The Non-Aligned Movement's decision over the weekend to bar Israeli tourists who live beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines from visiting their countries was greeted at the Foreign Ministry with an irritated yawn.

No doubt our diplomats should have mustered a bit more revulsion in their reaction to this affront to our national honor, rights and legitimacy. But it is equally true that the NAM declaration will doubtlessly have little impact on the vacation spots chosen by Israelis who live in eastern and northern Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria.

Just last week it was reported that Israelis make up the largest group – in absolute numbers – of tourists in Kashmir. The second largest group of tourists to that war-torn Indian state comes from China. That is, Israelis visit Kashmir in larger numbers than Chinese do even though China's population is 216 times larger than Israel's. No doubt, India, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Kenya, Tanzania and countless other states who are members of NAM would have serious qualms about voluntarily losing millions of dollars in tourist revenue annually by placing restrictions on travel by Israeli tourists in their mountain villages and marketplaces.

And lose them they most assuredly would. Because the truth is that Israelis don't like being treated badly. We don't like it when other people tell lies about us or when they try to selectively accept or reject us. In making our holiday choices, Israelis who are safely ensconced in Haifa and Tel-Aviv and Beersheva would think twice – actually, 75 times – before visiting a country that barred their brothers from Ariel and the French Hill and Gilo neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Despite what Peace Now would have the world believe, Israelis don't make distinctions between the blood of "bad settlers" who live in land controlled since 1967 and that of "good Israelis" who live in land controlled since 1949. And make no mistake, even if they do so with a stutter, our diplomats serving in NAM countries will make this point sufficiently clearly to their hosts.

A similar situation holds in the European Union. Like their NAM counterparts, EU member states believe it is to their political advantage to curry favor with the Arabs by condemning Israel and taking a passive-aggressive attitude toward the US. But so far, their talk of sanctions against Israel has been spoken in whispers that have been quickly silenced by cooler heads. As European sources well-versed in the policies of several EU member states assured me this week, the chance of the EU placing sanctions on Israel is small. Individual EU member states are barred from enacting trade sanctions unilaterally and Britain, Germany, Italy and the Czech Republic (among others) oppose them. Without consensus on the issue, it will never be adopted. Even with its original 15 members, the EU was never able to reach a consensus on suspension or abrogation of its association agreement with Israel. Now with 25 members and a new European Commission that is far less anti-Israel than its predecessor, the chance of the EU taking any concrete steps against Israel is virtually non-existent.

This is not to say that Israeli diplomats can rest on their laurels. This state of affairs must be cultivated. In spite of the well-known incompetence of Israel's diplomatic corps in making the case for Israel publicly, its members can take some pride in behind the scenes machinations that so far have prevented an anti-Israel consensus from forming in Europe.

All of this is important to bear in mind when examining the legal opinion submitted by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and to the editorial offices of Ha'aretz last week on the issue of the legal ramifications of the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion on the security fence. Mazuz made a series of claims in that brief regarding what he views as the perils to Israel emanating from that non-binding ICJ opinion.

Incorrectly referring to the ICJ's brief as a "decision," Mazuz wrote, "The decision creates a political reality for Israel on the international level that may be used to expedite actions against Israel in international forums, to the point where they may result in sanctions."

Mazuz did not give any evidence to support this claim. He simply asserted it. And on the basis of this far-fetched assertion, he reached some of the most radical and nationally destructive conclusions ever made by an unelected civil servant in Israel.

It should be noted that as a non-binding legal opinion, the ICJ's assertion that Israel has no right to take defensive measures in land it liberated in the 1967 Six Day War (or indeed any defensive measures against terrorism whatsoever), adds nothing substantive to the international legalistic onslaught against Israel that was officially inaugurated with the UN General Assembly resolution 3379 from 1975 equating Zionism with racism. There is nothing new in the ICJ's anti-Israel opinion that will in any way substantively change the hostile international political and pseudo-legal environment in which Israel has been operating for three decades.

Yet in spite of this, Mazuz reacted to the ICJ's opinion with hysteria. In order to placate the ICJ, as Mazuz fervently, though irrationally, believes Israel must, he recommends that the government "thoroughly examine" the formal application of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949 on the territories. This view flies in the face of the consistent policy of every single Israeli government since 1967. As former UN Ambassador Dore Gold puts it, "Even a theoretical discussion about the Fourth Geneva Convention appearing on the front page of Ha'aretz with its English website will undercut fundamental Israeli foreign policy positions held for over thirty years."

Israel's position on Judea, Samaria and Gaza has not changed since 1967. Israel claims the right to assert sovereignty over these lands by virtue of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine from 1922. The Mandate specifically designated all of these areas as part of what Britain was to develop as the Jewish homeland. As neither Gaza nor Judea and Samaria have been legally redesignated since, Israel is the lawful claimant to sovereignty in these areas.

Additionally, as Gold puts it, "The Fourth Geneva Convention is not applicable in the West Bank and Gaza because previous occupants [Jordan and Egypt] entered those territories illegally in 1948 during the Arab invasion of Israel." Since the Fourth Geneva Convention seeks to protect the sovereign from the occupying military power, and there has not been a recognized sovereign in the territories aside from the Jewish people since 1922, there is no factual basis for its application to the territories.

Perhaps as a result of this simple matter of fact, the ICJ judges felt it necessary to rewrite history in their opinion in a manner that erases the uncomfortable fact that the League of Nations determined that the Land of Israel was to become the Jewish state. In Gold's words, "The entire advisory opinion completely undercuts the fundamental rights of the Jewish people to national sovereignty. From its rendition of the history of the British Mandate one is to conclude that the League of Nations never made even a reference to the creation of a Jewish homeland but instead set up the Mandate for the Arab population alone."

Yet, on the basis of this completely biased and legally and historically inaccurate non-binding opinion, the sole goal of which is to groundlessly criminalize the Jewish state, Mazuz has determined that the government should summarily discard its solid legal positions and throw itself at the mercy of a hostile yet not acutely life-threatening UN.

Mazuz is not alone in preferring historically groundless, legally perverted opinions rendered by toothless international forums of not particularly noted jurists to the laws and policies of Israel's democratically elected governing authorities. Our self-appointed Supreme Court shares his view. In an apparent attempt to pre-empt the ICJ's non-binding advisory opinion to the UN General Assembly, the Supreme Court preferred the prescriptions of the irrelevant Fourth Geneva Convention to the security concerns of Israel as manifested in the route of the separation fence determined by the responsible military authorities.

Dismissing the army's security concerns and Israeli law, Supreme Court President Aharon Barak based his decision from June 30, to reroute the fence closer to the 1949 armistice lines on the application of the Fourth Geneva Convention to the territories.

Commenting on the new route, forced on the IDF by the Supreme Court, Yuval Steinitz, the Chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee said this week, "It is a dark day for Israel's national security."

When we take into consideration the low level of threat that UN General Assembly resolutions pose to Israel – a threat we have been living pretty well with now for 29 years – and combine it with the security threat constituted by our Supreme Court's reckless preference for its own international reputation over the legal rights and security concerns of the state, we come to a most discouraging conclusion that makes sense of Mazuz's unhinged legal opinion.

Our self-appointed and self-perpetuating legal elites have detached themselves from the rest of the country. Answerable to no one other than themselves, they have created a post-nationalist world view where the greatest threat to Israel's (read "their") well-being is our government and people's stubborn attachment to Israel's legal rights, laws and national interests.

It is not simply international pressure, hypocrisy and prejudice that have kept Israel from pursuing the war that was launched against it four years ago to a conclusive victory. When we look at our imperial legal fraternity we must come to the conclusion that our deepest wounds are self-inflicted.
 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The drumbeat of anti-Semitic and anti-American incitement marches on in the Egyptian government-controlled press. In recent weeks, the media in Egypt has come out with a series of articles that, like the long and continuous stream of their poisonous predecessors, dehumanize Jews, and criminalize both Israel and the United States.

In one recent piece in the ruling National Democratic Party's newspaper Al-Liwaa Al-Islami, Dr. Rif'at Sayyed Ahmad wrote a dirge of Holocaust denial entitled "The lie about the burning of the Jews." Like most Holocaust denials, this one argues that the Jews made up the Holocaust in order to blackmail the world into giving the Jews a state where they proceeded to carry out a "holocaust" against the Arabs.

In another article, in the government's religious magazine Aqidati, columnist Hussam Wahba penned a long blood libel against the Jews in which he argued repeatedly that the Talmud demands that Jews murder non-Jews wherever they are to be found. And, of course, that Jews murder non-Jews in ritual killings to make Passover matzot.

Less graphically, two Egyptian government magazines, Al-Ahram Al-Arabi Weekly and Al-Ahram Weekly published articles claiming that US concern about the genocide being carried out in the Darfur region of Sudan is really just a ruse for Washington to gain control over the Sudanese oil fields.

Unfortunately, if it weren't for the Middle East Media Research Institute's painstaking translations of these articles, there would be almost no way for us to know about the Egyptian government's continuous campaign to hammer deep and enduring hatred of the Jews, Israel, and the US into the hearts and minds of the Egyptian people.

The Israeli government rarely bats an eyelash in response to these expressions by Hosni Mubarak's media. It certainly doesn't link Israel's willingness to treat Egypt with deference to the cessation of this Nazi-like dehumanization of the Jewish people. And it doesn't seem to consider that the deep and abiding hatred for all things Jewish that is so studiously inculcated into the Egyptian consciousness may have policy implications for the stability of the cold war that exists between our two countries.

To the contrary, as Egyptians ingest their daily diet of venom, Israeli generals are vigorously engaging their Egyptian counterparts in discussions on the role that the Egyptian military will play in a post-Israeli withdrawal Gaza.

Earlier this month a high-ranking delegation of Egyptian generals, led by Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman, was treated to televised embraces by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and his underlings at the Defense Ministry. Next month, our generals are scheduled to fly to Cairo for a reciprocal visit. The aim of these friendly parleys is to work out the Egyptian role in Gaza after an IDF withdrawal.

Egypt's engagement of Israel is part of its two-pronged strategy for Gaza. At the same time that it discusses altering the 1979 treaty with Israel in a manner that will allow the Egyptian military to deploy up to 15,000 troops along the border with Israel, and perhaps in Gaza itself, it is holding discussions with the PA, Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad to put together a plan for what Gaza will look like after these terrorists take full control of the area.

Both Egyptian and Israeli sources involved in the bilateral security talks have informed the press that Egypt has laid down four conditions for its support for Sharon's unilateral Israeli retreat from Gaza. These conditions involve (1) the transfer of control over the 10-kilometer-long Gaza-Egypt border to Egypt; (2) full Palestinian control over the Rafah border terminal with Egypt, the PA airport in Dahaniya, and the Gaza seaport; (3) the reopening of the "safe passage" route connecting Gaza and Judea to enable uninhibited Palestinian travel through Israel; and (4) an Israeli commitment not to reoccupy or attack the Gaza Strip after an IDF withdrawal.

These demands, breathtaking in their effrontery, would endanger the national security of Israel. Yet Mofaz did not cancel the talks. Indeed the government continues to behave as if the Egyptians are being helpful.

Maj. General (res.) Doron Almog, who commanded the Southern Command from 2000-03 authored an article in the current issue of The Middle East Quarterly entitled "Tunnel Vision in Gaza." Almog argues that transferring control over the Gaza-Egypt border, or the so-called Philidelphi corridor to the Egyptian military, would be disastrous not merely to the stability of Gaza, which he claims is liable to quickly deteriorate into a "mini-Afghanistan" as a result. The move, he writes, could well destabilize the entire region by encouraging Egypt to abrogate the peace treaty.
 

Almog writes that Egyptian "[t]olerance for smuggling and infiltration, like anti-Israel demonstrations in Cairo and incitement in the media, appears to be designed to relieve some of the pressure exerted by anti-Israel public opinion in Egypt." Taking his analysis a step further, the Egyptian government encourages anti-Semitism and enables terrorism against Israel in order to promote domestic stability in Egypt itself.

As Almog notes, Egypt "is an authoritarian and inefficient state that has failed to meet even minimal goals of political and economic reform." If they didn't have Israel to hate, the frustration of Egyptians with the failure of their government to enable their national advancement and promote civil liberties would turn on the regime itself. So regime stability is dependent on anti-Semitism and support for Palestinian terrorism.

Given this state of affairs, Almog argues that Israel must not provide Egypt with a role in Gaza after the withdrawal. Rather, he concludes that Israel must retain total control of the international crossing points and border zones in Gaza even though doing so will provide the Palestinians with a rhetorical basis for claiming that Israel has not withdrawn. Like Hizbullah with the Sha'ba Farms, the Palestinians will use Israeli control of the borders to justify further terrorism emanating from Gaza itself.

Almog's view of Egypt is strengthened by the Egyptian-brokered deal between the PA, Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad for the post-IDF withdrawal period in Gaza. Reports of the deal vary but they all boil down to a few common elements. Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad will not be dismantled. Rather, they will either continue to operate autonomously but in a coordinated manner with the PA militias, or they will join the Palestinian army in Gaza that Cairo is set to train.

Terrorism against Israel will not cease, but its focal point will likely move to Judea and Samaria to provoke further Israeli retreats.

Several reports this week have claimed that Marwan Barghouti, the head of Fatah in Judea and Samaria who is now serving six consecutive life sentences in Israeli prison for six separate murder convictions of Israeli citizens, has played a large role in organizing the Egyptian-sponsored agreement. Yediot Aharonot reported this week that Barghouti, who is in solitary confinement, was able to conduct these negotiations with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders in Damascus and Beirut through meetings he has held in recent weeks with 48 different attorneys.

According to Ofer Lefler, the spokesman for Israel Prisons Service, prison authorities have no legal ability to prevent Barghouti from holding such meetings. But this is a willful misreading of the law. According to the Prisons Service Regulation 29(B), "if suspicion arises that a meeting between a prisoner and his lawyer will enable the commission of a crime that endangers the well-being or security of another person or the security of or well-being of the public or national security, the head of the Prisons Service or the prison warden may order the prevention or interruption of such a meeting."

Barghoutis's actions are motivated by clear goals. He wishes to strengthen his own position and he wishes to continue to coordinate cooperation between Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas in the conduct of the war against Israel as he has been doing since the planning stages for the war in the summer of 2000.

Egypt's two-pronged strategy of engaging Israel and the terrorists in separate negotiations is also clear. Egypt wishes through its coordination of the various terror factions to promote relative stability in Gaza among Palestinian terrorist groups to prevent Palestinian refugees from moving into the Sinai.

At the same time, it wishes to provide a framework for cooperation to ensure that all terrorist factions remain directed against Israel and only Israel to prevent destabilization of Egypt and promote destabilization of Israel.

Finally, Egypt seeks to enhance its position in the Arab world by extending its support for global jihad from the diplomatic sphere to direct sponsorship of terror against Israel even as it wins plaudits for its "constructive role" from both Israel and the US.

While the impetus driving Egypt and Barghouti in their moves to turn Gaza into a "mini-Afghanistan" are clear, Israel's policies on the issue are incoherent yet familiar. In planning for the retreat from Gaza today, as with the Oslo accords 11 years ago and Israel's view of Egyptian intentions at the Suez Canal in 1973, Israel's strategic planners are seized by wishful thinking about the intentions of our enemies as we voluntarily abandon the means to defend ourselves.

Those earlier strategic misconceptions based on fantasies caused us thousands of otherwise preventable deaths. We can only hope that our leaders and strategists will get wise to reality this time, before we are forced to pay yet another unthinkable price for their willful blindness to reality.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Events from the past week indicate the US has lost its way in the war on terrorism.

On August 8, warrants for the arrest of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi and his nephew, Salem Chalabi, who is overseeing the preparation of a war crimes tribunal against Saddam Hussein, were issued by a US-appointed Iraqi magistrate. Ahmed Chalabi, who headed the Iraqi Governing Council's finance committee, is charged with holding forged dinars. Yet Sinan Shabibi, the governor of Iraq's Central Bank, has denied he ever launched any charges against Chalabi and attests that the 3000 forged dinars found in Chalabi's office, valued at $2, were clearly stamped "Forgery" and that Chalabi held them by virtue of his official position.

Salem Chalabi is charged with the murder of the late director-general of the IGC's Finance Ministry. The only basis for the charge is that the two men argued some weeks before the murder. According to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, "...even Ahmed's enemies say they find the [charges against Salem] incredible." The judge who filed the arrest warrants against the Chalabis, as well as against the spokesman and the head of security for the INC, is one Zuhair al-Maliky, a former translator for the Coalition Provisional Authority who was appointed to head the Iraqi Criminal Court by the then-US regent in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer.

Maliky received his appointment in spite of the fact that he had no prior experience as a jurist. It was also Maliky who signed the order to raid Chalabi's offices last May. That raid led to allegations that Chalabi was spying for Iran. Those charges have never been substantiated. Yet the raid served to discredit both Chalabi and Pentagon officials who for years have championed Chalabi and the INC against repeated attempts by the CIA and State Department to destroy the organization.

The timing of the arrest warrants was doubtless not coincidental. This week, Ahmed Chalabi was set to participate in meetings ahead of the convention of the Iraqi national assembly, the provisional parliament that is supposed to constitute a check on the power of the UN-appointed government led by the former Baathist and CIA informant Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. According to former CPA employee Michael Rubin, who reported the background of this story in National Review Online this week, Allawi is uninterested in the convention of a national assembly that could check his as-of-now seemingly limitless authority.

This week, Chalabi was also scheduled to meet with visiting members of the US House of Representatives, who are in Iraq on a fact-finding mission regarding the UN oil-for-food scandal in which UN officials and foreign governments allegedly earned millions of dollars in scurrilous oil giveaways by Saddam Hussein. Chalabi had been conducting the IGC's investigation of the scandal. His investigation was coming to a fore last spring as the Bush administration was seeking to mollify the UN in order to receive its imprimatur on the handover of governing authority to the Iraqi provisional government.

As a result, last May, Robert Blackwill, the National Security Council's point man for Iraq, had his aides put together an options memo on how to marginalize Chalabi. Shortly thereafter, Maliky ordered the raid on Chalabi's offices.

Chalabi's colleagues view him as the most effective coalition-builder in Iraq and one of the main forces capable of transforming Iraq into a pluralistic, law-abiding, secular, pro-American democracy. Yet, in return for its decision to abandon Chalabi and derail his investigation of the oil-for-food scandal, the US received the short-term payoff of UN Security Council approval of the handover of sovereignty this past June.

But what have been the other consequences of US abandonment of the most stalwart voice for Iraqi democracy? Allawi, who according to eyewitnesses shot dead six bound and blindfolded Iraqi prisoners three weeks after he was named interim Iraqi prime minister, is pushing Iraq down the path of reversion to an authoritarian dictatorship run by former Baathists. The Shi'ites are concerned. The Kurds, the US's most stalwart allies in Iraq, are contemplating a future need to win independence to preserve their hard-earned democracy by force of arms. For his part, Chalabi has taken a recent liking to the US's Shi'ite enemy Moqtada al-Sadr, whom Chalabi recently defended for his struggle against US occupation.

And the US's decision to placate the UN has not made the UN more willing to send peacekeepers to Iraq. Nor has the UN Security Council's recognition of Allawi's government signaled a change in the overall UN hostility toward the US's stated aim of democratizing Iraq.

The French recently blocked a US bid to have NATO forces train Iraqi security forces. By squashing the independent Iraqi oil-for-food investigation, the US lost an opportunity of watching Iraqis themselves discredit the governments that most vociferously opposed the US decision to liberate them from Saddam.

The US actions in Iraq should be disturbing to Israel. Not only has Chalabi, the US's staunchest Shi'ite ally, been discarded in favor of forces that oppose the Bush administration's aim to bring democracy to Iraq. In the administration's haste to win UN approval of the Allawi government, it agreed that the UN resolution on the transfer of governing authority would make no mention of the temporary constitution (negotiated by Chalabi) that gave the Kurds veto power to ensure their freedom.

The Kurds viewed this as a betrayal of their friendship by Washington. As one Kurdish fighter explained last month in The Los Angeles Times, "After the incident with the UN resolution, the [Kurds] became impatient because their concerns were not answered. Kurds took part effectively in the liberation war, but what we got back was not as much as we put in." We see here that in order to appease institutions like the UN as well as the French, and the now overtly hostile Turks, the US has sidelined and indeed harmed its best friends.

What this bodes for Israel was alluded to by a story published in the Sunday New York Times about US disenchantment with diplomatic attempts to stem the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Times reported that given the failure of Western diplomacy aimed at thwarting Iran's nuclear weapons program, the US is now pushing for the issue to be transferred to the UN Security Council for management.

According to the Times, the Bush administration's increased urgency on the matter is driven in part "by increasingly strong private statements by Israeli officials that they will not tolerate the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, and may be forced to consider military action if Tehran is judged to be on the verge of deploying a weapon."

So, at least in part, what is driving the US to action in Iran is the fear that Israel, the US's inconvenient yet staunchest and most loyal ally in the war on terror, may actually deal with the largest threat looming from the global terror nexus: Israel's physical destruction by a terrorist regime in possession of nuclear weapons.

One would think that if the US is truly reconciled to the evil of the Axis of Evil's most active member, the US would embrace an Israeli military plan to take out Teheran's nuclear facilities, and indeed cooperate with Israel from its bases in Iraq and Afghanistan to ensure the success of this crucial mission.

Yet what we see is that Israel is liable to be treated like a Chalabi. While the US is pushing Britain, France and Germany – whose attempts to negotiate with Teheran have utterly failed – to move the issue from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the UN Security Council, it is far from clear that any of these countries support such a move. And it is even less clear whether, in the event that the US succeeds in moving the issue to the UN Security Council, these countries would sign on to any US resolution calling for effective (i.e., military) steps to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. Still less clear is whether the other two member of the UN Security Council – Russia, which built Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor, and China, which has supplied it with nuclear technology – could be swayed by the US.

More likely is a scenario in which Israel becomes a scapegoat in a US attempt to forge a coalition of states that share none of the US's interests vis-a-vis Iran. Iran this week demanded a guarantee of protection from Britain, France and Germany against an Israeli nuclear strike. IAEA chief ElBaradei's recent visit to Israel, where he pushed Israel to open its nuclear installations to international monitoring, could easily pave the way for a draft UN Security Council resolution calling for sanctions against Israel in the event that the government refuses to allow IAEA inspections of our nuclear installations. The US could well find itself in a position of being alone in demanding action against Iran and being either blackballed or forced to accept an equation of Israel with Iran in order to avert yet another head-on collision with its purported allies on the Security Council. And in the meantime, unless Israel acts on its own, months will have passed with no effective action against the Iranian nuclear program.

The situation is all the more distressing when we take into consideration the fact that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is even worse than the terribly confused Bush administration. Following the issuance of the spurious arrest warrants, Kerry called for an investigation into how the US ever had a relationship with Ahmed Chalabi to begin with. Last week, James Rubin, one of Kerry's senior foreign policy advisers, told Newsweek that a Kerry administration would seek to engage Iran and "call its bluff" by offering the fanatical theocracy nuclear fuel in exchange for a pledge not to develop nuclear weapons.

This means we are stuck with hoping for a Bush victory even as the administration itself has forgotten the fundamentals of statecraft and morality: In war and in peace, be good to your friends and bad to your enemies. We can only hope that it regains its bearings soon.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Ma'aleh Adumim defines the Israeli consensus in much the same way that falafel balls and Tel Aviv beaches do. Aside from some serious crazies on the extreme Left of the political spectrum, you aren't going to find Israelis who don't view Ma'aleh Adumim as an organic part of Israel, just like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Even when Ehud Barak moved from negotiating with Yasser Arafat at Camp David to begging Arafat to sign a deal, any deal at Taba, he still maintained that Ma'aleh Adumim, located ten minutes outside of Jerusalem, would remain part of Israel. Even when Bill Clinton announced his "final offer" to Arafat in December 2000 that included transferring the Temple Mount to PLO sovereignty, Ma'aleh Adumim remained part of Israel.

But suddenly this week we have the Bush administration, less than three months before the presidential elections, demanding that Israel not build in Ma'aleh Adumim. We have State Department officials and spokesmen skewering Israel for announcing plans to build 600 more housing units in the city with more than 30,000 residents. According to Ha'aretz, we even have a senior administration source threatening that "When President Bush is elected for a second term he will no longer treat [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon as he did the first term."

And it isn't only the State Department. According to press accounts, Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council's point man for Israel and the Palestinians arrived here Wednesday armed with strong words for Prime Minister Sharon the gist of which is, "Stop building in the settlements, or else."

The Bush administration's anger at the plan to build in Ma'aleh Adumim is wrong for three reasons. First of all, it makes no sense in the context of the administration's stated policy toward Israel. The Bush administration's policy toward the Palestinian war with Israel is that the Palestinians must reform to the point where they become an anti-terrorist democratic society. Once that happens, the US will support the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state that will exist west of the Jordan River and live at peace with Israel.

In the unlikely event that such a transformation of Palestinian society were to occur within the next generation, it is impossible to understand why an additional six hundred Israeli families living in the city of Ma'aleh Adumim will be a problem to anyone. If the Palestinians are democratic and anti-terrorist and therefore willing to live at peace with Israel, then they would surely be able to accept that Ma'aleh Adumim is one of the places beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines that will remain part of Israel forever. And if they cannot accept that position but rather insist that Ma'aleh Adumim belongs under Palestinian sovereignty, then surely a democratic, anti-terrorist Palestinian state won't have a problem with the ten percent of Palestine which is Jewish just as Israel doesn't have a problem with the Israeli Arabs who make up twenty percent of the Israeli population.

Indeed, it would be downright racist for the US to acquiesce to a demand that the peaceful, democratic, anti-terrorist State of Palestine west of the Jordan River become yet another Judenrein Arab state like Saudi Arabia. And if the Bush administration does foresee that the nascent Palestinian state will in fact be Judenrein then they are behaving immorally. Basing a foreign policy on inherently racialist assumptions is antithetical to everything the US stands for. And a policy which assumes that Jews must be barred from living freely in a Palestinian state is racist to the core.

Secondly, the Bush administration's policy towards the Palestinians is antithetical and counterproductive to its entire war against global terrorism. Last month, Ghaleb Awali, a senior Hizbullah terrorist responsible for coordinating Hizbullah assistance to and direction of Palestinian terror operations was killed in Lebanon. In a departure from his previous policy, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah admitted for the first time at Awali's funeral that Hizbullah is directly involved in the Palestinian war against Israel. On July 22nd, the Popular Resistance Committees, a terror umbrella group made up mainly of Fatah members and members of the PA's security forces held a memorial rally for Awali in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza. Members of the Islamic Jihad also participated. In front of a crowd of thousands, the organizers thanked Hizbullah for its assistance to the Palestinian cause. At the rally's conclusion, the crowd broke out in the traditional Hizbullah-Iranian slogan of "Death to America! Death to Israel!" as they burned US and Israeli flags.

The Palestinian jihad against Israel is part and parcel of the global jihad against the West. The war on Israel is no different in means or ends than the war taking place in the Philippines or Afghanistan or Iraq. And the need for stalwart, continuous pressure to be applied harshly on both the terrorists and the regimes that support them, which informs US policy everywhere else in the world, is needed in the case of the Palestinians. When America calls for Israel to compromise, or insists on engaging every single member of the Palestinian Authority except for Arafat, it is shooting itself in the foot. The notion that the 13 separate terrorist militias that Arafat formed since 1994 under the guise of "security services" can be magically transformed into normal, anti-terrorist police forces once they are collapsed into three militias run by an Arafat lackey as opposed to Arafat himself, is absurd.

And Muhammed Dahlan, the Bush administration's "great white hope" for Palestinian reform is just as much of a terrorist as Arafat. Their dispute is not over the jihad. It is a rivalry between thieves who can no longer figure out a way to share their loot. So it is that in an interview last week, Dahlan did not hesitate to express his sympathy for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah's terrorist arm. "I am proud of defending them every time it was necessary. They are familiar [and the Palestinian people] are proud of their heroic operations, which brought dignity to the Palestinian people," Dahlan said.

When President Bush outlined his policy toward the Palestinian war against Israel in June 2002, he made it clear that for a Palestinian state to be established, the Palestinians would first need to choose new leaders who were not "tainted by terror." Yet two years later there is still not one prominent Palestinian leader who is not a member of an active terrorist organization. The Bush administration's refusal to allow Israel to dismantle the PA's militias, which are all tainted by terror, makes it impossible for any alternative Palestinian leadership to emerge. Whether it is the so-called "old guard" of Fatah, or "new guard" of Fatah, it is still Fatah, and all of the factions of Fatah, like their colleagues in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, agree on one thing: as much as they may hate each other, they hate Israel more.

The most bizarre aspect of the Bush administration's policy toward Israel, particularly as it is exposed by statements about Ma'aleh Adumim, is that aside from rhetoric, there is no significant difference between how it perceives Israel and how the Carter administration perceived Israel. As president, Jimmy Carter failed to recognize the fact that the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the Arab world's official refusal since 1922 to agree to the presence of a Jewish sovereign state in the Levant. The Palestinian war with Israel is simply a consequence of the overall refusal of the Arab League to accept the existence of Israel as a Jewish state within any boundaries. Rather than accept this state of affairs, Carter preferred the path of denial and appeasement, which involved putting pressure on Israel and condemning Israel for somehow being responsible for Arab racism and rejection.

In every other area of the Middle East, and indeed in every other aspect of its foreign policy, the Bush administration has bravely sought to place blame where it belongs – on rogue states and terror supporting regimes rather than on the victims of their absolutism and aggression, be those victims the Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein, the Afghan people under the Taliban, the Iranian people under the ayatollahs, the North Korean people under the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang or the American people who are targeted by al Qaida and its state sponsors.

While Carter's presidency is remembered as a colossal failure by almost all Americans, in truth, his view of the world still stands at the center of the polarization of American politics. Carter's view of America as tasked with advancing the cause of human rights only when those rights are perceived as being suppressed by America or its fellow democracies – and never when human rights are suppressed by totalitarian dictatorships – is by and large the view of the Kerry campaign.

While the Bush administration has sensibly discarded this view as so much nonsense, particularly in the post-September 11 world, for some reason, the Bush administration still clings to Carter's view of Israel.

In the months before the US presidential election, it behooves those who desire an American victory against the global jihad to demand that the Bush administration finally discard the Carter doctrine once and for all. Regardless of how inconvenient it may be for appeasement minded State Department officials to accept, the fact of the matter is that Israel and the US are fighting the same war against the same enemies.

In refusing to integrate this reality into its overall foreign policy, the Bush administration is acting as a Kerry administration most certainly would. It is strengthening America's enemies and weakening the cause of freedom throughout the world.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.