Standing before the EU parliament in Brussels on May 16 2001, French EU parliamentarian Paul Marie Couteax made a stunning statement. After condemning Israel's actions to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism as the "theocratic excesses of this religious state," Couteax declared that Europe should supply the Arab world with nuclear weapons.

As he put it, "I have no hesitation in saying that we must consider giving the Arab side a large enough force, including a large enough nuclear force, to persuade Israel that it cannot simply do whatever it wants. That is the policy my country [France] pursued in the 1970s when it gave Iraq a nuclear force."
 

Couteax's statement, though over the top, follows a flow of seemingly obtuse and illogical statements and actions by the EU and its member states since the start of the Palestinian terror war almost four years ago.

For instance, in the midst of the IDF's counter-terror operations in Rafah last week, Ireland's Foreign Minister Brian Cowan, speaking for the EU whose presidency his country currently holds, condemned Israel's actions in the most hysterical and factually inaccurate terms.

After meeting a delegation from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (the same people who gave a standing ovation to Malaysia's then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad last fall when he claimed that Jews were the source of all the troubles in the world), Cowan all but accused Israel of carrying out war crimes when he stated that "Israeli forces showed a reckless disregard for human life."

Placing the IDF's military operations directed against Palestinian terrorists on par with the murder of Tali Hatuel and her four young daughters in a deliberate attack by Palestinian terrorists, Cowan said, "I would once again remind Israel, the occupying power, that the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War is fully applicable to the Gaza Strip."

Like almost all of the EU's statements, Cowan's remarks ignore basic facts.

As a database compiled by the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism shows quite clearly, Israel targets terrorists in its operations while Palestinians attack Israelis indiscriminately.
The institute's figures show conclusively that since the start of the Palestinian terror war, non-combatants have made up 80 percent of Israeli casualties, whereas on the Palestinian side, 56% of casualties have been verified combatants. Since Palestinian terrorists generally do not wear uniforms, Dan Radlauer – who oversees the database – explains that it is quite possible that the percentage of Palestinian casualties who are combatants may actually be significantly higher than that figure. This information is readily available to Cowan and his EU colleagues. They could easily have put together a similar study.

But that would not advance their interests.

In a revealing incident, earlier this month, the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) released a report outlining the systemic abuse of power by Palestinian security forces against Palestinian civilians.

According to an account in The Scotsman, the report has not won PHRMG accolades for its brave and honest reporting in an atmosphere of terror and repression cultivated by Arafat and his henchmen.

Rather, in response to the organization's decision to document human rights abuses by the PA and by Israel, the group has seen its financial support from the EU slashed.
 

If one believes the EU's rhetoric of support for the peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the EU's actions make no sense. After all, if the EU is interested in an end to the terror war, it should be empowering anti-terror groups in the PA to uncover abuses and fight them. Yet rather than do so, the EU has shelved every report that has proven that EU funds to the PA are actually diverted to finance terrorism and incitement.

If the EU wishes to play an active role in the search for peace and security in the region, it should not be condemning lawful Israeli actions against terrorists and ignoring the fact that, by its indiscriminate nature, Palestinian terrorism is an affront to the very notion of international law.

Yet, this is precisely the point. There is a yawning gap between the EU's rhetoric and its actual policies. Its rhetoric purports to work toward a workable peace between Israel and its neighbors. Its actual policy is to support the Arabs against Israel. Indeed, Europe has a three-tiered approach to the Arab world, each policy layer of which is inherently inimical to the notion of fairness and balance in relation to Israel.

Since the 1970s, Europe has embraced appeasement of the Arabs as a central plank of its foreign policy. This became entrenched in the wake of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. As well, following the trail blazed by Charles de Gaulle, sympathy to the Arabs and hostility towards Israel have served Europe's interest in differentiating itself from the US. Because the US is committed to European security through the NATO alliance, Europe can curry favor with the Arabs from whom the US will protect it. At the same time, it can deflect Arab wrath onto the US, which is unwilling – for strategic and moral reasons – to sever its alliance with Israel.

Finally, Europe has a domestic interest in currying the favor of the Arabs over Israel. Europe has a growing Muslim population that has been inculcated with a fanatical form of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is also rife on both the left and right sides of the European political spectrum. Given this, it is good politics domestically to condemn Israel, while turning a blind eye to Arab terrorism and human rights abuses.

So what we have in Europe, then, is not an otherwise friendly continent that condemns Israel out of sheer ignorance. Rather, we have a hostile continent that condemns Israel to advance its perceived political and strategic interests.

While hostility towards Israel is comprehensible when it comes from a militarily weak and self-interested Europe, such refusal to acknowledge the reality of the nature of the Palestinian war against Israel makes less sense in the American context. The US cannot depend on a security guarantee from any foreign power. It must defend itself and its global interests. From this distinction, it necessarily transpires that US national security interests cannot be long advanced by appeasement of terror-supporting regimes in the Arab and Muslim world which declare the US to be the primary source of evil in the world.

Yet since last spring, we have seen concerted American moves toward embracing Europe's hostile positions towards Israel. The latest example was the American refusal to cast a veto on last week's UN Security Council's condemnation of the IDF operations in Rafah. This move must be seen in the context of an overall US policy of giving the EU and the UN a larger role in the formulation of America's policy towards Israel. This trend was instigated by Washington's decision last year to work with the UN, the EU and Russia in formulating and launching the road-map plan for peace.

The US has moved in this direction because it believes that its national interest is served by placating the EU and UN on Israel in the hopes that doing so will make them more supportive of US initiatives in Iraq and elsewhere. Yet, what we have seen in Iraq is that regardless of the role that Washington charitably gives to the EU and the UN regarding Israel, these bureaucracies do not respond by supporting the US in Iraq and elsewhere. Again, since the EU has an institutional interest in not working in concert with the US, an American turn towards Europe simply causes Europeans to take even more extreme positions regarding both Israel and Iraq.

It isn't that all Europeans are inherently hostile towards Israel. In an amazing display of pride and wisdom two weeks ago, French Jews boycotted a rally against anti-Semitism. The boycott came not because the Jews of France do not view anti-Semitism as a salient threat. On the contrary, they boycotted the rally because its organizers refused to link anti-Semitic attacks in the country to anti-Zionism.

Given the direct link between anti-Semitism and hostility towards the Jewish state in Europe, it is important to question what Israel has been doing to diminish Europe's perceived interest in appeasing the Arab world. Looking at the government's policy towards Europe over the past few years, the answer is that it has done nothing effective to change European perceptions.

Last summer, for instance, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom expressed an interest in applying for membership in the EU.

When the EU condemns Israel, as it did last week, Israel may express revulsion. Yet, it continues to call for Europe to play an active role in the search for peace. In so doing, Israel maintains a fiction of European friendship and fair-mindedness in the pursuit of its Middle East agenda that simply do not exist.

Were Israel to treat Europe as the hostile force it is, it could craft a workable policy. This should be aimed at strengthening the voices in Europe calling for an abandonment of anti-Semitism and a reckoning with the actual threat that the increasingly radicalized Islamic world manifests to its own security.

As it stands, the current policy of sweeping European hostility under the rug of diplo-speak cocktail parties and press conferences is detracting from Israel's national security interests. The government's policy of denial is legitimizing hateful voices and blocking voices of reason from being heard above the din of anti-Zionist propaganda. At the same time, Israeli tolerance for European hostility strengthens the forces of appeasement in the US and weakens those allies who understand the strategic necessity of supporting Israel.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now tentatively set to bring his "new plan" for withdrawing IDF troops from the Gaza Strip and uprooting Israeli settlements there and in Samaria to the cabinet for its approval next Sunday. The new plan, we are told, is simply an incremental variation on Sharon's previous plan which was overwhelmingly rejected by Likud party members at the beginning of the month.

The new plan calls for IDF withdrawal from Gaza and uprooting of Israeli communities in three stages with each distinct stage coming before the cabinet for approval before implementation.

Aside from this, the plan also contains two additional novelties. The first is a call for amending the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt to enable the Egyptian military, as opposed to Egyptian border guards to deploy along the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza. The second new component of the plan that the prime minister's office is currently floating is the deployment of an international force into Gaza.

From a domestic standpoint, what stands out about the new plan is its author. Whereas authorship of the plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza belonged to former Labor party leader Amram Mitzna, the new plan comes straight from Yossi Beilin's drawing board. In crafting the Oslo plan, Beilin came up with the idea of establishing a PLO state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem on an incremental basis. So it was that Israel first removed its troops from Gaza and Jericho and only later from the other major cities and villages in Judea and Samaria. As well, over the past two years, Beilin has been pushing the idea of bringing foreign forces, including Arab armies, into the territories together with his American supporter, former US ambassador Martin Indyk.

The idea of amending the peace treaty with Egypt is bizarre on the face of it. The current IDF operation in Rafah was necessitated by Egypt's abject refusal or failure to prevent weapons smuggling into Gaza through subterranean tunnels burrowed across the Egypt-Gaza border. If Egypt were upholding its commitments to Israel in the peace treaty, it would have been actively and continuously working to prevent weapons flow from its territory to Gaza. It has not.

It is argued that an amendment of the 1979 treaty to allow regular Egyptian military units to deploy along the border will empower Egypt to take action against the weapons smugglers. This is ridiculous. As it stands the treaty enables Egyptian border guards to deploy along the border and places no restrictions on the size of such a force. These border guards can be armed with assault rifles for the dispatch of their duties and there is no reason why such armaments would be insufficient for stemming the arms trafficking.

More importantly, given the virulence of hatred of Israel in Egypt – hatred that is encouraged by the Egyptian government – the long term implications of an Israeli move to allow Egypt to deploy regular army forces along the border could be disastrous. Indeed, rather than look to Egypt for a solution to a problem it is largely responsible for creating, Israel should be leading a diplomatic campaign against Egypt to force it to act responsibly.

Up until this week when the idea of bringing foreign troops into Gaza in the framework of an Israeli withdrawal was first introduced by the prime minister's office, it had been the policy of all Israeli governments to reject out of hand any thought of bringing in foreign troops aside perhaps from US forces. This has been Israel's consistent policy because our successive governments have understood that the hostility towards Israel in the international community – from the Arab world to the EU to the UN to the international human rights organizations – is so inbred that any foreign troop presence in the area would automatically harm Israel's national interest of ensuring the security of its citizens and the inviolability of its territory.

The understanding was that foreign troops in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would not work to bring order and quell terrorism but would rather protect terrorists operating in these areas from Israeli military operations. This view was based not only on the knee-jerk anti-Israel positions taken by these governments and international organizations but also on Israel's experience with UN forces in southern Lebanon. There UN peacekeepers allowed themselves to be exploited, repeatedly and consistently by Hizbullah and other terrorist organizations that used UN cover to commit terrorist attacks against Israel.

It should not be forgotten that almost a year after IDF soldiers Benny Avraham, Omar Sawayid and Adi Avitan were kidnapped by Hizbullah in October 2000, Israel discovered that the UN had been hiding information about their abduction. Arguably in contravention of international law, the UN had hidden from the IDF videotapes it had of the soldiers' abduction as well as operational and personal effects of the soldiers. The Hizbullah terrorists who carried out the kidnapping traveled in a vehicle with UN plates and a UN flag. UN forces in Lebanon who found the vehicle while its engine was still running, removed the equipment from it, including several articles that were stained with blood.

After the information was revealed, the UN still insisted that Israel could not analyze the blood samples but rather that the analysis would have to be done by the World Health Organization. Until Israel discovered this information the government and the IDF were operating under the assumption that the soldiers were still alive. Early access to the information could have given the IDF the opportunity to discover that in fact the soldiers were murdered by their kidnappers.

The rationale for the current plan of bringing foreign troops into Gaza is that the prime minister and his advisors are attempting to find a way to negotiate the Gaza withdrawal with someone. In the absence of a responsible Palestinian interlocutor, the thinking goes, Israel must invent a partner with which it can implement the withdrawal plan from Gaza. Indeed, although the full-blown campaign launched by the Israeli media to delegitimize the results of the Likud vote has resulted in a majority of public support now for a withdrawal from Gaza, the public is still evenly split as to whether Israel can leave Gaza without handing over its responsibility for security to a responsible party.

The hope no doubt is that if the international community has an active role to play in Sharon's retreat plan, it will have a stake in the plan's success. Yet the international community's reaction to this week's IDF operation in Rafah has shown unequivocally that this hope is based on absolutely nothing.

Even before Israel committed its troops to Rafah, Amnesty International had already accused Israel of committing war crimes in destroying houses in Rafah along the border. Never mind that the claim has no basis whatsoever in international law. States have the lawful right to view as military targets any structure that is used to conduct military operations against them. And these houses were used specifically for that purpose.

Amnesty's condemnation came without the organization even bothering to check the facts. Just as was the case of the battle in Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, Amnesty reached its conclusion without launching an inquiry.

Amnesty's libelous attack on Israel was immediately picked up by media organizations worldwide as well as by the UN and the EU. These then repeated the condemnation of Israel verbatim. On Tuesday, no greater moral authority than the Church of Sweden called for its members to wage an economic boycott against Israel.

And it isn't that the UN and the EU, the media and the human rights organizations do not know the truth. They do. They have all received documented proof, not only from Israel but from their own people that have shown them conclusively that the Palestinian Authority is a terrorist organization and that its method of fighting Israel while hiding behind civilians is by its very nature a war crime.

They know everything, but they do not care. They believe that their national and institutional interests are best served by condemning Israel and embracing Palestinian war crimes as justified.

In an attempt to get the foreign media to report what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, the IDF's spokesman's unit pleaded with foreign news agencies to join IDF forces in their operations and see for themselves. By mid-week, the IDF had to admit that the attempt was an abject failure. Almost no one took them up on the offer. The foreign media is not interested in showing the truth. They simply want to criminalize Israel.

The most abject and obnoxious instance of this is the reaction to the IDF's apparent inadvertent killing of five Palestinian gunmen and two teenagers during a PA organized march towards IDF forces stationed in Rafah on Wednesday. Without bothering to check the facts, just as was the case in Jenin, the international media gushingly reported that IDF troops had "massacred" Palestinian civilians in a peaceful march in Gaza. The Palestinian press releases on the matter were indulgently quoted as fact as news organization after new organization dismissed the IDF's explanations as lies. In a matter of hours, the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel. The US -- due no doubt to its current self-destructive wooing of the UN and France in Iraq -- declined to veto the decision.

The sad and terrible thing about Sharon's newest plan is that he actually thinks he needs a plan in the first place. If our experience over the past 11 years has taught us anything, it is that no matter what Israel proposes to do in the interest of peace and Palestinian independence, it is always blamed when the Palestinians continue to make war against us – regardless of the barbarism of their actions.

The simple truth of the matter was made clear this week by COS Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya'alon. Speaking of the military necessity of the operation in Gaza to the Knesset, Ya'alon said, "Only the IDF can secure Gaza." No plan, no matter how new can change this basic truth.

Originaly published in The Jerusalem Post.

We are in a world war and yet we do not notice it.

Over the past few weeks reports have abounded about the widening berth of the forces of global jihad. On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that al-Qaida linked groups are operating in Africa from the Western Sahara to the Horn of Africa. The jihadis in countries like Niger, Chad and Mali are being financed, trained and indoctrinated by religious authorities from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

The recent elections in Indonesia ended with neither major party receiving much more than one fifth of the popular vote. In Indonesia's parliamentary system this means that the small Islamic parties will be able to exert great influence over the new government which will need to bring them into the governing coalition to rule.

In Nigeria this week Muslim mobs brandishing machetes butchered some thirty Christians in the streets of the city of Kano. The panicked Christians ran for shelter in police stations as they watched their co-religionists butchered and set aflame before their eyes.

The problems in Nigeria began in 1999 after elections brought an end to military rule in the oil rich country. Today 11 of Nigeria's 36 states are governed by Sharia law. Rights of women and non-Muslims in these areas have been summarily destroyed. Nigeria's turn to jihad has been spurred on by foreign Arabs. Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Sudanese have all been acting as advisers to the mullahs in Nigeria and have been actively funding and training the Muslim militias that have killed thousands of Christians there over the past few years.

In the Philippines, President Gloria Arroyo has given de facto autonomy over large swathes of the country to an al-Qaida linked group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front operating in the southern parts of the archipelago dominated by the country's Muslim minority. The MILF too is supported by the Saudis and other Arab states with money, arms and jihad indoctrination.

Both western intelligence agencies and casual observers are casting worried glances at Europe itself. With Western Europe's large and increasingly extremist Muslim minorities demanding cultural autonomy while preaching and funding and training men for jihad, many EU member states are looking more and more like Islamic countries everyday.

All of this should be taken into account when we look at the bloody toll of the Palestinian offensive in Gaza and when we observe the American confusion in Iraq today. It should be taken into account because we must realize that our enemies are engaged in a world war against the non-Muslim world. When we consider our daily battles on our limited terrain we must not allow our perceptions to be distorted by that directly before us.

Yet undermine our perceptive powers we have. Although the Palestinians, like their Iranian and Hizbullah overlords have consistently stated that their aim is to destroy Israel in stages, we Israelis refuse to see the overall picture of their strategy. They execute Tali Hatuel and her four daughters on the day of the Likud poll and we fail to understand the message. It is not, "Get out of Gaza, or else." It is, "Regardless of what you desire, we will push you out of Gaza as we pushed you out of Lebanon and as we will push you out of the rest of Palestine that you refer to as Israel."
 

But we don't see it that way. Our press, like our beleaguered and vain politicians, pushes a different story. In their story, there is no enemy, only Israel. There is no jihad, only settlers provocatively daring to live in their homes and soldiers carrying too much explosive material in their armored personnel carriers and tanks. It is the settlers who "endanger" their children and the soldiers who place too much TNT in their APCs who are responsible for their deaths.

We do not see news analyses of Palestinian societal derangement that manifests itself in cannibalism. We do not see debates of what an Israeli defeat in Gaza means to a society bred from the cradle to the grave on global jihad and its requisite genocide of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel and beyond.

Indeed, we see no discussion of Gaza as part of a larger whole – whether that whole be the entire Land of Israel or the entire non-Muslim world. Because we limit our gaze with super telephoto lenses to see only that immediately before us, our picture of the war being waged against us is taken up almost entirely by ourselves with the enemy barely visible at the outer edges of the frame.

Rather than learning from our mistakes, over the past month or so we have seen our American allies repeat them in Iraq. There, the US has limited its gaze to itself. Can the US forces enter into sacred Shiite towns or not? Can US forces engage in house to house battles, risking civilian casualties in Fallujah or not? Can the US empower its allies and weaken its enemies in Iraq without being perceived (by itself) as imperialistic? Can the US continue its occupation of Iraq and campaign to bring freedom to this malformed Arab state when a handful of its soldiers besmirch the honor of their uniforms by abusing Iraqi enemy prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison?

The questions here are not turned to the enemy that transforms sacred cities into armed camps and hides behind civilians, rendering them either fellow terrorists or hostages. The question, why would the US send 135,000 US troops to liberate Iraq only to have them turn it over to the same UN supported Ba'athist forces they were brought to Iraq to defeat is resoundingly ignored.

The confused Bush administration is not asked why the president should seek the approval of the Arab world for America's actions or forgiveness for its failings. It is not asked this even though, as the American scholar Fuad Ajami pointed out this week in The Wall Street Journal, the Arabs preferred Saddam's butchers to the American liberators and prefer to see Iraq revert to pan-Arab fascism and tyranny to its emerging as a secular democracy.

Indeed in the recent weeks of American Israeli-style navel gazing on Iraq, we see little questioning of what US retreats in Fallujah and hesitancy in Najaf do to the forces of jihad throughout the world. There is little note paid to the fact that in the attack on foreign workers in Yanbu, Saudi Arabia and the beginning of the month, the body of one of the American victims was tied to the terrorists' vehicle and dragged through the streets of the city as the terrorists invoked the lynching of US contractors in Fallujah in late March to the crowd that formed around them.

In the US tendency towards Israeli style self-obsession, we see them like us, buying into the psychological warfare of the enemy aimed at forcing their retreat. So it is that in the barbaric butchering of American businessman Nick Berg, the American press reports as fact the terrorists' contention that Berg's beheading was retribution for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Of course this is a lie. Daniel Pearl was beheaded before the US invaded Iraq. The workers in Yanbu were murdered a year after the US pulled its military forces out of Saudi Arabia. The US contractors were lynched before the Marines went into Fallujah.

When we pay attention to our enemies and see the scope of their ambitions and depth of their hatred we must come to a revolutionary conclusion. We, Israelis, Americans, and indeed all non-fascistic Muslims constitute the frontline in the war wherever we are. It was not US military deployment in Saudi Arabia that precipitated the September 11 attacks anymore than it was the Israeli presence in Lebanon or in Gaza or Judea and Samaria or Jerusalem that precipitated the Palestinian-led jihad against Israel. It is our existence that provokes our enemy.

Our enemies, the forces of global jihad, be they Palestinian or Jordanian, Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian or Iraqi use all the means at their disposal to wage their war against us. From their television and radio stations and newspapers they incite for our destruction and feed us fictions of our own culpability to both strengthen their forces' will to fight us and to weaken our will to defend ourselves.

In the UN, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and on countless other international stages they seek to criminalize us for our crime of defending our existence. In this they find accomplices among our own self-absorbed elites who are only too happy to blame the war being waged against us on ourselves.

When we limit our gaze to ourselves not only do we fail to take notice of the nature of the war, we craft national policies that harm both ourselves and our allies. In Israel, our self-obsession has brought about plan after plan all of which have weakened us and our allies in the global struggle.

From the Oslo initiative to the retreat from Lebanon to Sharon's pullout plan from Gaza and parts of Samaria we have hurt ourselves and our allies.

We have hurt ourselves by weakening our ability to recognize our enemies as such seeing them rather as erstwhile peace partners. We have hurt ourselves by discrediting our own right to live unmolested as large swathes of our elites have preferred our enemies the Palestinians to our own citizens in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

In behaving as though the Palestinian branch of the global jihad is engaging in a war over a few kilometers in Gaza, Judea and Samaria rather than playing a central role in the global jihad against non-Muslims, we are making it harder for our allies, first and foremost the Americans, to see the true nature of the war they too are fighting. If it is only Israeli settlers who are preventing peace by living in mobile homes in Judea and Samaria then perhaps it is only America in its "arrogance" that is preventing the jihadis from coming to a meeting of the minds with the West.

As the jihad spreads throughout the world, we must stop finally with our self-destructive self-absorption. The butchers in Zeitoun who kicked the remains of our soldiers like footballs on Tuesday, like the butchers in Baghdad, Karachi, Riyadh and beyond who kill with barbaric ecstasy and primordial hatred do so not because of anything we have done. They do so because they are barbarians. And if we do not wish to be destroyed, we must do everything to destroy them and nothing to give them hope for victory against us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

To understand what must be done to defeat the forces of Islamic fascism, we must understand its strengths and vulnerabilities. In a word, they are the same: Oil.

Last Saturday we were given a reminder of this fact in the form of a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia.

In the Red Sea port city of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, jihadi gunmen opened fire on foreign workers in the offices of the Swiss-based ABB Lummus engineering firm in the city. In all, the four terrorists, all Saudis, killed two Americans, two Britons, one Australian and one Saudi national.

The attack was distinctive because of its target. Yanbu, as the western endpoint of Saudi Arabia's east-west oil pipeline, is one of the backbones of Saudi Arabia's oil industry. Some nine hundred thousand barrels of oil are pumped to Yanbu daily.

Saudi Arabia's daily oil production of 8 million barrels constitutes ten percent of the world's total daily output. But that is not what makes Saudi Arabia so important. Saudi Arabia's oil is crucial to the global economy because it is the only country in the world that can easily ratchet up its production in a significant way – to as much as 10.5 million barrels per day. When oil workers go on strike in Venezuela, or when terrorists attack New York and Washington, the Saudis raise their supply and thus act as the shock absorbers of the global economy. Add to that the fact that Saudi Arabia has 25% of the world's proven petroleum reserves and the point becomes clear: An attack on Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructures is an attack on the global economy.

And indeed, the point was well taken. By mid-week, the price of crude oil futures for next month had surged to a 14 year high at just shy of $40 per barrel.

And this is nothing. The Yanbu attack did not actually cause any damage to the pipeline or the Yanbu port. It merely sent a message. Saudi Arabia's oil is devastatingly vulnerable to strategic attack. The kingdom exports most of its oil through two main terminals, Ras Tanura and Al Jubayl on the Persian Gulf side of the kingdom.

A major attack on one of the terminals could cripple global oil markets for months, sending the world into an economic depression more devastating than that of the 1930s. As The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, an attack that causes Saudi output to drop just 2.5 million barrels per day would raise the price of oil to $100 per barrel.

Wednesday, Pakistan announced that it had uncovered a plot to hijack a plane in Pakistan and fly it into a structure in the UAE. A plane crash into Ras Tanura, according to Dr. Gal Luft, the executive director of the Washington based Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, "could take 3 to 4 million barrels off the market overnight."

As one oil analyst told the paper, an attack on Saudi oil supplies is "one event to which no one has an answer."

The attack at Yanbu would not be particularly troubling if it could be seen as an isolated event. Yet, since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, there has been a string of attacks and attempted attacks on the oil economy in Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Over the past year of US-led occupation of Iraq, Iraqi oil infrastructures have been sabotaged no less than 100 times.

These attacks have severely degraded Iraq's daily production capacity from its pre-war average of 2.5 million barrels. If last week's coordinated seaborne attack on the Basra oil terminal in southern Iraq had been successful, the Iraqi oil economy would have been crippled and the reverberations of the attack would have been felt worldwide.

Osama bin Laden himself has explained that Al Qaida seeks to destroy the US by destroying the oil economy. According to Luft, "It is absolutely clear that we are looking at a growing phenomenon of terrorist attacks launched directly against oil infrastructures with the aim of destroying the international economy." Aside from the specter of a strategic attack on Saudi oil, the oil economy suffers from an additional structural weakness. Global demand for oil is rising steeply each year as India and China rapidly develop. Yet supply is not rising to meet this demand. According to Luft, "Growth in demand is outstripping exploration and recovery at a rate of 3-4 to 1."

More discouraging still is the fact that over the next 10 to 20 years proven reserves will become increasingly concentrated in the hands of Arab and Islamic producers. Whereas today 66 percent of the world's proven oil reserves are controlled by Middle Eastern regimes, at current production levels, by 2020, those regimes will control 83 percent of the world's petroleum.

And conquest of these lands to secure stable oil supplies does not provide an answer. As Luft notes, "The Iraqi case makes clear that it is one thing to conquer the oilfields. It is another thing completely to secure supplies from sabotage. The US has not been able to do that in Iraq and there is no reason to believe that it will have an easier time anywhere else."

The problem we are facing in our war against Islamic terrorism, not only in Israel but throughout the non-Islamic world is that we are fighting an enemy that we are economically dependent on. Saudi Arabia and Iran are the financial and ideological engines of the global jihad.

Yet, the structural flaws in the oil based economy – insufficient long-term supply, vulnerability to sabotage and concentration of resources in the hands Middle Eastern rogue states – point to the inherent weakness of these regimes: they are wholly dependent on their oil revenues. In Saudi Arabia, oil revenues make up 90-95% of total export earnings while oil and gas constitute 85% of Iran's total exports.

In the coming years, as demand outstrips supply, two things can happen. The global economy can be seriously damaged, or the major consumers of oil can seek alternative sources of energy to fuel their cars and airplanes. If the latter transpires, Saudi Arabia and Iran will cease to be capable of financing their holy war on the non-Islamic world and the war will end.

But how long will it take to find fuel sources capable of replacing oil?

The Institute for the Analysis of Global Security's work has shown that the way to diminish, with an eye towards ending global dependence on Middle Eastern oil is already at our fingertips. The technologies for developing and using alternative sources of transportation fuel already exists. Getting them on tap is largely a matter of public investment and private demand. Among the rewards is victory in the terror war by ending our enemies' ability to sponsor it.

In the short run, hybrid cars already exist and some three million cars that combine electric batteries with gasoline engines are already on the road in America. These "plug-in" cars can run on batteries for some 100 km before being recharged. Once the battery empties, the car immediately shifts to regular gasoline. Alternatively, the battery can be recharged by plugging the car into a 120-volt outlet for the night.

In the medium and long term, gasoline at the pump can be replaced by coal, biomass or natural gas-based methanol and corn or sugar-based ethanol. According to Luft, both fuels can be integrated into already existing transportation infrastructures and can run on internal combustion engines. An added benefit is that neither fuel emits carbon monoxide. Indeed, some four million cars already on the roads in the US are capable of running on ethanol and methanol as well as gasoline.

For an auto manufacturer, building engines that can run on these fuels involves an investment of a mere $100 per car. Methanol can currently be produced at 50 cents per gallon. For the US, which holds a quarter of the world's known coal reserves, as well as for China, which also has abundant domestic coal resources, moving to methanol transportation fuel could, according to Luft, reduce US demand for oil by half in the next 10 to 15 years. US power plants are already using clean technologies to convert coal into methanol.

Luft explains that all of these options are preferable to the hydrogen fuel cell technologies that have been touted from time to time in the past few years because "It will take 40-50 years for the technology to become viable and we don't have that kind of time."

For Israel, the need to develop alternate fuels should be a national priority and it is not beyond our grasp. Israeli scientists have made significant inroads in solar and wind energy, but have devoted less energy to synthetic fuels such as ethanol and methanol. With Israel's increased economic cooperation with India, which has a large domestic auto industry and a domestic demand for cars rising by over 50 percent per year, there is room for Israeli cooperative efforts with Indian car manufacturers to build electric hybrids and alcohol fuel friendly internal combustion engines.

Our tiny landmass, coupled with our high population concentration in the coastal plain makes Israel a perfect place to test out plug-in hybrid cars. It would both reduce pollution and act as a catalyst for demand overseas.

If the US economy were to suffer from an oil shock as a result of a debilitating attack on the Saudi oil supplies, the cost for the US of supporting Israel could well become prohibitive for American politicians sensitive to their public's demand for cheaper fuel. As Luft points out, during the oil shock of 1973, bumper stickers began appearing on US highways declaring, "We want oil, not Israel."

On the other hand, if Israel can outlast the oil economy, a new world, no longer fearful of Arab oil wrath will open up to us. The possibilities then would be limitless and the chances for true and lasting peace will no doubt be great and real.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.