Israel is in the midst of an economic revolution. Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has a vision and a strategy. He is steadily liberalizing our economy and springing us from our monopolistic, union-controlled prison.

The Histadrut, whose economic warfare has caused a net loss of 1.4 percent of GDP in 2003, is now losing its battle to protect its privilege and power. The tide has turned. Welfare queens have lost their bloom. Union bosses have become their own caricatures.

Netanyahu's adversaries have no vision, only Leninist determinism. Labor leader Shimon Peres has for the past decade been telling us we have no power to improve our lots in life. According to Peres and his fellow-travelers, the Israeli economy is a slave to political forces. If we have peace, we will have economic growth. If we don't have peace, we won't. Not surprisingly, Peres is now wooing Histadrut labor boss Amir Peretz to rejoin the Labor party.
 

Together, so the old thinking goes, they can destroy Netanyahu's plans for liberalizing the economy as they did when he was prime minister.

Together they can blame Israel's economic woes not on the stranglehold in which the Histadrut and Peres's monopoly owning buddies grip the economy, but on the Likud's failure to accept Peres's vision of political surrender to the PLO.

Luckily, Peretz has overplayed his hand. The public is sick of being blackmailed. No public embrace by Peres can hide the fact that Peretz is a bully. No amount of screaming about workers' rights can erase the pictures of piled up trash in Tel-Aviv, or ships stranded at sea with no one to offload their cargo, or thousands of Israelis stranded at Ben-Gurion Airport because of arbitrary, illegal, and unjustifiable strikes by overpaid baggage handlers.

If Netanyahu is successful in transforming the labor markets, fiscal reform will follow. With a competitive market and lower tax burdens, Israel will be better positioned to attract immigrants from Western countries where most Jews in the Diaspora now live. Today, even the most ideologically driven American, Australian, French, or Belgian Jew has to think twice about making aliya when he knows that moving to Israel means losing his earning power and living in a socialist backwater that rewards mediocrity and punishes initiative.

If Netanyahu is successful, we will be able to tell young Jewish families in these lands that joining the Jewish state makes both ideological and economic sense.

But economics isn't the only thing keeping them away. There is also the problem of jihad. Even as French and German rabbis warn Jewish men not to wear their kippot in public to avoid being attacked by anti-Semites, the call is not going out to pick up and move to Israel.

And why should it? Here in Israel, outside the economic sphere, we are stuck. Our government offers us nothing to counter the Leftist dogma. To the contrary, it accepts it without question. Why should Jews in Germany or France feel more secure in Israel where the government proclaims its support for the establishment of a PLO terror state?

After Prime Minister Ariel Sharon leaked that he is considering destroying a few Jewish towns in Gaza in order to teach the Palestinians a lesson for not negotiating a peace deal with Israel, I asked a number of Likud leaders what the difference is between the Likud and the Labor party.

Deputy Defense Minister Ze'ev Boim and Chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Yuval Steinitz described best the Likud's policies in this regard.

"The difference between Likud and Labor," said Steinitz, "revolves around the parameters we envision for an eventual agreement with the Palestinians. The question of the Land of Israel is no longer relevant. We accept that we will have to have a Palestinian state. But whereas Labor, under Ehud Barak, was willing to give away almost all of Judea and Samaria and to divide Jerusalem, we understand we need security zones. We need the Jordan Valley and Western Samaria and of course we will not accept partition of Jerusalem."

I asked Boim if he understood that the state that is about to be established will be a terrorist state.

"So what's new? We been living with terrorist states for the past 130 years," he said.

Both men described the establishment of a PLO state as an historic inevitability. What distinguished them from their Labor colleagues is that they are quite clear that this state will be unfriendly.

Until Netanyahu began his economic revolution, Israel's political and economic policies wre spawned in the same motionless swamp. In both cases, our inability to solve our problems is the result of our unquestioning acceptance of inaccurate strategic assumptions. In the case of our economy, the notion has been that only the PLO can solve our economic problems. In the case of our political debate, the notion has been that only the PLO can solve our demographic and security woes.

A precondition to entree into the world of political discourse in Israel has over the past decade become one's acceptance of the Leftist determinist view that if Israel does not allow the PLO to establish a terrorist state in our country's heartland, we will not be able to retain our identity as a sovereign Jewish democracy.

All of our leaders and most of us have accepted this completely baseless strategic assumption. Our extremists, on both sides of the ideological divide, push us ever more feverishly to this conclusion. Our extremists on the right tell us that given the axiomatic fact that we cannot sustain our status as Jewish and democratic state we must chuck democracy. Our extremists on the left exhort us that we have to quit being a Jewish state. And standing between the two extremities are our leaders whose answer to the quandary is to build the Great Wall of China and pretend that if we can't see our enemies, they will magically disappear.

In truth, the notion that our ability to remain a Jewish democracy is in question is a total fallacy. Over the past 55 years, the demographic balance between Jews and Muslims in Israel has remained more or less static. The Muslim birthrate has declined from three times the Jewish birth rate in 1967 to two times the Jewish birthrate in 2002. The rest of the difference has been made up by immigration of Jews to Israel.

There has been a major Muslim population increase in Israel as well as in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria over the past decade (although Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union kept the balance steady). This increase in Muslim immigration is a direct consequence of the Oslo process which empowered the PLO to bring tens of thousands of Jordanians and Egyptians into the Palestinian Authority while encouraging Palestinian women to view their wombs as weapons and to have as many babies as possible.

Those who think that establishing a PLO terror state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is necessary to maintain Israel's Jewish majority must ask themselves the following questions: Do they really believe that such a state will curb Muslim immigration to the area? Do they believe that somehow, when the PLO has attained sovereignty it will suddenly encourage its women to join the work force instead of the maternity wards?

On Sunday, Shin Bet head Avi Dichter extolled the separation fence. The presence of the fence, he said, is responsible for the drop in the level of terrorism inside of Israel. But the day after Dichter made the announcement it was reported that the PA has test fired a Kassam rocket with a range of 17 kilometers.

In a recent speech in Washington, Sharon adviser Dore Gold explained that the newest strategic threat to Israel's security stems from the flow of small arms from Iraq. How long after the PLO receives independence will it take for its terrorist forces to acquire Stinger anti-aircraft missiles? Just the threat of missile attack against El Al passenger planes in Canada caused the Canadian government to announce that it was considering stopping El Al traffic into Canadian airports. How many passenger planes will the Palestinians need to shoot down to shut down Ben-Gurion Airport and destroy Israel's economy? In this state of affairs, how many Jews will consider immigrating to Israel? How many will consider emigrating?

From 1967 until 1993, the policy of every Israeli government was that Israel needed to retain Judea, Samaria, and Gaza because of their strategic importance. From Eshkol to Begin to Shamir it was clear that arrangements with the Palestinians for self-rule could be made only when a Palestinian leadership emerged that would respect Israel's rights, including our right to remain a Jewish democracy. Israel made tactical errors in our relations with the Palestinians over the years, but our strategy of retaining strategically vital territories while expressing a genuine willingness to live at peace with the Palestinians was a sound one.

But then for absolutely no apparent reason, and without a hint of logic, as one million Jews from the former Soviet Union landed at our shores, the Labor party arbitrarily decided that our future as a Jewish democracy was imperiled and we threw a generation of strategic wisdom out the window.

Netanyahu is doing yeoman's work in convincing us to reject the Labor party's lies about our economic impotence. But these positive changes cannot stand on their own. Until we free ourselves of the canard that we cannot remain a Jewish democracy unless we enable the establishment of a terror state that will undermine both, our leaders will continue to delude themselves, and most of us, that fences and unilateral surrenders will save our lives and our state.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Two weeks ago, recently resigned Palestinian cabinet minister Abdel Fattah Hamayel told the BBC that the Palestinian Authority shells out $50,000 a month to members of Fatah's Aksa Brigades terror cells. Hamayel said that Yasser Arafat is aware of these payments.

The BBC reporter then sat down with Ata Abu Rumaileh and Zakariah Zubaidi, the respective heads of Fatah's political and terrorist wings in Jenin. Together the men explained to the BBC reporter that "there is no difference between Fatah and the Aksa Martyrs' Brigades." The men also explained that Arafat commands both.

What we learn from this report is that, as is the case with Hamas and Hizbullah, there is absolutely no difference between the political and terrorist arms of Fatah. This is rife with implications regarding the Palestinian Authority because, as one Palestinian journalist explained to me this week, "There is one ruling party in Palestine – Fatah – headed by Arafat."

His statement is not hyperbolic. It is a simple fact. It was, after all, the Fatah Central Council, acting on Arafat's orders, that approved new PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei's cabinet. Almost every single member of that cabinet is a member of Fatah's political wing, which is inseparable from Fatah's terrorist wing. And we know that they are one and the same not because the IDF says so. We know this because Fatah leaders say so.

What does this mean? It means that when the US and the rest of the international community tell Israel to ease up on its counter-terror operations in order to shore up Ahmed Qurei's new cabinet, Israel is being told to strengthen a terrorist organization. Yet this report – the most stunning revelation in the mainstream Western media about the nature of the Palestinian terror war – made not one iota of difference to anyone. Why?

The simple answer is that in Israel, as in the rest of the Western world, we have been otherwise occupied. We have Yossi Beiin's Swiss-finanaced Geneva Accord and the Ayalon-Nusseibeh EU-financed understandings and the IAF reserve pilots' refusal to bomb terror targets and the former heads of the Shin Bet and the Road Map to consider. Our heads are full, our attention span is limited.

How can we pay attention to reality when we are inundated with fiction?

How can US Secretary of State Colin Powell attend to the fact that the PA is a terrorist organization when he is being bombarded by reports from his department that Israel isn't dismantling mobile homes with Jewish residents in Judea and Samaria? How can he notice that there are serious implications to the fact that Fatah and Fatah are both Fatah when he hears that Yossi Beilin has signed away Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount to Yasser Abed Rabbo?

How can Prime Minister Ariel Sharon be expected to contend with the fact that the PA is a terrorist organization when Bush, pushed by Powell, who is pumped by Beilin, who is funded by the EU, tells him to get moving on the "settlements" and stop building fences and start being a good neighbor to Fatah's newly appointed "prime minister?"

How can the Israeli public take notice of the fact that the PA is a terrorist organization when, in her Pravda-inspired TV show Fact, "journalist" Ilana Dayan shows us a film in which Beilin and his friends breathlessly argue with their Palestinian counterparts over who gets to control the parking lot outside of the Old City's Dung Gate? How are we to absorb the fact that Beilin and company get their money from the Swiss government and the EU, who jointly concocted this deliberate attempt to undermine the power of the democratically elected government of Israel?

How can anyone be expected to notice that when Sharon speaks with Qurei he speaks with Arafat, when four failed former heads of the Shin Bet scream at us in Yediot Aharonot's weekend edition that our army is immoral and that we are losing our souls by fighting terrorists?
 

If history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce, what happens on the third, fourth and fifth iterations?

We have been down this road before. For the past decade, we have been cajoled, browbeaten and deceived into believing that our enemies are really our friends.

After the PLO distinguished itself by siding with Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, our "peace camp" embraced Arafat and his deputies as the only legitimate voice for the Palestinian people. After meeting illegally with these terrorists in Tunis, they rammed their agenda down our throats with the Oslo accords. Since then, in spite of overwhelming and continuous proof that the PA is devoted to the destruction of Israel, this camp and their fellow travelers in the Israeli media have disgraced themselves repeatedly by castigating their political opponents in Israel as "opponents of peace."

As a result of these efforts, we are faced with a situation where, after three years of war, we are still stuck with their paradigm of policy making. This paradigm holds that, in order to live in peace, we must forsake everything we hold precious and sacred.

Sharon is partially responsible here. Militarily, his tactics are all but indistinguishable from those of Ehud Barak. His diplomatic and information campaigns abroad and statements to the Israeli public have been marked by superficiality and intellectual confusion. He has squandered every opportunity to strengthen Israel's strategic alliance with the US, sufficing instead with public expressions of friendship by President Bush.

So yes, Sharon must be criticized for his failure to meet the challenge. Yet the fact remains that Beilin and his radical lefitst political allies Amram Mitzna and Avram Burg and Ami Ayalon and their media flacks have never ceased to undercut him. With money coming from overseas and their monopolistic control of the Israeli media, they have the wherewithal to campaign forever.
 

Even now, our military has the capacity, in spite of the naysayers, to defeat terrorism. What we lack is a political leadership with the moral courage to rally the people to victory. It will take courage to stand up to the entire world and say that Beilin's policy is not an option. It will take courage to tell the American administration that there is no point negotiating, much less making concessions or good will gestures, to anyone who represents the Palestinian Authority.

It will take courage to tell unpopular truths.

Sharon has been both lionized and demonized for his refusal to surrender to the Beilin logic. Now he must show that his reputation for courage is deserved.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

What does Europe want from the Jews?

Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis's Hitlerian rant this week was the latest expression of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. To an audience which included the Greek ministers of culture and education he asserted that the Jewish nation "is the root of evil. It is full of self-importance and evil stubbornness."

Theodorakis has a long personal history of hating Jews and Israel matched by a long history of support for the PLO – support which led to the PLO's decision to have him compose the Palestinian national anthem. Because of this, the fact that he feels the way he does about Israel and the Jews is no surprise.

What is interesting about Theodorakis's remarks is that they come but a week after we learned that 59 percent of Europeans believe that Israel is the single largest threat to peace in the world. And the publication of the EU poll came but a week after the EU, under French leadership, refused to condemn the anti-Semitic screed uttered by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed at the Islamic Summit Conference where he said that "the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

In Israel, Theodorakis's remarks, like the EU poll results have been greeted with red headlines and a shallow public discussion of what Israel has done to cause this rash of Jew hatred. Is our army's treatment of the Palestinians responsible? Are the Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to blame for Europe's steadily rising comfort level with public expressions of anti-Semitism?

Underlying all of this gratuitous and vain soul searching has been another running subtext.

What has Israel done to defend itself against the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a cultural and political force in the West and why have these actions, such as they are, failed so abysmally?

Under the gun of media scrutiny, Israel's public diplomacy gurus launched their breathless defense. Led by Foreign Ministry Deputy Director-General for Public Diplomacy Gideon Meir, they whined that they don't have enough money to launch a successful campaign to defend Israel abroad. The decision to close Israeli embassies due to budget cuts also adds to the Foreign Ministry's failure to defend the country and indeed the Jewish people from constant vilification, we were told. And, aside from these tired excuses, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office found a scapegoat on which to pin their failure.

Danny Seaman, who has headed the Government Press Office for the past three years, was informed Monday night by a reporter that a decision had been made to replace him. Seaman, whose crime has been his staunch and unprejudiced enforcement of Israeli laws towards the foreign press, we are told, is responsible for the biased reporting that characterizes the media coverage of Israel. If he hadn't made foreign news organizations hire Israeli cameramen and if he hadn't ended the policy of accrediting Palestinian journalists, Israel would never be in the mess it is in today.

Of course this is ridiculous, as are all of the Foreign Ministry's excuses for its failure to mount even a modicum of defense for the state in the international media and towards foreign governments.

The real cause of Israel's abject failure to combat anti-Semitism in Europe is our failure to see the big picture. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe because many members of the European political and intellectual elite believe that vilifying Israel and the Jews advances their interests. And what are these interests that are served by anti-Semitism? They have to do with the enhancement and projection of European power.

How has this been manifested? A month before the September 11th attacks on the US, French policy wonk Dominique Moissy published an article in Foreign Affairs under the title, "The Real Crisis over the Atlantic."

Moissy, an advisor to the French Institute for International Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission explained that the rift between the US and the EU has to do with how Europe defines its role in the world. Using the example of European rejection of the US's right to use the death penalty, Moissy explained, "Traditional state-centered concerns are no longer as relevant in this age of interdependence. Instead, domestic issues such as the death penalty and abortion have emerged on the foreign policy agenda."

Moissy's argument, at base, was that the US needs to accept European cultural supremacy if it wishes to maintain its Atlantic alliance with a self-confident New Europe. Two and a half years later, after the "New Europe" which Moissy described prevented the US from going to war in Iraq under UN Security Council or NATO aegis, many argue that the EU-US rift that was already apparent before the September 11th attacks has turned into an unbridgeable break.

Undaunted by the split his own government was so responsible for causing, Moissy recently published an article in the International Herald Tribune where he made the case for why Europe is indispensable for America. In his view, America cannot turn its back on Europe because "Europe is America's best protection against its own inner evils – neo-isolationist narcissism and arrogant ignorance of the way others may feel and think."

Moissy also provided a way to mend fences between Europe and the US. The way to rebuild the Atlantic alliance, he argued, was to work together to end Israeli sovereignty. In Moissy's words, "The road to reinvent the West goes through Jerusalem."

Moissy urged that Europeans and Americans work together to force Israelis to accept the European financed Geneva "peace formula" which he claims "is the only way out of the abyss into which the region is falling."

The Geneva initiative calls for the institution of an international regime to include military forces from the EU, UN, US, Russia and indeed, Mahathir's Organization of the Islamic Conference that will take over the role of sovereign from the government of Israel. The international forces will be responsible for settling all disputes between Israel and the Palestinian state and will oversee everything from the security of Jerusalem to the use of airspace and the protection of borders. In short, the Geneva initiative that the EU stands so squarely behind, calls for the end of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the reinstitution of an international mandate like that of the League of Nations.

It has been evident for years that many European governments view Israel's right to sovereignty as conditional upon our enemies' acceptance of our right to exist. European block voting in favor anti-Israel resolutions in the UN is case in point. So too, data indicating that levels of anti-Semitism in Europe reached an all-time low during the Oslo years are proof of this fact. As long as the PLO said it was okay to recognize Israel, the Europeans went along. The minute that Arafat renewed his call for the destruction of Israel, the Europeans, again, followed his lead.

But the current European hostility towards Israel, that is manifested as much in its policies as in its overt expressions of anti-Semitism is not simply a matter of never fully accepting Israel's right to exist. This conditional European acceptance of Jewish sovereignty is now linked to European aspirations to cultural hegemony over America.

There is a direct connection between Europe's anti-Semitism and its anti-Americanism. European anti-Americanism stems from cultural envy of American independence and power. Europe wants America to accept its cultural superiority and in so doing, hitch US military and financial might to European visions of social engineering and global governance.

Anti-Semitism plays an enormous role in the New Europe's attempt to force the US to adhere to its cultural dictates. If the US can be convinced that Israel is the gravest danger to world peace, as the vast majority of Europeans believe, then the US will effectively abandon its right to make moral distinctions for itself and come to rely on European guidance in its application of its military might.

If Israel, the archetype of the nation state is accepted as a rogue nation, then the US will hardly be able to argue with Europe's self-proclaimed right to interfere in its own internal debates about issues like the death penalty, abortion rights, genetically modified crops or global warming. Europe will have proven its point. According to the European logic, America, after abandoning Israel, will have been brought to cultural heel.

When seen as part of an overall European push for cultural hegemony over the West, the resurgence of anti-Semitism stops being a matter of simple public diplomacy. And our self-indulgence in blaming European anti-Semitism on loyal civil servants or on Jewish settlements is also unmasked as so much self-destructive nonsense.

To be successful, public diplomacy, like traditional diplomacy must be based upon what is actually happening in the real world. Israel has become a European pawn in its power bid to force its norms on America. If we wish to combat European anti-Semitism, we must understand that it has nothing to do with our actions. Rather, the resurgence of Jew-hatred in Europe has to do with the European quest for power.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Thursday morning we buried former Jerusalem Post editor David Bar-Illan in Jerusalem. I was blessed to have known David and to have learned from him when we worked together in then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's bureau. I was a young foreign policy aide and David headed the bureau's Policy Planning and Information Division.

David taught me many things. But if there was one lesson that stands out above the rest it was his insistence that I trust my common sense.

Common sense dictated that when terrorist leaders and operatives tell us that they wish to destroy Israel, we must believe them and act accordingly. Common sense demanded that if the price of a photo-op of soldiers withdrawing unilaterally from South Lebanon or of a handshake on the White House lawn was the imperiling of the State of Israel and the lives of its citizens, the photo-op should be politely, but firmly rejected.

On Sunday, the cabinet will meet to decide whether to provide the Israeli people with a photo-op.

The ministers will vote on whether to accept or reject a negotiated deal with Hizbullah. The parameters of the deal are that Israel will release from our prisons former Hizbullah leader Abdel Karim Obeid, former Amal militia chief Mustafa Dirani, 17 other Hizbullah terrorists who killed IDF soldiers, and more than 400 Palestinian terrorists, some of whom were directly involved in the murder of Israelis. In exchange, Israel will receive the bodies of IDF soldiers Adi Avitan, Omar Sawayid and Benny Avraham who were kidnapped from their base in Israel and murdered by Hizbullah in October 2000 and Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum who the same month was abducted and brought to Lebanon by Hizbullah while carrying out legally dubious business dealings in a Gulf state.

The benefit to Israel to be accrued from this deal is clear. Four Israeli families, whose lives three years ago became a nightmare, will finally be given some solace. The Avitan, Avraham and Sawayid families will at last be able to bury their sons and the Tannenbaum family will be allowed to embrace their father and, perhaps, escort him to the court room where he will be put on trial for his suspected criminal activities that led to his abduction.

Every family in Israel can take a measure of pride from the fact that our government does not shirk its responsibility for our soldiers who sacrificed their lives in defense of the country. Every Israeli can rest assured that no matter what we do in our private lives, the Government of Israel will not abandon us to our fates.

Or so it would seem if one were to take a narrow and wildly superficial view of the deal now in the offing. If we take a wider, and, indeed a common sense approach to the proposed deal, we will see another reality entirely.

Hizbullah is a terrorist organization dedicated the physical liquidation of the State of Israel. Since its inception, its leadership has indoctrinated its people from the cradle to the grave that their goal in life is to make war on Israel and the Jewish people until both are no more.

Every single thing that Hizbullah does, from "educating" children in schools to become human bombs, to running its mosques, its television station, its drug running operations and its guerrilla and terrorist training camps is devoted first and foremost to bringing about the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.

No Hizbullah leader, from Hassan Nasrallah to Obeid to their predecessors and their Iranian sponsors has ever denied that the destruction of Israel is their aim – to the contrary. And it is not just Israeli Jews that offend them. It is all Jews, everywhere. So it is that Hizbullah with its boss, Iran, committed the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It was Hizbullah, with Iran that blew up the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires is 1994 that left 86 Jews dead and the same week blew up a plane over Panama killing 22 people who it claimed were Jewish businessmen.

And, lest we forget, Hizbullah does not limit its goals merely to destroying the Jewish state. It is also carrying its war to the United States. Since the US-led invasion of Iraq, Hizbullah, reportedly together with Al Qaida has been sending its terrorists to fight the Coalition forces in Iraq. Hizbullah, which committed several massive terror attacks against US forces in Lebanon including the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the kidnapping of US citizens and personnel, today is known to operate terror cells in the US as well as Canada and Latin America.

Israelis have always known that this is what Hizbullah is about. Yet, for an eighteen month period in 1999-2000, under the spell of Yossi Beilin and his friends in the EU-financed Four Mothers organization, we managed to forget our common sense and delude ourselves into believing that all Hizbullah was after was the IDF's retreat from Lebanon. Beilin and his associates promised us that right after we left the security zone, Hizbullah would unilaterally disarm and become a political party in the Lebanese parliament. This lapse in reason brought about the IDF's precipitous and strategically disastrous retreat from Southern Lebanon.

It took no time at all for Hizbullah to point out the price we paid for taking a break from reality. The Palestinians, taking heart from our mad dash out of Dodge, were inspired to launch their terror war against us. Indeed, Arafat began planning his campaign almost immediately after the IDF retreat.

Hizbullah is not only a symbol for the Palestinians. It trains Palestinian terrorists and smuggles arms to them. It has its own terror cells operating in Israeli Arab towns and in PA ruled areas. Its forces in Southern Lebanon continue to attack the Northern Israel with anti-aircraft shells, artillery and Katyusha rockets just like in the good old days. The only difference of course is that Hizbullah is now perched directly at the border and its arsenal now includes 10,000 long-range rockets that can hit Hadera and perhaps Netanya.

Nasrallah's deputy last week announced that Hizbullah would now commence operations to "liberate" the Golan Heights for its patron Syria.

Given the nature and aims of Hizbullah, the question must be asked. Why is Nasrallah negotiating with Israel today? We know that the kidnapping of the three soldiers and Tannenbaum was directed precisely at forcing Israel to negotiate with Hizbullah to secure their release. That is, the whole point of their abduction was to force Israel to conduct negotiations with Hizbullah.

But why would Hizbullah want to negotiate with Israel if its purpose is to cause our physical liquidation? Here too, the answer is quite simple.

Hizbullah wishes to negotiate with Israel because it views negotiations as another tactic in its overall war. It views negotiations as a way to weaken Israel and strengthen itself. To understand this, we must consider what Hizbullah stands to gain from the deal.

First of all, it gains legitimacy for its terror tactics. If Israel plays ball with a group of kidnappers, then that means that kidnapping is a good idea and should be used again and again. Even as the negotiations reached their critical stage this week, Nasrallah continued to threaten to kidnap Israelis in the future. The same day the deal was announced, an IDF patrol on the northern border uncovered four roadside bombs that had been laid on its path. The Northern Command explained that the placement and nature of the explosives indicate that Hizbullah was planning to launch an attack against an IDF patrol similar to the one they conducted in October 2000 when they abducted Avitan, Suwaid and Avraham.

The fact that Israel is willing to give more than four hundred live terrorists for one live Israeli businessman means that now Hizbullah knows that every Israeli they can get their hands on is a prime target. If the government agrees to pay such a high price for Tannenbaum, the suspected felon, the lives of all Israelis everywhere are at risk. If his release costs Israel 400 terrorists, how much will Israel agree to pay to secure the release of an Israeli family abducted while on safari in Africa or a honeymooning couple kidnapped while trekking through South America? Today we are agreeing to play this game. Tomorrow we will see the price.

Then there is the issue of Hizbullah's regional posture. As Channel 10's military commentator Allon Ben David put it on Wednesday night, "Nasrallah comes out of this deal a regional hero. He can now say to the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Egyptians – 'You want something from Israel? Come to me.'" In achieving this deal with Israel, Hizbullah will be able to report to the entire Muslim world that it successfully brought Israel to its knees – again.

It has been reported that the US is encouraging the Sharon government to accept the deal in the interest of "regional stability."

But, as terror expert Professor Ely Carmon explains, if the Americans want stability, this is the wrong way to go about it. In his words, "The deal is likely to cause the kidnap of American soldiers in Iraq, just as occurred in the 1980s in Lebanon." So in exchange for the peace of mind of four families, who have been victimized by a venal terrorist organization bent on the destruction of our country and people, all of us will be placed in jeopardy. We will grant legitimacy to our sworn enemies and augment their power in profound and immediate ways.

It is impossible to envy the ministers, who will be called on Sunday to make a heartbreaking decision. Will they prefer the fortunes of four families who are suffering unspeakable sorrow over the well-being of every single Israeli citizen, and the lives of Coalition forces in Iraq even as the former is staring them in the face and the latter has yet to grasp the coming storm?

David Bar Illan had the presence of mind and common sense that made him, as his son Jeremy eulogized yesterday, "a Jewish superhero." He would undoubtedly have seen this deal as the poison tipped spear it is. Can we not expect and demand that our government follow in his deep footsteps and use their common sense?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.