After meeting with the members of the Quartet to discuss the so-called road map a week ago, US President George W. Bush said, "I view the road map as a part of the vision that I described, it is a way forward." A study of the proposed road map suggests otherwise.

Perhaps assuming that Yasser Arafat will reject this plan, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last week announced his willingness to accept it. The talk emanating from Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah tends to support an assumption of Palestinian rejectionism. At the same time, Israeli acceptance of the road map involves a renunciation of the traditional approach of all Israeli governments until now - including Ehud Barak's government - to reject the internationalization of the Arab-Israeli conflict that the road map explicitly dictates.

To understand the novelty of the new document it is necessary to place it in the continuum of agreements that Israel signed with the PLO in recent years.

On September 4, 1999, then prime minister Barak signed a memorandum of understanding at Sharm e-Sheikh with Arafat whereby the Palestinians committed themselves to combat terrorism, end incitement, and collect illegal weapons.

The Sharm e-Sheikh memorandum was simply a regurgitation of an identical Palestinian pledge in the Hebron Protocol from January 17, 1997.

But at no point did the PA take sustained action against terrorist infrastructures or official incitement in the PA. To the contrary, the PA has used all the resources at its disposal to increase the size and sophistication of its arsenal and to incite its population to use this arsenal against Israel.

Unfortunately, both the Sharm e-Sheikh memorandum and the Hebron Protocol are much more exacting in their demands towards the Palestinian Authority than the newly formulated road map.

While the fine print hasn't been revealed yet, the new document apparently makes no actual performance-based demands on the Palestinians. So too, there are no benchmarks to define whether the Palestinians have actually done anything either to reform themselves or to destroy their terror infrastructures. The road map includes nothing, for instance, about imprisoning all the heads of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Tanzim.

As for Israel, the demands made of it by the road map mark a departure from all previous agreements. In contrast to the Mitchell Committee report, for example, a freeze on Israeli settlement activities must take place irrespective of the PA's compliance with the document's amorphous demands regarding combating terrorism.

In addition, it is up to the Quartet members rather than Israel to determine when sufficient "progress" has been made for the sides to move toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

As opposed to all the Oslo agreements, which did not presuppose an end to the negotiations, Israel must at the outset agree that the Palestinians will receive sovereignty regardless of their behavior on the ground.

While the Oslo Agreements were based upon the assumption that Israel and the PLO would reach agreements through bilateral negotiations, the road map plan explicitly rejects this notion.

This new plan is based on an internationalization of the negotiating process where the UN, EU, Russia, and the US will determine the outcome of negotiations and Israel will be reduced to a bit player whose views will be "taken into account."

Another novel aspect of the road map is that it changes the terms of reference of the negotiating framework by specifically mentioning the so-called "Saudi peace initiative." That plan, which has never been officially proposed by the Saudi government, calls explicitly for the "return" of Palestinian refugees to Israel and to Palestine.

The fact that Israel is singled out in the new road map as the party guilty of attacking civilians indicates that far from being honest brokers, in its road map the Quartet has determined that Israel is the guilty party in the Palestinian terror war against it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

"If this is how you treat your friends, after we fought with you for 25 years, no one will ever want to make peace with you!"

"We don't want land, we don't want money, we want honor for our blood!"

The above are a representative sampling of the signs that were held by 1,000 demonstrators who stood in the driving rain and cold outside the Prime Minister's Office on Sunday afternoon.

The demonstrators, former soldiers and officers in the South Lebanese Army (SLA) and their families, came to the Prime Minister's Office demanding, for the umpteenth time since Israel turned them into refugees in the aftermath of the IDF's precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, that Israel treat its friends with respect and dignity.

Michael, the 13-year-old son of a former SLA officer who now lives in Kiryat Shmona, told a reporter at the scene, "My father did not put down his gun for 25 years. Today we live like dogs. We don't have any food in our house."

640 SLA soldiers were killed and more than a thousand were injured during their 25-year fight at the side of the IDF, first against the PLO and later against Hizbullah terrorists.

As 31-year-old Fahdi Fadel said to me at another SLA protest in Tel Aviv in September 2000, "We had a choice, either the PLO and Hizbullah or Israel. All the Israeli politicians and all the IDF generals applauded us and told us, 'Kiryat Shmona won't be safe if Marjayoun is under attack.'"

P., a former deputy battalion commander said, "It was always clear to us that you Israelis were our brothers. When there was a Hizbullah terror attack against IDF soldiers in Tyre in 1983, 300 SLA soldiers and officers donated blood right then and there because it was clear that we were blood brothers."

And how did Israeli authorities respond to the SLA protesters on Sunday? By encircling them. Rather than standing by their side and supporting these men and their families in their hour of need, police forces surrounded them as if they were a threat, which they then became when for 20 minutes, they clashed with police.

For his part, Jerusalem police commander Mickey Levy said of the protesters, "You didn't behave nicely. I won't call off the police troops until you behave yourselves."
 

Since September 11, we have witnessed a debate in the US regarding the roots of Islam's war on America. The verdict is still out regarding where the Bush administration will ultimately fall on this issue. Far from a theoretical discussion, the ultimate determination of the roots of Islamic belligerency will determine both how the US prosecutes its anti-terror war and how it will decide the ultimate ends of its campaign.

On the one side are those, like US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who join Muslim dictators in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Ramallah, in insisting on continuing the old approach to terrorism. This group claims that the root of Islamic belligerency towards the US and the West is the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict.

On the other side of the ideological fence are voices like Johns Hopkins University Prof. Fouad Ajami and Princeton's Bernard Lewis who argue that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the source of Arab and Islamic hatred. In their view, the roots of Arab and Islamic belligerency towards the US are found in the failure of despotic regimes to address the real needs of their countrymen. These scholars, and their allies both in the Bush Administration and outside it argue that the only way to defuse the hatred that spawned Osama Bin Laden and his murderous cohorts in al-Qaida and Hizbullah, is to bring about a democratic modernization of the Islamic world regardless of the situation on the ground in Ramallah.

In an article in next month's edition of Foreign Affairs, Ajami argues that this transformation of the Arab and Islamic world can and ought to begin in a post-Saddam Iraq. There, he believes the US should shepherd in a new, pluralistic and federal regime that gives the majority Shi'ite and Kurdish populations of Iraqi society the ability to rule themselves rather than be ruled by the Sunni minority as has been their lot since the British created Iraq in the 1920s.

Ajami contends that in such a new, quasi-democratic regime, "the passion for a Palestinian vocation may subside." A new regime in Iraq, Ajami writes, "might find within itself the ability to recognize that Palestine and the Palestinians are not an Iraqi concern."

For his part, Princeton's Michael Doran advances Ajami's message in his own article in January's Foreign Affairs, writing, "Palestine is central to the symbolism of Arab politics, but it is actually marginal in its substance." Not to be shunted aside, Colin Powell, while willing to pay lip service to the idea that modernizing the Arab world is important for the combat of terrorism, argued earlier this month for a plan that would largely subvert the notion. Among the initiatives that Powell spelled out in an address before the Heritage Foundation, (which he opened by dwelling the importance of establishing a Palestinian state), was a new US initiative to provide technical assistance to Saudi Arabia in its bid to join the World Trade Organization.

As law professor E.V. Kontorovich pointed out in Thursday's New York Post, Saudi Arabia's economic policy of imposing not only a trade boycott on Israel, but of imposing secondary and tertiary economic boycotts on companies that do business with Israel, renders the dictatorship an economic outlaw state that "flouts both the letter and spirit of the WTO treaties that the Saudis are bidding to join."

The intensity of the intellectual debate in the US over the root causes of the Islamic terrorist war being waged against it is a healthy reaction to the new and tangible sense of vulnerability to Arab-Islamic aggression that the US awoke to in the aftermath of September 11. The no-holes barred examination of the rot in Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt that the US traditionally supported has given rise to increasingly powerful voices arguing that the US will remain vulnerable until these nations are transformed and their people are forced to accept responsibility for their fate.

America's deliberations calls to mind a 1959 Peter Seller's comedy called "The Mouse that Roared." In that cinematic parody, Europe's smallest country, the fictional Duchy of Grand Fenwick decides that the best way to save its economy is by making war on the US. The prime minister of the postage stamp republic declares war not because he plans to vanquish America, but rather because he trusts that the US will rebuild his economy once it defeats his army.

In the present intellectual battle in America, those who advocate continued appeasement of ideologically and politically hostile Arab regimes call up the fictional US policymakers who emboldened the Duchy's prime minister to strike. Those who call for recognizing that these regimes stand on the side of the terrorist forces arrayed against the US, are the voices of prudence and reality that Peter Sellers no doubt hoped were actually in charge of things.

All of this brings us back to the SLA demonstration on Sunday afternoon in Jerusalem. The SLA fighters, like brave Palestinians who worked with Israel to prevent terrorism and build a stable, peaceful society for themselves both before and since Oslo, were betrayed by Israel. These allies were set adrift by successive Israeli governments who have preferred to keep company with the PLO and negotiate with the Syrian occupier of Lebanon rather than remain loyal to those who truly were at peace with us.

The deafening silence with which our government greets both the meager demands made by former SLA members and the systematic liquidation by the Palestinian Authority since 1994 of Palestinian friends of Israel is a mark of shame on our state and our nation.

And we continue to pay the price for our disloyalty. In the absence of the SLA and IDF in south Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Syria are arming Hizbullah with rockets and missiles capable of striking deep into Israel. As for the Palestinians, what voices of moderation can we expect to hear among them when our prime minister tells the world that the PA will be rewarded with statehood for its terrorist war against us?

September 11 was enough for the Americans to begin a systematic and brutally honest debate about the efficacy of coddling regimes that represent the antithesis of all their country stands for. Here in Israel unfortunately, our continuous battle against the same dark forces of blackmail and brutality has caused no reassessment of our abandonment of our friends and our embrace of our enemies.

In the end of "The Mouse that Roared," the Fenwickian army sails into New York harbor to surrender only to find the city deserted by an air-raid drill and so they claim victory. By accident they end up in possession of the ultra-powerful "Q-Bomb" and the whole world suddenly fears them.

In betraying our friends and rewarding our enemies in Lebanon, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Israel has shown that absurdity is not necessarily funny. When life reflects parody, the result is not humorous - but treacherous, violent and tragic.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

'Today, mine is the only right-wing party'

MK Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the combined list National Union, comprised of his Yisrael Beitenu, Benny Elon's Moledet, and Zvi Hendel's Tekuma Party, is a man who does not shy away from controversy.

He speaks bitterly of Sharon's policies and yet hopes to join his government. He views the Likud as a party that has lost its ideological bearings.

He is willing to sacrifice democratic rule for the purpose of national survival as a Jewish and Zionist state. And he believes that a Palestinian state will be a strategic disaster for Israel.

In an in-depth interview with The Jerusalem Post, Lieberman discusses his views on what he sees as the country's leadership crisis, his hopes for his party and views of the challenges facing Israel in the years to come.

Q) Do you think that Israel suffers from a leadership crisis?

Since the days of Begin we are steeped in a deep leadership crisis. What motivates our leaders is principally how to move from election cycle to election cycle. Decisions are made not on the basis of informed beliefs but on the basis of opinion poll data. Everyone just chases after his or her tail.

Q) Do you think that a leader can go against his own party?

It is crazy for a leader to go against the wishes of his party. He has to represent his party. If a leader doesn't know how to convince his party to follow him, if he cannot lead his party, he cannot lead a country. The wisdom of a leader is to at once be able to go against the grain of public opinion but to debate and to convince the people to follow him, not to be chasing after his followers to please them.

Q) Some of your critics say that what they find problematic with you is that it doesn't seem as though the notion of democracy is one that courses through your veins.

Whether a state is governed by democratic means or is led by a dictatorship is not a result of human caprice. It is a result of economic development, of cultural development. A regime type is not the result of will; it is the result of objective conditions. If we suffer a terrible economic downturn there will be a dictatorship here, and on the other hand, if we are able to maintain an adequate economic situation there is no way that our democracy will fail.

I do think that for me the identity of this country as a Jewish Zionist state is of supreme importance in a way that democracy is not. We cannot live under a democracy if this were to force upon us a situation of collective suicide. In Israel we have a phenomenon of people exploiting every loophole in our democracy in order to support Hizbullah, Fatah, Tanzim and all sorts of other terror groups that are attacking us on a daily basis.

Bear in mind that when America is at war, they are quite flexible in their interpretation of the laws. Think of what they did to the Japanese Americans during World War II or how they hunted Communists in the Cold War.

Q) This is true, but the democratic character of the US was maintained throughout. Decisions were made democratically and upheld through the democratic courts.

I agree. And it is the same thing here. We are in a war and we have to treat actions aimed at helping our enemies the same way that the American did when they were at war. Even in America the world's greatest democracy, when the US is at war limits are placed on otherwise permissible activities.

Q) While we are talking about democracy, why weren't there primaries in Yisrael Beitenu?

Because I don't believe that primaries are democratic. I think they promote inequality and corruption.

I don't think for instance that there are many new immigrants with the financial means to present themselves before 300,000 voters. To the contrary, the dependence on financial backers and vote contractors will just increase.

I think that the most democratic and fair way of choosing candidates is by committee. We have a selection committee. We have a committee of five people who decide. Look what happened in the political arena over the years.

When you walk through the halls of the Knesset you see the pictures of the members of all the previous Knessets. As you go from the first Knesset's to day's body you see how the landscape changed. Do you think for a moment that the same type of intellectuals, of thinkers and of builders that once sat in the Knesset would be able today to get a spot in the Likud's primaries? Uri Zvi Greenberg, would he get elected? Today people are in a constant rush to go out and meet people. They go from bar mitzvah to bat mitzvah. They have no time to think. I've talked to a lot of people, in the top of their fields who say that they would be happy to serve but they are unprepared to go out and make fools of themselves begging for votes.

Q) Yes, but there is a flip side to what you are saying. There is something right and proper about having direct contact with the people you are supposed to be representing. You shouldn't see it as a sacrifice to have to be talking to those who sent you where you are to advance their interests.

There is a difference between being a representative of a constituency and being enslaved by elections. We have a procedure in our party where twice a week we MKs go and meet with our party members, in our branch offices, in conferences.

Q) Again though, there has to be a sense of dependency on constituents. After all, think of Rabin in 1992. In those elections he promised not to talk to the PLO and he promised not to withdraw from the Golan Heights. He won the election because of those promises. A lot of people who voted for him would never have voted for him if they had known what he was going to do. Having to be in contact with voters means that you have to answer to your voters for what you do.

What happened with Rabin's lies was a result of the primaries in Labor. If Rabin needed to answer to 100,000 people he had to answer to no one. But if there had been a selections committee he would have known whom he had to answer to. It would have been much harder for him to manipulate the situation the way that he did.

Q) That really brings up the question, what is the right wing's problem? Since 1977, most of the time the right has been in power and yet, during the years that the right has been in power it has implemented the policies of the left.

I'm not a psychologist. What you say is true. I can't give explanations but I can say that with me that will not happen. Today, mine is the only right wing party. Today there is no nationalist camp, there is no right wing other than the party that I lead.

Q) The Likud isn't right wing?

Today there is no connection between the Likud and the nationalist camp. I think that it is clear today to everyone that a true Likudnik has to vote for the National Union. There has to be a limit to cynicism. The Likud is going to elections when in its platform it says that they oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state and the Prime Minister says that a Palestinian state will be established and that he won't appoint any minister who doesn't agree with him. This is impossible.

There has to be a limit even to our cynicism and all the dirty tricks that we are so used to that we have come to expect. You cannot lie to everyone like this.

Q) Yes, but here Sharon isn't lying. He's behaving just like your ideal leader. He's saying this is what I believe in and this is how I will do things and if you agree wonderful and if you don't tough. This is just the opposite of what Rabin did.

No, because here there is a double message. All the institutions of the Likud rejected Palestinian statehood and here he is saying the opposite. You can't do that. You have to leave your party. You don't represent your party.

Q) Yes, but he beat Netanyahu fair and square. He creamed him. Likud members knew what his policies were, they knew what Bibi's policies were and they chose Sharon. How do you explain that?

Bibi ran a bad campaign. Other than that I don't want to try to explain what happened there.

Q) Now when you are looking at everything that Sharon is saying and doing do you regret having had a hand in bringing down his government and forcing these elections?

Two people brought down the government Fuad [Binyamin Ben-Eliezer], and Sharon and both did it for internal political reasons. Fuad was having trouble with his primary challenge and Arik was having trouble with his. So Fuad left the government and Arik brought down the government and called speedy elections.

Q) But you refused to join the government.

When we were preparing for negotiations I told Yuri Stern who was in charge of them for us, 'If they start discussions by asking about ministerial portfolios it's a sign that they are hustling us. They will want to present us to the public as heavies who are trying to bilk them. Don't talk to them about portfolios, just talk to them about government platforms. Talk to them about throwing out Arafat, about fighting terror, about establishing a Palestinian state, about economic problems. If they immediately start talking to you about portfolios then they are trying to make us look like we are blackmailing Sharon.' And that is what happened exactly.

Q) And it worked.

I think it worked to a certain extent but not completely. But it was a partial success. There is a problem with Sharon. And he has really hurt me on a personal level as well. I am very concerned about Sharon's leadership.

Q) What do you mean?

I sat with him at his farm and we discussed what would happen to Gandhi's assassins. It was when our soldiers were sitting in Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and Arafat was sheltering Gandhi's murderers inside with him. I said to Sharon, 'The murderers can't come out alive. Those that gave the kill order and those that carried it out Ahmed Saadat and Majdi Ramali, they can't come out alive.' He got all upset. He stood up and looked at me and said, 'How dare you talk about Gandhi? What do you know about Gandhi? Do you know what the brotherhood of soldiers is? Me and Gandhi fought together in the Palmach. We went to sergeants course together in 1948. We received major general's ranks the same day, together. I would never let them come out.' A few days later he got on television and said 'I prefer early elections to compromising on Gandhi's murderers.'

Two days later they were transported to the guesthouse in Jericho. They are still there today, talking on cell phones, giving press interviews and planning terror attacks against us. These for me are totally unacceptable behaviors. This isn't even about politics, it's a measure of a man.

Q) So you figure that he probably won't want you to be in the next government.

I think at the end of the day he will ask us to join, we want to join very much. It's important that we be in the government because only we can prevent this disaster of a Palestinian state from falling on us.

Q) What will your party do if Sharon keeps his promise and turns his back on you again and forms a unity government with Mitzna for the express purpose of establishing a Palestinian state?

If that is what Sharon wants to do, we will do everything in our power to prevent this from happening. Sharon's problem isn't us. Sharon's real problem is within the Likud. We have already seen that his control of his party is compromised. Look at his argument with Tzahi Hanegbi [about Palestinian statehood]. Look at how he is now insisting that MKs agree with his diplomatic positions as a condition to serving in his government on the one hand and on the other hand he said that he will keep Bibi in the Foreign Ministry. Look at how he says he will ignore the primaries results of his own party and appoint anyone he wants.

I look at people like Tzahi Hanegbi and Netanyahu and Uzi Landau and Yuval Steinitz and wonder how will they accept the notion of a Palestinian state. Because of this we think that we can be a catalyst or an anchor for all of those who think that we must prevent for such a state to be established.

What is Sharon doing? He's taking votes from the right and moving them to the left. This we have to prevent. This is our job.

Q) Do you expect these people to leave the Likud and join your party? Do you expect to replace the Likud?

No I think that we will be able to be a political force that counterbalances Peres and Mitzna, a bloc that prevents the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Q) And why is a Palestinian state such a terrible thing in your view?

There are many reasons why the establishment of such a state would be a total disaster to Israel. I will give you just a sampling of them.

If today Kiryat Shmona sits under the constant threat of Katyushas and mortars from South Lebanon, a Palestinian state would increase this threat to all of the Sharon and Dan Region. All of the major cities would be living under threat of Kassam missiles, Katyusha rockets and mortars from the Palestinian state. The entire withdrawal line that people are proposing abuts population centers.

If today, when the Palestinians don't have statehood we are unable to prevent Al-Qaida from opening a branch office in Gaza, what do you think will happen when there is a recognized sovereign Palestine in our midst? How will be able to conduct anti-terror operations inside a Palestinian state recognized by the United States?

The linkage between Arab Israelis and Palestinians after the establishment of a Palestinian state will also become more dangerous. We already have seen the radicalization of Arab Israelis since the PA was established. The situation will only grow worse.

From an economic perspective as well we will suffer from the establishment of such a state. For instance what do you think will happen at Ashdod port if the Palestinians open their own port in Gaza? Lastly, in this non-exhaustive list, we must bear in mind that no concession that we have ever given the Arabs has improved our situation. To the contrary, every concession we made to Egypt, to Hizbullah, to Arafat brought us not peace, not prosperity but increased our enemies' hatred of us and rejection of our rights. Concessions are considered a show of weakness. For all of these reasons and many more, the establishment of a Palestinian state would be a disaster for Israel.

Over the past week, the leaders of Europe have been tuning their instruments ahead of today's meeting of the Quartet in Washington. The sound has been lousy.

Last Friday, EU leaders met in Copenhagen for a summit on the Middle East in order to blast Israel. Israel, the European ministers alleged, is responsible for Palestinian terrorism because it dares to allow Jews to live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. By daring to allow Jews to live in these areas, the EU said, Israel "violates international law, inflames an already volatile situation, and reinforces the fear of Palestinians that Israel is not genuinely committed to end the occupation."

The Europeans also excoriated the Bush administration for telling French President Jacques Chirac last Thursday that the Quartet would not issue a final version of its so called "road map" for the establishment of a Palestinian state in its meeting today.

After breaking for the weekend, on Monday, the Europeans were back on the warpath. This time the battle cry emanated from London. There, Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected a request from Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for a meeting to discuss cooperation on fighting terrorism and conceptualizing the said road map. Such a meeting, with a mere foreign minister was beneath Blair's dignity. Blair only meets with heads of state and ultra-leftist opposition party leaders, the Foreign Ministry was told.

At any rate, Blair was otherwise engaged this week. America's closest ally in its war against terrorism was busy debauching himself by hosting the terrorist supplier, cheerleader and enabler; the occupier of Lebanon; the weapons of mass destruction proliferator and human-rights abuser Syrian President Bashar Assad at 10 Downing Street. There, before the television cameras, Blair smiled and said, "it is important to engage with Syria because Syria is going to be an important part of building a peaceful and stable future in the Middle East."

For his part, Assad drew strength from Blair's hospitality. Assad, who last year sat next to the pope and condemned the Jews for murdering Jesus and Muhammad, has never been one to mince words.

Standing next to Blair, the Syrian dictator described the terrorist headquarters he happily houses in Damascus as "press centers." He extolled suicide bombers. He defended his friend Saddam Hussein. He condemned the United States. And of course, he condemned Israel - over and over.

Moreover, Assad used his trip to London to divert any attention the international press corps might have paid to his roundup of Kurdish political activists.

These Kurds, members of the outlawed Yakiti party, had held non-violent demonstrations outside the Syrian parliament building demanding political freedoms early last week. Three days later, Assad's security services started rounding them up in house-to-house arrests.

As if Blair's embrace of this enemy of everything he and his EU colleagues claim to stand for was not enough, Blair took leave of his honored guest to make a speech in Parliament about the Palestinians. There he announced his plan to organize a conference on Palestinian "reforms." To this summit next month he will invite the members of the Quartet, representatives of the Palestinian Authority as well as representatives of the burgeoning democracies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Together, without Netanyahu, all will discuss how to enact cosmetic reforms that will enable the assembled parties to demand the swift establishment of the State of Palestine.

Where does one begin analyzing this European behavior? Even as the Europeans launched their weekly assault against Israel and their embrace of terrorists, reports that Islamic terrorists have Europe itself in their sites were flowing freely.

On December 8th The New York Times reported on the increasing alarm of European security services over the gathering force and virility of these threats. This week the French announced the arrest of what appears to be an al-Qaida cell whose members were planning a chemical weapons attack on the Paris subway.

But no matter. The Europeans know who the villain in all of this is. The villain of course is Israel.

Assad, who launched the reenactment of the Arab League's economic boycott of Israel last year must have felt right at home in Europe where his call for economic strangulation of Israel has been enthusiastically taken up continent-wide.

The British have distinguished themselves not only for their department stores' recent moves to ban Israeli products from their shelves, or for their quiet governmental ban on weapons sales, but also for their decision to launch an academic boycott of Israel. The day before Assad chatted with Queen Elizabeth while drinking tea and munching on crumpets at Buckingham Palace, the British papers were reporting that this boycott has been extended from the social sciences and humanities to the include a boycott of Israeli scientific research.

In refusing Netanyahu's request for a meeting, Blair may have lost his chance to meet with any top ranking Israeli leader. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon after all is under threat of indictment for war crimes in Belgium which has an extradition treaty with Britain, and therefore has to be careful about his European travel plans. For its part, the British Ministry of Justice has refused Israeli requests to set aside the Arab demand to indict Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz for war crimes. Given this state of affairs, there is a likelihood that neither leader be calling on Blair anytime soon.

The irony of the fact that the Europeans, who are prime targets for Islamic terrorism staunchly refuse not only to fight it, but also refuse to accept that Israel is being victimized is breathtaking.

Before leaving London, Assad on Thursday threatened his generous host. Condemning Blair's meek call for Palestinian reforms, Assad proclaimed, "The result of reforms will be destruction."

This mind-boggling impertinence shows exactly where European Middle East policy is leading. By mindlessly asserting that Jewish towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the greatest obstacles to peace in the region, the Europeans simply whet the terrorists' appetite for destruction. The disingenuousness of the European claim that these towns, whose establishment and expansion is not even discussed, let alone proscribed, in the Oslo agreements are illegal or equivalent to the murder of Israelis by Palestinian terrorists is as appalling as it is destructive to the fight against terrorism.

And we must not forget that when at Camp David Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a deal that would include the evacuation of almost all of these "obstacles to peace" and the deportation of their Jewish residents into the shrunken State of Israel, Arafat responded by going to war.

Finally, it flies in the face of all the liberal values and international humanitarian laws that the Europeans so loudly espouse, that these enlightened leaders could demand the ethnic cleansing of Judea, Samaria and Gaza of Jews as a precondition not only for Palestinian statehood but also for the end of Palestinian terrorism.

Our prime minister tells us that we needn't worry about the European antagonism because at the end of the day, Washington, not Brussels, calls the shots. This would be comforting if it were not the case that the forces in Washington that call the shots are those who are most aligned with Europe.

Far from condemning Europe for its anti-Israel policies, the State Department under Colin Powell has embraced much of the European Middle East platform as its own. In his address at the Herzliya Conference earlier this month, US ambassador Dan Kurtzer warmly embraced the so-called Saudi peace plan which calls for the right of return of Palestinian refugees as "an encouraging sign."

While Kurtzer was stronger in condemning terrorism than his European cohorts, he minced no words in describing his view of the Israeli towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. "Terrorism, like settlements, must stop," Kurtzer said.

Kurtzer extolled the so-called road map that will be discussed in Washington today. In his own address before the same conference, Sharon tried desperately to force the State Department to lay off the road map which, the Prime Minister intimated is nothing but a sick mutation of President Bush's call for actual democratization of the Palestinian Authority as a precondition for statehood.

Many in Jerusalem have taken heart from the appointment of Elliott Abrams as the director of the Middle East desk at the National Security Council. Washington insiders however point to the fact that Flynt Leverett, the NSC's point man for the "peace process" is a State Department appointment. Leverett, a former CIA officer came to Israel with Undersecretary of State William Burns last month to discuss the road map. At the time, his participation in the delegation was seen as a sign to the Prime Minister that contrary to what he would like to believe, the White House is very much on board with the road map.

To placate European rancor over the Bush administration's decision to postpone publishing the road map until after next month's general elections, Colin Powell arranged for the Quartet members to meet with President Bush today. For its part, the World Bank kicked into State's European appeasement drive by announcing this week that it will be giving the PA $40 million in short order to pay the salaries of its employees. All of this was apparently deemed necessary in order for the State Department to win a one month delay in the publishing of road map that represents nothing more than the total repudiation of President Bush's Middle East policy.

Rather than demanding actual Palestinian reform and cessation of terror, the Orwellian road map calls for the Palestinians to regurgitate past statements to the effect that terrorism is a bad thing and declare that they plan to reform. In exchange, Israel will have to ban all Jewish construction activities in Jewish towns in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and withdraw IDF forces from Palestinian areas so that the Palestinians can think about making additional statements to the effect that they intend to reform themselves and stop murdering Israelis.

What we learn from this situation is that we are in very big trouble. The Europeans have cast their lots with the enemies of all they proclaim themselves to represent. As President Bush prepares for war in Iraq, he has allowed the State Department, whose head opposes Bush's vision, to take full control of the Israeli-Palestinian agenda. All that Prime Minister Sharon has managed to win for us is a one-month respite before we begin our descent down the European road. Fasten your seatbelts, we are in for a very bumpy ride.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In an interview last year, former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross responded somewhat awkwardly to a question of mine about Palestinian corruption and authoritarianism. I had asked him why the Clinton Administration did not raise an eyebrow when it was clear that the Palestinian Authority was an authoritarian regime and completely corrupt. After a brief pause and an embarrassed glance, Ross said, "Well, it wasn't as if the Israelis were particularly concerned about the problem."

In answering the question as he did, Ross was behaving like the consummate diplomat that he is. The Rabin, Peres and Barak governments, who initiated and went forward with the Oslo process, were actually very interested in Palestinian authoritarianism and corruption. But what interested these governments was encouraging this corrupt dictatorship. Rabin, we recall, defended his choice of PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat as the Palestinian leader by explaining that under the dictatorship of Arafat, the PA would fight terrorism unimpeded by "the Supreme Court and [the human rights organization] B'tselem."

Israeli encouragement of Palestinian corruption was cut from the same cloth as our leaders' support for Arafat's dictatorship. In the early years of Oslo, as the first inklings of Arafat's economic adviser Muhammad Rashid's economic machinations began surfacing, far from discouraging the trend, Israeli political leaders and security brass clamored for meetings with Rashid.

Rather than opposing the systematic terrorization of Palestinian businessmen as Rashid squeezed them out of an ever widening swathe of economic markets, (cement, gas and petroleum, cigarette and mobile telephone imports come to mind most rapidly), Israeli officials dropped all connections to these forcibly disenfranchised businessmen and concentrated all their charms and favors on Rashid and his business partners Palestinian strongmen Muhammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub as well as Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and from time to time Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala).

The justification for Israeli encouragement of the undermining of any semblance of financial order or legal system for the Palestinians under Arafat's regime was the stability of the peace process. It was argued, or actually, it was taken for granted, that the concentration of wealth in the hands of Arafat's close associates would give them a vested and personal interest in making peace with Israel.

The same men who enriched themselves at the expense of their own people were considered by Israeli and US policymakers to be the best candidates for forcing acquiescence to peaceful coexistence with Israel down the throats of rank and file Palestinian society.

As the law of unintended consequences would have it, in the end just the opposite occurred. These men, together with their boss and business partner Arafat, increased their hold over Palestinian society as expected, but it was the Israelis, not the Palestinians who developed vested and personal interests in continuing with Oslo.

A number of months ago, this column discussed the corrupting impact of the Shimon Peres Center for Peace on the decision-making capability of top Israeli leaders. As I wrote at the time, the fact that the Government of Norway was one of the center's principal contributors may have had something to do with the $100,000 cash prize that the center presented to UN Special Middle East Coordinator Terje Larsen and his wife, Norwegian Ambassador Mona Juul in 1999. And this fiduciary relationship may also have influenced then-foreign minister Shimon Peres's lone defense of Larsen after he libeled Israel in the immediate aftermath of the bloody battle in Jenin refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield.

As I also wrote in that column, Yossi Ginossar sits on the Board of Directors of the Peres Center. In a tell-all interview with Ma'ariv last week, Ginossar's business partner, Ozrad Lev gave a detailed account of Swiss bank accounts that he and Ginossar managed for Rashid and Arafat. Lev told of the millions of dollars that he and Ginossar received in kickbacks from Rashid and Arafat for their handling of the funds.

While Lev's account is as disturbing as it is revealing, all it serves to do is expose the worst kept secret in Israel. Since 1994, everyone who is anyone in the top echelons of Israel knew full well that Ginossar, who served as special envoy to Arafat for prime ministers Rabin, Peres, and Barak, was Rashid's business partner. Everyone knew that Ginossar was a partner in Rashid's cement and petroleum monopolies. Everyone knew that Ginossar was Rashid's bagman for funds he siphoned off from the PA treasury accounts.

Everyone knew and everyone either stood by silently or actively supported this situation. And Ginossar is far from the only Israeli official who has accrued financial and professional benefit from his activities with the Palestinian Authority.

In his defense, Ginossar told Ma'ariv, "During the entire period of my activities with the Palestinian Authority and other Arab regional officials on behalf of the state, I acted in accordance with the state's requests to me, using my special connections with the Palestinians as a private citizen."

This is a disingenuous statement. While Ginossar's intimate relations with Rashid and Arafat may have made him attractive to Israeli leaders, there can be no doubt that Ginossar's access to Israeli leaders made him attractive to the Palestinian leadership.

Because of his official position, the Shin Bet, under Ya'acov Perry, Carmi Gillon and Ami Ayalon, gave Ginossar not only free access to intelligence information about the Palestinians, they also gave him free access to Arafat. When Gaza was declared a closed military zone to which Israelis were prohibited from traveling, Ginossar was chauffeured to Arafat's office in Shin Bet armored cars.

In his interview with Ma'ariv, Lev also spoke of Ginossar's partner Stephen Cohen. According to Ma'ariv's account, Cohen, who is deeply embedded in the Jewish American peace camp, opened up Arafat's kingdom to Ginossar when Rabin first appointed him point man with the PA in 1993. Together the two made millions in kickbacks they received from Rashid for their role in the cement and petroleum monopolies he built.

Americans are more familiar with Cohen than Israelis. For over a decade his name has frequently appeared on the op-ed page of The New York Times as columnist Thomas Friedman's in-house Middle East specialist.

According to a top former governmental official, Cohen made a name for himself as an unofficial channel to Egyptian, Syrian, and PLO leaders as far back as the 1980s. What we learn from Ma'ariv's disclosures is that Cohen's impassioned defense of Israeli concessions to the PLO, which he voiced regularly to key officials in the Clinton administration, like Ross's deputy Aaron Miller and media stars like Friedman, may very well have been influenced as much by pecuniary as ideological motivations. Then too, it has been reported that during the Camp David summit, Ginossar was the most fervent advocate of Israeli concessions to Arafat among the Israeli team.

Stephen Cohen has over the years also enjoyed financial backing from US business tycoon Daniel Abraham. Abraham is also one of the largest backers of the Peres Center. Then too, Cohen's close colleague Nimrod Novick was Peres's chief of staff during the 1984-1988 unity government with Yitzhak Shamir and a close associate of Yossi Beilin's.

Yossi Beilin himself has used his Oslo advocacy to draw large foreign contributions to his think tank the Economic Cooperation Foundation. It has been reported that in his capacity as a chief researcher at ECF, Beilin receives a ministerial salary and an unlimited expense account for his world travels during which he advances his radical views on the need for Israeli surrender to Palestinian terrorism.

And there are many others as well. The sad fact that comes out of a study of the financial interests of high ranking Israeli officials and international peace activists is that while Arafat, Rashid and their associates pocketed their monies and prepared for war against Israel, these top Israeli officials became their chief advocates. These peace profiteers have for nine and a half years made their personal fortunes by illogically arguing that Arafat is both the problem and the solution  - that without his dictatorial consent, Israel will get no peace deal with the Palestinians.

In a column on the subject back in 1994, Friedman quoted Cohen as saying, "Everyone is ready to tell Arafat how to shave his beard, but as long as they treat him only as a problem and not a solution, the problem just gets worse."

The truth is that the problem has gotten worse because so many so-called peace advocates have made personal fortunes by dint of their close relations with Arafat and his cronies. When we look around us, after two years and three months of the PA terror war and wonder how it is possible that Oslo and the corrupt terror regime it spawned still has domestic and international support, we need only to look to the money for our explanation.

Rather than acting as the catalyst for Palestinian support of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Israeli support for and participation in the emergence of the PA as a wholly corrupt authoritarian regime has created a permanent Israeli constituency for Arafat's regime.

In a column in last Friday's Ma'ariv, commenting on Lev's disclosures, prominent Israeli media personality Dan Margalit called for the establishment of a commission of inquiry into Ginossar's financial dealings with the PA. What Margalit probably does not realize is that in calling for the formation of such a commission he is adding his voice to those calling for an inquiry into the entire Oslo process.

Ginossar's double-dealings, corruption, and borderline treason cannot be truly investigated without an impartial (whatever that means) investigation into the entire history of Oslo. As one security source put it to me this week, "Ginossar is never going to be a scapegoat. If he goes down, he'll bring the entire Israeli establishment down ahead of him." If we've learned anything from the past two years and three months, we have learned that this will never happen.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Since its inception three years ago, the Herzliya Conference on the Balance of National Strength and Security has rightly been considered the most important conference in Israel. Its importance stems both from the conference's ability to engage all the members of Israel's elite political, military, economic and academic -- and from the comprehensiveness of the issues discussed during its three days of panel discussions that include a wide spectrum of challenges and opportunities facing the state.

The problem with the conference is that, rather than being a forum for open debate and serious engagement on the most salient topics of the day, in some crucial areas, it serves as an obstacle to such debate. Although the conference organizers went to great lengths to provide a balanced forum, we were shown this week that the participants representing the highest echelons of Israeli society, are simply incapable of handling the challenges of such a meeting of the minds. Brought together for three days a year, the Israeli elites use the occasion of the Herzliya Conference not to listen to new ideas but to delineate the borders of acceptable national discourse. And it works out that for certain crucial issues, those borders are quite narrow and wholly counterproductive to the purposes of the conference.

This state of affairs was made most clear with regard to the issue of the future of Israel's relations with the Palestinians. In a panel discussion on the topic, the audience of luminaries listened respectfully as Orit Gal from Yossi Beilin's think tank and former US Ambassador Martin Indyk presented their proposals that the Palestinians, like the Kosovars, be governed by an international trusteeship.

The connotation that Israel is analogous to Serbia under Slobodan Milosevic -- who is now being tried for war crimes at The Hague -- was barely hidden from view and no one batted a lash.

And yet, when it came time for NRP chairman, Minister Effi Eitam to give his view on the topic, the crowd could not control itself. Eitam offered his original, if wacky scheme of a regional solution to the Palestinian conflict involving setting up a Palestinian state in the Sinai.

Former generals, business tycoons, professors and diplomats, who just moments before had politely swallowed the notion that their country is a criminal state, responded to Eitam's idea with heckles and guffaws, making it difficult to even hear what he was saying.

On this most crucial panel it was hammered home to one and all that to be respected and acceptable to the Israeli elite, one may raise any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for debate one pleases so long as the proposed solution involves the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse are those ideas that argue with or deny the viability of this central assumption. Any effort to argue that the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories will be suicidal for the Jewish State or that the setting up of such a state is not Israel's exclusive responsibility, but rather a regional concern as Eitam impertinently suggested, is beyond the pale.

So now we know. Luckily for us, at least there is no chance that the Israeli public will buy into Labor leader Amram Mitzna's view of how that state will be formed. When his turn came on Wednesday to tell his tolerant colleagues how he views the conflict, Mitzna made clear that if elected, he will ensure that the Palestinian state will be established via unconditional Israeli surrender of the territories.

In a performance that would have seemed surrealistic if not preceded by the chastisement of Eitam, Mitzna stood before the forum and declared that his plan is "Unconditional separation, at almost any price." Mitzna explained that we must "cut ourselves off from our reality by creating a border." This is of course highly flammable poppycock. The Labor party is now being led by a man who advocates unreality as a national strategy.

Since the 1970s, Israel has suffered two colossal strategic failures as a result of its elite classes latching onto mistaken conceptions of reality and then quashing debate. The first time this occurred, in the late '60s and early '70s, we were blindsided by the Yom Kippur War. Our elites' view of Israeli invincibility for years prevented them from taking note of Egypt's systematic preparations for war.

The second failed conception was our elites' unsubstantiated determination in 1993 that the PLO was no longer devoted to the destruction of Israel. The failure of the Camp David summit and Oslo's thousand Israeli victims murdered since 1994 as a result of the PLO regime these elites foisted upon the dubious public are testament to the failure of this id e fixe.

One would have hoped that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who in 1973 was called out of military retirement to save Israel from the physical destruction he had unpopularly foreseen, and then returned conclusively from the political desert in 2001 to save Israel from the ravages of Oslo, which he had also foreseen, would have the sense to reject mistaken conceptions. And yet, in his address before the two-time failures at the conference's closing session, Sharon swallowed their Palestinian state conception whole.

Sharon, who has emerged as one of the most effective and charismatic leaders in our history, stood before all assembled Wednesday evening and explained that the Palestinians have lost and will lose absolutely nothing as a result of rejecting the premises of Oslo and conducting a genocidal terrorist war against the State of Israel. All Israeli concessions are irreversible, he said, explaining that the provisional Palestinian state that will soon be created will encompass all the lands Israel handed over in the Oslo agreements as well as additional lands to enable territorial contiguity in Judea and Samaria for the cosmetically reformed Palestinian state.

Arafat, the creator, symbol, commander and enabler of the mass murder of Israelis at the hands of Palestinian war criminals for the past four decades will not be tried before an Israeli or international tribunal for crimes against humanity or even deported. Rather, he will somehow be divested of his powers and stay on as a symbolic dictator.

The only national leader rude enough to puncture the elitist bubble without being heckled was Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. No doubt the crowd's politeness stemmed from the fact that the national conception builders and Ariel Sharon together handily defeated Netanyahu in the Likud leadership primary last week.

In his address before the conferees Netanyahu related the US doctrine of regime change in Iraq to our situation here with the Palestinians. Netanyahu spoke of the need to usher in a process of democratization of Palestinian society like that which the Bush administration foresees in Iraq.

Whereas Sharon devoted his speech to embracing a policy that the US has dictated for Israel to follow, Netanyahu devoted his address to how Israel should adopt elements of US policy towards Iraq in constructing our policies toward the Palestinians. As in a post-Saddam Iraq, a post-Arafat Palestinian Authority must undergo a long process of democratization at the end of which free and fair elections for a new leadership will be held.

According to Netanyahu, this new leadership would be judged not simply on the basis of the presence or absence of terrorism but by its willingness to abandon the demand for a return of Palestinian refugees to the area. "Instead of 'Gaza-Jericho first,' the policy must be [renunciation of the] right of return first," Netanyahu said. Only such a concession, he said, will show that the new Palestinian leadership will have abandoned the aim of destroying the State of Israel.

Netanyahu was careful in his address to be loyal to the prime minister by not reiterating his rejection of the notion of a Palestinian state, which he sincerely believes will today, under the cosmetic reform program that the US has advocated and Sharon has embraced, constitute nothing but a platform for the destruction of Israel. In this Netanyahu behaved properly and responsibly, as befits Sharon's number two.

One can only hope that when forming his next government Ariel Sharon will be similarly responsible. Sharon, who twice foresaw the grave dangers of the elites' misconceptions of reality and twice moved in to shepherd the country out of the catastrophes these misconceptions have caused, must do so again now.

Since taking office, Sharon's political skills have established him as a leader trusted by the rank and file citizenry and acceptable to our elite commissars. If he works constructively with Netanyahu, who has demonstrated his willingness to serve well and loyally as foreign minister in the next government, Sharon will be able to save us for a third time. If he instead moves forward with his embrace of this new misconception he will be bitterly recalled as the man who proved that the only way for a politician to gain legitimacy from our elitists is by leading the country down the conceptual garden path.

Originally published in The Jeusalem Post.