My home is alongside the ambulance route in Jerusalem so I don't need to listen to the radio to know when bombs go off in the city. If I don't hear the blasts themselves, I hear the ambulance convoys – their sirens screeching and howling as they pummel into traffic on their way to evacuate wounded and take them to the trauma wards. The sirens are a constant reminder that I live on the front lines of the war.

By noon yesterday, I received a more personalized confirmation of this fact. I heard news that among the wounded in yesterday's carnage are two of my friends. One is still in surgery as I write these lines. I am told that his wounds are not life threatening. The other, who got off with a broken knee, lies in Shaare Zedek's orthopedic ward awaiting word of whether she needs surgery.

Government sources were quick to tell us that there is no connection between the carnage in Rehavia and the deal negotiated with Hizbullah that was proceeding in Germany as our enemies murdered and maimed us in the streets of Jerusalem. Science Minister Eliezer Sandberg announced, "There is no connection and it is forbidden to make a connection between the bombing and the deal for the prisoner swap."

The fact that the PLO's Fatah terror group claimed responsibility for the attack on Hizbullah television should give considerable pause to those like Sandberg who protest that there is no connection. In fact Fatah and Hizbullah have been cooperating closely since late 2001. Fatah receives funding and direction from Iran. Hizbullah is an Iranian organization.

The date of the prisoner swap was announced publicly last week. No doubt, Hizbullah has known the date for some time. There is no reason not to suspect that this information was passed on to Fatah and so today was chosen for the attack. What better way for Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah to declare complete victory over Israel than for his allies to carry out a massacre of Israeli civilians the day he secures the release of hundreds of their terrorist brethren?

We shouldn't be surprised that our national leadership is making such statements in the wake of the bombing. In the sensational build-up to the prisoner swap, we have received a full diet of groundless assertions by our leadership. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon for instance said on Tuesday in the Knesset that Hizbullah would be unlikely to resume kidnappings after the prisoner swap because its leadership knows that the IDF will respond militarily to such an action. Even Channel 2's left-wing commentator Amnon Abramovich couldn't resist mentioning that given Israel's decision not to retaliate for the abduction of our soldiers and subsequent Hizbullah attacks, Israeli threats today have little credibility with Nasrallah.

Indeed, how can anyone with a modicum of common sense make the argument that terror doesn't pay when they look at the current positions of our government and security brass? Hizbullah received 461 live terrorists and 59 dead terrorists for going to the trouble of abducting and murdering our soldiers and kidnapping Elhanan Tannenbaum. If that isn't a good payoff for terrorism, what is?

And yet, the deal with Hizbullah is but one of the strategic errors of the government in recent days and weeks.

On Sunday, the government approved the election of Irineos I as the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem. In July 2001, Irineos penned a letter to PA chief Yasser Arafat riddled with anti-Semitic slanders. He told Arafat that the Jews are "crucifying" the Palestinians. In addition, Irineos informed Arafat that he looked forward to cooperating with Arafat in Jerusalem. Irineos has claimed that the letter is a forgery, but a police investigation, which was closed two weeks ago, substantiated its authenticity. Sources close to the investigation say that three people were with Irineos when he penned the letter and all provided testimony to the police that the letter was authentic.

The Greek Orthodox Church is the largest landowner in Israel after the Jewish National Fund. The church owns large swathes of Rehavia and Talbiyeh neighborhoods in Jerusalem including the land on which the Knesset, the Prime Minister's Residence and the President's Residence are located. As patriarch, Irineos will have the power to refuse to renew the leases for the land when they come due in the coming years.

The cabinet had no reason to approve the appointment. Israel is under no obligation to approve the lifetime appointment of an anti-Semite to an office which owns such sensitive sites. One must wonder what motivated our ministers to approve this appointment that risks handing control of such vital properties to Arafat's friend. In an interview with Kul al-Arab last week, Irineos's spokesman said that the cabinet bowed to pressure from the US and Greek governments as well as to pressure from Israeli businessmen in approving the appointment.

It is hard to imagine what sort of pressure could have possibly justified such a dangerous move. And yet, Irineos's appointment is small potatoes when compared with the prime minister's newest plan to unilaterally withdraw from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. This plan is packaged as a way of enhancing Israel's security. And yet, any way one looks at it, it involves the surrender of control of large swathes of strategically vital areas of Judea and Samaria to terrorists in the midst of war.

In the hours after yesterday's attack, unnamed government sources were quick to see the massacre as a way to advance the program. Sources claimed to Ynet, "If the Palestinians were behind fences, maybe they would finally reach the conclusion that terror doesn't pay." This little bit of strategic wishful thinking was apparently directed toward the two US envoys, David Satterfield and John Wolf, who are here visiting this week in yet another attempt to draw water from a rock and get Palestinian terrorists to reform themselves. The sources argued, "The unilateral steps the prime minister advocates are the only way to save the president's vision and the road-map plan."

How exactly a unilateral withdrawal under fire by Israeli security forces would advance anything other than Yasser Arafat's vision of the destruction of Israel is unclear. Why would the forced transfer of Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and the redeployment of IDF forces out of Palestinian population centers, make the situation better for Israel and worse for the PLO?

Advocates of Sharon's plan claim that it has four distinct advantages for Israel. They say that unilateral withdrawal will reduce contact between Israel and the Palestinians and, as a result, lessen the Palestinians' desire and ability to kill Israelis. They say that if the IDF leaves the Palestinian population centers and redeploys behind static barriers like the fence, Israel's lines of defense will be enhanced. They say that an Israeli withdrawal will increase the international legitimacy of Israeli counter-terror measures in the future and they argue that unilateral withdrawal will enhance Israel's demographic balance with the Arabs.

But the Palestinians, like their ally Hizbullah, have already proven all these contentions false.

When Israel transferred control of Palestinian cities to the PLO, the government built bypass roads around the cities to enable Israelis to drive through the territories without contact with the Palestinians. Yet, this move to prevent contact failed to prevent attacks. The Palestinian gunmen simply left the cities and began shooting Israeli motorists on the bypass roads. In so doing they proved that it isn't contact with Israelis that moves Palestinian terrorists to murder, it is the existence of Israelis that moves them to murder. Retreating behind a barrier won't make them stop killing us. It will only make them change their route of approach.

The fact of the matter is that Arafat has taken the territory that Israel transferred to his control and transformed it into a terror fiefdom. If IDF forces withdraw, these areas will not magically become islands of tranquility. They will, like South Lebanon, become strongholds of terrorists who will train and arm and set out for attacks from their now safe havens.

The main reason that Israel has yet to seriously retaliate against Hizbullah is that Hizbullah, in the wake of the IDF's withdrawal from South Lebanon, has deployed thousands of rockets along the border. If Israel attacks, they will launch the rockets against us. So who has deterred whom here?

Another reason for lack of action by the IDF against this unacceptable terrorist threat is international pressure. The US opposes IDF action in Lebanon for fear that such action will destabilize the region. Why would the US respond differently to attacks emanating from behind the fence after an IDF withdrawal?

Finally, how will the demographic balance be in any way enhanced by the withdrawal? The only population that will dwindle as a result of the plan is the Israeli population in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Aside from that, the situation will be unaffected.

In short, the prime minister's withdrawal plan will simply reenact in Judea, Samaria and Gaza the IDF retreat from Lebanon in 2000. The Palestinians see the plan as such. Hizbullah too sees it as such.

As Thursday's massacre in Jerusalem proved, yet again, our terrorist enemies have transformed our entire country into a frontline community. Our enemies see no difference between civilians on a bus, soldiers on a border or businessmen traveling in the Persian Gulf. All of us are targets for murder, blackmail and manipulation.

They view Israeli retreats as their victory. They view Israeli concessions as their gain. This week's retreats have no doubt played into our enemies' hands. If our leadership's strategic blindness is not soon rectified it may usher in a more dangerous phase in our war for national survival.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Acting Attorney General and State Attorney Edna Arbel has had a busy week. On Sunday, she let it be known that she will find it difficult to defend the government's decision to build the security fence on land located in the disputed territories.

On Wednesday, she let it be known to Channel 2 that she supports indicting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on charges of accepting bribes from businessman David Appel.

These statements by the nation's top law-enforcement officer are shocking and stunning. On the issue of the security fence, since 1967, the view of every Israeli government has been that the status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza is disputed. Israel has never accepted the legal view that these territories are "occupied." Indeed, former attorney-general Elyakim Rubinstein felt the need to remind prime ministers Ehud Barak and Sharon that UN Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967 does not speak of an Israeli need to unload all of the territories it conquered in the Six Day War. Rather it speaks of the eventual transfer of control over some of the territories to the Arabs in the framework of peace treaties between Israel and our neighbors. Rubinstein also reminded our elected leaders that Israel does not view these territories as "occupied" but rather as "disputed" – that is, that Israel has a legitimate claim to sovereignty over these lands.

Even if Israel had renounced its claim to the territories, which it has not, it would still be wrong to interpret international law as saying that Israel cannot take necessary measures in territories it occupies to protect its civilians and military personnel from attack by enemy forces. Building a fence to prevent terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians and military personnel in occupied territories is permissible in times of a belligerent occupation according to the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949.

And yet, in spite of this, Edna Arbel says that she will find it difficult to defend the state in the forthcoming debate on the fence in the High Court of Justice. One can only infer from Arbel's quandary that she has adopted the Palestinian misinterpretation of international law. This misinterpretation argues, with no legal basis, that Israel not only has no right to the disputed territories but that indeed, Israeli citizens have no right to live in these areas or even to be protected from attacks emanating from these areas.

If as her remarks would indicate, Arbel has in fact adopted this anti-Israel and legally unjustifiable view, then she should be fired immediately on the grounds of incompetence. There can be no professional justification of her statements or actions in the context of her position as an unelected civil servant charged with defending the legal rights and prerogatives of the government of Israel.

Arbel's comfort level with using spurious legal arguments to force what can only be considered her personal political views on the elected government is the result of a troubling phenomenon that has plagued Israel for the past 20-odd years. This phenomenon, the catapulting of the unelected and largely self-selected state legal authorities and judiciary to the position of policymakers is one of the most troubling weaknesses of Israeli democracy.

We have seen repeated examples of the preference of our High Court of Justice and our legal elites in the State Attorney's Office to widen their power to enforce their own narrowly held views on our elected leadership and indeed on the population as a whole. Supreme Court President Aharon Barak's view of the judiciary as somehow more "enlightened" than the rest of us has informed his judgment on issue after issue.

In March 2000, for instance, Barak presided over the court ruling that the Jewish Agency has no right to set up towns in Israel for Jewish settlement. The Katzir decision has been roundly criticized by some of the most respected jurists in Israel for undermining the very foundation of Zionism – that is the establishment of a Jewish state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.

Last November, the court under Barak issued an interim order prohibiting the government from enforcing the Knesset's amendment to the Citizenship Law. The Knesset's amendment, passed last June, prevents the automatic conferral of citizenship to Palestinians on the basis of marriage to Israeli Arab citizens. The cause for the amendment was the Knesset's view that the law providing such citizenship was being used as a back door for forcing the so-called "right of return" of Arabs to Israel with the aim of upsetting the demographic balance of the state. The Knesset also worried that the abuse of the law was enabling terrorist elements to infiltrate into Israel for the purpose of conducting terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens.

As with his decision on housing rights, Barak's decision to prevent the enforcement of the Citizenship Law places his court in the position of the arbiter of norms and of policies in the place of the elected leadership of the country.

Most recently, the Supreme Court has decided to weigh in on the Knesset's prerogative to pass the Budget Law. At the beginning of the month, the court gave itself the authority to determine whether the Knesset's welfare cuts in the 2004 budget impinge on citizens' rights to "dignified human existence." As with its body of past decisions, the court's determination that its unelected justices are better qualified than the people's representatives in the Knesset to determine what tax-financed welfare levels should be is an egregious usurpation of power from the Knesset. To put it more bluntly, it is yet another instance of the court undermining the democratic character of the state.

For her part, Edna Arbel has used her position as state attorney to subvert the authority of the elected representatives of the people by indicting and promiscuously investigating our leaders. Since assuming the office of state attorney seven years ago, Arbel has indicted six sitting and former cabinet ministers on various charges. In all but one case (that of former Shas leader Aryeh Deri), the ministers in question – Ehud Olmert, Tzahi Hanegbi, Rafael Eitan, Avigdor Kahalani and Yaakov Neeman – have been found innocent of all charges.

In 1997, it was Arbel, in her first stint as acting attorney-general, who decided to launch a loud criminal investigation into the government's appointment of Roni Bar-On as attorney-general.

The investigation, which undermined the legitimacy of our elected government, failed to produce any indictments.

In 2000, it was Arbel again who led the charge to indict by then former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu of accepting illegal gifts. She held this view in spite of the fact that the prosecutors in charge of the investigation claimed that there was no concrete evidence that Netanyahu had broken any law.

Arbel has also stood behind several investigations of Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman that seem to have been carried out in breach of democratic norms. So it was that in one investigation, police wiretapped and transcribed telephone conversations between Lieberman and then prime minister Netanyahu on issues unrelated to the suspicions of wrongdoing for which he was being investigated.

While it could be argued that Arbel is simply executing her duty of upholding the law by conducting no holds barred investigations of officials, the fact of the matter is that this defense falls apart when one compares her aggressive investigation of politicians identified with Israel's right wing, with her halting and sympathetic investigations of officials identified with the left wing of Israeli politics.

So it is, for instance that no one has been indicted in the allegedly illegal fund-raising schemes that financed Ehud Barak's campaign for prime minister in 1999.This is spite of State Comptroller Eliezer Goldberg's scathing report on this fund-raising that led to the levying of NIS 13.8 million fines on Barak's One Israel Party for campaign funding abuse. Indeed, the decision taken jointly late last year by Edna Arbel and Elyakim Rubinstein not to indict the recently deceased Yossi Ginossar for egregious misconduct smacks of a similar bias.

The two claimed lack of evidence as a reason for closing the case against Ginossar who was alleged to have not reported his multi-million dollar financial dealings with the Palestinian Authority while he was acting as the representative of prime ministers Rabin, Peres and Barak to PA chief Yasser Arafat. And yet, an investigative report by Ma'ariv newspaper based on the testimony of Ginossar's business partner Ozrad Lev, may have been enough to indict him. If the state prosecutor had asked the police to simply interview officials who had worked with Ginossar in his capacity as envoy to Arafat, they would have easily received enough evidence to substantiate an indictment.

An indictment of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on bribery charges will, because of High Court precedent, create an irrepressible groundswell of pressure for Sharon's resignation that he will be hard pressed to ignore. And so, by claiming that she favors the indictment of Sharon, Arbel is in effect stating that she favors the ousting of our top elected official from office.

The bribery charges now hovering over the prime minister are extremely serious. If Sharon did in fact accept bribes from David Appel then he should rightly be considered unfit to lead the country in spite of his overwhelming popularity at the polls. And yet, it is not at all clear that Arbel is competent to oversee his investigation.

Her statement on the legality of the security fence places her on the fringes of the political left in this country. Her history of unsubstantiated indictments and irresponsible investigations of right wing politicians on the one hand and ineffectual, almost apologetic investigations of left-wing politicians on the other hand show that she cannot be trusted to enforce the laws without prejudice.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speaking to the press Wednesday after a Palestinian woman suicide bomber murdered four Israelis at Erez, Gaza Division commander Brig. Gen. Gad Shamni spoke of the seeming pointlessness of the attack. Erez, Shamni noted, is a tangible manifestation of Israel's commitment to coexistence with the Palestinians.

Some four thousand Gazans work at the Erez industrial park, which was built for the sole purpose of enabling Palestinians to work even when security closures prevented them from entering into Israel. Its bombed out terminal has been constructed and reconstructed after repeated terrorist attacks in order to enable Palestinians to enter Israel to work and support their families. In the words of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's spokesman David Baker, "the Palestinian terrorists not only have blatant disregard for Israeli lives but an equally blatant disregard for their own economic interests."

Similarly, IDF sources noted that the roadside murder of Ro'i Arbel on Tuesday night probably came about as a result of the easing of roadblocks in Judea and Samaria to enable free movement of Palestinian traffic.

It's reasonable for Israeli officials to point out that Palestinian terrorists exploit Israel's humanitarian gestures to murder Israelis. But it really isn't the point.

Ever since Yasser Arafat spurned peace for war in the autumn of 2000, it has been absolutely clear that the Palestinian political and terrorist leadership have no interest in advancing their societal interests. What they are interested in is marshalling the sum total of their resources to destroy Israeli society. Terrorism is but one of the means employed to advance this goal. Other means include the indoctrination of Palestinian society – via schools, religious bodies, and the mass media – to seek the destruction of Israel as its highest national goal.

In the case of the media, this mobilization was brought to our attention when a delegation of 100 Palestinian "journalists" paid a visit to Arafat this past Tuesday in order to declare their fealty.

Addressing his vassals, Arafat lauded their work on behalf of the Palestinian cause. For their part, several of the "journalists" read poems they had composed in his honor.

The Palestinian total war against Israel is not simply a local story. The PLO advances its efforts with the full support of the Arab-Israeli leadership, the governments of Arab and Muslim states, most of the EU member states, the UN General Assembly and the bulk of the international human rights community. The point of this international campaign is to criminalize Israel in every possible way.

Every action that Israel takes to protect its citizenry from mass murder is condemned. Actions by Israel in the realm of law enforcement raise immediate outcries.

A seemingly insignificant incident this week in the Knesset is indicative of this larger campaign.

On Wednesday Arab MKs Issam Mahoul and Jamal Zahlakha had to be forcibly removed from the Knesset's Interior Affairs Committee when they sought to disrupt its proceedings. Committee chairman MK Yuri Shtern convened the committee to conduct a hearing on the illegal seizure of state and privately owned land by Palestinian criminal gangs in east Jerusalem. The gangs, with close ties to the Palestinian Authority, are the terror of Arab Jerusalemites.

They illegally seize land belonging to absentee Arab owners and to the state, construct multi-storey apartment buildings and sell the units. On average, between 800 and 900 such buildings are constructed every year. When the owners appear they are harassed and threatened.

And when the government takes action to stop the building or remove the illegal structures, Palestinian activists take to the human-rights circuit and accuse Israel of oppression.

For its part, the PA funds the illegal construction with low-interest loans and pays the builders' legal fines and lawyers' fees.

The hearing was only able to take place after Shtern expelled Zahlakha and Mahoul from the meeting because the MKs threatened the officials brought before the committee to provide testimony. They told the officials that they would write letters to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague accusing the officials by name of war crimes.

As an Arab Jerusalemite lamented to me after the meeting, "These MKs are harming the interests of the Arabs in Jerusalem. It is we who suffer from the gangs who terrorize us and steal our land, but they don't care. All they care about is attacking Israel."

Zahlahka and Mahoul's threats came a day after Deputy Knesset Speaker Muhammad Barakei penned a letter on Knesset stationery to the ICJ asking to provide testimony on "Israeli war crimes" in constructing the security fence in Judea and Samaria. The proximate cause of Barakei's effort to undermine the legitimacy of the state's actions is the docket before the ICJ on Israel's construction of the security fence in Judea and Samaria.

In late November, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a report claiming that, in building the fence, Israel is violating international law.

Annan's report was used as the basis for the PLO's resolution in the General Assembly, which passed overwhelmingly last month, asking the ICJ to issue an opinion on the legality of the fence. The court is scheduled to conduct hearings on the matter at the end of next month.

The case "is groundless," says David Rivkin, an international lawyer and former official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations."There is no basis in international law for this claim. The Geneva Conventions are in no way breached by the fence. This is a misinterpretation of international law for the purpose of misapplying international law," he says.

Of course he is right. But that's the point. If international law can be perverted to indict a lawful state taking the minimal measures necessary to defend its citizenry against slaughter, then the Palestinians and their allies will have taken one more step towards the criminalization of Israel. As international lawyer and fellow at the Washington based Center for Strategic and International Studies Laurence Rothenberg puts it, the case is "a form of 'lawfare' where the law is distorted to serve as a form of warfare against a state."

And no doubt, if the court decides that it has jurisdiction over the issue, it will be complicit with this "lawfare."

Egyptian judge Nabil Elaraby made his views clear in an interview he gave to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in November 2002, where he called on the Arab and Muslim states to sue Israel at the ICJ for genocide. Jordanian judge Awn Shawhat Al-Khasawneh acted in 1994 as a special rapporteur to the UN Human Rights commission and filed a brief arguing that Israeli settlements are illegal.

Today, the government is trying to put together its line of defense and general approach to the ICJ. There is some dispute among those involved over whether Israel should simply state that the ICJ has no jurisdiction to hear the case or whether Israel should provide the legal basis for its actions. Those arguing for the minimalist approach claim that Israel should not grant the politicized court legitimacy by engaging it in legal arguments. Those arguing for the latter approach claim that the provision of the legal basis for the separation fence will, if nothing else, serve as the basis for Israel's public relations campaign against the expected anti-Israel decision by the ICJ.

While both approaches have merit, neither addresses the real issue. As it is reasonable for Israel to point out that bombers in Erez harm Palestinians, it is also reasonable to note that building the fence is legal. Those who are willing to listen will hear. Those who still value the truth will be convinced. Those who care about the law will be disgusted with the perversion of international law and miscarriage of justice by the UN and the ICJ.

But the main point is to be found elsewhere. It is to be found in a recognition and presentation by Israel of the fact that the Palestinians are conducting a total war against us that encompasses nearly every facet of human life. In defending Israel in public forums, it is neither productive nor reasonable for Israel to limit its defense to reactions against Palestinian legalistic aggression and diplomatic perversion.

A more strategically apt defense would necessarily point out the larger picture. For instance: In her videotaped message before Wednesday's bombing, the terrorist said "It was always my wish to turn my body into deadly shrapnel against the Zionists and to knock on the doors of heaven with the skulls of Zionists."

This statement, like thousands of others made by bombers, their commanders, official PA spokesmen and media outlets over the years are sufficient for Israel to make a credible legal case against the Palestinians. That case would be based on The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

By condemning each separate act of self-defense Israel adopts to protect its citizens, Palestinians and their allies seek to obfuscate the true nature of their campaign against the Jewish state and its citizens. Crafting a successful counter-strategy will necessarily center on the one ingredient that their campaign lacks: the truth.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In an address at Haifa University on Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon told his audience, "The dilemma regarding targeted killings [of terrorists] takes into account how the action will impact the public debate. As the chief of staff I have a dilemma: to wait for a terrorist attack in order to be just, or to attack in order to prevent casualties."

Contrast Ya'alon's statement with one made by Mrs. Hagit Mendellevich in a Haifa courtroom on Sunday. Mendellevich's 13-year-old son Yuval was murdered in the suicide attack on bus 37 on Moriah Boulevard in Haifa last March 5. The occasion of her remarks was a petition by the parents of the 17 murdered Israelis to the court to cancel a plea bargain reached by the district attorney with one of the conspirators to the attack. The plea bargain, which the court upheld, erased the charges of conspiracy to murder from his indictment.

In her court testimony Mendellevich said: "Many buses have blown up in recent years in Israel. How many of you remember the attack on Moriah Boulevard? If you don't remember, it is because we have learned to be slaughtered and murdered without a sound. What is the difference between the bus on which my son was murdered and the crematoria where my grandfather and grandmother were murdered? Buses are moving crematoria for those who have no choice but to travel by public transportation. I feel that I have been abandoned by the state and that Israel is the only country that judges crimes against humanity as if they are criminal offenses."

Also in his address on Tuesday, Ya'alon restated his position that the lack of consensus in Israeli society about the nature of the conflict with the Palestinians "makes it difficult to agree on the response; impedes the legitimacy of the application of force and the support for the IDF and its actions."

Colonel (res.), Yehuda Wegman believes that Ya'alon's statements are the result of professional confusion. "The COS gets paid to protect Israeli citizens, not to worry about what people will say about what the IDF does. He is 'just' when he defends Israelis, not when he waits for a massacre in order to justify providing this defense."

Wegman, who commands a reserve armored brigade, caused waves in the defense establishment when in September 2002 he published an article in the defense journal Ma'arachot under the title, "The limited conflict trap." Wegman argued that the major cause for the IDF's failure to end the Palestinian terror onslaught is the refusal of the General Staff to define the current state of armed conflict as a war.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post this week, Wegman explained, "A decision was made by former Deputy COS Major Gen. Uzi Dayan at the outset of the conflict that Israel would view Palestinian terror as a limited conflict rather than as a war. From that point on, the IDF was left without direction. Its entire war fighting doctrine was unceremoniously discarded.

"Terror and guerrilla wars are a type of actual war and the IDF's fighting doctrine applies equally to these types of warfare as to conventional warfare between armored divisions. The purpose is to defeat the enemy. But when the commanders on the ground are told that this isn't a war, what are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to fight? What is the job of the army here?"

Wegman makes a clear distinction between the IDF's tactical commanders in the field and its strategic leadership on the General Staff. "Israel's tactical command is the best in the world. After a relatively long period of limited engagements with the Palestinians, the field commanders understood that the piecemeal policy of dealing with the terrorists as if they were not waging a war against Israel didn't work. It was the field commanders – the brigade and battalion commanders – who convinced the General Staff to allow IDF forces to go into the refugee camps. The officers in the General Staff insisted that going into the camps would involve hundreds of casualties, that they were unconquerable. It was the tactical forces on the ground that convinced them otherwise and their operations were a world-class success."

The difference between the tactics and strategy are clear when one looks at what is actually being accomplished. The day after Ya'alon gave his address in Haifa, IDF forces killed three terrorists and arrested 30 terror suspects in operations in five refugee camps in Samaria. Among the terror suspects rounded up was Mutaser Abu Aliyoun, a senior Fatah terrorist from Jenin who was involved in numerous attacks, including the murder of three Israelis.

The effectiveness of the IDF's tactical operations was brought home on Thursday with the IDF's publication of comparative statistics on the war from 2001-2003. 2003 saw a 30 percent drop in the number of terror attacks from 2002 (3,831 vs. 5,301) and a 50% drop in fatalities – 213 in 2003 vs. 451 in 2002.

At the same time, the report points to the fact that the Palestinians are developing new tactics for fighting. These include the increased use of women as bombers and bombing accomplices; the use of foreign terrorists to conduct operations in Israel; a rise in the involvement of Israeli Arabs in terrorist attacks; attacks against American targets; attempted assassination of Israeli leaders; use of Palestinians with foreign passports to attack Israeli and Jewish targets abroad; utilization of underground tunnels to bomb IDF outposts; the attachment of bombs to animals; and the use of ambulances to transport bombers and their accomplices.

Added to the Palestinian operational adjustments is the fact that the Palestinian leadership refuses to take any action against the terrorists and that Palestinian society still supports the terror war. The latter issue was made clear this week when a consortium of Palestinian NGOs refused to sign a US declaration that the aid they receive will not go to terrorists or terrorist organizations. And, so, as Wegman notes, "as we flit from operation to operation, the Palestinians remain committed to carrying out their war until they achieve their goal of defeating Israel."

Wegman rues the IDF's high command's misapprehension of the nature of the armed struggle. "The IDF high command's refusal to accept that Israel is fighting a war makes the ingenious fighting of the forces in the field strategically pointless." In his view, "If Israel continues along this path, we will see a Lebanonization of the war."

In Lebanon, the IDF's acceptance of the view that "there is no military solution" gave Hizbullah complete control over the level of hostilities. Every time that the IDF managed to cause Hizbullah painful losses, the terrorist organization sued for temporary cease-fires which allowed it to regroup and escalate its attacks. Israel surrendered the initiative. The location and intensity of the fighting was decided by the enemy.

In an interview with Yediot Aharonot two weeks ago, Ya'alon indicated that the IDF is indeed following a similar course with the Palestinians to the one it adopted so abysmally in South Lebanon. Speaking of targeted killing of Hamas commanders, Ya'alon opined, "Since our attack [in September 2003] against the Hamas leadership, they fear for their continued existence and are careful not to provide us a justification for attacking their leadership again," he said.
 

Wegman believes that the IDF's decision to stop targeting the leaders of Hamas this past fall was a strategic blunder of the first order. "The basis for reaching a decisive conclusion of war is the doctrinal principle of 'concentration of effort.'

The point is to concentrate your forces and resources in a manner that brings about the achievement of superiority that causes the defeat of your enemy."

"When we were conducting targeted killings once every couple of weeks, they had no effect. When, in September 2003, the IDF conducted these attacks everyday, Hamas sued for a cease-fire. This showed that the concentration of effort was succeeding. But the war fighting doctrine is also based on the principle of continuous engagement. Rather than continuing the operations until Hamas was defeated, the IDF gave them a reprieve. Again, this is the direct result of the General Staff refusing to accept that this is a war."

In late November, there were a number of articles in the US press referring to assistance and coaching that Israel is providing for the US military forces in Iraq. In everything from erecting roadblocks to conducting arrests of terror suspects in urban areas, the reports noted, the Americans are emulating IDF operational tactics. When questioned about the issue, US Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez explained that the difference between US and Israeli actions is that the US forces in Iraq are engaged in a war.

Commenting from Baghdad on the progress of that war to The Washington Post last month, US Army Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling indicated that the decrease in attacks in December over November "might be due to us having significantly hurt the enemy during the operations; it could be that the thugs and criminals being paid to conduct the attacks are not up for fighting anymore. Or, it might mean the enemy is gearing up for another offensive. And that's why it's important that we keep the pressure on with offensive operations."

In his interview with Yediot Aharonot, Ya'alon stated that he looks forward to a Hizbullah-styled cease-fire being reached "within weeks," followed by years of low intensity fighting. In light of this, it would seem that while the US moves ahead towards victory over the terrorist and guerrilla fighters in Iraq in part by adopting IDF operational tactics, the IDF itself will continue to amaze with its tactical achievements while victory slips from its grasp.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week The Los Angeles Times published an investigative report exposing the depth of Syria's collaboration with Saddam Hussein in the years, months and indeed weeks and days preceding the US-led invasion of Iraq last March.

The report, which ran under the headline "Paper trail leads to Syria as Iraq's main arms link," is nothing less than devastating to the Ba'athist regime in Damascus. Documents procured by the Times show that a Syrian trading company called SES, which is run by Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's cousin, signed more than 50 contracts "to supply tens of millions of dollars' worth of arms and equipment to Iraq's military shortly before the US-led invasion."

For its part, Washington is taking seriously the growing body of evidence of Syria's present role as a financier of the current insurgency and an assembly point for terrorists en route to Iraq. Sources close to the administration have told me that the Bush administration is "planning to deal harshly" with Syria after the presidential elections in November. An invasion of Syria bringing about the overthrow of Assad's minority regime, they say, is being carefully considered.

The US's newfound understanding of Syria's hostility is a good thing for Israel. Throughout the 1990s, the US ignored Syria's links to terrorism and its non-conventional arsenals. All Syria's late dictator Hafez Assad had to do to get off the US blacklist was send a handful of soldiers to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War and, in its aftermath, declare that he "had made a strategic decision for peace."

This was a lie, as his sponsorship of Hizbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations showed. But during the 1990s, the US was as willing as Israel to pretend that the underlying character of a regime and its actual sponsorship of terrorism were unimportant. What mattered, in other words, was what Syria said, not what it did.

So it is strange that while Assad is increasingly viewed as an enemy of the US, our politicians and policymakers are discussing seriously the possibility of renewing negotiations for the transfer of the Golan Heights to the Ba'athists in Damascus in exchange for a peace treaty. Rather than dismissing Bashar Assad's opportunistic declaration to The New York Times that he is interested in negotiating with Israel, our foreign minister and his underlings are acting as though this proposal by a drowning tyrant should be taken seriously. The argument now being sounded in Jerusalem is that Israel should take advantage of Syria's weakness to forge a deal that it wouldn't be making if it were in a better bargaining position with the US.

This is the same rationale used by Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres in 1993, when they went about secretly negotiating the Oslo accords with the PLO. The PLO had supported Saddam in the Gulf War and was being properly punished for this strategic error by the US and the Gulf States. Abandoned by its Arab allies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the PLO, stranded in Tunis, was poised to become irrelevant.

The intifada petered out by 1992 and local Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza were beginning to shake-off their fear and dependency on Arafat's money and thugs.

When Israel successfully excluded the PLO from the negotiations which began in the wake of the 1992 Madrid Conference, the chance that a new Palestinian leadership willing to co-exist with Israel would arise was becoming a real possibility.

Ignoring these trends, Peres and Beilin and their in-house academics went to Tunis and Oslo, forged a deal with the PLO, and the rest is history.

One of the most disturbing themes in Israel's relations with the Arab states and the Palestinians is our consistent inability to see beyond a two-dimensional reality of how things currently appear. In the wake of the Gulf War and the end of the intifada, the Palestinians in their weakness declared the PLO their sole representative. Rather than see this as the bluff it was, Peres and his deputies embraced Arafat when they should have been cultivating a new leadership not dedicated to Israel's destruction.

Similarly today, according to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, Hamas is currently not engaging in suicide bombings because its leaders fear being killed by the IDF. Yet rather than chasing, arresting and killing these terrorists while they are on the run, our government leaves them alone to plot attacks in the future.

The Syrian dictatorship has never been more in danger of overthrow by the US. Yet our foreign minister, rather than encouraging its downfall, is publicly discussing sending it a lifeline.

The underlying problem with all of our analyses is that no one in our military, political, diplomatic or intellectual leadership seems to have a vision for a future where there could be Arabs in positions of power who actually would like to live in peace with us.

Case in point is our treatment of the Iraqi National Congress in the 1990s. As The Jerusalem Post reported last week, the head of the INC, Ahmed Chalabi, now the most senior member of the Iraqi Governing Council, met with Binyamin Netanyahu while he was prime minister and offered to cooperate with Israel. According to Chalabi, Netanyahu responded to the offer by suggesting that Chalabi meet with the head of the Mossad. Chalabi told the Post that he had been deeply offended by Netanyahu's response. Rather than cultivating him as an ally, Chalabi felt he was being brushed off as nothing more than a potential spy.

One of the things that distinguish US President George W. Bush is a clear vision of where he wants to move the world. He is not simply leading a war against terror; he is leading a war for freedom and democracy in the Arab and Muslim world. The names his administration has chosen for its campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq – Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom – describe not the overthrow of the Taliban and the Ba'athists, but what those overthrows intend to achieve.

In stark contrast, the name Israel gave to our one major offensive against the Palestinian terrorist regime was Operation Defensive Shield. The aim was to increase the margin of safety, rather than make the world a better one.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's supporters note that he has not actually given the Palestinians anything concrete in their war against Israel. He is, they say, playing for time, understanding that the new regional situation being created by the US is working in Israel's favor. If so, Sharon is not helping things along by standing in place. He should be actively assisting the US in rearranging our region in a manner that will be conducive to freedom and democracy in the Arab world and peace for Israel.

In Washington, a group of Syrian dissidents have formed a political party in exile called the Syrian Reform Party. Its leaders envision a Syrian democracy being formed after the overthrow of Assad and the Ba'athists that will live in peace with Israel. Our diplomats and intellectuals should be actively engaging these Syrian patriots and cultivating ties with them as potential allies.

In Jordan, Prince Hassan told the Italian newspaper La Stampa Monday, "From my perspective, Jordan should include all the Palestinians.

"Israel, Palestine and Jordan should enjoy the same sort of interdependence as there is in the Benelux countries," Hassan said.

This is an interesting vision, which is apparently supported by members of the Iraqi Governing Council angry at the support the Hashemite regime gave Saddam Hussein over many years. The government and our other elites should be talking to Hassan and his colleagues, rather than wondering when Ahmed Qurei is going to get serious about opening barren discussions with Israel about the establishment of a terrorist state in our midst.

Outside of the Arab world, Israel has shown visionary leadership. In the 1990s, Israel developed close alliances with Turkey and India, two other non-Christian democracies that are today wedge states in the global battle against Islamic terrorism. It was Israel's strategic embrace of these two countries that paved the way for their now strong ties with the US.

It is true that it was Ariel Sharon, who in a visionary move in 1982 attempted to bring about new leadership in Lebanon. His initiative failed not because it was unwise, but because the US was unsupportive. In 1982 the Reagan administration, embroiled in the Cold War, failed to acknowledge the threat of jihad and the need for regime change in the Arab world even after the US itself fell victim to these forces in Beirut. But September 11 changed all that.

Israel is the US's staunchest ally in the Middle East. As a liberal democracy which understands the need for strength to protect our way of life, we share common values as well as common enemies. But our leadership's lack of a vision for cultivating, encouraging and supporting our friends in the Arab world harms not only our safety. It degrades our ability to contribute meaningfully to the US-led war to make our region peaceful and free.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.