In one of the most virulent attacks on the IDF in recent memory, Ha'aretz's senior diplomatic correspondent Aluf Benn penned an article published in The Washington Post on August 18 in which he accused former Chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz specifically and IDF commanders generally of responsibility for the war.

In Benn's view, the IDF's definition of the Palestinian Authority as an enemy is based on the political views of its commanders rather than the reality on the ground, and in pursuing the war to victory, the generals are not acting out of military necessity but rather to advance their own right-wing worldviews.

Writing for an American audience, in an argument bordering on racial stereotyping, Benn claimed that the transformation of military thinking about the Palestinians over the past two years is due to fact that Ashkenazim no longer form the backbone of the officer corps. In his words, "The social composition of the army has changed in the last two decades, as the upper classes shunned military careers and left the combat ranks to members of religious and settler groups and more right-wing-oriented Jews of Mideast origin."

Benn regurgitated as fact the Israeli Left's allegation that the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel is really just a cycle of violence. He reported as fact the Left's contention that the political leadership had negotiated a "fragile cease-fire" in December 2001 that could have held had Mofaz not ordered the assassination of Fatah leader Raed Karmi in January. This, of course, is a lie.

In the 48 hours after Yasser Arafat's mealy-mouthed cease-fire speech on December 16, the Palestinians carried out 31 attacks against Israel.

In all, from December 17 until Karmi's assassination on January 11, the Palestinians carried out an average of 10 attacks a day.

In his indictment of the army, Benn also neglected to mention that during the time that his imaginary cease-fire was in force, on January 5, the IDF interdicted the Karine A weapons ship in the Red Sea laden with 50 tons of Iranian arms destined for the PA. Omar Acawi, the ship's skipper from the PA's Naval Police, said himself that he had assumed that he would be ordered to scrap the mission after Arafat's speech and yet, since no such order was given, he proceeded on course.

What is most bizarre about Benn's indictment of Mofaz personally and the IDF commanders in general is that he fails to mention that, almost to the man, they supported the Oslo process for seven years. In fact, Benn's own newspaper, Ha'aretz published a two-part series this month on how IDF Intelligence systematically refused, either by neglect or design, to take note of information indicating Arafat was not committed to peace but rather saw the Oslo process as a way to implement the PLO's 1974 plan to liberate Palestine in stages.

And the IDF's naive approach to Oslo was not simply the view of Military Intelligence. For seven years, from the moment Yitzhak Rabin appointed then Deputy Chief of General Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak to head the negotiations with the PLO in October 1993 until late October 2000, the IDF swallowed the strategic assumptions of Oslo more or less whole and translated them into operational models.

Brig.-Gen Arye Eldad, who served as the IDF's chief medical officer, retells how as medical officer of the Central Command in 1994 he was rebuked by his colleagues and commander for asking what the IDF would do if the Palestinian forces, recently deployed in Jericho, turned their weapons on Israel. "My commander responded by asking, 'As the representative of which settlement are you asking this question?'" he recalls. "Any operational question that cast any doubt on the efficacy of Oslo, was immediately labeled as 'political' and could thereby be dismissed without further comment."

The fact that the IDF was utterly convinced of the promise of the Oslo Accords was brought home even further, when on July 11, 2000 - the eve of the Camp David summit - Mofaz decided to cut back compulsory military service for men from 36 to 30 months. Then OC Manpower Maj.-Gen. Yehuda Segev explained to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that shortening service was reasonable given the expectation of peace with the Palestinians. In the coming era of peace, Segev explained, the IDF would be able to cut its order of battle, as the army's routine security role would taper off.

Perhaps the most egregious single consequence of the IDF's unthinking internalization of Oslo's incorrect assumptions about Palestinian intentions toward Israel in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence was the death of Border Police Cpl. Madhat Yusef at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus on October 1, 2000.

In May 2000, a Palestinian mob tried to take over Joseph's Tomb. During the ensuing riot, Palestinians shot into the holy site and lightly wounded an IDF officer. Fearing that a forceful evacuation of the wounded officer would endanger the "peace process," the IDF brass decided not to bring in a rescue squad to evacuate him but rather waited for the PA to send in troops to disperse the mob to enable the wounded officer's evacuation.

In what the IDF later referred to as an "abject failure," the PA refused to intervene with the mob for more than four hours. Luckily for the officer, his wound was light and he survived the wait.

According to an internal IDF report written by Lt.-Col. Alex Hikov, commander of the liaison office with the PA in Nablus and published by Y-net last month, in discussions held after the incident with PA security forces, the IDF was told in no uncertain terms that it could not expect the PA to behave any differently in the future. Hikov relayed that the PA's operations officer, Abu Luwi, told his Israeli counterparts, "The Israeli side should not expect or imagine a situation in which Palestinian security forces take control of a crowd of rioters, some of them armed, like those who attacked the tomb."

But then, six months later, just past noon on October 1, the IDF proved that it had not taken the PA officer at his word. On the second day of Rosh Hashana, with PA security forces participating in rioting throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and the Temple Mount, a Palestinian mob again descended on Joseph's Tomb. Yusef, 19, was shot and critically wounded. Rather then sending in troops to evacuate him, the IDF commanders in the field again decided to wait for the PA security forces to evacuate him.

The medic at the scene informed the officers at the forward command post that Yusef was bleeding profusely and in need of immediate evacuation. He kept the command post updated on a minute-to-minute basis on the deterioration of Yusef's condition and the urgent need for medical evacuation.

But the commanders remained impervious to the medic's pleas for help. Just as they had the previous May, the commanders insisted on waiting for Jibril Rajoub's men to disperse the mob. At 5.30 p.m., the medic reported that Yusef had bled to death. At 6:30 p.m. PA security forces took control of the area and Yusef's body was evacuated.

Responding to the public outcry, Mofaz appointed a committee of inquiry into Yusef's death. Chaired by Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yoram Yair, the commission quickly came to the conclusion that it was reasonable for the commanders to have waited for the PA to evacuate Yusef and to believe that such a course of action would be the quickest way to ensure his evacuation.

If one wishes to date the end of the IDF's honeymoon with the Oslo process, the weeks after Yusef's death would probably be a good place to start. Quite simply, the violence of October 2000 was so virulent, widespread, and clearly dictated and planned by Arafat that anyone who was willing to see could not help but draw the conclusion that Arafat had mobilized both the PA and Palestinian society as a whole to launch a terrorist war against Israel.

In back-to-back interviews with Ha'aretz, OC Air Force Maj.-Gen. Dan Halutz and Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon have gone to Aluf Benn's professional home and demanded that he and his fellow leftists recognize reality. In an interview appearing today, Ya'alon explains that the leftist media elite's unwillingness to recognize what is happening is more damaging to national security than the IDF's unwillingness to change its belief that Egypt had no plan to invade the Sinai in 1973.

Calling their behavior "pathological," Ya'alon explained, "There is a deep psychological problem here: Because it is difficult for people to apprehend a reality that they do not control, it is more convenient to blame the Israeli side. Or the army. Or the Chief of General Staff. Or whoever is reporting to them that the reality is not exactly the way they would like it to be. In addition, there are people for whom the conception has become their whole world, so they entrench themselves in it and refuse to let it go."

For his part, in his Ha'aretz interview last Friday, Halutz likened Israeli leftists who work for the indictment of IDF officers for war crimes in the Hague to the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust, explained that they are traitors, and recommended that they be brought to trial.

Listening to the IDF commanders, it is abundantly clear that today the army would never wait for the PA to act before saving a wounded soldier and that is a comfort. But as Ya'alon also explained, military determination to win this war is not sufficient to guarantee victory. He said that this war, which he views as the most important since the War of Independence in 1948, is "a combined campaign military, political, civilian, media, economic. In order to build a defensive wall, all those elements have to work in synergy."

By going to Ha'aretz's readers, the IDF commanders are clearly sending a message to elitists like Aluf Benn. Without mincing words, they are telling him that in continuing to subscribe to Palestinian and Beilinist propaganda claiming that this war is Israel's fault, they are aiding and abetting the enemy in wartime. We can only hope that the message is received.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

A hundred and forty years ago, on August 22, 1862, US president Abraham Lincoln commented about the nature of the American Civil War in a letter published in the Washington Intelligencer newspaper. His draft letter contained a sentence which James Welling, the newspaper's editor edited out because he considered it too common and folksy for his "dignified" publication. The president had written, "Broken eggs cannot be mended and the longer the breaking proceeds, the more eggs will be broken."

Abraham Lincoln left countless memorable words for posterity. Yet, this unpublished sentence contains within it the essence of the president's thinking on the meaning of the war and how it would be concluded. For Lincoln, by the summer of 1862 it had become clear that contrary to what many in the North desired, the war could not end in a draw, leading to a negotiated peace with the rebellious southern states that had seceded from the United States the previous year. The South had broken too many eggs. The United States, at the war's end, like Humpty Dumpty, could never return to what it had been before.

One month later, on September 22, 1862, against the advice of several members of his cabinet and political consultants, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that as of January 1, 1863, all the slaves in the rebellious states would be free. In one fell swoop, the president transformed the war from a limited campaign to "restore the Union as it was," to a revolutionary struggle to transform the union into "what it ought to be."

From the start, Lincoln's policies were steeped in controversy. Even after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, most northern generals and politicians believed that there was no military solution to the conflict. Their thinking, represented most clearly by Maj.-Gen. George B. McClellan and by the Democratic Peace Party, which McClellan would lead in the 1864 presidential elections in a run against Lincoln, was that the aim of the war was to reach a military stalemate.

This military stalemate would lead to a negotiated peace restoring "the Union as it was." For these leaders, a fundamental transformation of the South, from a slave-owning society to an egalitarian one, far from being a war aim, was considered a recipe for disaster -- forcing upon the nation a prolonged, bloody total war for the subjugation of the South. For them, this was a price too high to pay and a goal too radical to accept.

History has proven Lincoln right. A negotiated peace with the South was unacceptable to Lincoln because he understood that without a fundamental transformation of southern society, which could only be brought about by a total Union military victory, the causes of the war itself would be left to fester on and the peace could never hold. Yet, Lincoln's revolution was not limited to the South. By pursuing the war to full military victory rather than accepting a negotiated settlement, he transformed the North as well. He redefined for his fellow citizens what the fundamental essence of the United States was, and what it meant to be an American.

One hundred and forty years later, we in Israel are facing a dilemma similar to that faced by the United States and Lincoln so many years ago. After two years of war with the Palestinians, we have yet to decide for ourselves what this war means and what our aim in it should be.

The Labor party, in all its component parts, is clearly of the opinion that Israel's aim in this war is to return Israel and the Palestinians to the place we were before Arafat and his minions opened this terrorist war against us. The new Labor sweetheart, Amram Mitzna, like his colleague Yossi Beilin, speaks of opening negotiations with the PA without conditioning these negotiations on a cessation of their war against Israel. For his part, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres defended Yasser Arafat's leadership this week in Norway, explaining that it is not that Arafat chose war, but rather that he is incapable of reining in his terrorists.

And of course, Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had himself photographed with Arafat's "generals" this week, and "negotiated" the IDF's withdrawal from Bethlehem. Palestinian forces loyal to Arafat have now replaced our troops.

The Labor party's view of this war is thus clear. There should be no transformation of Palestinian society at the end of this war. Terrorist leaders, who have supported, funded, abetted and committed attacks against Israel are still acceptable negotiating partners. At the end of the war will come a negotiated solution based on the same proposals the Barak government put on the table at Taba in December 2000 and January 2001 as if it is possible to dismiss everything that has happened over the past two years.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has not come forward with a competing vision of the post-war era. While he maintains that there will be no negotiations until there is a complete cessation of Palestinian terrorism, he has allowed his ministers to negotiate with the Palestinian leadership and has sent his own emissaries to meet with them. For Sharon then, it would seem, there is no fundamental disagreement with the Labor Party's view that the end of the war will be to restore the status quo. Rather a difference of opinion over what conditions must be met before such a restoration of the status quo can be achieved and what Israel's negotiating position will be once things are returned to the status quo antebellum seems to be the sum total of his disagreement with his Labor ministers.

Ironically, the only strong voice advocating for a fundamentally different war end has been that of the Bush administration. In his June 24th address, President Bush argued that for peace to be achieved, Palestinian society first must be transformed.

In the president's words, for Israel to achieve security and peace "I deeply believe you need a reformed, responsible Palestinian partner." Bush called on the Palestinians to reject their current leaders and to "elect leaders not compromised by terror." He explained, "A Palestinian state will never be created by terror -- it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism."

Two weeks ago, as Israel's leaders flocked to embrace Arafat's new "reform" ministers, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was clearly unimpressed. Far from jumping on the bandwagon, Rumsfeld raised the possibility that for Israel to find a responsible Palestinian partner, it may be necessary "for some Palestinian expatriates [to come] back into the region and provide the kind of responsible government that would give confidence that you could make an arrangement with them that would stick."

What is it about our leaders that makes it impossible for them to accept that the Palestinian Authority must be destroyed before there can be a prospect for a viable peace to be forged with other Palestinian leaders at the end of the war? Why is it that our leaders cling to the terror bosses who individually and collectively bear responsibility for the murder of over 600 Israelis and the maiming of thousands more over the past two years?

For the Labor Party, the answer is clear. A prerequisite for Israeli adoption of the Bush administration's vision of a transformed Palestinian society is a transformation of the way the Israeli Left perceives the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No Israeli who continues to ascribe to the Oslo agreements, or to the interpretation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as fundamentally one of Israel's making, can possibly advocate transformation of Palestinian society into one governed by democratic norms and peaceful leaders who accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.

As for Sharon, his continued abidance by the thoroughly discredited Labor paradigm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a mystery. It can hardly be due to fear of public opinion. Over the past eighteen months, poll after poll has shown that the majority of the public rejects the Labor model and wants a complete revamping of the way things are done in Israel. Given the Bush administration's clear rejection of the Labor Party's paradigm, international pressure is also not standing in his way.

On the first anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks, the US government decided that Lincoln's most important single statement -- the Gettysburg Address -- will be recited simultaneously at the ruins of the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon. In that speech, given on November 19, 1863 on a battlefield where thousands of soldiers had just sacrificed their lives for their country, Lincoln gave meaning to that sacrifice.

"It is for us the living," he said, "to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

When considering our war dead, are we to accept that our citizens were sacrificed to preserve the Palestinian Authority or can we commit ourselves to a larger vision of this war? Are we too timid and cowed by our self-righteous Oslophiles to embrace the radical vision of the US president? Is it too much for us to accept that we wage our war against Palestinian terrorism to force a transformation of Palestinian society from a genocidal enemy into a democratic and peaceful neighbor that embraces Israel while we ourselves are transformed into a society capable of demanding such behavior from our neighbors?

It would seem that too many eggs have been broken for us to do anything less.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On Sunday morning, November 3, 1968, the IDF General Staff was presented for the first time with COS Haim Bar Lev's plan for the defense of the Sinai Peninsula. The plan called for the construction of a line of separation along the water line of the Suez Canal to be defended by small outposts, spaced five to six kilometers apart, located along the canal from north to south.

Major General Ariel Sharon reacted negatively to the COS's plan arguing, "The IDF never built its operations around immobile defensive lines because until the Six Day War we didn't have borders that we could defend on a static basis. Israel's military doctrine has been based on offensive strikes that bring the war to the enemy's territory. I believe that the defense of the Sinai should be based on mobile, not immobile forces."

Bar Lev was furious, and led the members of the general staff in ridiculing Sharon and his lone ally, Major General Yisrael Tal, for their criticism of what shortly became known as "The Bar Lev Line." Among the public, the Bar Lev Line was wildly popular. Israel's national muse, Naomi Shemer even composed an ode to it called "Praise for the outpost," which became an overnight sensation.

But Sharon and Tal were right. On Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973, the Egyptian army invaded and easily overran the outposts along the water line, killing and capturing the soldiers trapped inside them.

Yet the Egyptian invasion was not needed to see that the Bar Lev Line was a consummate failure as a defensive strategy. Tal pointed this out clearly to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in a letter dated September 20, 1970, where he explained:

"The outposts have transformed the zone from one empty of Israeli targets, to a zone with static Israeli targets Furthermore, in order to maintain and defend these positions we are forced to carry out routine activities above and beyond our regular fighting duties, and so the support units vehicles and people, mainly civilians are exposed to enemy fire. From January to June 1970, the Sinai division's casualty count is 498 among them 69 dead, 49 were killed, and 200 were wounded inside the outposts themselves."

This Wednesday, the security cabinet mutely approved the decision to build the first 116 km. of the planned 360-km. wall of separation a few kilometers east of the Green line. That is, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has just led the Israeli government to agree to a plan that will base Israel's defenses on a static line along an indefensible border.

Even more ominous than the Bar Lev Line, which at least had the advantage of being removed from civilian population centers by hundreds of kilometers of desert, the static defense line approved on Wednesday is to be located in the midst of crowded civilian centers. Worse still, it will physically, psychologically and diplomatically separate tens of thousands of Israelis from the rest of the country.

Israel already has experience with unilateral separation from the Palestinians. After the Oslo accord was signed, OC Central Command Ilan Biran introduced the notion of the bypass roads to our collective consciousness. Biran realized that in spite of the fact that Israel was to be at peace with the Palestinians, forcing Israelis to continue to drive through areas transferred to Arafat's military control would be tantamount to signing their death warrants.

But the success of the bypass road defensive strategy is dubious at best. With well over a hundred Israelis killed by terrorists on the bypass roads, it could be reasonably argued that far from providing real security, these roads simply disguise and transport the danger from the Palestinian cities to the roads.

Proponents of the wall argue that a physical barrier between the Palestinian towns and Israeli population centers will deter attacks. After every massacre within the Green line, even before the body count is known, wizened television anchors and military experts ruminate knowingly that the attack was caused because of "breaches in the seam line." This ignores the fact that fences have already proven ineffective in thwarting attacks.

In the north Israel has spent hundreds of millions of shekels building an electronic fence along the international border. This fence did not stop Hizbullah from kidnapping our soldiers. Nor did it stop Hizbullah from constructing a bow shaped ladder that easily traversed the fence, enabling their terrorists to enter Israel and mow down six Israelis on March 12 by Shlomi. It will certainly not present any obstacle to the Hizbullah lobbing its 10,000 Iranian rockets onto the Haifa Bay.

The only way for a fence to prevent incursions by individual terrorists is by placing thousands of soldiers on continuous patrols along the fence - thus canceling the need for the fence. The only way to prevent rocket attacks is to control the enemy's territory.

Separation proponents also argue that since most of the attacks inside the Green line come from the West Bank which has no wall, rather than from Gaza which does, the wall around Gaza is a deterrent. This argument ignores the fact that contrary to popular belief, the front in Gaza is actually more violent than the West Bank. According to the IDF Spokesman, from September 29, 2000 until August 12, 2002, there were 6,883 terrorist attacks in Gaza and 6,543 attacks in the West Bank. The Palestinians have utilized frogmen, tunnels and mortars to breach the fence, and they are currently developing gliders to fly over it.

Dr. Martin Sherman of Tel-Aviv University and the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya decries the separation wall as a "strategic disaster at every possible level."

"The entire coastal plane is exposed from the heights of Judea and Samaria. A mortar, missile or rocket attack on the coastal road at rush hour would be catastrophic. If we needed a security zone in South Lebanon to defend our settlements in the north, how do we intend, from the Green line to defend Ramat Hasharon and Kfar Saba?"

Sherman further notes that there has also been no debate over how Israel will prevent the wall from becoming a de facto border which will make the international community even more unwilling to accept preventive or punitive IDF actions against Palestinian terrorists on the other side.

Then, too, no one has asked the question, what possible control could Israel exert on the Palestinians on the other side of the wall to change their behavior? What possible impetus will the new PLO-Hamas unity government have to stop fighting for the dismantlement of the Jewish state when, as a result of their behavior, Israel meekly walls itself in to its indefensible pre-Six Day War borders as General Ariel Sharon argued in 1968 that Israel would never have contemplated doing?

Indeed, at the heart of the separation campaign is an unwillingness to contend with the simple fact that it is the Palestinians who are to be blamed for all the attacks and not the absence of a wall.
The way to protect Israelis is not by building bypass roads and fences but by preventing the enemy from attacking in the first place. That, as Ariel Sharon as head of the 101st battalion in the 1950s knew full well, can only be done by attacking the enemy on his own territory.

Internal Security Minister Uzi landau takes a wider view of things. He sees the possibilities of the wall as something beyond fighting terrorism, which he agrees, "can only be accomplished with IDF forces on both sides of the fence."

In his view, the primary function of the wall "is to prevent the tens of thousands of Palestinians who cross the Green line everyday from continuing to do so." This he admits, has little to do with stopping suicide bombers, which he does not believe the wall will be able to accomplish. Rather he sees it as a way to stem the tide of Palestinians who enter illegally, marry, start families and thus work to upset Israel's Jewish majority.

Landau says that he does not know where Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer's separation plan is aiming at, but voted for the plan because he sees its benefit in stemming the illegal immigration. Landau is also of the opinion that regardless of what Ben-Eliezer's motives may be, the reality of Palestinian terrorism will make any withdrawal plans the Labor leader may have impossible to implement.

For opponents of the wall, Landau's arguments provide little comfort. Building the wall, in Sherman's view "is another example of the abject failure of the nationalist camp to educate the public about the nature of our struggle."

"Rather than telling the nation the simple, but bitter truth, that the Palestinians are waging war not to win their self-determination, but rather to destroy Jewish self-determination, the nationalist camp enables the Oslophiles to carp about the need for a political solution that is impossible to achieve. By not fighting and winning the battle over the domestic consciousness," Sherman adds, "Israel has over the past thirty years whittled away its options both militarily and diplomatically to the point where it becomes inevitable that we hide behind the delusion of the defense of a wall across an indefensible border."

Back in 1968, the debate over the efficacy of the Bar Lev Line lasted for one day. Today, in the midst of a war, with no real public discussion, no debate within the government or the IDF, Israel is repeating its mistake. Proponents of the wall see it as the first step in Israel's complete pullout to the indefensible pre-Six Day War borders. Opponents of the concept of unilateral separation within the government go along with the plan, seeing in it certain tactical benefits and convinced that the Palestinians themselves will deprive the Labor party of the ability to withdraw from the West Bank.

In the midst of all of this is the public who our leaders have misled into believing that an expensive wall, that has little prospect of reducing the terrorist threat to our lives, is really a panacea. The question is, where will Israel be, and how many more Israelis will die by the time the Palestinians prove this point to us, and what will we delude ourselves into believing then?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

How did it come to pass that Yassra Bakri, a 20-year-old Israeli Arab nursing student at Safed College, and her girlfriend, Samiya Asedi, another Israeli Arab student, said nothing for 20 minutes about the presence of a mass murderer on a No. 361 Egged bus this past Sunday morning?

And how is it that the murderer was certain that he could tip Bakri off to his plan to blow up the bus and not worry that she would call the police during the 20 minutes that elapsed between his warning to her and his detonation of his bomb?

And how is it possible that MK Muhammad Barakei reacted Wednesday to Interior Minister Eli Yishai's decision to revoke the citizenship of three Israeli Arabs who have joined the ranks of Israel's enemies by committing terrorist attacks against Israel, by saying that he and the Israeli Arab community would launch their opposition to the legal move in international bodies?

Following last Wednesday's massacre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the somewhat embarrassed gut reaction of many students was to murmur that Israeli Arab students at the university may have assisted the terrorists in bringing their bomb onto the campus.

Shmuel Mattityahu, a graduating economics major, explains that the suspicion arose naturally, because over the course of his studies he, like many other students, has witnessed a frightening radicalization among their Arab classmates. At the core of this radicalization, in his mind, lies a total rejection of Israel's right to exist.

"The Arab students have boycotted elections to the Student Union. They formed their own Arab Student Union and as a group neither run for election nor vote in the regular elections," he explains.

In the academic years of 2000 and 2001, hundreds of Arab students demonstrated at the Frank Sinatra International Student Center on May 15 the secular date of Israel's founding with black flags.

Waving their black flags and wearing black T-shirts, they chanted in Arabic, "With blood and fire we will liberate you, Palestine." Among their many flyers and signs were maps of Israel with the names of pre-1948 Arab villages. The names of Jewish towns and villages were not on the map.

"In April 2000," Mattityahu recalls, "six months before the October 2000 riots, the Arab students organized violent clashes with police. Several students were injured and many were arrested. When the 2001 school year began, the Arab students distributed student organizers with Muhammad Dura's picture on the cover. (Dura was the Palestinian boy who was killed in the cross-fire between soldiers and PA forces in Gaza in October 2000 and quickly became an international symbol of the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel.)

In November 2001, the Arab students demonstrated at Frank Sinatra with extreme leftist groups. To their "blood and fire" chant they added, "Barak is a murderer, the intifada will be victorious."

Mattityahu explains, "The Arabs speak with one voice, and act in another. They say they are championing equal rights, but what they are actually calling for is political autonomy based on a rejection of the state. While calling for equal rights, they distribute literature in Arabic calling for the establishment of Arab autonomy in Galilee."

Mattityahu believes that the Arab students at the Hebrew University are not exceptional, but rather reflect the sentiments of Israeli Arabs generally. "The irredentism of the students is not unique to them. They are following the same worrisome trend of Arab Israelis generally. It involves complete rejection of Israel and unstinting support for the Palestinians as called for by their leaders."

Who is pushing this trend among Arab Israelis?

According to Moti Zaken, Internal Security Minister Uzi Landau's Arab affairs adviser, much of this extremist trend is the result of work by Arab non-governmental organizations that were founded over the last decade.

"During the 1990s, Israeli Arabs started setting up independent organizations because they felt, with some justification, that their needs were not being met through their traditional representatives in the Knesset and in the local authorities. But rather than limit themselves to working to improve the quality of life and equality of Arabs in Israel, they are working both here and abroad to uproot the foundations of Israel as a Jewish state."

One of the most active and most successful of these organizations is Adala, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Adala, founded in 1996, was one of the primary forces that caused the Barak government to form the Or Commission of Inquiry into the rioting in the Israeli Arab sector in October 2000.

One of Adala's funding organizations is the New Israel Fund, which seeks through donations to civil society organizations in Israel to "promote equality and social justice for all Israelis."

Adala, however, is not interested in justice for all Israelis. According to its Web site, "The main goal of Adala's work is to achieve equal rights and minority rights protections for Palestinian citizens of Israel."

Through its court cases and advocacy work at the UN, Adala has systematically sought to receive recognition not for equal rights for Israeli Arabs, but rather extraordinary rights for them. At the same time, the group seeks to undermine the right of the Jewish people to self-determination by undercutting the laws and denying the morality of the state.

After forcing the Barak government to form the Or Commission at the end of 2000, Adala set out to prevent Israelis called to give account before the commission the most basic rights of the accused. Adala demanded, and the commission granted, permission to collect testimony from Israeli Arab witnesses independently and bring the edited material before the commission. Thus Adala, with the commission's assent, denied the Israeli police officers called before the commission the basic right of all defendants to confront their accusers.

When last month the Or Commission sent letters of warning to two Israeli Arab MKs and the head of the Israeli Islamic Movement stating that they could face punishment for their roles in inciting the riots, Adala petitioned the High Court of Justice demanding that the Or Commission's actions be limited to the "executive branch."

While the court rejected Adala's petition this week, Adala maintains that the court was wrong because the commission couldn't help but be "discriminatory."

In addition to its legal work in Israel, Adala has been one of the main engines behind the defamation of Israel and the equation of Zionism with racism at the UN. As Adala proudly reports on its Web site, since 1998, the organization has been submitting testimony to various UN bodies about the racist character of Israel. According to Adala, its 1998 report to the UN Commission for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination identified "20 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel."

Among the laws Adala found objectionable are the Law of Return, which allows for free Jewish immigration to Israel, the law establishing the flag and the national anthem of Israel.

As Zaken, who represented Israel at the conference, recalls, "Adala was the chief accuser of Israel in Geneva. The entire body, chaired by the Egyptian representative, was completely hostile towards Israel. Adala mobilized this hostility to delegitimize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state."

So, too, at the UN World Conference on Racism last summer in Durban, South Africa, Adala was in at the ground floor preparing for the festival of anti-Semitism that Durban was to become.

In a report submitted to the Amman NGO networking meeting for the UN World Conference Against Racism in February 2001, Adala claimed that in Israel, "Racism exists at almost every level of society."

At Durban itself, Adala was a central force in the NGO conference, where Israel was defined to be "a racist apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid is a crime against humanity."

In Adala's activities in Israel and abroad, we see the line that connects between the terrorist on bus 361, Bakri and Assedi, the irredentism of Arab students at Mount Scopus, and MK Barakei's insulting threats against the minister of the interior and the State of Israel. At their core, in all of these actions, there is an acceptance of the notion that equality for Arabs in Israel can only come about with the destruction of Jewish nationalism. At the most basic level there lies an unabashed hostility and a total rejection of the right of the Jewish people to self-determination.

Many liberal Jews believe that by enabling groups like Adala to take on leadership roles in Israel, they are advancing the causes of equal rights and democracy in Israel for all of Israel's citizens. What we find however, is that through the actions of organizations like Adala, that are supported by liberal Jewish groups both here and abroad, the causes of democracy and equal rights not to mention good citizenship are impeded. Adala, in its actions before the Or Commission and the Supreme Court (where it is currently attempting to limit the state's discretion in prosecuting both ultra-Marxist MK Azmi Bishara and Raed Salah, the head of the Islamic Movement), is attempting to set legal norms where equality will not exist before the law. In Adala's view, since the state itself is illegitimate, Arabs who defy the laws should not be prosecuted.

The widespread legitimacy given to Adala's advocacy of the notion that Israel is a racist state whose very self-definition as a Jewish state is wrong, paves the way for monstrous behavior like that of Bakri and Assedi on the No. 361 bus. After all, if the goal is irredentism, what possible responsibility should they have toward citizens of the state that they are taught to consider illegitimate and racist?

Adala's international legitimacy also clears a path for statements like that of MK Barakei, an elected official of the State of Israel who clearly rejects the notion that Israel has a right to take action against traitors by saying that he will bring his case before the fair-minded international community.

In his decision this week to revoke the citizenship of three Israeli Arab terrorists, Yishai advanced another notion of equality and democracy. In this version, Yishai argues that equal rights of all citizens must be based upon a prior and minimal loyalty to that state. Perhaps this is a notion that Adala's Jewish supporters, who no doubt accept the Jewish people's right to self-determination, should mull over before signing their next checks.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The television camera lens moves with seeming effortlessness from the pictures of suffering and death at the Hebrew University to the carnival in Gaza City, where thousands take to the streets in celebration of the pictures from Jerusalem.

Gazing at the revelers on the screen, one strains one's eyes to find an expression of shame, guilt, or remorse on the faces in the crowd. One unconsciously prays to discern anything that would show that those in front of the camera are there by accident or because they were forced to be there. But no, the faces on the screen are uninhibited, joyful ones.

Far from being forced to participate in the festivities, each and every one of the people at the parade in Gaza makes a personal decision to leave his or her home and join the crowd in applauding the mass murder of Jews. They are there because they support the murders. They are there because such murders make them happy.

These Gazans, and their counterparts at Balata refugee camp near Nablus, were not celebrating a military victory. There was no battle at the cafeteria in the Frank Sinatra International Student Center. These Palestinians - men, women, teenagers, and small children - came together to celebrate another massacre in their genocidal campaign against the Jewish people.

Yes, genocide. The Palestinians have reached a point in this war where it has now become clear that their goal in this struggle is not the end of the so-called "occupation," but rather the organized, premeditated mass murder of Jews because they are Jewish. That is, the Palestinian goal today is genocide.

In a seminal article in Commentary magazine this past February on the recent rise of anti-Semitism, Hillel Halkin argued, counterintuitively, that the Holocaust is the main reason why it is so difficult for Jews today to accept the fact of anti-Semitism. In his words, "The Holocaust has made some Jews less, rather than more, able to see anti-Semitism around them. This is because if the Nazis demonized the Jew, they also demonized the anti-Semite." In short, if an anti-Semite is not a Nazi, then it is hard for Jews to perceive him as a threat.

Just so, even as generations of Jews adopted "Never Again" as their rallying cry, the Holocaust made it difficult for us to notice when genocide is adopted as a policy against the Jewish people, without gas chambers present. The fact that the Palestinians currently lack the means used by the Germans to perpetrate their genocidal policy against the Jews blinds us from the fact that their desire to do so is the same as that of the Germans in the 1930s and 1940s.

The absence of the trappings of the Nazi Holocaust also prevents us from properly identifying repeated massacres of Israelis by Palestinians. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, these attacks are not expressions of rage or reactions to specific actions by the IDF. They are acts of genocide perpetrated against Jews as Jews because the Palestinians have descended to the level of depravity where they do not view the Jews as human beings whose murder is an inherently immoral act.

The fact that the Palestinians don ski masks and keffiyehs rather than brown shirts and swastikas also makes us undervalue the fact that, like the Nazis, the Palestinians are utilizing all their technological know-how and military resources to kill Jews and are making their best efforts to constantly improve and enhance these resources to increase their kill rate.

Daniel Goldhagen showed in his masterful book, Hitler's Willing Executioners Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, that contrary to popular belief, the Holocaust was not a Nazi-specific affair, but rather a German affair. While Hitler and his Nazi Party dominated Germany, the Germans allowed themselves to be dominated. While the Nazis were the architects of the Holocaust, they perpetrated it with the active support and participation of many rank-and-file Germans from all walks of life, in all sectors of German society regardless of membership in the Nazi Party.

Such is also the case in Palestinian society today. It is not just Hamas or Tanzim or Islamic Jihad that we must fight, but Palestinian society itself must be transformed for there to be peaceful coexistence. All major indicators point to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians is complicit in the aim of committing genocide against the Israelis. Poll after poll shows that a solid majority of Palestinians from all socio-economic levels supports suicide bombers and other forms of terrorism against Israel. In fact the polls show that the higher the socio-economic level of the respondents, the stronger their support for terrorism.

Virulent, Nazi-style Jew hatred and dehumanization has become for the Palestinians, as for the Germans before them, the central unifying theme of society. The best-seller lists in the PA for years have included such works as Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Being a relative of a suicide bomber is a status symbol.

From the schoolrooms to the mosques to the daily papers to the art studios, Palestinians teach, preach, write and paint in praise of genocide. Even Yasser Arafat's purportedly democratic and pro-Western opposition has no moral qualms about massacring Israelis. Leaders like the much-feted Sari Nusseibeh argue against suicide bombings not because they are morally reprehensible, but because of their tactical inconvenience.

In an interview on Al-Jazeera television on July 14, translated by Palestinian Media Watch, Nusseibeh praised everyone involved in jihad against Israel. Explaining that he did not want to pass moral judgment on the murderers when he signed a petition a month earlier calling for an end to suicide bombers, Nusseibeh said that terrorism presents no moral dilemma, it is only a question of whether or not "political benefit" accrues from killing Israeli civilians.

Nusseibeh's explanation echoes the official PA condemnations of every attack. There is never a moral judgment made, only a cost-benefit analysis. That killing Jews is acceptable is quite simply taken for granted.

Once we understand that this is the situation in Palestinian society, we reconcile ourselves with the fact that we are not in a struggle against a political movement for national sovereignty. We are being victimized by a genocidal campaign for our violent elimination supported by the overwhelming majority of Palestinians.

To defuse the danger presented to Israel by the genocidal Palestinians, we must also look to the German experience and take our cue from the Allied policy for the de-Nazification of postwar Germany. In World War II it was clear to the Allies that Germany would have to undergo a long process of social and political transformation before the Germans could again be trusted with sovereignty. The first step on the road was an unconditional surrender of the German army to Allied forces. As part of their military surrender, German nationals were forcibly deported from the strategically vital Danzig corridor and East Prussia, which were handed over to Poland. The Germans ceded all claims to the territory and deported nationals were banished with no right of return.

Furthermore, the surrender terms for Germany involved the stationing of a permanent occupation force on German soil, which still exists today, 58 years later, and forced limitations on German military capabilities and troop levels. The transformation of German politics involved permanently banning anyone involved in the Nazi regime or supportive of that regime from participation in German political life.

There is no longer any room to doubt that the Palestinians, to become a nation that will live at peace with Israel, must undergo a similar transformation. Whether Israel can force such a process onto the Palestinians by itself or whether such a transformation will necessarily take place as part of a reshuffling of the Arab world that supports its genocidal program remains to be seen. But what is clear enough is that there can be no negotiations, no legitimacy, and no tolerance for a society whose central organizing principle is the physical elimination of the Jewish people.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.