The arrival Wednesday morning of a special El Al flight at Ben Gurion airport with 200 French Jews immigrating to Israel was a beautiful thing. As they disembarked, to the buzz of news crews from around the world, the new arrivals broke out in song and dance as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon welcomed our brothers and sisters home. It was enough to turn the greatest cynic into a sobbing idealist.

The scene was significant not simply because every time a Jew moves to Israel we see the Zionist dream come true. It was significant also because it came just a week and a half after Sharon, in a moment of moral leadership and clarity, told the Jews of France, "If I have to advocate to our brothers in France, I will tell them one thing: Move to Israel, as early as possible."

In the first six months of 2004, the French Interior Ministry recorded 510 anti-Jewish attacks or threats. During the whole of 2003, only 563 such incidents were reported. Yet, in the wake of Sharon's call for French Jews to come to Israel, where they will be able to live proudly, if not safely, as Jews, French President Jacques Chirac went ballistic. If there is anything the French hate, it is moral clarity.

Sharon's remarks coincided nicely with France's success in bringing the entire European Union on board in voting for the UN General Assembly resolution condemning the security fence. That resolution was itself founded on the International Court of Justice's ruling that Israel has no right to build the fence to protect ourselves from Palestinian suicide bombers.

It is no coincidence that France was acting in an overtly hostile manner toward the Jewish state when Sharon made his declaration. In recent years, rarely a day has gone by without some French leader doing something to make common cause with those devoted to the annihilation of the Jewish state.

From the French ambassador to Britain's statement calling Israel a "sh-tty little country," to former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard's declaration that the creation of Israel was "a mistake", to its persistent support of Arafat despite mountains of evidence implicating him as a current and active mastermind of terror, France has made it plain that it is an opponent, not an ally, in the Arab-Muslim war to destroy us. So yes, it was sweet to see 200 Jews telling us that they see their future here and not in France.

The problem with France is not simply that one in five French citizens voted for an avowed Holocaust-denier in the last election. Nor is it just that almost every week we hear another story about a synagogue torched, a rabbi beaten, a Jewish cemetery or Holocaust memorial defaced with swastikas or Jewish children terrorized on the subway or on their way to Hebrew school. Nor is it that France hates Israel. The French hating Israel is nothing that keeps anyone here awake at night.

The problem with France, rather, is that it has appointed itself arbiter of global justice, and in so doing inserted itself as a key factor in the US presidential race.

Senator John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, has made his objections to Bush administration's foreign policy a defining issue of his candidacy. During this week's Democratic national convention in Boston, speaker after speaker took to the podium and declared that under a Kerry presidency, the US would not act "unilaterally." A Washington Post analysis of Kerry's basic message to American voters noted that Kerry's major theme is a "restoration" of US positions during the 1990's under the Clinton administration.

As former Clinton administration official and current Kerry foreign policy adviser Richard Holbrooke put it to the Post, the Bush administration advocated "extremist ideas" that had "never had a voice in the policymaking bodies of the executive branch." One such idea, the Post paraphrased, was "acting unilaterally."

But what does "acting unilaterally" mean? It does not mean "going it alone." After all, there are several dozen other countries actively involved in US operations in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan.

Neither does "acting unilaterally" mean that in Iraq the US is acting outside of a clear UN Security Council mandate. Ahead of the US-led operations in Kosovo in 1999, in which Holbrooke played a key role, Russia used the threat of its Security Council veto to prevent the US from taking action under a UN umbrella. Yet no one has ever accused the US of acting unilaterally in Kosovo.

What "acting unilaterally" actually means to Holbrooke and Kerry is that the multilateral coalition Bush assembled in Iraq does not include France. It was France that prevented a UN Security Council resolution backing the US-led invasion, and it was France that led the EU and NATO to reject US requests to forge coalitions under whose aegis the US would lead the war against Saddam's regime.

With its UN Security Council veto, its membership in NATO and its leading position in the EU, France has fashioned itself the indispensable ally for Eurocentric Americans. This it has done in spite of the fact that France has opposed almost every single US foreign policy initiative since September 11. Yet, in spite of France's overt hostility, administration critics still believe that the US cannot garner a politically palatable coalition for action on the international stage without French involvement.

One of the truly disturbing aspects of France's success in so positioning itself is that the veneer of respectability of a French-approved coalition is so thick that even when such coalitions fail abysmally, no one seems to notice. Thus, according to a recently released report by Human Rights Watch, it was the French forces who were most responsible for NATO-led Kosovo force's decision to remain garrisoned as thousands of Kosovar Christians were evicted from their homes and villages by Albanian Muslims even as they were begged to come forward and protect these minorities. But who's noticing?

It is hard to know precisely what a Kerry presidency would hold in store for Israel specifically.

Yes, it is true that he seems to pay inordinate respect to outspoken Israel-bashers such as former President Jimmy Carter and Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Then again, Bush appointed the harshly anti-Israel Marine General Anthony Zinni to be his Middle East mediator shortly after assuming office.

Yes, it is true that Kerry seems determined to force Israel back to the negotiating table with Arafat and using Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk as his emissaries in spite of the colossal failure of every policy the two men advocated during the Clinton presidency. But Bush has adopted the Road Map, which formally, if not practically, gives the EU, Russia and the UN the status of arbiters in the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

One thing though, is clear enough. In the unrelenting emphasis Kerry places on a certain brand of "multilateralism," he is providing undue, unreasonable and unacceptable legitimacy to a country that does not wish Israel well. Kerry can choose to be a friend of France, or he can choose to be a friend of Israel. But this is one area where he can't have it both ways.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Has Israel won the Oslo War? Is the Aksa intifada over? Over the past several weeks a number of prominent voices have weighed in on this topic claiming triumphantly that indeed, the war is over. Israel has won.

There are several objective factors that lend to this conclusion.

Israel's economy, which was teetering on the verge of collapse in the first two years of the war is now making a strong comeback. Whereas in 2001 and 2002 the economy shrunk, by 2003, our economy grew by a modest 1.3 percent and conservative projections forecast a healthy 3.8 percent increase in GDP by the end of 2004.

The number of successful terrorist attacks has decreased by some 70% over the past year. The fact of the matter is that IDF forward deployment in Judea, Samaria and Gaza together with more sophisticated defenses, better technology and more specialized training and professionalization of the armed forces have together enabled Israel to prevent terror attacks that would have been undetectable four and even two years ago.

The precipitous drop in the number of Israeli casualties has had a psychological impact on Israelis. Today we cringe, rather than fall into a sweaty-palmed panic every time we hear ambulance sirens. Tourists, the kind that come here for fun rather than "solidarity missions," have returned to us.

Foreign exchange students are returning to our university campuses.

In short, it would seem, we are back to normal.

On the other hand, the Palestinian towns and cities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are wracked with anarchy and gangland violence between the various terror groups and PA militias in a seemingly endless turf war. When polled late last month about Gaza's prospects after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's planned evacuation, 59 percent of Palestinians said that they are worried that internal Palestinian infighting will ensue. More starkly, 69 percent of Palestinians believe that their lives and those of their family members are not assured.

Add to this popular sentiment about the Palestinian Authority. Eighty-seven percent of Palestinians believe it is corrupt; 92 percent support fundamental reforms of the PA while 53 percent do not believe that the PA is reforming. Fifty three percent of Palestinians also believe the status of human rights and democracy in the PA is poor.

And then there are the PLO apologists. Over the past couple of weeks some of the PLO's strongest and most knee-jerk supporters are voicing criticism of Yassir Arafat. Terje Roed-Larsen, who as the UN Coordinator in the territories has been one of Arafat's most trusted shields from criticism and one of his main shills for libelous attacks against Israel, has suddenly said that things are bad in Gaza and the Arafat isn't interested in governing.

Even more shocking, The New York Times, which holds the greatest responsibility for mainstreaming the PLO in the US, politely suggested on Thursday that Arafat consider retirement. Such statements from Arafat's best friends seem to indicate that the wall of international support for Arafat's terrorist dictatorship may be starting to crumble.

But there is another side to this story. And it tells a far different tale. Yes it is true, so this story begins, that Israelis are persevering and proving once again that the presence or absence of peace has no bearing on our ability to function normally and indeed to prosper. And yes, the Palestinians are miserable and poor.

Yet we have changed and they have not.

When Ehud Barak went to Camp David in July 2000, he did so after having lost a vote of confidence in the Knesset. He went as the head of a minority government increasingly despised by the overwhelming majority of Israelis. His offers at Camp David were rejected by a majority of Israelis. After the collapse of that summit, as Barak desperately begged Arafat for a peace deal in Taba, there was a complete disconnect between the sentiments of Israeli citizens and the machinations of the government. The landslide with which Ariel Sharon was voted into office in 2001 attests to the fact that Barak's platform – the surrender of all or most of Judea, Samaria and Gaza and the partition of Jerusalem with the ceding of the Temple Mount to Arafat – was completely rejected by the Israeli people.

Back in 2000, the idea of erecting a fence more or less along the 1949 armistice lines was seen as the default view of the far-Left. Politicians like Haim Ramon, who wanted to put distance between the Labor Party and the messianic visions of Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin, embraced the idea of the fence as a way to force Israel out of the territories with a delusion that we weren't creating a terror kingdom on the other side. The Likud under Sharon opposed the fence, rejecting the idea as a stupid version of the stupid Bar Lev Line which led to the fiasco of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Tempered by two years of war, in 2003, the Labor Party discarded its grandiose visions of PLO flags unfurled on the Temple Mount and based its election campaign on a call for the mere withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza and the destruction of the Israeli towns and farms that have been built there. Again, Israelis laughed, Sharon called it folly and won an overwhelming victory as the Labor party was all but decimated.

Yet what do we have today? Largely as a result of the Palestinian terror war, the Likud has adopted some of the most radical Labor views from four years ago. Not only is Sharon calling for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and the deportation of some 8,000 Israelis from their homes. He and the Likud have made Ramon's fence their own. Even Sharon's original route for the fence left plenty of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria on the Palestinian side and thus spelled out their eventual destruction. Under US pressure, Sharon basically agreed to have the fence follow the route of the 1949 armistice lines. And now, the Supreme Court has determined that even that was not enough. The Supreme Court's decision on the fence laid down the legal precedent that, as Ehud Barak conceded at Camp David, the territories are not disputed, they belong to Arafat.

Although Sharon still argues that he will not divide Jerusalem, his deputy and gadfly Ehud Olmert has already stated that at least five Jerusalem neighborhoods would end up in PLO hands. The route of the fence already takes two neighborhoods out of the city.

Shimon Peres, who has never been elected by Israeli voters, is poised to become reunited with his seat in the Foreign Minister's office. Four years after the transformation of his Oslo Peace into the Oslo War, Peres is still a true believer. He insists on resuming negotiations with Arafat and believes that it would be "immoral" for Israel to retain any territory it gained in 1967. According to Palestinian sources, Arafat is banking on both Peres's return and Bush's defeat in November.

When he assumed office in 2001, US President George W. Bush proclaimed that the proposals offered by Israel at Camp David, like the December 2000 Clinton Plan, were no longer valid. Yet over the past three and a half years, Bush has made Palestinian statehood one of the central planks of his foreign policy. His advisors have made clear that from their perspective Israel will at the end of the day transfer nearly all of the territories to the PLO. And Bush is still more supportive of Israel than his Democratic rival Senator John Kerry.

When Arafat rejected peace and turned to war four years ago, Barak and his foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami both argued that Europe would have to react to Arafat's action by finally ending its automatic support for the PLO. Alas, time has proved them wrong – again. As we learned last year, far from supporting Israel, the EU now considers us the greatest threat to world peace.

Levels of anti-Semitic sentiment and violence in Europe are higher than they have been since the Holocaust. Not only does the EU support every Palestinian position against Israel in every international forum, its leaders and elites have a new comfort level with the notion of Israel's destruction.

For their part, the Palestinians are proud of what they have accomplished. While 16% of Palestinians believe that Israel has won the war, 40 percent believe that they are on the winning side. There has been no dampening of support for terrorist attacks since the beginning of the war. Support for suicide attacks in Israel remains more or less steady at 62 percent. Sixty-nine percent of Palestinians believe that the "armed confrontations have helped achieve Palestinian rights in a way that negotiations could not."

As for Arafat, he is still the unquestioned leader. While it is true that various Palestinian factions are fighting one another, they are all paid by Arafat and they are all loyal to him. And while his supporters in the West half-heartedly criticize him, they will never abandon him.

And look at what he has accomplished: He went to war to gain through terror what he was given at the negotiating table. And he has achieved this aim. In so doing he showed that he will receive Israel's final offer from July 2000 as Israel's opening offer tomorrow and will do so without having made any concession in return. He is still a terrorist overtly committed to Israel's destruction and he has been handsomely rewarded for this.

Perhaps then, the best that can be said is that Israel won the Aksa intifada but Israel has lost the Oslo War.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On June 30, the Council for the Protection of Journalists penned a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon protesting a missile attack the previous night on an office building in Gaza. According to the CPJ, whose honorary chairman is Walter Cronkite, the building housed the offices of several foreign press organizations, including the BBC and MBC.

According to the IDF and to the Government Press Office, the building in question also housed offices of Hizbullah's Al Manar television and operated as a Hamas communication center. Through it, Hamas maintained constant communications with terrorists, disseminated propaganda and claimed responsibility for attacks like the one the organization had carried out the previous day – the murder of 4 year old Afik Zahavi and 49 year old Mordechai Yosepov by Kassam rockets in Sderot. This fact was ignored by the CPJ.

In its penultimate paragraph, the letter stated, "CPJ reminds you that media offices are civilian facilities and are protected from attack under international humanitarian law unless they are used for military purposes. The IDF has not provided any compelling evidence that the office was used in this manner. The attack on the building was also disproportionate to any perceived threat and reckless in endangering civilians – in this case the many journalists who work there."

The letter by the CPJ followed a similar protest launch by the Foreign Press Association in Israel.

The fact that Hamas and Hizbullah cohabit a building used by media organizations and hide their operations behind journalistic cover is nothing new. It is standard fare for terrorists, both in the Palestinian population centers and in Iraq, to disguise themselves as journalists and to use journalistic cover to travel freely.

Before his arrest by the IDF, Hassam Yusuf, the Hamas commander in Judea and Samaria, sat in a Ramallah office bearing the sign, "Nur Press Office." When last fall the US began pressuring Syrian dictator Bashar Assad to close the terrorist headquarters in Damascus, Assad claimed that they were not headquarters, but press offices.

At the beginning of the month, Agence France Presse photographer Mohammed Abed took a picture of two Palestinian terrorists in ski caps assembling a bomb in Rafah refugee camp. The photograph was shot from a distance of less than a meter. How was he allowed to get so close?

In Iraq there have been several instances of reporters arriving at the scene of terror attacks against coalition forces before the attacks take place. They have admitted that they were tipped off by the terrorists in order to enable them to take real time footage of dying Americans.

While Israel was roundly criticized for firing three missiles into the "press" headquarters of Hamas and Hizbullah, neither the CPJ nor the Foreign Press Association issued any condemnatory statement against the Palestinian Authority for the attack on New York Times bureau chief James Bennet in Gaza in May. When AFP photographer Jamal Arouri had both his arms broken by the Aksa Martyr Brigades earlier in the year to prevent him from working, neither organization launched a protest.

A Washington Post article about the US Army's fight against the Sadr army in southern Iraq this past spring includes a revealing line. In a fight in Najaf, US forces fought terrorists in a pitched battle that lasted six hours in order to prevent the enemy from taking hold of a burning Humvee. As one of the officers put it, "We weren't going to let them dance on it for the news. Even with all the guys they lost that day, that still would have given them a victory."

All the above vignettes point to the fact that the ability to harness the media and to control the images of the war is one of the chief components of the terrorist war doctrine. The enemy hides behind press credentials in order to gain operational cover. It stage-manages terrorist theater by giving "scoops" of attacks to fellow travelers with cameras, tape recorders and notepads. It reenacts battlefield defeats as victories before the cameras. It uses its video footage of its own atrocities to both frighten its foes and encourage its sympathizers.

In the strategic use of the media to advance their war aims, the terrorists are assisted by Western press agencies. "Reporters" from Al Manar, Al Jazeera, Hamas and Al Qaida websites and other propaganda organs are viewed as "colleagues" rather than agents of jihad and participants in the war.

From all of this it is clear that one of the greatest challenges to democracies in fighting and winning the war is finding adequate answers to the question of how to conduct an informational warfare campaign that is integrally linked to the battlefield and diplomatic aspects of the war.

The US military rediscovered one of the most potent weapons against terrorist media warfare in the planning stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The decision to integrate or embed journalists with US forces was a monumental achievement. In so doing, the US reinstated a long tradition of battlefield reporting that had been nearly snuffed out in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Having reporters with the troops enables the military to get out the story from the perspective of its own personnel in real time. When I was in Iraq with the US Army's 3rd Infantry Division the necessity of the embed program was constantly in evidence. This was perhaps most starkly brought to my attention with the American seizure of Baghdad airport.

As I phoned into Israel Channel 2 news to report that I was at the airport, I was told by the television producer on the other end of the line that I must be mistaken because the Iraqi "Information" Minister had just said that there were no US forces at Baghdad Airport.

So embedding journalists with combat units is exceedingly important. But as the war moves on and mutates into increasingly ugly and sophisticated forms of made-for-TV barbarism it clearly is not sufficient. Additional methods of fighting terrorist propaganda must also be found. One of these methods is to refuse to accord journalistic privileges automatically to anyone claiming to be a member of the press. The Iraqi Provisional Governing Authority recognized this when its members last year banned Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya satellite stations from broadcasting in Iraq.

News organizations should be judged by the impact of their reports and their content as well as by their legitimacy. If they are actively pursuing the cause of the enemy, they should be unmasked as the enemy. And this should be done without apology.

One of the advantages of the terrorists over the democracies they fight is that they have no compunction about lying. So it was in the case of the US air strike against a terrorist drop-off point on the Syrian-Iraqi border: before US officials in Baghdad had information about the raid, Arab "journalists" were reporting that US forces had bombed a wedding party.

In Israel's case, the first blood libel of the Palestinian terrorist war – the allegation that the IDF had killed 12 year-old Muhammed al-Dura in October 2000, was created as a result of the slowness of the IDF's ability to check the facts of the case. By the time the IDF had proved irrefutably that al-Dura had been killed by Palestinian forces, weeks had passed and the blood libel had circulated all over the Arab world.

To solve this problem, a policy must be adopted of never providing the terrorists with the moral high ground. On a strategic level, this requires never accepting blame for anything until all the facts have been unearthed. It is better to deny – indeed, it is possible to deny because, as a rule, the IDF does not target civilians – than to allow that the allegations may or may not be true. If, after the fact, it works out that civilians were killed, an explanation of the deaths can be given in a full context. The terrorists must never be granted a monopoly on telling the story.

On a tactical level, it means that democratic armies must integrate the informational warfare component into all their operational plans. This may involve becoming more flexible about exposing intelligence information. This may involve bringing army photographers with troops in every operation in order to take control of the visual image emanating from battle scenes.

While not according rights to terrorists and their media helpers, democratic armies must protect journalists who are actually doing their job. Reports have surfaced again and again of reporters from the US funded Al Hurra news network being physically attacked and harassed by terrorists and their supporters. This must not be allowed to continue.

While reporting in war zones always involves risk, democratic forces must do everything they can to provide a modicum of safety for legitimate reporters.

The informational component of terrorist-warfare doctrine is one of the most unique aspects of the present war. The proliferation of news sources through the internet and satellite television combined with the post-nationalist, post-modernist preferences of large swathes of the Western media elites have made the necessity of integrating informational warfare components into every stage of battle planning, fighting and post-combat debriefings and overall strategic planning absolutely essential. Getting the story out is now of equal if not greater importance than defeating enemy forces in any particular engagement.

Because without the story, the battlefield victory will eventually become a strategic defeat.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Sunday morning Shin Bet Director Avi Dichter made an incredible disclosure at the cabinet meeting. Dichter stated that Israel is the largest contributor to the Palestinian Authority's budget.

Israel gives the PA one billion dollars a year. This comprises 45 percent of the PA's total budget. "There is no oversight [to ensure] that each and every dollar Israel transfers doesn't go to funding terror," Dichter said. He added that Arafat's office receives a budget of roughly nine million dollars and, the director of the Shin Bet noted, "I cannot promise that at the margins the money doesn't go to finance Fatah/Tanzim terrorists."

In saying this, Dichter was making a clear and almost unprecedented indictment of the government. Our government is putting a billion dollars a year into a black hole controlled by one of the most active terror regimes in the world. And this terror regime is actively waging war against our country. And of course, our government knows that the PA uses its budgetary funds to finance terror because in the aftermath of Operation Defensive Shield, it published documents seized in IDF raids of PA offices and Arafat's headquarters proving that the PA directly funded suicide bombings and was paying the salaries of terrorists.

In any even semi-rational country, this disclosure would have been the story of the week – if not the year. After all, can anyone imagine the US media reaction to a disclosure by the head of the FBI that the US was funding the Taliban or the Ba'athist regime in Iraq after September 11? In any marginally sane society, there would be demonstrations launched, lawsuits filed, black headlines, and stuttering government spokesmen sent out to whimper excuses for the government's financing of the murder of its citizens by the sworn enemies of the state.

But, sadly, this story received four lines buried at the end of a story in the inside pages of Yediot Aharonot and barely a mention anywhere else.

Dichter also told the cabinet members that Jerusalem Arabs support the terrorist war against Israel as strongly as Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This too is a major story. It calls into question the entire rationale of the security fence. Sixty percent of all suicide bombings in the past year occurred in the capital. If the terror masters have a local population sitting in the capital that identifies with their jihad against Israel, how will a fence protect us from them? This story too, received almost no attention.

On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom met with US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington. Their meeting came three days before the ICJ was to announce its opinion on the legality of Israel's construction of the security fence and the day before the International Atomic Energy Agency's director Mohammed ElBaradei arrived in Israel for an unfriendly visit.

According to Shalom, during the meeting the two reached a series of understandings on Israel's requests that the Bush administration shield Israel from being scapegoated and sanctioned if, as anticipated, the anti-Semitic Egyptian and Jordanian justices on the court convince their colleagues to find Israel in breach of international law for trying to defend its citizens from suicide bombers.

Shalom also said that the two had discussed the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear weapons program; the PA's collusion with terrorist organizations; Egypt's refusal to end weapons smuggling operations to Gaza from its territory and Sharon's unilateral withdrawal plan from Gaza.

All of these are weighty issues. All of them are agenda setters. If one of the Israeli journalists at the two men's press appearance had gotten Powell on record saying anything about any of these issues, it would have been a major story. Imagine the headlines: "Powell says Iranian nukes pose existential threat to Israel," the day before ElBaradei's visit, or "Powell says Egypt must stop weapons smuggling to Gaza" ahead of Egyptian Intelligence Director Omar Suleiman's upcoming visit to Washington, or "Powell says PA has failed to reform," as the Quartet members met with Ahmed Qurei in Jerusalem.

But none of those stories held any interest for the Israeli reporters at the scene. Rather, Yaron Dekel from Israel Radio badgered Powell about the mobile homes at the so-called outposts in Judea and Samaria that have gotten Peace Now and Ambassador Dan Kurtzer all bent out of shape.

Isn't the US mad at Israel for not throwing the Jews living in these communities out of their homes fast enough? That's what Dekel desperately wanted to know. And so it was that to the extent that anyone paid attention to the visit, (it received but a picture with a caption in Yediot and Ma'ariv), the headline was: "Powell expresses disappointment on Israeli record with settlements."

This week a freelance writer named Lee Kaplan published an article in the on-line journal Frontpage Magazine about the International Solidarity Movement. ISM sends foreigners to Israel to disrupt IDF operations in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and to act as "human shields" to prevent IDF demolition operations. The British jihadis who carried out the attack at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv in April 2003 came to Israel with the organization.

Kaplan related how he went undercover as an ISM volunteer and underwent training sessions by the group ahead of a trip to Israel. The inside look that he provides on this organization is an unnerving expose of the inner workings of the radical Left's active collusion with terrorists. Kaplan noted that the ISM trainers touted their collaboration with Israeli leftists working for the B'tselem human rights organization, who provide alibis for ISM volunteers at the border to allow them to lie their way into the country, and provide them with legal assistance in the event they are arrested.

The article ought to provoke an immediate outcry about Israeli organizations that, according to Kaplan, systematically obstruct IDF anti-terror operations, hamper police investigations, and lie to border inspectors. It would certainly be of great interest to the Israeli public.

But no matter, no mention of the article was made in the Israeli press. Indeed, on Thursday, Haaretz ran a sympathetic story about one ISM volunteer who has been under arrest at Ben-Gurion Airport for the past two weeks refusing the Ministry of the Interior's deportation order. According to Kaplan, the woman's refusal to leave Israel, like her rapid acquisition of the legal services of two Israeli lawyers, one of whom, Shamai Leibowitz, also defended Marwan Barghouti, are all taken directly from the ISM playbook.

Wednesday CNN and several major newspapers in the US and The Jerusalem Post carried the story of an $875 million lawsuit filed in New York Federal Court by Israeli and American victims of Palestinian terrorism against the Jordan-based Arab Bank. The suit arose from documents that the IDF seized in its raid of the Arab Bank branch in Ramallah at the end of February which showed direct collusion by the Arab Bank in transferring funds from the US to Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The Arab Bank's role is so blatant, that on the Islamic Jihad's Web site (palestineway.com) the terror group gives account numbers of charitable organizations linked to the group at Arab Bank branches in Bethlehem, Jenin and Gaza to which donors can make contributions to the jihad.

The Arab Bank is one of the largest banks in the Arab world. It has branches worldwide and is closely linked to the Hashemites. According to the lawsuit, "the Jordanian-based banking institution with a branch in New York is knowingly administering the distribution of financial benefits to terrorists, the families of terrorists and foreign terrorist organizations as part of a scheme to encourage and facilitate acts of international terrorism."

This is a huge story. Its political and financial repercussions will be felt throughout the region and will no doubt have a significant impact on the Jordanian monarchy. But it received no attention from the Israeli media. It went unreported. No mention was made in the Wednesday papers, radio broadcasts or television newscasts.

This week of course, our media has been very busy. Since Dichter Sunday made an unsubstantiated comment, which he more or less retracted on Wednesday, about an increase in violence among the extreme right, the press has been busy demonizing the settlers. Our media cannot be bothered with real news when it is manufacturing conspiracy theories about unidentified assassins who are just waiting to kill the prime minister.

Last week, the Jewish Agency's Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning submitted a report to the prime minister on the state of the Jewish people worldwide. The institute is chaired by Dennis Ross, the former chief US peace processor.

Ross and his colleagues at the institute alleged that the Israeli government's policies have a negative effect on world Jewry. They argued that the government doesn't understand how its policies harm world Jewry and suggested that the solution is for Israel to confer official status on a consulting body of Diaspora Jews that would be involved in the decision making processes of the government. Ross also argued that Israel should do everything it can to reach out to the Arab world and make at least a partial agreement with the PA.

Ross's bald attempt to insert himself into Israeli policymaking evinced little note and certainly no shock from the Israeli media or the public. This should be strange since Ross's aggressive intervention into Israeli policymaking for close to a decade led to the most colossal policy failure in Israel's history and to one of the lowest points in US-Israel relations. The notion that anyone would listen to anything that he has to say, let alone give him a seat at the table, is patently absurd.

Yet, given the pathetic, mind numbing level of journalism in this country, it makes sense that no one noticed.

It is a sad and terrible thing that our media gives little real news to our understandably news addicted country. It is a sad and terrible thing that the People of the Book are served a diet of daily drivel from our print and broadcast media.

Rational people make their decisions on the basis of the best information they have on hand. Next time we wonder why Israel behaves in a seemingly irrational fashion, the first place to look for explanations is our media.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

As a little boy is murdered by rockets on his way to nursery school; and as soldiers are killed and wounded when bombs, burrowed deep beneath their outposts are detonated by terrorists using video cameras and increasingly sophisticated digging machines; and as 17 would-be suicide bombers are intercepted en route to Israeli population centers in one month, all eyes are now turning to The Hague.

Next Friday, the International Court of Justice will render its opinion on the security fence. That would be the fence Israel is building to protect its citizens from guided bombs in blue jeans.

The ICJ's decision last December to take up the request by the UN General Assembly and Secretary General Kofi Annan to provide an opinion on Israel's right to construct the security barrier must be seen as a hostile act by the ICJ against the Jewish state and not as a simple response to a simple request. This is so not only because two ICJ justices have gone on record in the past stating overtly hostile positions against Israel. The ICJ's decision to allow the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference – two explicitly anti-Semitic organizations – to make oral arguments before the bench is also a clear indication of the court's lack of objectivity towards the Jewish state.

That the ICJ agreed to produce an opinion, in spite of the fact that the General Assembly's request for one was stated in terms that presupposed what such an opinion would say, is also an unambiguous sign that the ICJ understood its role in this game was fixed from the start.

Israel did have some slight hope of curbing the court's reach. The hope was based on the briefs submitted by the US and some European states in which the court was told that it had no legal authority to voice an opinion on Israel's security policies when the issue of the final adjudication of territory was subject to political negotiation. If Western powers were convincing in their view that a court decision was insignificant, then, so the thinking in Jerusalem went, chances would be better than zero that the court would say that it cannot address the issue.

There is precedent for such a view. In 1996, the ICJ was asked by the General Assembly to issue an opinion on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons. Understanding that an opinion that their use is illegal would be laughed at, or worse, ignored, the court stated that in the absence of a clear context it could not give a studied opinion on the legality of nuclear warfare. In the case of the security fence, since the route of the fence was still largely unknown and the fence itself was only in the beginning stages of construction last December, the court could easily have stated that it doesn't have sufficient contextual information on which to render an authoritative opinion.

This hope, fragile from the start, was rendered even weaker on Wednesday morning by Israel's Supreme Court. Court President Aharon Barak and his fellow justices Eliahu Mazza and Mishael Cheshin made it clear that for its part, the Israeli Court would take the ICJ opinion seriously. The justices, who found Israel guilty of breaching the Geneva Conventions by causing "disproportionate" harm to Palestinian farmers in constructing the security fence, laid the legal and rhetorical groundwork for all future legalistic warfare against the Jewish state.

The Supreme Court made it clear that it places higher value on the convenience of Palestinians and on the wellbeing of their olive trees than it does on Jewish lives. As it stated in its judgment, "the state must find an alternative [route for the fence] that may give less security but would harm the local population less."

Such views arise from two sources: the first, Soviet-inspired, is that Arab hostility to Israel is a reaction to Israeli "crimes." Second is the historical ambivalence of Jews to the notion that we have a right to protect ourselves and assert our rights as a nation.

It is this view, the "blame Israel first view," that turns a blind eye to the bias against Israel that is becoming more and more prevalent and acceptable throughout the world. The same day that the Supreme Court issued its judgment, Ralph Nader, a candidate for the presidency of the United States, made one of the most overtly anti-Semitic statements ever uttered by an American politician. Nader said, "The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington. The Israeli puppeteer meets with puppets at the White House, and then moves down Pennsylvania Avenue, and meets with puppets at the Congress. And then takes billions in taxpayer dollars."

Also on Wednesday, French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, visiting Ramallah, claimed that Arafat "is the legitimate and elected president of the Palestinian people. The situation [of keeping Arafat limited to his headquarters in Ramallah] should not continue like this and this is the reason for my visit."

These statements, from an American and a Frenchman, make clear the biased atmosphere in which Israel operates in the world. Do our court justices need to be reminded what the Arabs say about us? Do they need to be reminded of what Palestinian society feels for us? Only last month two polls released by Palestinian institutions showed that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians sees no chance of peace with Israel and supports continuing the war against Israel. A poll by the PLO's Jerusalem Media Communications Center showed that 70 percent of Palestinians support continuing the war, with 62% voicing support for suicide bombings, and 46% saying that the goal of the war is to replace Israel with Palestine. A poll by Bir Zeit University showed that 84% of Palestinians see no chance for peace without the so-called right of return and 54% claim that there will be no peace even if Israel allows itself to be overrun by foreign-born Arabs.

Throughout the Arab world, children are taught in schools that Jews are subhuman and that their goal in life should be to annihilate us. Mosque preachers and television stars alike analyze the intricacies of Jewish cunning and evil and our monkey-like and piggish characters and evolutionary history. Even as Iranian UN mission personnel are expelled from the US for having photographed potential bombing sites in Manhattan, the Arab and Islamic world, not to mention swathes of European opinion, are captivated by fables of Mossad responsibility for carrying out the September 11 attacks, of Jews found photographing the Twin Towers in the weeks before they were bombed, and of 4,000 Jewish workers who mysteriously stayed home from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Yet Justice Barak will see none of this. Military necessity be damned. The absolute priority of safety for Israelis be damned. We cannot make Palestinian shepherds go through an inspection before they tend their flocks (even though Israelis need to undergo inspections every time we go grocery shopping, out for a cup a coffee, park our cars in public lots, board a public bus, and enter our schools, universities and office buildings). In both cases, the need for inspection is not to punish Israelis or Palestinians but rather to ensure that Palestinian bombers are thwarted in their attempt to murder innocent civilians.

Our elected leadership has consoled itself over Barak's usurpation of its legal authority to determine national policy by saying that his judgment is evidence that Israel doesn't need the ICJ to judge it. Our independent judiciary, so the thinking goes, is capable of ensuring that we follow the law. Yet this buys into the Barakian delusion of lack of international bias. Barak did not protect Israel from international condemnation by condemning Israel himself. He paved the way for more groundless opprobrium. Barak did not take the wind out of the sails of the anti-Israel justices at the ICJ. He gave them a tailwind in showing that the Israeli High Court of Justice shares their negative view of the Israeli government and armed forces.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.