So on Wednesday it started. The fight for and against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate 8,000 law-abiding Israeli citizens from their homes has begun. There can be no doubt today in anyone's mind that in ignoring the mandate he received from Israeli voters in 2003 to oppose unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and in joining forces with the rejected Left, Sharon made a decision to plunge Israeli society into deep internal crisis.

The dire security and political implications of the plan have been proven beyond doubt. The Palestinians have made clear by word and by deed that they consider Sharon's plan a vindication of their terror war strategy for destroying Israel. As spokesmen for the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad have stated repeatedly, they will pocket their gains in Gaza and in northern Samaria and launch the next wave of war against Israel from Judea and the rest of Samaria. As the Bush administration and the left wing in Israel have made clear, pressure on Israel to follow up the expulsion of Jews from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria with more and deeper expulsions in Judea and the rest of Samaria will begin in earnest the moment the operation is completed.

Given all this, the only conclusion that one can reasonably reach is that the decision to forcibly evacuate Israeli citizens from their homes and communities was made with an eye toward fomenting an internal crisis in Israeli society. Some have offered that Sharon desires this crisis because he wishes to demonstrate to the Americans that destroying additional communities in Judea and Samaria as Washington demands will simply be impossible. Whether or not this is the case, there can be no question that if the struggle that is now unfolding is not handled responsibly by all sectors of Israeli society, it will lead to open and violent cleavages across the Right-Left and religious-secular divides, and will set the course for the unraveling of Israeli society in the years to come.

One of the main groups of actors in Israeli society bearing grave responsibility for the Furies that are now upon us is the local media. And, judging by the coverage of the violent events on Wednesday in Gaza and along the highways throughout the country, the radio, television, print media and Internet news portals are poised to guarantee that Israeli society will fall apart completely in the coming months.

In anticipation of the blockage of roads by demonstrators against the expulsion plan during evening rush hour Wednesday, the Walla news portal, which is operated by the left-wing Haaretz group, published an article entitled "How to throw the settlers off the road." The suggested modes of action included "walking onto the Ayalon [highway in Tel Aviv] in large groups with heavy chains, bats for those with a good grip, or just plain fists with the safety lock off, and waiting to see which idiots insist on blocking roads and going crazy in our territory."

Other suggestions involved threatening to douse the demonstrators with gasoline, lassoing them and attacking them with pit bulls.

On Wednesday evening, Channel 10 showed irate motorists heading toward the youths sitting on the Ayalon Highway. The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday, "One motorcyclist took out a heavy metal chain used to lock up a bike and began waving it over the heads of young activists... Another motorist took out a metal pipe and pushed demonstrators to the side of the road."

As the Channel 10 reporter noted, it seemed as though they were acting in direct response to the Walla article.

In acting thus, Walla and the Haaretz group are, on the face of it, guilty of solicitation of violence, which is a felony offense. In releasing its instructions for beating demonstrators, when the public had already been riled by the morning papers and radio broadcasts with doomsday scenarios for rush hour traffic, Walla had every reason to believe with near certainty that its readers would act on its suggestions. And so, already on the first day of the official struggle for Gaza and northern Samaria, a major media outlet was engaged in fanning the flames of civil war.
 

On a non-criminal but still publicly irresponsible and indeed reprehensible level, the local media, from the television commentators and anchors to the morning newsmagazine anchors on Israel Radio and Army Radio to the front page editors of Ma'ariv and Yediot Ahronot, are through their irresponsible and distorted commentary and screaming front-page headlines doing two unforgivable things. First, they are dousing the flames of internecine hatred with gasoline rather than water, and second, they are giving increased political legitimacy to the Palestinians to carry out their plans to murder Israelis.

On Wednesday, a few dozen teenage thugs who had holed up in an abandoned Palestinian building near the Shirat Hayam community on the Gaza sea coast engaged in a rock fight with Palestinian teenagers in a neighboring building. In the course of the fight, these Israeli hoodlums cornered one of the Palestinian youths and caused him moderate wounds after he was already downed by their initial volley of stones. The IDF, in what can only be referred to as a complete tactical failure by the Gaza division, sent in a tiny group of 30 soldiers and tasked them with ending the fight. And so, before the cameras, the soldiers looked on helplessly as the fighting continued. The IDF came out perceived as incompetent and the stone-throwing Jewish criminals came out looking like what they are – criminals.

The thing of it is that residents of Gush Katif had said for the previous three days, ever since the youths arrived at the scene, that they were dangerous. The residents begged the army and police to remove them from the premises and both services dithered and did nothing. And yet, when the inevitable occurred, the media had a field day. On Wednesday, Channel 2's chief commentator, Amnon Abromovich, breathlessly declared that with the fighting at Shirat Hayam and the blocking of highway traffic, "the war between the State of the Settlers and the State of Israel has begun."

Thursday morning, Aryeh Golan of Israel Radio, like the headline writers for Ma'ariv and Yediot, excitedly referred to the fight as a "lynching." Golan, for his part, said the event will be remembered by the Palestinians as an episode on the order of the death of Muhammad a-Dura in September 2000. And through it all, our mainstream media in their power and glory did everything they could to present the image that the actions of these youths are typical of those of all opponents of Sharon's planned expulsions.

One of the greatest lies regarding the planned expulsions is the name that Sharon's publicists have given it: disengagement. As the Palestinians and their friends in the global jihad have repeatedly made clear, they for their part have no intention of disengaging from Israel after the unilateral withdrawal. Rather, they have every intention of continuing to fight us and to kill us in the hope of forcing still more Israeli withdrawals and causing a still deeper erosion of Israel's national will.

Notably, the fighting between teenage gangs of stone throwers in Gaza on Wednesday did not strike the Palestinians as news. The PA's press organs barely reported the story. On the inside pages of their papers, it was merely noted a teenager sustained light to moderate wounds during "clashes" with Jewish settlers. No Palestinian media outlet or PA official referred to the fighting as a "lynching," and certainly no one drew the parallel between Dura and Wednesday's wounded.

But no need to worry, the Palestinians will soon understand its propaganda value and ride the fictional lynching for all it is worth, and then some. After all, whether the Israeli media gurus realize it or not, their reports cater to two audiences, not one. Aside from determining the daily agenda for Israelis, the Israeli press also contributes in large part to the daily talk among the Palestinians.

By acting as though the actions of a few dozen barbarians dressed up as withdrawal opponents characterize the opposition as a whole, the Israeli press is providing political legitimacy to the Palestinians for carrying out their murderous plans. They set up an equivalence between a marginal group of Israelis, rejected by its own camp, and the mainstream Palestinian call for the violent destruction of Israel through terrorism.

Just as the US mainstream media, in characterizing the crimes of a few American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison as indicative of the US military as a whole, gave political cover to terrorists to continue their attacks against American forces and their Iraqi partners, so the Israeli press provides propaganda value to Israel's enemies when it denigrates opponents of the withdrawal in this manner.

What has gone almost completely unreported by the Israeli press, in its rush to civil war, is the fact that the organized leadership of the opponents of the withdrawal plan – from the residents slated for expulsion, to the leadership of the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, to the heads of the Chabad movement – has called for the avoidance of violence at all costs. In the wake of reports that protesters on Wednesday morning blocked the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway by dousing oil on the road and lining it with nails, the leadership immediately condemned the action and Chabad leaders prohibited their followers from participating in blocking traffic. Rather than giving voice to these responsible leaders, the press is chasing after every known hothead and giving him an open microphone through which to convince the general public that he represents the voice of the majority of opponents of the withdrawal plan.

Volumes have already been written about how the leftist "mainstream" media in the West have made countries like the US, Australia and Israel fight the forces of jihad with both hands tied behind their backs. Unfortunately, if the Israeli media do not come to their senses, their criminal, irresponsible and reprehensible behavior will be the subject of many future tomes discussing the reasons for Israel's destruction which, it will be said, began in earnest with the Israeli media's coverage of the events of June 29, 2005.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Sunday night the Labor Party's new general secretary, MK Eitan Cabel, was forced to adjourn the party's central committee meeting when it descended into fistfights between the various groups of hooligans who comprise the "political" camps of the competing contenders for party leadership. Minister Dalia Itzik burst into tears when she received a blow on her leg and reportedly even the party leader, Vice Premier Shimon Peres, was roughed up a bit in the fracas.

To a degree, the fights between the street thugs, who now make up a significant chunk of the party's central committee membership, should surprise no one. After all, the reason the meeting was convened in the first place is that these people, at the behest of the five contenders for party leadership – Amir Peretz, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Matan Vilna'i – had managed a party membership drive so blatantly corrupt that there was no way to sweep the fact under the rug.

Of the 129,000 membership forms submitted ahead of primary registration, according to retired Judge Sarah Frish, at least 44,000 were "tainted." In the fine tradition of Tammany Hall and the late Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley's political machine, forms were magically filled out by dead people as well as by thousands who are members of other political parties.

As a result of the membership drive, Arab Israelis became the largest Labor constituency. And yet, as was immediately discovered, many of those who signed up for membership were members of the same clan in the village of Kabul, who apparently were registered without their knowledge.

It seems that the main source of consternation among the candidates was that Peretz, as head of the Histadrut, managed, through his membership drive, to beat out Barak, Vilna'i and Ben-Eliezer in the polls. This, the three felt, was just wrong. And so, wrapping themselves in the robes of anti-corruption champions, they demanded that the primaries, scheduled to take place today, be postponed.

The thing is, there are thousands of people in Israel who ardently support the Labor Party. They believe in its political, social and economic ideologies. But in light of the mass voter drives, people who owe no allegiance whatsoever to the party end up outflanking the party faithful and determining its leadership. And so the core of Labor's supporters, whose members should be determining the party's leadership, is effectively disenfranchised.

THE PHENOMENON of political leaders bypassing their voters has become systemic in Israel in recent years. In 2002, ahead of the Likud primaries between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sharon's campaign, led by his son Omri, registered members of the South Lebanese Army who didn't even have Israeli citizenship. Omri also brought in thousands of kibbutz members who had no connection whatsoever to Likud and had, one would suspect, no plans to vote for the party in the general elections. At the same time, to prevent citizens who believe in the Likud's ideological, political and economic platforms from joining the party, Sharon's camp forced applicants from various ideological camps to undergo a cumbersome and humiliating vetting process before being allowed to join.

And so it is that we have a prime minister, who, like his Labor counterparts, has used all the powers at his disposal to take control of his party away from its natural support base and transfer it to himself, with the help of professional voters who care nothing for the Likud or its policies.

The result of the disempowerment of voters is reflected in Knesset membership. Rather than intellectuals, entrepreneurs and statesmen, our parliament is filled with a shocking array of machine hacks whose central unifying feature is their willingness to be bought off for jobs.

So it was that Sharon was able to manipulate the Knesset vote for the withdrawal and expulsion from Gaza and northern Samaria plan by promising cabinet positions and deputy ministries to eight Likud MKs. And so it was that rather than form an effective opposition party, Labor MKs fought each other for jobs in Sharon's government.

In similar vein, Sharon used the power of his office to subvert the will of the World Likud organization to prevent former minister Natan Sharansky being elected head of the Jewish Agency. Playing off Jewish Agency members' tradition of supporting the prime minister's candidate, Sharon effectively prevented Sharansky from running against the lightweight and virtually unknown Sharon loyalist, Ra'anana mayor Ze'ev Bielski for the position. The campaign against Sharansky was run by Omri.

The fact that Sharansky, the best-known Zionist figure in the world, opposes Sharon's democratically dubious plan to expel 10,000 Jews from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria in exchange for absolutely nothing from the Palestinians, makes him unfit for the position.

Critics of Israeli political corruption on the Left generally focus their scrutiny on political patronage, particularly when it emanates from right-wing parties. They argue that political appointees are inherently corrupt. And yet in a democracy the opposite should be the case. What political appointees are appointed to do in most cases is force the unelected bureaucracies to conform to policies that politicians were elected by voters to carry out.

THE REAL source of corruption in Israeli politics is the voting system. In the current party system, political leaders are able to bypass and thus ignore the will of the voters by exploiting party procedures and institutional weaknesses through which they create artificial majorities for themselves and their policies. They then wrap themselves in the rhetoric of democracy in order to justify moves that could only be enacted by circumventing voters and prostituting democratic institutions.

There are currently two bills being circulated that would work to reform primary election procedures. Both would open primaries to the general public and have them held for all parties on the same day, much as is the case in the US. Such reform, which would put the focus on the voters rather than the politicians and take away much of their ability to manipulate voter rolls, would be a welcome move. However, not surprisingly, owing their power to the prevailing system, virtually no MKs in either the Likud or Labor support such reform.

The dark phase of political development that currently plagues Israel is not unique. In the late 19th century the US went through a similar crisis. As is the case with Israel's current political crop of hacks, that period in American political history brought such Churchillian figures as Chester Arthur and Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House. There they spent their single terms in office handing out jobs to machine men, only to be immediately forgotten.

Fortunately for America, when its politicians were corrupting the system and bypassing the voters, the country faced no particular threat from anywhere. In Israel's case, we find ourselves in one of the most dangerous periods of our history led by party hacks who owe loyalty to no one other than the unaccountable leaders who brought them into office.

Popular outrage was what caused the US to finally reform its system. Perhaps the footage of Labor thugs beating each other up at Sunday's meeting will provoke a similar reaction among Israelis. At any rate, reform can't come quickly enough.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

During his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told Rice that the PA had ceased all incitement activities against Israel. Yet on the same day that they met, the PA's official news service WAFA "reported" that Israelis were sending hordes of wild pigs to Palestinian villages around Hawarah village in the Nablus district to attack them and destroy their fields. The PA's official news service even interviewed Hawarah Mayor Mansour Dmaidi, who backed these ludicrous and incendiary statements.

It is not surprising that Abbas brazenly lied to Rice about PA-sponsored incitement against Israel. After all, he lied to her about everything else. Most importantly, Abbas told Rice that he is opposed to terrorism. And yet, Abbas fervently supports terrorism. Abbas complained to Rice – as he complains to anyone who will listen – that Israel's actions to defend its citizens against terrorism make it impossible for him to fight terrorists. This is a logically unsupportable statement. If Abbas opposes terrorism, then he should support Israel's counterterrorist operations.

Aside from this, the prescriptions for Israeli action which Abbas sets forth on a daily basis are all aimed at strengthening rather than weakening terrorists. These steps include the release of terrorists from Israeli jails; the elimination of roadblocks meant to intercept terrorists on their way to bombing missions, as happened yet again this week at Hawarah; the re-arming of the Palestinian security services to which he is systematically enlisting terrorists; and a cessation of counterterror operations against all terrorists – to name just a few.

There are two theories running now about the proper interpretation of Abbas's actions. The first is that Abbas is too weak to do anything to end terrorism and has consequently decided to embrace the various groups in the hope that in so doing, they will not assassinate him. The other is that Abbas feigns weakness in order to justify his lack of action against the terrorists whom he, like Arafat before him, supports. In either case, the fact remains, due to weakness or guile, through word and deed Abbas has made it absolutely clear that he has no interest in doing anything against terrorists.

The US, like Israel, has taken great pains to distinguish Abbas's party, Fatah, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. We are told that Fatah is secular and pro-peace with Israel, while Hamas and Islamic Jihad are Islamist and wish to destroy Israel. And yet, the day after Rice left Israel, IDF troops intercepted 21-year-old Wafa Samir Ibrahim at Erez checkpoint in Gaza en route to carrying out a suicide bombing at Soroka Hospital, where she was scheduled to receive treatment for burns she had sustained while cooking last year.

Interviewed that evening by Channel 10, Ibrahim announced proudly that she belonged to Fatah and that she wanted to follow the will of Allah by killing Israeli medical personnel and patients. When the Israeli interviewer asked her how she could want to carry out a suicide bombing when Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) has stated that he opposes them, she looked at him blankly and said, "Abu Mazen opposes them? I haven't heard Abu Mazen say that."

And yet, rather than withdraw US support for Abbas as a result of his blatant failure to deliver on even the smallest American expectation from him, during her visit over the weekend, Rice simply shored up US support for him. Rice supports continued Israeli security "gestures" to Abbas, like the release of further prisoners. This, even as the night before she arrived, the IDF arrested Rami Muhammad Hassan Kandil in Jenin. Kandil, a member of Islamic Jihad who was among the 900 terrorists recently released from prison by Israel in order to "strengthen" Abbas, was planning to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel.

Rice also supports the transfer of security authority over additional cities to the PA even as Nablus, Tulkarm and Jericho have been used as safe havens, weapons development centers and terror training camps by Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad cells from the moment the IDF relinquished control over them to PA security forces. As the armed attack on PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei by Fatah gunmen in Nablus Wednesday showed, Abbas's claim to have disarmed the terrorists is just another lie.

The reason for Rice's insistent support for Abbas is clear. The US, in committing itself to President George W. Bush's "vision" of the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and perhaps Jerusalem, has mortgaged its entire Middle East policy to a "solution" of the Palestinian conflict with Israel that has no relation whatsoever to the realities on the ground. The reality on the ground is that Palestinian society is unified by a dedication to the destruction of Israel, not the establishment of a Palestinian state. Abbas is a reflection of his society.

In backing Abbas, the US is not shoring up a weak leader who wants a different future for the Palestinians. The US is backing one Palestinian terrorist organization – Fatah – against Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Yet since Fatah coexists harmoniously with Hamas and Islamic Jihad, by backing Fatah, the US is effectively backing all Palestinian terror groups. That is, the US commitment to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state as quickly as possible simply blocks its path from developing any strategy for actually addressing the true reality on the ground. And at the same time, by calling for Israeli "confidence-building measures" to strengthen Abbas, the US is effectively weakening its ally.

ONE CANNOT be too harsh with the Americans for acting on their delusions since the policies of Israel's own government are even more hallucinatory – and dangerous.

This week it was announced that during his visit with Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, Vice Premier Shimon Peres reached an agreement on the deployment of 750-800 Egyptian mechanized infantry forces to the Philadelphi Route, which links Gaza to the Sinai. We were told that Israel has not agreed to the Egyptian demand to deploy a force of 5,000 soldiers along Israel's border with Egypt from Kerem Shalom to Eilat. Nor, we were told have we agreed to Egypt's demand to be allowed to deploy attack helicopters, arm its infantry forces with antitank missiles and heavy guns or anchor missile boats at El-Arish.

Thursday morning a senior diplomatic source told Israel Radio that the decision not to accede to Egypt's demands is not due to the government's objection to the cancellation of the agreement to demilitarize the Sinai, which was signed together with the peace treaty in 1979. Rather, the government wants to avoid acceding to the Knesset's demand that any substantive change to the 1979 treaty – and a cancellation of the demilitarization agreement certainly constitutes a "substantive" change – must first receive Knesset approval.

The prime minister knows that there is no way that he would receive majority support for enabling the deployment of the Egyptian military, which Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, notes "has been training for war against Israel for the past 10 years" along the border. And so, in a bid to prevent Knesset oversight, Peres and Sharon have limited their agreement with Mubarak to the Gaza-Sinai border – although according to the committee's legal adviser, this too is a substantive change in the agreement.

Yet, a senior security source close to the discussions with the Egyptians told me that in fact, Peres did not reject Mubarak's demands. He accepted them. According to the source, "Peres explained to Mubarak that the Knesset won't approve the agreement now, but that next year, after the withdrawal from Gaza, if Egypt renews its demand, Israel will accept it."

In responding to Rice's demands that it coordinate the withdrawal with the Palestinians, Israel has gone back on its previous demand to retain control of the international crossing points to Gaza. Gaza's land passage to Egypt – from which 90 percent of the arms smuggled into the PA emanate – will be controlled by the Egyptians and the Palestinians. The Palestinians will be allowed to build and control a seaport and reopen their airport in Gaza. In addition, Israel has agreed to link Judea and Gaza with either a railroad or a dedicated highway and to ease restrictions on Palestinian entry into Israel.

In transferring control over the international borders to the Palestinians, the government, in time of war, is effectively enabling – indeed inviting – the rapid transformation of the Gaza Strip into a center of global terrorism. In agreeing to link Judea and Gaza, Israel is building the Palestinians' supply lines from a post-withdrawal, arms-flooded Gaza to their new center of effort in Judea and Samaria. In empowering the Egyptians, Israel has agreed to enable the largest, strongest and most overtly hostile Arab military force to perch itself on its border. The collapse of Israeli defense rationality inherent in these moves can only be described as horrific.

In acting thus, Israel is behaving similarly to the Bush administration. If Palestinian statehood is Washington's irrelevant solution to the irrelevant problem of lack of Palestinian sovereignty, empowering a hostile Egypt and transferring Gaza to Abbas is Israel's irrelevant solution to the irrelevant problem of what Vice Premier Ehud Olmert referred to in an interview with The Jerusalem Post Thursday as the "lack of political progress" toward peace. The "lack of political progress" toward peace is irrelevant because the Palestinians are still actively involved in fighting a terror war against Israel.

If either Washington or Jerusalem were willing to base their policies on reality rather than "visions," they would both come up with multiple options for fighting Palestinian terrorism and transforming Palestinian society.

In so doing both would be making a great contribution to the cause of democracy and counterterrorism throughout the Arab world. But since both are committed to "solutions" that have no connection to the real world, the steps they adopt to achieve their goals are both counter-productive and dangerous.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

During her visit to Jerusalem on Sunday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice applauded Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying, "He has displayed courage and vision in putting forth this disengagement plan."

Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.

In a new book, Boomerang, published in Hebrew last week, left-wing commentators Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelach provide an insider's narrative account of how Sharon came to make the decision to withdraw from Gaza and Northern Samaria. Their findings are devastating.

Based on interviews with senior government and military officials, Drucker and Shelach report that Sharon's decision in December 2003 to abandon his electoral platform, which opposed the unilateral transfer of land to the Palestinians and rejected out of hand the notion of expelling Israelis from their communities in the Gaza Strip or Judea and Samaria, stemmed from considerations that had absolutely nothing to do with Israel's national security interests.

According to the two writers, Sharon's basic impetus for adopting the radical left-wing plan – that had been overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the January 2003 elections – was his desire to avoid indictment for his role in corruption scandals for which he and his sons Gilad and Omri were under police investigation.

They write: "In private conversations [Sharon] said he was convinced that [state attorney Edna] Arbel would try to bring about his indictment and his resignation from the premiership." Sharon's aides, first and foremost among them his personal attorney and chief of staff Dov Weisglass, told Sharon that to avert indictment he had to take a bold initiative "to change the public agenda away from the media's focus on the investigation." And so the disengagement plan was born.

After Arbel was booted up to the Supreme Court, Sharon, still under investigation, made a move to head off an indictment by the new attorney-general, Menachem Mazuz. As the media bleated daily, Mazuz's first order of business upon taking office would be to decide whether or not to indict Sharon and his son Gilad in what had become known as "The Greek Island Affair."

The day after Mazuz came into office, Sharon invited radical left-wing columnist Yoel Marcus from Haaretz for a visit at his residence in Jerusalem. Sharon outlined his plan to withdraw from Gaza to Marcus. As expected, Marcus embraced both Sharon and the plan in Haaretz the next day, and thus the radical Left was brought on board Sharon's bandwagon. Shortly thereafter Mazuz closed the investigation on Sharon and Gilad.

In an interview last Wednesday night on Channel 2, Shelach said, "The people who are closest to Sharon told us absolutely that if it hadn't been for those police investigations, this decision [to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria] would not have been made."

Several months ago, a senior government official who was involved in the government discussions about the withdrawal plan told me, "Sharon placed the legal establishment on the horns of a dilemma. They had to decide what moved them more, their love of the law or their hatred of the settlers. It was an easy decision."

SHELACH AND Drucker's book gives the lie to the notion that any security or strategic considerations were taken into account by Sharon and Weisglass in formulating the withdrawal plan. Indeed, as Maj.-Gen. (res.) Amos Yaron, who now serves as Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz's senior policy adviser, is quoted as having said, "If the disengagement goes through, it will be proof that there is no need for any decision-making process in the State of Israel."

This is the case because, as the authors demonstrate, the plan, which was Weisglass's brainchild, was made without any staff work, without any discussion with the army, and without any debate by the cabinet. Weisglass presented it to then US national security adviser Rice without any discussion with or forewarning to the IDF or the Shin Bet and against the strenuous objections of both.

To counteract the security establishment's opposition, Sharon effectively fired the IDF chief of general staff, Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon, and Shin Bet director Avi Dichter by not extending their tours of duty, as is routinely done for both positions. He simultaneously stacked the General Staff and the Shin Bet with commanders who, like Mofaz, understand that they are personally indebted to the prime minister.

Not surprisingly, the media establishment, which, like the legal establishment, hates the settlers more than it loves the law, has been silent on Drucker's and Shelach's revelations. There have been no follow-ups to Shelach and Drucker's television appearance from last Wednesday in any of the television newscasts or major newspapers.

DRUCKER'S AND Shelach's findings point to two critical and acute problems in Israel. The first is that Sharon, in sharp contrast to the public image that his advisers have carefully crafted for him, is neither a great visionary nor a strong leader. He is an old widower moved by personal ambition and an overarching desire to be perceived as a man he is no longer capable of being. The second problem is that our legal establishment is perceived by our political leadership as so prejudicial that it is capable of inspiring policies that are antithetical to national security.

The fact that, in spite of their clear support for the left-wing platform of an Israeli return to the 1949 armistice lines Drucker and Shelach could not ignore the fact that Sharon's entire policy was based on nothing other than his desire to be admired and to avert criminal indictment, shows clearly how history will look back on this period. It also shows that, as was the case with the critics of the Oslo process, critics of this plan – which, like the Oslo agreement, was put together with no discussion or debate, against the strenuous opposition of the defense establishment and with no thought of what would come in its aftermath – will be proven right in all of their warnings of impending disaster.

There are still two months before this ill-begotten and breathtakingly ridiculous plan is to be carried out. In the time that remains it will be interesting to see whether those, both in Israel and the US, who were brave enough to oppose the Oslo plan on the basis of its obvious and gaping flaws but who today, placing their trust in large part on Sharon's reputation as a strong leader, support the withdrawal plan, will reconsider that support. If they do not, they, like Sharon, will not be remembered by history for their past bravery, but rather for their decision to prefer momentary and opportunistic accolades for their "moderation" over the long-term security of the State of Israel and the stability of the Middle East as a whole.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In an in-depth article entitled "How we would fight China" published in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan analyzes the encroaching specter of a cold war between the US and China. He also sets out the strategies and tactics that the US military's Pacific Command is constructing to contend with the emerging reality.

In his words, "the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East." From the US military's perspective, "the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict... will start to wind down during the second Bush administration."

Kaplan quotes a US Marine general in the Pacific Command who explains that the nascent US strategy for dealing with China will be based on multilateral military cooperation, or as he put it bluntly, it will be "military multilateralism on steroids." As its Atlantic alliances with NATO countries are breaking down in the face European rejection of America's decision to fight Islamic imperialism rather than appease it, the US is quietly building deep military alliances with countries such as Singapore, India, Australia, Japan and Thailand, which will all play key roles in containing China in the coming cold war in the Pacific.

Kaplan notes that one of the US's Achilles' heels in building this alliance structure is the technological gap between the US military and these crucial allies in the Pacific. As he writes, "Getting militarily so far ahead of everyone else in the world creates a particular kind of loneliness that not even the best diplomats can always alleviate, because diplomacy itself is worthless if it's not rooted in realistic assessments of comparative power."

Kaplan's report points to a strategic reality that US policymakers in Washington seem intent on ignoring. Israel's military sales and strategic military ties to linchpin states in the Pacific, like Singapore and India, have made it possible for these states today to center so prominently in American long-term strategic planning for its emerging cold war with China.

Israel was the first state to offer military assistance to Singapore, back in 1965 when that tiny island nation's entire military amounted to one battalion. For the next 10 years Israel was the only state assisting the Singaporeans, who one US military official interviewed by Kaplan referred to today as "just awesome in every way."

Israeli military officials involved in strategic cooperation with Singapore explain that the relationship has advanced to the point where most of the arms sales take the form of joint military ventures. Israel sells Singapore weapons systems that are tailor-made for its needs, and Singapore finances much of the research and development of these systems. Until it was outpaced by India, Singapore was the Israeli military industries' largest client. Sales range from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per year.

While military cooperation with India has only become prominent in recent years, Israel was assisting India militarily as early as the 1960s, during its wars with Pakistan. Today, between multi-billion dollar annual military sales and joint training exercises, Israel's strategic importance for the modernization of the Indian military is undeniable.

In cultivating its relationships with countries like Singapore and India, Israel's defense planners have followed a clear rationale that fuses commercial and strategic concerns. On the one hand, for Israel to maintain its military superiority over the Arabs, it must have a cutting-edge arms industry. For the industry to remain state-of-the-art, Israel must develop export markets to make its research, development and production costs manageable and sustainable. On the other hand, Israel has a strategic, long-term interest in developing ties with countries like India and Singapore, which share similar threats and concerns, because at the end of the day, these states form natural alliances with Israel.

Today, rather than thank Israel and India and Singapore for their forward thinking, whose importance to the US is unquestionable, the US is punishing them. This week it was reported that following Israel's misguided sale of Harpy aerial drones to China, Washington is now demanding control over its weapons exports to India and Singapore.

There can be no doubt that Israel's decision to sell advanced weapons systems to China was strategically blind. China does not only threaten US interests. Through its missile sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia, it also threatens Israel's national security interests. In the wake of US wrath over the Harpy deal, Israel has corrected its behavior and agreed not to sell weapons systems to China in the future.

It is more than possible that the US attempt to take away Israel's independence in developing its exports markets is simply an attempt to hitch a ride on the current crisis with China to advance the interests of US weapons manufacturers, who have trouble competing with their Israeli counterparts. Yet in so acting, not only is the US harming its relations with Israel and damaging Israel's reputation internationally, it is also insulting Singapore and India by acting as though there is something wrong with these US allies' acquisition of advanced weapons systems.

In comparing the ease of crafting a strategy for contending with China to the difficulty of formulating policy on the Middle East, Kaplan makes one of the most common American mistakes in characterizing the constraints on their actions in the Arab world. Kaplan writes, "Our actions in the Pacific will not be swayed by the equivalent of the Israel lobby; Protestant evangelicals will care less about the Pacific Rim than about the fate of the Holy Land."

Yet what Israel's cultivation of its own bilateral strategic ties with countries like Singapore and India shows is that when Israel is behaving in a strategically responsible way, it is also advancing America's strategic interests. This is the case because, at the end of the day, the two countries share the same enemies and therefore are drawn to the same potential allies.

That is, the foundation of the US-Israel alliance is not American altruism or domestic political pressure to save God's Chosen People from destruction. The rationale behind the US-Israel alliance is the fact that Israel is a strong, self-sufficient democracy whose strength and stability, both locally and globally, enhance US national security.

When, as happened this week, Palestinian Authority cabinet ministers insanely announce that Israel is trying to poison the Palestinians by selling them cancer-causing juices, there should be no place for doubt as to who America's ally is in the Middle East. Indeed, the levels of cultural anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Palestinian society and the Arab world should make it absolutely clear to Washington that a strong Israel is a national security necessity.

Yet, in the Americans' haste this week to humiliate Israel and emasculate its arms industry, even at the expense of its other allies, we see a disturbing indication that as the Bush administration slogs through its second term, it is intent on ignoring the strategic realities of the region and indeed of the global strategic environment, preferring instead to try to appease the Arabs and the Europeans at Israel's expense in the hopes of receiving their cooperation in the future.

This latest American move was not carried out in a vacuum. It comes against of backdrop of a disconcerting pattern of behavior by the administration that leads inexorably to the devastating conclusion that the US is moving to abandon its alliance with Israel. The publication of the federal indictment against former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin this week is case in point.

From a perusal of the charges against Franklin, the following picture emerges: Franklin, a hawk on Iran's nuclear weapons program, sought to bring his views to the attention of decision-makers. In so doing, he did what countless Washington policy analysts do on a daily basis. He sought to build a coalition with like-minded thinkers outside the government.

According to the indictment, Franklin passed no significant classified information to AIPAC officials or to Naor Gillon at the Israeli embassy. He received no compensation for his relationships with them. All he did was talk about Iran with people who share his concerns in the hope that they could – through their official dealings with administration officials – advance his views.

Franklin's one crime, it would seem, was his unquestioning view of Israel as a strategic ally of the US at a time when powerful circles in Washington are trying to disengage from this alliance. Had he conducted identical conversations with British diplomats or pro-Japanese lobbyists, there is little doubt that he would still be sitting behind his desk at the Pentagon.

Franklin has pleaded innocent to all charges submitted against him. His trial is set to start on September 6. To a degree, what will really be on trial will be the question of whether the US does or does not view Israel as its ally.

And so the question necessarily arises: If the Bush administration is planning to abandon Israel, who does it think will replace it? Egypt, an economic basket-case run by a dictator who galvanizes popular support by cultivating societal hatred of America? Saudi Arabia, which is now pushing a policy with the International Atomic Energy Agency that will allow it to accumulate small quantities of uranium and plutonium which it could easily transfer to terrorist organizations for the purpose of attacking the US?

Israel was wrong to sell weapons systems to China. But the damage done to US national security interests has been effectively brought under control. The damage that the US's increasingly hostile position toward Israel is doing to US national security interests will not be so easily contained. The positive consequences for America from its alliance with a strong and secure Israel are enormous and unique. The negative consequences of an abandonment of Israel will be equally vast.

Why would Singapore or India or any other US ally trust an America that would abandon Israel? And how will the US be more secure if it increases its dependence on Arab regimes that are inherently hostile to it and everything it stands for?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week, the state prosecutor's office announced that it is considering a plan that would declare "negligent" parents of minor children who are repeatedly arrested for taking part in protests against the government's withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria.

In so declaring the parents, the state would pave the way for the forcible removal of these children from their homes and their transfer to state custody. That is, the government's newest way to fight opposition protests against its plan to forcibly remove 10,000 law-abiding Israeli citizens from their homes, farms and communities this summer is to threaten parents with the forcible removal of their children from their custody if their children don't agree to stop protesting against the forcible removal plan.

This child confiscation proposal, which was defended on Wednesday by Deputy Attorney-General Shai Nitzan, is more than simply controversial. It is totalitarian. It is not simply hard-hearted. It is inhuman. And in announcing it, the government showed that in light of the precipitous drop in public support for its plan, it has lost its connection to the principles of democracy, morality and simple human decency which are the outstanding characteristics of the Israeli public.

While the public was still reeling from the state prosecution's intention to declare war on the sanctity of the family as a means to fight 14-year-old girls who prefer to stay in jail rather than agree to surrender their right to protest the policies of their government, the government launched yet another offensive against its enemies.

The newest move, reported Thursday in Ma'ariv, is its decision to threaten citizens set for expulsion that if they don't leave their homes and farms voluntarily by August 15, the government will fine them each $40,000. This announcement came in the wake of Housing Minister Isaac Herzog's statement to The Jerusalem Post Wednesday that residents who don't cut a deal with the government for resettlement ahead of their planned eviction will simply be loaded onto buses and thrown out of their homes. Where they go after that is their problem, he explained.

The government is in trouble. With each passing day the fact that the plan to which it owes its existence – the forcible removal of 10,000 citizens from their homes and communities and the transfer of their land to the Palestinians who have been attacking them continuously for the past five years – is seen by more and more Israelis as irrational and dangerous.

This week, the polls, which over the past several months have registered a gradual yet consistent erosion of public support for the plan, showed that today only 48 percent of the public supports it.

In its attempts to defend its increasingly precarious position, the government has reacted wildly to its critics. Rather than increase public support, its moves have simply added to the general sense that the Sharon-Peres government has lost control of events and, in its zeal to defend its controversial program, it is willing to sacrifice the nation's security and its own morality.

The reasons for the increase in public opposition to the plan are varied, but they all redound to the fact that Sharon's current governing coalition has no reason to exist other than to implement the withdrawal plan. Because of this, everything that occurs domestically, diplomatically and militarily, is viewed by the public through the prism of the withdrawal plan.

In recent weeks there has been a steep increase in media coverage of violent crime. A 14-year-old is brutally attacked by bullies in school and the story is given five minutes of coverage on prime-time television newscasts. The murder of a 15-year-old girl by a glue-sniffing juvenile delinquent is front-page news for two days.

While the increase in violent crime, or at least the increase in media attention to violent crime, has nothing to do with the planned withdrawal and expulsion plan, it is linked to the plan in the eye of the public because rather than fight crime, thousands of police officers are training to carry out the expulsion of law abiding citizens from their homes this August. And rather than try criminals, the courts are clogged with juveniles arrested for blocking traffic in protest of the withdrawal plan.

In recent weeks the fact that there has been a steep decline in the Bush administration's support for Israel, matched by a steep increase in the administration pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinian Authority, has become undeniable. The fact that Washington has even considered opening discussions with Hamas is evidence of the fact that, if nothing else, the government has completely failed in explaining the actual situation in the Palestinian war against Israel to the administration. And of course it has.

In order to justify their withdrawal and expulsion plan both domestically and internationally, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his associates have had to proclaim their support for PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas. This they have done even as Abbas has done everything in his power to support and strengthen terrorist organizations. To the extent that Abbas is weak, his weakness is due to the fact that the terrorists don't believe that his support has been sufficient.

But because Sharon has publicly supported Abbas, the Americans feel justified in pressuring Israel for more concessions to him. The government cannot publicly admit that Abbas is part of the problem, and that strengthening him will only make matters worse because doing so will merely point to the absurdity of the planned withdrawal and expulsion.

So too, the government has been completely incompetent in contending with the increased military capabilities and terrorist assaults by the Palestinian terrorist organizations and with the open collusion between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah with the PA militias and the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt. Last Thursday, Sharon's personal attorney Dov Weisglass dismissed the threat emanating from Kassam rockets by referring to them as mere "flying objects." When these "flying objects" destroyed a home in Sderot on Tuesday and killed three people in the hothouses in Gush Katif, the general public could not ignore the fact that those "flying objects" are deadly weapons and that in attempting to defend its increasingly indefensible policy the government is making war on its political opponents instead of fighting the nation's enemies.

In his first public comments since assuming the mantle of IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz stood before the cameras in Sderot on Tuesday and told the nation that all these attacks on Israel were merely the result of Palestinian turf wars and that the attacks on Israel endangered the Palestinian Authority more than they endangered Israel. The absurdity of his remarks, made in the shadow of the destroyed apartment building, and at the same time as Abbas is doing everything he can to legitimize Hamas both domestically and internationally, could not have been more glaring.

Indeed, in response to the IDF's peevish attack on terrorists poised to launch Kassam rockets in Gaza on Wednesday, Abbas condemned Israel and said that Israel was bringing about the collapse of the cease-fire, as if his own forces weren't actively colluding with Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad terror squads who launched their rockets, mortars and anti-tank missiles this week within spitting distance from his military posts and as if Israel hadn't arrested 15 would-be suicide bombers over the past month.

The Keystone Kops-style machinations of the government might be a source of ironic amusement if the consequences of the government's signature policy weren't so dangerous for Israel. Last Friday, on the eve of his hand-over of command to Halutz, Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon gave an in-depth interview to Haaretz in which he said, among other things, that given the fact that the Palestinians continue to reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, the notion of a "two-state" solution west of the Jordan River is a recipe for war. Of the government's current withdrawal plan, Ya'alon stated that if it is implemented, the Palestinians would pocket Gaza and then relaunch their terror war against Israel from Judea and Samaria. In his words, "I have no doubt that they will have an interest in demonstrating that after the pullout from Gaza there will be a period of quiet there. 'You left Gaza? You get quiet. You will leave Judea and Samaria? You will get quiet. Leave Tel Aviv and things will be completely quiet.'"
 

Ya'alon's statements were quickly backed up by retired security brass from across the political spectrum in Tuesday's edition of Ma'ariv. These former Mossad chiefs and IDF generals noted that the plan will erode Israel's international standing; place pressure on Israel for more and deeper withdrawals and expulsions in Judea and Samaria; set a precedent for a retreat to the 1949 armistice lines including a redivision of Jerusalem; and increase vastly the capabilities and the motivation of the Palestinians and the Arab world generally to reignite the terror war against Israel in the fall.

The government's reaction to these cautionary notes was to denounce the critics as gasbags and to ratchet up its rhetoric against the residents it is set to expel and their supporters. Rather than contending with the content of Ya'alon's arguments, Sharon Wednesday responded dubiously that during his entire tour of duty as Chief of General Staff, Ya'alon had never made these points to him.

Given the fact that the government has inextricably linked its fortunes to the success of its irrational and dangerous withdrawal and expulsion plan, Sharon and his partners are unable to respond to attacks against them with anything other than venom, bravado and hysteria.

The public's abandonment of its support for the government is a direct result of this state of affairs and, given the consistency of the downward trend in support that preceded its loss of the majority, there can be no doubt that the government is on its way to collapse. The only question that remains open today is whether the government will collapse before or after it implements its ruinous policy.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Yesterday we celebrated Jerusalem Day, commemorating Israel's liberation of eastern and southern Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation 38 years ago. As usual, our political leaders pledged their undying and sincere commitment to the continued unity of the city as the "eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish People." Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, always one to flaunt his commitment to Jerusalem, pledged to protect the city's unity by transferring NIS 40 million in budgetary funds to the municipal budget.

But talk is cheap. In the Arab sections of the city, the people tell a different tale. In recent months, they have come to live under the shadow of terror and intimidation by the Palestinian Authority. After an absence of four years, the PA, under the leadership of "democratically elected" chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has been reasserting its presence in the city.

The moment they are convinced they will not be directly quoted and no indication of their identity will be published, residents in neighborhoods like Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah all tell the same story: Hundreds of Arab Jerusalemites who hold Israeli identity cards and enjoy Israeli welfare benefits and health insurance, travel daily to Ramallah and Jericho to train in the various Palestinian security services. There they don their uniforms and wear their weapons. At the end of the day they return to Jerusalem and intimidate their neighbors.

These law-abiding Jerusalemites are threatened with abduction, torture, loss of livelihood and worse if they turn to Israeli authorities for any assistance other than welfare. If squatters move onto their land, they are not allowed to complain. If a husband beats his wife, she cannot turn to Israeli authorities for help. The address for all their grievances has now become the Palestinian militiamen - many of whom hold the ranks of colonel and general - living next door, in Jerusalem, the eternal, undivided capital city of Israel to which Sharon has pledged his undying commitment.

Arab participation in Jerusalem's municipal elections has, since the establishment of the PA, dwindled to near insignificance. This too is the direct result of intimidation. Since 1996, the PA's appointed mufti at the Temple Mount, Sheikh Ikrama Sabri - a Jerusalem resident himself - has ordered Arab Jerusalemites to boycott the elections.

Sabri has done more than that. Aside from preaching the genocidal destruction of Israel and the conquest of the US by Islamic fundamentalists, he has issued three death sentences for Arabs who sold land to Jews. Recently, he announced his intention to approve the death sentences issued by the PA for 15 people accused of assisting Israel in its counterterrorism efforts. Any lawyer worth a penny would say that in so acting, Sabri is guilty of murder. And yet no charges have been brought against him by the Israel's State Attorney's Office.

The issue of land sales to Jews is one of the most disturbing indications of what the PA's true goals are in its dealings with Israel. When the PA was first established in 1994, one of the first laws "promulgated" by then "justice" minister Freih Abu Meddin was to make the selling of land to Jews a capital offense. In short order, Arab land dealers started showing up dead in dumpsters in Ramallah and Jericho. Two were murdered in Jerusalem. Dozens of other Jerusalemites underwent torture at the hands of the PA militias.

IN 2001, after the massacre of 21 teenagers outside the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv by a Palestinian terrorist, the government, in its one political move against the PA throughout the entire war, announced the closing of Orient House in Jerusalem and a clamp-down on all PA military and political activities in the city. Until that date, heads of state on official visits to Israel would make it a point to also visit the PLO's headquarters in the city, paying homage to its aspiration to take over Israel's eternal, undivided capital.

Since then, and until Abbas, the "reform" leader took power last November, the PA had gone underground in Jerusalem, and its Arab residents breathed a sigh of relief. But with the new legitimacy conferred on Abbas by the US and Israel, the PA is again asserting its terrorist authority over the residents of the city.

The newest victim of the PA's power grab is not an Arab at all, but the recently excommunicated Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Irineous I.

Since the PA was established, it has worked diligently to bring all the various Christian sects under its direct control. In the 1990s this involved terrorizing priests and nuns into submission. In Jericho and Hebron, the PA took control of the convents and churches of the White Russian churches and transferred them to the pro-PLO Red Russian church. In 2002, Fatah terrorists laid siege to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and held the priests hostage for weeks while ostentatiously desecrating the holy site.

Until the sacking of Irineous last month, the Greek Orthodox Church was the only church operating in Israel and the PA that retained its independence from the PA. Before Easter, Ma'ariv published a report that Irineous had committed the "crime" of leasing church property by the Jaffa Gate of the Old City to Jews. Seeing an opportunity, the PA immediately pounced on Irineous. As columnist Nadav Haetzni reported in Ma'ariv on Friday, PA ministers and militia commanders, equipped with Israeli VIP travel documents, descended on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and organized attacks against Irineous, who was immediately condemned as a "traitor" and a "collaborator."

Irineous was summoned for an interrogation by PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei. His lawyer's arm was broken and his financial adviser was brutally beaten. Under the gun of PA intimidation, the church's Holy Synod convened and excommunicated Irineous last month. The PA took over the church's finances and incited an international scandal which brought Greece's deputy foreign minister to Ramallah, where he apologized to Qurei for Irineous's terrible crime.

As all of this was happening, Israel's government sat quietly on the side and did nothing. The attacks against Irineous were organized by a PLO-sponsored Arab Israeli priest, Theodosius Atallah Hanna. Hanna has repeatedly glorified suicide bombers and, indeed, called for Palestinians to become bombers in interviews to the Arab press. He is positioning himself to become the first Arab patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church since the 16th century.

Aside from the fact that the current Arabization of the Greek Orthodox Church will signal the complete takeover of all Christian churches by the PA, it also has strategic significance for Israel's national security. The PA has now made clear that the prohibition of land sales to Jews extends even to foreigners. As well, the Greek Orthodox Church owns vast land tracts throughout Israel. In Jerusalem alone, the Knesset, the President's House and large swathes of Rehavia are owned by the church. With the church under PLO control, what will become of these lands when their current leases expire?

Jerusalem is the indivisible and eternal capital of the Jewish people. But from the passivity of the government in the wake of PA encroachment on the city, it seems that, rhetoric aside, our leaders are abandoning their duty to defend it.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On Thursday afternoon, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's personal attorney Dov Weisglass announced a major policy initiative during a speech at Tel Aviv University. Weisglass said that after the completion of the expulsion of 10,000 Israelis from their villages in Gaza and northern Samaria, Israel will expel still more citizens from their homes by destroying the so-called "unauthorized communities" in Judea and the rest of Samaria.

This statement is remarkable for two reasons. First, it totally contradicts the statements Weisglass made last year to Haaretz newspaper according to which the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria would be Israel's last withdrawal for years. Specifically, Weisglass said then that after the planned pullout goes through, "there will be no timetable to implement the settlers' nightmare [of further expulsions from additional communities]. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns." So that was a lie, or perhaps he is lying now. At any rate, Weisglass's statement Thursday proves incontrovertibly that he has no personal credibility.

The second reason that Weisglass's statement is remarkable is that this major policy announcement came seemingly out of thin air. There has been no debate regarding the destruction of these communities in the government in recent weeks. There has been no public advocacy for the move by Sharon or Weisglass. There has been no report of staff work being assigned to the IDF or to members of the civil service to weigh the advantages or disadvantages of the announced plan, and of course, the announcement comes with no mention of what will result from such a move.

In testimony before the Knesset's State Comptroller's Committee on Monday, Sharon was grilled by committee members on the staff work which preceded his decision to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria. MK Yuri Shtern attempted to find out what policy options the plan was weighed against and what the strategic purpose of the plan is supposed to be. Other committee members requested that Sharon describe the staff work regarding the strengthening of communities in Judea and Samaria and plans for resettlement of the Israelis now scheduled for expulsion.

Sharon refused to answer any of these queries, opting instead to slide by the proceedings by telling jokes, teasing and patronizing female committee members, and reading irrelevant statements from a prepared text from which he did not deviate. The press coverage of the meeting was generally sympathetic towards Sharon. Anchormen raved about his charm and wit that enabled him to emerge unscathed from the committee without answering a single question.

In the US, the big story of the week was the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat – the near mythological source of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's coverage of the Watergate scandal. The reportage of the fact that Deep Throat was W. Mark Felt, the then No. 2 man at the FBI, has been remarkably up-front about the problematic nature of Felt's motivations for bringing down the Nixon Administration by leaking privileged information to Woodward. Even the Washington Post noted that Felt was moved to act against Nixon at least in part by untoward motivations.

On the one hand Felt had a personal animus towards Nixon after the president refrained from appointing him to replace J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director when Hoover passed away in 1972. On the other hand, Felt took umbrage at the fact that Nixon was attempting to bring the FBI – which for nearly half a century under Hoover's leadership operated beyond the oversight of any governing body – under executive control. To a degree then, in light of Felt's centrality in causing Nixon to resign in disgrace, it can be said that Watergate was a war between a corrupt White House and a corrupt FBI and the corrupt FBI won.

The fact that today the US press is able to take a critical look at the role that Felt played shows that the American media have moved a long way from their monolithic support for anyone who had anything bad to say against Nixon from 33 years ago. As opposed to the situation in the 1970s, today the US media are not monolithic. The ideological competition between the various major media outlets in the US today means that the bias of one side is often canceled out by the bias of the other side and in the balance what remains is a reasonably sophisticated and credible media debate on the issues of the day.

When senior officials in the CIA attempted in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections to bring about President George W. Bush's defeat at the polls by constantly leaking damaging stories about Bush and his advisers to the press, the CIA itself came under media scrutiny. So too, when CBS tried to bring about Bush's defeat by reporting embarrassing documents regarding his service in the Texas Air National Guard, the right-wing press almost immediately proved that the documents were forgeries and so CBS, once immune from criticism, too had its professionalism questioned.

In the competitive media market that exists today in America, it is almost unthinkable that a new Deep Throat could emerge and evade all questioning of his motivations. And this is to the good. Leftist media scrutiny of Bush's claims that Iraq under Saddam had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction did not end as a result of the revelation that much of the material related to the issue came from anti-Bush CIA and State Department officials. So too, if Felt had been exposed in 1973, Nixon may well have still been forced to resign, but the public would also have had a chance to understand the nature of the game being played and the shock incurred by the US political system as a result of the Watergate scandal could have been moderated.

In France and Holland this week we saw again what happens when media and policy elites operate for too long outside the realm of public scrutiny. If the French and Dutch governments and the rest of the EU elites had invested time over that past 30 or so years debating the ramifications of European integration with their citizenry, then the humiliation their people served them at the polls this week by overwhelmingly rejecting the verbose and inscrutable constitution they had written probably would have been averted.

What keeps democratic societies on a stable and forward-moving keel is the constant back and forth between leaders and the people, just as the reason why some businesses succeed while others fail is because some pay attention to the needs of their consumers and stockholders and others pay attention to the needs of their top executives.

Haaretz, the newspaper of Israel's narcissistic elites, editorialized sneeringly that the lesson of the French vote is that it is unwise to trust the people to make important decisions. "What clearly arises," the paper lectured, "is the danger inherent when a representative democracy gives up its elected representatives' authority to decide. Legislatures, governments and heads of the executive branch are elected in order to bear the burden of making difficult decisions. Abandoning this responsibility and transferring it to the general public transfers the vote from the domain of the intellect to that of emotion."

In Israel today there is no debate about anything substantive. Our monolithically leftist media and legal establishment block all discussion about the ramifications of Sharon's withdrawal plan, limiting pubic scrutiny to how best to punish those who publicly oppose it. Rather than discuss the implications of handing Gaza over to the PA which, under "democratically elected" chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has done everything in its power to strengthen terrorist elements in Palestinian society, we discuss whether minors arrested for blocking traffic to protest the plan should be allowed to take their university matriculation examinations in prison.

Rather than discuss how Sharon plans to hold onto the rest of Judea and Samaria, we are given exclusive footage of right-wingers who have taken over the hotel in Neveh Dekalim in Gaza ahead of the planned pullout.

Rather than discuss why it is that Sharon decided to evacuate four communities in northern Samaria when the IDF and the Shin Bet both say that at any rate the IDF will have to remain in place to prevent rocket and mortar attacks on Tel Aviv and Kfar Saba, we are told that the opponents of the plan are anti-democratic thugs who have no loyalty to the state.

Rather than discuss the fact that the prime minister arguably broke the law by not cooperating with a Knesset hearing, we are told how charming and funny he was as he brushed off irritating questions from fuddy-duddy parliamentarians who haven't yet gotten with the program.

And rather than discuss the status of the government's relations with the White House, which has clearly increased its support for the PA and diminished its support for Israel over the past year and a half, we are regaled with stories about how Sharon boasted to the president that he has more cows on his ranch in Israel than Bush has on his ranch in Texas.

What we learn from the US experience from Watergate and the European experience with their constitution is that when governmental and media elites ignore or mislead their societies, societal stability and democratic institutions are always the greatest victims. Sharon, in making the most important decisions affecting the future of Israeli society in secretive meetings with his sons, attorneys and publicists, while seeking only the approval of the self-serving elites who long ago cut themselves off from the wider public which they view as stupid, shallow and emotional, is following in the worst traditions of corrupt politicians throughout the Western world. And unless he is forced by the Knesset, the media and the citizenry at large to abandon this path, the harsh consequences won't be long in coming.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.