In the wake of the Union Army's defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862, US president Abraham Lincoln paused to meditate about God's role in the war. The North lost some 14,000 men in the three-day battle, and so Lincoln had a great deal to ponder.

Considering the loss, Lincoln wrote, "The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to be acting in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time."

In the world we live in, many of us feel much more distant from God than did the men and women of Lincoln's day. In our world, we suffer less from crises of faith than from crises of perception. The reality we inhabit is filtered through to us not simply by what we see ourselves. In our global village, which links us together with satellite images and digital feed, events that occur on the other side of the planet are brought into our living rooms as quickly as events that happened down the street. And yet, our immediate experience is not pure.

In order to see what happens so far away from us, we are at the mercy not only of the photographer who shoots the picture. Our view is further influenced by the reporter who tells us what we are seeing, and the context he or she provides. We are then impacted by the media filters in the places we live. The television producers or newspaper editors decide where to cut the image or the story. Indeed, they decide whether to tell us the story in the first place. And if we are told, we then have the story interpreted for us by a battery of experts, who, like us, were neither present nor witnessed it themselves. But they are paid for their expertise, which they provide with abandon, if perhaps with a deficit of humility.

On Tuesday, in America, the citizens of the greatest democracy in the world will take to the polls to choose their leader. Acting as leaders must, both President George W. Bush, and his challenger, Senator John Kerry, have done their own jobs of interpreting reality for their people. And they have provided contradictory explanations.

Bush tells his people, and the rest of the world, that America is at war. Its enemies are pan-Arab, pan-Islamic terrorists and the regimes that support them. Their aim is world domination and is based on their fascistic, totalitarian ideology which, appropriately or not, they claim finds its roots and justification in the Koran. Bush explains that the war is real and that it cannot be wished away. It must be fought to victory and that victory will not arrive until the terrorists have been crushed and the dictatorial regimes that support them have been transformed into democratic governments that fight them.

Kerry, on the other hand, explains that the war is not real, but a result of Bush's hubris and a figment of his messianic imagination. It is possible to end the war, he promises, by reaching an accommodation with various regimes. Both the Arabs who harbor and support the terrorists and the Europeans who preach accommodation and hope for an American defeat can be brought to heel with a bit of love and kindness and a great deal of sympathy and appeasement from America. As to the terrorists, by Kerry's lights, with the right sort of legal framework – which of course would not include any impingement on anyone's civil liberties – they can be transformed from a warring foe into a nuisance to be dealt with via law enforcement techniques much like those used to curb prostitution and gambling.

These are two very different views of reality, and both of them cannot be correct simultaneously. Reality cannot be one thing and its opposite at the same time.

Today, American military planners are looking very closely at Israel's experience on the front lines of the global terror war. They view our experience as a guidepost for their planning because they realize that the enemies we both fight are common ones.

Since Israelis don't have an interest in domestic US politics – we are stuck with our draconian income-tax rates, our over-regulated marketplace, our Bolshevik labor unions, and our overtaxed socialized health system – what interests us most about the US presidential elections is how the candidates view the war. Although our media elites and experts spend most of their time trying to imitate their European counterparts and have therefore spent the better part of the past four years saying nasty, passive-aggressive things about George W. Bush while cheering on his political opponents, we Israelis, who live on the frontlines – who live the daily pictures sent by satellite feed around the world – don't need their pictures to tell us what we see.

We experience a new global reality with all of our senses. We walk the streets that have exploded. We sit in the cafes that have gone up in flames. And in opinion poll after opinion poll, we say, in overwhelming numbers, that Bush is right. Bush's margin of victory in Israel is larger than his projected margin of victory in his home state of Texas.

Ashton Carter, a former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Clinton administration, is now a professor at Harvard. Back in the roaring '90s he told his students, "Security is like air. You never think about it when you have it, but when it is gone, it is the only thing that matters."

Israelis know what he means. We have been living this way, here in the Land of Israel, for more than 100 years. We tried to pretend we were in Kerry's world in the 1990s with Oslo, but it blew up in our faces. Over the past four years we relearned what we had known until then: When you are facing an enemy who wishes to destroy you, you cannot wish him away no matter how hard you try. The only way to make him disappear is to fight him until you win.

Winning a war – whether against a conventional or a terrorist foe – requires three things: a military whose capabilities match its tasks; a nation with a survival instinct and a fighting spirit; and a leader who guarantees both.

In Israel we have the first two elements of victory pretty well in hand. We know the task before us, and in spite of our media, which is far more monolithic than that of the US, we recognize the reality before us. Our military is the world leader in counterterror warfare, and although we have much to improve, our commanders are aware of the challenges they face and rise to meet them in a manner that brings honor to themselves, their soldiers, and their country.

What is lacking in this country is leadership. When the Palestinians declared war on Israel in 2000, then prime minister Ehud Barak's response was to beg Yasser Arafat to change his mind. Then we got Ariel Sharon. The great general, who had fought with valor in all of our previous wars, stepped up to the plate and immediately lost his nerve.

As prime minister, he has done as little as he thinks his countrymen will let him get away with, and now he has turned his big guns against his party, his governing coalition, and his staunchest supporters who loved him all these years because of the courage he exhibited when he was younger.

But most Israelis are not moved by Sharon's promises of peace and security through retreat. Some 70 percent of Israelis believe that terror levels will remain static or increase if he goes through with his planned withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria. Sixty-two percent believe that international pressure on Israel to retreat from Judea and Samaria will either remain at its current high or increase if we vacate Gaza. Sharon's aides have already admitted that the reason he opposes a referendum on the withdrawal is that he believes he will lose. But if we don't get a referendum, given the way Sharon has decimated his governing coalition, we'll have new elections and shop around for someone better.

We know there is no silver bullet – that this war is long because it is great. We know that Palestinian terrorism is the prototype for the terrorism the entire world now faces. As with the Nazis before them, these present-day fascists began their war with the Jews because we were the most isolated enclave of the freedom and progress they hate. And like the Nazis, they have expanded their aims to world domination, while continuing their war against the Jews.

Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the same states that support the PLO and its charter members – Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah – are the main supporters of the terrorists fighting the rest of the world today. This, we know, will be a long war, but we also know, because we have seen reality unfiltered, that we have no choice but to fight.

In the US, the situation is reversed. Like Israel, the United States possesses an awesome military that has raced to match its capabilities with the tasks it must perform on the battlefield. Unlike Israel, the United States has been given the leader it needs for this fight – Bush. It seems that the only element in question is whether the American people are willing to accept the reality they have been dealt or if they hope, like Israel's leaders, that they can somehow wish it away with silver bullets that never seem to hit the proper targets.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Tomorrow will mark the 21st anniversary of one of the most egregious failures in US military history. On October 23, 1983, a Syrian- and Iranian-backed Hizbullah terrorist drove a Mercedes truck laden with 180 kilograms of explosives into the US Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport. Three hundred and fifty US Marines lived in the four-story building. Two hundred and forty-one of those men were killed in their sleep that Sunday morning when, in a split second, the building was reduced to a 4.5-meter pile of debris.

In a gripping memoir, Peacekeepers at War – A Marine's Account of the Beirut Catastrophe, written in 1986, former marine Michael Petit recalled his shock as he surveyed the rubble, gazing at the crushed bodies and tattered bedrolls of his fellow marines, smelling the acrid stench of fiery death and hearing the howls of those buried alive.

"How could this happen?" he wrote. "I wailed in anguish as I surveyed the carnage moments after the blast. I felt devastated. Furious. Friends had lived in the [building]. Co-workers. Marines who were in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission."

US forces were initially deployed to Beirut in 1982 to enable PLO forces to escape from Lebanon. In 1983 they returned, along with French, British and Italian troops to separate the IDF, the Christian, Druse and Muslim militias and the Syrian military forces from one another. The purpose was to enable the incapable, incompetent and corrupt Lebanese Army to assert control, first over Beirut and its suburbs and gradually over the entire country.

Inevitably, things did not work as the policymakers had hoped and the forces on the ground were quickly sucked into the Lebanese Civil War. During the early phase of the Marines' deployment in 1983, they had frequent hostile run-ins with Israeli forces. Informed by the accepted wisdom of the time, the Marines thought the Israeli military presence was the main reason for the violence. After US pressure forced Israel to redeploy IDF forces out of Beirut, however, the Marines suddenly found themselves being attacked by the same Syrian forces and Druse and Muslim militias that had previously been fighting the IDF. Moreover, they found themselves exploited by the Christian militias which shelled the Druse and Muslims from behind Marine positions, using the Americans as cover just as had been the case for the IDF.
 

After the barracks bombing, the intelligence section of the Marine Task Force on the ground sent a cable to Washington explaining the situation rather aptly. "This country is at war. There is no cease-fire. Tactics have changed The Multinational Force is not the target of an Iranian madman suicide commando. The Multinational Force is the target of a collective group of Syrian surrogates and Syrian-dependent militias who are conducting a war, a terrorist war, against the French 11th Division paratroopers and the US Marines."

The intelligence report went on to explain that without an increase in military capabilities, Beirut would be lost. For its part, back in Washington, the Reagan administration realized that it was up against something both new and highly undesirable in Lebanon. Rather than contend with this new terror war, it changed the subject – attacking a Soviet proxy in Grenada and then quietly pulling its forces out of Lebanon in the months that followed.

The failure of US forces in Lebanon was based on a number of incorrect assumptions of policymakers in Washington as well as on an antiquated fighting doctrine for the US armed forces that provided little guidance for troops engaged in a war against unconventional foes.

In 1983 the US viewed armed conflicts through the prism of the Cold War and even through the lens of World War II. The enemy was the Russians and the method of battle was attrition warfare between two large, conventional and well-identified opponents. Policymakers and military commanders alike had next to no understanding of the threat of Arab and Islamic terrorism and little understanding of the military threat posed by state-sponsored terrorism. The US had little cultural understanding of the forces at play in Lebanon and no means of effectively communicating messages to anyone on the ground.

On a military level, the Americans were politically constrained. As a force with a defined mission of peacekeeping, the Marines were prohibited from taking the kinds of military actions that might have deterred the Syrians and the Syrian-backed militias from targeting the American forces. The Syrian army was using its SAM anti-aircraft batteries to target US aircraft and nothing was done. For months, the Marines responded to artillery attacks against their headquarters at the airport and their forward positions around the American University with illumination rounds.

America's interest in being perceived by the warring factions and by the media as "above the fray" even made it impossible for the forces on the ground to take the necessary steps to protect themselves from a car bombing attack. Such an attack was likely given that just months before, a similar car bomb had been used to attack the US Embassy in Beirut.

As Petit put it, "Immediately after the embassy bombing, steps had been taken to safeguard the Marines at the airport, particularly the [barracks building] For a variety of political reasons, extraordinarily stringent security measures were ruled out."

Can there be a repeat of the US's misadventure in Beirut today? Discussing the difference between how the US military perceived armed conflicts 21 years ago and how it now views them with two of the US army's key concept builders this week, it was hard not to be amazed by the radical transformation in thinking that the US military has undergone in the past 10-15 years. US Army Col. Bob Johnson, the chief of Future Warfare at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, and Bill Rittenhouse, TRADOC's chief of war gaming, are the US Army's chief futurists. As futurists, they are acutely aware of how the military operated in the past and what its chief challenges are today. Both past and present, then, form the basis for how these men project into the future to work to ensure that the US will be capable of contending successfully with threats and wars that will be fought in 2020 and 2025.

According to Rittenhouse, in 1983, with the US's focus on the Cold War and the Soviet Union, "Beirut was an anomaly. It was a tragedy but it wasn't part of our operational thinking. That's changed right now."

Johnson explains that not only is force protection a central aspect of planning and carrying out deployments, but there is an understanding that "there has got to be the view that stability operations or peacekeeping missions are still taking place with some level of combat."

Johnson and Rittenhouse are charged with building concepts for future warfare for the US military. Every year they conduct a comprehensive seminar-type war game called Unified Quest which is based on a scenario for a war that will take place in 10 to 15 years. For the past two years they have conceptualized a war between the US, leading a multinational coalition, and a country called NAIR, which is modeled on Iran from both a geographical and cultural perspective.

In an article in Haaretz at the beginning of the month, military commentator Amir Oren argued that because Johnson and Rittenhouse and their associates chose to base their scenario on Iran, and because the IDF has delegates who participate in Unified Quest, Israel and the US must be planning a joint invasion of Iran. Perhaps unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

Unified Quest is an unclassified intellectual exercise with participants from 11 foreign countries, international organizations, academia, the State Department, US governmental and law enforcement agencies, members of the media, representatives from the technology and business sectors, and international lawyers, just for starters. Because the game takes place in a futuristic environment that Johnson and Rittenhouse, working with relevant experts, extrapolate from current conditions, Unified Quest "is of absolutely no value," as Johnson put it, to commanders in the field or the Pentagon officials who are charged with planning today's wars.

It is interesting to note the presence of Israelis in the exercise, but as Johnson explains, IDF representatives are there not as coalition members "but as subject matter experts." This in itself is frustrating to many and may, as one senior IDF official who is involved in Unified Quest notes, even explain Oren's irrational departure from reasoned analysis which led him to the bizarre conclusion that the US and Israel are openly and jointly planning the invasion of Iran and that they are doing so in an unclassified war game in the presence of 500 participants from 10 other countries.

At the same time, while the US still refuses to contemplate having Israel as a coalition partner, even in a theoretical war game set to take place 10 years from now, there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.

Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On Wednesday, Army Radio reported the contents of a secret Foreign Ministry report which forecast the state of Israel's relations with Europe over the next decade. The picture it painted was bleak. Israel, the report's author claims, will be increasingly castigated by EU governments as a racist apartheid state.

In the sense that the leaked report does nothing other than project current trends onto the future, it is fundamentally uninteresting. What is interesting about it is how it flies in the face of the bravado-filled forecasts that Prime Minister Sharon's Svengali and outgoing Bureau Chief Dov Weisglass fed us last week through his long interview with Haaretz.

According to Weisglass, the downward trend in Europe's view of Israel will be halted by Sharon's withdrawal plan from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria. By Weisglass's telling, the need to mollify and moderate Europe's view of Israel is one of the main reasons that Sharon chose the radical approach of withdrawal without an agreement and in the midst of war. In his words, the purpose of the withdrawal plan is to enable the US "to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, 'What do you want [from Israel]?'"

So, according to Weisglass, who speaks for Sharon, transferring territory to the enemy in the midst of war, while perhaps tactically problematic or even dangerous, is the right thing to do because it strategically and politically empowers Israel. This, of course was the assumption of Yitzhak Rabin in Oslo. By reaching out to the PLO and giving it arms, territory and political legitimacy, Israel was gambling with security in order to buy itself a political insurance policy. If things went well, there would be peace. If Oslo failed, the Palestinians would be blamed. Of course this turned out to be false. Oslo failed, our security was squandered, and Israel was blamed.

In speaking of the current plan, Weisglass echoes Rabin's mistaken assumption almost word for word as he says that the unilateral withdrawal plan "transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea, with the scenario we wrote. It places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure It thrusts them into a situation in which they have to prove their seriousness."

Again, while he says this, as was the case throughout the Oslo years, we see on the ground that pressure on Israel since the announcement of the withdrawal plan has not abated. And we have the Foreign Ministry report – written with full awareness of the withdrawal plan – saying that pressure on Israel will increase and support for the Palestinians will remain constant throughout the coming decade.

Why is this? Although the leaked accounts of the report did not say, common sense has it that Israel, with all due respect, does not determine how the EU defines its interests. With oil now selling for $54 per barrel, and with the demographic challenges of growing Muslim and shrinking Christian populations in Europe motivating Bernard Lewis to say matter-of-factly that Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century, it should be fairly obvious that something other than the presence or absence of Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is motivating Europe.

Given this, we must ask, why would the Israeli leadership build its central policy initiative around the goal of influencing Europe?

Since Sharon unveiled his withdrawal plan last winter, we have heard a constant chatter of commentary – sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted – that things can't be as they appear; that Sharon must have something up his sleeve. Such talk also accompanied Ehud Barak to Camp David. The idea is that by pushing a radical leftist agenda, Barak then and Sharon today have both been pulling the wool over our eyes – forcing the Palestinians to show their cards and in so doing, pointing to the emptiness of the Left's ideology of appeasement, thereby, indirectly, advancing the platform of the Right.

Weisglass's interview serves to demystify Sharon. In it he proves definitively that no, there is no hidden agenda. Disturbingly, Weisglass not only shows that there is no secret plan, he also admits that Israel under Sharon has had no influence on US policy, while he exposes the vacuousness of the prime minister's thinking and Weisglass's own vanity and inanity.

The Weisglass interview focuses on two separate issues. The first is Weisglass's personal relationship with US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The second is his influence over Sharon's policymaking and the rationale for the decisions that have emerged from the Weisglass-Sharon duo.

In the first instance, Weisglass cannot stop congratulating himself for his friendly relations and constant communications with Rice. Yet what has Israel accomplished through this direct channel to the White House? The answer, according to Weisglass, is absolutely nothing. By his telling, Israel had nothing to do with the Bush administration's formulation of its policy toward the Palestinian Authority.

Weisglass states: "The Americans were here for four months in 2003 They saw the Palestinians' detailed working plans and their splendid diagrams and they saw how nothing came of it. When you add to that the trauma of September 11 and their understanding that Islamic terrorism is indivisible, you understand that they reached their conclusions by themselves. They didn't need us to understand what it was all about."

So, rather than enjoying a near-symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration – as Sharon likes to characterize his relationship with the Bush White House – what we have in the Weisglass-Rice camaraderie is an Israeli gasbag who mistakes access for influence.

Weisglass's descriptions of Sharon's motivations for making the decisions he has made provide ample room for worry. According to Sharon's right-hand man, "When Arafat undermined [PA Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas aka] Abu Mazen at the end of the summer of 2003, we reached the sad conclusion that there is no one to talk to, no one to negotiate with. Hence the disengagement plan. Because when you're playing solitaire, when there is no one sitting across from you at the table, you have no choice but to deal the cards yourself."

Yet, if Israel is playing cards by itself, why would it give its aces (or any cards for that matter) to someone who isn't even playing – to someone who blew up the card table? Barry Rubin pointed out in The Jerusalem Post this week that PLO legal adviser Michael Tarazi's recent op-ed in The New York Times calling for the destruction of Israel and a one-state solution marks a fundamental admission by the PLO that it is interested not in Palestinian statehood, but in the destruction of Israel. And yet, with this state of affairs self-evident, the prime minister has still decided to destroy Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria and hand over land to PLO militias.

Weisglass said that by moving to the withdrawal plan, Israel would be ensuring that the US would continue to support Israel in spite of the absence of a peace process. In his words, "The Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."

Actually, the withdrawal plan, like Sharon's decision to accept the Quartet's road map, has not cemented the administration's pro-Israel position; it has served to exacerbate its anti-Israel position. The Bush administration is the first American administration to support Palestinian statehood. And Bush's support for the road map and for Sharon's withdrawal plan has not attenuated US pressure on Israel to build the separation fence more or less along the 1949 armistice lines. Nor has the administration's support for his plans lessened American pressure on Israel to freeze construction in Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria with an eye towards eventually dismantling them all, down to Ma'aleh Adumim.

Finally, Weisglass argues that Sharon's withdrawal plan was necessary because public support for the conduct of the war against Palestinian terror was waning at the end of 2003. In his words, "Domestically everything was collapsing The Geneva Initiative garnered broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [letters of refusal to serve in the territories]."

The problem with the extreme Left is both real and manufactured. It is true that there are those on the leftist fringe of Israel's political spectrum who have sided with the Palestinians. But they are few in number and not growing. Almost three years after their first public appearance on the cover of Yediot Aharonot's weekend features magazine, the pacifist soldiers and officers club has only garnered 628 signatures on their manifesto. And Yossi Beilin is so despised that he couldn't get himself elected to Knesset even though he ran on two separate lists.

The importance of fringe movements is largely determined by the agenda-setters. Yediot and Haaretz have adopted the pacifist reservists as their cause celebre and so they have received notice.

But the prime minister is also a major agenda-setter. Weisglass is right: Sharon's adoption of the plan to withdraw unilaterally from territory in the midst of war did take the microphone away from the likes of Beilin and David Zonshein of the pacifist reservists' club. But he could have taken away their microphone with any plan. Why did he have to choose theirs? Why did he feel that he had to move Israel backwards rather than lead it forward?

Weisglass no doubt gave the interview in a bid to mollify the right-wing critics of Sharon's withdrawal plan with his claim that unilateral withdrawal effectively ends US pressure for Palestinian statehood. Yet his own words demonstrate the wisdom of those who oppose Sharon's policy. The rationale Weisglass provides for Sharon's decisions cannot stand up to scrutiny. Moreover, the great chemistry that Weisglass has cultivated with the Bush administration has made Weisglass personally popular, while rendering Israel effectively without advocate.

No wonder Sharon has insisted for so long on holding his hand close to his chest. It turns out that he's not holding any cards.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Monday The New York Times ran an op-ed by the PLO's lawyer, Michael Tarazi, under the headline "Two Peoples, One State." In the essay, Tarazi argued that the world must move beyond the "two-state" solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel to a "one-state" solution that would end Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Since the destruction of Israel has been the aim of the PLO since its founding in 1964, it is not clear why the Times felt the fact that the PLO remains committed to its 40-year-old official policy is noteworthy.

Indeed, the Times's decision to run Tarazi's op-ed tells us more about America's paper of record than it tells us about the PLO. In his article, Tarazi libelously attacks Israel, referring to it as an apartheid state and arguing mendaciously that the Jewish state allocates rights on the basis of ethnicity. In Tarazi's words, "Palestinian Christians and Muslims are denied the same political and civil rights as Jews."

This of course, is a complete lie. Israel does not provide or deny rights on the basis of religion or ethnicity, but on the basis of citizenship. Palestinian Christians and Muslims comprise 20 percent of Israel's citizenry and have the same political and civil rights as Israel's Jewish citizens. And The New York Times knows this.

In enabling these lies to be printed, the Times is not simply advancing the cause of the destruction of the Jewish state. It is also serving as a forum in which the cause of Palestinian racial absolutism is championed, given the PLO's demand that all land that will form the basis of the State of Palestine must be completely free of Jews.

The fact that the Times would provide a stage for an author who seeks to baselessly criminalize the Jewish state, while ignoring the racist agenda of the writer himself, is not really news. The Times's record in covering the Middle East in general and Israel in particular for the past several decades has made clear that from the Gray Lady's perspective, Israel is not to receive fair coverage. Just this week, the paper did not devote a specific, full article to two major stories – either on its news or editorial pages – that would provide its readers with important information about what Israel is up against.

The first of these was that, in a major interview, former PA prime minister Mahmoud Abbas – who is consistently championed by the Times as a "reformer" – said that, at the Camp David talks in 2000, he had protested Israel's decision to cancel the Absentee Property Fund for reparations to Palestinian "refugees" with a retort to the effect that the Holocaust was justified. In his words, he told Elyakim Rubinstein: "If that's the case, then Hitler's decisions were right." 

The second is the IDF's controversial allegations that UNRWA personnel are involved in Palestinian terror operations against Israel and that UNRWA chief Peter Hansen gave an interview to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in which he admitted that UNRWA workers are members of Hamas.

On the positive side, this week's events seem to indicate that for its part, Israel has finally stopped caring what The New York Times does or does not do. This in itself is a major development. Understanding that the Times's focus often dictates the network news coverage and therefore determines to a large extent the substance of the US news cycle, the IDF and the Foreign Ministry have for years assiduously yet fruitlessly attempted to influence the Times's coverage of Israel.
 

So it was that when, during Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002, the IDF uncovered a treasure trove of documents in PA headquarters in Judea and Samaria unequivocally linking PLO chairman Yasser Arafat to terrorist attacks, the army decided that the best way to get the story out was by giving the Times exclusive use of the documents.

The Times, with its exclusive rights to this paradigm-shattering scoop, proceeded to downplay the story. This decision made sense from the paper's perspective. Why would the Times, which for years has been arguing that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians, give appropriate coverage to documents that proved unequivocally that the PLO, from Arafat on down, was directly involved in the terror war against Israeli civilians? This week, when the IDF again had a major story, it did not wait for the Times, but ran with it itself and, in so doing, scored a major victory in the information war; a victory which may well have positive policy implications for Israel in the long term.

Despite the subsequent doubts over the IDF's allegation that UNRWA employees had been caught red-handed on videotape transporting what appeared to be a Kassam rocket in a UN ambulance, the IDF's decision to release the footage and the story was an immensely important undertaking. This is the case because UNRWA is not simply yet another Palestinian organization linked to terrorism. UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for eternalizing the plight of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 and their foreign-born descendants by ensuring that they will never be naturalized in the countries where they have lived for the past three generations, is funded mainly by the US, Canada and the EU – all of which profess to be working to curb terrorist funding.

The US annually hands UNRWA a check for $100 million. EU member states donate even more and Canada gives UNRWA $10 million each year. This financing has continued unabated year after year, in spite of the fact that UNRWA has played a role in the Palestinian terror war against Israel for the last four years.

According to a document drawn up by the Israeli defense establishment last year, UNRWA employees like Nahed Attalah and Nidal Nazzal have admitted that they have used their UN vehicles to ferry weapons, explosives and terrorists, while Alaa Muhammad Ali Hassan, a PLO terrorist, has admitted that he carried out sniper attacks against Israelis from an UNRWA school in an UNRWA camp in Nablus.

UNRWA schools have been used as indoctrination centers for Palestinian children. UNRWA camps, from Jenin to Jabalya to Ein Hilweh in Lebanon, have been used as operational bases, mobilization and training centers and weapons storage facilities for terrorists. All of this has been documented. And yet, to date neither UNRWA nor the UN has been forced to account for the actions.

So the footage of the UNRWA employees at the scene of an operation where terrorists were laying a large explosive mine along what they hoped would be the route of an IDF armored vehicle, followed by UNRWA personnel placing what appeared to be a Kassam rocket in their UN ambulance, was an important story because it put an indefensible UN agency on the defensive.

Serendipitously, the IDF's aggressive information offensive against UNRWA came just as UNRWA's director Peter Hansen told CBC, "I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll."

Hansen denied the IDF's charges, claiming that the UN personnel photographed by the IDF's drone were simply carrying a stretcher. This may or may not be the case. Given the context of the video – a terrorist mine-laying operation, as well as the rich history of UNRWA involvement in terror – the IDF charge remains more credible than Hansen's denial.

Allowing for the chance that Hansen may be correct, the IDF removed the incriminating video from its Web site. But it remained on the offensive, with OC Operations Maj.-Gen. Yisrael Ziv announcing that the army has arrested and will soon indict 13 UNRWA employees in Gaza for their involvement in terror activities.

The local press has been quick to harshly judge the IDF for aggressively pursuing the story. Haaretz's editorialist alleged Wednesday that "Israel behaved with reckless haste and injured its pretensions to superiority over the Palestinians with regard to credibility." But this is not the case.

The IDF does not run stories that have no circumstantial, contextual and factual grounding, the way the Palestinians do. And because of this, neither the IDF nor the Foreign Ministry should be swayed by such recriminations. The IDF may have phrased its statements against UNRWA too coarsely, but the essence of the allegations remains unassailable: UNRWA employees are today, and have for years been, directly involved in terror operations against Israel, and for this the agency must be called to account.

Given the convergence of the IDF footage and Hansen's impervious admission to CBC that his group employs people associated with a genocidal terrorist organization, Canada's government has already announced that it is reviewing its support of UNRWA. US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was personally briefed on the issue this week, has demanded an accounting by the UN for the actions of its employees.

For too long, the IDF has surrendered the information offensive to Palestinian flacks proffering lies like Tarazi and Saeb Erekat and their media allies at places like The New York Times, with devastating results for Israel's international reputation. The international consequences of the IDF's self-marketed scoop have proven the army's ability to move important stories without winning over biased news organizations. And just as importantly, the impact of the footage has shown that it is far better to err slightly on the side of overzealousness, when backed up by fact, context and circumstance, than to surrender the stage to lies for fear of being only 95 percent right.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.