killed 14 civilians in collateral damage.

This cave-in is rife with dangerous consequences for Israel.

First, there will be no way of ensuring that this money won't be used to indirectly finance the murder of Israelis by PA terrorists. Second, and perhaps more significantly, the very notion that Israel would agree to transfer any money at all to Arafat's terror-laced PA gives renewed legitimacy to both Arafat and his jihad in the eyes of Palestinian society and the international community. This, as both were just beginning to reconcile themselves with the notion that Arafat and his PA have to go.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres says he trusts the new Arafat-appointed PA Finance Minister Salam Fayed and, so of course, we should as well. Just so, we should all agree with the foreign minister's statement on Sunday that Arafat's Fatah can and should be relied on to fight terrorism. In Peres's view, Fatah, which itself carries out suicide bombings, is to be coddled and embraced so that Arafat and his minions will be convinced to join the fight against themselves.

These Peres-inspired fallacies bring into stark relief the basic problems with Israel's war effort, which must be addressed if we are to stand any chance of winning.

While Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continues to insist that the national unity government is a strategic asset, on the ground we see that just the opposite is the case. The presence of Oslo loyalists in the government has, time after time, prevented Israel from taking consistent action to carry out the war successfully.

As Yossi Sarid, Yossi Beilin, and their radical allies continue to condemn any action Israel takes to defend itself and demand an unconditional Israeli surrender to Arafat's terrorist armies and hate-filled Palestinian public, Peres, using his influence as foreign minister, pushes us to their end.

By insisting, against all evidence, in the face of almost 600 dead Israelis, that the PA is a legitimate partner for negotiations and agreements, the foreign minister maintains a situation where, in spite of Operation Defensive Shield and Operation Determined Path, the PLO has no real disincentive against waging its jihad against Israel.

Peres's continued presence in the government also is a distraction for more realistic ministers, preventing them from formulating effective policies for winning the war. Indeed, the polarizing influence Peres exerts on the government causes a situation where Israel's responses can often be characterized as semi-hysterical shots across the bow, rather than the implementation of a carefully crafted strategy to provide the Palestinians with enough disincentives for fighting that they capitulate.

The last three weeks have laid bare this strategic vacuum. This week it was the decision to continue financing Arafat. Last week it was the government's announcement of its seemingly arbitrary intention to deport male relatives of suicide bombers to Gaza, and two weeks ago it was its anti-democratic and unnecessary decision to establish Jews-only towns.

Added to this mix is the erection of the concrete fence that pushes Israel toward a de facto renunciation of its claim to Judea and Samaria without any public debate or governmental decision on the wisdom of this move. These decisions are not characteristic of a government that knows what its policy is but expose a lack of strategic depth as well as ideological confusion, which harm Israeli democracy as much as they diminish our chances of winning the war.

Rather than coming up with effective strategies, the Likud ministers, as is their stock in trade, dissipate their energies arguing with Peres rather than applying themselves to the real issue at hand, which is winning the war.

And what might such a war-winning strategy be based on? In the first instance, it would recognize that given the international community's hostility toward Israel, a hostility that ensures condemnation for every action Israel takes to defend itself, Israel must make act deliberately and make every shot count. We cannot afford any more mistakes.

Second, if the government were intent on victory, it would realize that it is fighting against two separate forces - the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian people who support their leadership - and separate strategies would be fashioned to deal with each one.

Finally, the government, if it were to form a war-winning strategy, would also work to ensure that every action it takes to deprive the Palestinians of the wherewithal to continue fighting will also bring Israel closer to our own strategic goal of maintaining and enhancing the long-term security and political stability of our Jewish and democratic state.

As Arafat and his lieutenants have made clear countless times, the Palestinian leadership's goal is to liquidate the State of Israel and replace it with a PLO dominated state. As Arafat and his lieutenants have consistently declared since the onset of Oslo, the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem is the first step toward the achievement of their goal.

Given this, Israel must adopt a strategy that will make it impossible for the Palestinian leadership to achieve any of its goals. Saying that this will never be allowed to occur is not sufficient. Over the past decade, Israel's threats and declarations have lost all credibility with successive governments renouncing every red line that they themselves declare.

Implementation of such a strategy directed against the PA could reasonably and without public protest include the application of Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and the reopening of the Temple Mount to Jewish worship.

There is wide consensus in Israel that in any settlement, Israel must maintain its control over the Jordan Valley. Anchoring this consensus as government policy will achieve the twin aims of distancing the Palestinian leadership from achieving its strategic goal of displacing Israel by denying it control of strategic assets and enhancing Israel's long-term security.

So too, enabling Jewish worship on the Temple Mount will distance the Palestinians from their goal of displacing Israel from the heart and soul of Jewish civilization and strengthen Israel's identity as a Jewish and democratic state.

The Palestinian Wakf has adopted the role of systematic destroyer of archeological evidence of the Jewish temples in Jerusalem by conducting illegal excavations beneath Al-Aksa Mosque. A governmental embrace of the ideological, religious, and historic importance of the Temple Mount to the Jewish people will go far toward ensuring that this core aspect of Israel's identity is unimpeachable. Fairly applying Israel's law of free access to holy sites for all worshipers will end the discriminatory practice of barring Jews from free religious worship, thus increasing respect for Israel's laws and strengthening Israeli democracy.

As for the Palestinian people themselves, if Israel is intent on ending their full-throated support and collaboration with terrorism, Israel's government must create disincentives for that support and collaboration. For instance, why should Israel stand idly by as Palestinian families receive thousands of dollars from Saudi Arabia and Iraq in payment for their children committing mass murder? The military commander of the West Bank and his counterpart in Gaza should issue orders that would make them pay for accepting blood money. Military orders to that effect could dictate that such families would be fined five times the amount they receive. If Saddam or Prince Abdullah gives them $25,000, they should owe Israel $125,000. Confiscation of their property could be seen as partial payment.

By the same token, if the military experts believe that deporting Palestinians who aid and abet terrorism to Gaza would act as an effective disincentive for others to do so, then deportation to Gaza should be adopted as policy. There is absolutely no logic, however, to arbitrarily applying this measure only to male relatives of suicide bombers. Are women above the law? What about accomplices who are unrelated? As with all laws and policies, to be effective, a policy of deporting accomplices to terror to Gaza must be implemented without discrimination.

These and other moves could become the pillars of a war-winning strategy. Applied consistently they could make a significant contribution toward winning this crucial war for the very existence of the State of Israel. But, as the government's self-defeating policy of continuing to finance the PA and refusing to make irrevocable moves to break the enemy's will clearly shows, as long as Oslo's champions remain in positions of power, the government will fail at this, its principal task.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In the world arena, why is it that "voices of victims" do not include Jews?

On a clear day in early May at San Francisco State University, Jewish students demonstrating for peace in the Middle East were attacked by a mob in the campus's central plaza. Describing the events the next day, Dr. Laurie Zoloth, the director of the Jewish Studies Program, wrote in a mass-circulation email, "As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters."

This group of counter-demonstrators was not expressing a counter-vision for peace in the Middle East. They were, according to Zoloth's account, since corroborated by other participants, "a hate mob."

As the Arabs and their supporters called out slogans like "Go back to Russia!" "Get out or we will kill you!" and "Hitler did not finish the job," the only people who came to stand by the Jewish Hillel students, (clad in yellow T-shirts embossed with an iron-on reading "Peace, Shalom, Sallam)," were Zoloth and regional Hillel Director Fred Astren.

The police refused to intervene, except in the end by escorting the Jewish students trapped in a corner of the plaza away from the mob. "Not one administrator came to stand with us," Zoloth wrote, angrily noting, "I knew if a crowd of Palestinian or black students had been there, surrounded by a crowd of white racists screaming racist threats, shielded by police, the faculty and staff would have no trouble deciding which side to stand on."

The university maintained its silence regarding the incident for more than a week. Once it began to act however, SFSU President Robert Corrigan claimed that he had asked California District Attorney Terence Hallinan's office to assign a member of its hate crime unit to work with SFSU in investigating the incident. Hallinan himself denied to the San Francisco Chronicle that any such request had been submitted. At the same time, a timeline of the rally posted by Corrigan on the SFSU Web site insisted that "individuals from both sides said offensive words," and blamed both for the incident.

The anti-Semitic riot in San Francisco was not an isolated incident. In April, Arabs in Beverlywood, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles, assaulted three Jewish students, and a Jewish man was assaulted in Oakland in March. Synagogues in San Francisco and Berkeley have been attacked, as have Jews on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where one Jewish man was severely beaten. Meanwhile, Israel supporters on campuses from Harvard to Princeton to the University of Michigan to Berkeley have been heckled, jeered, and threatened by anti-Israel demonstrators who refer to Israel as a racist apartheid state and call for their universities to divest from Israel as they were called upon to do against the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s.

The scattered, although increasingly commonplace, physical attacks on Jews in the United States in 2002 pale by comparison to the hundreds of violent assaults on Jews and Jewish centers throughout Europe, particularly in France and Belgium, where attacks on Jews became so frequent and violent in the spring that the Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a travel advisory, warning Jews of the dangers of visiting both countries.

All of these attacks on Israel and Jews in the United States and Europe are also directly related --ccording to the perpetrators themselves -- to the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel. By mid-May, the human toll in that war had risen to 460 dead and more than 3,500 wounded Israelis.

For many, one of the most disturbing aspects of the current onslaught against Jews and the Jewish state is that it is met with such indifference, if not support, by the most "enlightened" members of the international community -- namely the intellectual elite, mainstream human rights organizations, and the United Nations. These groups, like the administrators at San Francisco State, often refuse to acknowledge Jewish victimization by the Arabs and their supporters or to stand by the beleaguered Jews.
 

Anne Bayefsky, visiting professor of international law at Columbia University, believes that the current climate, which enables such attacks on Jews and Israel received its operating license last August at the U.N. Conference on "Racism, Xenophobia and Other Forms of Hatred" in Durban, South Africa.

Bayefsky, a scholar of international and human rights law with 25 years of experience in the field, participated in the conference as a representative of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. At Durban, Bayefsky relates, the international community engaged in a systematic criminalization of the State of Israel and denial of anti-Semitism.

Signs of what was awaiting the Jews at Durban were evident from the start. Bayefsky relates that all representatives from Jewish and Israeli organizations were so designated on the nametags given them by conference organizers upon registration. While this may be standard operating procedure, because of the harsh anti-Semitic sentiment pervading the conference, such designation of Jewish and Israeli delegates worked to single them out for attack by other delegates and outside protesters for the duration of the conference.

Bayefsky explains that from registration on, Jewish delegates at Durban were systematically exposed to continuous harassment. "Like all Jewish participants, I felt concern for my safety. The Jewish Center in Durban was forced to close because of threats of violence." Adding to the Jewish delegates' fears was the fact that copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were sold on the conference grounds as were fliers, such as one depicting Hitler's image with the question, "What if I had won?" Among the answers: "There would be NO Israel and NO Palestinian bloodshed."

There were two U.N. conferences that were conducted simultaneously at Durban -- the governmental conference and a conference of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), where, according to the U.N., the "voices of the victims" were to be given expression.

Israel and the United States walked out of the governmental conference because, as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, "I know that you do not combat racism by conferences that produce declarations containing hateful language, some of which is a throwback to the days of 'Zionism equals racism,' or supports the idea that we have made too much of the Holocaust; or suggests that apartheid exists in Israel; or that singles out only one country in the world -- Israel -- for censure and abuse."

While the governmental conference was marked by vilification of Israel, it was at the NGO conference where general acceptance of hatred for Jews and Israel was most uninhibited. The conference's final resolution called Israel "a racist apartheid state," guilty of the "systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing ... and state terror against the Palestinian people."

This resolution -- effectively airing the "voices of the victims" in the Mideast conflict, according to proponents -- was overwhelmingly adopted by the NGO conference, receiving the support of such mainstream human rights organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Lawyers for Human Rights, and Physicians for Human Rights.

And what of the Jewish victims? The Jewish caucus at the NGO conference put forward a resolution of its own stating that violence directed against Jews because of their support for the State of Israel, as well as Holocaust denial, are forms of anti-Semitism. This clause was voted down overwhelmingly. "The only group that voted for it was the Jews," says Bayefsky. "Of all the 'voices of the victims' put into the resolution, only one voice was deleted -- the Jewish voice."

The next day, when Bayefsky went to a meeting to represent her international NGO during a discussion of Palestianan issues, she was asked to leave the room by representatives of human rights organizations. "They explained to me that as a representative of a Jewish organization, I was biased and couldn't be counted on to act in the interest of general human rights."

For Bayefsky, Durban was an eye-opening experience. "These are people I had worked with for a very long time, but as soon as I identified myself with issues relating to the Jewish people, I immediately became devoid of human rights credentials."

This tendency to delegitimize and even criminalize Israel is especially striking, Bayefsky and others have noted, because the entire notion of human rights originated as a response to the Holocaust.

Dr. Alex Safian, deputy director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), has conducted in-depth analyses of the anti-Israel bias of mainstream human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Safian explains that part of the problem with these organizations' work on Israel stems from the fact that much of their field work is done by Palestinians with political motivations to criminalize Israel. On Oct. 3, 2000, Amnesty put out a press release charging Israel with using excessive force against the Palestinians, Safian noted. On Oct. 5, Amnesty announced it was sending a team to investigate and make recommendations to the government of Israel.

"There are two problems with this chain of events," said Safian. "First, Amnesty leveled its allegations against Israel before it had checked to see if they were true. Second, why, if it is going to investigate, is it already clear that it will only make recommendations to Israel and not the Palestinian Authority?

The fact is that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both rely heavily on work done by Palestinians working for Palestinian human rights organizations like Al-Haq (Law in the Service of Man) and LAW -- The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment. Both organizations receive accolades from U.S. and European institutions and both were intimately involved with the anti-Semitic campaign at Durban.

Shawqi Issa, who drafted the resolutions accusing Israel of war crimes and genocide, spent a year as LAW's director at Harvard Law School as a Human Rights Fellow in 1999. He explained in an online chat on the Arab Web site Arabia.com in October 2001 that he sees human rights activism against Israel as one form of resistance to Israel. In his words, "Each Palestinian has a role to play in the resistance against the Israeli occupation. We see [that] our role as human rights lawyers is to write and report to the whole world what is going on. Such as crimes and violations of human rights … Other Palestinians participate [in resisting Israel] by other methods."

The tendency of these organizations to castigate Israel is so strong that often, according to Israeli Justice Ministry sources, they do not even conduct an investigation of allegations against Israel before they arrive at their conclusions. This was again the case with both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty -- not to mention the U.N. -- in their statements about the pitched battle between IDF forces and Palestinian gunmen in the Jenin refugee camp in April.

While the U.N.'s special coordinator for the West Bank and Gaza Strip Terje Larsen accused Israel of committing "atrocities" during the battle, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty intimated that "war crimes" had been committed although they offered no proof of this allegation and reached it after visiting the area for one day apiece.

The fact that at the end, even the United Nations Relief and Works Association (UNRWA) acknowledged that the Palestinian death toll stood at 56, 48 of whom had been gunmen, while Israel's death toll from the battle was 23, did not cause any of these organizations to retract their initial allegations against Israel. Indeed Amnesty, insisted that in carrying out Operation Defensive Shield, launched after Palestinians terrorists killed 130 Israelis during March, Israel was guilty of "gross violations of human rights and international law."

Finally, the organization explained that from its perspective, Israel had no right to self-defense because all of Israel's tactics -- from assassinating terrorists, to arresting them to demolishing buildings used for launching and planning attacks against Israel—are deemed "human rights breaches."

For its part, Human Rights Watch concluded that an investigation should be conducted into "Israeli war crimes." Like Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, insisted that the Israeli army was bound to abide by standards unheard of throughout the world.

While Palestinian fighters themselves told Arabic language press outlets that they had personally booby trapped most of the structures in the camp and had used civilians to lure Israeli soldiers into the mined structures -- a tactic which caused 13 Israeli reservists to be killed in an ambush on April 9 -- Human Rights Watch argued only that Israel deliberately targeted civilians and it recommended that individual Israel military commanders be indicted for war crimes.

In an earlier, well-reported case, Human Rights Watch ignored the findings of its investigators because those findings cleared Israel of all wrongdoing. 

In 1990, Human Rights Watch sent a team of investigators to look into the treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, but disregarded the conclusion of two of three penology experts on the team that "while conditions were harsh, they were neither inhuman nor intolerable." Instead, the organization published a report that reached the opposite conclusion, based largely on work conducted by Palestinian field workers, according to the Washington Post.

Professor Robert Wistrich, director of Hebrew University's Center for Research on anti-Semitism, views Israel's treatment by the human rights community as "grotesque," a 20-year-old legacy of the fading Marxist left in search of ideological renewal.

Wistrich adds: "Given that ... human rights has become the ultimate in politically correct discourse, it has become the most effective mode to stigmatize Israel."

As to whether the criminalization of Israel by human rights organizations is the result of anti-Semitism, Wistrich is cautious in judging whether anti-Semitism is the chicken or the egg in the relationship. In his view, "I am not sure how far one should take the linkage between human rights and anti-Semitism. I do see it as the convenient language of our time for anti-Semites because there is no credibility whatsoever to the claims against us, and the idea that people spontaneously drew these conclusions is ridiculous."

On the academic front, there are two main causes for the virulently anti-Israel climate at campuses throughout the United States, according to professor Martin Kramer, former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University and the editor of Middle East Quarterly.

"The first cause is generational," said Kramer, author of the recently published book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America. "Most professors teaching today became interested in the field during the 1960s when Third World revolutionaries were all the rage. While mainstream liberals outside the universities moved on from this, the universities, as if stuck in a vat of formaldehyde, remained frozen in time."

The second reason for academe's long history of casting Israel as the villain is that Israel, per se, is not much studied -- unlike the much larger Arab-Muslim world.

The result is a situation in which popular courses on the Arab-Israeli conflict are often taught by professors with no expertise on Israel and with anti-Israel biases, according to Kramer.

Kramer cites as an example the case of Joseph Massad, who teaches such a course at Columbia University. "Massad is a known and outspoken activist for the cause of the Palestinians," he said.
 
"This would be fine if he were teaching Arab politics, but he is not teaching Arab politics."

Kramer dates the acceptability of the situation to what he refers to as the "Said Revolution" after PLO supporter and comparative literature professor at Columbia, Edward Said, who contended in his seminal 1979 book Orientalism that Western chauvinism and colonialism are at the heart of problems in the Arab world.

Taking a cue from Said, Middle East scholars have published a wealth of academic books and articles that paint a wholly distorted picture of the Middle East, according to Kramer.

Because of the rigidity of thought at Middle East studies departments in the United States, (Kramer refers to this as a "popular front mentality") students can emerge from universities as Middle East studies majors and graduate students having never been exposed to any view other than the orthodoxy that claims that Israel is illegitimate and the Arab world poses no threat to the West. "

"No one will assign works by world-renowned scholars like Bernard Lewis or Elie Kedourie or Fuad Ajami, who consider radical Islam a strategic threat to the West, to their classes today."

What can be done to defend against this situation? Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University, believes that there is only one way to defend against the onslaught, and in fact only one way for Jews to fight effectively for human rights generally.

"The only way to truly fight for human rights is by insisting on the dignity and justice of the Jewish people, because the Jews are the most negatively mythologized people on earth."

Wisse explains that Jews as a group and as individuals are a target for hatred and rejection because "Jews represent the embodiment of modernity in supreme adaptability, tolerance, pluralism, and mobility. In short, all the features that make up democratic culture are embodied in the Jew. Many people hate these things and therefore hate the Jew, who is an incorporation of all of them."

Jews have been remiss in standing up for the very Jewish ideal of human rights by not standing up for themselves as Jews, Wisse admonishes. "It was right for Jews as Jews to march with the blacks during the Civil Rights movement," she explains. "But these universalist Jews should have insisted that the blacks march with them when they came under attack. Otherwise their activism lacks credibility. It becomes simple running away from their identity as Jews. What could the blacks have taken away from this? Not that this was selflessness. The Jews who did not stand up for their own rights were abandoning their responsibilities and the principles they stood for."

Wisse insists that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are at their core anti-democratic. "The real problem for the world is the unassimilable Jew -- except for democracies. To the extent that a society cannot accept Jews, that country is anti-democratic. Therefore, the problem of anti-Semitism is not a problem about the Jews, but an indication that there is something wrong, something regressive about the society that enables anti-Semitism."

Bayefsky, Kramer, and Wistrich all generally agree with Wisse regarding the proper Jewish response to the onslaught. Kramer believes American Jews must pay more attention to what is happening on college campuses and give Jewish students the knowledge they need to defend against attacks.

"For Israel's enemies, if the Jewish students can be made to doubt, the rest will fall into place. Nothing is more valued in these places than Jewish converts to their cause," Kramer warns.

"The problem," he adds, "is that the Jewish students are on the front lines of this battle and they don't know enough. The Jewish community must accept criticism for this educational failure because these students are unprepared. Education to combat anti-Israel propaganda is not transferred genetically or through osmosis."

Wistrich and Bayefsky believe that one of the weapons for Jewish defense against the anti-Semitic tendencies of human rights organizations is to simply not join or contribute to them.

Wistrich contends for his part, "I think that Jews should stop and ask themselves some searching questions about how compatible their support for human rights organizations is with their support for Israel. How do they square their support for Israel with these organizations that are Israel's most virulent vilifiers? I get the feeling that when American Jews think about Palestinian terrorism they have yet to connect suicide bombing with infringement on the human rights of Israeli civilians despite the fact that I can't think of a larger abuse of human rights than suicide bombers attacking civilians."

Bayefsky is even more adamant. "Jews must stop funding human rights organizations which fail to speak out against anti-Semitism. Jews must stop pretending that anti-Semitism is unrelated to the treatment of the State of Israel. Jews must stop worrying about their credibility in the human rights movement and start supporting Israel in its time of need. We must remember the [the passage from] Sayings of the Fathers, 'If I am not for myself, who will be for me?'"

In the meantime, sadly, the resolution passed by the NGO conference at Durban is moving steadily toward implementation. On college campuses, the divestiture from Israel campaign is well under way. Graffiti equating the Star of David with the swastika is commonplace throughout Europe and on college campuses in the U.S. European Union member nations have instituted informal boycotts of Israeli products and quiet bans on weapons sales to the Jewish state as Jews throughout Europe are increasingly under violent attack.

Meanwhile, the Belgian courts have yet to close the case against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon regarding the Sabra and Shatilla massacre of Palestinians in Beirut conducted by Christian Lebanese militiamen in 1982.

Back at San Francisco State University, Laurie Zoloth concluded her post-riot missive, stating that after the Jews were safely escorted away from the rioting Arabs and their supporters by the police, "One young student told me, 'I have read about anti-Semitism in books, but this is the first time I have seen real anti-Semites, people who hate me without knowing me, just because I am a Jew.' She lives in the dorms. Her mother calls and urges her to transfer to a safer campus.

"Today is advising day," says Zoloth. "For me, the question is an open one. What do I advise the Jewish students to do?"

Originally published in Moment Magazine
 
  
 

In a week chock full of diplomatic activity regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the calendars of Israeli diplomats have been awkwardly empty.

While every Israeli government has maintained its absolute opposition to the internationalization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what we have seen this week is that, in practice, this internationalization is occurring. How else is one to assess the fact that, in the shadow of the latest massacre of Israeli civilians, world leaders have met and made plans regarding the future of Israel and the Palestinians without bothering to invite a representative of the Jewish state to participate in discussions?

Starting with a meeting of the so-called "Quartet," (UN, EU, Russia, and US) in New York on Tuesday, and culminating with US President George W. Bush's meeting yesterday with the Egyptian, Saudi, and Jordanian foreign ministers, Israelis watched with bewilderment as these international leaders clucked out pro forma condemnations of the wanton murder of our women and children and then proceeded to tell us what we need to do to make the Palestinians' lives better.
 

In their joint statement, the enlightened world leaders placed Israel in the same category as the Palestinians. The Palestinians, we were told, have to reform their government, but Israel has to help them do this by transferring frozen tax revenues to Arafat's PA and easing closure restrictions. We are all to accept and even applaud the fact that the goal of all of this is to establish a Palestinian state.

The significance of the fact that this statement, coming just hours after the Emmanuel massacre, included the UN's imprimatur, cannot be underestimated. Israel's governments have for over a generation understood that the UN is not a credible player in the Middle East.

Because of this, every Israeli government has maintained constant vigilance in insisting that this body, which sponsored the anti-Semitic hate fest at Durban, South Africa, last summer and hid pertinent information from our government about the Hizbullah kidnapping of our soldiers in October 2000, not be granted a seat at any table where our future is discussed.

The same has been the case for the EU, which to this day is the primary source of financing for the PA. As for Russia, Foreign Minister Ivanov's presence at the meeting naturally raised the question of what the facilitator of Iran's ballistic missile and nuclear programs has to contribute to the enhancement of Israeli security. And yet there was Colin Powell standing shoulder to shoulder with Kofi Annan, three representatives of the EU, and Ivanov, at UN headquarters laying out a plan that Israel is expected to follow.

Then came Bush's meeting with the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi foreign ministers yesterday. Ahead of their meeting with Bush, these representatives of robust Middle Eastern democracies leaked their "Palestinian reform program" to The Washington Post.

According to the plan, Arafat's government is to remain in charge until elections, and elections can only be held after Israel withdraws from all territory it handed over to Arafat in the framework of the now defunct Oslo Accords.

One cannot help but scratch one's head while staring at all these wise men assembled in the United States and wonder, where is the Israeli government in all of this? How is it possible that in meetings relating directly to the security and well-being, not to mention future borders of our state, Israel is not even granted observer status? Has the international quest for evenhandedness been so successful that Israel's government now accepts the position that our representatives can only participate in discussions relating directly to our lives if a representative of the Palestinian terrorist authority is also seated at the table?

In the midst of all Israel-related summitry, Powell announced that the CIA has put together a plan to protect Israel from terrorism, which he claims is "very good." Oddly, this plan does not involve extradition of Palestinian murderers of US nationals to the US to stand trial. It does not involve placing Arafat's PA on the State Department's list of terror organizations. It does not involve stopping Saudi payments to families of Palestinians suicide bombers or Egyptian action to prevent the smuggling of weaponry to the Gaza Strip. No, the CIA's "very good" plan for protecting Israel from Palestinian terrorism involves rebuilding Palestinian security forces that are involved in terrorism.

If all of this were not enough to elicit formal protests from our government, one need only peruse State Department spokesman Richard Boucher's press briefing from Wednesday to understand just how far the internationalization of the conflict has proceeded. In response to a question on the practical implications of the "Quartet's" meeting, Boucher explained that the parties have set up "seven working groups to look into various things." On the ground, Boucher explained, "you have immediate work being done on security, on economic reform, civil reform, and you have the political aspects also being looked at as we can try to move forward on those."
 

Boucher went on to say that the arbiter of whether Palestinian reforms have been sufficient will, in the first instance, be the "international community" that "will be in a position to know what's going on." After the "international community" gives its good housekeeping seal of approval, the Palestinians themselves will "judge whether the system and the government that they have are meeting their needs."

The fact that Israel might have something to say about the nature of Palestinian reforms seems not to have occurred to Boucher.

Then, too, in remarking on the role of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi governments in the internationalized process, Boucher did not make mention of any US demand for them to stop their Goebbels-inspired anti-Semitic incitement against Israel as a possible outcome of their meeting with the US president. Instead, Boucher maintained that discussions with these countries will revolve around "steps that Israel can take, either on the humanitarian side... or on moving towards a political dialogue."

For much of the past two years of Palestinian jihad against Israel it has been plain that the only way for a truly reformed Palestinian leadership to emerge is for Israel to first obliterate the PA security forces together with their fellow travelers in Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Since the inception of the Oslo process, Arafat has, with Israeli and international blessings, spawned a malignant Palestinian nationalism that has taken hold throughout Palestinian society. As Dr. Yitzhak Klein from the Ariel Center for Policy Research pointed out back in March 2001, this Palestinian nationalism sees as its aim not the establishment of a Palestinian state in the framework of an accord with Israel, but rather the liberation of Palestine at the expense of Israel. Now combine this with the fact that a solid majority within Palestinian society support the continuation of the mass murder of Israeli civilians.

If Bush's vision for a peaceful Middle East is ever to be realized, it is imperative that the Palestinian public understand that the only way for them to move forward is to accept Israel's right to exist, wholly reject the PLO's liberation strategies, and forcibly eject all members of their society who refuse to toe the line.

Yet rather than move forward with the only plan that stands a chance of bringing stability and security to Israel, our government is mutely accepting the internationalization of the conflict.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's spokesman, Ra'anan Gissin, argues that Sharon's strategy for winning this war is to move slowly in order to allow the international community to realize for itself that working with the Palestinian Authority is futile.

Gissin points out that, with her remarks on Channel 2 last Friday calling for a transformation of the structure of the Palestinian Authority rather than simply replacing Arafat, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice showed that the Bush administration has gotten the point. "We cannot solve the problem with a sledgehammer," Gissin noted, "it has to be a gradual process."

All of this is well and good except for the fact that, as even Gissin noted, "the waiting around is literally killing us."

While winning the war may in fact be "a gradual process," given our rising death toll, there can be no doubt that more must be done to implement it faster. Everyday the PA exists, Jewish lives are in danger. Every time that Chris Patten or Kofi Annan refer to Arafat as the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, license is given to continue spilling Jewish blood. Without a doubt, mutely standing by as the "international community" devises plans for our future strengthens Arafat's hand. To hope that at some future date Annan and our European, Egyptian, and Saudi friends will let us do what needs to be done while prolonging this unacceptable situation situation defies not just reason, but decency.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Who's afraid of Aryeh Deri?

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 Jul. 12, 2002

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The Prisons Service Parole Board's decision Wednesday to release former Shas leader Aryeh Deri from prison next Monday contained a curious condition. In paroling Deri after he completed two thirds of his three-year sentence for accepting $60,000 in bribes, the board stipulated, "Due to the special circumstances of [Deri's] case, including his public standing and the impact of his behavior and expressions on his followers, the board believes that it must be strict with him during his parole. As a paroled prisoner, he is prohibited from involvement in political activities whose character involves criticism and is liable to harm the governing system."

Deri's supporters greeted this bizarre condition with a shrug of their shoulders. So much of the state's prosecution of the most popular grassroots leader in Israel's history has been beyond the pale of rational treatment of suspects and even convicts, they claim, that this new dictate is simply par for the course.

Since allegations against him first arose in 1990, Aryeh Deri has maintained his innocence. In November 2000, two months after he began serving his prison sentence, Deri's attorneys submitted a request for a retrial to the Supreme Court along with a request that the state's star witness against him - Ya'acov Shmuelevitch - be investigated on suspicion of perjury at Deri's trial. Both of these requests are still pending before the court.

As a citizen in a free country, Deri has the right to freedom of speech. As a man who claims that he was unjustly convicted, Deri should reasonably use all tools at his disposal, including "criticism" of the judicial process that led to what he maintains was a false conviction to try to prove his innocence.

Given Deri's "public standing," it is perfectly reasonable that he should wish to do everything in his power not simply to clear his name in the court of law, but also to do so in the court of public opinion.

And yet, this natural and altogether reasonable inclination and legal right is what the parole board unabashedly demands he not exercise.

All of this could simply be dismissed as just another "one of those things," were it not for the fact that Deri's attorneys have provided ostensibly convincing evidence that the state prosecutors in his trial railroaded their client.

Deri's attorneys' case revolves around the credibility of the testimony provided by Shmuelevitch, which the Jerusalem district court claimed was "rock solid," and was crucial for his conviction.

In the late 1980s, the period during which Deri, as director-general of the Ministry of the Interior, was convicted of receiving bribes from the Jerusalem Lev Banim Yeshiva, Shmuelevitch worked as Lev Banim's bookkeeper. Since all the individuals accused of paying Deri bribes denied the charges, Shmuelevitch's testimony was absolutely vital to the state prosecutors' case.

Unfortunately for the prosecutors, Shmuelevitch was arrested in Zurich in July 1994 on fraud charges. According to Deri's attorneys, and as has been published by investigative journalist Yoav Yitzhak, then state's attorney (and presently Supreme Court Justice) Dorit Beinish and chief prosecutor Yehoshua Resnick flew to Zurich to meet with Swiss prosecutors about having Shmuelevitch released to testify against Deri in Israel. Both Beinish and Resnick claimed that his testimony was "central" to their case.

Resnick and Beinish's protestations to the Swiss were sufficient to get Shmuelevitch released from jail to testify in Deri's trial. According to Yitzhak's exhaustive research, at the trial, Shmuelevitch (and, apparently Resnick and Beinish) hid what they knew about the charges being brought against the witness in Switzerland from the Israeli courts. Yitzhak's findings were backed up by Ma'ariv newspaper editor Amnon Dankner and investigative journalist/lawyer Ben Dror Yemini.

On May 22, 1995, in response to Resnick's gentle query, Shmuelevitch told the court, "I was arrested on July 20, 1994. The arrest was due to suspicion of attempted fraud. It related to two deals my company acted as an agent for These suspicions were cleared, there remained against me a [lesser] suspicion of a type of negligence in my business and the other count was working without a permit." During the trial, Deri's attorney attempted to get Shmuelevitch to admit that the suspicions for which he was held in Switzerland were more serious than he claimed and had not been dismissed. Shmuelevitch testified that this allegation was "a complete lie."

The judges at Deri's trial reprimanded his defense attorney for daring to cast aspersions on Shmuelevitch's credibility. In their decision, judges Ya'acov Tzemah, Musia Arad, and Miriam Naor attacked Deri's lawyers for accusing Shmuelevitch "of false allegations claiming that he was under suspicion for fraudulent activities worth tens of millions of dollars."

The documents that Deri's attorneys submitted to the Supreme Court with their request for a retrial and a criminal investigation against Shmuelevitch are Swiss court documents. These documents reportedly prove that Shmuelevitch was in fact indicted by the Swiss judicial authorities prior to his testimony against Deri based on his own admissions during his period of arrest in Zurich. The documents are further said to show that when served with his indictment, Shmuelevitch pleaded no contest and was subsequently convicted of fraud charges and sentenced to time served and permanent expulsion from Switzerland. Neither the Jerusalem District Court which convicted Deri, nor the Supreme Court which upheld most of the guilty verdict, was informed of Shmuelevitch's indictment or conviction.

Responding the Supreme Court's request for a reaction to Deri's petitions, Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein called upon none other than attorney Yehoshua Resnick, Deri's chief prosecutor, to review the perjury allegations (which of course, also likely implicate Resnick in hiding pertinent information from the court). Not surprisingly, Resnick claimed that the charges against his star witness were groundless.

Moreover, to Deri's attorneys' request to receive the minutes of Beinish's and Resnick's meetings with Swiss prosecutors, Swiss authorities responded that they could only provide such information if requested to do so by the State Attorney's Office. That is, the only way to find out what Beinish and Resnick knew about the Swiss judicial proceedings against Shmuelevitch is if their own colleagues request that this information be coughed up by the Swiss.

Again, not surprisingly, the State Attorney's Office has yet to submit such a request to the Swiss.

All of this reeks of a cover-up. The parole board's insistence that Deri not engage in criticism during his period of parole only strengthens the impression, expressed angrily by Deri's supporters, of a government conspiracy to criminalize their leader. These allegations, and the deep-seated belief held by hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens that Israel's law-enforcement arms and elite media outlets are out to get them manifests a long-term threat to the stability of Israeli society and political system. The attorney-general's stubborn refusal to seriously respond to Deri's allegations against Shmuelevitch only exacerbates the situation.

For Deri's supporters, the entire affair is quite simple. They contend that the media, bureaucratic, and political establishments in Israel targeted Deri for political destruction, because he sought to raise the stature of the Sephardi underclass to the rank of first-class citizens. For his supporters, Deri's conviction, imprisonment and now anti-democratic parole terms are all perceived as further proof of the rot and corruption of Israel's political and social elites. Given the legal establishment's insistence on behaving as if all means justified the end of convicting Deri and now of maintaining his conviction, the perception of rot and corruption is palpable even to those who do not count themselves among Deri's supporters.

Some would argue that Israel has enough problems to deal with without Deri and therefore the matter should just be allowed to drop. But this cannot be right. The foundations of Israeli political order, like those of any democracy, rest on the belief of its citizenry that all are equal before the law and that allegations of wrongdoing, by whomever, will be conscientiously investigated by law-enforcement agencies.

All involved in the case against Deri, from media elites to police investigators to prosecutors, wardens, and judges have made much of the case's "special circumstances" given Deri's massive support base. Deri, it is claimed, must be held to a higher level of scrutiny than regular private citizens because of his high public profile. In a democracy, where all are considered equal under the law, this claim is at best debatable. But if we accept it as grounds for argument, then it should be equally true that Deri's prosecutors should also be held to a higher than normal degree of public scrutiny and judicial oversight than prosecutors of "regular" defendants.

One thing is clear, if Israel's audacious judicial authorities continue to refuse to conscientiously investigate Deri's allegations against Shmuelevitch, and if Israeli political and media elites allow them to get away with it, the rifts in Israeli society between the haves and have-nots will continue to grow as an ever increasing number of citizens loses faith in the organs of Israeli law and democracy.

Yesterday was the Fourth of July and we Israelis celebrated US Independence Day in our hearts with a feeling of respect and kinship far deeper and closer than we ever felt before. For the past 35 years, the United States has been Israel's closest, and often only, ally.

Yet, in spite of the closeness of our relationship, over the years there has been little reflection on what America really is or how it came to pass that the US has become Israel's best friend.

Concentrating only on the outcome of American success rather than its causes, for most Israelis, America has defined hyperbole. The US was a caricature of wealth and power - Wall Street, Hollywood, big cars, big bellies - a John D. Rockefeller who hands out dimes to shoeshine boys. Rarely did we pause to look below the surface and wonder about the firm foundation upon which this sustained success was built.

Then came the attacks of September 11, and the American response, and Israelis saw a US that we had rarely considered. Behind the self-absorbed success story, we found a thoughtful patriot. Behind the John Wayne swagger we found Gary Cooper's humility and stubborn defiance. Behind the shell-game morality of Monica's White House, we discovered the New York Fire Department and Rudolph Giuliani.

Rather than falling apart in hysteria and finger pointing after thousands of their countrymen were murdered in single day, we saw Americans come together in anger and defiance, united in their deep conviction of the basic goodness of America and their willingness to discriminate between good and evil.

It is common wisdom that you learn the truth about a person's character by how he acts in times of crisis. This is no less true of nations. In times of crisis, a well-grounded person will be able to call upon reserves of strength and wisdom cultivated by generations of like-minded people who preceded him, even if, on a day-to-day basis, he rarely considers them important. So too, a moral relativist, who rejects tradition, flitting instead from fad to fad, will fall apart at crunch time.

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Israel saw Americans collectively embracing ideas of human freedom and individual responsibility promulgated and defended by the Founding Fathers. History engulfed every action, both symbolic and concrete. America, the gossamer dream of fast cash and liposuction, was replaced by America the land of Special Forces and B-52 bombers.

Endless debates about multiculturalism and victimology were sidelined. In their place came discussions of civilizational struggles against barbarism; the durability of the US Constitution; and the ability of an open society to defend against an enemy who exploits its freedoms to destroy freedom.

For the first time in recent memory, the foundations of the US were exposed for all to see. They were very strong.

For Israelis, America returning to its roots and acting with the collective wisdom of its history paralleled our own post-Oslo national awakening and catalyzed our newfound understanding of our friend. Although many have argued that Israel's relations with the US reached new heights of intimacy in the 1990s, the truth is that for most of the last decade, neither Israel nor the US was capable of being true friends to each other, for they were untrue to themselves.

In the 1990s, both countries were enjoying unprecedented prosperity, the result of the hard work and vigilant defense of their security and freedom in the decades before. Both Israel and the US brazenly ignored the causes for their success and trivialized the importance of their respective traditions and histories. In so doing they ignored and so emboldened the enemies at their gates.

Americans and Israelis know from their respective histories that freedom and free people will forever be the enemy and the envy of all who seek power for power's sake and therefore must always be vigilantly upheld and protected.

The problem is that the success of that protection causes free men and women to take their freedom for granted and object to paying the necessary price for its preservation. Understanding this phenomenon, in 1837, a young Abraham Lincoln declared, "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

In the 1990s, both Israel and the US took freedom for granted.

Here we decided that we were tired of protecting ourselves and sought shortcuts to our liberty. We turned our backs on our history, symbols, collective wisdom and ideals of Jewish continuity, responsibility and law and absurdly assumed that this self-flagellation would earn us respect and safety. The Oslophiles' blithe sacrifice of the Temple Mount, the concrete anchor of our history and values, was the pinnacle of this folly.

In the US, American ideals of liberty and limited government were replaced by European artifices of moral relativism and political correctness. Talk of communal rights became more and more prevalent as the guiding principles of individual responsibilities and rights were summarily discarded. Lawsuits abounded, with individuals at every turn claiming that all ill they experienced was someone else's fault. Universities were filled with talk of the end of the nation-state system and the emergence of UN-led global governance. The US, far from being exceptional and unique, was to be relegated to the role of financier as the Third World. The European Union, and the World Court were embraced as the true harbingers of a global utopia and peace that the US was too provincial to appreciate.

For Israel, the lynching of our IDF reservists in Ramallah shattered these irresponsible delusions. The naked barbarity of the act a crowd raucously applauding a monster with bloodstained hands and then ecstatically tearing apart our human flesh on that bright afternoon in October 2000 was the death knell of Oslo. The UN sponsored anti-Semitic hate fest at Durban last August was its funeral.

For the US it was, of course, September 11, both for what the attack represented in itself, as well as for the fact that the same voices that previously had been heard championing political correctness were now telling us the US had more or less asked for it.

What is most revealing for Israelis about the US's post-September 11 odyssey back to its ideological and social roots of patriotism is that the more "American" Americans become, the more understanding they are of Israel's struggle. While in Europe and the Arab world, patriotism bears a direct link to anti-Semitism, in the US just the opposite is the case. So too, as Israelis cast aside Oslo's self-abasement and become more patriotic, we are able to recognize for the first time just how natural and moral our ties to the US truly are.

For three generations, American Jews, still smarting from the wounds incurred by European chauvinism and utopian fervor, have feared the canard of dual loyalty as they feared little else. What we see today is that there is no contradiction between being an American patriot and being an Israeli patriot. As both Israel and the US return to our first principles while we fight civilization's battle against barbarism, we learn that at our national foundations stand shared values of freedom and humility and collective defense of individual rights.

Both countries are a finger in the eye to enemies of these common values and therefore are destined to ensure their separate and joint success only by vigilantly defending themselves today and in every generation to come. Understanding this today, we Israelis realize that we are linked to the American people not by circumstance, but by providential justice.

In the week of US Independence Day, under the common threat of terrorism, we embrace our American friends as brothers in arms and in peace.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post