JERUSALEM, Israel - Yesterday found Mahmoud Abbas, (aka Abu Mazen), Yasser Arafat's replacement as head of the Palestinian Authority, hot on the campaign trail in the Jenin refugee camp. There Mr. Abbas, the Bush administration's favored candidate in the elections scheduled to take place January 9, spent the afternoon with Zakariah Zubeidi, who is head of the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade terrorist organization, and one of the top men on the Israeli army's list of wanted terrorists.

Mr. Zubeidi has planned and orchestrated several suicide bombings and shooting attacks against Israeli civilians, and has been actively involved in recruiting terrorists and coordinating his operations with the Hezbollah terror group in Iran, and senior international terrorists in Damascus.

In the company of Mr. Zubeidi, Mr. Abbas met with, hugged, and kissed several members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and visited the "Martyrs Cemetery," where he paid homage to the memory of Palestinian Arab terrorists who have been killed over the past four-and-a-half years. During his visit with the terrorists, Mr. Abbas pledged to remain faithful to Arafat's legacy.

To finance the upcoming election, and as a sign of its support for Mr. Abbas, the American government for the first time since 2003 transferred $23.5 million directly to the Palestinian Authority's bank account on Wednesday. The assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, William Burns, said that the funds reflect "our confidence in the direction of the PA's reform program, and our expectation that reform will continue to be implemented energetically." President Bush signed a special waiver enabling the funds to be transferred without congressional approval December 8.

Mr. Abbas is the only candidate that the ruling Fatah party is fielding in the elections. Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO, and was founded by Arafat in 1964. Its members control the PA bureaucracy, security forces, education system, and press.

Initially, the imprisoned Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, who is serving several consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison for multiple counts of terrorist murder of Israeli citizens, announced that he was planning on running against Mr. Abbas. But a concerted campaign by Mr. Abbas, supported by America and Israel, caused him to change his mind and pull out of the race in early December.

A Palestinian Arab journalist in the West Bank argues that the pressure exerted on Mr. Barghouti was misplaced. In his view: "The decision to have Abbas run unopposed from within Fatah effectively blocked all possibility of a democratic election that would provide the Palestinians with the opportunity to express their wishes at the ballot box. If Barghouti had won, it would have been a clear signal that they reject peace with Israel and support murderers. If Abbas won in a race against Barghouti, it would have been a clear signal that the Palestinians reject terrorism, since that is what Barghouti represents. The problem with Abbas running unopposed from within Fatah is that he isn't given the opportunity or the challenge of stating clearly if he supports or rejects terrorism, and so we're back to the same unclear situation we had for years with Arafat."

Before Palestinian Arab voters cast their votes, it is clear to all that Mr. Abbas will win the election, but he is still not running unopposed. Six men are running against him. The three most notable challengers are Mustafa Barghouti, Bassam el Salhi, and Tayfeer Khaled, who all reside in Ramallah. One of the problems these men have had campaigning is the Palestinian Arab press, which is under the complete control of the PA, has given almost no coverage to their campaigns.

All three men's platforms, vis-a-vis Israel, are more or less identical to Mr. Abbas's platform. They call for the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with its capital in Jerusalem. They call for the destruction of all Israeli communities in these areas, and demand recognition of the so-called "right of return" of the descendants of Palestinian Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and 1967. None of the three have spent time in Israeli jails, and according to Palestinian Arab sources, they have not been involved in terrorist attacks against Israel.

While their platforms regarding Israel are like Mr. Abbas's, they spend little time discussing Israel. Mr. Abbas's opponents devote the overwhelming majority of their time discussing the need to reform the PA - making it accountable, transparent, and subordinate to the rule of law - democratizing Palestinian Arab society, and developing the Palestinian economy. All are highly critical of the Palestinian Arab security services, which they accuse of being the source of the lawlessness and chaos in the Palestinian Arab areas.

Mustafa Barghouti, a distant cousin of the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, is the most popular among the non-frontrunner candidates. Polls have him enjoying the support of between 10% and 20% of Palestinian Arabs. Mr. Barghouti is a physician and a former communist. He is the founder and head of the Medical Relief Center in Ramallah. He is the Palestinian Arab point man for the American-based, radically anti-Israel International Solidarity Movement, and has led most of the Palestinian Arab demonstrations against Israel's security fence in the West Bank.

At a campaign meeting in Beita village near Nablus on Wednesday, Mr. Barghouti, who has been an outspoken critic of PA corruption, and a strident advocate for democracy for the past two years, spoke of the "Oslo elite" meaning the Arafat associates surrounding Mr. Abbas, who became rich and powerful as a result of the Oslo peace process with Israel.

To a crowd of hundreds of supporters in the communist-leaning village, Mr. Barghouti declared, "The Palestinian people have the right to ask what happened to the $6.5 billion that we received in foreign aid over the past 10 years."

Mr. Barghouti received a push for his campaign on Wednesday when the jailed leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Saadat, declared his party's support for Mr. Barghouti. Mr. Saadat is under detention in Jericho for masterminding the assassination of Israel's tourism minister in October 2001.

Bassam el-Falhi is the chairman of the Palestinian Communist Party. Tayfeer Khaled is the West Bank representative of Nayef Hawatweh's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group, headquartered in Damascus. Both men have placed the emphasis of their campaigns on fostering democracy and fighting corruption, much like Mr. Barghouti. Neither has registered significant support in opinion polls.

According to Palestinian Arab sources, one of the reasons that none of the three candidates has received much support is intimidation by the PA. "People are afraid to be seen even reading their campaign literature," says one Palestinian Arab who asked to remain anonymous.

The message that the people have received from various leaders of the PA is that if they vote for a candidate other than Mr. Abbas they will either lose jobs they already have in the PA or will not be hired by the PA in the future. Since the PA is the largest employer in the West Bank and Gaza, the threat carries a great deal of weight.

Physical intimidation has also played a role in frightening Palestinian Arabs not to pay attention to candidates other than Mr. Abbas. On Wednesday, shots were fired at Salhi's offices in Ramallah as well as at the home of PA legislator and former Cabinet minister Abdel Jawad Salah, one of the most outspoken critics of PA official corruption.

The turnout in next Sunday's elections is expected to be low. As the saying on the streets of the West Bank goes, "Why bother voting, all the ballots were already filled out in Washington."

Originally published in The New York Sun.

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the global war on terror that quickly ensued, it is difficult to remember that the first challenge to American security that the Bush administration encountered came not from the Arabs but from the Chinese.

On April 1, 2001, the Chinese government detained 24 US naval personnel whose EP-3E reconnaissance plane made an emergency landing on Hainan Island in China after colliding with a Chinese F-8 fighter craft that was tailing it. The Chinese held the US crew for 13 days before releasing them.

Today the US and Israel are embroiled in a serious dispute which Defense Ministry Director General Amos Yaron referred to as a "crisis" in his testimony Wednesday before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. According to reports, the crisis revolves around Israel's upgrade or servicing of Israeli-made Harpy unmanned aerial vehicles which Israel sold to China in the mid-1990s.

The US objects to the upgrade or servicing of the UAVs and is currently demanding that Israel not return the weapons to China, in spite of the fact that China already owns them.

Concerned that Israel may buckle to US pressure, Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Tang Jiaxuan flew to Israel this week to meet with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and ostentatiously invited him for a state visit to China.

There is good reason for the US to be concerned over Israeli arms sales to China. China, with the second largest national economy in the world, an annual economic growth rate of eight percent, a seemingly insatiable and growing appetite for petroleum and rising global interests and influence is viewed by US policymakers in both parties as one of the central rising challenges to US global power.

At the same time, it should be noted that Israel's arms sales to China in the mid-1990s, including the sale of the Harpy UAVs as well as the aborted sale of Phalcon AWACs aircraft, received the blessings of the Clinton Administration, which in the run-up to the 1996 presidential elections was conspicuously courting Chinese support for the campaign. Bill Clinton's reversal on Israeli weapons sales to China in 1999 came about as a result of his weakened position in his scandal-wracked second term. His weakening, which was due partly to allegations that his campaign knowingly received illegal campaign contributions from Chinese agents, combined with allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage at the Los Alamos nuclear research facility, caused Clinton to do an about-face on his China policy.

The most visible casualty of this reversal was Israel's Phalcon sale to China. That is, it was inconsistency in US policy, combined with Israel's reasonable interest in cultivating good relations with a rising global power, which caused Israel to nurture closer military relations with China in the 1990s.

Additionally, when assessing the current crisis in US-Israel strategic ties arising from American ire at the servicing of the Harpy UAVs, it should be born in mind that the US is not coming to the table with its hands clean. China may be the principal emerging conventional threat to US national security interests, but Egypt, thanks to US arms sales, constitutes the largest potential conventional threat to Israel's national security. Indeed, the conventional threat that the Egyptian military now poses to Israel is far greater than the threat Egypt posed to Israel, with its Soviet platforms and military doctrine in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

To date, Egypt's arsenal boasts some 880 Abrams M1-A1 main battle tanks. Egypt has no external enemies and yet, in its military's main joint forces exercise each year, the imaginary enemy they are fighting is "a small country to the north." Its F-16 pilots receive training in the US and for some years now, Egypt has been producing Abrams tanks at its own domestic facilities.

The US has insisted that its arms sales to Egypt, like its arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, pose no danger to Israel's qualitative edge against its neighbors. Yet the truth is more complicated. The American weapons systems and platforms sold to Israel's neighbors are much more sophisticated than the Soviet models they have replaced. Their presence in Arab arsenals forces Israel to continuously upgrade its own weapons systems in order to maintain its qualitative advantage over the increasingly sophisticated Arab militaries. To do this, Israel must rely on its local military industries. To offset the cost of the constant upgrades of Israeli systems, again necessitated in large part by US weapons sales to Arab states, Like every other weapons developer, Israel must seek international markets for its systems. And China is not merely a major arms purchaser; it is also an important country with which Israel has a national interest in cultivating good relations.
 

It is easy for Israelis to be angry at the Americans for exhibiting righteous rage over Israeli sales to China given both US competition with Israeli weapons producers in the global arms market and American weapons sales to Arab states. It is also understandable why these weapons sales to China in and of themselves enrage the Americans.

When analyzing the current crisis, which both sides have a clear interest in defusing, it is not enough to engage in prurient and self-righteous finger-pointing. It is necessary to understand what it is about the Israel-US relationship that has caused this current crisis and to look for ways to change the nature of the relationship to ensure that such crises not repeat themselves every few years.

From a strictly strategic perspective, Israel is a valuable ally to the US. Both countries share mutual and increasingly dangerous enemies in Syria, Al Qaida, Hizbullah and Iran, just for starters. Israel is a stable and reliable ally to the US in its war on Arab and Islamic terrorism. Israel provides the US with a wealth of intelligence which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has reasonably stated "is worth its weight in gold."

Since the terror war against US forces in Iraq was instigated shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in the spring of 2003, Israel has provided the US with constant and active assistance in improving its urban warfare capabilities and its tactical intelligence gathering and assessment abilities. Aside from that, the US has benefited greatly from Israeli collaboration in the development of anti-ballistic missile defenses and other sophisticated weapons systems.

From Israel's perspective, there is no question about the strategic importance if its alliance with America. America is Israel's only real ally in the world today. This alliance manifests itself in all spheres of Israel's national welfare – from its military prowess to its economic well-being to its ability to withstand the pressures of Europe and the UN to capitulate to Arab intransigence and Palestinian terrorism.

And yet, in spite of the mutual importance of the Israel-American alliance, which is recognized by both sides, it suffers from some serious drawbacks that can and ought to be faced and dealt with. Given Israel's international weakness, as a nation rejected by both Europe and the Arab world, American policymakers have a tendency to take Israel for granted as a dependent nation that must always follow America's bidding, lacking any ability to survive on its own.

It is true that Israel is weak internationally. But Israel does have its own national interests that are not a mere reflection of American will. To ensure the long-term health of the relationship it would serve America's interests to stop seeing Israel as a mere dependent and to recognize that Israel, as a sovereign state, may have interests that do not jibe completely with those of the US.

Rather than denying that this is the case, the strategic dialogue between the two allies should focus not only on their shared interests but also on how their separate interests can be mutually beneficial. For instance, Israel's burgeoning security ties with India are a strategic asset to the US in spite of the fact that the alliance serves Israeli and Indian interests that are not specifically related to America. The same is the case with Israel's ties to Mauritania and Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Israel's international weakness has caused a childish neurosis of powerlessness to take hold of many Israelis. The thought that something that Israel does for itself might have adverse effects on a giant like America seems all but impossible to imagine. Indeed, Israeli weakness internationally and its dependence on America has caused many Israelis to become almost genetically programmed to view their state as a vassal of the US. As a result, some Israelis have developed a passive-aggressive and adolescent view of Washington.

Washington is perceived as an all powerful grown-up that can do anything it wishes without any worries. To strengthen its own long-term relations with the US, it is high time for Israelis to grow up and recognize that in spite of its international isolation, Israel is far from powerless in the grip of circumstances and that its actions can and do impact, sometimes adversely, the interests of its only ally.

The current crisis in the US-Israel alliance will no doubt be solved in due course given the importance of the relationship to both sides. Yet the crisis provides a learning opportunity for both countries. If this opportunity is seized, rather than simply patch up the ends that have been tattered, the alliance can be reworked and strengthened in a manner that better reflects the real value each side brings to the table and the shared interests and values that stand at the foundation of the alliance itself.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog, who commanded the IDF's Southern Command from 2000-2003, wrote a paper for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs entitled "Lessons of the Gaza Security Fence for the West Bank." In his paper Almog explains that the fence around Gaza has blocked 30 percent of the attempted terror attacks on Israel, while IDF offensive operations inside the Strip have accounted for the other 70 percent of Israel's successes.

Although his paper is intended to be instructive for Judea and Samaria, his point raises the obvious question for Gaza: If the government goes through with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw, thereby ending the IDF's offensive operations in the area, how will such attacks be prevented? Furthermore, today the IDF has a defensive perimeter one kilometer long inside Gaza. According to Almog, this perimeter, along with monitoring equipment that can see six kilometers into Gaza, accounts for most of the success of the fence. Who will be manning the perimeter and maintaining the observation equipment if the IDF pulls out?

Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ya'acov Amidror, the former head of the IDF War Colleges and Military Intelligence analysis division, warned last week that in the absence of an Israeli military presence in Gaza, the area will become a focal point for global jihad.

Just this week, the Shin Bet announced the arrest of Jordanian national Muhammad Abu Juyad in Tulkarm this past August. Abu Juyad was recruited by Fatah and Hizbullah. He received terror training twice in Syria and also took part in the terror war against American forces in Iraq before turning up here with a plan to recruit Israeli Arabs to blow up trains, kidnap soldiers and attack Israeli facilities in Jordan. Abu Juyad is emblematic of the global and regional face of the war.

Luckily our forces are deployed in Judea and Samaria. If he or one of the thousands of terrorists like him were to come to Gaza after Sharon's proposed withdrawal goes through, who would arrest him?

More than 5,000 rockets and mortar shells have now fallen on Israeli communities in Gaza since the Palestinian terror war began. In anticipation of the proposed expulsion of their 8,000 Jewish residents, the Palestinians have dramatically increased their attacks. They want to make it look like we are running away. And the IDF is doing little to dissuade them. IDF incursions into Khan Yunis have been as ineffective as IDF operations against Hizbullah in southern Lebanon were in the months that preceded the withdrawal in May 2000. Like Hizbullah in Lebanon, the terrorists in Gaza will be viewed by the entire global jihad network as having defeated Israel.

The price we paid for our precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon was the Palestinian terror war. What should we expect after we have Hamas, Fatah and Hizbullah terror cells operating openly five kilometers from the power station in Ashkelon?

THOSE WHO oppose the withdrawal have sought to make these arguments. But no one will listen. Ariel Sharon, the great military leader of yesteryear, says that it will be okay. And so, as we did when the late prime minister and former IDF chief of General Staff Yitzhak Rabin scoffed in 1994 at the notion that the Palestinians would use the territory he transferred to their control to shoot mortar shells and rockets at Israeli communities, we now believe that our lives will be better and safer if we eject Jews from their homes and farms and villages as our military withdraws to the 1949 armistice lines.

The residents of Gaza themselves are at their wits' end. Over the past several weeks they have been absorbing volley after volley of rockets and mortar shells, antitank shells and rifle fire. Their homes and synagogues have been bombed. Their children's nurseries and community centers have been hit. Their hothouses have been shelled. In a meeting Thursday in Netzer Hazani, residents spoke of the prospect of taking measures into their own hands with village residents manning any gun post that the IDF abandons.

Speaking to Ynet, Yaki Yisraeli, treasurer of the community in Gush Katif, said, "If there isn't a suitable response to the mortar fire, people will start defending themselves. The residents serve in all the IDF units and the fear is that they will take the law into their own hands. If the IDF evacuates positions, the residents will take them over."

Aside from the fact that the IDF is clearly failing in its mission to defend them, the residents of Gaza have another problem on their hands. How are they to deal with the fact that the government and the Knesset seem determined to expel them from their homes? How are they to imagine that the lands they have cultivated, the communities they have built and the homes where they have raised their families are set to be turned over to the same people who are bombing them around the clock?

The moral dimension of the proposed destruction of Israeli communities in Gaza and northern Samaria is one that has received scant attention over the past year since Sharon adopted the Labor Party's plan of retreat and expulsion as his own. Indeed, although it was one of the implicit assumptions of the 1993 Oslo process, the fact that a precondition for a final peace accord with the PLO was that all Jewish residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza would be ethnically cleansed has rarely been mentioned. As for Sharon's withdrawal plan for Gaza and northern Samaria, everyone from US National Security Council Middle East Adviser Elliott Abrams to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to British Prime Minister Tony Blair have all noted that the plan, if enacted, will provide a precedent for the destruction of all or most of the remaining Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria with their population of some 250,000 Israelis.

THIS WEEK, the public debate shifted its attention for the first time in 11 years to the question of whether it is moral to ethnically cleanse the territories of their Jewish residents and force all Israelis to live within the cease-fire lines from 1949. With the publication of an open letter from Binyamin Regional Council head Pinhas Wallerstein calling for mass civil disobedience against the proposed ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria, the question of the morality of the plan has exploded onto the public stage.

Wallerstein wrote, "The government of Israel has approved the first reading of the immoral law that paves the way for the crime of the displacement of Jews from their homes. The law does not provide those targeted for expulsion with even the minimal human right – to oppose their displacement from their homes. I call for the public to break the expulsion law and to be ready to pay the price of going to jail."

Wallerstein's call, which was adopted by the entire organized leadership of the Israeli communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, caused some dozen members of Knesset to sign a declaration stating that they will oppose the enactment of the law even at the price of losing their parliamentary immunity from prosecution and going to jail.

Gaza residents caused a public outcry when they taped orange Stars of David to their clothes this week. The hue and cry of the politicians on the Right and on the Left said that in using symbols from the Holocaust they were besmirching the memory of the victims of Europe's genocide of its Jews. It would seem that those who decried the residents' symbol have forgotten what a metaphor is.

The point was not that Sharon is Adolf Hitler or that Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is Adolf Eichmann. The point of the protest was that Israel is the first Western state to call for the forced removal of Jews from their homes, simply because they are Jews, since the Holocaust and that there is something morally atrocious about the notion that for peace to come – to Israel and to those bombing Israel – it is necessary for entire regions to be rendered Judenrein. And again, as leaders in Israel and throughout the world have stated, the expulsion from Gaza and northern Samaria is simply a preview of coming attractions for what awaits those who live in Judea and the rest of Samaria.

The security implications of the planned withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza and northern Samaria are entirely separate from the moral dimensions of the policy for what it means for Israel to be a free and secure Jewish state. But they share a common root. This root is to be found in those who are shooting off the mortars and rifles and rockets. It is found in Abu Juyad; it is found in the murder of Ariela Fahima outside her home near Beit Shemesh this week; and it is found in the attempted murder of an Israeli motorist who accidentally drove into Ramallah Monday night and had to be saved by the IDF as a lynch mob gathered around him. This common root is Palestinian rejection of Israel.

There would be no reason for the IDF to be operating in Gaza if the Palestinians weren't conducting a war against Israel from Gaza. And there would be no question about the right of Jews to live in Gaza or northern Samaria or anywhere else they have lived for thousands of years if Palestinian nationalism weren't predicated on genocidal anti-Semitism.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speaking at the Interdisciplinary Center's Herzliya Conference on Monday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon said that Israel's "interest is to separate the general Palestinian population from those involved in terrorism."

This, of course, stands at the core of all anti-guerrilla and counterterror operational thinking.

Ya'alon noted the economic devastation that the Palestinian terror war has wrought on the general Palestinian population. Repeated suicide attacks at the Erez Industrial Park, where  4,000 Gazans worked each day to support some 35,000 people, forced Israel to close the park. This week's attack against an IDF outpost on the border between Gaza and Egypt forced the army to close the border-crossing terminal, preventing Gazans from conducting business in Egypt. Suicide bombers disguised as ordinary workers have forced Israel to stringently limit the number of Palestinians working in Israel and to erect roadblocks throughout Judea and Samaria.

Over the past for year, and indeed since the first Palestinian suicide bomber introduced himself to Israeli civilians back in 1994, Israe has tried to develop methods of screening cargo and workers that would make Palestinian economic activity possible while preventing the infiltration of human bombs.

Additionally, as Ya'alon noted, Israel has worked to ensure that the health and education systems in Judea, Samaria and Gaza have continued to operate. This, in spite of the fact that terrorists have hidden in maternity and cancer wards from Bethlehem to Jenin and that the Palestinian school system teaches children that their life goal should be to become a suicide bomber.

Yet, in spite of all of Israel's attempts to separate the broader Palestinian population from the terrorists, Ya'alon admitted that support for the terrorists has not waned, nor has enthusiasm for terrorism in general. In his words, IDF counterterror operations over the past two years "have decreased the ability, not the motivation" of Palestinians to carry out attacks against Israelis.
 

And so it can be said that the IDF, and Israel as a whole, have failed in the mission of separating the general Palestinian population from those involved in terrorism.

How can this be the case? After all, Israel's leaders have never declared war on the Palestinians. To the contrary, every time it seemed there was a break in the clouds, Israel moved quickly to embrace any opportunity to begin discussions with Palestinian officials – whether at the political level or among the various official Palestinian militia commanders.

An answer to this seeming paradox was provided by The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh in a dispatch from Gaza earlier in the week. Toameh reported the case of Dr. Hassan Nurani, a psychologist from Gaza City who wished to run for the PA's presidency. Nurani composed a platform calling for the building of a "civilized and moral society." He was able to collect the requisite 5,000 signatures to submit his candidacy but couldn't afford the $3000 needed to register for the election. Desperate to run, Nurani tried selling off his small parcel of land and his home furnishings. But he still wasn't able to raise the sum, which is the rough equivalent of an annual salary in Gaza.

It is possible that Dr. Nurani supports terrorism. It is possible that he is not willing to live in a Palestinian society which exists alongside a strong and vibrant Jewish state. It is possible that he insists that Israel allow millions of foreign-born Arabs to immigrate freely into Israel as a condition for peace. But we'll never know, and neither will the Palestinians, because he is too poor to tell us.

And then we have the frontrunner for the Palestinian presidency, new PLO head Mahmoud Abbas. He's the only show in town. It doesn't seem to bother anyone that Yasser Arafat's deputy of 40 years has refused to call for an end to the Palestinian terror war, saying just Wednesday in Saudi Arabia that he didn't mean to offend anyone when he said the day before that violence against Israel is counterproductive.

"All I meant," Abbas explained, "is that we are in a phase that does not necessitate arms because we want to negotiate." And in the meantime, he decried Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom's call earlier in the day for the international community to build permanent housing for the millions of Arabs, whose ancestors may have once lived in Israel, who have been interned in UN refugee camps in the Arab world for the past 55 years.

"Any proposal regarding the resettlement of the refugees is completely rejected," Abbas, the soon-to-be-democratically elected Palestinian leader, said.

Shalom's call for the rehabilitation of the residents of the UN refugee camps was given in the course of his address to the Herzliya Conference. Aside from daring to raise the possibility of letting these poor people finally be free of the burden of living their lives as political symbols, his speech was actually wholly supportive of the combative, rejectionist Abbas.

Shalom devoted much of his address to calling for the convention of a second Aqaba summit with US President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Abbas right after the January 9 elections. In his words: "The lead actors from the first Aqaba summit, which took place in June 2003 – Sharon, Bush and Abu Mazen [Abbas] – are the same actors today, but stronger."

So, in the run-up to the Palestinian election, which is supposed to be the first step toward the liberalization and democratization of Palestinian society, the presumptive winner – who stands opposed to any action against terror operatives or compromise on the so-called refugees that would enable peace to be achieved – is embraced as a positive development, a window of opportunity and a foregone conclusion. So much for giving the Palestinians a reason to separate themselves off from the terrorists.

In an interview with the Post's Ruthie Blum appearing today, Palestinian apologist extraordinaire Hanan Ashrawi assailed Bush for adopting "the neocon agenda" in calling for the transformation of Palestinian society from a terror-supporting and -engendering society into a peaceful democratic one before the establishment of a Palestinian state.

In her words, "You don't use democracy for justifying the existence of states. You would then have to remove many states. Self-determination for Palestinians is a right that has to be implemented as a way of bringing peace and stability to the region. Therefore, you don't make a state dependent on its system of government."

And Ashrawi isn't alone. In his speech at the conference on Tuesday, Labor party leader and soon-to-be acting prime minister Shimon Peres assailed the notion that democratic reform is a necessary condition for peaceful relations.

Indeed, ironically the very thought that Palestinian society must be democratized meets its staunchest opposition from Israelis; specifically from the Israeli elites. In his column in Yediot Ahronot last Friday, Nahum Barnea, Israel's journalistic supremo and proud socialist, wrote scathingly of Bush's attachment to the notions of democracy and morality. Speaking of Bush's reading of Minister-without-Portfolio Natan Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy, which argues that peaceful relations are contingent on individual freedom and democracy, Barnea sneered, "The book publisher can now advertise it as 'the only book the president has read in the last 10 years.'"

He then went on to witheringly criticize Sharansky's book, describing it as "clear, easily digestible, unburdened by doubt, moralistic, very positive and totally simplistic."

Israel's elitists, like Barnea and Peres, and their sheep-like followers like Shalom, no doubt took comfort in the obnoxious responses evinced toward the Bush administration's policy doctrine of bringing democracy to the Arab world during last Saturday's international summit on the topic in Rabat, Morocco. There, US Secretary of State Colin Powell was barraged by angry statements from the Egyptian, Saudi and Libyan foreign ministers, who claimed that the US can't talk about democracy until "the peace process" goes forward and US occupation of Iraq comes to an end.

Even German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the champion of the Israeli Left, said that progress toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians "will lend all reform and modernization efforts in the Arab world unprecedented momentum."

It isn't surprising that the same people who demonize their political opposition in Israel as warmongering extremists and potential political assassins would have such a low opinion of the possibility that Arabs might, if given the opportunity, choose to live freely and at peace with Israel and the rest of their neighbors.

And yet, as The Washington Post's editorialist noted on Wednesday, even as the Arab potentates at the Rabat summit were berating the Americans for daring to discuss democracy with them, Arab human rights activists who also participated in the conference insisted that the Americans continue to pressure their governments and that "Palestinian and Iraqi issues should not be used as excuses for not launching reforms."
 

And what did these people want? They demanded that their governments "allow free ownership of media institutions and sources; allow freedom of expression and especially freedom of assembly and meetings; ensure women's rights and remove all forms of inequality and discrimination against women in the Arab world; and immediately release reformers, human rights activists and political prisoners."

The American neoconservatives, who have been the most visible proponents of democracy in the Arab world and who Barnea, echoing Ashrawi, alleges "control the foreign policy of the Bush administration," have often been accused of working for Israel. Yet, as our elites' revulsion with democracy and our government's silence on the issue shows, American democracy advocates have almost no one to talk to in Israel.

Indeed, Israel's passivity in the face of Palestinian corruption, authoritarianism and hate indicates that what Israel needs most desperately is for a movement of Israeli neoconservatives to arise and "take control" of Israel's foreign policy.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The US hopes that Iran will follow Libya's lead in abandoning its nuclear program, but nobody should rule out the possibility of military action against Teheran's nuclear sites if it does not, US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith told The Jerusalem Post in an exclusive interview.

Feith stated that the US is now concentrating on "a process to try to get the existing international legal mechanisms – the nonproliferation treaty [and] the International Atomic Energy Agency – to work, to bring the kind of pressure to bear on Iran that would induce the Iranians to follow the path that Libya took in deciding that they were actually better off in abandoning their WMD [weapons of mass destruction] programs."

Feith stressed that the Americans are interested in seeing whether the suspension of uranium-enrichment activities that the Iranians agreed to last month in a deal with France, Germany and Britain "can get turned into a permanent abandonment."

But strikingly, whereas British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw last month ruled out any possibility of military action against Iranian nuclear sites should the diplomatic path lead to failure, Feith said that "I don't think that anybody should be ruling in or ruling out anything while we are conducting diplomacy."

In the wide-ranging interview conducted on Friday, Feith, who will be remaining in his position during US President George W. Bush's second term, told the Post that democratic reform of the Arab world, including in US-allied Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, will be the linchpin of Bush's foreign policy in the next four years.

He was speaking a day before outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell told a conference of Islamic leaders in Morocco that the Arab world had to implement political and economic reform and stop "pointing to the [deadlocked] Middle East peace process as a pretext for delay."

Feith recalled that "the president has said over and over again that he believes that the world will be a better place, there will be a better treatment of people [and] there will be a more secure international environment if there is a development of representative, democratic-type institutions in the Middle East."

The undersecretary said he saw signs that Bush's democratization platform was having an effect on the public discussion now taking place in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan about democracy, dialogue that barely existed before Bush began discussing the issue in 2002.

"The kinds of things that the president has been saying are stimulating talk about reform throughout the Middle East," said Feith. "There is more attention being paid to the subject. People who are aware of what's going on in the world at large cannot fail to see that the countries that have democratic governments and free economies have a greater degree of prosperity, of political stability [and] of peaceful politics as opposed to violent domestic politics, and they are happier. And that kind of observation, in part because the president is stressing it, is getting more and more play throughout the entire region."

As a principal architect of the US war on terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan, Feith is one of the most controversial members of the Bush administration. Disliked in liberal circles in the US and internationally, Feith, a staunch supporter of Israel, began his government career in 1981 as an assistant to Soviet expert Richard Pipes at the US National Security Council in the Reagan administration. In that position, as he does today for the Middle East, Feith advocated the advancement of the cause of democracy and human rights in the former Soviet bloc as a means of bringing about the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When asked about the failure thus far of the US to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world, where levels of anti-Americanism have risen sharply since September 11, 2001, Feith admitted, "There are a lot of things that need to be done to improve communications. Part of it is how we're organized: how the combatant commands relate back to headquarters here in the Pentagon; how the Pentagon relates to the State Department and the other agencies."

Feith argued that the media's need to grab the attention of viewers motivates news organizations to concentrate on violence at the expense of giving news consumers an accurate portrayal of what life is like in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Comparing the news coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan to the news coverage of Israel, Feith said, "If you live in Israel and you see the way life is there and then you go abroad and see the way Israel is reported on, the way that Israel gets reported on night after night is simply pictures of bombings or military actions. And there are people who have an image that that's all that's going on in the country and people have similar images about Afghanistan or Iraq.

"One of the problems is how do you communicate that, while there are things like that going on and they're a big problem, there's also an enormous amount of life going on that is commerce and culture and education and happy ordinary life."

Feith was highly critical of the role that Syria is playing in fueling the insurgency against Iraqi and coalition forces in Iraq. "Their role is unhelpful," he said. "We know that there are various activities important to the insurgents in Iraq that are occurring in Syria. There are people that have safe-havened there. There are people passing through Syria to join the insurgents [and] to supply them. And it's a bad thing."

One of the elements of prewar planning for which Feith has come under a barrage of criticism from US military commanders was his intention to train an exiled Iraqi military force to fight with the US during the March 2003 invasion. Feith continues to defend his recommendation.

"I did think it was important to do what we could to train up Iraqis as a security force in advance of our military operation. We saw lots of benefits of that – both with regard to the military operation itself and with regard to the post-major combat period. There were certain obvious benefits that trained Iraqis could bring, as people who know the language, who know the lay of the land who know the local culture, [and] work with our forces and help liberate their own country. And then afterward these would be people that we knew and whose views and whose leadership qualities we knew and who could help identify other Iraqis who could play a useful role in the building of a new Iraq.

"We saw lots of benefits in that effort," he continued. "We were hoping to get thousands of Iraqis trained before the war and as it turns out we were only able to train a few score and that was unfortunate. I think it would have been better if we had had thousands who were trained."

While Feith indicated that the US was doing nothing at present to encourage the Iraqis to end their enmity toward Israel, he dismissed the possibility of the post-Saddam Iraq going to war against it.

"If all goes well, the Iraqis are going to have a country that's going to have a representative government and will be at peace with its neighbors and in the region," said Feith. "And if that happens, the whole Middle East will be better off."

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week saw Arafat's heirs, PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, on a junket to Syria and Lebanon where they labored to shore up their base of political support. In Syria, the Palestinian "moderates" met with dictator Bashar Assad and his underlings and agreed to coordinate their positions in future negotiations with Israel with him.

That base covered, they went to meetings with the senior terror chieftains who make their homes in Damascus: Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command; Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas; and Ramadan Shalah, head of the Islamic Jihad.

Reinforced from their meetings – where, according to Shaath, they discovered that between the "moderate" leaders and the arch terrorists, "There are no differences over the objectives" – the three went for visits in UN-run internment camps falsely referred to as Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. There they promised that they will never give up the demand for the unlimited immigration of these foreign-born Arabs to Israel in the framework of a peace treaty.

At the same time as they were running around in the terrorist capitals of the Levant, the US announced that it would for the first time be providing the PA with $23.5 million in direct budgetary aid to make it easier for the Palestinians to conduct elections in which these three moderates will be elected.

Unfortunately, no one of any consequence seems to think it at all necessary to call attention to the fact that in order for Abbas and his colleagues to shore up their legitimacy in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, they have moved to build alliances with the most overtly extreme and violent forces in the region. Even as the US is now openly admitting Syria's major role in leading and financing the terror war being perpetrated in Iraq, no one has cast aspersions at Western supported Palestinian leaders who just declared their fealty to Assad and his terrorist vassals.

At the same time, Israel has been awash this week with excitement and enthusiasm over Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's newfound adoration for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Pharaoh Hosni's decision to release Azzam Azzam from his dungeon, like his announced intention to begin to abide by his obligation to the Camp David peace treaty by returning his ambassador to Israel sometime next year, have been taken as indications that Mubarak is now an ally of Israel. He can be trusted, we are told, to remilitarize the Sinai and control the border between Gaza and Egypt even though he is responsible for his country's refusal to date to do anything to stop the weapons smuggling into Gaza. He can be trusted to train Palestinian military forces even though the ones he trained in the last go-around went on to become senior terrorists in the now four-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian terror war.

No one in Israel this week saw fit to mention that the very day Azzam was finally allowed to come home after eight years of politically motivated persecution, it was announced that Iran had transferred Mustafa Hamza, leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya, to Egyptian custody. Hamza had been tried and sentenced to death in absentia by Egyptian courts three times since 1992 and is believed to have masterminded the attempted assassination of Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995. Reports of the transfer noted that ever since Egypt hosted the Sharm e-Sheikh conference aimed at preventing Iraqi elections last month, Egyptian-Iranian relations have improved considerably to the point where they are considering reinstating full diplomatic ties.

Few in Israel, or in the US for that matter, are particularly interested in analyzing what is happening with the Palestinians or the Egyptians today. This is so because it is considered impolitic, not to mention extremist, to point out anything that might cast doubt on the viability of Sharon's plan to abandon Gaza and northern Samaria while expelling some 10,000 Israelis from their homes, farms and communities.

Next week we will have the fifth annual Herzliya Conference. The conference has become a centerpiece in Israel's national politics because the prime minister has used his address there for the past two years to mark dramatic shifts in his policies. Two years ago he shocked everyone by saying that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state. Last year he outlined his plan to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria. Each time, it took several months for Sharon to ram his new strategic outlook down the throats of his party members. But with the assistance of the press, this year, he is going into the conference with his withdrawal plan firmly entrenched in the received wisdom of our times.

Sharon's adoption of the Labor Party's cut-and-run strategy has had catastrophic consequences for Israel's international standing. Because the plan is being advanced by Sharon, who has been demonized by the international Left as a war criminal, Israel's friends abroad have abandoned the strategic wisdom of never rewarding terror that they bravely advocated for decades and embraced the plan.

Pro-Israel writers and policymakers in the US like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire and Abraham Sofaer have publicly lauded Sharon for his "strategic wisdom" and have castigated as extremists those who insist that the planned withdrawal will be devastating to Israel's national security. Sharon's minions in the government like Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have taken to threatening Israelis directly, arguing that if we oppose the withdrawal we will receive Yossi Beilin's delusional Geneva Initiative, which gives up the entire store to the PLO even as the US National Security Council's point man on Israel, Elliott Abrams, reportedly told leading American Jewish leftists that the White House views all Israeli communities located to the east of the security fence as slated for destruction.

In an opinion column in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Sofaer, who as legal adviser to the State Department during the Reagan administration arguably did more than anyone to prevent international law from being used as a whip to prevent nations from fighting international terrorism, argued that Sharon's withdrawal plan is the only option. Sofaer allows that "the Palestinians are far from ready to negotiate." The advantage of Sharon's plan therefore, is that it gets Israel out of an "untenable" position in Gaza. Sofaer compares the withdrawal from Gaza to Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, arguing, "Today, the Lebanese-Israeli border is more secure than during occupation."

This is the sort of sophistry that friends of Israel like Sofaer would almost certainly never have entertained before Sharon adopted the plan. The fact of the matter is that today, Hizbullah forces in south Lebanon constitute a strategic threat to Israel. Just this week the army reported that Hizbullah is developing unconventional weapons. Last week the IDF deployed a battery of Patriot missiles to Haifa to prevent Hizbullah drones, which can be armed with chemical and biological weapons, from infiltrating Israel – again.

Hizbullah's transformation from a tactical challenge to a strategic threat has advanced unfettered over the past four years because the IDF left Lebanon and stopped fighting Hizbullah. The fact that since the withdrawal of IDF forces from Lebanon no soldiers have been killed in Lebanon is a tautology, not proof that the move was wise. Aside from that, the IDF also reported this week that the majority of Palestinian terror cells in Judea and Samaria that executed successful terror attacks in 2004 have been affiliated with Hizbullah. And so we disengaged from them in Lebanon only to fight them in Israel.

This week St.-Sgt. Nadav Kudinsky was killed in Gaza as he led forces in uncovering a tunnel for transferring terrorists into Israel. How exactly will Israel be able to prevent such tunnels from becoming operational once IDF forces have left the area? Will Egyptian or British forces fight Palestinian terrorists for us?

Sofaer writes that "Israel's security would be threatened if Gaza is taken over by terrorists." Well, who else does he think will take it over when, in order to shore up domestic support, the likes of Abbas and Qurei and Shaath feel it necessary to bed down with the likes of Ahmed Jibril and Assad? What do Sofaer or any of Israel's other staunch supporters think Egypt, with fresh diplomatic ties with Teheran and new legitimacy in Israel because of Azzam's release, will do against these people when Mubarak's chief government-sponsored cleric Sheikh Tantawi this week extolled the legitimacy of the Sunni terrorists fighting Iraqi and coalition forces in Iraq?

The fact of the matter is that by fighting Palestinian terrorists on the ground in Gaza and along the Egyptian border and by controlling the air, land and sea entry points to Gaza, Israel is not in an untenable position. It is in a difficult position. But there can be no doubt that the threat won't go away if we turn our backs to it and call it untenable. As in Lebanon, it will grow all the more dangerous.

It is hard to dispute the strategic wisdom of a man with Sharon's military credentials. But can we not at least entertain the notion that Sharon at 76, embroiled in criminal investigations, may be past his prime? This is not the time for debating Sharon's place of honor in Israel's history, which he more than earned long ago. But we owe it to ourselves to coldly analyze the strategic options with which we are faced, rather than simply saying that, since Sharon has said his piece, all that is left for us to do is quietly follow along.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Freelance journalist Kevin Sites was just another guy trying to make his way in the business until the battle of Fallujah. While accompanying US Marines into a mosque, Sites filmed a Marine shooting a prostrate terrorist lying in the mosque, then crassly pronouncing him dead. As the pictures made their way around the world, millions of anti-US voices rang up angrily denouncing the Marines for committing "war crimes."

Overnight, Sites became an international star. Everyone wanted to read the Left's dazzling Johnny-on-the-Spot and all "right-thinking" people pronounced him a professional upholding the highest standards of journalism. Heady stuff for a reporter on the make and a powerful message for all aspiring plyers of the trade.

In Israel, our TV news broadcast Sites's footage over and over as wizened anchors shook their heads with revulsion over the inhumanity of US armed forces in Iraq. The newspapers played up coverage of the event to make certain that all of us knew just how awful American forces really are.

No one bothered to make mention of the fact that Marines and soldiers fighting in Fallujah had been repeatedly attacked by terrorists playing possum. No one bothered to make mention of the numerous instances of terrorists raising the white flag of surrender only to fire at forces coming to take them into custody.

What does the context of the battle matter when a case can be made for vilifying US Marines as war criminals – on the basis of Sites's isolated, deconstructionist footage – rather than praising them as battle-trained warriors?

Terrorists have two basic advantages over the Western armies and societies that fight them: their own invisibility, and the self-obsession and hatred of Western Leftists. By not abiding by the centuries-old rules of war that stipulate that combatants are uniformed members of the armed forces of a country or a recognized insurgency in control of territory, the terrorists have an upper hand despite their relatively small numbers and outdated weaponry. How can a war be justified against an enemy you can't see who looks just like the civilians you are obligated by law and your values to protect?

Add to this the fact that terrorists eagerly exploit universally recognized symbols of non-combatants and you have a war that you simply cannot justify on camera. Terrorist shoot from mosques so mosques must be raided. Terrorists are transported in ambulances so ambulances must be inspected. But of course, the television cameras aren't filming when the terrorists fire RPGs from minarets, only when terrorists wounded while shooting them lay pitifully on the floor. And there is no camera on hand when they plant explosives beneath gurneys.

AND FOR all that, the US in Iraq is in a better position than Israel is in waging its counterterror operations against the Palestinians. Iraq is a heterogeneous society. The US can mobilize the Shi'ites and Kurds to assist its efforts to fight the Sunni Arab terrorists and it can depend on Iraqis generally to support coalition forces' efforts against foreign jihadists.

Israel, on the other hand, is fighting against a homogeneous enemy. The Palestinians are almost exclusively Sunni Muslims and the majority of Palestinians support the aims of the terrorists to murder Israeli civilians with the eventual goal of destroying Israel.

For solipsistic Leftists, who reign supreme in Israel's media, academia and judiciary, the homogeneity of Palestinian society makes it easy to ignore the enemy while vainly walking through their distorted halls of mirrors and echo chambers. Their goal is to create a perception of reality in which the Palestinians are all innocent and Israel is always at fault. In recent weeks, their primary target has been the IDF.

A week and a half ago, Supreme Court justices demanded that Deputy Chief of General Staff Maj.-Gen. Dan Halutz present them, in writing, with his views on the morality of collateral damage. The fact that there is no legal basis for this Orwellian thought control has never been raised by any of Israel's legal pundits or court reporters. Halutz's appointment to his job was opposed by the radical Left for a statement he made in a newspaper interview in which he said he slept like a baby after arch-terrorist Salah Shehadeh was killed by an IAF helicopter in 2002, despite the fact that civilians were also killed in the operation.

The crusaders of mercy for Palestinian terrorists petitioned the Supreme Court to revoke his appointment. No one in the media ever questioned whether in a normal country these radical leftist organizations would have any standing, or wondered about the credentials of these groups that never launched a petition questioning the moral probity of Palestinian murderers with whom the Israeli government has negotiated.

Then we have the Palestinian violinist. On November 9, the radical Leftist "human rights" organization Machsom Watch videotaped a Palestinian playing his violin at an IDF checkpoint near Nablus. Machsom Watch is a group of enlightened ladies that fan out to checkpoints to ensure that soldiers charged with keeping terrorists out of Israel behave politely to Palestinians wishing to cross into Israel.

According to its Web site, the organization is devoted to advancing Palestinian human rights. No mention whatsoever is made of Israeli human rights, but then why get bogged down by details? The fact made very plain by Machsom Watch's Web site is that the organization is devoted to exposing the evil of the Israeli military forces.

But who cares about the inherent hostility of Machsom Watch to the IDF when it shoots great footage of soldiers caught red-handed "humiliating" a Palestinian violinist? The local media pounced on the tape.

In last Friday's papers, the IDF was excoriated for its inhumanity. Novelist Meir Shalev, writing on the cover of Yediot Ahronot's news magazine, likened the scene to images of the Holocaust. Maariv devoted its cover story to eyewitness accounts of reserve soldiers enumerating the human-rights violations they committed during their reserve service.

No mention was made by anyone of the fact that a violin case is a pretty good place to hide a bomb. No mention was made of the fact that the terrorists who conducted the massacre at Sbarro pizzeria in August 2001 hid their bomb in a guitar case.

The incident at the roadblock was investigated by the IDF and the findings, released this week, show that the Palestinian in question was asked to remove his violin from its case by the soldiers and that he began playing his instrument on his own initiative. Indeed, the report reveals that the soldiers had to ask him to stop playing. But what does the truth matter when the image can be used by the Israel-bashing radical Left to "prove" that its narrative, in which Israel is the aggressor and Palestinians are innocent victims, is right and reality is wrong?

The inability of Israel's "enlightened" elite, like their counterparts in Europe and the US, to ever see anything right about their own side, and their insistence on refusing to countenance that many aspects of their enemy's culture of hatred are unpardonably evil, extend to all aspects of life.

This week at the Jerusalem Summit conference, Shinui MK Etti Livni participated in a panel discussion regarding the persecution of women in Muslim society. Livni stated that in her view, the stories of abuse of Muslim women are similar to tales of abuse of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women.

The preposterousness of this claim is boundless. In Egypt, the majority of girls are forced by their fathers to undergo the barbaric procedure of genital mutilation euphemistically referred to as female circumcision. Where does this happen in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities?

According to a report released this week by Human Rights Watch, one third of Egyptian women have been beaten by their husbands. In what ultra-Orthodox community are comparable numbers to be found?

But admitting that Muslim societies and countries are misogynistic and systematically enslave half their members would make Israel look good by comparison, so it is better to sweep the evil under the rug.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum reported this week that a new legend is being propagated in left-wing circles in Europe and the US that the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have been demonstrating against the patently fraudulent elections results in their country are actually all CIA provocateurs. An article in the UK's Guardian, for instance, alleged that the protests are "an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in Western branding and mass marketing."

As Applebaum argues it, the myth is being created to explain away the inconvenient truth that millions of people look to the US as an inspirational beacon of freedom which they wish to emulate. It cannot be, say these reactionary anti-American "progressives," that good people actually like the US and oppose those who share the "enlightened" public's hatred of Uncle Sam. Therefore, anyone advancing a claim that could be viewed as pro-American cannot be an authentic activist. Rather, the CIA must be paying his light bill.

When faced with this sort of opportunistic America- and Israel-bashing we have to ask what exactly these people want. The only rational answer is power. If we can be convinced that they are right and reality is wrong, they will never have to pay a price for all their mendacious notions of Israeli racism and American imperialism. They will never be taken to task for the thousands who have died as a result of their conviction that anyone who fights for the right to be free and unmolested by Third World fascists is by definition a fascist.

The only way to fight these people is to refuse to play by their rules. We must be able to look in the mirror and realize that indeed we are the good guys here. And we must be willing to look at the rotten evil that characterizes the ideology of our enemies and say that defeating them is the mission of our generation.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.