A close friend was recently called up to the reserves, where he serves as a commander in an infantry battalion currently responsible for an area of operations in Samaria. On his first furlough home, he told me the story of an interchange with one of his soldiers. The soldier – a kibbutznik whom we'll call Alon – gave my friend, his new commander, the following background information during a personal interview:

"I refused to serve in the reserves for the past three years while we were in Gaza because I think that we should give the territories to the Palestinians. But then I realized that the Arabs keep killing us no matter what we do, so now I don't know what I think. My wife, who comes from Denmark, doesn't think I should be here. She wants us to move to Denmark. I decided to serve this year because now I think I am supposed to fight.

"On the one hand, we should give them a state. On the other hand, they don't want a state because we already gave them one at Camp David and they went to war to kill us. On the one hand, maybe our being in the territories gets them mad, but on the other hand they keep killing us no matter what we do, so we have to keep fighting them because they will never leave us alone. So I am confused. I came here to fight because I think this is what I am supposed to do, but I don't know."

Alon cannot really be blamed for his confusion. Over the past four years of the Palestinian terror war, we have been receiving mixed messages from all quarters. On the one hand, we have images like the children of Sderot being incinerated by rockets in front of their mothers' eyes. On the other hand, we are given explanations from a variety of sources that are aimed at explaining away these unforgivable crimes.

First on the list of the obfuscators are the Palestinians, whose goal it is to confuse us. One of the chief aims of the terror war doctrine is to maintain a sense of confusion among the target nation. The point of the confusion is to bring about a situation where the targeted society is no longer able to make the causal link between the source of its pain – the terrorists and the regimes supporting them – and the pain itself. Once the link is broken, a target society will turn against itself and the terrorists will win.

The Palestinians disorient us by playing a double game. They conduct a war against us while simultaneously projecting their aggression onto us by pretending that they wouldn't be killing our babies with rockets and mortars and bullets and bombs if we hadn't killed terrorists the day or week or month or year before. So our babies die, and if the Palestinians are successful as they generally are, we spend weeks and months blaming ourselves.

After the Palestinians come the media. It is they, after all who are charged with telling us the story of our reality. Their success in doing their job can be measured, in light of the terror doctrine of disorienting a target society, by the degree to which our society is able to understand the nature of our enemies.

Sadly, given statements like Alon's and the general resignation with which terror attacks are now greeted by Israeli society, it is clear that to the extent that Israelis are not confused about who the aggressor in this war is, they have been convinced that there is little they can do about it.

This latter point is clear when we compare the reaction of Israelis to terror attacks in the early Oslo years to terror attacks today.

In 1995, when the first bus bombing in Tel Aviv occurred, I was serving in the army. Immediately after we got word of the bombing, my soldiers and I walked to the Magen David Adom blood bank in the center of the city to donate blood. When we arrived, we found that thousands of other people had the same idea. We waited on line for over five hours. Today, no one would think of giving blood after an attack. No one thinks of doing anything. After the early attacks, thousands of Israelis – religious and secular alike – would protest. Today no one does.

In a recent article in The New Republic, Israeli authors Michael Oren and Yossi Klein Halevi argue that without anyone having noticed, Israel has won the war against Palestinian terrorism. Entitled "Israel's unexpected victory over terrorism," the article claims that since Israelis have not stopped going out to dinner or riding the bus, the terrorists have lost. In their words, "Terror that no longer paralyzes is no longer terror." Perhaps. But then terror never paralyzed Israelis.

The main reason that shops were empty in the first years of the war is because the tourists were staying away. The truth is that the heroism of Israelis – from our soldiers in the field to Egged bus drivers who have personally thrown bombers from their buses, to waiters who have wrestled bombers to the ground and border policemen who have sacrificed their lives to keep suicide bombers away from civilians at a bus stop – is unmatched by that of any nation in the world. The problem isn't our resilience; it is our lack of outrage. We have gotten used to being killed.

If this were not the case, then how could we explain the lack of public outcry after Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei's statements last week on Israel Radio. During the interview, Qurei admitted that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the most active terror organization in the Palestinian terror war, is an integral part of Fatah, the ruling party of the PA. Qurei said, "The Aksa Brigades are part of Fatah, and we are ready to absorb them and deal with them, but for this to happen, I must ask that Israel guarantee their security."

The meaning of Qurei's call for Israel to grant immunity to these PA killers was made clear on Sunday in the aftermath of the IDF's targeted killing of Aksa Brigades commander Jihad Hassan. Reacting to Hassan's death, PA General Intelligence Commander for Judea and Samaria Tawfik Tirawi issued an obituary notice. The obituary stated, "The command of the Palestinian General Intelligence Force and all its officers and soldiers mourn the death of martyr and hero Lieutenant Jihad Hassan, who was martyred on the soil of Salfit on September 26, 2004, while carrying out his duties." Yet in spite of this, the public has not called for the destruction of the PA.

Oren and Klein Halevi equate Arafat's sidelining with Israel's isolation. In their words, "Arafat may be a pariah, but Israel is becoming one too."

The problem, however, is that Arafat is not Israel's central problem, and his sidelining does not equal an Israeli victory; it certainly is not a reasonable trade-off for Israel's international isolation. As Qurei's admission makes clear, the PA itself, not just its leader, is a terrorist entity. The militias that the Americans so wish to see placed under the command of someone other than Arafat are terrorist organizations and their commanders are actively involved in terrorism and terror training.

Getting rid of Arafat solves none of this. And of course, the PA and its terror cells from Fatah and its terror militias are not the only folks out there. There is also Hamas and Hizbullah and Syria and Iran and Islamic Jihad.

And the actions of these groups and countries, together with the international reach of the PLO, show that far from being a local war, the Palestinian terror war is simply one front in the global Islamic war against the West.

Hamas itself makes this point in its internal propaganda. CD ROMs created by Hamas and distributed at colleges in the territories that were seized by the IDF in recent months depict Chechen and al-Qaida figures next to Hamas commanders. The message the recordings, replete with fatwas and Koran quotes, drum home is that the fight against Israel is the same as the fight against Russia and the fight against America.

In their article, Oren and Klein Halevi lionize Ariel Sharon as the architect of the victory. The two paint a glowing portrait of Sharon, claiming he "imposed on himself a regimen of single-mindedness and patience."

They claim that while he refused to go to war after the June 2001 Dolphinarium discotheque bombing, in which 22 Israeli teenagers were murdered, he was "gradually escalating" and "acted like the leader of a nation at war, not a party at war."

Yet, the truth is that Sharon has not exhibited any courage in his leadership. Oren and Klein Halevi applaud Sharon for becoming the first Likud leader to endorse a Palestinian state, for in so doing "Sharon broke with his own party's ideology and recast himself as a consensus politician." But what does that mean?

Acceptance on the Left for what Sharon has done does not constitute consensus.

And the price of Sharon's acceptance by the Left, where there is less clarity about the need to fight and be heroic, has been that our wartime leader has never articulated Israel's case in this war in a memorable way to his own countrymen.

As a result, a reservist like Alon has no direction other than his survival instinct and native patriotism to guide him through the moral dilemmas and national crises with which Israel's longest and most confusing war has presented him – and us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week began with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon succumbing to US pressure and tabling a security cabinet debate on the route of the security fence. After preventing his ministers from discussing the issue, Sharon sent his bureau chief Dov Weissglass to Washington. There, he pleaded with US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice not to sanction Israel for building the fence on land beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The dagger dangling above the prime minister's head was the Bush administration's threat to deduct the hundreds of millions of dollars Israel wishes to spend on the fence from the $9 billion in loan guarantees. In exchange for a promise by Weissglass to change the route of the fence, Rice apparently agreed grudgingly not to deduct the construction outlays from the loan guarantees.

This would be fine news if the fence advanced Israel's national interests. It doesn't.

Here are three falsehoods told about the fence. First, we are told it will keep us safe. Second, we are told that it is not a harbinger of the abandonment of over 200,000 Israelis who live on its eastern side. Third, we are told that the fence is not a border.

But not one of these statements is true. Military commanders admit openly that the only thing that prevents suicide bombers from entering our cities isn't the fence, but the presence of the IDF in Palestinian cities. Even Major General (res.) Uzi Dayan, an advocate of the fence, said in an interview with Israel Radio this past March that the fence "is not a wonder solution." Israel's security, he says, requires military activity "in the entire territory, [i.e., all of Judea and Samaria and Gaza] with freedom of action in the entire territory."

Yet not only is the fence of little defensive value, building it will provide another excuse -- both for this country's Left as well as the international community -- to demand the withdrawal of the IDF from Palestinian cities and villages. So, a fence that will not stop infiltrations will also prevent us from doing the one thing that works in stopping terrorism.

But the fence is more than an obstacle for operations. It will furnish our enemies with static targets. Today they murder construction workers building the fence more or less at will. When completed, they will target the soldiers patrolling it.

Yet even if this were not the case, even if at least some suicide bombers were deterred by the need to go around or cross over or under the fence, what about the Israelis on the other side?

Our leaders promise that there will be no reduction in their security. Surely this is not true. Placing a fence in a particular spot involves stating a preference. Placing Alon Shvut and Beit El outside the fence sends the message: The Israelis who live in these towns merit somewhat less protection than those who live within the Green Line.

And so we come to the question of the border. What the Defense Ministry has begun to build is not a simple fence. It is a total defensive package with a width of fifty meters. First comes the concertina wire. After the wire is a 1.8-2.4 meter ditch. After the ditch is the three-meter-high electronic fence with sensors. Directly beyond the fence is a patrol path followed by a 1.8 meter high pyramid of barbed wire and finally, dotting the length of "fence" are mounted security cameras.

Perhaps drug lords in Colombian jungles have security systems like this, but aside from them, the only place such defensive obstacles exist is along international borders.

And so we see that in building the fence which supposedly is not a border, the government is building Israel's border. And 200,000 Israelis live on the other side of the border.

And so we come to understand what the dispute with Washington is really about. In the absence of a Palestinian partner to whom we may surrender our land, the government is engaging in border negotiations with Condoleezza Rice. And it turns out that by insisting that Israel build only along the 1949 lines, Rice drives as hard a bargain as Arafat himself.

After meeting with Weissglass, Rice told reporters her view of the border."It is extremely important," she said, "if it is going to be built, that as much as possible it not intrude on the lives of Palestinians and most importantly, that it not look as if it is trying to prejudge the outcome of the peace agreement."

That is, the dispute between the government and the Bush administration is over whether the Palestinians, after waging their terror war for three years will, for their labors, receive 90 percent of Judea and Samaria as Barak offered them, or whether they will receive all of of it. Sharon's fence route will provide them with more or less what Barak offered. To judge from remarks by Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell, it becomes manifest that the Bush administration wants to give them still more.

For the Palestinians, the true beauty of the fence is that they object to it. While the fence furnishes them with a state, by objecting to its construction they are ensuring that the border only works in one direction. While Israel, in building it is renouncing its claims to everything on its eastern side, the Palestinians, in objecting to it, renounce none of their claims to land on its western side. By maintaining that it is bound to a negotiated settlement, Israel is laying the groundwork for future claims by the Palestinians.

This is disturbing. As Arafat has often said, the Palestinians under his leadership can fight forever. He can do this because he does not care about his own people. As long as he and the other godfathers of global terrorism are alive and in power, they will send their people out to murder Israelis in the hope that Israel will act precisely as it is acting. And as they teach their subjects to murder, Israel makes one concession after another, just as Arafat and his friends Hassan Nasrallah and Ahmed Yassin said we would.

As the war enters its fourth year this week, and as we reflect on the year just passed, let's recall the mood here three years ago. Then, the day before Yom Kippur, Ehud Barak laid down the gauntlet. Banging his fist on the table, he gave Arafat a 48-hour ultimatum to stop his onslaught. 48 hours and three years later, Arafat is still at it. Meanwhile, we mourn another 850 Israeli victims and base our policies on the imperative of losing the war.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This coming Sunday, Israel's Who's Who will be joined by the rich and famous from around the world at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv to celebrate Shimon Peres's 80th birthday. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is scheduled to attend the festival, as is former US president Bill Clinton. Mikhail Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela are also set to be there.

More than providing the public with yet another display of Peres's narcissism, the gala event will show the yawning gap between the world we occupy and the world occupied by Peres and his friends and supporters. In the world we live in, every promise of peace and a New Middle East has not only been broken, but has blown up in our faces. In the world we live in, the notion that it is either possible or desirable to negotiate a peace deal with the PLO has been rent asunder.

But in the Land of Peres, it is reality, not Peres, that is wrong. It is reality that is doomed to be remembered in history as a failure. It is reality that is to be condemned as not merely inconvenient but as impossible to countenance.

And so it is that 10 years after that first handshake on the lawn of the White House Rose Garden, Peres defends Yasser Arafat and condemns Israel. In a recent television interview with Fareed Zakaria on MSNBC, the erstwhile foreign minister held up Arafat as a paragon for combating Hamas in 1996, after 60 Israelis were blown to bits in eight days of carnage.

When Zakaria asked him why Arafat stopped combating Hamas, Peres replied that it was the fault of his successor, Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, according to Peres, was to blame for Arafat not combating Hamas because Netanyahu was not forthcoming enough in negotiations with Peres's Nobel co-laureate.

Never mind that Peres's entire claim that Arafat fought Hamas is a lie. Arafat, ahead of the 1996 general elections in Israel, rounded up, as he was wont to do, several hundred "usual suspects."

Less than a week later, and before the elections had taken place, he had already released more than a hundred of them. At the same time, Muhammad Dahlan, then head of his Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip, was actively hiding Hamas terror chief Muhammad Deif, who had orchestrated the attacks. And Peres knew this.

The upshot of all that Peres has told us for the past decade is that he cannot be held responsible for the consequences of his strategies. He must only be congratulated for the hope he bestowed on us all.

And herein lays the entire problem not just with Peres but with all his honored guests and supporters. While some continue to blame Israel for the Palestinian war being fought against the state, others claim to be more "pragmatic." These people are willing to allow that Arafat is not a partner in peace, but still protest that Israel must move ahead with the non-existent peace process, "along the lines of the Camp David proposals."

And so it is that former US Middle East mediator Dennis Ross came to write an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this week protesting the government's decision to "remove" Arafat. Ross, who was the only Oslo pusher to acknowledge that Arafat would never cut a peace deal with Israel, explained that if Israel were to expel Arafat from its heartland, it would have to be in the context of large Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.

Like Peres, Ross refuses to acknowledge reality. If Israel were to make concessions of any kind to the Palestinians as part of its move to expel, arrest, or kill Arafat, these concessions would only go to the unrepentant murderers who'd take his place. Surely Ross knows this. Surely Peres does, too. So the question must be asked. What is it that propels these urbane and cultivated men to such conclusions?

The answer was given three weeks ago by no less of an authority than Ian Buruma, in no less a venue than The New York Times. There, in an article titled "How to talk about Israel," Buruma explained, "The Palestinian cause has become the universal litmus test of liberal credentials." And so it is. In the wreckage of Oslo it is important to note who its greatest beneficiaries were. The Israelis? Our lives have become a crapshoot. The Palestinians? Their standard of living was decimated by Arafat's kleptocracy, while their children were brainwashed by its jihadist media.

No. The real beneficiaries of the Oslo process were people on the political Left like Peres and Ross and Annan and Clinton and their peace-activist friends. At Oslo, where Yasser Arafat and his PLO were crowned in glory and legitimacy, these men finally found a way to be pro-PLO and "pro-Israel."

As long as Israel had a government that favored Arafat and Oslo, they could ignore the fact that Arafat's regime was among the greatest human-rights abusers in the world. They could, as the UN did this week, condemn every move that Israel takes to defend itself against aggression, never condemn the massacre of Israeli civilians, and still say they were friends of Israel because they believed in peace. They could equate Zionism with racism, as Mandela has, and pretend that they actually cared about the human rights of Jews because they support Oslo. They could keep their place on the liberal A-list without ever having to come to terms with the fact that what they claimed to be supporting and what they actually were advocating were mutually exclusive.

But now that is over. Oslo is dead. The overwhelming majority of Israelis want Arafat to disappear and do not believe that peace can be achieved in the foreseeable future. The PA stands revealed as the terrorist regime it has been since its inception.

Sides must be chosen. Some leftists, like Meron Benvenisti and Uri Avnery, have already done so. Benvenisti advocates the destruction of the Jewish state, and Avnery acts as a human shield for Arafat.

In America, historian of Zionism Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, like philanthropists Edgar Bronfman and Marvin Lender, has also chosen sides by appealing to President George W. Bush to put sanctions on Israel and to view Israel and the PA as equivalents. Thus do they remain acceptable to their liberal friends, rather than true to genuinely liberal values.

Then again, at least they've "shown their cards" as Bush might say. Not so men like Peres and Ross, who continue to view reality as just another option, and choose self-delusion over the plain meaning of facts.

No doubt many on the Left are emotionally, politically, and financially invested in the false assumptions of Oslo. And yet the time has come to cut their losses. If the values they espouse are more important to them than the company they keep, they will side with reality. If, on the other hand, hanging with the A-list is what really motivates them, at least they'll have a great party to go to.
When it's Happy Hour in the Land of Delusion, the drinks are free.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speaking hours before Hamas began its Tuesday murder spree, Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon said he ordered the air force to use insufficient force to carry out its mission of bombing the Hamas leadership during its meeting in Gaza on Saturday. Ya'alon explained that he had purposely caused the mission of decapitating the Hamas leadership to fail, because he wished to avoid killing "innocent civilians."

Not surprisingly, the anemic strike did not deter Hamas. Ahmed Yassin immediately called for revenge. And so it was that the innocent civilians who were killed were not Palestinians who were acting as human shields for mass murderers. They were Jews waiting for buses and drinking coffee.

Apparently not learning the lesson, in its strike against Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar on Wednesday the IDF again employed insufficient force to destroy the target. The IDF announced that the mission had again been purposely handicapped in order to avert collateral damage.

Picking up on the message of disorientation and weakness from the army, Zahar issued a vitriolic threat to begin bombing Israeli homes.

On Thursday we learned that both of Tuesday's human bombs had been held in administrative detention in Ketziot Military Prison until their release six months ago. Was this part of the confidence-building measures that Israel provided for the PA and the Bush administration to show that Israel wants peace? Neither of these murderers had personally been involved in murders when they were released. Did anyone talk to these true believers while they were in custody? Did anyone follow them once they were released? Clearly the answer is no. And clearly, they were unimpressed by Israel's humanitarian gesture.

In his first public remarks after the Tzrifin and Jerusalem bombings, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his Indian hosts that Israel wants to make peace and is willing to make painful concessions for peace. What message did this statement send the Palestinians? Can Sharon honestly believe that it gave them pause as they danced and hooted in exultation for having sent Nava Applebaum's wedding guests to the cemetery to bury her and her father instead of to her wedding canopy to celebrate with them?

What are we to make of the murderous responses to Israeli statements of goodwill? How are these responses to inform our future actions?

In remarks Wednesday ahead of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that the terror regimes that the US has brought down in Afghanistan and Iraq were not moved by US deterrence. The Taliban, Rumsfeld said, allowed al-Qaida to use its territory as its base of operations for attacks on the US without a thought for its own survival. Saddam Hussein ignored 17 UN Security Council resolutions assuming that the US would never lift a finger against him. Rumsfeld said that he could not give an explanation for why these regimes did not fear their eventual destruction.

On Monday, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kupperwasser, the head of Military Intelligence's Research Division, provided the answer. Speaking at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center's conference, "Post Modern Terrorism Trends, Scenarios, and Future Threats," Kupperwasser said that terrorist regimes are the exact opposite of democracies. While democratic societies turn their efforts towards expanding freedom and economic prosperity in the interests of enabling "the pursuit of happiness," terrorist regimes "cultivate the pursuit of suffering."

According to Kupperwasser, subjects in terrorist regimes like the Palestinian Authority must believe that the purpose of their lives is to die to destroy their enemy. In this environment, economic depression is acceptable. As he noted, "Hamas carries out attacks that are aimed at making the Palestinians poorer." Hence they have targeted the Erez Industrial Zone and the Karni cargo terminal in Gaza. The sole purpose these areas were created to serve is the provision of employment for Palestinians in Gaza.

Every sacrifice in the advance of the destruction of the enemy is divinely dictated whether by Big Brother Arafat or by Allah himself.

On a positive note, Kupperwasser argued that the EU's decision over the weekend to classify Hamas's so-called political wing as a terrorist organization constitutes "a strategic victory" for Israel.

Yet, while the EU's belated decision is no doubt welcome, to call it a strategic victory is to overreach. It is nice that after three years of the unrelenting terrorist war on Israel, the EU was willing to pass a non-binding resolution of this sort against Hamas.

But in truth it is Israel, not the EU, that will be the source of a true strategic advance in this war. Such an advance that will pave the way for eventual victory will not be the result of simply killing Hamas leaders, although such killing is essential.

A true strategic advance in the war that will pave the way for Israel's eventual victory will come with strategic clarity. When the Israeli government acts on the knowledge that not only is there no distinction between the various wings of Hamas, but there is no distinction between the PA and its Fatah, Tanzim, and Aksa Brigades terror cells and when the government bases its actions on the fact that there is no distinction between the PA and Hamas, Israel will find itself on the road to true victory.

Why is this? A few weeks ago, Dr. Joel Fishman, a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published a compelling essay about Israel's fundamental misstep in contending with the Palestinian war. Fishman explains through historical analysis that the PLO, like its partner Hamas, fights its war for the destruction of Israel not only by launching a military-terrorist campaign against the state, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by fighting a political war against the country.

The PLO adopted its dual strategy against Israel after consulting with North Vietnamese commanders in Hanoi in the late 1960s. There it was explained to Yasser Arafat and his aide Salah Khalaf that the way to fight and win an asymmetrical war against a democratic and militarily powerful enemy is by causing, through propaganda and other means of psychological warfare, the internal disintegration of the democratic enemy's will to fight. By cultivating constituencies within the enemy state as well as in the international community they would be able to render the democracy incapable of defending itself against aggression.

The terrorist component of the war is used to achieve the same goal of societal disintegration. In speaking of suicide operations, Kupperwasser noted that suicide attacks cause a psychological weakening of the enemy society. "Not only [do such attacks] force the enemy to pay a terrible economic and physical price, they tell him that if you believe so much in your cause that you are willing to die there must be something to what you are saying. The enemy is motivated to check the legitimacy of his position against you," Kupperwasser said.

Of course, to mobilize people to strap explosives belts to their body and blow themselves up in a cafe or on a bus, these mass murderers must themselves undergo indoctrination and terrorization. The PA's systematic killing of Palestinians it labels as collaborators with Israel provides a Soviet-style sense of justice in the PA ruled areas. These executions as well as the conduct of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, torture, and land confiscation by PA forces have brought Palestinian society to a point of psychological weakness and disorientation.

The state terror coupled with mass indoctrination to suicide operations has distorted the Palestinian psyche to the point where, as Kupperwasser noted, "the terrorists are able to clone themselves." If the IDF arrests 250 terrorists in Judea and Samaria, because of the PA indoctrination and terror these men can be replaced immediately with other willing executioners.

And so we see that like the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Ba'athists in Iraq, the PA is a totalitarian entity through and through, little different from the Soviet Union.

In assessing how to win this war, Israel in fact should take a lesson from the man most responsible for destroying the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War - President Ronald Reagan. This is so, because at its most basic level, in fighting the US, the Soviet Union mirrored the PLO's campaign against Israel. In both instances, the totalitarian entity believed that coexistence with its enemy was an ideological impossibility. At the end of the day, only one side would survive.

During the 1970s, the US tried through detente to peacefully coexist with the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not appreciate the US gestures but rather pocketed the concessions and invaded Afghanistan.

Recognizing the true nature of the USSR, Reagan came forward and adopted the Soviet view of the rivalry and set out to ensure that the US, not the USSR, would be the side left standing. During his presidency, Reagan consciously engaged the Soviets at every level. In championing human rights and labeling the Soviet Union "the evil empire," Reagan launched an ideological and political battle against the Kremlin. In fighting the Soviets in Nicaragua, Grenada, and Afghanistan, Reagan forced the Soviets onto the military defensive and emerged victorious. In launching Star Wars Reagan brought the technological advantages of a free society to bear against the intellectually barren Soviets. Within a decade, the most feared regime in the world was no more.

When Reagan launched his own "people's war" against the Soviet Union, he did so above the shrill criticism and hysterical protests of the mainstream US media, the Democratic party, and the governments of Western Europe. These opponents challenged him every step of the way. They portrayed him as a murderer, a criminal, a lunatic, and a simpleton. But he was right and the American people knew it.

While the Palestinians have the advantage of ideological uniformity and mass indoctrination, Israel has the power of freedom and democracy. We can learn from our mistakes and innovate. We can grow our economy, expand our markets, and combat our enemies on the fields of our choosing. If we have the courage of our convictions in our basic decency and morality, we can identify our enemy for who he really is and what he is trying to achieve. All it takes is will and fortitude and honesty. The Palestinians fight their people's war against the Israeli people. It is the Israeli people that, if just given the signal from our leadership, will win this war for our survival.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In a recent interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, translated by MEMRI, Syria's Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass made a number of revealing statements.

On the military front, he explained that Israel and the US are terrorist states. At the same time, terrorism-supporting countries like Syria and Saudi Arabia are victims, and terrorist organizations like Hizbullah in Syrian-controlled Lebanon and Palestinian terrorist groups operating in Israel and headquartered in Damascus are legitimate resistance movements.

On the theological front, Tlass explained that the Jews have no right to object to his book "The Matza of Zion." There he described the 1841 blood libel against the Jews of Damascus, which accused them of killing children to make Pessah matzot, as historical fact. Tlass argued that Jews have no right to object to his writing, because killing children to make matzot is a "Jewish ritual."

Finally, Jews, according to Tlass, have no right to claim that anti-Semitism is discrimination against Jews, because Arabs are the majority of Semites.

Aside from lying about every subject he was asked to discuss, Tlass in one interview managed by statement and inference to distort the meaning of a number of key terms. These include terrorism, resistance, occupation, racism, discrimination, anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism.

By Tlass's redefinition of these terms, both Israel and the US are criminal states. The US must be reeducated and Israel must be destroyed.

* * *

Last week, Prof. Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University debated Dr. Daniel Pipes, the head of the Middle East Forum, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country. In the course of his remarks, Khalidi personally attacked Pipes twice, implying that he is a bigot because he supports Israel.

He also referred to support for Israel by senior policy makers in the Defense Department and Vice President's Office as "virulent."

As the Edward Said Professor of Middle East Studies, Khalidi no doubt is aware that Webster's defines "virulent" as "malignant; extremely poisonous or venomous."

While referring to support for Israel in this way, Khalidi, under direct questioning from host Joe Scarborough, nonetheless felt it necessary to lie about the fact that in the past he has referred to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as "a fanatic, extreme right-wing Zionist."

He also denied referring to Israel as a "racist" state with an "apartheid" system and of claiming that America has been "brainwashed" by Israel. Yet when interviewed by writers from The Australian Financial Review and the online magazine opentent.org, Khalidi was absolutely clear in making these statements.

* * *

Two years ago this week, the UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was in the midst of its deliberations in Durban, South Africa. The end result of the weeklong conference was the subversion of the definitions of "racism," "racial discrimination," "xenophobia," and "related intolerance."

At Durban, Israel and the US were isolated, as every other member nation of the UN and every major international human rights organization either stood by and watched or was actively engaged in the systematic criminalization of Israel, the marginalization of the Holocaust, the whitewashing of anti-Semitism, and the demonization of the Jewish people as a nation and of Jews as individuals.

In the course of its deliberations, the terms "Zionism," "anti-Semitism," "racism," "refugees," "colonialization," "terrorism," "civilians," "resistance," and "occupation" were all redefined to one end. That end was to foment a distortion of reality whereby, one week before the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York, Israel was castigated as the single most lethal and virulent threat to the world.

* * *

George Orwell once said: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

In the two years since the Durban conference, our political language has been distorted by an alliance of the international political Left and the Arab world to the point where neither Israel nor the US can easily use words to either describe the reality we live in or to motivate others to join us in fighting our enemies.

After September 11, US President George W. Bush called on the nations of the world to join the US in destroying terrorism. Most nations came forward and expressed their support for his call. Yet when Saudi Arabia can claim to be fighting terrorism, even while it funds al-Qaida and Hamas, it is clear that we have reached a point at which we cannot even have a conversation about terrorism and expect our interlocutors to be talking about the same thing.

For Israel, the disintegration of language is even more devastating than it is for the US. Every single term that we need to describe what is happening to us and what we ourselves are doing has been seized by the new Orwellian language police. By distorting the meaning of terrorism and anti-Semitism, our enemies deny us the ability to speak about the crimes being carried out against us.

If we are terrorists because we control Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, then we cannot defend ourselves.

If the Palestinian Authority, which organizes, incites, and enables Palestinians to murder us at every opportunity, is simply involved in legitimate resistance to our terrorism, then we cannot defend ourselves, either.

The fact that the Western media refuse to refer to Palestinians who commit mass murders of Israelis as terrorists, but prefer the term "militants," indicates that from their perspective there is something basically acceptable about these murders. Referring to Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers in this manner distinguishes them from other people who commit similar crimes against non-Jews. The fact that the Israeli media also use the term "activist" and "terrorist" interchangeably to describe those who murder us shows that we too have lost the power to describe our enemies.

If being anti-Semitic means being anti-Arab, then Israel is the greatest anti-Semitic entity in the world. Arab hatred and demonization of Jews, which occurs daily throughout the world, is acceptable. Widespread European hatred of Jews can also be defended as simple opposition to Israel. Hatred of Jews and the Jewish state, as well as acts of war against it, are turned on their head. Israel is the criminal. Jews are racist anti-Semites. Israel is the terrorist.

The subversion of the term "refugee" in the case of Palestinians is equally debilitating for Israel. For every other group, the status of refugee exists only for those individuals who actually lived in a country and left. But for Palestinians, every relative, child, and grandchild of an Arab who left Israel in 1948 is a refugee.  

Under international law, it is the responsibility of the countries that take in refugees to provide them with a home. But for Palestinians, the situation is reversed. It is the responsibility of the countries in which these people were born and live never to accept them, and it is Israel's responsibility to allow 4 million hostile Arabs to immigrate and receive citizenship. Because we have accepted this subverted definition of refugee, Israelis engage in vacuous and self-defeating conversations about the so-called right of return of millions of people who have never set foot here and who actively seek the destruction of the state.

Because we have relinquished our right to language, for three years we have been unable to have any serious national conversation about the reality we experience every single day. As Prime Minister Ariel Sharon demonstrated when he referred to the disputed territories of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip as "occupied," we have surrendered our right to define reality to our enemies.
We cannot describe our lives.

For three years the Palestinians have been making war against us. Yet because they have taken over our language, we cannot so much as give a name to the war that we are unable to notice. We have been so imprisoned by our enemies' perversion of our words that we find it strange when outsiders have the courage to make statements about the "so-called occupied territories." We cannot even recognize when someone is trying to help us.

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men," said Orwell, "is the restatement of the obvious."

And so, two years after Durban, 10 years after Oslo, three years after the Palestinian terrorist war was launched, and two years after the September 11 attacks, we must take it upon ourselves to do just that. If we allow our enemies to define our world for us, we are destined to lose our place in it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.