"How could you report the war in Iraq if you sided with the Americans?"

"How can you say that George Bush is better than Saddam Hussein?"

These are some of the milder questions I received from an audience of some 150 undergraduate students from Tel Aviv University's Political Science Department. The occasion was a guest lecture I gave last month on my experiences as an embedded reporter with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Many of the students were visibly jolted by my assertion that the patriotism of American soldiers was inspirational. The vocal ones among them were appalled when I argued that journalists must be able to make moral distinctions between good and evil, when such distinctions exist, if they wish to provide their readership with an accurate picture of the events they describe in their reports.

"Who are you to make moral judgments? What you say is good may well be bad for someone else."

"I am a sane human being capable of distinguishing good from evil, just like every other sane human being," I answered. "As criminal law states, you are criminally insane if you can't distinguish between good and evil. Unless you are crazy, you should be able to tell the difference."

When the show was over, and the students began shuffling out of the lecture hall, a young woman approached me.

"Excuse me," she said with a heavy Russian accent.

"How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?"

"Because it is better to be free than to be a slave," I answered.

Undeterred, she pressed on, "How can you support America when the US is a totalitarian state?"

"Did you learn that in Russia?" I asked.

"No, here," she said.

"Here at Tel Aviv University?"

"Yes, that is what my professors say," she said.

In the weeks that have passed since I gave that lecture, I have not been able to get those students out of my mind. While campuses throughout the Western world are known as hotbeds for radicalism, it is still hard to believe that Israeli students, who themselves served in the IDF, and who as civilians have experienced more than three years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on their cafes, night clubs, campuses, highways and public buses, could subscribe to such views.

How can they believe it is impossible to make moral distinctions between those fighting terrorism and totalitarian regimes and those perpetrating terrorism and leading such dictatorships?

It is an open secret that many of the most prominent Israeli academics and professors are also identified with the radical leftist fringes of the Israeli political spectrum. The Hebrew University's Political Science Department was dominated for years by the leaders of Peace Now. Tel Aviv University's Social Science and Humanities Faculties are the professional home to some of the leaders of the even more radical Ta'ayush and Yesh Gvul organizations.

Israeli professors have signed petitions calling for boycotts of Israeli goods. Some have even supported the boycott of Israeli academics by foreign universities and academic publications. Israel Radio reported this week that the letter written by 13 reservists from the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit in which they announced their refusal to serve in the territories was written for them by a Tel Aviv University professor.

Prof. Rafi Yisraeli from the Hebrew University notes, "It is ironic that the university presidents and Minister Natan Sharansky are now organizing a campaign to stop the boycott of Israeli academics in foreign universities. A year ago, I discussed the issue, as well as the rampant anti-Semitism on European campuses with the president of the University of Paris. He told me, 'What do you want from us? All we are doing is repeating what we hear from Israeli professors.'"

Case in point is Tel Aviv University law professor Andrei Marmor. Marmor is currently a visiting faculty member at the University of Southern California Law School. Recently he published a policy paper at USC where he argues that Israel's territorial claims to land it secured during the 1948-49 War of Independence are no different from its claims to land secured in the 1967 Six Day War. In his view, both are illegitimate. Marmor goes on to argue that Zionism cannot claim to be a liberal movement unless it accepts the "right of return" of Palestinians to Israel.

In the mid-1990s, a Tel Aviv University graduate student conducted a survey of the political views of university professors. The student discovered that not only were the professors overwhelmingly self-identified with far left and Arab political parties, most also expressed absolute intolerance for the notion that professors with right-wing or even centrist views should be allowed to teach in their departments. "Over my dead body," said one.

All of this is well known. Yet knowing of the professors' radicalism, and seeing the effects of such dogmatic views on university students, are different things. Since my exchange with those students, I have spoken to professors and students at the five major liberal arts universities in Israel to try to understand how the intellectual tyranny of the radical Left on campuses impacts their educational and professional experiences.

Students speak of a regime of fear and intimidation in the classroom. Ofra Gracier, a doctoral student in Tel-Aviv University's humanities faculty explains the process as follows:

"It starts with the course syllabus. In a class on introduction to political theory for instance, you will never see the likes of Leo Strauss or Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman. You will only get Marx and Rousseau and people like that. So, if you want to argue with Marx, you are on your own. You don't know anything else.

"But say you want to dispute your professor. I was taught this class by Yoav Peled, an avowed communist. He was explaining why capitalism is evil. I mentioned the Asian economic miracle – South Korea, Japan, Singapore. He went nuts and spent the rest of the class screaming at me.

"Then there is the grading system. In a history course I took, I took a Zionist line in a research paper. My professor gave me a low grade and explained that my grade was the result of my argument.

"Most people toe the leftist line even when they disagree because of the grade discrimination. If you get low grades, you can't get accepted to a master's program and if, in the master's program you get low grades you won't be accepted into a doctoral program."

Avi Bell, a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University's Law School, relates a separate but related problem. "Last year I taught a course on the legal aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Most of my students were clearly Zionists and also knowledgeable about Israeli history. And yet, when I received their seminar papers at the end of the term, I saw that most of them wrote anti-Zionist arguments.

"The reason this happened is because there is a dire lack of scholarship in certain areas. For instance, if you want to research the issue of Palestinian policies of land discrimination against Jews, you have to go to primary sources. No one has written a book about it even though it is a huge issue. But if you want to research the question of alleged Jewish land discrimination against Arabs, you have a bookshelf full of books at your disposal."

Indeed, Dr. Martin Sherman of Tel-Aviv University's Political Science Department was unable to get the university's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies to publish his original work on the hydro-strategic impact of a Palestinian state on Israel. Sherman, with degrees in physics and geology and practical experience as a water adviser in the Ministry of Agriculture, is a recognized expert in the field.

"My paper showed conclusively that the establishment of such a state would involve the transfer of control over 60 percent–70 percent of Israel's water sources to the Palestinians. They wouldn't have it. I was strung along by Shai Feldman [the head of the Jaffee Center] for months and months, until it was finally made clear that it wouldn't be published."

Citing alternate publications in research papers is also not allowed. Another graduate student explained that her professor gave her a low grade on a paper because she cited research published in Netiv magazine. "That is a right-wing propaganda sheet, published in the Occupied Territories," she was told. Her argument that most of Netiv's articles are written by academics and are based on original research didn't matter. She ran into a similar problem when she cited an article published in the Shalem Center's journal Azure.
 

Most of the academics and students that I spoke with were happy to discuss their situations and yet averse to the notion of being quoted by name. "I am up for tenure," and "I still need my dissertation proposal approved," were some of the most frequent explanations.

A survey carried out by the left-wing Israel Democracy Institute on Israeli attitudes toward the state was published on Thursday in Haaretz. According to the findings, a mere 58% of Israelis are proud of being Israeli, while 97% of Americans and Poles are proud of their national identity. Mexicans, Chileans, Norwegians, and Indians all have higher degrees of pride in their national identities than Israelis.

Is it possible that our academic tyrants have something to do with the inability of 42% of Israelis to take pride in who they are?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The US war on terror hit a new high and a new low this week. The capture of Saddam Hussein was a great victory. It showed that as far as the ousted Iraqi regime is concerned, President Bush is fulfilling the pledge he made on September 20, 2001, that, when it comes to fighting international terrorism, "We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail."

Yet in the days before Saddam's capture, the Bush administration was moving ahead with a policy towards Palestinian terrorists which is the polar opposite of its policies toward Iraq. Last week, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA Director George Tenet all reportedly met with Egyptian intelligence chief Gen. Omar Suleiman. During the meetings, Suleiman reportedly demanded that the Bush administration provide guarantees to Palestinian terrorist organizations in exchange for a temporary cessation of terrorist attacks inside Israel's pre-'67 borders. Specifically, he demanded that the US pressure Israel to force IDF redeployment outside areas transferred to the PLO in the Oslo Accords and to end Israeli military action against Palestinian terrorist chiefs, their operatives, and their terrorist infrastructures.

Upon his return to Cairo, Suleiman dispatched his emissaries to Gaza to meet with the commanders of the official PA security services, Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the DFLP, and the Iraqi Baathist Arab Liberation Front. There they told the terror chiefs that Suleiman had received such guarantees from Washington.

The meetings convened on Monday, just two days after Hamas held a mass rally in Gaza celebrating the 16th anniversary of its founding. During the rally, Hamas commander Abdel Aziz Rantisi told the crowd of more than 100,000 that his organization would continue its jihad against Israel until the entire country was destroyed.

"Palestine will never be Jewish," he said as he promised a renewal of suicide bombings against Israelis. Over the weekend security forces thwarted yet another attempted suicide bombing in the Dan region – the third such attack thwarted in a 10-day period according to Shin Bet director Avi Dichter.

The Palestinian terror bosses have reportedly rejected the US offer because it was too vague. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Islamic Jihad leaders Muhammad al-Hindi and Nafez Azzam said Wednesday that there could be no cessation of attacks until Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners from jail, ceases the construction of the security fence, and redeploys IDF forces to where they were stationed on September 28, 2000 – the day the Palestinians launched their terror war. The terrorists said US guarantees themselves were insufficient because "we don't believe the American promises."

It is not remarkable that the Palestinian terrorists, who routinely burn US flags and effigies of President Bush and call for jihad against the US, would reject ambiguous US guarantees. What is shocking is that the US would deem it proper to make any gesture at all towards these terrorists.

Indeed, the most significant aspect of the latest round of cease-fire talks is that the Egyptians are no longer acting simply as a party to the talks. Rather, in the aftermath of Suleiman's visit to Washington, they are acting as mediators between the Bush administration and Palestinian terror bosses.

To say that negotiating with terrorists is antithetical to US national security interests would seem to be stating the obvious. Official Palestinian links to Saddam's regime, as well as to al-Qaida and Hizbullah, have been well documented. After the murder of three American personnel in Gaza and the subsequent physical abuse of US investigators at the scene this past October, it should also be self-evident that Palestinian terrorists operating in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are hostile to the US.

And yet, the fact that Palestinian leaders have lent assistance – both rhetorical and concrete – to the guerrillas fighting coalition forces in Iraq is ignored. PA security boss Jibril Rajoub's call last month for Arabs to join the guerrilla forces in Iraq was barely noted in Washington.

Noticing the fact that Palestinian leaders find common cause with parties presently warring against America would force the administration to admit what it has so far refused to countenance: that the PLO and its Palestinian terror affiliates are openly hostile to the US and share Osama bin Laden's views of America.

No doubt this American refusal to contend with Palestinian hostility is a great failure of US national security policy. But the blame cannot be placed solely at Washington's doorstep. The Israeli government has played a critical role in this policy failure.

Not only is our government unable to convince the US of the danger that Palestinian terrorist groups pose to America's national security, it is also unwilling to make the case to Israelis that the existence of these forces, harbored and led by the PLO's Palestinian Authority, constitutes an unacceptable national security threat to Israel.

This failure has been made abundantly clear over the past two weeks. When two weeks ago, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert adopted former Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna's policy of unilateral withdrawal from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, he effectively said that Palestinian terrorist organizations deserve safe-havens and Israel should surrender ground rather than fight them. Since Olmert's breathtaking display of defeatism, our already superficial national debate has become incomprehensible.

At this week's much touted three-day Herzliya Conference, which presumed to debate the most salient issues impacting Israel's national security, almost no mention was made of the PLO's continued dedication to the violent destruction of Israel. Not a word was spoken of the implications of Egypt's sponsorship of the Palestinian terror war or Cairo's protective embrace of Palestinian terror organizations. No real discussion was held about the links between Palestinian terrorist networks and international terror networks now actively engaging US forces in Iraq and around the world. Indeed, the entire vacuous debate seemed to be a tired collection of cliches, all the way down to Sharon's much-touted message Thursday night.

When policy-makers, experts, and pundits talk about the need for reform of the PA, no mention is ever made of the simple fact that every Palestinian political party is a terrorist organization. Every faction represented in the PA's legislature is an armed group.

When discussion is held on the need to reorganize the PA's security services, no one bothers to notice that every single one of these forces is involved in terrorist attacks against Israel.

It is as if none of these facts has any bearing on the nature of the war.

Indeed, when Israeli leaders like Olmert proclaim the need for unilateral surrender, when Israel's prime minister declares that in the absence of a Palestinian campaign against terrorism Israel will expel Jews from their homes in order to hand over territory to Palestinian terrorists, they behave as though the Palestinians do not exist and the matter of the war they have been waging against Israel is an internal Israeli affair.

At base, this pathological Israeli political discourse is the direct result of Sharon's declaration in late September 2001 that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Since Sharon made this declaration, the fact that such a state would be the first ever to be spawned directly by a terrorist organization has been conscientiously ignored. Palestinian actions, intentions, and connections to global terrorism were swept under the rug even before the US ousted the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

This all makes sense. If Israelis were to internalize the fact that, as presently constituted, the Palestinian body politic is immersed in terrorist ideology, how could anyone define "progress" as anything other than benchmarks towards the ousting of the PLO and its sister terrorist organizations from positions of power? If our leaders were to actually look at what the Palestinian leadership is doing and listen to what it is saying, they would be forced to reject the expressed policy of the prime minister.

And so it came about that our national debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes almost no mention of the Palestinians. In the absence of another side, we can talk about the need to "cut ourselves off" from Palestinians without considering whether Palestinian terrorists have any intention of cutting themselves off from Israel.

It is reasonable for the Bush administration to be criticized for its willingness to engage in mediated discussions with Palestinian terror bosses. Such engagements are inimical to US national security interests. How can the US deter terrorism when it is actively involved in the rapid establishment of a terrorist state? How long will the image of Saddam Hussein's cowardice work to dispel the jihadist belief that the US is a paper tiger when the US is undermining its own strategic posture by genuflecting to the Palestinian terrorist agenda?

Yet the criticism should first be focused on our own leadership. It is the responsibility of our leaders to wage a war against terrorists who attack Israelis. It is the responsibility of our leaders to pay attention to what our enemies are saying and doing and to point out their actions and plans both to the Israeli people and to our allies in Washington.

Perhaps now that our glitterati have had their chance to shine in Herzliya and Olmert has consumed his 15 minutes, we can clear the decks for a real discussion of the threats to Israel's security. The first item on the agenda should be, "What would Israel's diplomatic policy look like if our government took into account the fact that Palestinian society is infected root and branch by terrorist ideology?"

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The 20-day ground offensive that ended with the fall of Baghdad on April 9 to U.S. forces was characterized as much by the levelheaded courage of the men who fought it as by its speed and brilliance of execution.

Its signature finish -- the fall of Saddam Hussein's statue in downtown Baghdad -- was celebrated in the streets of the city by thousands of Iraqis who drew that day the first breaths of freedom they had breathed in three decades.

Yet, for those standing in the streets of the city that bright April day, it was clear that the war was not over. The rampant looting and the sullen faces of angry young men with military haircuts standing in groups on the streets attested to the dangers ahead.

On the one hand, the Iraqi people's anarchic celebrations were testimony to the fact that these people, long enslaved, did not yet understand the responsibilities that accrue to free people. The angry gazes of the young men, calling out "We are all fedayeen," first in shouts, and then in muttered whispers as the American troops approached them, showed that while the battle was won, the war was far from over.

Saturday night's capture of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was another great victory in the war on terror, equal in importance to the fall of Baghdad.

The specter of Saddam's return to power over the past nine months cast a pall on the U.S.-led victory. His elusiveness together with the increasing violence of terror attacks led many Iraqis to question whether the U.S.-led Coalition would be willing to stay the course in their country.

Saddam's ability to remain at large bolstered his henchmen and empowered jihadists throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

The psychological impact on Saddam's loyalists and on terrorists around the world of the picture of the tyrant's dirty, mired face and meek complicity during his medical examination by a U.S. army doctor is immeasurable. Today they are forced to ask the question, "Why should we die when Saddam surrendered so abjectly?"

It has been argued that it was wrong for Americans to show such pictures of Saddam. Doing so, it was said, will enrage jihadists who will fight all the more desperately to regain the honor lost by Saddam's humiliation.

The problem with this argument is that it fails to take common sense into account. Saddam's surrender is a signal to his allies as much as to his victims. The former attain from this sight the beginning of understanding, that theirs is a lost cause. When Major General Raymond Odierno told reporters Sunday afternoon that Saddam "was caught just like a rat," he said that the tipping point has past.

In capturing Saddam, the U.S. went a long way to proving that it can be relied upon to win its war. In his surrender, Saddam showed that his loyalists, like his fellow dictators, will lose.

Saddam's victims, the Iraqi people, responded to the pictures with joy unmatched since April 9. They too, received the message. The humiliation of Saddam Hussein is not their humiliation. It is their victory.

And yet, the victory, though great, does not mean that the war is over. Just as the Battle of the Bulge followed the invasion of Normandy, so many battles still await the democratic armies arrayed against the forces of jihad.

The blasts in Baghdad and the attempted assassination of Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf in the hours after the announcement of Saddam's capture are evidence of this truth. As U.S. President George W. Bush said Sunday, "The war on terror is a different kind of war, waged capture by capture, cell by cell, and victory by victory. Our security is assured by our perseverance and by our sure belief in the success of liberty."

Originally published in National Review Online.

One week after Egypt scuttled Israel's proposed UN resolution condemning the murder of Israeli children by terrorists, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom met with Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak in Geneva.

Commenting on Wednesday's meeting on Israel Radio, Shalom explained, "The very existence of the meeting... show[s] more than anything that the Egyptians have tried to warm up relations with Israel."

Shalom met with Mubarak ahead of the autocrat's trip to Washington. In so doing, while Shalom received nothing for his trouble of meeting with Mubarak, Mubarak received Israeli cover ahead of his meetings with US President George W. Bush. And Mubarak could use such Israeli legitimacy.

This week, Egypt absorbed a public relations blow when the UN's Human Rights Report lambasted its miserable human rights record.

It is a shame that our foreign minister felt it necessary to confer such legitimacy on Mubarak. One of the worst-kept secrets in our region is that aside from Iran's nuclear weapons program, Egypt is the greatest looming threat to Israel's national security. As our governing officials pander to Mubarak and his top brass, these men oversee diplomatic and military policies that endanger the very existence of the Jewish state.

Egypt is generally applauded for what is considered its "constructive" role in attempting to end the Palestinian terror war. Mubarak's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman's efforts to secure a temporary cessation of terrorist attacks are viewed in a positive light.

In the Foreign Ministry's press release about the meeting in Geneva, the ministry said that Shalom "found that the Egyptian president was committed to the peace process." And yet Egypt plays a pivotal role in enabling, justifying, and prolonging the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

As Chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee MK Yuval Steinitz points out, the Egyptian initiative to achieve a temporary cease-fire among the various Palestinian terrorist organizations is aimed not at achieving peace, but at "preserving Hamas's terror capabilities."

"In pushing for the so-called hudna, the Egyptians are trying to force a temporary cease-fire that will save Hamas from the demand that it be dismantled as is dictated by the road map," Steinitz explains. "Doing so is not only counter to the expressed demands of the road map.

It is antithetical to the objectives of the US war on terror. These call explicitly for an end to state sponsorship of terrorism and for the denial of safe havens and bases of operation for terrorists," he adds.

For the past three years, the Egyptian military has turned a blind eye to the constant smuggling of weaponry to Palestinian terrorist forces through tunnel networks in the Sinai Desert. "In enabling the continuation of the smuggling operations, Egypt has become the logistical base for Hamas," Steinitz argues.

Egypt's support for the continuation of the Palestinian terror war is part and parcel of an overall strategy of weakening Israel politically, diplomatically, and defensively while building up the Egyptian armed forces to a level of parity with the IDF. Dr. Arieh Stav, director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, explains, "Egypt is an impoverished country. Its per capita income is $870.

And yet, it spends a quarter of its GDP on its military. Egypt has 450,000 men in uniform and another 450,000 men in its paramilitary units. This battle roster does not include its reserve forces. By way of comparison, at the height of World War II, Nazi Germany did not spend such a large proportion of its GDP on its war efforts."

Egypt's military capabilities include a sophisticated and well-stocked arsenal of chemical and biological weapons as well as advanced ballistic missiles capable of targeting Israel.

According to Dr. Dany Shoham from Bar-Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center, the Egyptian chemical arsenal includes VX, sarin, mustard gas, and luisite.

"Egypt was the first Middle East country to develop and use chemical weapons. It did so effectively in its war with Yemen between 1962-67," Shoham notes, adding, "Egypt's chemical and biological weapons procurement programs reached their height in the 1970s and 1980s.

"While in the 1990s, Egypt claimed alternately that its non-conventional arsenals were of a defensive nature or that it had no such arsenals, the fact is that there are no indications whatsoever that their chemical and biological weapons were dispensed with – to the contrary. Their weapons were also not rendered obsolete with the passage of time. There is in fact no certainty whatsoever that the Egyptians ceased their development programs."

Egypt's biological arsenal contains advanced strains of toxins, bacterial and viral agents. Egypt possesses varied and advanced dispersal systems for its unconventional weapons. These include chemical mines, artillery shells, aerial bombs, and ballistic warheads. Egypt's ballistic missile systems include advanced Scud and Nodong missiles. As late as this year, Egypt continued its ballistic missile collaboration with North Korea and there have been scattered reports of cooperation with Libya as well.

In the 1980's Egyptian scientists and engineers actively participated in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons programs. This Egyptian-Iraqi cooperation continued, with less publicity during the 1990's according to US government sources at the time. In the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Egyptian government refused US and British requests that those engineers and scientists be interviewed by US officials.

Egypt has continued to cultivate its weapons of mass destruction programs while modernizing its conventional armed forces. The $2 billion in annual US military assistance has allowed Egypt to transform its armed forces from a Soviet era force to a modern and sophisticated Western military.

Egypt has built local production facilities for the US M1A1 Abrams main battle tank. Israeli pilots have noted with alarm over the years that the US-trained Egyptian pilots in US-supplied F-16 fighter jets may well have achieved operational parity with the IAF.

And, Steinitz notes, "While Egypt has achieved near parity with Israel in ground and air forces, its naval power has outstripped Israel's. Today, the Egyptian navy has 2-3 times the number of naval platforms as Israel."

A former senior IDF intelligence officer allows that "Egypt's military buildup is beyond any proportion to conceivable external threats to Egypt and is a cause for alarm." Yet, at the same time, he argues that under Mubarak's dictatorship, Egypt has no interest in moving towards open warfare with Israel. "The problem will arise if a succession crisis ensues after Mubarak's death."

This argument, that 75-year-old Mubarak's despotic rule of Egypt acts as a barrier to protect Israel from his own massive buildup of Egypt's military forces, is the conventional wisdom on Egypt. It is voiced by officials throughout the political spectrum in Israel and accepted unquestioningly in Washington. The problem is that Egypt's military is explicit in naming Israel as the intended recipient of the full brunt of its massive might.

Starting in 1996, the order of battle at Egypt's annual Bader combined forces exercise has explicitly named the opposing force as "a small nation to the country's northeast." Unless the Egyptians are referring to the Gaza Strip, that nation is of course Israel.

"The Egyptian military has already achieved absolute superiority against any Middle Eastern and African state. Egypt has no military threat to deal with from anywhere. It does not even have border disputes with any of its neighbors," Steinitz notes. "It is clear that Egypt is working to achieve military parity with Israel. This is made all the more dangerous when one bears in mind that in the event of a war, Egypt will not be fighting by itself but rather as part of a coalition of Arab states."

Steinitz also notes with worry the recent intensification of cooperation between the Egyptian and Saudi Arabian air forces.

The Saudi air force has drawn attention of late because after the US-led invasion of Iraq it stationed F-16 squadrons at Tabuk airfield, within striking distance of Israel. This deployment is in contravention of US pledges to Israel that the Saudi F-16s, flown by US-trained pilots, would be prohibited from using the Tabuk air base.

The US, which has almost singlehandedly overseen Egypt's conventional military ascendancy, has not made any serious attempt to alter Egypt's behavior. Again, the common wisdom is that Mubarak is a moderate who, regardless of his personal view of Israel, understands that it does not serve his interests to abrogate his country's peace treaty with Israel. And yet, largely as a result of the actions of officially-sponsored incitement, Egypt is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world.

As Steinitz notes, "Mubarak, through years of incitement, has prepared his people psychologically for war against Israel and has even brought them to assume that such a war is inevitable."

By signing a peace agreement with Israel, Egypt became the second-largest recipient of US military assistance in the world. It has received a pass for its anti-Semitism and active support of Palestinian terrorist organizations. Its massive militarization, non-conventional arsenal, and its refusal to develop its civilian economy or grant political freedom to its subjects have been systematically ignored.

In many ways, the Egyptian experience is mirrored by that of the PLO, itself an organization founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1964. After signing the 1993 Oslo Accord with Israel, the PLO benefited from Israeli arms and US training of its forces.

Its incitement was ignored. Its corrupt autocracy in the territories was encouraged in the interest of "stability." The fact that on paper the PLO remains committed to peace with Israel preserves its international legitimacy in spite of its actions and declarations that prove unequivocally that it is still bent on Israel's destruction as its principle aim.

In Egypt's case, as Steinitz explains, "It is an alarming irony that while Israel has a peace agreement with Egypt, but remains in an official state of war with Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, and Libya, Egypt causes Israel more damage diplomatically and constitutes a larger threat militarily than all these states that are still our declared enemies."

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Two Jews were brutally murdered in Paris in the week that followed the torching of the Jewish day school Merkaz HaTorah in the Paris suburb of Gagny.

In an interview with Boston's Jewish Advocate, French Jewish novelist Nidra Poller says that the two murders, of a 23 year-old Jewish DJ and of a recently widowed Jewish shopkeeper, were played down by the French press. In the case of the murdered young man, whose throat was slit and whose body was mutilated, the alleged assailant, a young male Muslim, reportedly told his mother after the fact, "Now I can go to paradise. I've killed my Jew."

Poller relates that the French authorities have released the man from custody, claiming that he is insane and therefore unfit to stand trial. There have been no arrests in the case of the Jewish shopkeeper. Her ten year-old daughter and a customer, who hid in the shop's storeroom during the attack, said they saw two North Africans fleeing the scene. Nothing was stolen from the shop. The French authorities have not classified the murders as acts of anti-Semitism.

This week, an 11 year-old Jewish boy was brutally beaten by Muslim students at their elite Paris secondary school. While beating the boy, the Muslim students taunted him yelling, "We'll finish Hitler's job."

Although the headmaster says he has filed a lawsuit against the Muslim youth, they have yet to be expelled and no criminal charges have been brought against them. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, the headmaster explained, "The issue is very complex. There is obviously a victim that should be protected, but there are no admissions and no witnesses willing to testify. We're in a dead-end."

In a speech before diplomatic correspondents in Tel-Aviv this week, the EU's ambassador to Israel said that he was "not willing to agree" that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe. At the same time, Ambassador Giancarlo Chevallard said he did know for a fact that there has been a rise in attacks against Muslims.

Chevallard's remarks gibe with the EU's refusal to publish its own commissioned report on anti-Semitism in Europe. That report raised the hackles of the EU bureaucracy by showing that the main source of anti-Semitic violence in Europe is the Muslim community, and that the mainstream press encourages anti-Semitism through its distorted coverage of the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

How does Europe defend itself against the growing evidence that the Continent has reverted to its pre-Holocaust levels of anti-Semitism? Aside from denying the truth, it relies on the good offices of sympathetic Israelis. In doing so, Europe is guilty of a kind of subversion.

This is not to say that foreign governments aren't free to make their views of Israeli politics known to Israelis, just as Israeli politicians are welcome to make their views of foreign governments known to foreign audiences. But it's a very different matter when these governments seek to manipulate our politics by funding, publicizing and lending their prestige to the work of Israelis sympathetic to their views.

This is all the more illegitimate given that Yossi Beilin, along with Amnon Lipkin Shahak, Nehama Ronen, Avrum Burg and Amram Mitzna, who engineered and signed the Swiss-funded Geneva Accord with the Palestinian Authority's propaganda minister Yasser Abd Rabbo are all failed politicians. They have all been rejected by the voters, repeatedly. Their constituencies are as imaginary as their "peace treaties." They are as comparatively marginal to the political landscape here as, say, the Free Democrats are in Germany.

It would be interesting to know how German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder would react if the Bush administration (as part of its commitment to free-market economics, of course), began funneling millions to front groups connected to that party. One guess is that the Chancellor would be screaming bloody murder.

Yet this is precisely what the Europeans involved in the Geneva initiative are now doing vis-a-vis Israel. Indeed, they are doing worse. Employing the rhetoric of peace, they are working steadily to undermine the legitimacy of Jewish statehood.

On the specious ground that "the whole world has a stake in Mideast peace," they are purchasing a seat at the Israeli cabinet table. Who put them there? Certainly not the Israeli electorate. Instead, they are creating a virtual constituency consisting of the media, foreign leaders, the UN, Left-wing NGOs and a handful of unpopular Israelis to shape the terms of our government debate.

The problem, however, goes deeper than European interference. There is also the problem of our willingness to let them interfere. Ever since we won our statehood 55 years ago, successive Israeli governments have failed to grasp that Israel is truly sovereign. We hear competing voices among the Jewish people, both in Israel and the Diaspora, and often fail to internalize the fact that these voices, however well funded, do not represent the collective will of the Jewish people embodied in the sovereign decisions of the Jewish state. They do not speak for us. As our collective voice, the government has the sole right to set our policies and defend our rights.

And defend us it must. Over the past three years, it has become absolutely clear that any thought we might have had that the establishment of the State of Israel would be the death knell of millennia of anti-Semitism was misplaced. Two thousand years of Christian Judeophobia and 1400 years of Muslim hatred did not dissipate in 1948. We see this in the daily libels against Israel in the European press and at the UN General Assembly. And we see it in the constant incitement to the annihilation of the Jewish people throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds. The fact is inescapable: Anti-Semitism remains one of the most potent forces in the world today.

Whether he knows it or not, Beilin serves anti-Semites in Europe and the Arab world as a fig leaf. It is he who allows them to advance their anti-Israel agenda with immunity. And this is nowhere as important as in the US. It is in Washington, where traditions of anti-Semitism never took firm root, where Beilin and his colleagues seek to advance their aims. And they are succeeding.

Within the administration, Beilin is being received by the State Department and – more remarkably – by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

Then there are the Democrats. With next year's presidential election before them, US Senators such as Diane Feinstein and Frank Lautenberg and US Congressmen such as Rahm Emmanuel and Darryl Issa are seeking to turn the Geneva initiative into their party's official Middle East agenda.

In other words, they are using the fig leaf of Beilin to adopt one of the most anti-Israel documents in recent memory into their ostensibly pro-Israel party platform.

As the surge of anti-Semitism in what was until recently considered civilized Europe shows, much has not changed since 1948. Now, as then, there are millions of people who believe that their interests are advanced by anti-Semitism. Now, as then, Jews are under attack not because of anything that they have done, but because they exist.

But at the same time, something did fundamentally change 55 years ago. We Jews are no longer powerless. We have our government now to defend us. By setting the record straight on who speaks for the Jews, and by going on the offensive against our enemies, our leadership can protect us and strengthen our fellow Jews under attack in Europe.

Yossi Beilin may speak for Europe. He does not speak for Israel. It is past time for those who do to make themselves heard.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.