WASHINGTON On Tuesday night Haifa mayor Amram Mitzna proved that our Labor party has officially decided to march its way directly into the political dustbin. For this he is to be thanked. In his unambiguous message of total capitulation to Palestinian terrorism -- I'll negotiate with Arafat and if he won't agree, I'll give him a state anyway -- Mitzna has done a service to the country.

Gone are Labor's protestations of patriotism and security-mindedness. Gone are the vestiges of national responsibility and self-respect that could give voters pause to believe that despite all the failures, perhaps the party of David Ben-Gurion still exists. With Mitzna comes clarity: In handing the helm to Amram Mitzna on a silver platter, the Labor party said good-bye to its ninety-year legacy of national leadership and responsibility and embraced the party's decade-old identity as an ultra-orthodox movement of true believers in the all knowing Messiah of Oslo.

The night before Labor's self-destruction, in a glittering ballroom not far from the Pentagon outside Washington, DC, a different, less historic and yet highly revealing occasion was taking place. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz received the Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

No one has ever bothered to ask Mitzna what he thinks of President George W. Bush or the US administration's war on terrorism. He has never been asked about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But judging from Mitzna's enthusiastic embrace of Yasser Arafat in the face of the Bush administration's pointed demand that the mastermind of the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel be replaced, it seems reasonable to assume that Mitzna, like Shimon Peres, does not hold the Bush administration's anti-terrorism policies in particularly high regard.

What is most interesting about the Bush administration's policies regarding international terrorism is that in large part, they were framed twenty-five years ago by the namesake of Wolfowitz's award -- the late US Senator Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson. And the interesting thing about Jackson's view of international terrorism is how central Israel's unstinting war against Palestinian terrorism was in shaping his thinking.

The occasion at which Jackson articulated his thoughts most extensively was in a speech he gave in Jerusalem in 1979 when he addressed the Conference on International Terrorism sponsored by the Jonathan Institute named for Yoni Netanyahu. In his speech in 1979, Jackson referred to terrorism as "a modern form of warfare against liberal democracies" whose goal "is to destroy the very fabric of democracy."

Alluding to the PLO, Jackson argued then, "To insist that free nations negotiate with terrorist organizations can only strengthen the latter and weaken the former. To crown with statehood a movement based on terrorism would devastate the moral authority that rightly lies behind the effort of free states everywhere to combat terrorism." Jackson ended that address by praising Israel's battle against Palestinian terrorism saying, "In providing for her own defense against terrorism, Israeli courage has inspired those who love freedom around the world."

Jackson was a leader in the Democratic party and yet, in the 1970s, as that party under George McGovern and Jimmy Carter veered increasingly to the anti-war, "blame America first" Left, many of Jackson's key aides switched to the Republican Party. These "Jackson Republicans" among them Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Frank Gaffney held key positions in the Reagan administration. Today they and their proteges are now firmly rooted in the Bush administration.

In accepting his award on Monday night, Secretary Wolfowitz extolled Jackson, his mentor, as a visionary. In so doing, Wolfowitz spelled out his view that terrorism, as the greatest evil in the world today, must be expunged by force because it cannot be appeased.

Perhaps to avoid being quoted, on Monday night, Wolfowitz spoke of who he is by commenting on Jackson. "One of the things that characterized Scoop," he said, "was a willingness to confront the truth squarely, including some of the world's worst evils, but at the same time, to think in hard practical terms about how to deal with them." Wolfowitz drew a straight line connecting Jackson to his current boss, President Bush saying that the late politician "would have been proud and pleased to know our President," who Wolfowitz defined as "a man who is determined to move forward strategically, pragmatic step after pragmatic step toward a goal that the faint-hearted deride as visionary."

Wolfowitz used Jackson to defend against his own critics who have cast aside his clear views of fighting international terrorism by mindlessly labeling him as a "hawk." He said that Jackson himself once rejected this label, quipping "I'm not a hawk or a dove, I just don't want my country to be a pigeon."

For his part, Wolfowitz took strong issue with those, like Mitzna, who argue that fighting terrorism is not a goal because there is no promise of Nirvana at the end of the fight. "To suggest that we must accept a dismal status quo because we cannot achieve perfection is to counsel despair. It discourages us from those bold and realistic steps that can achieve real progress," he said.

Denouncing the appeasers, Wolfowitz explained that defeatists are singularly ill-equipped to lead a war for freedom from terrorism. "Freedom cannot be defended, much less advanced by the faint hearted who shun all risks. And it cannot be advanced if we believe that evil dictators can be brought around to peaceful ways without at least the threat of force."

Wolfowitz, who is now one of the principle architects of the US war against Islamic terrorism, comes from a pedigree of successful strategists schooled by Henry Jackson. Their policies are shaped by a deep-seated belief in the justice of their country. They acknowledge realistically that as the land of freedom and liberty, the US is locked in a constant and never-ending struggle against movements and ideologies that would murder innocents and blot out freedom.

As their teacher, Henry Jackson made clear, the inspiration for much of what they stand for comes from watching and emulating Israel.

It is the legacy of the Jewish state, indeed of the Jewish people as the solitary fighter combating terrorism against innocent civilians that captivated these men's attention thirty years ago. It was Israel's struggle that made them recognize that terrorism, like Communism - the major threat of that day must be fought without compromise. As Jackson put it, "The idea that one person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter' cannot be sanctioned. Freedom fighters or revolutionaries don't blow up buses containing noncombatants; terrorist murderers do . It is a disgrace that democracies would allow the treasured word 'freedom' to be associated with the acts of the terrorists."

Meanwhile, in Jerusalem on Thursday morning, terrorist murderers greeted Mitzna's "peace at any price" victory by blowing up a bus full of children on their way to school.

The job of the Likud, whether led by Ariel Sharon or Binyamin Netanyahu is to restore to Israel the mantle of warrior for freedom and justice against darkness and evil - a mantle we wore so defiantly and naturally throughout our history until Oslo. Our earlier unstinting combat of terrorism is in large part responsible for the fact that today the Bush administration is able to advance so clearly the notion that terrorists must be destroyed because they cannot be appeased.

Amram Mitzna's ascension to leadership of Labor, like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter's leadership of the Democratic party in the 1970s, has shown that the Likud today, like the Republican party then is the only party capable of leading.

Paul Wolfowitz quoted on Monday night from President Bush's State of the Union message in explaining the end of the current war. "This is a decisive decade in the history of liberty," Bush said. "We've been called to a unique role in human events. Rarely has the world faced a choice more clear or consequential."

According to the opinion polls, we Israelis have already made our choice. The great challenge before our leadership today is not merely to remind us that we have no choice but to fight and win our war on terrorism. Our leaders must make us again believe, like we once made Senator Jackson believe, that by fighting without apology and without pause, we are fulfilling our dream of advancing the cause of world peace by making our world safe for ourselves to live freely and without fear.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Arab world is now enjoying a Ramadan treat, courtesy of Egyptian state television. The pan-Arab celebration comes in the form of the hit mini-series Knight without a Horse, which is based on the anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fact that Egypt, which receives $2 billion in US aid annually because of its peace treaty with Israel, is directly promoting anti-Semitism through the 41-part series is hardly surprising and almost unworthy of note.

After all, under President Hosni Mubarak, practically the only area in which Egyptian citizen-subjects are given the right to express themselves freely is in the sphere of anti-Semitism. Just last month, an Egyptian administrative court outlawed the Cairo Association for Peace, which was devoted to cultivating peaceful ties with Israel. The suit against the association was brought by attorney Ibrahim Yusri, former director of the Foreign Ministry's Department of International Law and Agreements.

Given Egypt's leading role as an inciter of hatred against Israel and the Jewish people, it was also not surprising that Cairo hosted this week's Palestinian terror conference between Fatah and Hamas. Hamas terrorist extraordinaire Abdul Aziz Rantisi told the Palestinian Information Center earlier this week that the dialogue was taking place to find common ground among all the Palestinians. He said, "We hope that [the] resistance option would be the common ground of this dialogue and any other future dialogue."

Osama Abu Hamdan, Hamas's representative in Lebanon, who also attended the talks, lauded the Egyptian role in hosting them and pointed out that Hamas delegates had held numerous conversations with Egyptian government officials. Media accounts over the past week reported that the head of Egyptian intelligence was personally handling all Egyptian talks with Hamas.

Slightly more surprising is that the European Union sponsored the conference. Alistair Crook, EU Middle East envoy Miguel Moratinos's security adviser, was in Cairo. According to Javier Sancho, Moratinos's spokesman, the EU's role was "to facilitate" the dialogue as "part of its ongoing efforts to stop terrorism."

Also as part of the EU's efforts to stop Palestinian terrorism - or at least some Palestinian terrorism - this week it was reported that the EU recently held talks with one Muhammed Naifa in an effort to persuade him to limit Fatah terror attacks to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.

Sancho explained to me that the EU does not hold discussions with members of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, which the EU defines as a terror organization. "We only talk with Fatah," he said.

Apparently when the EU representatives spoke to Naifa, he must have been wearing his Fatah hat. Since they are the same organization, saying he is from Fatah was not a lie.

Naifa, of course was the mastermind of the Kibbutz Metzer massacre, as well as the massacre at the French Hill junction in Jerusalem this past June in which seven people, including five-year-old Gal Eisenman and her grandmother, Noa Alon, were murdered.

One wonders what Moratinos was thinking about when on Tuesday, as his security adviser was ensconced at the terror summit in Cairo, he attended the joint funerals of Metzer massacre victims Revital Ohayon and her young sons Matan and Ohad. He told reporters "I have come to identify with the victims."

But how could he identify with them? He, who just recently had his representatives meet with their murderer to try to cut a deal. He, who insists that Fatah is not a terrorist organization even when Fatah's Web site published the Aksa Martyrs Brigades' announcement of the "qualitative operation in the settlement of Metzer" in which their comrade killed "five Zionist colonizers."

The announcement also warned us that the murder of little boys and girls is an actual aim of Fatah today. "We will continue to strike in any place, targeting their children as well," it read.

How could Moratinos possibly be capable of identifying with the Ohayons? Just this week, Chris Patten, the European Commission's foreign relations chief, said that he needs an investigation of PA abuse of EU funds "like I need a hole in the head." Moratinos, like Patten, refuses to stop the EU's monthly $10 million payments to the PA even though the government and the IDF have provided them both with documented proof that those funds are used to finance Fatah terror cells.

It is a puzzle how people of reasonable intelligence and of purported liberal values can fund, meet with, and even sponsor conferences for known murderers in the name of saving lives. It was this puzzle that was troubling me, when I received an e-mail from the Zionist student group at Harvard University. It contained the minutes of the group's meeting last week at which programming decisions were discussed. One of the participants encouraged the group to work with the new "Palestine Solidarity" organization on campus. Although he admitted that he had been treated with overt hostility when he attended its meeting, he argued that it is an organization "very similar to Harvard Students for Israel." No one dissented.

The Harvard students' decision to work with a group whose battle cry is pressuring Harvard to end its investments in companies that do business with Israel jibed well with a similar incident at Georgetown University a few weeks back. According to Rod Dreher in The National Review, the Zionist students organization sponsored a lecture about human rights in Arab countries that was given by Dr. Bat Yeor and her husband, historian David Littman. Both lectures were met with hostility by Arab students, who opposed their historical account of Islamic jihads that were followed by discrimination against non-Muslims in conquered lands.

In the aftermath of the lectures, the same Jewish students who had invited them to speak wrote a letter to their school newspaper in which they condemned their own guests. "We denounce the views brought forth by Bat Yeor and David Littman," they wrote, and accused them of making "no effort to make a clear distinction between pure, harmonious Islam, and the acts of a few who falsely claim to act in the name of Islam."

At both Harvard and Georgetown, we find examples of the products of fine liberal Jewish upbringings. In both cases, these liberal Jewish youths are completely incapable of making a case for why it is reasonable for Jews to defend themselves or understand the inadmissibility of hatred, terror, and mistreatment of Jews.

What has happened to these flowers of Jewish American society that would make them defend those who represent the total rejection of their right to defend themselves as Jews or to defend the Jewish state's right to exist? Unfortunately, we have no need to look as far as the US for
such examples of unwillingness of Jews to defend themselves against attack or their refusal to blame the attacker rather than the victim.

The day after the Metzer massacre, kibbutz members extolled their harmonious relations with their Arab neighbors. Just last month members of Metzer organized demonstrations with those neighbors to protest the proposed location of the separation fence - being built to protect them from terrorist infiltrations - because the fence is set to be built 800 meters east of the Green Line.

Speaking to Ha'aretz at that time, kibbutz member Doron Liebler explained, "I fear that after the fence is built, the gates of hell will open up. The minute there's a fence here, we won't be able to take afternoon strolls without firearms."

Translated into real terms, what Liebler was actually saying was that if Israel builds a fence to protect its citizens, the Palestinian response will be to butcher Jews. So if this is the case, then the belief in peaceful ties is nothing but a fantasy.

In what liberal, peace-loving society can one reasonably expect one's neighbors to react to the expropriation of 800 meters of land with terrorism against civilians? The answer is in no such society would one reasonably expect such a response.

How many times over the past nine years have we heard it said by our politicians and sober-minded peaceniks, and even the EU and the UN from time to time, that the Palestinian Authority "is not doing enough to stop terror."

The real question, of course, is how could one expect the Palestinian Authority, which is doing everything it can to promote terror, to do anything at all to stop it? What is it that leads people of goodwill and liberal conscience to make common cause with people who are not only fighting to destroy the very liberal, human values they espouse but are also murdering their children?

Perhaps on college campuses it can be chalked up to simple ignorance and naivete. But when it comes to the EU and the messianic Israeli left, the answer is seemingly far more foreboding. It appears, that by clinging to patently false assumptions about the nature of those that murder Israelis in the face of all facts on the ground, these diehards either do not really believe in the values they so vehemently proclaim, or they believe in them only in cases where Jewish lives are not at stake.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Netanyahu: Mine will be a government of solutions

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CAROLINE B. GLICK Nov. 7, 2002

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In an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, newly sworn-in Foreign Minister and Likud leadership candidate Binyamin Netanyahu elaborated on his differences with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, explaining why he believes he is the best man to lead the country.

Do you think you were a successful prime minister?

Yes and I think the public thought I was successful, because in retrospect, a year and a half after I was defeated I was going to be reelected by the greatest majority in Israeli history. All the polls were placing me at 70 percent. And the reason that was the case is because people looked in retrospect at the three years that I served and saw the virtual absence of terror and the economic liberalization moves that I made, and concluded rightly that those were years of security and prosperity.

Yes, but you did lose the 1999 elections by a considerable margin. Did you learn any lessons from that? How would you act differently in a second go around as prime minister?

I think I concentrated an enormous amount of time on policy and less on politics, and I think the balance of the two is required. You have to spend time on people. You cannot just concentrate on policy. We did tremendously important things for the economy. When the Russian economy tanked, when the Asian markets collapsed, we were able to move the economy forward. We also achieved a breakthrough in the strong security. This requires spending effort and time with political colleagues and reporters.

Do you favor forming a unity government after the elections?

The government has to be one that is based on solutions. The important thing is not the breadth but rather the depth of the government. What do you elect a government for? You don't elect a government just to have people sit there in as many seats as possible.

You elect a government in order to solve the country's problems and preferably to leave the country in better shape than you received it. I can say that of the last four prime ministers I am the only one to have left the country in better shape than I received it.

Do you think that Sharon is leaving the country in worse shape than he received it?

I think one of the things that we see is the tremendous escalation of terror. The economy is in worse shape. There is no question about it. A lot of that is derived not so much from the lack of security but from the absence of a coherent economic policy.

So you don't plan to have a unity government, then?

I will have the broadest government possible around the solutions that I plan to bring to revitalize the economy and restore security. This means that whoever opts to join will be most welcome. I will certainly ask Labor to join as well. But the important thing is, I want to have a government that will solve Israel's problems and get the country moving again. This is more important to me than if we extend our majority by whatever number of seats.

With regard to that policy, until 1993 it was the policy of the State of Israel and the US not to negotiate with the PLO, and to oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state. Do you think -- based on the experience we have had over the past nine years with the opposite policy -- that it is possible now to revert to the old one?

I have no problem with negotiations. I'll negotiate with someone who doesn't want to destroy us. But Arafat's regime has failed twice. It abrogated its promise to recognize the State of Israel and to promote that recognition among its people. Second, it abrogated its promise to cease terror. So they are not partners for anything. I think it is easy to persuade the international community of what the majority of Israelis understand: namely, that Arafat is not a partner.

What about Palestinian statehood? In a television interview Tuesday night, you said that a Palestinian terror state won't be established in 2003. Could it be established in 2004 or 2005?

I think we have to resist and I think we can and must resist the Palestinians' efforts to achieve the powers that would endanger the State of Israel, like the fielding of an army.

Would the forces they have today be acceptable to you in a future arrangement?

Not really. They were supposed to have a modest police force, and here they have much more than that. But I'm talking about the threat of an army with half-tracks and missiles and eventually with an air force. This would not be merely irresponsible, it would be a mortal threat to the life of State of Israel. The ability to have certain sovereign powers that have nothing to do with self-determination must be withheld.

The Palestinians have a right to self-rule. I have no intention whatsoever of interfering with the self-government. But allowing them the powers that could destroy the one and only Jewish state is not a prescription for peace. It is a prescription for catastrophe.

President Bush is talking about the establishment of a Palestinian state. Do you see agreement between what you are saying and what he is saying?

Yes, I think there are maybe some differences, and some of them primarily in the semantic areas, but I think there are aspects of his view that I fully subscribe to. I think, first of all, we agree on the interim stages. We agree that the Palestinians have to completely, radically alter their behavior in the interim period.

We need to also speak more precisely about what it is that we envision in a final settlement. I envision a situation where the Palestinians would have the all powers of self-government but none of the powers that could destroy or threaten the state of the lives of Israelis.

Shimon Peres and others have said that Israel doesn't have the right to determine the leadership of the Palestinians. Do you think that they are right?

The Palestinians don't have the right to determine their own leadership. I think that certain leaderships make themselves illegitimate. Does America have the right to intervene in the leadership of the Iraqi people? Do we say that the Iraqi people choose their own leadership? That's absurd. In certain cases, when dictators unfold a regime of terror on their own people and their neighbors, they become disqualified as legitimate leaders. This is precisely what President Bush said about Arafat, and he's right.

So Israel has the right to say that these people are not acceptable leaders of the Palestinians?

We don't choose the leaders, but we can say categorically who we won't accept as their leaders. We cannot say who we will accept.

So who would you categorically exclude?

Anyone who espouses the destruction of Israel and the pursuit of terror.

Anybody?

Anybody. The name is irrelevant. It's the policy that is relevant.

What is your view then of the US 'road map' plan for peace? It doesn't seem to be as explicit as the president's speech in making negotiations or statehood contingent on changing Palestinian behavior in a radical way.

I am looking into it right now and so I don't want to comment, except to say that the prime minister said he had some serious reservations.

Prime Minister Sharon has visited with President Bush more than any other world leader. He claims that the relationship he has developed with the president is a strategic asset to the country. What do you think of that claim?

I think that I have a dual view -- a slightly more nuanced view of the way that our relations with the US are structured. The relations of leaders is important. I am glad that both the prime minister and I have good relations with this administration. We know the president personally, and I have known the people around the president for the last 20 years. I entertained the president when I was prime minister. I thought then that it was critical to bring him over and to show him Israel. It was his one and only visit to Israel. I think it helped cement his view about Israel. But equally, I have known the key figures in the administration for two decades and we share many elements of our world view.

Like what?

Like the difference between those who believe in paper and those who believe in power, to use Charles Krauthammer's dichotomy. This administration does not believe in the power of paper contracts with dictators. It believes in deterrence and the use of power to roll back aggression if deterrence fails. This is exactly what I have been arguing for many years regarding our relations with our neighbors. So there is an intellectual and personal conviviality here that is very natural and obvious to me. I know the US and I know Washington and I know this administration.

But I think that this is only one aspect of our relations with the US. The critical factor in shaping the foreign policy of the United States is public opinion. American public opinion is one main asset that we need to nurture all of the time. Because public opinion will prevent any government from turning on Israel. It will also make a friendly government friendlier.

It is a fact that when we had pressures coming from the United States in the first few days of Operation Defensive Shield, the prime minister asked me to go to the United States, which I had been doing anyway. But then, as throughout, my main effort was to educate American public opinion about Israel's right to defend itself. The right that was exercised by the United States in Afghanistan after it was attacked by terrorists.

Public opinion was decisive in shaping policy then. Public opinion is always decisive. And therefore, our efforts have to be multi-layered. We need good relations with Washington, which we have, and we need to constantly work on public opinion.

It is amazing to me that most Israelis don't understand that America is a very different country from China. In China, public opinion doesn't count. It is solely what the leaders of China decide that becomes the policy. In America it is very different. This is the case in some countries in Europe as well. We are fortunate that the most accessible country in regard to public opinion is also the most important country in the world.

One of my main efforts as foreign minister and as prime minister will be the nurturing of American public opinion. And to nurture that public opinion we need to persuade Americans of the justice of our cause.

What about Europe?

Yes, Europe too.

Do you think there is a problem of anti-Semitism in Europe?

There is definitely latent anti-Semitism in Europe.

Latent or active anti-Semitism?

Well, it was latent for 50 years. Parts of European society are laced with anti-Semitism; [other] parts of European society are not laced with anti-Semitism. But anti-Semitism is a very old tradition there. It goes back not only 2,000 years but even to the 500 years of Hellenistic anti-Semitism that preceded the birth of Christianity, so it goes very strongly with tradition. And it doesn't disappear overnight. The odd thing, the exception, is that Europe did not have overt anti-Semitic expression over the last 50 years, and that's an historical exception because of the Holocaust.

In my view, there are many in Europe who oppose anti-Semitism and many governments and leaders who oppose anti-Semitism, but the strain exists there. It is ignoring reality to say that it is not present. It has now been wedded to and stimulated by the more potent and more overt force of anti-Semitism which is Islamic anti-Semitism coming from some of the Islamic minorities in European countries. This is often disguised as anti-Zionism.

As foreign minister now and possibly the next prime minister, what do you propose to do to combat the now active European anti-Semitism?

You try to lance this boil. You try to fight its canards, its myths. But this is a very difficult proposition. What you must do is put forward your case, to insist that when we are being attacked and slaughtered by savage barbarians who happen to have good PR who have a PR effort that they are unjust, and that we who defend ourselves are acting in the most sensible and moral tradition of self-defense, the most decent tradition of self-defense that any society has had.

Speaking of bad PR, why do you think that the Israeli settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are such an explosive issue?

I don't think they are. They are presented as such. But it is a fact that when Barak was prime minister, when he offered practically the entire territory of Judea and Samaria, including the uprooting of dozens of settlements, Arafat merely pocketed the offer and proceeded to the real aim of the conflict, which is the eradication of the rest of pre-1967 Israel. The settlements are a smokescreen under which Palestinian and Arab propaganda tries to reverse causality. What they typically do is present the results of Arab aggression as the cause of the problem.

Now they are saying that the settlements or our being in the territories is the cause of the problem. But of course, when we were attacked from these very territories in 1967, there wasn't a single Israeli soldier or settlement there. That came about as a result of Arab aggression, not the cause of it. They did the same thing about 1948 in 1967. Then they said the cause of the conflict was the refugees, but there wasn't one refugee in the Middle East when five Arab armies attacked us. What they consistently do is turn the results of this aggression against us.

So what are you going to do to change Israel's image and the settlement's image as the cause of the problem?

I'm going to tell the truth just tell the truth. How do you do that? Just get people who know the facts and are convinced of the justice of our cause to appear on the international airwaves and to make our case forcefully.

Have we not done that until now?

No, we haven't. What I have tried to do on a voluntary basis is not enough.

Why haven't we done it?

Because, I think, our whole machinery for it has not understood the principle observation of the 20th century: that you cannot protect a military victory without a political victory. You cannot protect a political victory without anchoring it in public opinion. You cannot win over public opinion unless you persuade that public that your cause is just.

The Arabs, having been defeated on the battlefield, are trying to reverse our military victories from 1948, and especially from 1967, by winning over Western public opinion by convincing that public opinion that our victories are unjust, and that the reversal of those victories would serve justice and peace. They are lying, of course. But the important thing is that they have had the field to themselves in many parts of the world. In Europe, they have been practically unchallenged. In the US, they have been challenged more successfully. That is one of the reasons that the situation in the United States is better.

So, as foreign minister and then perhaps as prime minister, what will you do to change the situation?

I am going to set up a hasbara effort that will be launched from Jerusalem to these various places. Both through the appointment of ambassadors and the appointment of advisors who have access to the media to influence the international news organizations, I arrange a steady stream of written and oral argumentation to explain our justice.

Speaking of ambassadors, Shimon Peres just appointed two of his allies Nissim Zvilli and Danny Gillerman to key diplomatic postings. Would you expect them to submit their resignations now?

I am going to look into all these appointments. I have decided to accept the resignation of Mr. Peres's director-general. I have asked the long-time professional Yoav Biran to step in in the interim. I believe the key job of ambassador in democratic countries is to influence public opinion and promote trade and commerce with Israel.

For this, don't they need to reflect the policies of the government in power?

I would assume it is taken for granted that to effect public opinion they of course must reflect the coherent policies of the government.

Sharon's advisors have claimed that your appointment as foreign minister was aimed as neutralizing you as an opponent, because you cannot at once serve in his government and attack him. Yet they have attacked you. Sharon did so on Monday in the Knesset and his son, Omri, said Wednesday morning that you don't get along with people. And you stated here that the country is worse off today than it was when Sharon assumed office. How can the two of you work together?

There is an objective test. People can judge what the situation was in 1999. Is there a secret? Is it a state secret what our situation is today? Do we have to spell it out? Do we have to have poverty reports? People don't need reports. People are living this reality and it is a very difficult one. Can it be compared to the situation in 1999 when I left office? And was the situation in 1999 when I left office comparable to the situation in 1996, when I came into office after a plethora of suicide attacks?

How can you represent policies you oppose and serve under a man you are running against, and how can this be prevented from degenerating into a mud fest?

I don't think there will be a mud fest, and you will never find me making personal attacks against the prime minister -- ever. I think what I am going to do is present my vision of moving the country forward, of moving the economy forward -- creating growth and jobs, and allowing for lower taxes that could actually induce an increase in tax revenues. This would provide more money for social programs. These are things I deeply believe in. They are policies I began implemented as prime minister.

These are policies of liberalization and privatization, and I will implement them again. I will put my vision before the people. Let the people choose. In the coming elections people have to choose one thing. They don't have to choose a foreign minister or a finance minister. They have to choose a policy that will get the country moving. That policy can be determined by only one man the prime minister of Israel.

How do you respond to them saying that such criticism is undermining the prime minister?

Undermining, that is absurd. I am running because the country is in dire straits and we have to get it out. That doesn't mean that I personally attack the prime minister. But you have to be blind... I spoke about my economic views and I have been critical of the government's economic policies. But I don't want to concentrate on the malaise. I want to concentrate on solutions. Mine will be a government of solutions.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu are locked in a match of political wills and wiles. Each, today, rightly believes that his political future will, to a large degree, be determined by how this match plays out.

Both Sharon and Netanyahu know that Sharon's request of Netanyahu to accept the position of foreign minister in the narrow coalition government Sharon now seeks to build is a calculated political move. If Netanyahu were to refuse Sharon's offer outright, he would open himself up to criticism as one who would bring down a right-wing government. If Netanyahu were to accept Sharon's offer outright, Sharon would have a year to transform Netanyahu's image from that of a legitimate contender for Likud leadership into that of an underling daring to defy his boss.
 

In giving Sharon his conditional agreement to serve as foreign minister, Netanyahu provided himself with what he considers necessary breathing room. Netanyahu explained to Sharon that he believes today, as he did two years ago, that the current makeup of a possible right-wing coalition with a total of 62 Knesset seats only 19 of which belong to the Likud renders the possibility of building a stable governing coalition impossible. Because of this, he agreed to Sharon's offer on condition the government they form be a transition government that will lead the country only until early elections are called.

Reasonable people can argue that Netanyahu's counter-offer is irresponsible. The argument is that under all circumstances, it makes no sense for the Likud to voluntarily risk, in elections, the loss of the power it now has.

Furthermore, the argument continues, according to the latest polls, a future Likud-led government would still necessarily rely on the same coalition partners - Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, the National Religious Party, Yisrael Ba'aliya, and the ultra-Orthodox parties. As a result, Netanyahu is wrong to argue, as he does, that elections will empower the Likud sufficiently to enable the party to enact radical economic reforms necessary to extricate the economy from the current deep recession.

If the current polling projections translate into actual election results, necessary measures including drastic slashing of transfer payments, massive government investment in infrastructure projects, significant tax decreases, and deregulation will be just as difficult to implement in the future as they are today.

At the same time, it is equally apparent that Sharon's behavior is problematic. If, until last Wednesday night, Sharon could justify his support for resuscitating the moribund Oslo process by claiming that it is a necessary sacrifice to ensure Labor's continued partnership in the unity government, such support makes no sense today.

As the leader of the opposition, the Labor Party today will oppose every action taken by the government against the Palestinian terror war on the grounds that it "kills" imaginary prospects for peace. Under this new reality, Sharon cannot justify not embracing the Likud's own view that security, rather than a peace agreement with a terrorist regime, is Israel's goal in fighting and emerging victorious from the present war.

And beneath the overlay of both politicians' personal interests, the strategic threats against Israel are gathering force. In the North, the Syria-Hizbullah-Iran axis is showing, through constant escalation, that it will not stop its provocations until Israel is sucked into another military operation in south Lebanon. Sunday's disclosure that the Lebanese are now dumping raw sewage into the streams flowing into the Jordan River is only the latest example.

The Palestinians have shown that they have no intention of reaching a cease-fire with Israel. Rather, it is clear that they, with the support of the Arab regimes, are vying for a post-Iraq war situation in which Israel will be forced by the US to pay a price for Arab non-intervention in that war by accepting the establishment of a PLO-run terror state in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip.

The conclusion of the current clash of the Likud titans is anybody's guess. But what is absolutely clear is that the stakes of this game couldn't possibly be any higher.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

The large boom that reverberated throughout Jerusalem on Tuesday morning threw the city's residents into a momentary panic. Windows of homes and offices rattled. As my dog nose-dived under the bed, I, heart pounding, went over to the window to see if smoke was rising from any tall buildings around my shaking home. Seeing none, I decided it must have been a sonic boom and went about my business, cursing the air force under my breath, yet feeling a little silly for my reaction.

As the day wore on, more and more people related similar stories. "I was standing in the mall and heard the boom and everyone dropped to the floor," went one of the worst. It became clear that I was far from alone in my anxiety.

Responding to the incident, OC Air Force Maj.-Gen. Dan Halutz grounded the F-16 squadron responsible and ordered an investigation of how it happened that our pilots could be so insensitive to a justifiably jittery public.

To a certain degree, the otherwise unremarkable incident is an indication of the shallowness of our sense of security. Quite simply, if a sonic boom can cause a general panic, we have no sense of security. And the panic was reasonable, because statistically speaking, given the IAF's record of thoughtfulness, the chance of that boom having been a bomb was actually larger than it being a jet fighter breaking the sound barrier directly above our rooftops.

Up in the North, our fellow citizens probably raised an eyebrow when they heard of their anxious brethren in the capital. While a sonic boom is a rare occurrence here, from Haifa to Nahariya to Kiryat Shmona, they are heard all the time. While in Jerusalem we reasonably mistake sonic booms for Palestinian bombs, in the North the automatic response is to believe that Hizbullah is attacking.

Since the start of the year, Hizbullah has been deliberately firing anti-aircraft guns at northern communities. The specially designed shells explode at an altitude of some 3,000 meters. This ensures that the noise heard on the ground is extremely loud and frightening. By lobbing the shells over the border, Hizbullah also ensures that the fragments fall in our cities and towns.

We are being victimized by a terrorist war fought against us on two fronts. Both the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, and Hizbullah in south Lebanon manifest strategic threats.

As the government has limited its engagement in this war to the Palestinian front, the threat of Hizbullah has been left to escalate into what security sources are now arguing may very well be the most serious emerging strategic threat to the state.

Like the Palestinian terror organizations, Hizbullah is wholly dedicated to the physical eradication of the State of Israel. So, like the Palestinians, Hizbullah is impossible to deter. It can only be fought until its ability to cause harm has been destroyed.

The impossibility of deterring Hizbullah was brought home yet again this past week when the group began dumping raw sewage into Nahal Ayoun, which flows into Israel. The dumping dovetails with the Lebanese project of diverting the flow of the Wazzani River away from the Hatzbani, which flows into the Jordan and Lake Kinneret.

Both of these provocations, like the anti-aircraft fire, the cross-border shootings, the kidnapping of three soldiers, the killing of another three, and the terrorist attack near Shlomi in the spring, point to an abject failure to deter the rising Hizbullah threat.

Dr. Boaz Ganor, director of the Counterterrorism Institute at Herzliya's Interdisciplinary Center, explains why Hizbullah is a growing cause for alarm. "Before the precipitous IDF pullout from south Lebanon in May 2000, Hizbullah was simply an annoyance, a tactical threat to Israel. Since the pullout, because it is deployed directly across the border and because it has significantly upgraded its capabilities, it now for the first time constitutes a strategic threat to the country."

On Tuesday, the US army conducted a successful test of a high-energy laser that shot down an artillery shell in New Mexico. The test followed a successful test some months ago of the laser that shot down both single and multiple Katyusha rockets. The high-energy laser system is a joint US-Israeli project.

The Defense Ministry is no doubt keen to get the system operating in the North. This because Hizbullah has a large Iranian- and Syrian-supplied arsenal of long-range Katyusha rockets and mortars capable of reaching targets as far south as Netanya. Sources familiar with Hizbullah's capabilities explain that it has developed advanced guidance systems that enable it to hit specific targets. This situation exposes not only civilians to attack, but also endangers sensitive strategic targets like the oil refineries in Haifa and military installations throughout the north and center of the country.

Even more foreboding was The Sunday Times of London's report last month that Hizbullah recently acquired Zelzal-2 ballistic missiles with a range of 250 kilometers capable of hitting Tel Aviv ,that can be armed with chemical warheads.

According to Ganor, the recent capture of the ring of Beduin suspected of spying for Hizbullah, like the recent arrest of a senior Hizbullah operative in Hebron, "gives a clear indication of the group's intentions."

Similar to its response to the Palestinian terror war, the international community's response to the growing Hizbullah threat, to a large degree, is to blame the situation on Israel. Of late, this tendency has been most clearly expressed by Canada. Its government, which is working to withhold tax-exempt status from the Canadian chapter of Magen David Adom on the grounds that MDA ambulances operate in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, refuses to define Hizbullah as a terrorist organization.

Two weeks after Prime Minister Jean Chretien shared a stage in Beirut with Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah, the Canadian embassy demanded the right to see Fawzi Ayoub, a senior Hizbullah terrorist granted citizenship by Canada and arrested in Hebron in June. Canada has refused to curb Hizbullah activities on its soil. Late last month, Foreign Minister Bill Graham defended Hizbullah, insisting that there is a distinction between the organization's "humanitarian" arm and its "military" apparatus.

It is true that much of Hizbullah's annual budget of $100 million goes to social services. But like Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, its media, educational, and welfare systems are aimed at indoctrinating Shi'ite Muslims in Lebanon in its ideology of jihad and Islamic fundamentalism.

On the day that an IDF artillery battery misfired and killed Lebanese civilians in Kafr Kana during Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, then prime minister Shimon Peres was meeting with Yasser Arafat at the Erez checkpoint. When reports of the incident started flowing in, both Arafat and Muhammad Dahlan joked with their Israeli counterparts, congratulating them on the operation. Arafat and Dahlan explained that the PLO hates Hizbullah, which is sponsored by Iran and Syria, both of which were at the time hostile to Arafat for signing the Oslo Accords.

And yet, the strategic ties between Palestinian terrorism and Hizbullah are deep and long-standing. In his recent expose on Hizbullah in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that Imad Mugniyah, its chief of overseas operations and the second most wanted terrorist, after Osama bin Laden, on the FBI's list, began his career in the PLO training camps in Lebanon in the 1970s and later served in Arafat's Force 17, until the IDF drove the PLO from Lebanon in 1982. Goldberg reports that Mugniyah served as an agent for the PA's acquisition of Iranian weaponry that was bound for Gaza on the Karine-A in January.

That the Palestinians perceived the IDF's pullout from south Lebanon as a Hizbullah victory and modeled their terror campaign along Hizbullah lines is a well-known and undisputed fact. Aside from the fact that Al-Manar, Hizbullah's television station, is the first to report on Palestinian terrorist attacks, experts do not see a direct link between Palestinian terror operations and Hizbullah. At the same time, since Yitzhak Rabin temporarily deported 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists to south Lebanon in 1992, there has been close cooperation between these groups and Hizbullah.

The fact that the primary sponsor of both Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad is Iran acts to strengthen these ties. The fact that Hamas leaders met with Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut before their meeting with Fatah terrorists in Cairo this week is a further sign of the strategic coordination between the organizations.

In Israel's timidity in facing down Hizbullah's aggression, we see deterrence theory turned upside down.

As Ganor put it, "If Israel can be said to have tried to lay down red lines for terror organizations, we see that not only has it failed, but that the Hizbullah has successfully laid down red lines for Israel. After the IDF bombed a Hizbullah training camp in Baalbek in 1994, they bombed the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. When the IDF inadvertently caused civilian casualties while fighting Hizbullah in south Lebanon, they lobbed Katyushas at Kiryat Shmona."

There is no doubt that between the bombs in Jerusalem and the Katyushas pointing at Hadera, we have cause for anxiety. The only way to end the constant attacks and eliminate the threat of even greater ones is to destroy the capabilities of our terrorist enemies and to deter their state sponsors. As with the US war on al-Qaida, our war on Palestinian and Hizbullah terror will be long, costly, and unpopular in Europe and Canada. But the alternative is too frightening to contemplate.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In an interview with Ha'aretz published last Tuesday, new Palestinian Authority Interior Minister Dr. Hani al-Hassan explained that as far as he is concerned, murdering Israeli civilians who live in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip is a legitimate operation of "resistance" against "occupation."

Tuesday night, a terrorist from the Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades infiltrated the community of Hermesh in Samaria and went on a shooting rampage. Before IDF forces managed to kill him, he resisted the occupation by murdering two 14-year-old girlfriends Linoy Saroussi and Hadas Turgeman and 53-year-old Orna Eshel.

It is difficult for us not to see the direct connection between the new commander of the PA security forces' statement and the murder of Saroussi, Turgeman, and Eshel hours later by a Fatah-affiliated gunman.

The authors of Human Rights Watch's recent report on Palestinian suicide bombers seem to have more trouble seeing PA culpability. In the 170-page report, released on Friday and entitled "Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing Attacks against Israeli Civilians," Human Rights Watch claimed it could not find "evidence that Arafat or the PA planned, ordered, or carried out suicide bombings or other attacks on Israeli civilians."

We do not wish to come down too hard on Human Rights Watch. After all, it only took the well-known human rights group eight years to come out with a full-blown report that deals comprehensively with Palestinian attacks upon Israelis, but we cannot help but be discouraged by the result. Although the report devotes great detail to the terror organizations that claim responsibility for acts of mass murder of Israeli civilians, it refuses to draw the conclusion that the Palestinian Authority created and sustained the milieu in which these attacks continue to take place.

The report states that there may be a link between Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's decision to release all of the terror suspects held in PA jails in October 2000 and the rash of suicide bombings that began some months later. We appreciate that admission, but the report makes no mention of the documented actions taken and statements made by Arafat between his return from the failed Camp David summit in July 2000 and the beginning of the Palestinian offensive in September of that year. In those two months, Arafat ordered his security chiefs to prepare for war and, as Arafat directed, the PA television and radio ratcheted up their anti-Israel incitement several decibels.

For all its thoroughness, the report mysteriously makes absolutely no mention of the Karine-A weapons ship intercepted en route to Gaza by IDF commandos this past January. That ship was skippered by the deputy commander of the PA naval police and contained 50 tons of weapons that Arafat purchased from Iran. Among the weapons seized were large quantities of C-4 explosives, widely considered the terrorist bomb-maker's explosive of choice.

The report also makes no mention of the fact that Arafat harbors known and wanted terrorists in his Ramallah compound. To our mind, this makes Arafat an accessory to their crimes. Israeli criminal law, like that in most Western democracies, defines harboring murderers as aiding and abetting murder.

Then too, the report says that Israel should allow for the proper functioning of the PA's judicial branch to enable the PA to take concerted action against terrorists. Yet the report makes no mention of the fact that the primary function today of the PA's judiciary is to sentence to death Palestinians found guilty of the crime of "collaborating" with Israel against terrorists.

Again, we don't wish to come down too hard on Human Rights Watch. After all, the report, such as it is, marks a departure from Human Rights Watch's actions just a little over a year ago. Back in September 2001, the organization supported the resolution at the UN's conference on racism in Durban, South Africa where Israel was defined as "a racist apartheid state," guilty of the "systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing and state terror against the Palestinian people."

Apparently old habits are hard to break. After years of vilifying Israel, it cannot be easy for Human Rights Watch to admit that one of their favorite victims - the Palestinians - is systematically victimizing Israelis. But by refusing to contend with the overwhelming evidence of PA support and sponsorship of the terror war against Israel, we believe that Human Rights Watch failed in its primary function. That is, it failed to take the kind of action that could eventually lead to the end of these attacks by placing the blame on the group ultimately responsible for them - the Palestinian Authority.

Originally published as an unsigned editorial in The Jerusalem Post

Since the 1980s, under the direction of Shimon Peres, the Labor Party establishment has become one with the leftist ideological fringe. It was in the era of unity government in the 1980s that Peres discarded his security-minded and ideologically motivated support for the settlement movement in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip of the 1970s and embraced appeasement as a national strategy.

In advancing his agenda, Peres cultivated the group of young men -- Yossi Beilin, Avraham Burg, Haim Ramon, and Uri Savir among others -- that would, under his tutelage, transform Labor from a Zionist ruling party into what it has become today. That is, a party of Neville Chamberlains and Edouard Daladiers, irrelevantly arguing among themselves over whether the surrender of the country's Sudentenland in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza or the building of a "Maginot Line" along the pre-Six Day War border is the proper policy.

Commenting on the state of his party in an interview with Makor Rishon a month ago, soon to be former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer explained, "There is a struggle between two world views. What is the gang [of Labor Party opponents] accusing me of being? That I'm Likud B. That is their accusation. All the various Beilins are trying to turn the Labor Party into Meretz B or Meretz C."

Like a character in a Greek tragedy, whose demise is foretold from the beginning, on Wednesday, Ben-Eliezer capitulated to his party's opposition and left the unity government. In so doing, he embraced his party's irrelevant doctrinal position hook, line, and sinker and ensured that, from an ideological point of view, the results of the elections for the Labor leadership in two weeks will have no impact on the party's continued appeasement platform.

It had to be this way. Today, the Labor Party is comprised of Peres and the Beilins, a handful of shopworn, ideologically barren former generals, old-guard retirees clinging to their party for its nostalgic value, and political hacks who go with the prevailing political wind for personal gain.

It is not an accident that the sum total of the Labor Party's dialogue with the public is one long-winded diatribe against "right-wing extremists."

After their appeasement strategy of the past two decades finally brought the country to a state of war, the only political tool (in the absence of a repudiation of that policy) at the Labor leadership's disposal is hatred of their political opponents.

As Chemi Shalev wrote in Ma'ariv after the unity government's collapse, Ben-Eliezer could not have faced his party colleagues with an 11th-hour agreement with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to stay in the government that did not "explicitly mention the 'settlements.' " Without Sharon's submission to the Labor Party's definition of the "settlers" as an internal enemy that must be punished, Ben-Eliezer could not justify his continued partnership in Sharon's government.

The degeneration of Labor into Meretz C is a tragedy. Given Ben-Eliezer's failure to realign his party with reality and the nation after the destruction of the Oslo process, the historic Labor Party will remain a has-been for the foreseeable future.

This state of affairs leaves the country with only one nationalist centrist party to turn to for leadership -- the Likud. The only question that the public needs to concern itself with is whether the Likud is capable of meeting the challenges of national leadership. Its record in office to date is far from encouraging. Although the party has been in power for 17 of the past 25 years, it has never been able to assert itself as a wholly legitimate party for national leadership.

Menachem Begin, who emerged as national leader in 1977 after more than a generation in opposition, feared the Labor movement's opposition and so gave Laborites key positions in his government. Begin also did nothing to end Labor's uncontested control over the governing bureaucracy and the state-run media.

Replacing Begin in 1983, Yitzhak Shamir also did not work to replace the Labor Party as the governing body. During the unity government with Peres, Shamir did not offer an attractive alternative to Labor for young, aspiring, talented professionals, nor did he break the increasingly leftist Labor party's lock on legitimacy with the media and intellectual elites. Neither Begin nor Shamir offered a coherent economic policy, as one should expect from a governing party. Rather, on both the economic and diplomatic fronts, the two spent much of their time either advancing Labor's policies or attacking those policies as if they were still in the opposition.

Under Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud made its first attempt at becoming a national governing party. This attempt failed largely because Netanyahu could not find a way to co-opt or replace the economic, media, and cultural elites who chose to make war on him rather than accept him and his policies -- political and economic -- as legitimate. Facing this failure, Netanyahu, like his predecessors, ended up advancing the Labor Party's appeasement policy in spite of his personal opposition to it.

Finally, Ariel Sharon, since taking office, has deliberately and counter-intuitively embraced the failed Labor appeasement paradigm. In a public appearance early in the week, Sharon, as he has since taking office, parroted Labor's inane diplomatic-economic platform, when he explained that the tourism industry would only be resuscitated after a peace accord with the Palestinians is signed. In this he echoed the bizarre leftist interpretation of the 1990s high-tech revolution as a Yasser Arafat production.

Hours before the unity government collapsed on Wednesday, Likud MK Yuval Steinitz reasonably told me that the only way for the Likud to emerge as the national governing party is to win the next election. "So far, we haven't had too many achievements to run on," he said. "Our main achievement has been national unity which while important, necessarily falls apart the minute elections are in the offing, so it's not a real achievement."

Steinitz is right. To date, the government has simultaneously fought the war on terror and appeased terror. It has limited its public diplomacy to condemning terrorism, without explaining why the terrorists' goals are illegitimate. It has not even fully managed to convince the US that its war on terrorism is also Israel's war. The government, under Ariel Sharon, has patched together an economic policy based on the Herbert Hoover model of economic stagnation through budgetary austerity and high taxes during a deep recession, rather than the Ronald Reagan model of deficit spending and lower taxes to spur economic growth for the duration.

With all this, no wonder the latest polls show that in contrast to the 15-19 Knesset seats it would have won in a general election in 2001, Labor is now polling 21 seats, while the Likud, which was projected to win more than 40 seats in a general election in 2001, is now polling at 29. Quite simply, in spite of the public's rejection of Labor's appeasement strategy, the Likud has yet, after more than two years of war, to seize the reins of leadership and offer up effective policies for governing.

To meet its challenge as the national governing party, the Likud -- whether leading a narrow coalition government or campaigning for office -- must advance policies founded on an interpretation of reality based on its own ideological worldview.

This worldview, in contrast to Labor's, has since Ze'ev Jabotinsky been based on achieving national well-being by simultaneously cultivating a liberal Jewish democracy and building and ensuring strong military deterrence of the country's enemies. It is an ideological viewpoint that enables Israel to be a vibrant pluralistic society, while accepting the reality of Arab rejectionism of its right to exist as the fact of life that it is.

Jabotinsky's vision is not end-oriented. It does not have peace, socialism, or secular statism as its goal. Rather, with its core embrace of all the diverse strands of Judaism and Israeli society and its acceptance of Arab rejectionism as a normal state of affairs, it is flexible enough to allow constant adaptation to changing situations. In this, Jabotinsky's way, which has rarely been tried and never fully implemented, is far healthier and more attractive than Labor's appeasement doctrine which forces the country to distort reality in order to make it jibe with incorrect ideological tautologies.

The Likud is the only choice for leadership, but its success is far from certain. To succeed as the sole party capable of national leadership, the Likud must embrace its own historic identity as a liberal, democratic movement that bases its policies on a firm understanding and acceptance of the country's social and geopolitical realities. It must, for the first time, both perceive itself and convince the public to view it as the legitimate governing party.

Repudiating the Labor model of utopian appeasement and self-hatred and relegating the Labor chorus to the position of irrelevance that it already occupies by making a convincing case for its own inclusive, realistic path are the great tasks before it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post