"Reality," John Lennon once quipped, "leaves a lot to the imagination." But he spoke truer than he knew.

Over the last seven days, two distinct dramas have unfolded, each containing, for a separate segment of the public, its own version of reality. On Saturday, at Gilad Farm, near Nablus, settlers and security forces faced off in a dispute over a handful of huts, which the government terms an illegal outpost and Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer claimed, "endangered the state." When it was all over, the security forces won, at a cost of 25 policemen, 17 soldiers, and 19 settlers injured.

Two days later, at Karkur junction, two Palestinian suicide bombers rammed a car full of explosives into a bus, killing 14 and wounding 65. Here was another reality: the reality of terror, of the Palestinian war against us, of our fight for survival.

Taken together, the two incidents tell us something interesting about the strange universe we have inhabited since the Oslo process began nine years ago. On the one hand, we have inhabited the reality of the Left, in which the essential conflict was Israeli vs. Israeli in a struggle for Zion's soul. On the other hand, we have inhabited the reality of the Right, where the battle was Israeli vs. Palestinian in the struggle for Zion's existence.

The story of Gilad Farm is the story of the Left.

It is generally believed that Oslo was about making peace with the Palestinians by cutting a deal with the PLO. Yet for those who supported it, Oslo really had very little to do with the Palestinians. Oslo was a quest by the Left to win the struggle for the country's soul by showing the rest of their countrymen that their messiah Peace Now was the true and only savior.

Oslo began to go awry in April 1994, when the Palestinians introduced the suicide bomber to civilians for the first time. Undeterred, the messianic Left found an excuse for this steep rise in violence. That excuse was the Right and, specifically, the settlers.

In two significant ways, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres contributed actively to this attempt to blame the settlers for everything wrong that happened after Oslo. First, both sought to play down the significance of Palestinian terror that escalated exponentially after the Oslo process began.

Peres coined the Orwellian phrase "victims of peace" to describe terror victims. In so defining the victims, Peres was able to ignore the strategic implications of the fact that by the time Rabin was assassinated, two years into the process, 183 people had already been killed by Palestinian terrorism.

Equally important was both men's use of the term "enemies of peace." These "enemies" were defined as the internal opposition to the Oslo process on both the Israeli side and the Palestinian side. Thus, democratic opposition to a policy that aside from the period immediately after Rabin's assassination never enjoyed a clear majority of support among Israeli voters, was blithely equated with Palestinian terrorists who were murdering civilians.

Peres, Rabin, and their followers could only equate the Right with Hamas by maintaining complete indifference to the Palestinians. To compare those who rejected their messiah to terrorists demanded that Oslo advocates remain completely oblivious to what was happening in the territories turned over to Yasser Arafat.

By ignoring what was happening on the Palestinian side of the Oslo process, and dismissing the importance of suicide bombers, the Left was able to limit the national debate to an irrelevant dispute. This dispute whether peace or the Greater Land of Israel is the messiah had absolutely no value in a situation in which we were handing over territory and arms to an enemy who was using both to build a war machine against us. But framing the debate in this manner was essential to the continuance of Oslo, once it was clear that Arafat was not credible and the Left was evicted from office in 1996.

Fast forward to this past week at Gilad Farm, we see Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer back making open warfare on the same Right and for much the same reason. It is not that Ben-Eliezer, after two years of warfare with the Palestinians, believes that the war is the Right's fault. But he, who next month will face the fourth challenge to his leadership of the Labor Party, knows what his party members want to see. The unreconstructed Oslophiles hold the balance of power in the party.

Those Laborites, whose spiritual guide remains Yossi Beilin, still blame the Right for the failure of Oslo more than they blame the Palestinians. To placate them, Ben-Eliezer needed to orchestrate a violent clash with their true enemy. And this he did on Sunday. As leading Labor dove Shlomo Ben-Ami's decision yesterday to endorse Ben-Eliezer's leadership shows, this ploy was successful.

For the settlers at Gilad Farm, the entire story is one of betrayal. To be sure, they had no business violating the law or confronting an army on whose protection they depend. Yet to the man, they claim that the entire dispute had ended last Wednesday. At the time, security officials reached an agreement with them whereby they would continue to farm the land, but not live at the farm. After that agreement, 2,000 settlers left Gilad Farm peacefully. Immediately after the compromise was reached, Ben-Eliezer denied it existed, and so the scene was set for the violent confrontations.

Because of Ben-Eliezer's renewal of the Left's open warfare with the Right over the outposts, for the past two weeks the entire country has been sent reeling back to the period before Camp David, where the Left felt it could still blame the Right for everything bad that ever happened. For a good five days, it seemed as if the past two years had never happened. At Sunday's Cabinet meeting, Peres cursed the rabbis in language he has never used against Palestinian terrorists. Labor MKs from Haim Ramon to Ofir Pines-Paz jumped on the bandwagon of accusing the settlers of incitement to murder, shamelessly conjuring up their libelous attacks against rabbis in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of Rabin's assassination.

Now turn to the other reality, the reality of Karkur junction. On Monday, the Palestinians showed that they too are a side of the Oslo process, and that they care not a whit for the struggle for Israel's soul or how any of us define the messiah.

When the bombers incinerated 14 people on Egged bus No. 841, it was a case of back to the future, where a real enemy is fighting a real war against us.

The attack instantly rendered the entire battle over Gilad Farm passe. People who could think of nothing else on Sunday, suddenly couldn't have cared less on Monday evening, and this was a reasonable response to the carnage.

But we must understand what happened at Gilad Farm. In staging the showdown with the settlers in order to denounce them yet again as the enemies of the good, we learned that after two years of war the Left is willing to continue to ignore reality and that the settlers, to their shame, are willing to play along with them.

In order to win this war, we must recognize what happened over that past nine years. While the Left waged its messianic battles against the Right, it forced us to ignore the real dangers. At Gilad Farm this week, it reenacted this mistake. In the midst of a war for our national survival, the defense minister sent 1,700 soldiers and policemen to evacuate people from Gilad Farm not because they were in danger, but because they were there.

Monday's massacre was proof that this should never have been allowed to happen.

Oslo was an internal debate, and the 283 Israelis murdered between September 1993 and September 2000 were proof we ignore our enemy at our peril. The 641 people whom the Palestinians have murdered since, including the 14 this week, show that anyone not willing to recognize the mistake is not fit for office or a seat at the Cabinet table.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

A roadmap to misery

As US President Bush’s envoy to the region, it would see reasonable to presume that Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns is committed to advancing Bush’s Middle East policy.

In order to assess Burns’s chances of success in advancing Secretary of State Colin Powell’s boss’s plans, we think it is important to bear in mind just what those plans involve.

Standing on the White House lawn with Secretary of State Colin Powell at his side, on June 24 President Bush laid out his “roadmap” for the Middle East in great and eloquent detail.

Since we would not presume to know the President’s policy better than the president himself, we think it is reasonable to quote the major points of that address. For clarity’s sake, we have taken the liberty of organizing the Bush’s remarks as bullet points.

- "There is simply no way to achieve that peace until all parties fight terror…"
- Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born.             
-  When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state.

 - A Palestinian state will never be created by terror -- it will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change, or 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.
- The United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.
- Every leader actually committed to peace will end incitement to violence in official media, and publicly denounce homicide bombings. Every nation actually committed to peace will stop the flow of money, equipment and recruits to terrorist groups seeking the destruction of Israel.
- As we make progress towards security, Israel’s forces need to withdraw fully to positions they held prior to September 28, 2000.
- As violence subsides, freedom of movement should be restored, permitting innocent Palestinians to resume work and normal life. And Israel should release frozen Palestinian revenues into honest, accountable hands.
 

Last week at the White House, Burns handed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the State Department’s “road map” for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

In stark contradiction to the President’s program, this “roadmap” which Burns is now here to discuss with Israel’s leaders, calls for Israel to withdraw IDF forces to the position they held on September 28, 2000 ahead of any Palestinian action to dismantle terror organizations and confiscate of illegal weapons.

Colin Powell’s plan further dictates that Israel must hand over billions of shekels in tax revenues to the Palestinians now. That is, the funds must be given to Arafat’s men who today head the wholly unreformed Palestinian security services and dictatorial bureaucracy.

On Tuesday IDF Chief of Staff, Lt.-General Moshe Ya’alon told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that it was Israel’s decision to ease its hold on Jenin in order to enable the civilian population to live their lives with a semblance of normality that enabled the terrorists to carry out their barbaric attack on bus 841 on Monday.

The State Department’s “roadmap” calls on the IDF to cease all of its anti-terror operations immediately in order to ease the humanitarian conditions of the Palestinians.

The State Department’s plan further calls for Palestinian statehood without any real benchmarks really being met to ensure that such a state will not simply be another state supporter of terrorism like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which the US is set to deploy thousands of troops to depose.

Prejudging the outcome of a mission still underway can be tricky business. But given the absolute divergence of the State Department’s “roadmap” from the president’s Middle East policy the outcome is clear.

For the past nine years over a thousand Israelis have been murdered and the Palestinians have been systematically disenfranchised because the world turned a blind eye to PA corruption, terrorism and incitement to the destruction of Israel.

Understanding this reality, the president demanded that all future attempts to make peace be based on a fundamental transformation of Palestinian society, starting at the top.

 In regurgitating formulas that have been repeatedly tried and have repeatedly failed in its attempt to restart the peace process, the State Department has shown total disregard for President Bush’s Middle East policy. If adopted, the State Department’s “roadmap” will push both Israel and the Palestinians onto a path that will lead only to more terror, more misery and more hatred. Because of this, we can only conclude, that a success for Burns will be a failure for President Bush, for Israel and for the Palestinians.

Originally published as an unsigned editorial in The Jerusalem Post

In an interview with London's Guardian this past February, revisionist historian Benny Morris referred to the Palestinian Authority as "a virtual kingdom of mendacity." On Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office announced that his government supports this kingdom.

Ahead of Sharon's junket to the White House, a high-ranking official in his office told this newspaper that Israel has agreed to transfer NIS 2 billion in tax arrears to the PA. The official explained that this decision did not represent any change in the government's policy, because it has always been Israel's intention to transfer the money as soon as there was a mechanism in place to ensure that the funds would not be used to finance terrorism. Now, the official explained, Israel, the US, and PA "reform" Finance Minister Salaam Fayad have agreed that the allocation will be conducted under the supervision of American and EU officials, so Israel can rest assured that the funds will not be used to finance murder.

During Wednesday's photo-op at the White House with Sharon, US President George W. Bush pressed the issue. Extolling Sharon's decision to transfer the funds, he said, "I appreciate so very much the fact that the prime minister is committed to working with his cabinet to move some of the Palestinian money to the Palestinian people."

Next Sunday morning, no doubt, the prime minister will set to work. He will explain to his cabinet that he gave his word to the president that the money will be transferred, and that his credibility with the administration hangs in the balance. Since the mutual trust he has cultivated with Bush is the key to close cooperation and warm relations with Washington, he will likely argue, the ministers must vote in favor of transferring the funds that have been frozen since the PA went to war against Israel two years ago. Sharon will demand that his cabinet members ignore the briefing they received at the last cabinet meeting from Maj.-Gen. Amos Gilad, the coordinator of activities in the territories, in which he explained that the NIS 140 million transferred to the PA since July has been used to finance terrorists.

For his part, Gilad has already fallen in line. In an address at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on Wednesday, he argued that on the strength of the Oslo Accords, the money belongs to the PA, meaning that Israel has to transfer the funds eventually. Now, Sharon will argue, the time has come, because we can trust the US and the EU to ensure that the money will be wisely spent by the PA.

In a seemingly unrelated incident this week, the Jerusalem District Court placed a lien on NIS 64m. of those same tax revenues.

The attachment was decreed pending a decision on a suit filed by the family of Cpl. Vadim Novesche, who, together with fellow reservist Sgt.-Maj. Yosef Avrahami, was torn apart by PA security forces at the PA police station in Ramallah on October 12, 2000, and whose body was then tossed out the window of the station and into the hands of a frenzied Palestinian mob. The court apparently thought the PA itself had something to do with this act of barbarism and that Novesche's family, including the child who was born after his father's murder, might have a legitimate claim to these tax revenues.

It might be possible that the court will find that Avrahami's family also has a legitimate claim to these funds. Then too, the families of the six Israelis killed by a Fatah gunman at Nina Kardashov's bat-mitzva party in Hadera on January 17, 2002, might also have a claim to the money. Documents seized during Operation Defensive Shield implicated PA Intelligence chief Tawfik Tirawi directly with that mass murder.

In fact, there are so many families who have suffered personal loss and injury from the PA's terror war that it is not outside the realm of possibility that when all their claims are sorted out, the PA will end up owing them billions above and beyond the NIS 2b. that Sharon and Bush are committed to handing over to the Yasser Arafat-appointed "reform" finance minister.

Gilad's argument that the money belongs to the PA because Israel agreed in the Oslo Accords to collect and transfer taxes to the PA is tendentious at best. The Oslo agreements were predicated on the PLO's pledge to combat terrorism and to solve all its differences with Israel through negotiations. The moment that Arafat ordered his forces to conduct a terrorist war against Israel the foundation of the agreements was voided. The PA has no legal grounds to expect the tax revenues.

Even Sharon has stated that Arafat's terrorist war has voided the Oslo Accords. For his part, US Embassy spokesman Paul Patten said of this argument: "I understand your point logically, in principle, but I don't have the expertise to respond."

No, Patten does not have the expertise to respond and not because he is not a lawyer. Patten, Ambassador Dan Kurtzer, George Bush, Ariel Sharon, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, and all the rest cannot respond to this argument because they are basing their policies toward the PA on a basic, and seemingly intentional, misjudgment. They believe it is possible to reform the PA and to work with Fayad and his security counterpart, Interior Minister Abdel Razak al-Yahya, and turn Arafat's PA from a terrorist entity into a "partner" for peace.

So encouraged are the Americans by the "progress" already made in PA reform that Bush announced that he is sending Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns over to us next week to "oversee" these reforms. Burns has already given Sharon's people a draft of the State Department's "road map" on how to establish a sovereign Palestinian state within three years.

As interior minister, Yahya has presumptively been placed in command of the PA security forces. His reputation as a straight-shooter won him meetings with US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Our government has embraced him. And yet, as this newspaper reported this week, Yahya spent much of his free time in 2000 and 2001 running guns for Palestinian terror cells.

Arafat is playing the mendacious game of reform to the hilt. He conducts pro-forma meetings with Palestinian Legislative Council members who demand an overhaul of his cabinet, and then refuses to act on their demands. He tells the Americans that he would like to hold elections in January as he has promised, but then explains that elections will be out of the question unless the IDF leaves the Palestinian cities first and anyway, he is running for reelection. He claims that Fayad will have control over PA funding, then refuses to hand over the accounts.

Palestinians living under Arafat's terror regime see the US and Israel accepting this state of affairs and draw the reasonable conclusion that they cannot rise up against Arafat and his regime.

For the past eight years, the Palestinians have been systematically disenfranchised by Arafat and his regime. Journalists, professors, judges, human-rights workers, businessmen, and day laborers who have dared to criticize the PA have been arrested, tortured, and murdered. And now, after Arafat has led them to privation and barbarism, Israel and the US are not simply letting him get away with it, they are financing him.

Commenting on Sharon's decision to transfer the NIS 2b. to Arafat's PA, Construction and Housing Minister Natan Sharansky said he is "shocked and appalled at the prospect of giving funds to the Palestinian Authority."

"Irrespective of any agreement on 'supervision' by American observers," Sharansky said, "it is inconceivable that we will conspire in the payment of moneys to the very people killing and maiming our citizens. No amount of 'oversight' will change this. Only a change of regime, as President Bush so resolutely demanded and as I have proposed before, with a real oversight system in place within an entirely restructured temporary administration, run by Western and democratic technocrats completely unaffiliated with the Palestinian Authority, would justify the gift of such sums."

Sharansky has demanded that Sharon bring the matter before the cabinet for debate next Sunday. He said he expects the cabinet to vote down the proposed transfer. As to the fact that Bush himself is demanding the cabinet approve the transfer, Sharansky said, "In this case, I believe we must disagree with the president. I believe that we can disagree with the president. We need to stick to our principled stand that we cannot finance a terrorist totalitarian regime a regime that is making war on us and on its own people. I believe if we say this, there are many people in the administration who will convince the president that we are doing the right thing."

For the sake of our security and the future of the Palestinians forced to live in Arafat's kingdom, we can only hope that Sharansky's will not be a lone voice in our government.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

In the shifting sands of Arab alliances, it is hard to find instances of enduring relationships. But in a world where raw power struggles and dictatorial jealousies reign sovereign, one alliance stands out for its vitality, durability, and the mutual benefit it accrues to both sides. This rare relationship is Yasser Arafat's partnership with Saddam Hussein.

Fuad Shubaki, Arafat's paymaster, is widely known for forging the PA's relations with Iran. Shubaki, it is recalled, gained notoriety for engineering the $10 million weapons shipment from Iran that was interdicted en route to the territories on the Karine A by IDF naval commandos in January.

What is less widely known is that Arafat's closest adviser has spent much of his time in Baghdad.

When IDF forces entered Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield, among the documents seized from the compound was Shubaki's passport. The passport was stamped with numerous Iraqi entry and exit stamps recording repeated visits by Arafat's closest confidant to Iraq between 2000 and the spring of this year. According to intelligence sources, these visits were an indication of the strategic relationship between Arafat's PA and Saddam Hussein's regime.

This week, following the October 2 arrest of Arafat adviser and member of the PLO's executive committee Rakad Salim in Ramallah, the Shin Bet announced that Salim, as local General Secretary of the Iraqi--sponsored Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), admitted to dispersing some $15m. in direct aid from Saddam Hussein.

In November 2001, Abdel Razak al-Yahya, now touted as the great white hope of Palestinian security reform, was directly implicated with an Iraqi-trained and supplied PLF terror cell. The cell carried out the July 24, 2001 kidnapping and murder of 18-year-old Yuri Gushchin in Jerusalem and the bombing at Haifa's Checkpost junction the same month that injured five Israelis. Members of the cell had been trained in Iraq to use shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, and were planning to carry out a massive terror attack against civilian jetliners at Ben-Gurion Airport when Israeli security forces arrested them in August of last year.

From their interrogations, Israel learned that the cell's weapons had been smuggled into the territories from Jordan through the Allenby Bridge international crossing in Yahya's car.

Shubaki's travel log, Salim's financial transactions, and Yahya's smuggling operation are just the tip of the iceberg of what Israeli intelligence sources explain is a "longstanding strategic relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Saddam Hussein's regime." This relationship was first brought to public attention when Arafat sided with Saddam after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Forces from Arafat's Palestine Liberation Army, organized in Iraq as the Bader Brigade, participated in the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait just as they had fought as a regular unit of the Iraqi army in the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. Some three thousand troops from the Bader Brigade entered the PA in 1994 as part of the PA police.

As PA minister for public works, Azzam al-Ahmed commented in December 1997, to Al-Ayyam, that since the forming of the PA, "contacts between Arafat and Saddam Hussein have not ceased, not even for a moment." Arafat himself owns three villas in Baghdad. One of these homes, a palatial structure in Baghdad's Jadiriya district, serves as the PLO's embassy. Against the backdrop of increasing tensions between UN weapons inspectors and Saddam Hussein in late 1997 - tension that led to their expulsion in March 1998 - reports surfaced of PLO assistance to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs.

Exiled Iraqi intelligence officers informed the UN in September 1997 that documents related to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction programs were being hidden in the PLO's embassy. As an official legation, the PLO embassy in Baghdad enjoyed diplomatic immunity and was thus off limits to UN inspectors. Iraqi opposition forces told this newspaper at that time that the documents contained information pertaining to Saddam's chemical weapons programs, including Iraq's arsenal of VX nerve gas. The same sources said that in an August 8, 1997 visit to the Iraqi embassy in Amman, Arafat himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.

If these reports are to be believed, they would tend to indicate that not only is Saddam providing Arafat with assistance in his war against Israel, but that Arafat actively assists Saddam in his weapons of mass destruction programs.

Information that surfaced this past April provided additional signs that Arafat's PA is an active partner in Saddam's military--terrorist strategies. Western intelligence sources claimed that senior Iraqi intelligence officials held discussions in Baghdad in March 2002 with an Arafat aide who provided them with a list of strategic sites in Israel and Saudi Arabia that might be attacked in the event of an American campaign against the Iraqi regime. The aide also reportedly provided Iraqi intelligence with 37 blank passports from various Arab countries to be used by Iraqi terrorist operatives.

The IDF's raid on Arafat's Mukata compound in April also uncovered twelve liters of poisonous bromine that had been hidden in a sandbox. Bromine liquid is highly volatile and poisonous if inhaled, even in low concentrations.

Yoav Yitzhak, Ma'ariv's investigative reporter who first unveiled the finding, included a throwaway line in his report musing, "The Palestinians, perhaps with Iraqi inspiration, have begun preparing a chemical arsenal for their war against the Jews."

Unfortunately, according to the London Times, British intelligence is of the opinion that Saddam is planning to use Palestinian operatives to carry out a biological terror attack against the US or Israel in the event of an American--led offensive. A Times report from August 3 sites a Whitehall dossier distributed to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet members indicating that Saddam plans to use Palestinian terrorists as his proxy force against Israel and the US.

Although an Israeli intelligence source dismisses the report as "far-\-fetched," Israeli intelligence did unearth recently that Palestinian terror operatives were trained in Iraq as recently as this past June. In an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes aired two weeks ago, IDF intelligence officer Ido Hecht told CBS's Lesley Stahl that Palestinian operatives underwent training at an elite Republican Guard base in Saddam's hometown of Tikrit in June. While there, they were trained by Iraqi intelligence personnel in the use of "firearms of various types, RPGs, anti--tank rockets, how to manufacture explosives, how to make these explosives into actual bombs," and in the "use of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, equivalent of the American Stinger, SA-18."

In the IDF's raid of Arafat's compound in April, troops also discovered Iraqi-modified Soviet-made RPGs. The IDF assumes that the weapons were smuggled into the areas in Arafat's helicopter. At the time, defense sources intimated that they saw indications of Iraqi sourced chemical weapons programs being advanced by the PA from Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah.

Iraq's overt assistance to the Palestinians has won Saddam Hussein a pride of place in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. As this newspaper reported this week, Jordan has barred Palestinians from entering the kingdom in order to prevent thousands of Palestinians from crossing into Iraq to fight for Saddam in a war against the US. In a recent opinion poll, the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion found that 79.9% of Palestinians would support Iraq in the event of a US led attack against the regime.

In 1998, during the buildup to Saddam's standoff with UNSCOM inspectors, Palestinians staged mass demonstrations in support of Saddam and against the US throughout the territories. So large and widespread were the demonstrations that Arafat, fearing a US backlash, ordered PA forces to enforce a ban of all such demonstrations and prohibited press coverage of any pro--Iraqi demonstrations in the PA.

Last week, by ordering Israel to transfer NIS 70m. to the PA treasury, the Bush administration showed that there would be no US backlash against Arafat's multi--layered strategic terror alliance with Saddam's regime. The US insistence that Israel enable the CIA--led training of Palestinian security forces in Jericho is further indication that the US sees no relevance to this strategic relationship.

Palestinian sources claim that the NIS 70m., like the previous NIS 140m. Israel transferred in July, is going to pay the salaries of those who Arafat wishes to strengthen in the PA's security forces, including Tanzim fighters and PA bureaucrats close to Arafat. The forces being trained by the CIA in Jericho are supposed to be trusted because they are purportedly under the control of Iraqi arms smuggler (aka Palestinian "reform" minister) Yahya.

By not delegitimizing the PLO, the US is repeating the same mistake the first Bush administration made after the Gulf War. Then, after having struck a blow at Saddam Hussein, the US pressured Israel to reconstitute and embrace Saddam's terrorist proxy. After the Oslo process was launched, the US and Europe funneled billions of dollars into the PLO's coffers and lavished legitimacy on Arafat.

The abject failure of the Oslo process and the regional instability that Arafat's empowerment has unleashed should have led the US to an opposite policy. Today, as the US is poised to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime and husband the emergence of a pro--Western Iraqi quasi--democracy, the US should adopt a similar policy with Iraq's terrorist proxy. Failure to do so may well adversely impact the US's ability to win the war, and will undoubtedly adversely impact the US's ability to achieve the post--war peace it wishes to forge.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

As the beat of the US’s war drums against Saddam Hussein boom ever louder, the voices of opposition sound ever shriller. On Monday night, US President George W. Bush gave yet another speech in which he set out to answer these voices.

One of the primary arguments that have been made against the Bush administration’s plans is that by going to war against the Iraqi regime, the US is being diverted from its primary war effort of combating international terrorism.

Former Vice President Al Gore made this argument clearly two weeks ago in saying, “I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism.”

In his address on Monday evening, Bush countered this argument explaining, “Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war against terror…. Terror cells and outlaw regimes building weapons of mass destruction are different faces of the same evil. Our security requires that we confront both.”

We wholeheartedly agree with the President, but we believe that he understated the case.

As Gore’s running mate in the 2000 presidential elections Senator Joseph Lieberman wrote in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “Saddam himself meets the definition of a terrorist.” That is, not only does Saddam Hussein run a terror supporting regime, his regime is a terrorist entity. From his underground bunker Saddam has combined the roles of dictator and terror chief into a cataclysmic hybrid that manifests a clear and present danger to the entire world.

A brief and far from comprehensive perusal of Saddam’s own record shows that he has turned Iraq into one great big terror factory.

In October 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked for the first time. According to recent in-depth studies, Saddam Hussein was the primary force behind the attack.

Since the September 11 attacks, reams of information have surfaced about the Iraqi training camp at Salman Pak outside Baghdad where terrorist operatives were trained in hijacking civilian aircraft with knives. Information has also come out regarding close cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida in developing chemical warfare agents suitable for terror attacks.

Closer to home, Saddam Hussein has taken an active role in organizing and supporting the Palestinian terror war against Israel. In November 2001, the Shin Beit arrested 15 Palestinians who operated a terrorist cell affiliated with the Palestine Liberation Front. The PLF, run by Abul Abbas operates out of Baghdad.

Some members of the PLF terror cell arrested last year had been trained for their operations in Iraq. The cell was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Yuri Gushstein from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Ze'ev and for planting an explosive device at the Checkpoint Junction near Haifa which lightly injured five Israelis in the summer of 2001. Its members were arrested while planning to carry out attacks against civilian jetliners at Ben Gurion International Airport.

The PLF has also been a primary vehicle through which Saddam Hussein pays blood money to the families of Palestinian terrorists. The Shin Beit yesterday announced that its investigation of recently arrested PLF leader in the West Bank, Rachad Salim, has taught them that Saddam has paid in excess of $15 million to families of suicide bombers and terrorists wounded while attacking Israeli targets. Saddam himself determined the mounts to be paid: $10,000 to families of suicide bombers, $1,000 to critically wounded terrorists and $500 to light to moderately wounded terrorists.

Today security officials fear that in the coming US campaign against Iraq, Saddam will deploy Iraqi pilots on kamikaze attacks against Israel. In recent press reports, western security sources have claimed that the Iraqi air force has managed to prepare a number of its Soviet-made Tupolev-16 and Sukhoi-25 aircraft for suicide missions against Israel. These aircraft would be equipped with a "dirty bomb" (radiological weapon) as a possible payload.

Saddam himself makes no effort to hide the fact that he views terrorism as a legitimate form of warfare. On September 5, the Iraqi weekly Al-Iqtisadi [The Economist], which is owned by Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday, called for the carrying out of suicide operations against US targets. According to MEMRI’s translation, the call went out for Arabs to consider “everything American as a military target, including embassies, installations, and American companies, and to create suicide/martyr squads to attack American military and naval bases inside and outside the region, and mine the waterways to prevent the movement of war ships...”

The facts are unimpeachable. Iraq under Saddam has fully incorporated terrorism into its military doctrine thus moving from a state supporting terror to a state defined by terror. Not only is launching a military campaign against Saddam eminently justified in the framework of the war on terrorism, it will be impossible to competently prosecute the war without carrying out the operation.

Originally published as an unsigned editorial in The Jerusalem Post

In a speech before his Labor Party on Tuesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair issued a rallying cry that the world as a whole should welcome.

Calling for moral and political courage in dealing with a world in transformation, Blair said, "The radical decision is usually the right one. The right decision is usually the hardest one. And the hardest decisions are often the least popular at the time."

These are words to live by, but sadly, in the same speech Blair proved that he is personally unwilling to answer his call. As Blair turned his remarks to the Middle East, he stood bereft of any boldness or courage to make the hard choices that he demands of his party and his nation. When it came to Israel, Blair reverted to type and called on Israel to implement UN resolutions just as Britain and the US are demanding from Saddam Hussein.

If this were simply a matter of a prime minister hypocritically raising or lowering taxes after pledging to do just the opposite, Blair's perfidy could be forgiven as so much politics. But by calling for Israel to implement UN resolutions, Blair crossed the line that separates simple political hypocrisy from immorality and wiped away any distinction between himself and his wife Cherie who this spring, to the applause of a depraved audience, explained how she understands suicide bombers.

It isn't easy to attack Tony Blair. After all, he is the only world leader, aside from Ariel Sharon, who openly supports US President George W. Bush's plan to depose Saddam Hussein. In doing so he has distinguished himself as a lone moral force in a degenerate Europe that even he politely allows is "not yet politically coherent."

So why should Blair's call for Israel to fulfill UN resolutions brand him as immoral? Stated simply, in order for Israel to abide by UN resolutions, Israel must cease to exist. A call for Israel to heed UN resolutions is a call for Israel to commit suicide.

Over the past year alone, the UN has passed resolution after resolution, in the Security Council, in the General Assembly, in its Human Rights Commission, and even in its Commission on Aging that deny Israel its legal right, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, to defend itself against aggression.

In one month, between March and April, the UN Security Council held 32 separate debates on Israel. The UN Conference on Racism last September effectively reinstated the General Assembly's definition of Zionism as racism and thus denied that Israel has the legal right to exist under international law. In April, the UN Human Rights Commission passed a resolution endorsing Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

For the past 54 years, the UN has followed a consistent and coherent policy regarding only one issue: anti-Semitism. Its policy has been to advance anti-Semitism by systematically and illegally discriminating against the Jewish state all the time and everywhere. In so doing, the UN has lost even the semblance of legitimacy as a world government. It cannot be regarded as a body responsible for enforcing international law, because in its systematic discrimination against Israel, it stands in breach of international law as embodied in its own charter's determination that all member states are to be treated equally.

In his remarkable speech before the UN General Assembly on September 12, President Bush posed a challenge to the world body, saying, "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?"

Bush, of course, asked the question in regards to enforcement of Security Council resolutions against Iraq, but his challenge is no less valid, in fact it is more valid, as it relates to Israel. How can the United Nations be expected to take Saddam to task for his breaches of Security Council dictates when it cannot even abide by its own charter?

Today, through the good offices of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the president's call for action against the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein is being undermined. With Kofi's nodding encouragement, the Arabs and the French have echoed Blair's call for Israeli suicide. The Arabs have unabashedly argued that the destruction of Israel through the enforcement of UN resolutions must come before the liberation of Iraq through the enforcement of UN resolutions.

To a large extent, the Bush administration has only itself to blame for Annan's carefully crafted box that it must now escape. By not preempting their nefarious linkage of Israel and Iraq, Bush gave both the Arabs and the UN a perfect way to sabotage action on his devastating indictment of Saddam.

What motivates the otherwise honorable Bush administration to refuse to call the Arabs and the UN to task for their illegal rejection of Israel's legitimacy? What caused the administration this week to breach the US Constitution by announcing its intention to ignore Congress's bill demanding US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital even as the president was signing it into law? And what stands behind Tony Blair's cynical call for Israel to implement anti-Semitic UN resolutions?

The basic problem is that the Bush administration, like Tony Blair, is basing its policies on Iraq, and the war on Islamic terrorism in general, on a misconception. That misconception, which has been a centerpiece of US policy in the Middle East since 1948, is that the American interest in stability in the Middle East is advanced by not questioning the Arab world's rejection of Israel.

Unfortunately, this view, which over the years has become an article of faith in Washington, is not grounded in reality. After all, Arab rejection of Israel's right to exist has been translated into a situation of continuous warfare in the region for the past 54 years. That is, Arab rejection of Israel is the primary cause of the instability the US so labors to defuse.

At the UN, the US has distinguished itself as Israel's protector. The US, particularly under the Bush administration, has refused to sign on to Security Council resolutions that only condemn Israel. The Bush administration only signs on to Security Council resolutions that condemn both Israel and the Palestinians. That is, the administration rejects the UN's claim that only the fireman is to blame for the fire, and insists on distributing its recriminations equally between the fireman and the arsonist.

With regard to Jerusalem, while the US claims neutrality on the issue of Israel's right to its capital, its actual policy has been to accept the Arab view that Israel has no right to its capital city. By refusing to formally accept that Jerusalem is part of Israel, the administration is saying that although sovereignty will be settled in a peace accord, in the meantime, it is with the Arabs who make war on Israel rather than sign a peace accord.

All of this is carried out to show the Arabs that it is okay to reject Israel's right to exist.

Today, the US has but two allies in its war against terrorism. These allies also share the US's primary interest in achieving stability in the Middle East. The two allies are Britain and Israel. The rest of the world is led by forces - from Moscow to Paris to New York to Cairo - who are automatically opposed to the war and wish to prevent the achievement of that stability.

The rest of the world is now holding the cards for the US in the UN Security Council. In linking their tepid support for the war on terror with American acceptance of the continued legitimacy of Arab rejectionism of Israel, they are working to ensure that the US will win neither its war on terrorism nor achieve stability in the Middle East.

Ironically, a potential way for the US to sidestep these hostile forces and achieve its aims is to do the one thing it has refused to do in the name of that war and in the name of that stability. If the US were to sign a mutual defense treaty with Israel, it could take down Saddam Hussein's regime tomorrow, basing its actions on the right to collective defense against terrorist attacks that Saddam is today funding and organizing against Israel. Such a treaty would enable the US to take action against other terrorist regimes and organizations - from Iran to Syria to the Hizbullah - without need for UN approval and with full Israeli military assistance.

Fifty-four years of war in the Middle East have shown that the Middle East will only be stable when the Arabs accept Israel. Fifty-four years of war have shown that the Arabs will accept Israel only when they see that they have no other choice. The September 11 attacks and Arab policy towards the US since have shown that Israel and the US have the same enemies.

The outcome of the war will be determined by the ability of the Bush administration and the Blair government to meet Blair's challenge of accepting that "the radical decision is usually the right one." If Bush and Blair cling to their failed policy of pursuing stability by accepting Arab rejectionism, they will become enslaved to an illegitimate and unreformed UN, lose the war on terror, and promote instability in the Middle East for generations to come. If they take the right and radical course, at the end of the war they will likely be greeted by the world they envision for us all.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post