Discussions of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's options for forming his next governing coalition began immediately after the polls closed on Tuesday night. Will he form a coalition with the Right or a coalition with the Left? Will he bring in the religious parties or will he form a secular government with Shinui? Then again, perhaps he will decide to mix it up a bit and have many disparate small parties represented around the cabinet table.

But building a coalition is not as simple as counting heads. Each potential member of the coalition constrains Sharon's maneuvering room in certain ways at the same time as each potential member enables action in other areas. Shinui for instance, enables liberalization of Israel's economy but comes with the price tag of loosening the Jewish character of the state and accepting a defeatist view of our prospects of winning the Palestinian terrorist war.

Bringing Shas into the coalition will provide the Prime Minister with the ability to fight the war on terrorism, but constrains Sharon's ability to enact measures to restructure the economy to allow for growth. The National Union will provide firm support for winning the war and reconstituting national deterrence, and enable liberalization of the economy, but opens Sharon to opprobrium from the leftist media.

Then there is Labor. Labor's electoral defeat, like the political decimation of the Left in general on Tuesday, has been expected since the collapse of the Oslo process. Although Sharon has repeatedly made clear that his first preference is to form a coalition with Labor, it is unclear what Labor's 19 seats will bring him in terms of policy. Labor has no economic vision. And even after its political rout at the polls, Labor leaders from Amram Mitzna to Shimon Peres to Binyamin Ben-Eliezer remain fully committed to their wholly discredited belief in the false messiah of Oslo.

While options for potential coalition governments have been endlessly discussed since Tuesday, absent from the discussion is one simple question: What is the next government supposed to do?

When Sharon assumed office in 2001, his only realistic option for forming an even marginally stable governing coalition was to join forces with Labor. With only 19 seats in the Knesset, the Likud was not in a position to redefine the national agenda in a manner that would suit the changed military, diplomatic, political and economic conditions of the country. All that Sharon could do was stem the fall. And this he did.

For ending the Labor induced process of national disintegration, Sharon was rewarded Tuesday with a parliamentary mandate from the people to lead us forward. But what does he wish to do? What must he do if he wishes to be crowned a success?

The success or failure of Sharon's next government will be judged not by its ability to maintain the status quo but by its ability to move the country forward in three crucial areas. It must reconstitute our security; it must lead us out of the deep economic recession; and it must enact reforms that will strengthen our democracy.

Sharon has stated that his vision for ending the Palestinian terrorist war and moving Israel toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians is the plan put forward by US President George W. Bush last June for the democratization of Palestinian society after the removal from power of Arafat and his terrorist cronies.

Our experience since Arafat instigated his war two and half years ago has taught us three important lessons. We have learned that the war will not end until Arafat's regime is removed from power by military means. We have learned that unilateral concessions, far from enhancing Israel's image among its enemies, erode the credibility of Israeli deterrence and thus embolden forces of war and destruction. We have also learned that Palestinian society as a whole must be transformed after nine years of totalitarian indoctrination under Arafat's rule before a replacement for Arafat can be found among a Palestinian population willing to live at peace with Israel.

So while both Bush and Sharon are correct that the democratization of Palestinian society is a precondition for Palestinian statehood, it is clear that such a process of democratization and pacification will take years to complete. Sharon's security policy must as a result be based on what will happen in the interim. There is no doubt that the world's attention will be focused on Israel after the coming war in Iraq. Sharon will have to offer a military and diplomatic plan to counter calls for capitulation to Palestinian terrorism and unilateral concessions by Israel to an unreformed and unrepentant terrorist regime and society. In forming his government, Sharon must answer the question of what coalition partners will be most useful in constructing and enacting such a policy.

The economic well-being of the country is vital for our security, our attractiveness to Diaspora Jewry, and our ability to retain our current population. Sharon's economic policies over the past two years have been characterized by incoherence, shallowness and error. This situation must be radically altered.

The challenge before the government today is to construct and adhere to an economic vision of liberalization. This vision must include radical welfare reform, slashing of taxes, privatization of government-owned companies, reform of the banking system and capital markets, deregulation of the media markets and a vast decrease in the government's share of the GDP. In forming his next government Sharon must determine which policymakers and coalition members will be most useful in constructing and enacting such a vision.

The bizarre spectacle of an unelected judge silencing the voice of the Prime Minister on television in the middle of a national election showed us that there is a burning need for reform of our election laws. The artificial constriction of campaigning and political speech by the Elections Law prevents open debate and free expression of ideas when they are most needed.

Justice Mishael Cheshin's decision to silence the Prime Minister together with the Supreme Court's decision to bar Moshe Feiglin from running for Knesset, while allowing Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara to run show the stunning politicization of our judiciary's philosopher kings. The Supreme Court barred Feiglin from running because, while protesting the now thoroughly delegitimized Oslo process in 1994 and 1995, he organized demonstrations that disturbed the peace of drivers on highways.

The fact that the Court made this decision the same week that Amir Peretz, the head of the Am Ehad party, instructed truckers to stage a similar traffic slowdown only reinforced the sense that there is something terribly injudicious about our judiciary. Then too, in ruling that Tibi and Bishara were allowed to run for office in spite of their clear support for terrorism -- support that bars them by law from seeking office -- was further evidence that the Supreme Court justices use their power to check the Knesset in a completely unbalanced manner.

The revelation that Liora Glatt-Berkowitz, the public prosecutor who illegally leaked information about Cyril Kern's present of $1.5 million to the Sharon family was motivated by political considerations provides direct evidence that the state prosecution does not provide equal protection of the law.

Taken together, these actions point to the conclusion that the judicial branch and legal authorities of the country have enjoyed unchecked power for too long. Serious reform of both the State Prosecution and the judiciary is vital to the health of our democracy. So again, in forming his next government, Sharon must answer the question, what coalition partners would be most useful in conceptualizing and enacting this vital reform?

Finally, the rampant corruption of our politicians that has come out over the past ten years must end. We have had five elections in the last decade. With the governing stability of Italy, it should not be surprising that here, as in Italy, criminal elements have infiltrated the ranks of our representatives.

The next government must enact electoral reforms that will make our politicians less prone to corruption. Raising the minimal percentage of the vote necessary for parties to gain entrance into the Knesset is one way to decrease politicians' exposure to blackmail. Revising the primary system by making party primary elections open to the general public, as they are in the US, is another way to ensure that our representatives in the Knesset understand that rather than being accountable to an invisible few, they are personally accountable to the public for their performance in office.

For stemming the Labor induced course of national destruction, Sharon was rewarded with a mandate to move the country forward in radical new directions. If he wishes to meet this challenge, Sharon must form a governing coalition capable not simply of filling seats around the cabinet table, but of enacting a vision of governance that will secure our democracy, safety and prosperity for generations to come.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The faces of the audience in a packed school auditorium near Moshav She'ar Yishuv on Wednesday afternoon were the hollow faces of bereavement. There, hundreds of parents, brothers, sisters, and friends of the 73 soldiers who died in the collision of two IAF helicopters en route to southern Lebanon were joined by army brass, President Moshe Katsav, and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz in honoring the dead on the sixth anniversary of the tragedy.

The images of the victims' faces were projected onto a large screen as their names and ages were intoned by the mellifluous voice of an invisible announcer. One after another: round faces, angular faces, sweet faces, beautiful faces -- all full of youth and promise. All dead.

The days after the terrible accident on February 4, 1997 were days of national mourning. Malls, theaters, and restaurants closed down. Flags flew at half-mast. Stone-faced officers and politicians hurried from funeral to funeral.

For its part, Israel's Left was quick to capitalize on the national tragedy to legitimize its call for unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon. In so doing, these politicians and political activists intimated that the sacrifice of so many had been a vain and unnecessary one.

Just hours after the helicopter crash, then-opposition leader Shimon Peres set the course for the Left's exploitation of the tragedy that was to follow. Speaking on Israel Television, Peres said, "The time has come to put an end to this involvement in Lebanon. We will end up making the same concessions in the end anyway, but only after more blood has been spilled."

In the days and weeks after the crash, the media gave almost uninterrupted coverage to defeatist voices telling the public that there was no reason for the IDF to be in south Lebanon.

Statements by security officials such as then-head of IDF Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon who explained that such remarks played into the hands of Hizbullah and obfuscated the fact that the soldiers were in Lebanon in order to protect Israel's towns and villages in the north were either given cursory attention or dismissed as opportunistic opining of officers trying to defuse legitimate criticism of the IDF.

So overwhelming was the media's coverage and backing of the campaign for defeatism, and so successful was the manipulation of national grief, that a poll taken a week and a half after the accident showed that 74 percent of Israelis favored a unilateral pullout from Lebanon.

Dr. Ya'acov Katz from Bar-Ilan University, who conducted the poll, explained that the results were the direct consequence of the helicopter crash. "From a psychological point of view it is a very dangerous sign. It means that any unrelated issue can have serious bearing on a matter of great importance. People tend to put things together where there is no connection," Katz said.

EU-financed organizations lobbying for IDF withdrawal from Lebanon such as the Four Mothers group sprang up in the months after the crash. These groups, together with EU-financed politicians such as Yossi Beilin, and with the unstinting backing of the media led by radical personalities such as Shelly Yahimovich, dictated the parameters of political debate in the country on the issue of Lebanon.

We were told to ignore repeated statements by Hizbullah to the effect that it wasn't the IDF presence in south Lebanon but rather the existence of Israel itself that they were fighting. We were told that Hizbullah would somehow magically disappear if the IDF were to just pick up and leave the security zone. We were told that there were but two policy options: to stay and continue incurring meaningless casualties, or to leave.

No attention was given to the notion that there might be another option -- to stay and fight, but to do so in a manner that built on the IDF's strengths. That is, abandoning the failed strategy of immobile defenses conceived by Ehud Barak during his tenure as chief of General Staff, and replacing it with small, mobile anti-guerrilla units that could strike Hizbullah forces where they were weakest -- in their permanent encampments and along their supply routes. This possibility was never seriously considered.

Three years later, the campaigners for capitulation got their way as then-prime minister Barak ordered the precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000. They got their way and we were left to deal with the results. As Ya'alon put it in an interview last August, now as Lt.-Gen. and IDF Chief of General Staff: "The potential threat from Lebanon today is much more serious than it was during the period that we were deployed in the security zone. Hizbullah, together with the Syrians and the Iranians, manifests a strategic threat for northern Israel comprised of various types of rockets with various ranges that threaten the population centers of northern Israel."

For their part, the Palestinians themselves have stated repeatedly since the withdrawal that the perception that Hizbullah forced Israel to surrender in Lebanon was the major inspiration for their terrorist war against Israel. According to Ya'alon, "The withdrawal from Lebanon is perceived in the region as a major victory of the Islamic revolution. For this we are paying a strategic price. It impacted the Palestinian situation and in the long run it has implications for the Syrians."

In other words, the decision to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon was a mistake in every respect. Yet, rather than learning the lessons of Lebanon, Israel's Left, again with media support, has for the past two years been attempting to repeat its policy prescriptions with the Palestinians.

On the eve of a general election, now under the leadership of Labor chairman Amram Mitzna, this camp tells us that we have but two options for dealing with the Palestinians: We can fight on and continue incurring losses until we agree -- as, it is said, we inevitably must -- to a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, the Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem; or we can retreat unilaterally, build a fence, and the problem will somehow disappear.

For the past two years and four months, the Left's response to every massacre -- a response embraced and advanced by the media -- is to pointedly demand that a fence be built around Judea and Samaria like the fence in Gaza.

In so responding, these voices push us into a false reality. In this reality, the Palestinians are only fighting us because we are there. Then too, the Palestinians are incapable of adaptation and improvement. If left to their own devices, if Israeli towns are dismantled and Israeli forces removed, the Palestinian strategic threat to Israel will wither away.

Yet as Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has said recently, the Palestinians' motivation to continue their war for the destruction of Israel remains high. Moreover, he asserted this week that the Palestinians are constantly working to improve their capabilities and, like Hizbullah in Lebanon, the threat emanating from the Palestinian Authority is constantly evolving. Today, for instance, he explains that in addition to the local Palestinian forces fighting Israel, the involvement of external Arab and Islamic forces in the Palestinian terror war has grown.

In exchange for agreeing to sell Arafat arms, intercepted in January 2002 aboard the Karine A weapons ship, Iran has received a foothold in the PA. Fatah cells receive money and instruction from Iran. Hizbullah and al-Qaida also have Palestinian operatives in the areas that receive guidance and instruction from operatives in Lebanon. Terror groups based in Damascus fund and instruct cells in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. Iraq and Saudi Arabia provide funding and political cover for the war effort.

According to the false reality of the Left, Israel is said to have no ability to act either diplomatically or militarily to change the situation on the ground. We must either continue to cohabit the areas with terrorist forces or we must surrender the territories to terrorist forces. Little attention is given to a third option -- of throwing out the terrorists and destroying their political apparatus now constituted by Arafat's government.

Back in 1997, Israeli society was evenly divided between Left and Right. By 2001, support for the Left, as gauged by election results, was down to 38 percent. If today's polls are to be believed, the Left, as constituted by Labor, Meretz, and the Arab parties, enjoys the support of less than one third of Israeli society.

In four days, we go to the polls. Barring any major political upheaval, the members of the 16th Knesset will reflect this balance of forces between Left and Right.

But as the political and media manipulation of public debate on Lebanon in the aftermath of the helicopter crash over She'ar Yishuv six years ago shows, the public must not become complacent in the wake of the election results. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by voices preaching defeatism. We must not be cowed into believing that bodies of Israeli victims of Palestinian aggression have paved the way for the inevitable establishment of a terrorist state in our midst.

We must not surrender our right to support a policy of victory.

For their part, our political leaders, and first and foremost among them Ariel Sharon, must act in a manner that shows that they have heard the people's message at the voting booth above the noise of defeatist pontificators. When forming the next government and charting its policies, Sharon must acknowledge that two-thirds of the public is rejecting the Left's defeatist message and is counting on the next government to reject both of the Left's policy options -- surrender or attrition that will in the end lead to surrender.

The 73 soldiers who died in the helicopter collision six years ago did not die in vain. They died in the line of duty, protecting the country. The two thirds of Israelis that are set to reject the Left on Tuesday know this. The great task of the next government is to demonstrate that it, too, understands the meaning of our losses, by rejecting false realities and placing us on a policy course to victory.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

If anyone doubts the power of the media to transform the policies of democratic governments, one need only to look to The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman for proof. It was Friedman, after all, who a year ago invented the so-called Saudi plan for peace in the Middle East.

Last February, reacting to the precipitous drop in American public support for the kingdom in the wake of mounting evidence of Saudi sponsorship of al-Qaida and hatred for the US generally, the House of Saud invited Friedman to Riyadh as part of a PR campaign.

Over dinner in a gilded palace, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah told Friedman that he was considering a peace initiative whereby in exchange for Israel's retreat to the 1949 armistice lines and acceptance of Palestinian refugees, the Arab world would normalize its relations with Israel.

Friedman and The New York Times jumped on Abdullah's propaganda bandwagon and the "Saudi Plan" was born. It took but a week from press time for the White House to embrace the imaginary and dangerous initiative that is now firmly ensconced in the so-called "Road Map" for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Now Friedman is back in the region. Reporting from Cairo on Sunday, he wrote about the ferocity of anti-American sentiment in Egypt.

Yet rather than condemn the hatred and call for a re-evaluation of US support for Hosni Mubarak's America-bashing dictatorship, he wrote that Americans must understand that the root cause of this hatred is US support for Israel.

"I am not talking about what is right, or what is fair, or even what is rational," Friedman wrote of Arab hatred. But, he concluded, "if we ignore it, if we dismiss it all as a fraud, we will never fully harvest the positive changes that could come from regime change in Iraq."

Put another way, if the US doesn't put pressure on Israel in a way that will convince the irrational, hate filled anti-American and anti-Semitic Egyptian "street" that the Bush administration isn't simply a tool of "the Jewish lobby," then the Arabs will continue to hate the US and blow up more of its skyscrapers.

This week we were witnesses to two dangerous diplomatic charades that showed that key international players are already on board with Friedman's cause of throwing Israel to the wolves in an attempt to mollify the Arab world.

First there was Tuesday's conference on Palestinian reform in London, to which Israel was not invited.

Defying Israel's reasonable refusal to allow Arafat's minions to travel to London to take part in a conference whose sole outcome would be legitimizing his terrorist regime, the British insisted that these terror apologists participate.

In a highly provocative move, the British bypassed the travel ban by setting up a satellite hookup joining Ramallah and Gaza to London. In so doing, the British government made a decision to legitimize Arafat's terror regime just one week after Arafat's Fatah organization took credit for the massacre of 23 people in last week's bombing in Tel Aviv.

Far from steering clear of the outrageous embrace of Arafat's terror factory, the US State Department dispatched Assistant Secretary of State William Burns to the summit. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher applauded Britain's embrace of the Palestinian Authority stating that the "reform" summit advances President Bush's vision of a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

In the international community's embrace of Arafat's regime through its support for a patently fraudulent reform effort, we see an example of a Munich-like decision where Israel plays the role of Czechoslovakia. In the London conference this week we saw the British again leading the West in ignoring everything that is known about a dictator's aggressive behavior and designs and turning a blind eye to the genuine depravity of the society that he leads through indoctrination and terror.
And as in 1938, we see a British bid to force a democratic ally to accept concessions that will prevent it from defending itself against that aggression and depravity.

The honored guest at the London summit was Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. Suleiman has recently made a name for himself by hosting the ongoing EU-backed summit of Palestinian terror chiefs in Cairo. Suleiman came to the meeting crowned in glory as the mastermind of the talks presumptively aimed at calling for a halt to the murder of Israeli civilians by Palestinian terrorists.

Israeli security sources have repeatedly called these talks, like the reform rhetoric, a sham aimed only at giving the appearance of interest in ending the Palestinian terrorist war against Israel. This is engineered, they warn, in order to pave the way for the international community's selling out of Israel to these unreformed and unrelenting terrorist chieftains.

In reality, what stands as a basis for the Cairo discussions is a plan that would both bolster the legitimacy of terrorism and prevent Israel from fighting to defend itself. The plan, which has so far received conditional and duplicitous approval by Arafat, calls for the establishment of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. The borders of this state remain conspicuously undefined.

According to the plan, the various terrorist organizations would agree to stop killing civilians although it is unclear whether they would stop killing all civilians. The terror organizations would be allowed to continue to kill IDF forces. In exchange for this vague and limited temporary halt to Palestinian aggression, Israel would redeploy its forces out of areas previously transferred to Arafat's control, would release all the terrorists arrested over the past two years and would cease all military actions against the terror organizations.

It takes few powers of discernment to realize that this cease-fire plan is a complete lie. Yet the EU has been sponsoring this charade and the State Department has been highly supportive of Egypt's "positive role" in attempting to end Palestinian terrorism. Suleiman was so comfortable in London that he did not even feel it necessary to present the great accomplishments of his mediation efforts to those assembled. Rather he sufficed with a promise that these efforts would continue. For their part, Arafat's lackeys announced on Thursday that the talks would continue in Cairo starting next week.

What is Israel to do when faced with an enemy that uses lying as its principle tool of diplomacy? What is Israel to do when the pivotal Western powers the US and Britain are only too happy to accept the Arab lies in an attempt to appease their hate filled societies? What is Israel to do when super influential columnists advocate fashioning US foreign policy in a manner that rewards insane and groundless hatred by abandoning loyal and rational democratic allies?

At the same time that the London appeasement conference was taking place, Labor leader Amram Mitzna announced that the Labor party will not join a unity government led by Ariel Sharon. Given the fact that it took Mitzna's colleagues less than five minutes to dispute his position on record, it is likely that while Mitzna himself may not join a Sharon led government, his Labor colleagues will do so happily. Now that Yossi Beilin has left Labor, the only Oslo extremists of Thomas Friedman's ilk left in the party are Amram Mitzna and Shimon Peres.

Sharon claims with some justification that only with a unity government can Israel properly defend itself against military and diplomatic aggression. There is some truth to the claim that having had Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Dalia Rabin heading the Defense Ministry helped build the national consensus around the need to take offensive action against the Palestinian terrorist war machine. At the same time, it is absolutely clear that Shimon Peres's presence at the helm of Israel's diplomatic front for the past two years hindered Israel's cause in the diplomatic arena. Rather than combating appeasement-prone foreign ministries, Peres strengthened and legitimized the voices in the West like Thomas Friedman's that are committed to appeasing Arab hatred.

There is no doubt that Shaul Mofaz is an excellent choice for Defense Minister. But there is also no doubt that to form a national unity government Sharon will have to give the Labor party responsibility for either the Defense or Foreign Ministry. Today, thanks in large part to Mofaz's leadership as IDF Chief of Staff, our army is capable of doing what it takes to defend against military aggression.

But after two years of Peres's stewardship, and the better part of the past ten years under his tutelage, the Foreign Ministry is yet to be readied for its vital task of fighting the Western appeasement drive.

Beginning with Friedman's overt call for the US to appease the Arab world at Israel's expense, and continuing both at the London summit where that call was advanced and with the international embrace of Cairo's diplomatic deception, we saw this week both the ideological underpinnings and the first fruits of the renewed drive to sacrifice Israel's security for the Arab world's self-respect.

Back in October 2001, Prime Minister Sharon warned the West that Israel would not be the second Czechoslovakia in the present world war against Islamic terrorism. For his warning Sharon was roundly condemned, particularly by the Bush White House which resented being compared to Neville Chamberlain's government.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration's adoption of Friedman's policy prescriptions, first by embracing the fictitious Saudi peace initiative and now by legitimizing irrational Arab hatred by pressuring Israel to accept an imaginary cease-fire and fraudulent reforms of Arafat's terror regime shows Sharon's warning to have been on target.

In the months ahead, Israel's primary challenge will be use every opportunity to repeat Sharon's stern warning to the West against treating us like Czechoslovakia. It will take our most powerful diplomatic guns to fight this fight. Winning it will in many respects be even more difficult than emerging victorious from the military struggle. This fact must be at the core of the Prime Minister's thinking as he forms his next unity government.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

 A few days after Ehud Barak defeated Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1999 elections, my mentor, David Bar-Illan, wrote in a column in this paper, "There is not a great deal of difference between Barak's vision of the final-status agreement with the Palestinians and that of Netanyahu's. Both are committed to an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, both consider the Jordan Valley Israel's strategic border, both oppose withdrawing to the 1967 armistice lines, and both have pledged to keep the settlements under Israeli control."

We know today that Barak lied to the Israeli people in the 1999 elections about all of these commitments and pledges. In his less than two years in office, Barak broke every single one of these campaign promises and by doing so brought the country to one of the most difficult strategic positions it has been in since the 1948 War of Independence. Then as now, the war being waged against us is a war on our homes.

But Barak was smart. He knew that if the 1999 elections were to focus on strategic national issues, he would lose. So he neutralized these issues by lying about his plans. In so doing he was able to run a campaign that centered on his opponent's political weaknesses and on inciting hatred and intolerance among Israel's various social and ethnic groups irrespective of the voters' views on the most important issues of Jerusalem, security, and negotiations with Yasser Arafat.

This month's elections will take place against a backdrop of a swiftly approaching upheaval in our region. On January 27, the day before we head for the polls, the UN weapons inspectors will submit their report on Iraqi noncompliance with UN Security Council Resolution 1441, setting the stage for a US-led invasion of Iraq.

Recent media reports have unveiled plans for the institution of a US military government in that enemy land after the fall of Saddam Hussein. This gathering storm places the Arab world, that is, our world at the precipice of a change that has the potential to be as strategically significant as the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, and will certainly be no less significant than the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Either way, the repercussions for Israel will be massive.

Unfortunately, this month's elections, like the 1999 elections, have focused not at all on the real, imminent, and fateful challenges facing our country and our next government. As in the 1999 elections, the leftist parties, from Meretz to Labor to Shinui, have dumbed down and, with the help of the media, silenced debate on national security. This issue, the most important issue facing our country, is now seen as one that the Likud would like to exploit merely in order to obfuscate the "real" issue of political corruption.

So we are told that the prime minister's focus on preparedness for the Iraq war is a political ploy. We are told that Likud candidates breathed a sigh of relief (!) at the massacre in Tel Aviv on Sunday hoping that the double bombing would force the media and their political opponents on the left to focus on security. We are told that, since there is "no solution" to the war with the Palestinians, that we should concentrate our attentions on which party will stick it to the ultra-Orthodox and provide higher welfare payments to more people. We are told, once again, that in the current security environment there is no difference between Left and Right. And, in a dramatic display of a nation unschooled by its recent history, we are showing the same naivete of tourists in New York City seduced by slicks into playing three-card monte. We are buying these lies, again.

In reality, today we are faced with one of the most complex and foreboding strategic environments in our history. The complexity of this environment stems not only from the growing Arab capabilities to employ weapons of mass destruction against Israel, but also from the media savvy of our enemies in portraying their aggressive designs against us as a response to "provocations" by Israel.

As our enemies from Iraq to Iran to Syria to Egypt steadily upgrade their military capabilities, they augment these capabilities and destabilize the regional power balance by continuing to fund, train, and sponsor terrorist organizations as their "strategic" and expedient weapon of choice against us.

At the same time, from the EU to the UN to US college campuses, terror apologists on the left work to steadily degrade our national legitimacy in a bid to prevent us from taking the necessary steps to prevent our national destruction. Our ability to safely navigate a course for surviving and even emerging stronger in this climate will be determined by the composition of our next government.

And yet, none of this is being discussed today in the final run-up to the general elections. The national agenda has been completely taken over by politically motivated scandalmongers and prejudiced political hacks that tell us that the only enemy we should worry about when casting our one ballot is the ultra-Orthodox or the settlers or the wealthy or the mafia. With scandals filling up the pages of our tabloids and fuelling our newscasts, we turn a blind eye to the elephant holding the AK-47 and Scud missile standing in the middle of the room.

The success of the leftist parties in dumbing down the elections agenda is even more startling than it was in 1999, given the fact that we have reverted, for the first time in 10 years, to the old one ballot system. Since 1996, we could get away with voting our prejudices, because we cast one vote for the government and one vote for the Knesset. Today we have no such luxury.

Today we have one vote. It is a blunt instrument. We cannot finesse it. We cannot qualify it and we cannot split it. Today we are given one choice. We can either choose a party that will vote to make Ariel Sharon prime minister or a party that will vote to make Amram Mitzna prime minister. We are voting for our representatives in the Knesset it is true, but more importantly, we are voting for our government that will be formed by the majority of the Knesset members elected. We might not like it. We might wish with all our heart that this was not the case, but no amount of denying the situation will change the reality that will greet us at the ballot box in two and a half weeks.

The opinion polls indicate that the party that has most benefited from the shallowness that has so far characterized our election campaign has been the anti-religious Shinui Party. Shinui, we are told, has picked up votes from disgruntled leftists and from disgruntled rightists. Given that most of Shinui's candidate list is comprised of former Meretz members, the leftist move to Tommy Lapid's party is not unexpected.

What is more surprising is that votes that were destined for the Likud have moved to Shinui. Right-wing voters who have decided to vote for Lapid's anti-religious list need to ask themselves why it is that they are supporting a party that would vote to make Amram Mitzna prime minister. And they need to reflect on the fate of every party, from Dash to The Third Way to the Center Party, that has run on a centrist platform. Such reflection will show that, in every case, the parties claiming to represent the center ceased to be  centrist parties the moment the time came to form a government and that the parties' actual identities were again clarified when the governments they joined or did not join were challenged in no-confidence votes.

Corruption is the scourge of our historically dysfunctional political system as it has been for many young democracies. Much should and must be done in the years ahead to reform our political system to make our representatives more accountable to voters and to ensure that our elected representatives are in fact worthy of the honor of representing us in Knesset.

Unfortunately, as a result of our political system, our recoiling from scandal and our indignation over who drinks most from the public trough cannot be addressed at the ballot box on January 28. The only issue that this vote will decide is who forms the next government  -- Ariel Sharon or Amram Mitzna.

We are living in precarious times in a precarious region. We head for the polls in the midst of an unstinting and monstrous terrorist war being waged against us by the Palestinians. We will go to the polls against the backdrop of a rapidly approaching regional upheaval whose reverberations will be felt in every Arab land, and perhaps most directly in our own Jewish land.

Hopefully the 16th Knesset will enact political reforms that will advance the cause of accountable and clean government. But our next government will not be crowned a success or a failure by this benchmark. Our next government will be judged at the end of the day only by how it meets and handles the complex and daunting strategic challenges of our times. When we go to the polls we have but one question to ask ourselves: who will better navigate this storm -- Amram Mitzna or Ariel Sharon. Our answer to that question and no other question will be the answer that determines our fate as a nation.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

 This past week, the right of Israel's representative bodies to exercise independent judgment was moved to the top of the national agenda. One month shy of the general elections, the media and the activist legal community launched an unrelenting attack against the members of the Central Elections Committee, indirectly indicting the institutional legitimacy of the Knesset.

The controversy surrounded the fact that the committee's decisions this week to allow the candidacy of Baruch Marzel and reject the Knesset candidacies of MKs Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara and Bishara's Balad Party were made in spite of the express wishes of the committee's chairman, Supreme Court Justice Mishael Cheshin.

According to Israel's Basic Law: The Knesset, "A list of candidates will not take part in the elections to the Knesset nor shall an individual person be a candidate for the Knesset if the goals or deeds of the list or the deeds of the person explicitly or implicitly, are one of the following: (1) reject the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; (2) incite to racism; (3) support the armed struggle of an enemy state or terrorist organization against the State of Israel."

In accordance with this Basic Law, members of the Central Elections Committee debated this week whether or not to ban certain members of Knesset, candidates and lists of candidates from the upcoming elections. In accordance with the Elections to the Knesset Law, the 41-member Central Elections Committee is composed of representatives of the various Knesset factions based on the representational key of roughly one member for each four MKs from large parties with special provisions for representatives of small factions. The law calls for a Supreme Court justice to preside over the committee and grants him voting rights.

After debating evidence brought before it and listening to candidates' testimonies, the committee this week ruled to allow MK Abd el-Malak Dahamshe, Baruch Marzel, and candidate lists Ram, Hadash, Herut, and Labor to run for Knesset and barred MKs Tibi and Bishara and Bishara's Balad Party from running for office. The committee's votes on Tibi, Bishara, Balad, and Marzel were, as stated, made contrary to the expressed views of Justice Cheshin.

For their labors, committee members were treated to personal attacks by the media fueled by negative remarks made by Cheshin himself, as well as by other legal icons such as retired Supreme Court Justice Yitzhak Zamir.

Ma'ariv's Aryeh Bender wrote a scathing indictment of the committee on Wednesday. He bemoaned Cheshin's plight of being forced to "descend from the heights of the judiciary to act as a kindergarten teacher and a legal adviser to a group of apparatchiks, most of them low level, and also some MKs and lawyers."

For his part, Yediot Aharonot's Gabi Baron wrote, "The committee's political character placed its honorable chairman, Justice Cheshin, in a tough position when he was forced to hear that they 'don't care' about his recommendations."

Cheshin himself made no secret of his contempt for the members of the committee.

In one instance, when requested by MK Michael Kleiner to delay debate on Azmi Bishara's case in order to enable more committee members to be present to hear Bishara's testimony, Cheshin reportedly replied that there was no reason to hold up the hearing. Even if the committee members were there, he said, "It is open to question whether they could understand [what they heard]."

Zamir joined the attacks on the committee, telling Yediot, "It is a scandal that the committee members voted contrary to the chairman's views. It is evidence of a further deterioration of Israeli political culture... It is unacceptable that they would ignore his view of legal matters and decide according to political interests."

Perhaps the most upsetting aspect of all these attacks on members of the committee is that they fly in the face of court precedent in defining Israeli administrative law. According to judicial precedent, members of administrative bodies in Israel are legally required to regard all issues brought before them "with an open heart and a receptive soul." That is, if the Central Elections Committee members were to disregard evidence brought before them, suspend their own judgment and vote simply in accordance with the wishes of Cheshin, then they would be breaking the law.

Cheshin argued, "In order to disqualify a list or a candidate, absolute proof of a total rejection of the state as a Jewish democratic state and absolute racism is needed." Why absolute proof is necessary, when in regular legal proceedings proof needs only to rise to the level of "beyond a reasonable doubt," is unclear. But on the basis of his own legal interpretation, it is similarly unclear why Justice Cheshin insisted on barring Baruch Marzel from running for office.

It is true that in the 1980s, as a member of Rabbi Meir Kahane's Kach Party, Marzel made racist statements against Arabs. But as far as the public record is concerned, he has not repeated those remarks in recent years. Cheshin himself originally rejected Labor's request to disqualify Marzel's candidacy stating that the party presented no compelling evidence of racism.

It was only when Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein added classified information to Labor's petition that Cheshin decided to allow debate on Marzel to go forward in the committee. And yet, after the committee voted to allow Marzel to run, Cheshin publicly stated that he was "shocked" by the committee's decision. Gavel in hand, Cheshin stated, "I hope that the Supreme Court will rectify the situation. The decision about Marzel was wrong."

In contrast to the paucity of the public record on Marzel, press reports of statements made by Bishara and Tibi indicate clearly that both have made racist statements, have rejected the Jewish democratic character of the state and have supported armed struggle by terrorist organizations against the state. And as opposed to Marzel's statements, both men have made these remarks as recently as this past year. In fact, while Cheshin called for disqualification of Marzel on grounds of racism alone, Tibi and Bishara have made public remarks that would tend to show them in breach of all the possible justifications for disqualification - racism, support for terrorism, and rejection of Israel's Jewish democratic character.

In February 2002, Tibi visited PA Chairman Yasser Arafat in Ramallah and joined him in calling out, "Millions of martyrs [i.e. suicide bombers] are marching on Jerusalem." In May 2001, Tibi defended Hizballah's abduction of three IDF soldiers claiming that the terrorist organization "had to kidnap the Israelis because of mentality of the Israeli leadership and its stupidity." In late June 2001, Tibi was listed by Arafat's office as an officer of the Palestinian Authority. Specifically he was listed as Arafat's "Israeli affairs adviser." On June 2, the cabinet announced its determination that the PA is a "terror-stained entity."

MK Azmi Bishara has participated in conferences in the PA calling for continued "resistance" to the IDF. He is currently standing trial for his participation in a meeting in June 2001 in Syria, where, flanked by Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah, he called on Arab countries to promote "resistance" against Israel.

Unlike Marzel, who owned up to his previous racist statements but argued they no longer represent his views, both Tibi and Bishara improbably denied they had ever made any such statements although such statements are a matter of public record. Bishara even managed the improbable trick of denying his rejection of the state while rejecting the state.

Thus, arguing against Shin Bet evidence of his activities against the state (including allegedly telling members of Balad's youth movement to act like soldiers, because they would one day defeat the Zionists in battle), Bishara dismissed the Shin Bet's right, as an organ of the state, to collect evidence against him. "For Israeli Arabs," Bishara argued, "the Shin Bet is a political force that interferes with political life. Therefore it does not have the right to present evidence."

Acting on the basis of the evidence presented before them, and in spite of attempts by Cheshin and the media to influence their decisions, the committee members made their decisions in accordance with the law. In so acting they upheld the independence of the Knesset and behaved in accordance with norms of administrative law.

And yet, immediately after the committee had concluded its deliberations, both Cheshin and Labor MK Ofir Pines Paz declared their view that the law itself is wrong and that, by rights, Cheshin himself ought to be the sole authority vested with the power to disqualify candidates. Both men called for the Elections Law to be changed to reflect their views.

In so arguing, Pines Paz and Cheshin were striking a blow at the very foundations of Israeli democracy. To argue that 'political' considerations that may or may not have influenced committee members are somehow contaminated and only legal philosopher kings like Cheshin can be trusted is to argue that Israelis cannot be trusted with democracy. The argument also ignores the fact that Cheshin himself, like his colleagues on the Supreme Court, has his own a political worldview that shapes his judgments. It is an open secret that the political worldviews of the Supreme Court justices do not constitute a representative sample of the variety of views of Israeli society.

Understanding the gravity of the task of disqualifying candidates, the Knesset legislated that the multi-partisan Central Elections Committee in which all factions of the Israeli body politic have a voice would make such decisions. It behooves all those who claim to speak out in favor of our democracy to value this wealth of representation and to respect and uphold the work of the committee as all representative bodies of our democracy should be respected.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.