So it looks like the EU's constitution might have run up against an iceberg. According to a report from Paris in The Weekly Standard, French President Jacques Chirac may have overplayed his EU card by allowing the French people to decide by referendum whether or not they wish to ratify the French-authored, 448-article EU constitution. Opinion polls taken in mid-April indicate that 56 percent of French voters now oppose the constitution which they are set to vote on in late May.

According to the report, French opposition to the constitution is based on a combination of economic populism and general distaste for the entire project – one which diminishes their national sovereignty and puts them under the control of people they dislike and distrust.

If this negative trend is not reversed, it seems that the French voters will reject the plans of the nonelected European bureaucratic elite that have been more or less pushing through the program of European unification for the past few decades without public oversight. That is, the European elite, in progressing to their post-nationalist (and anti-American) dream regime of multinational elites writing treaties and regulations and hatching plots together in Brussels, may actually suffer the consequences of cutting themselves off from the people in whose name they purport to be working.

The most striking aspect of this turn of events is that it reminds us what it means to live in a democratically governed society. It means that when elections are free and fair and direct, the leaders of any particular government are supposed to reflect the collective will of their people and that the policies of a democratically elected government will, at the end of the day, be a reflection of the self-interests of the community of voters that make up its society. If, as the West has asserted for the past 400 or so years, the citizens of a country are considered rational actors, then the result of elections should be the emergence and development of peaceful, non-revolutionary, wealth-creating societies.
 

In countries where elections are corrupted – either by non-direct electoral processes or by regimes that organize them in a manner that prevent the people from exercising an authentic free choice – the connection between the governed and their leaders becomes attenuated and the policies of the government will not be informed necessarily by the interest of the people.

This is the case, no doubt, in Saudi Arabia. Last Saturday, in the third round of municipal elections in that absolute monarchy, Islamist candidates were swept into office. The fact that women in Saudi Arabia are denied the vote, like the fact that the country is governed as much by the religious thought police as by the secret police, no doubt had something to do with the results.

In the Palestinian Authority the situation is even more acute. Palestinians are governed by a series of interlocking yet quasi-independent tyrannies. On the one hand, they have the PA itself with its secret police and goon squads, better known as the Palestinian security forces, that determine whether they will receive jobs, various licenses or permits to work in Israel. As well, the PA determines the content of school and university curricula, mosque sermons, newspapers, and radio and television broadcasts.

On the other hand, Palestinians are governed by the terrorist organizations that rule their streets from Rafah to Jenin. Some, like Hamas, bring them into their fold through Saudi-funded welfare services. Others, like Fatah, bring them in by intimidating them or paying them off with PA, Iranian or Hizbullah-financed salaries.

Given this situation, the PA-ruled areas can be compared to a jungle and the strongest force in any particular area is the most popular one.

So, when PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas wants to pander to the people, he panders to the
strongmen, who are also terrorists. This presents both Israel and the US with an unworkable situation. Under pressure from both to reform his security services, he turns to strongman Rashid Abu Shabak – strongman Muhammad Dahlan's replacement as head of the Preventive Security Service (the PA version of the KGB) – to head the PSS in both Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

Shabak is a powerful man. But he is also a mass murderer and master terrorist. He commanded the bombing of the school bus in Kfar Darom in November 2000 that killed two adults and left three children legless. He is known in Gaza as both the father of the Palestinian mortars – over 5,000 of which have rained down on Israeli communities in the area since their introduction in 2001 – and as the "collaborator hunter." According to The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh, over the past several years, Shabak has "hunted down" more than 100 Palestinians who have assisted Israel in its counter-terror operations.

Yet in the jungle of Palestinian society, it is not enough to coddle terrorists. What is most important is to be a terrorist. And so, Hamas is poised to become a political force to be reckoned with after the planned July 17 elections for the Palestinian legislature. Hamas leaders have already made clear that they are first and foremost a terrorist organization and will not abandon their arms as a result of their political involvement. As Mushir al-Masri told the press this week, "Our fingers will remain on the trigger." Masri maintained that Hamas's participation in the elections, "does not mean it is on the way to becoming a political party."

In the meantime, the Palestinians, election or no election, are preparing for the next round of war, which they plan to open in September, immediately after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to expel all Israeli citizens from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria is completed.

This week there were several reports that Palestinians have already smuggled anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns into Judea and Samaria. The Islamic Jihad is reorganizing in the Jenin area which is set for Israeli withdrawal. At the same time, the IDF is sending special forces to man the 180-km border with Egypt which now, for the first time since the signing of the peace treaty 25 years ago, is considered by the IDF to constitute a strategic threat to Israel.

As for Israel, after buying off a sufficient number of Likud backbenchers to prevent a national referendum on his planned withdrawal and expulsion plan, Sharon managed to scare a lot of friends of Israel in Washington earlier in the month with his talk of the likelihood of civil war breaking out. Americans take the specter of civil war very seriously.

But what they cannot possibly understand from where they sit is that it isn't the Israelis slated for expulsion from their homes that wish for civil war, but Sharon's newfound supporters on the far Left. Voicing this bloodlust most recently was Haaretz columnist and Susan Sontag-admiring pseudo-intellectual Avirama Golan. Golan explained her opposition to the proposal to build new communities in Nitzanim for the set-for-expulsion Israelis thus: "Transferring the evacuees from Gush Katif to a brand new neighborhood built especially for them along the beautiful strip of Nitzanim transmits a problematic implicit message. This is a message that says [once again] to the Jewish settlers in the territories: You are a chosen group You will not be like all the other Israelis... If this is what the government does in the evacuation of Gush Katif, the main sting of the evacuation of the settlements will be neutralized It will be as though nothing has been done."

So, for Golan, if the thousands of Israelis whom the government plans to forcibly expel from their homes and farms are not treated poorly, then the whole operation won't be meaningful. She wants her political antagonists who insist on believing in God and Jewish rights to suffer. And if they don't, then Sharon will have failed her.

What Golan represents is the Israeli version of the European elites. She and her buddies represent a tiny minority of Israelis, but like their European counterparts, they exert a great deal of influence through their control of the media, the legal system and the universities. As Amnon Abromovich, Channel 2's chief commentator, said of the prime minister at a conference on Sharon's withdrawal plan, "In my view, we must protect Sharon not only from political threats but also from legal threats."

When his remarks were subject to scrutiny this week, he relented and said that Sharon should only be protected by the media until September – after the withdrawal goes through.

Eighty-thousand Israelis braved the rocket-and-mortar onslaught on the Israeli communities in Gaza on Wednesday to come to Gush Katif and demonstrate against Sharon's planned withdrawal. The prime minister's supporters claim that a majority of Israelis support the plan. But the truth is probably different. A majority of Israelis is probably indifferent today to the plan, but indifference cannot be confused with support.

Given this, and given that from day to day it becomes increasingly apparent just how ill-advised Sharon's plan is from both a strategic and an operational perspective, it is clear why Sharon and his elitist supporters and protectors are so deathly afraid of a referendum. But the issue that Israelis, friends of Israel and supporters of Israeli democracy should be raising now is as follows: The French have recourse to a referendum to voice their views on a project that was undertaken largely without their consent and with which they have become increasingly disenchanted. The Israeli pubic is forced by events to face the dangers that Sharon's plan poses to the country and its citizens.

In the absence of a referendum – and assuming that the government will not fall before the withdrawal because the Labor, Yahad (Meretz) and Arab parties will protect Sharon to ensure that elections are out of the question – what is the vehicle through which Israelis will be able to voice their opposition to a plan adopted without their consent with which they are becoming increasingly disenchanted?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last May, in the aftermath of the massacre of the Hatuel family; the rocket propelled grenade attacks on IDF forces and a steep increase in arms smuggling from Egypt through tunnels to Rafah, the IDF launched Operation Rainbow in Gaza. Its aim was to clean out Rafah of terrorists and stem the hemorrhage of arms being smuggled into Gaza from Egypt.

The international outcry against Israel, which began the moment the operation was launched, was hysterical and obscene. Israel was accused of perpetrating crimes against humanity for every action it took to protect its territory and citizens from attack.

The international denunciation was supported by leftist commentators in the Israeli media, most prominently by Ha’aretz newspaper whose coverage of the operation was barely distinguishable from Al Jazeera’s. Ari Shavit, one of Ha’aretz’s most prominent writers penned a column where he renounced all ties with Israelis who live in Judea, Samaria and Gaza claiming that they should not be considered Israelis.

A few days after Shavit’s column was published, I was asked to give an interview to Britain’s Channel 4. When I arrived in the studio I saw that Shavit had been invited as well and concluded that I had been set up. Shavit, I was certain, would be the “good Israeli” who would say terrible things about Israel, and I would be the “bad Israeli” called upon in a post-modern disputation to be criminalized before the camera.

Yet what actually transpired was even more outrageous than I had expected. When our turn came to speak, the anchorman– acting as the Grand Inquisitor – attacked us both fairly equally. Clearly, the British would have none of Shavit’s attempt to separate the “good” Israelis like himself, from the “bad” Israelis like myself. All Israelis were criminals for Channel 4.

Recent events in Britain have forced me to recall this miserable little episode. Last Friday, on the eve of Passover, Britain’s Association of University Teachers passed a resolution calling for the boycott of Bar Ilan and Haifa Universities, promising that Hebrew University will be next.

This decision is an act of pure anti-Semitism. Israel is being singled out from all the countries in the world. There is no call to boycott Palestinian universities which celebrate terrorist massacres; indoctrinate students to jihad and are used as recruiting grounds for terrorist organizations. There is no call to boycott Saudi Arabian universities where gender apartheid and religious persecution are the explicit and rigidly followed norms. And of course, no one would think of boycotting Chinese universities for China’s occupation of Tibet. Only the Jewish state and its research universities are unacceptable.

There is an ironic twist to all of this. The highest density of anti-Israel activists in Israeli society is to be found in the humanities and social science faculties of Israeli universities. Indeed, it is Ilan Pappe, from Haifa University who, while scandalously receiving a tax-payer financed salary, travels around the US and Europe vilifying his country and calling for anti-Semites like the members of the AUT to boycott us.

Earlier last week, we witnessed another sort of abject prejudice in Britain when two far Left, virulently anti-Israel and anti-American politicians – Oona King and George Galloway -- were attacked by Islamic extremists as they campaigned in their heavily Muslim district.

King makes a big deal about the fact that she is anti-Israel and Jewish at the same time, and has compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and the Palestinians to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Iraqi government documents uncovered after the US-led invasion of Iraq two years ago reportedly exposed that Galloway, who is running against King, and has been one of the most vociferously anti-American voices in Britain for years, received payments for his pro-Saddam, anti-American positions from the Iraqi government.

Yet, in spite of these politicians’ pandering to Britain’s large and increasingly extremist Muslim minority, they were physically assaulted by members of that very group. Indeed, over the past week, there have been repeated reports of Islamic extremists storming campaign meetings and denouncing democracy, calling any Muslim who participates in the elections an infidel. British security forces are on high alert for terrorist attacks in the country ahead of next month’s elections.

Mainly due to Britain’s relationship with the US, Israelis have a tendency to view it as an ally. But the situation on the ground in Britain must force us to reconsider this friendly view. Today Britain manifests the symptoms of a suicidal society. Its elites have been taken over by far-Left bigots who, while purporting to care for the downtrodden, work to perpetuate a situation where the Arab world is wholly controlled by brutes who call for the destruction not only of Israel, but of Britain itself.

Anti-Semitism, which has become pervasive among Britain’s aristocracy, and the chattering classes in the media, culture and academia, is a sign of Britain’s steep and steady slide into nihilistic self-destruction. Their animus towards Israel and towards Jews who refuse to denounce the Jewish state, has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with them. They are fully aware of the threats posed by the international jihad but rather than fight it they have tried to appease it by at once denying its danger and obsessively embracing Palestinian terrorists and calling for Israel’s destruction. They do this even as the jihadis in their own country make it clear that they are unappeasable.

There is nothing that Israel can do to stem Britain’s decline. All we can do is keep our distance from that self-destructive society which, like a dying lion, can still do us great harm if we let it get close to us. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Jonathan Pollard is one of the most polarizing figures of our times. Pollard, a former intelligence analyst in US naval intelligence, has now served 20 years of a life imprisonment sentence following his conviction for transferring classified US intelligence materials relating to Arab ballistic missile and nonconventional weapons programs to Israel from May 1984 until his arrest in November 1985.

For his contribution to Israel's security and for his long suffering in prison, Israelis consider Pollard a national hero. He is commonly considered the source of Israel's preparedness for the Iraqi missile attacks during the Gulf War. Israelis across the right-left and religious-secular divide are basically unified in their hope to greet Pollard in Israel as a free man.

For many American Jews, Pollard is reviled as a traitor. Since his arrest, a cloud of suspicion has hung over all Jews employed in the Pentagon, the State Department, the US military and intelligence services. Time after time, baseless allegations surface of American Jews spying for Israel. In spite of Israel's strategic alliance with the US, American intelligence agencies define Israel as a "country of concern" for intelligence breaches and American Jews are under constant, often malicious scrutiny. All a person has to do to expose the deep frustration of Washington Jews with the constant discrimination by intelligence agencies is mention the name "Pollard."
Immediately he will be showered with bitter statements like, "If it weren't for that traitor, we wouldn't be in this position," and, "I hope he rots in jail."

For the past 12 years Pollard has been incarcerated in Butner Federal Prison in North Carolina. He was transferred to Butner from Marion Federal Prison in Illinois where he was held in a subterranean cell in solitary confinement for seven years. Pollard's treatment, like his life sentence, is unprecedented in the history of US espionage investigations. Never has a spy in the employ of a friendly country received such a sentence. On average, spies working for countries considered US allies receive between 4-7 years in jail. Aldrich Ames, the most notorious spy in recent history, who as head of the CIA counter-intelligence department compromised all US intelligence emanating from the Soviet Union for over 15 years and caused the death of more than 10 US agents operating in the Soviet Union – while sentenced to life in prison – was never placed in solitary confinement for stretches comparable to Pollard.

I went to see Jonathan Pollard last week. During a two-and-a-half-hour meeting, we spoke at length about his espionage, the conditions of his imprisonment, his feelings toward the US, Israel, the Jewish people and his hopes for the future.

Pollard is now 50 years old. He grew up in South Bend, Indiana. He studied political science, economics and classics at Stanford University and was studying towards a doctorate in military history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts when he was recruited in 1979 by Naval Intelligence.

Pollard first visited Israel in 1971 for a summer program at the Weitzman Institute. He refers to his Jewish background as "modern-Orthodox, American style. The centrality of Israel for the Jewish people was emphasized."

"I had thought constantly about aliya," he says, "But it's hard to pick up and leave the 'Golden Medina.' My parents are proud Americans. My father is a decorated Army officer. He carries a copy of the US Constitution in his pocket. But when I joined Naval Intelligence my father warned me that it's not a good place for a Jew. There is a lot of anti-Semitism there. But even when I saw it, I thought it would be better for me to stay."

Today at Butner, Pollard is employed as a window washer. His life is one of constant terror.

"I will give you an impressionistic description of my life. It involves constant noise, constant violence; profanity – every conceivable type of profanity. There is no place to be quiet or to find quiet – to read. You really have to be disciplined not to be provoked. You need to be disciplined to see when a situation is getting out of hand and to get away as quickly as possible. I have to be ready if my door opens at 2 in the morning.

"I live in a small room, not in a cell, with a roommate. My room is so small that when I sit on my bed and stretch out my arms I touch both of the walls. And it is impossible to lock the door. When I am not washing windows I spend my day reading and listening to the radio – to NPR and the BBC."

The prison has television sets set up in common rooms for inmates. His fellow inmates include murderers, rapists, armed robbers, pedophiles and other violent criminals. On September 11, Pollard was in the TV room, watching CNN.

What did you feel when you saw the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacked?

"I felt sick to my stomach. The worst thing for me was that a lot of the Muslim inmates here greeted the attacks by saying Alla Akhbar and cheering."

But why would it bother you to see the US under attack? After all, you betrayed this country.

To this, Jonathan gave me a look of profound sadness and said, "I fell in love with two women –Israel and the US. It doesn't work in private life, and it doesn't work in politics. My reaction to September 11 was as an American. As an American, I believe that this country is guarding the gates of Western civilization from the barbarians."

In 1983, shortly after Israel and the US signed a memorandum on intelligence sharing, then deputy director of the CIA Admiral Bobby Ray Inman unilaterally breached the agreement by stopping all intelligence transfers to Israel on Arab and Muslim states not directly bordering Israel. This included Iraq, Iran, Libya, Tunis and Pakistan. Inman was hired after leaving the agency by a company called International Signal and Control. The company's owner, James Guerin, was imprisoned later for transferring military technology to Iraq and South Africa.

Pollard, who was privy to the now embargoed intelligence, believed that Israel faced the specter of chemical and biological warfare attacks from these countries. Pollard claims that he considered all legal venues for ending the embargo but felt that informing the media, testifying before Congress or involving the US Jewish leadership of the situation would all be ineffective.

He claims also that "there was an incident during Operation Peace for the Galilee that provided me with my introduction to the US-Israel 'special relationship.' I saw the incredible cynicism with which the US views Israel. It flew in the face of everything that I thought was the point of the relationship. The way I viewed the world was destroyed. I had never before thought that my loyalties towards the US and Israel were in contradiction. But then I understood."

What did you understand?

"I understood that we are alone."

Pollard argues that his decision to spy for Israel, and thus betray the US, stemmed from his conviction that he "was preventing a second Holocaust."

One can question whether it was necessary for him to prevent it personally, or whether he could simply have quit his position, informed the responsible Israeli officials of the mounting dangers and let Israel – with its intelligence agencies and military -- contend with the issue as a sovereign state. But the fact is that Pollard chose himself for the task and Israel, too, in employing Pollard as its agent, chose him for the task. Over the 18-month period that Pollard worked for Israel, he provided suitcases of documents to his handlers on a regular basis.

Rafi Eitan, Israel's master spy who served as Pollard's chief handler from his position as head of the Office for Information Cooperation (LAKAM) at the Israeli Embassy, told him that his information was discussed at cabinet meetings and Pollard understood that his main contractor was then Maj.-Gen. Ehud Barak, who then served as Commander of Military Intelligence.

Yet, when Pollard was arrested, Israel did whatever it could to deny its connection to him. From the moment then prime minister Shimon Peres ordered embassy security officers to physically eject Pollard and his wife-at-the-time Anne from the embassy, Israel has done everything in its power to distance itself from Pollard. It wasn't until 1995 that he was granted Israeli citizenship and it wasn't until 1998 that Israel officially recognized that Pollard was its agent.

Binyamin Netanyahu was the only prime minister to have made a serious effort to get Pollard released. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has abjectly refused to take any action on Pollard's behalf.

For Pollard, who expected to be protected by Israel if caught, it is the treatment he has received from the Israeli government that surprises and disturbs him more than the harsh and disproportionate punishment that he has received from US authorities.

"I had two particularly memorable terrible days since I was arrested. The first was when the FBI showed me transcripts of statements that Israeli officials made shortly after my arrest. It was clear that the Mossad had three goals. They wanted to put all the blame on the Office for Information Connections and Rafi Eitan; they wanted to protect AIPAC at all costs; and they wanted to bury me. It was the Mossad that was the source of all the disinformation about me and my character. The lies that I used cocaine and was a mercenary, selling secrets to countries other than Israel, it all came from them.

"Later, in 1995, a Mossad agent came here to see me and suggested that I kill myself. I said that while I would die for Israel, I would not die for some group of toadies.

"The Israelis claimed that mine was a rogue operation. But this was a total lie. Not only did the senior political and military leadership know what was happening, Ariel Sharon tried to use me for his own ends. Rafi Eitan was Arik's man. And he asked me to collect political intelligence for Sharon – what people in Washington were saying about him and the like. I refused.

"But what hurt me the most was when I saw the unclassified version of the Eban Report. [The Eban Report was a report of the Knesset's sub-committee on intelligence services investigation into the Pollard affair that was published in 1987.] It made me almost physically ill. The report includes a summary of a midnight conversation between Peres and [then US Secretary of State George] Schultz about a week after I was arrested. Schultz asked Peres to return the documents I took and Peres agreed but made Schultz promise that the documents wouldn't be used against me and Schultz agreed.

"No one ever told me about this agreement. I could have used it in my defense. It is the country's responsibility. Israel had standing before the court. Israel is the only country to participate in the prosecution of its own agent.

"Several years later [in 1990] Sharon attacked Yitzhak Shamir for going along with my abandonment. But that is what Sharon is doing now."

Although sources close to Sharon claim that Pollard may be released on the sidelines of the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria and the pullout of IDF forces from the areas, White House sources know of no request on Sharon's part to release Pollard from prison.

Ahead of Sharon's visit to the White House last spring, 112 Knesset members, including Sharon himself, signed a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to release Pollard from prison. Sharon refused to deliver the letter to Bush. This month, ahead of Sharon's meeting with Bush at his ranch in Texas, all current and former Israeli chief rabbis signed a letter to Bush requesting that he free Pollard. Again, Sharon refused to deliver the letter to Bush during his meeting.

After meeting with Pollard, I contacted James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. Woolsey told me that upon taking up his position in 1993 he reviewed Pollard's entire file carefully. "This man would not be my first candidate for clemency, but 20 years is a long time. As a general proposition, one dimension of this is that a substantial penalty has been paid, so that the element of deterrence is dealt with.

"I do think there is a consideration here. Israel and the US, Australia, Japan, Poland and Britain are all in this war on terror together. We need to pay attention to the concerns of the citizens in fellow democracies. I would feel this way if it were Japanese espionage. We have to have a degree of sympathy for the sentiments of citizens in a fellow democracy." At the same time, Woolsey was quick to explain, "This is not a recommendation for clemency."

Woolsey also stated that Pollard was not suspected of having transferred secrets to governments other than Israel. In his view "the heart of the matter" was the US fear that Israel's own intelligence apparatus would be penetrated by hostile governments and that as a result the materials Pollard transferred would be picked up. This, he explained, "would present a danger to the US ability to collect intelligence."

"The fear was that the Israeli government itself might have been penetrated, not that Pollard gave the information to anyone else."

When Pollard speaks of his future, he says that he has been training himself to go into a non-security related field if released from prison and most of his reading materials are scientific.

"I have an interest in alternative energy sources to replace oil and in water desalination."

Is there any reason that the US should worry about security damage you may cause if released from prison?

"There is no substantive American worry regarding my release. My life has been destroyed so deterrence has been achieved. Nothing I know and certainly nothing I would ever do would be antithetical to US interests. The bottom line is, I want to come home so I can be with my wife, my people and my land."

In the days that have passed since the interview it occurred to me that the reprehensible behavior of the Israeli government in the Pollard affair tops that of all concerned parties – all of whom have behaved reprehensibly. Aside from the anti-Semites who take pleasure in spewing Jewish conspiracy theories, Israel was the only side that gained anything from Pollard's espionage. The US gained nothing and Pollard lost everything.

In shirking its responsibility for Pollard, Israel paved the way for the entire story being blown out of all proportion by opportunistic enemies of Israel and American Jewry for two decades now. If Israel had resolutely stood by Pollard, then the aspersions cast on Washington's Jews would be far more circumspect than they are today and the US would have seen that Israel is an ally to be reckoned with, not a doormat to be stepped on at will.

Pessah is the holiday of freedom. But for a nation to be free it must take responsibility for its actions, no matter how grave those consequences may be. In shirking its responsibility a nation is doing more than casting out the unwanted weight. It is casting off its own ties to freedom. Pollard said, "The abandonment of a nation begins with the abandonment of an individual."

If we wish to maintain our integrity as a free people, we can do so only by taking on the task of bringing Pollard home. He may be a hero and he may be a fool. However he is viewed, he is one of us and he has been discriminated against and persecuted because he helped us. And other Jews are being persecuted because we refused to defend him. It is time for us to take responsibility for Pollard because his imprisonment paves the road to our servitude.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

As irony would have it, democracy is now the biggest threat facing the so-called peace process between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This we have learned from the press reports and media spins that preceded and followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's photogenic visit to US President George W. Bush's ranch in Texas this week.

Both the Americans and the Israelis are concerned, deeply concerned that is, by the specter of the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council that are scheduled to take place on July 17, just a few days before Sharon's planned expulsion of all Jews from their homes, farms, businesses, synagogues and graves in Gaza and northern Samaria.

According to the polls, Hamas, which won some 70 percent of the seats in the recent municipal elections in Gaza, will do quite well in these elections – winning at least a third of the legislative seats. Fatah sources acknowledge that, if anything, the polls have severely underestimated Hamas's support base. They believe that if the elections are held on schedule, Hamas will win a majority of seats in the PLC.

Recent weeks have brought on a steady drumbeat of statements by top IDF officials and Palestinian sources that Fatah is planning a major terror offensive in June in a bid either to force a postponement of the elections or to increase public support for PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas's party ahead of the poll. Senior Fatah officials told The Jerusalem Post last Saturday that they wished to postpone the July elections in order to prevent a Hamas takeover, and the Israeli government, like the Bush Administration, is praying for their success.

The thing is, both the US and Israel are largely responsible for the current political realities in the PA – where not only are all major political parties also terrorist organizations, but the relative popularity of each party is directly proportional to the volume of terror attacks it has carried out. It was the Bush Administration that first lumped the January 9 elections for PA chairman together with the January 30 general elections in Iraq for a transitional constitutional assembly, as well as with last month's anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon as evidence of a wave of democratization in the Middle East.

This conflation of these events has made it difficult for the general public to understand just how different the situation in the PA is from that of Iraq and Lebanon. As events in the latter two advance the goals of the global war on terrorism, the events in the PA work to its detriment.

In Iraq, the electorate was given the chance to choose its leaders freely, with its former dictator Saddam Hussein in jail and his Ba'ath party defanged, delegitimized and barred from competing in the elections. Not only were Iraqis empowered to speak out freely against the former regime, they have also bravely exposed the roles played by the former regime's allies – the UN, Jordan, Syria and Iran – in prolonging Saddam's grip on power and in fueling the insurgency in the aftermath of his fall.

So, not only was the Iraqi dictatorship destroyed before the Iraqis went to vote, the international and regional systems that were allied with the dictatorial regime and allowed it to continue to rule were also delegitimized in the eyes of the Iraqis.

In Lebanon, where the fate of democracy remains much more unclear, last month's mass protests against the Damascus-backed Lebanese government and the effective Syrian occupation of Lebanon were not simply a result of domestic frustration with the status quo. The Lebanese would never have taken to the streets if former prime minister Rafik Hariri's assassination had been greeted with a yawn by Paris and Washington. The protesters were responding to what they sensed to be a change in the momentum of events, and this is what allowed them to express their political desires in public. For the first time in years, it seemed that the Syrian mukhabarat and Hizbullah terrorists were on the losing side, and so they were suddenly fair game.

The situation in the PA couldn't be more different. Abbas ran for office as Arafat's heir apparent, pre-anointed by the White House. Neither Fatah chief and imprisoned mass murderer Marwan Barghouti nor Hamas challenged him. The other candidates were pro forma – lacking funds and access to the media (both controlled by Abbas) that were necessary to raise any sort of challenge to Arafat's deputy of more than 40 years. And yet, despite the open field, Abbas's campaign was marked by vote fraud and voter intimidation.

Its endemic corruption – which included keeping polls open an extra three hours and busing PA militiamen from poll to poll to vote multiple times – was overshadowed only by Abbas's embrace of master terrorists and attacks on the "Zionist entity" to prove his bona fides as Palestinian leader.

The Palestinian election experience, then, is in no way similar to the Iraqi elections or to the Lebanese anti-Syrian protest movement. Whereas in both Iraq and Lebanon, terrorists such as Hizbullah, and terrorist-supporting regimes like Jordan and Syria and Iran, are seen as part of the problem, among the Palestinians the opposite is the case. The overwhelming majority of Palestinians believes that it was terrorism that forced Sharon to move to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and northern Samaria, expel all Jewish residents and declare a cessation of offensive operations against terrorists throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The terrorists themselves have been promised protection from the PA regime, which has put out the red carpet and the gravy train to make them feel welcome in the "newly reformed" PA militias, rather than keeping its word to Israel and the US by casting them out of its ranks and imprisoning them for murder.

At the Bush-Sharon press briefing on Monday, we saw which way the wind will be blowing in the coming months and years. For his part, Bush refused to countenance the notion that the PA's current lack of action against terrorism (that is, active protection and support of terrorists) might hold up further Israeli concessions. He explained that his native optimism makes it impossible for him to believe that things will be bad and so he can't foresee a situation in which events warrant putting off further Israeli land giveaways to the PA.

The only clear position Bush adopted during his appearance with Sharon was that he sees the expulsion of Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria as a mere first step. If this hadn't been the case, he would not have said – three times – that Israel mustn't build in the rest of its communities in Judea and Samaria -- even those that Sharon insists Bush has slated for inclusion in the envisioned shrunken, post-roadmap Israel.

Sharon, with no way to hide the fact that for the past year he has been lying to the Israeli public by claiming that in exchange for the destruction of the Jewish presence in Gaza and northern Samaria he received American support for expanding the Jewish communities in the rest of Judea and Samaria, has simply changed the subject. He has changed the subject by changing the enemy. It is not the Palestinians who worry him anymore, but the Jews. It's the Jews – and in particular his political supporters turned opponents who two years ago elected him on the basis of his declared opposition to precisely the unilateral giveaway plan he is now forcing them to swallow – who are the greatest danger.

In an exclusive interview with NBC TV, which set the tone for his entire visit, Sharon said that Israel "looks like on the eve of a civil war." He then went on to say, "All my life I was defending [the] life of Jews. Now, for [the] first time, security steps are taken to protect me from Jews."

The sheer obscenity of this statement by Sharon, made at the same time that the people he is set to expel from their homes were being attacked by Palestinian mortars that Sharon ordered the IDF to do nothing about, is made all the more clear when one looks at a statement he himself made 10 years ago.

Speaking to Kfar Chabad's local newspaper in 1995 of the press accusations at the time that opponents of the so-called peace process were inciting civil war, Sharon said, "Look what happened in Stalinist Russia, for example. In the mid-1930s, the Soviet authorities disseminated stories that there was a plan to assassinate Stalin. They were used as a justification for destroying the high command of the Red Army as well as the Jewish writers and the Jewish doctors. This is exactly what the Rabin government is doing now in Israel... Have we gotten to such Stalinist Bolshevism? Where are they leading with the blood libels they are putting out? To the abandonment of the settlers in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and maybe to a civil war. We have to shout out the warning: Tyrants at the gate."

So there we have it: Not only has US policy of safeguarding the PA while insisting on further Israeli land concessions to the PA made terrorism the choice of the Palestinian electorate, but Ariel Sharon's decision to go along with the US has made him chart a policy course that leads, as he stated so well a decade ago, to grave dangers to Israeli democracy.

Minister Natan Sharansky has explained that the true test of democracy is not the test of elections, but the "town square test" – whether an individual can stand in the middle of the town square and freely express his unpopular political opinion without fear of punishment. By this measure, the PA is not now and has never been a democracy. And the only change in democracy witnessed by Holy Land residents in the last year has been the increased danger to Israelis who have taken to the town squares to voice their opposition to Sharon's alarming new policies.

Is the Middle East democratizing? Certainly not in our neck of the woods.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In late January Columbia University was forced to postpone a conference on the Palestinian conflict with Israel when Ambassador Danny Ayalon canceled his participation in the event. A source at the Israeli Embassy told The New York Sun at the time that Ayalon's decision to pull out of the conference came "in view of complaints by Jewish students of intimidation by faculty members."

Ayalon's move was a welcome decision for those who have been closely following the situation at Columbia where Jewish students have credibly and copiously documented repeated and pervasive abuse and intimidation at the hands of professors at the university's rabidly anti-Israel Middle East Languages and Cultures Department. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear both to once-proud Columbia alumni like myself and to the concerned public that Columbia cannot be trusted either to adequately address the issue of abuse or to contend with the fact that its Middle East Department has become a bastion of anti-Jewish bigotry posing as scholarship.

The pedagogical abuse of Jewish students was brought to the attention of the general public last October when the Boston-based pro-Israel group, The David Project, which was set up to combat anti-Israel propaganda at US university campuses, produced a short documentary on the issue.

Columbia students interviewed in the film recounted incidents where they had been publicly humiliated by their professors when they dared to question their instructors' mendacious assaults against Israel and support for Palestinian terrorists.

In the wake of the public maelstrom, and consequent inquiries by alumni donors, Columbia president Lee Bollinger appointed an ad-hoc committee of five faculty members last December to look into the complaints of abuse. From the committee's membership it was immediately clear that its report would be a whitewash of the entire situation. Two of the members had signed a petition calling for the university to divest its holdings in companies that sell military equipment to Israel.
Another committee member was the doctoral adviser for one of the professors under investigation. American Jewish leaders as well as the students who complained of professorial abuse immediately launched an outcry denouncing Bollinger's committee.

That committee issued its report late last week and as expected, it largely exonerated the university and its professors from all allegations of wrongdoing. Aside from proving that indeed, Bollinger had set up the committee to ensure that the intended conclusion would be reached, the report exposes three fundamental failures of the university in contending with anti-Israel propaganda in its classrooms.

The committee report centers on three allegations by Jewish students among dozens submitted. The first was a student's allegation that Prof. Joseph Massad ordered her to leave his lecture hall when she suggested that the IDF often warns Palestinians before bombing buildings. The second involved a student alleging that when he identified himself as an Israeli student who had served in the IDF, Massad demanded that he tell him how many Palestinians he had killed. The third instance involved a student's allegation that Prof. George Saliba told her that because she has green eyes, she has no claim to the Land of Israel because she is not a Semite, whereas since he has brown eyes, he is a Semite and therefore has a right to the Land of Israel.

The odd thing is not that the committee refused to focus on any of the other student complaints. Rather, in each of these three complaints, the committee found that the students' allegations were probably true and that the professors' denials of their complaints were probably untrue. And yet, rather than lashing out at these professors for making such amazing statements and then lying about having made them, the committee didn't find anything egregious about them.

The same is true of the committee's treatment of a decision by some of the professors to cancel classes in April 2002 to participate in an anti-Israel campus demonstration held on Israeli Independence Day. Columbia's tuition is more than $30,000 a year. When one breaks that down for cost per hour of instruction it comes to roughly $100 per class session. This means that the professors who canceled their classes to participate in a radically anti-Israel protest essentially stole $100 from each student. And yet, aside from mentioning that it is not exactly proper for professors to cancel class and not offer a make-up session, the committee again, saw nothing unacceptable about what the professors did.

Another striking aspect of the report is that the term "diversity" does not appear once. In this morally relative age where "diversity" seems to have replaced goodness as the only value worth upholding, at no point is the issue of the homogeneity of views in Columbia's Middle East Department mentioned. What this shows is just how opportunistic Columbia's embrace of "diversity" really is. If all diversity means is that the professorate is a rainbow coalition of like-minded radical leftists then the university has moved from the world of scholarship into the world of intellectual bankruptcy.

Finally, the report reserves its harshest criticism, indeed, its only harsh criticism, for "outside organizations," which, the committee alleged, acted not out of regard for the health of the university, but rather were motivated by prejudicial concerns, and for faculty members who were "apparently prepared to encourage students to report to them on a fellow-professor's classroom statements."

The notion that faculty members would try to monitor what their colleagues were doing in their classrooms was "deeply disturbing" to the members of the faculty committee charged with investigating what their colleagues have been doing in their classrooms.

The only conclusion that can be drawn from Columbia's failure to police itself, or even to accept the notion that there is something wrong on campus when professors exploit their classrooms to indoctrinate students in the bile of anti-Israel claptrap is that public pressure on Columbia must be increased, not lessened. Just as Ayalon was right to boycott Columbia's conference in January, so alumni should withhold all donations until the university is forced to take steps to end brainwashing in the classroom and force its professors to contend with the kind of intellectual scrutiny that they should have had to encounter when they were hired to teach at a once-great institution.

  
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.