The top story in Sunday's Washington Post reported that the Bush administration is revising its counter-terrorism strategy. Whereas since the September 11 attacks the US has concentrated its efforts on physically destroying al-Qaida to prevent it from carrying out another major attack by arresting and killing its operatives and leaders, now, according to the report, the US will be widening the focus to include contending with the threat of militant Islam generally by trying to counteract it as a social and political force among Muslims worldwide.
 

This of course would be a welcome change. After all, al-Qaida couldn't exist if it weren't for the indoctrination systems rife throughout the Arab and Islamic world that preach jihad to Muslims day in and day out. However, judging from US actions over the past several weeks, it would seem that in his second term in office, US President George W. Bush and his administration have transformed their activist policy from the first term into one best characterized by speaking loudly and carrying no stick. Indeed, an assessment of recent American moves toward Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians gives little reason to take seriously the notion that the president and his team are planning to advance the cause of fighting global jihad at all in the coming years.

On Thursday the US allowed Iran to begin negotiations toward joining the World Trade Organization. This concession was made apparently as a quid pro quo in exchange for an Iranian promise to suspend uranium enrichment activities until the end of July. In so acting, the US gave an irrevocable payoff to the Iranians in exchange for a temporary and – given Iran's past penchant for breaking its commitments – suspect concession. The rationale apparently is that the US doesn't want to press the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons program until after next month's Iranian presidential elections. The frontrunner in those elections, after nearly all of the candidates were rejected by the mullahs, is former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Speaking of what awaits the world under a repeat Rafsanjani presidency last Friday Hojatolislam Gholam Hasani, a representative of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told worshipers at a mosque: "You need to vote for Rafsanjani. This way we will finally be able to have for ourselves the atomic bomb to fairly stand up to Israeli weapons." According to a report by Adnkronos news agency, Hasani continued, "Freedom, democracy and stupidities of this type cannot be carried over to any part, and these concepts are out of sync with the principles of Islam. Islam always spoke with the sword in the hand, and I don't see why now we should change attitudes and talk with other civilizations."

Last week too, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ratcheted up US rhetoric against Iran, promising US backing for Iranian democracy activists and saying on two separate occasions that the US and the world cannot abide by a nuclear-armed Iran. And yet, by agreeing to allow the mullahs to negotiate entrance into the WTO, the fact of the matter is that the US's actions tend to dispel the credibility of her statements.

THEN THERE is Saudi Arabia. On Friday, UPI reported that King Fahd was dead. If true, the delay in the official announcement is no doubt due to intrigue among the kingdom's princes vying for leadership roles in the succession process. By all accounts, the Bush administration is dealing with this intrigue by placing its support behind Crown Prince Abdullah, who has been running the kingdom since Fahd was incapacitated by a stroke in 1995.

During Abdullah's visit last month at Bush's ranch in Crawford, the only issue on the table from the US side was the price of oil. Democracy, human rights and Saudi support for terror and the insurgency in Iraq were all ignored. Bush made no mention of the fact that one of the members of Abdullah's entourage was barred from entering the US because of his presence on the terror watch list, or of the fact that Saudi authorities rounded up some 40 Christians in the weeks before Abdullah's visit for the crime of practicing Christianity in a private home.

In its dealings with the Saudis, the Americans apparently feel that they are between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Saudi oil profits finance global jihad. On the other hand, with the world's largest known petroleum reserves, the Saudis exert enormous power over the global economy. If the US presses too hard on Saudi support for terrorism, they can shut down the wells and raise oil prices from their current $50 per barrel to $100 per barrel, plunging the world into a global depression.

Yet according to the Set America Free Coalition – an unprecedented alliance made up of senior US security experts, labor unions and environmentalist groups – if the US wished it could, for the mere cost of $12 billion over the next four years, move rapidly to end its dependency on foreign oil by developing alternatives to fossil fuel like ethanol and methanol and subsidizing hybrid cars that run on a mix of oil and electricity. The fact that to date, the Bush administration's energy policy involves securing its access to foreign oil, building more refineries and drilling in Alaska, shows clearly that the president and his advisers have yet to decide to deal with Saudi Arabia in a serious manner.

FINALLY, there is the evolving US policy toward the Palestinian Authority. From the Palestinians' perspective, PA chief Mahmoud Abbas's visit to the White House last week was an unvarnished success. In expanding the responsibilities of US security coordinator to the PA General William Ward to include coordinating Israeli and Palestinian talks on the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria, the US all but said that it views Israel and the PA as equals and the US role as referee.

Bush reportedly told Abbas that if he rounds up wanted terrorists, the US will force Israel to uproot all unauthorized Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria immediately after Israel throws 10,000 of its citizens out of their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria this summer. The administration is now even backing a PA initiative to bring 1,500 terrorists from Jordan – otherwise known as the Badr Brigade from the Palestine Liberation Army – into Judea and Samaria. All this the US is doing in spite of the fact that Abbas has done nothing to thwart or combat terrorists since taking office. To the contrary, rather than outlaw Hamas he has upgraded it to the status of political party.

A revised US strategy toward fighting global jihad that placed in the crosshairs the regimes that indoctrinate hundreds of millions of people to believe in jihad would be a welcome policy development. And yet, from the Bush administration's actions on the ground from Teheran to Riyadh to Ramallah, it seems that rather than placing these terror regimes in the crosshairs, the president and his advisers are strengthening them. If this is the case, then Israel is in for one of the toughest periods in its history.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

MK Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, compares Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to enable the Egyptian military to deploy its forces in the Sinai Peninsula to the decision by the ancient Greeks to allow the Trojan horse to enter their city.

"The strategic blindness of both decisions is equally complete," Steinitz explains. "Here what is involved is an Israeli government enabling our most formidable enemy – Egypt – to deploy its forces at our borders within striking distance of all of our air force bases and other sensitive sites in southern Israel. It constitutes a strategic threat of the highest order to Israel's national security and survival."

According to the plan that Sharon and his advisers have been negotiating with Egypt over the past several months, after Israel's planned evacuation of the Gaza Strip, Egyptian forces will take control of the border between Gaza and Egypt. Both Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Sharon said this week that in spite of the strenuous objections of the IDF and the Shin Bet security service, Israel will transfer control over the Philadephi Route, which separates Palestinian Rafah from Egyptian Rafah, to Egyptian control. According to Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, Egypt will deploy 750 troops to the border with Gaza and another 1,500-2,000 troops to the border with Israel.

As Steinitz and Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – another harsh critic of the plan – have made clear, this initiative constitutes nothing less than an Israeli invitation to the Egyptians to remilitarize the Sinai Peninsula, the demilitarization of which was the most important strategic accomplishment of the 1981 Camp David peace treaty.

Sharon and his advisers argue that the step is necessary to enable Egypt to stem weapon-smuggling from Egypt to Gaza. And yet, according to senior IDF commanders, the border guard presence that Egypt currently fields in the Sinai is more than sufficient to block the smuggling. What Egypt lacks, they say, is not the wherewithal, but the will, to act. And yet, in his negotiations with the Egyptians, Sharon has agreed to allow them to deploy heavy armored forces to the Sinai.

Steinitz is working to block this move by insisting that any change in the status of forces agreement between Israel and Egypt must receive the approval of the Knesset before it is implemented.

As Steinitz has rightly argued, in spite of its presumptive peace with Israel, Egypt is in fact the Arab state most hostile to the Jewish state. Since the mid-1990s, the Egyptian military's annual joint forces exercise involves simulating a war against Israel. Egypt, which due to US military aid, boasts the most powerful army in the Arab world, is the epicenter of Arab anti-Semitic publications and incitement.

Egypt stands at the head of almost every political initiative launched against Israel in international forums. And, in hosting the continuous dialogue between Palestinian terror groups, the Egyptians have overseen the operational coordination between the PA, Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

ISRAEL'S DECISION to invite the deployment of Egyptian forces to its borders is based on an increasingly common and exceedingly dangerous malady that has plagued Israel's leaders over the past decade. In working to defend itself against Arab aggression, Israel is presented with a number of difficult military options. In the case at hand, Israel faces a security challenge of contending with Palestinian weapon-smuggling from Egypt. Given that to date it has not wished to deploy its own forces in the Sinai to stem the flow, Israel has placed its forces on the narrow strip of land separating Gaza from Egypt and attempted to seize the weapons at the border. Now that the government has decided to vacate Gaza, it no longer wishes for the IDF to man this border.

The reason why weapons are smuggled from Egypt to Gaza is twofold. On the one hand, the Egyptians have an interest in continuing and escalating the Palestinian terror war against Israel, because they believe their position is enhanced through an erosion of Israeli strength. On the other, the Palestinians have an interest in bringing in the weapons because they wish to enhance their ability to wage war on Israel.

Israel's decision to vacate Gaza has done nothing to change the way the Egyptians and Palestinians perceive their interests. And yet, in order to leave Gaza with a good conscience, Sharon and his advisers apparently feel that they must at least pretend this is not the case. So in the absence of any palatable option for continuing to stem the flow of weapons from Egypt to the PA, Israel has made one up. In this imaginary option, Israel will leave and Egypt and the Palestinians will immediately redefine their interests to match those of Israel. The fact that there is no factual basis for this assessment is evidently of no interest to Sharon.

The same strategic blindness and petulance informed former prime minister Ehud Barak when he decided to pull Israeli forces out of southern Lebanon and when he offered to cede almost all of Judea and Samaria to Palestinian sovereignty. Israel was deployed in south Lebanon to provide a buffer zone between Israeli towns in the North and the terrorist forces operating in Lebanon under Syrian and Iranian sponsorship. Five years ago this week, responding to years of public pressure from EU-financed political groups, Barak decided to unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon without defeating Hizbullah and while betraying Israel's longtime ally, the Christian-dominated South Lebanese Army.

The results of this decision are mixed. On the one hand, the IDF has still managed to deter Hizbullah from attacking Israel – or at least from attacking Israel often – in spite of its absence in Lebanon. On the other hand, Israel's precipitous withdrawal gave a psychological victory to the forces of jihad worldwide and was one of the factors that led the Palestinians to launch their terror war against Israel four months later.

Speaking on Wednesday of Israel's retreat, Syrian-backed Lebanese President Emil Lahoud said, "Lebanon has been the only Arab territory to drive Israeli occupation forces out of its territory and the only Arab country to regain its legitimate territorial rights without making any compromise or concessions. Lebanon will continue its legitimate struggle with Israel until a global, comprehensive and just peace is reached in the Middle East."

Aside from that, in the IDF's absence, with Syrian and Iranian assistance, Hizbullah has massively expanded its arsenal, and as Hassan Nasrallah stated on Wednesday, it now has 12,000 rockets poised at the border capable of attacking all of northern Israel and has longer-range missiles capable of hitting targets in southern Israel.

Five years ago, Barak promised Israelis that after an IDF withdrawal, the "international community" would prevail on the Lebanese government to deploy the Lebanese Army along the border with Israel. He said that once Israel was gone, Hizbullah would stop being a terrorist organization dedicated to Israel's destruction and turn into a political party. Of course, none of this happened, but Barak then, like Sharon today, decided not to recognize the real options on the table, preferring instead to win popularity domestically by promising the public a perfect option that suffered only from the marginal deficit of being imaginary.

Barak tried to reenact this same security genius in his offer to the Palestinians at Camp David in July 2000. Setting aside Israel's legal claims to sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, Israel has justified its control of the areas from a security perspective on three main grounds: It is necessary for intelligence collection; for preventing an invasion from across the Jordan River; and for preventing terrorist attacks against Israeli population centers.

Although the threat of an eastern invasion has been at least temporarily mitigated by our peace treaty with Jordan and the US military occupation of Iraq, the other two rationales remain both valid and acute – and were five years ago. And yet, given his desire to cut a deal with the PLO, Barak claimed that as soon as the Palestinians signed an agreement with Israel, they would magically abandon their societal aggression toward Israel and act as allies. If Israel needed to enter the areas after they were ceded to Palestinian control, he argued, the Palestinians would, as allies, allow our forces to do so.

AS THE ensuing four and a half years of war have shown, there was no basis for Barak's view other than his fervent prayers to the Tooth Fairy and his own vanity. Still today, even as the US is launching a global war on terrorism, the Palestinian leadership has made no attempt to curb terrorism. As Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, head of Military Intelligence Analysis, told foreign diplomats this week, like his predecessor Yasser Arafat, PA leader Mahmoud Abbas "relates to terrorists as though they were heroes, and therefore he is not interested in implementing arrests, disarming terrorist groups from their weapons, punishing terrorists, or stopping the smuggling of weaponry."

So today, as was the case with Barak five years ago, Sharon is basing his strategic policies not on the reality of Israel's security situation, but on what he wishes that security situation to be, and in so doing, as Steinitz argues, he is imperiling our national security.

Sharon has often said that what one sees when sitting in the prime minister's chair is different from what we little people see from down below. To judge from the strategic blindness that afflicts its current and past occupants, it might be in Israel's national security interest to replace all the chairs in the prime minister's office with new ones. And if that isn't practical, we will need to elect ourselves a new prime minister and hope that he isn't similarly afflicted by delusions of perfect choices that do not exist.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

How long is the Bush administration planning on putting up with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's terror circus?

Ahead of his visit with US President George W. Bush at the White House this Thursday, Abbas said on Saturday that he plans to demand that Washington beef up its political and economic support for the PA.

Abbas believes he has the right to expect US support because he has come through so well on his promises to reform the PA. He will tell the president that, just as he promised, he has reformed the PA security forces. He will further tell the president that in reaching an agreement with Hamas for a pause in terrorist attacks against Israel, he has done his part in combating terrorism. Finally, he will tell the president that in pushing ahead with the PA legislative elections in July he is the very model of a democratizing leader, in tune with Bush's plan to bring freedom and liberty to the Arab world.

These are all lies. Abbas's claims find their basis in a distortion of language. Ahead of the president's meeting with Abbas, it therefore behooves us to understand how he has twisted the meaning of the terms "reform," "combating terrorism," and "democracy" to serve his interests, all of which are inimical to everything Bush is trying to achieve in the Middle East.

Three years ago, Bush called for the PA to transform its 13 security services from terror organizations into counter-terror militias. This demand was immediately emptied of all substance by the Palestinians and their friends, then foreign minister and now Vice-Premier Shimon Peres, the heads of the EU, and the Near Eastern Bureau at the US State Department. Inside of a New York minute, the call for an overhaul morphed into a call for reorganization. Suddenly, the be-all and end-all of PA security reform became the merging of the 13 Palestinian forces into three proto-military organizations under a clear chain of command.

This demand had the advantage of being concrete and measurable, but the disadvantage of being completely meaningless. As long as the PA's security services are actively involved in terrorism, who cares how they are organized? It is far from clear that Abbas has actually fused his various militias into three groups, as he claims he has. But what is absolutely apparent is that not one of them is taking any action whatsoever against terror cells. On the contrary, they are openly bringing known terrorists into their ranks.

For years Abbas consistently stated that he would take no action against Hamas, Fatah or Islamic Jihad terror organizations. His mantra has always been that he will not start a Palestinian civil war. Since he replaced Yasser Arafat last November, far from changing his view that no harm should befall terrorists, he has strengthened them in every possible way. The first steps Abbas took involved legitimizing these organizations by openly meeting with their commanders. Next he sought to bring Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the PLO (of which his Fatah party and terror group is the largest faction). He has agreed to finance them from the PA budget and lavished them with respect and adulation.

SINCE LAST December Abbas has been selling Israel and the US the fiction of his cease-fire with the terror groups. This is a magical cease-fire that gets concluded anew, daily, right after the Palestinian shooters have finished their terror attacks on Israeli targets for the day.

And, every day, the press duly reports that a cease-fire has been reached and ignores the fact that, on the one hand, Israel is the only side that has stopped fighting and, on the other hand, that the PA's "reformed" security forces are helping the terrorist groups to rearm with rockets, mortars, bombs, anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns and missiles, small arms and ammunition.

Assessing the increasingly dangerous situation, the IDF brass, from the Chief of Staff on down has warned that this reorganization and rearmament is the prelude to the next round of war set to begin the day after the IDF expels all 10,000 Jews from their homes, schools, businesses, farms and cemeteries in Gaza and northern Samaria this summer. In the wake of that operation,
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz casually mentioned last week that 43 communities in the Negev will be within rocket range of the Palestinians from Gaza. This, of course, will be a temporary situation since the Palestinians will no doubt quickly extend the range of their rockets the moment the IDF is no longer around to stop them from doing so.

As for Abbas's proclaimed ardor regarding democracy, it is important to notice the character of the support bases he is building for himself. During his campaign for PA leadership in December and January, he went out of his way to endear himself to the Palestinian public by visiting terror masters in Syria and Lebanon and being photographed every day with wanted terror bosses in Palestinian cities and villages.

Since his election, Abbas's pro-democracy work has involved enabling Hamas to participate in the Palestinian election process; signing the death warrants of Palestinians accused of assisting Israel in combating terror; and ratcheting up incitement in the PA media against Israel and the US.

Indeed, the only thing Abbas's "pro-democracy" machinations point to is just how premature the calls for Palestinian elections and statehood actually are.

And yet, rather than reaching this forthright conclusion, the Bush administration has been willfully ignoring it. This weekend we learned that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's representative here – the invisible US security coordinator for the PA, General William Ward – ordered the government to release yet another 400 Palestinian terrorists from prison and allow the terrorists who laid siege to the Church of the Nativity in 2002 to return to the PA from European exile.

Ward's argument apparently is that Israel cannot expect Abbas to abide by his commitments to Israel (and to Bush) unless it fulfills the promises it made to Abbas at the Sharm e-Sheikh summit last February. As reported in Haaretz, Ward told his Israeli interlocutors: "You complain that the Palestinians are not fulfilling their commitments, but what about your commitments?"

So for Ward, in order to get Abbas to fight terrorism, it is necessary for Israel to strengthen the terrorists.

The Bush administration seems absolutely committed to ensuring that the PA will not become a failed state on the model of Somalia or Lebanon. And yet, in its rush to strengthen Abbas in order to prevent chaos, the US is backing his bid to establish a Palestinian rogue state.

If President Bush really believes in his vision for freedom and democracy for the Palestinians, he would be well advised to tell Abbas that as long as the choices are between a failed Palestinian state and a rogue Palestinian state, the US opts for no Palestinian state.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Almost every day, a report surfaces of some new act of often violent intolerance committed by Muslim minorities in Europe against their fellow citizens.

This week, the London Times reported that at the beginning of the month, Chris Crain, the editor of the Washington, DC-based gay magazine The Washington Blade was brutally beaten by a group of young Muslim males while he was vacationing with his partner in Amsterdam.

It turns out that Holland – the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriages – has become a dangerous place for gays. The Amsterdam Tourist Board felt constrained to issue a warning to gay and lesbian tourists to be careful when they visit the city in light of the rash of anti-homosexual violence perpetrated regularly by gangs of Muslim immigrant youth.

In Sweden today, Pentecostal preacher Runar Sogaard is now under police protection after receiving death threats from Muslims angry that he referred to Muhammad as a "confused pedophile" during a sermon. Members of the Kurdish terrorist group Ansar el-Islam reportedly received a religious edict to kill him for his remarks.

Rather than rally to Sogaard's defense, in an interview with the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Swedish Islam expert Jan Hjarpe, at the University of Lund, basically accused Sogaard of purposely stirring up trouble, saying, "It was a statement from an odd man in an odd sect but the effect is stronger antagonism between different groups. It becomes a pure religious polemic and is extremely unpleasant."

Reports from country after country in recent years have referred to entire neighborhoods where ambulances and fire trucks refuse to enter for fear of being attacked by Islamic immigrant gangs. Quite simply, the European response to this violence has been to pretend that it isn't happening as states exercise their sovereignty over decreasing areas of their territory.

The most discouraging cases of governmental passivity in the face of jihad-inspired local violence have occurred in France. On March 8, approximately 1,000 Muslim and black youths descended on tens of thousands of schoolchildren protesting against educational reforms in Paris. They beat them and taunted them, and according to a report in the Weekly Standard, "the general sentiment was a desire to 'take revenge on whites.'"

Also in France, at the end of March, Jean-Pierre Obin, the inspector-general of the French school system, submitted a report to the Education Ministry regarding religious expression in state schools. According to the Weekly Standard's write-up of the report, Obin found that schools attended by large numbers of Muslims are being systematically Islamized.

The most prominent victims of this trend are schoolgirls who, fearing violent attacks, have taken to wearing loose, long clothing to cover themselves, not only in schools but in the surrounding communities. Anti-Semitism has become so rampant that not only are Jewish children simply forced to study elsewhere, but the most popular insult that the schoolchildren now hurl at one another is "Jew."

Obin noted that the levels of Islamization are determined in large part by the degree to which teachers and administrators tolerate the students' behavior. In schools where the children's violence and aggressiveness was met with little tolerance, Islamization was lower than in schools where school officials have sought to appease the aggressors.

This conclusion clearly had little impact on the Education Ministry, which sought to squelch the report – refusing to publish its findings until the report itself was leaked on the Internet.

Bat Ye'or, the prominent scholar of dhimmitude – or the systematic discrimination and repression of non-Muslims by Muslim societies – believes that the continent-wide phenomenon of Muslim aggression and intolerance met by European passivity and acceptance finds its roots in European policy toward the Arab world dating back to 1973.

According to her analysis, which is copiously documented in her recently released book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, the current pathological relationship between the Muslim immigrant communities and the European majorities is the direct result of a decision by the leaders of Europe following the OPEC oil embargo to allow open immigration of Muslims to their countries and to accept the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference's demand that these immigrants would not only not be encouraged to integrate within their larger societies, but would be encouraged to maintain and cultivate their separate and intolerant ways of life.

Ye'or, who came to Israel this week to launch her book, is convinced that Europe is already too far along in its cultural decline and acceptance of its dhimmitude to save itself from ultimate destruction. She explains that she wrote her book in English and published it in the US because her target audience is "the Americans, who are the only society still capable of fighting the global jihad."

It is possible that Bat Ye'or's pessimistic view of Europe is correct. Her book makes a strong argument for believing that Europe, in casting its fortunes with the Arabs at the expense of the Americans and Israelis, long ago signed its own cultural and political death warrant.

And yet, in recent months we have seen an awakening of sorts among elements of European society to the threat posed to their way of life by the intolerant culture which in recent years has become the norm, rather than the exception, among Muslim immigrant populations.

Queen Margrethe of Denmark said last month that people have to take the "challenge" of Islam seriously. "We have to run the risk of being labeled in an unflattering way, because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance," she said.

In 2002, Denmark itself passed one of the toughest immigration reform statutes in the world, and other EU member states like Ireland and Holland are considering enacting similar statutes. The law stipulates that (as is the case in the US) the fact that a foreigner is married to a Danish citizen confers no legal right to reunification with his or her spouse. At the same time, throughout Europe, instances of longtime Muslim immigrants being deported from their European havens have become increasingly frequent occurrences in recent years.

And yet, as luck would have it, just as the Europeans seem to be taking the first tentative steps towards acknowledging and contending with the dangers posed to their ways of life by separatist and intolerant Islamic minorities, Israel, which faces a much more acute threat of physical destruction from the same forces, is rejecting the wisdom – such as it is – that is now instructing Europe's self-preservationists.

This past Sunday the government approved a change in immigration regulations governing the conferral of Israeli citizenship on Palestinians from Judea, Samaria and Gaza. From 1993-2003, some 130,000 Palestinians received Israeli citizenship by marrying Israeli Arab citizens. In 2003, after a number of these new citizens were actively involved in terrorism against Israel, the Knesset approved the government's temporary ban on all "family reunification."

Under the new regulation adopted on Sunday, Palestinian men over the age of 35 and Palestinian women over the age of 25 who marry Israeli citizens can again apply for Israeli citizenship and receive residency rights in Israel.

In so acting, the government paid no attention to the views of respected leftist Zionist legal scholars Profs. Amnon Rubinstein and Ruth Gavison. In an interview with Haaretz Rubinstein argues, "no country allows into its territory people who have attachments to the side that is fighting against the country during an armed confrontation." Rubinstein recommends that in any permanent immigration law, Israel should restrict the entry of nationals from enemy states into Israel.

For her part, Gavison, the former chairman of the leftist Association for Civil Rights in Israel, recommends that Israel demand that the person seeking citizenship integrate into the public culture and swear allegiance to Israel as a democratic Jewish state.

Indeed, the government seemed not to note the absurdity of basically enabling large-scale immigration to Israel of Palestinians. The irony of the move is painful given that the government is defending its decision to destroy Israeli communities in Gaza and northern Samaria as a way to defend Israel's Jewish majority, and at the same time as the Palestinians themselves are giving their support at the ballot box to Hamas – a group whose declared policy is the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state.

Fundamentally, there are two arguments which favor enabling Palestinian immigration to Israel. The first is put forward by Arab Israeli leaders like attorney Hasan Jabarin, the head of Adallah, an Arab-Israeli self-styled human rights group which, through generous funding from the liberal American-Jewish New Israel Fund, has gained prominence both in Israel and abroad for its insistence that Jewish nationalism is inherently racist.

In an op-ed in Haaretz on Wednesday, Jabarin argued that it is racist for Israel to differentiate between Jewish immigrants and Arab immigrants. Following Jabarin's lead, mainstream Israeli leftist bureaucrats like Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz have argued in interviews with Haaretz for enabling Palestinian immigration to Israel based on family reunification because, given the proximity of Israeli Arabs to the Palestinians, it would be unfair for Israel to restrict their dating habits.

Immigration reform advocates on the political Left couch their support for immigration in policymaking terms, arguing that the fact that Israel has yet to set up a methodical policy for non-Jewish immigration is a failure that needs to be addressed. There is no doubt that this is a true statement.

But Israel, like every sovereign state, has a right, and indeed a duty to its citizens, to engage in selective immigration policies based on economic status, political loyalties, security implications and national origins of prospective immigrants before conferring them with the privilege of Israeli citizenship. Sadly, in voting to reinstate Palestinian immigration to Israel on Sunday, our government ministers, unlike some of their wiser European counterparts, failed to take any of these issues into account.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday it was reported that the US is suspending cooperation with Israel on the Arrow-2 missile defense system. If accurate, as the Middle East Newsline report noted, this will be the latest in a series of recent blows to US-Israel military cooperation, following the US decision not to fund the joint Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser project. That project, geared toward shooting down short-range rockets, missiles and mortars, is of utmost importance to Israel in light of the 10,000 rockets that Hizbullah has amassed in Lebanon and the ever-increasing Palestinian rocket and mortar capabilities.

Both decisions come on the heels of last month's decision by the Pentagon to drop Israel from the design process of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter – the next generation of US fighter jets that are set for delivery in 2012. The IAF views the F-35 as its fighter of choice for the future.

A source quoted by MENL explained the rationale for the encroaching US boycott: "It's all about China." The source went on to explain, "The Pentagon, with full support of the administration, does not want to deal with Israeli products or technology that could be sent to China."

No doubt the Pentagon decision-makers conducted cost-benefit analyses of American weapons technology sharing and development with Israel, compared to the dangers to US national security interests emanating from China, before taking these drastic steps. Those analyses clearly led them to the conclusion that the dangers from China outweigh the benefits of collaboration with Israel.

THE US has good reason to be concerned about China. Even as the US seeks to engage China, the fact of the matter is that China views the US as its primary opponent, and has built much of its foreign policy around curbing and weakening the US globally. China is spurred both by its global power aspirations and by its voracious and growing appetite for oil.

In 1993, China became a net importer of oil. Today it imports some 2 million barrels of oil a day. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030 it will import 10 million barrels per day, equaling the current levels of US oil imports. To meet its exponentially growing needs, China has cultivated close ties with Saudi Arabia and Iran. Chinese oil imports from Iran increased by a factor of 155 between 1994 and 2002, and its imports from Saudi Arabia increased by a factor of 77 over the same period.

Writing in the current issue of The Middle East Quarterly, Dan Blumenthal, who served as the Pentagon's country director for China and Taiwan from 2002-2004, explains that for Iran and Saudi Arabia, the real impetus for doing business with the Chinese involves Beijing's willingness to sell them ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

Teheran has purchased Chinese anti-ship missiles, some of which, like the C-107 missile, were specially designed for its needs. For their part, Blumenthal argues, the Chinese have an interest in selling the Iranians these missiles because they wish to harm the US Navy's ability to protect and control shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, and particularly in the Straits of Hormuz.

The Chinese played a major role in Iran's development of the Shihab-3 ballistic missile, which is capable of hitting Israel. And, as Blumenthal notes, the Chinese assisted the Iranian nuclear weapons program by supplying Teheran with a uranium conversion facility and nuclear power reactors.

The Saudis have received Chinese intermediate range ballistic missiles with a range of 3,000 km. After the US vacated its bases in Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2003, Chinese military personnel reportedly quietly moved in.

Fox News military commentator John Loftus explained Sunday that China uses nuclear proliferation as a way of containing the US and its allies as well as Chinese competitors. As he explained, China has played a major role in building the Pakistani, Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons programs. The Pakistani bomb is used to contain India; the North Korean program is used to contain Japan; and the Iranian nuclear program is used to contain the US.

And in the midst of all of this Chinese wheeling and dealing, here is Israel, with its one friend in the world – the US – and its world-class military industries, insisting on selling advanced weapons systems to the Chinese. Indeed, Israel is the second-largest arms seller to the Chinese, after Russia.

The Harpy unmanned aerial vehicles which Israel sold the Chinese in 1999 (after receiving a green light from the oddly pro-Chinese Clinton administration) and is reportedly now upgrading, can loiter in the air for hours and then attack radar used to guide air and missile defense systems. These systems, and others that Israel has sold China, can be used against US forces sent to the China Sea to defend Taiwan against Chinese attack.

OVER THE past few years, Israeli defense officials have defended Israeli military sales to China in various ways. The most convincing justification is that export markets are necessary to ensure the economic viability of the Israeli military industries. These industries are vital to ensure Israel's qualitative edge over the Arab armies. And this qualitative edge is eroded by the massive US military sales to the Arabs. In short, the Israeli excuse is that the Americans reap what they sow.

The problem is that the Americans aren't the only ones who reap the whirlwind. Our reckless bureaucrats in the Defense Ministry, who insist on continuing to allow Israeli military exports to China, are harming Israel's national security twice. First, they are advancing the military fortunes of China, which, by selling missile and nuclear technologies to our enemies, is contributing to the largest looming existential threat to the country. Second, by arming China, Israel is systematically eroding its strategic partnership with America.

Jin Liangxiang, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, also writing in the Spring issue of The Middle East Quarterly, threatens that if Israel buckles under US pressure and cancels its deal to upgrade the Harpy UAVs, the Chinese will likely respond by "launch[ing] sanctions on Israeli enterprises not only on the Chinese mainland, but also in Hong Kong."

The time has come for Israel to conduct its own cost-benefit analysis. What is more important, our business relationship with the state that is arming our sworn enemies with nuclear weapons and delivery systems, or our strategic relationship with the country that is working to deny them both?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Wednesday the White House and the US Capitol were hurriedly evacuated as a small Cessna plane entered the restricted airspace over Washington, DC. The swift evacuation of both buildings is an indication of just how seriously the US takes the threat of yet more attacks against its homeland.

And the truth is that the US has good reason to worry. First there was the spate of recent reports about al-Qaida's non-conventional weapons programs and the suspected connections between al-Qaida chief in Iraq Abu Musab Zarkawi, the Iranian regime and Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan's general store for nuclear weapons. But over and above that, the events of the past week show that the US attempts to use diplomacy to advance its efforts to stem the North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons programs have thus far been abysmal failures.

Since last Thursday, delegates from 180 nations have been convening at the UN for a month-long review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This review occurs every five years and is generally both a dialogue of the deaf and utterly inconsequential. But over the past year, Bush administration officials as well as American non-proliferation experts have noted the need to update the NPT to prevent rogue regimes like Iran and North Korea from exploiting the loophole in the treaty that allows all states to develop nuclear programs for peaceful use. Both Iran and North Korea have used the loophole to attain the nuclear infrastructure necessary to develop illicit weapons.

Unfortunately, the treaty's signatories are dominated by the so-called Non-Aligned movement whose 116 members, generally led by Egypt, divide their time fairly equally between condemning Israel and condemning the US. The current treaty review conference is no exception. Led by Egypt, the developing nations have scuttled all American attempts to even agree on a conference agenda.
The Egyptians first demanded that the conference set up a subsidiary body that would be charged with making the Middle East a "nuclear free zone" – meaning that a new group would be formed whose sole goal is to pressure Israel to destroy its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Beyond their obsession with Israel-bashing, the Egyptians went a step further and aimed their diplomatic guns at the Americans. The bloc of developing countries under Egyptian leadership has demanded that the US address its "violations" of the agreement. These presumed violations involve the Bush administration's denying that the US's announced decision from five years ago to disarm parts of its nuclear arsenal is binding.

Not that there is any reason for the sanctimonious Egyptian delegates to worry, but according to Israeli security sources, their own country has some answering to do for its own covert nuclear armament program. On Tuesday night, Channel 10 reported that, based on a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, Israel now believes that Egypt is developing nuclear weapons with the assistance of North Korea and A.Q. Khan's nuclear proliferation network.

According to the sources, until recently the identity of the third country – aside from Iran and Libya – that received assistance for its nuclear weapons program from Khan was unclear. Now, they claim it is all but certain that Egypt was the beneficiary of his largesse. Egypt has received heavy North Korean assistance for its ballistic missile program – having illicitly purchased Nodong missiles from the North Koreans in recent years. Israel now reportedly believes that Pyongyang has also been assisting Egypt with its nuclear program.

The Egyptian Foreign Ministry had good reason to feel confident going into the NPT conference. This week the anti-American Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hosted a summit of South American and Arab states whose main purpose – like that of the NPT conference – was to condemn Israel and the US. The Arabs managed to get their South American friends to sign onto a declaration calling for Israel to remove itself to the 1949 armistice lines – including in Jerusalem – and received their support for a definition of terrorism that leaves out Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Additionally, the conferees condemned the US for renewing its sanctions against Syria. The US reportedly requested to be present at the conference as an observer but was turned down by Silva.

AND IN the meantime, on the ground, unscathed by the "international community," the North Koreans and the Iranians are imperviously sprinting forward with their nuclear weapons programs.

On Wednesday, North Korea announced that it had removed 8,000 nuclear fuel rods from its reactor at Yongbyon. If the rods are reprocessed, the South Korean media reported that in the course of the next several months, North Korea will have enough plutonium to make a few nuclear bombs. Mohammed ElBaradei, the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, said last weekend that Pyongyang already has enough plutonium to make six bombs.

To date, the US strategy for dealing with North Korea has been to try to induce it to cease its nuclear program through the six-nation talks that Pyongyang walked out of last June. Hopes for the talks have hinged on China curbing North Korea – a Chinese client state. China, through its oil supplies and other trade with North Korea, has kept the Stalinist regime alive and kicking.

These hopes came up empty on Tuesday when the Chinese announced that they would not support placing sanctions on North Korea for its nuclear weapons program. In so doing, the Chinese effectively gave their approval for North Korea's acquisition of nuclear arms. In light of China's new declared policy, it is unclear what diplomatic options remain open to the US in dealing with Pyongyang.

The Iranian situation is even bleaker. Iran, far from being a client state, has its own state clients. Aside from that, whereas North Korea's neighbors in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are alarmed by its nuclear weapons programs, Iran's program has not evoked any particular concern from its immediate neighbors – only from their common enemies – Israel and the US.

On Monday, Teheran stated that it was lifting a suspension on its uranium enrichment activities. It is supposed to officially inform the IAEA of its decision to continue with its uranium enrichment activities by the end of the week. If it does so, it will effectively kill the British, French and German attempt to convince Teheran to end its nuclear program and move the issue to the UN Security Council. But even if this happens, the Chinese have already declared that they will use their veto in the Council to oppose any action against Iran.

In an interview with Ma'ariv on Wednesday, IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon said that, within a year to 18 months, Iran will have completed the nuclear fuel cycle giving it the ability to produce nuclear weapons at will.

According to sources in Washington, the US policy towards Iran is based primarily on a plan to topple the regime. Some 70 percent of Iranians oppose the regime and there has been a significant amount of unrest throughout the country for the past several months.

However, as Iran expert Michael Ledeen from the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently in the National Review, the US has done next to nothing to assist the democratic opponents of the regime. And as Henry Kissinger pointed out in an op-ed in The Australian on Wednesday, it is far from clear that regime change, if it is to occur at all, will happen fast enough to thwart the Iranian nuclear weapons program from reaching completion.

There is a strong sense in Washington these days that a large part of the reason that the Bush administration has yet to construct a coherent policy for dealing with Iran's nuclear program is that it is hoping Israel will launch a military strike against the Iranian nuclear sites, thus obviating the need for any real action. And yet, if these officials are even mildly aware of what is happening today in Israel – with the government completely obsessed with the Palestinians and the Gaza and northern Samaria withdrawal programs – they would take little comfort in that hope.

Clarifying this point, on Monday Col. David Marciano, head of the weapons department in the IDF's Ground Forces Command, reportedly said that the current war with the Palestinians has absorbed virtually all the attention of senior commanders. Israel is so engrossed with the Palestinians, he said, that little time has been spent planning for a regional war with enemies like Syria and Iran.

Kissinger wrote, "If George W. Bush's first term was dominated by the war against terrorism, the second will be preoccupied with the effort to stem the spread of nuclear weapons." Given the events of the past week, it is unclear what diplomatic options remain open for the president to choose from.

Many opponents of the Bush administration have been eager to accuse the president and his advisers of being responsible for the failure of their diplomatic attempts to deal with the issue. But the truth is, given the fact that anti-Americanism is second only to anti-Zionism as the popular course in the world today for countries seeking to augment their international standing on the cheap, it is unclear what the Americans could have done differently.

Today it would seem that what is really necessary is a diplomatic campaign aimed not at convincing the Iranians and the North Koreans to cease their nuclear programs, but to pave the way both internationally and domestically for military assaults against the countries' nuclear programs. Such a campaign should highlight North Korea's policy of starving its people to death and gassing them in death camps. It should also highlight Iran's abysmal human rights record, the regime's lack of legitimacy and its support for terrorism throughout the world.

Aside from that, the Americans would be well advised to quietly mention to the Israeli government that the Palestinians, while important, are not the only problem that Israel should be dealing with right now. Barring all these, the already startling evacuations of the White House and the Capitol will become far more terrifying.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The legacies of the wars and the heroes who fought to bring us victory have passed through the hands of many who have sought to twist the meaning of the past to comport with their own desires and convenience. The fact that this has occurred should not blind us to the true gifts that the wars themselves and the heroic sacrifices of those who have fought them have bequeathed to us, who live today in freedom because of what they did.

This week we witness again attempts to co-opt our memories – with the commemoration of V-E Day and our commemoration of our fallen soldiers on Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance Day for the Fallen of Israel's Wars), which begins tonight.

Speaking ahead of V-E Day, Germany's ambassador to Britain, Thomas Matussek, reportedly said, "The British behave as if they had conquered Hitler's hordes singlehandedly. And they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they have to refight the battles every evening. They are enchanted by this Nazi dimension. It's not anti-German sentiment precisely, but it's because we know too little about each other. Ignorance can breed xenophobia, which can breed hatred. That's what we've learned in Germany."

So, 60 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, the German ambassador to London can conjure up no greater meaning for the Allied defeat of Germany than to say that it's all about getting to know one another better.

In a speech on V-E day at the US military cemetery at Margraten, Holland, US President George W. Bush took a different view of the lessons of the war. Bush said, "We come to this ground to recall the evil these Americans fought against. For Holland, the war began with the bombing of Rotterdam. The destruction of Rotterdam would be a signpost to the terror and inhumanity that the Nazi lie would impose on this continent. Like so much of Europe, over the next years of occupation, Holland would come to know curfews, and oppression, and armbands with yellow stars, and deportation for its Jewish citizens."

In determining the national calendar for the infant State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion understood the importance of embracing symbolism and symbols that would instill and uphold the meaning of the rebirth of Jewish freedom in the Land of Israel so that the nation, once free, would neither forget the costs of powerlessness nor take its liberty for granted.

And so it was that he fixed the 4th of Iyar as the date on which we remember the men and women who have died defending the country, coming as it does both a week after Holocaust Remembrance Day, when we remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the day before he declared Israel's independence 57 years ago.

The message, of course, couldn't be clearer. The Holocaust was able to occur because the Jews were powerless to stop it. Our freedom today is the direct consequence of our soldiers' heroic willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good.

The disparity of views between the Germans and the Americans regarding the lessons of World War II does not mean that the truth lies somewhere in between. The Germans, perhaps stunned by their barbarity, saw an embrace of pacifism as an antidote to their embrace of Hitler. But pacifism isn't the opposite of evil, good is. Militarism in and of itself is a tool, not a value system, and therefore one cannot understand and thus prevent the recurrence of what the German people did by simply attributing it to the tool that was used to advance the pure evil they embraced and advanced as a people.

In Israel we also have a problem of divergent interpretations of the symbols of our collective identity. Particularly since the inauguration of the Oslo process with the PLO in 1993, leaders on the political and cultural Left have often claimed that our soldiers who have died in the defense of our country made their sacrifice in order to advance the peace process. "In their death," so the slogan goes, "they bequeathed us peace."

But is that really what they did? Or were our honored dead, through their self-sacrifice that has enabled us to live in our land, doing something else?

In his eulogy to Lt. Col. Yoni Netanyahu, who was killed commanding the raid to rescue the hostages at Entebbe on July 4, 1976, Yoni's comrade and commander Ehud Barak placed his sacrifice in the context of the true meaning of our continuous struggle for our freedom:

"In the generation that saw with its own eyes the Holocaust of Israel, the rebirth of Israel and the wars of Israel – the crowded nature of the chronology of events -- of our disasters and our victories, assaults the faculties and makes it difficult for the faint-spirited among us to discern that through all time – from Yonatan, the son of Shaul, through the various Yonatans of the Maccabees and up through our Yoni – the rebirths of Israel and the sovereignty of Israel were dependent on the Sword of Israel held in the hands of a few of her sons, and on the willingness of the sons to grasp the sword and raise the heavy burden.

"Because more than armaments, people, and the foundations of training and experience; more than the delicate balance between the planning, operational and decision-making levels – between bravery, and sound judgment; between imagination and responsibility – beyond all of these, the indomitable spirit of Israel is what stood for a test at Entebbe. It was the spirit that propelled him – at great cost, but with an undaunted will.

"We will never be able to restore Yoni, the man, to life, but Yoni the legacy and the symbol – this spirit that was pure, this warm heart, thirsting for knowledge, this belief in the justness and value of the cause and in the willingness to place yourself in the balance, until the end – all these we can, if we wish, adopt and uphold for ourselves, and teach them to those who come after us. If we do not do these things, we will be egregiously sinning against the commitments that his death bequeaths us."

The legacy of heroism of those who fought for freedom – whether of the entire world or just our tiny nation – is one of constant vigilance in the defense of our liberty, and not the embrace of childish, self-indulgent and naive dreams.

Freedom is our greatest gift. Our dead gave it to us as a trust to protect for those who come after us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

One of the first concrete acts that the Bush administration took in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks was to outlaw the Holy Land Fund for Relief and Development and freeze its financial assets. The HLF was one of the principal funding arms of Hamas. Israel had tracked its financial activities for over a decade, and had repeatedly requested that the US take action against it, but the requests came to nothing until after 9/11.

In an article in National Review from December 2002, terrorism investigators Ritz Katz and James Mitre documented that HLF, like several other US-registered non-profits that since September 11 have been closed down or placed under federal investigation, was funding arms not only for Hamas but also for al-Qaida. The Saudi-headquartered International Islamic Relief Organization; Benevolence International Foundation; and terror financier Yassin al-Qadi, to name just a few, were all funneling millions to both Hamas and al-Qaida.
 

Hamas and al-Qaida share more than financial networks. They share the same ideological roots. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

I
n his column in The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday, Daniel Pipes noted that in February, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before the Senate's Intelligence Committee that Hamas's "US network is theoretically capable of facilitating acts of terrorism in the US." As well, a senior US counterterrorism official was quoted stating that Hamas is merging with elements of al-Qaida's "all inclusive military arm that will carry out military strikes" against the US.

So, a cursory glance at the wealth of documentation regarding Islamic terror organizations shows that Hamas and al-Qaida are linked financially, ideologically and operationally. This, at the same time as the know-it-alls from Washington to London to Riyadh insist that the Palestinian terror war against Israel has no connection to the global jihad being launched by the likes of "real" terrorists, such as Osama bin Laden and (Palestinian) Abu Musab Zarkawi.

The terror attacks in Madrid in March 2004 brought about the fall of the pro-American Spanish government of Jose Maria Anzar. Bush supporters were quick to condemn Spain's new leader, the leftist Jose Luis Zapatero, for his decision to immediately pull the Spanish military contingent out of Iraq to appease the terrorists who struck Madrid. The newly elected Spanish government, it was argued, was telling the terrorists that terrorism pays, thereby increasing the likelihood of attacks throughout the world.

Since the September 11 attacks, there has been continuous pressure exerted on the Bush administration from within and without to refuse to accept that the war against Israel has anything to do with the war against the US and the rest of the non-Islamist world. And President Bush's embrace of Sharon's plan to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and northern Samaria, while expelling thousands of Israelis from their homes and communities – like his embrace of the so-called road map to peace – is an indication that the pressure has succeeded.

While Bush and his supporters were quick to see the ruinous impact of Spanish appeasement of terrorists on the war efforts, in backing Sharon's plan and in showering the Palestinians with money and support, the president is showing that as far as Israel is concerned, the policy he has adopted is the same one the Spanish voters opted for: appeasement.

In his letter of resignation from the Israeli government, Minister Natan Sharansky wrote, "In my view, the disengagement plan is a tragic mistake that will exacerbate the conflict with the Palestinians, increase terrorism, and dim the prospects of forging a genuine peace. Yet what turns this tragic mistake into a missed opportunity of historic proportions is the fact that as a result of changes in the Palestinian leadership and the firm conviction of the leader of the free world that democracy is essential to stability and peace... an unprecedented window of opportunity has opened."

Yet the fact of the matter is that as far as Israel is concerned, the Americans have shut the window of opportunity. Gone is the president's strong rhetoric from three years ago about US support for Palestinian statehood being conditional on the transformation of Palestinian society into a democratic, liberal, terror-fighting society. The Bush administration has been pushing Israel to arm the PA security forces in spite of their overt connection with terror cells. The Bush administration has refused to back Israel's opposition to Hamas participation in the July legislative elections despite its links to al-Qaida. The Bush administration has insisted that Israel hand over the homes of the Israelis set for expulsion to the Palestinians, in spite of the fact that this means Israel will be handing their homes to the same terrorists who have been shooting and bombing them for the past four-and-a-half years.

If the Bush administration had not made the intellectually unsupportable decision to refuse to accept that the Palestinian war against Israel is a crucial front in the global jihad, the president and his advisers would no doubt be asking Sharon some very hard questions right now.

Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria present a tangible threat to US national security interests from both military and psychological warfare perspectives.

On the military level, one of the core principles of the US counter-terror strategy is to deny terrorists sanctuary. Yet Gaza and northern Samaria are both poised to become new operational bases for global terror organizations.

During his negotiations with the terror chiefs in Cairo in March, in the presence of Syria's foreign minister, PA chairman and US favorite Mahmoud Abbas invited the leaders of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command to relocate from Damascus to Gaza after Israel withdraws. How does this square with the US strategy to bar terrorists from receiving shelter?

Then there is Egypt's role as a spoiler in all this. This week, the Palestinians claimed that Egypt pressured the PA to release a Hamas terrorist they had apprehended en route to launching rockets at Sderot. This claim is believable given that it was Egypt's dictator Hosni Mubarak who pressured Yasser Arafat not to accept Israel's peace offer at Camp David in July 2000. And yet, in spite of the fact that Mubarak has played a central role in fomenting and eternalizing the Palestinian war with Israel, in his favored role as broker between Israel and the Palestinians and among the Palestinian terror groups, he has built a reputation in Washington as the irreplaceable peacemaker.

After Gaza becomes an international terror center in the wake of the Israeli pullout, Mubarak will be poised to increase US dependence on him. If this occurs, his payback will be Washington's shoving its plan to bring democracy to Egypt into a circular file in the recesses of the Old Executive Office Building.

On a psychological level, the images of an Israeli retreat from Gaza and northern Samaria will be footage for jihadi recruitment videos for years to come. In Iraq, a large proportion of the insurgent groups' energies are devoted to producing images that portray them as strong and the US forces as weak. Al-Jazeera and its clones – along with cameramen employed as stringers by Western news networks and agencies – work hand-in-glove with the terrorists to produce just such images. The point, of course, is that in at least one central respect, Arabs are no different from Americans. Both like winners. Videos showing the decapitation of hostages are meant to mobilize supporters.

Yet there can be no doubt that, as attractive as watching helpless hostages getting beheaded may be to potential recruits, the spectacle of Hamas and Fatah flags being foisted onto Israeli homes in Gaza and Samaria is even more alluring. And footage of Jews attacking one another as Israel comes apart at the seams will also serve the terrorists' purposes wonderfully well.

What will "friendly" Arab states demand from the US in exchange for their combating of Islamist forces energized by the footage of Israel's withdrawal? Shelving democracy perhaps? And will these governments be appreciative of US efforts to pressure Israel into destroying its own villages? No, they will demand more such destruction.

What will happen to the Arab democrats from Baghdad to Damascus to Beirut to Riyadh when they are force fed footage of mosques being built on synagogues in Gush Katif 24/7?

Will they believe in US promises of support when they see the US supporting terrorists in Gaza?

Will they be willing to stick their necks out when they see how America lets Israel, its ally, lose?

This week, Fatah leaders sent a public birthday greeting to Saddam Hussein. The greeting ended, "We wish him long life for the sake of Iraq and to free the Arab nation from the enslavement of foreign imperialism. Oh, the glory of victory, with the help of Allah."

The Bush administration, like the Israeli government, wants Fatah to win the elections because it is considered "moderate."

Friends of Israel in Washington, like former CIA director James Woolsey, say of Sharon's planned withdrawal from Gaza that they cannot second guess the Israeli leadership about what is best for Israel's national security. This is a true and honorable statement. But the US can discuss the impact that Israel's decisions will have on its own security interests.

Unless one ignores reality, it is impossible to sustain an argument that as presently constituted, Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will do anything other than strengthen the cause of global jihad and Arab authoritarianism. Unfortunately, until the US abandons the contrived belief that what happens to Israel has no connection to what happens to the US, it will be unable to see – and thus thwart – the dangers that await it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The war made it clear that almost everybody agreed that the Jews had no right to live.

That goes straight to the bone.

Other people have some choice of options – their attention is solicited by this issue or that, and being besieged by issues they make their choices according to their inclinations. But for "the chosen" there is no choice. Such a volume of hatred and denial of the right to live has never been heard or felt, and the will that willed their death was confirmed and justified by a vast collective agreement that the world would be improved by their disappearance and their extinction.

– Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, 2000

Yom Hashoah is a day of collective Jewish mourning. We have other days when we mourn – most prominently Tisha Be'av, when we mourn the loss of the First and Second Temples and of our sovereignty.

As a day of mourning, Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day is distinct in that it is not a fast day. We don't deny ourselves things on Yom Hashoah. We eat. We drink. We go to work.

There are explanations – handed to us by generations of rabbis – for the destruction of the ancient Kingdoms of Israel. We were persecuted back then by the Greeks and the Assyrians and the Romans, but we too played a role in our own destruction. We had some power over our fate.

The Holocaust was unique from those other catastrophes that befell us in just how little it had to do with the Jews. We were not actors in the Holocaust. We were objects acted upon by the nations of Europe which, as Bellow wrote, did in fact agree that it would not be too objectionable to anyone if the Germans were to go ahead and exterminate the Jewish people.

In March a dispute between Holocaust survivors and Yad Vashem generated a modicum of domestic media attention. It seems that Jews who saved other Jews want to be recognized by Yad Vashem in some way. These Jewish heroes – now approaching death – argued that since the non-Jews who saved Jews are recognized as Righteous Gentiles, they, who at much greater peril saved far more Jewish lives should also be distinguished officially for their valor.

Yad Vashem rejected their request explaining that from its perspective, a Jew acting heroically to save another Jew is obeying an existential imperative. The murder of one Jew is a wound that every other Jew absorbs. In contrast, the Christians who saved Jews in the Holocaust were exercising a choice. Therefore, said the officials at Yad Vashem, those Christians should be specifically and individually acknowledged for their efforts.

There is something telling in Yad Vashem's argument. It cuts to the heart of something that has nothing at all to do with the Holocaust. It speaks about what it means to be a Jew. We have a responsibility to our fellow Jews because the fortunes of all of us are connected inextricably with the fortunes of each individual Jew. Try as we might, there is nothing we can do to escape this reality.

BUT AGAIN, the Holocaust, in and of itself, tells us nothing about Jewish identity. It only tells us about the rest of the world. The Jews of Europe did not decide to die. They neither seized territory nor did they plant bombs in German cafes. The Holocaust was a German initiative, carried out by Germans and millions of collaborators from France to Greece to Poland to Lithuania. The decision to prevent the Jews' escape from Europe to the Land of Israel belonged to Britain.

The group that really ought to be taking the Holocaust to heart is not the Jews, but the Europeans who two generations ago descended to the depths of human depravity by either conducting the extermination of European Jewry or enabling it.

Sadly, Europe has avoided serious self-examination and instead has turned the Holocaust into a fetish. Holocaust memorials spring up like mushrooms after the rainfall throughout the continent. But what do they signify? A sop to Holocaust-obsessed Jews, they are used to teach Europeans that nationalism is bad.

Speaking in 2000, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, "The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance of power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states."

But this has nothing to do with the causes for the liquidation of European Jewry. It was not Polish or American nationalism that led to the Holocaust. The balance of power between Britain and France had nothing to do with the Holocaust. It was genocidal anti-Semitism, nurtured by 2000 years of Christian mythology, embraced by a post-Nietzschean Germany, and accepted relatively enthusiastically by the overwhelming majority of the rest of Europe that caused the Holocaust.

There is something deeply distasteful and viscerally disturbing about the spectacle of dozens of leaders of anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian governments coming together at Auschwitz or the UN General Assembly or Westminster Cathedral and self-righteously bowing their heads for our exterminated brothers and sisters. It is particularly odious given that the nihilistic moral relativism that played such a role in enabling the Holocaust remains the order of the day in the societies these leaders now govern.

Israel exists and Jewish communal organizations in the Diaspora exist both to cultivate Jewish life for the benefit of Jews, and to protect Jewish existence from manifestations of anti-Semitism. Jews cannot convince anti-Semites not to hate us anymore than a deer can convince a wolf not to hunt it. That work must be done by the societies that committed and enabled the Holocaust.

Israel has a duty to recall the Holocaust for what it means to the Jewish people to have lost a third of our members. But we have nothing to gain from joining the Europeans in their bizarre Holocaust rituals. It is neither our right nor our responsibility to wash Europe's hands of our brothers' blood.

Indeed, what that blood tells us most of all is that in the postwar world, we cannot allow ourselves to be enchanted by odes to brotherly love or utopian dreams. We can only defend ourselves, in our land, with our military and with our economic creativity, because the notion of trust perished at Auschwitz.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.