The announcements this week by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top advisers, in-house generals and Vice Premier Shimon Peres (along with Sharon's dubious denials) that the government will now begin planning more land giveaways to the Palestinians after last month's destruction of our communities in Gaza and northern Samaria ought to have caused a furor in the country. And yet it is hard to escape the impression that these latest announcements are something of an anticlimax.

Politically, the announcements only served to reinforce the sense that Sharon's political and policy machinations have passed all previous bounds of cynicism. After all, before the Likud Central Committee's vote on Monday regarding the date of elections for the party leadership, Sharon and his advisers strenuously denied any plan to continue the prime minister's policy of confronting Palestinian terrorism by expelling Jews from their homes and destroying their communities.

It isn't that anyone really believed his protestations, although the local media, which to all intents and purposes act as an adjunct to Sharon's official spin team, were quick to give credence to these fundamentally unconvincing claims. More than anything, the lack of public outrage at Sharon's latest policy flip-flop, like the yawn that greeted the exposure of his flagrantly illegal election fund-raising during his recent visit to New York, stems from a widespread sense that the political system in Israel is incurably corrupt. It isn't that Israelis are apathetic about the fact that the prime minister doesn't even pretend not to lie or cheat. It is just that at this point most people feel powerless to do anything about it.

Aside from what the plan to expand the government's policy of national cannibalism tells us about the corruption of Israel's political system by Sharon and his associates, it also makes clear a larger point about the consequences of surrender. As events in Gaza, Judea and Samaria since the government enacted its withdrawal and expulsion plan last month have shown, the adoption of a surrender policy automatically rules out any option for achieving either a peace agreement or agreed and credible security arrangements with the Palestinians or neighboring Arab states.

Addressing an annual conference at the left-wing Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University on Wednesday, head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze'evi Farkash stated dryly that al-Qaida has exploited Gaza's breached border with Egypt to infiltrate its operatives into the area. The disturbing aspect of Farkash's statement is that it was not accompanied by a pledge that Israel will kill or arrest these operatives before they have a chance to set up operations in the area. Then again, such a statement would in the end be counterproductive because now that Israel has abandoned Gaza, it is unclear what options that IDF has for contending with this new threat. As well, Israel's deterrent posture vis-a-vis the Palestinians was so eroded by the withdrawal and expulsion that it is hard to know how uttering yet another empty threat would do anything other than weaken Israel's credibility that much more.

Adding his voice to the defeatism that has necessarily taken hold of the senior echelons of the IDF in the wake of its enactment of last month's withdrawal and expulsion plan, on Tuesday Brig.-Gen. Udi Dekel, the head of Strategic Planning in the General Staff, claimed at another academic conference that the transformation of Gaza into "Hamastan" has much to recommend it. In Dekel's view, "there is a potential that Hamas will be more committed than the Palestinian Authority [to stop attacking Israel] the moment it takes responsibility and control of the Strip." The fact that he made this statement just hours after Hamas released an al-Qaida-style videotape of kidnapped and bound Israeli businessman Sasson Nuriel begging for his life just before he was murdered simply makes the complete disconnect from reality that his statement exposes all the more dramatic.

It is true that Hamas, with its ideological and strategic clarity, could cut a deal with Israel much more easily than the PLO can. But then again, that clarity, which is based on a total dedication to the annihilation of Israel, is what makes the notion that it is possible to take solace in Hamas control of Palestinian society insane.

In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority, under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas, has continued to extol its support for continued war against Israel and for the empowerment of Hamas as a "legitimate" political party. The PA indirectly supported Hamas's kidnapping and murder of Nuriel though its official media organs, which reported as fact Hamas's contention that Nuriel – who owned a candy factory – was an intelligence officer.

TODAY ONLY two things seem to bother the PA: Israel's counterterror operations, which Abbas and his deputies refer to as "barbaric acts of terrorism," and the fear that they may lose international support. The PA attempted to deal with the latter concern this week when it leaked a Syrian directive to Hamas and Islamic Jihad calling on the terror groups to continue their attacks against Israel. The obvious purpose of publishing the report was to get Syria blamed for the PA's own pro-terror policies.

The Egyptians, who were supposed to be the guarantors that Gaza would not turn into a base for global terrorism and that its border with the Sinai would remain sealed, have expressed no embarrassment over the fact that their military forces along the border not only have done nothing to stop the open cross border traffic between Gaza and the Sinai, they have facilitated it. Rather than voicing contrition or acting to exert effective control over the border, the Egyptians have demanded that Israel allow their forces to deploy in Judea and Samaria where, the Egyptians claim, they will reenact their operations in Gaza. For his part, Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak reacted to the mayhem that he enabled by telling the media that Sharon is thwarting peace prospects.

All of the actions and statements by the Palestinian leadership and the Egyptians show that in the wake of Israel's abandonment of Gaza and northern Samaria, it has both curtailed its military options and cast off all possibility of ever reaching either a political settlement with the Palestinians or security arrangements regarding the Palestinians with Egypt or Jordan. The Palestinians realize that they no longer have an incentive to negotiate with Israel because Israel will surrender without even a fig leaf of an agreement. From their perspective, the lesson of the withdrawal and expulsion plan – and now the latest announcements that more land transfers are in the offing – is that there is no reason for them to concede anything.

The Egyptians have learned that they can negotiate security arrangements with Israel, not abide by any of their commitments, and continue to be viewed as a positive force in the region by all parties concerned. The fact that Egypt has paid no price for its duplicity shows Cairo that there is no justification for adhering to Israeli demands that it behave like a good neighbor and stop encouraging and facilitating Palestinian terrorists.

For their part, the Jordanians – who for the past five years have successfully sealed their border with Israel to terrorist infiltration – have no interest in getting involved in the terror swamp now expanding its depth and breadth in Judea and Samaria. Not only is Jordanian society overwhelmingly pro-Islamist, but Jordan would end up having to confront Egypt as well as its own people if it gave Israel a hand in dealing with the Palestinians. Quite simply, after last month's withdrawal, cooperating with Israel holds costs but no benefits for the Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians.

SHARON AND his associates argue that the rationale for continued retreat is the absence of a diplomatic option for achieving peace. According to their reasoning, surrendering territory to terrorists is in Israel's interest because in doing so, Israel is able to determine its borders in accordance with its needs. But there is a major flaw in this logic.

In the absence of a diplomatic option, it is necessary for Israel – as for any state contending with such issues – to take unilateral steps that ensure its interests. But it is in Israel's interest to prevent al-Qaida from establishing operational bases in Gaza, Judea and Samaria. It is in Israel's interests to prevent terrorists from launching rockets, mortars and missiles at its population centers. It is in Israel's interest to prevent terrorists from controlling territory from which they can launch shoulder-fired missiles at civilian aircraft. By surrendering territory to terrorists, Israel is ensuring that it will be unable to do anything meaningful to guarantee any of these vital interests.

Rather than unilaterally taking the action necessary to ensure its interests, Israel, by destroying its own communities and transferring territory to its enemies, is actively advancing the cause of its enemies while endangering its citizens and economy.

In the post-mortem review of the causes for Sharon's close victory in the Likud Central Committee on Monday, it is clear that the primary reason he won is that his opposition refused to rally around former finance minister Binyamin Netanyahu as their leader. For the past year and a half Sharon has avoided providing a defense of his policy of surrender by casting every political and policy battle as a personal dispute. With the firm backing of the local media, Sharon has beaten all his opponents by accusing them of the crime of attempting to usurp his power. It is not that his political opponents cannot do anything against this tactic, it is just that to date they have refused to adopt the one remedy – providing an alternate, agreed-upon leader to replace him – that could force Sharon to engage in a policy debate.

In light of this, there is no reason for Israelis in general or for Sharon's political opponents specifically to despair over the results of Monday's central committee vote. All that is necessary to return vibrancy to the political debate in Israel is to maintain pressure on Sharon by rallying around the one leader with the ability to actually win a national election.

Once this obstacle has been mounted, it is necessary for Sharon's opponents in the Likud and its sister parties on the Right to make the point that the absence of a diplomatic option is not a justification for the further abandonment of Israel's right to guarantee its national interests. Such a debate will constrict Sharon's maneuver room as he plots a course for further withdrawals. Pointing out that fact that the lack of a diplomatic option was exacerbated, not alleviated, by last month's withdrawals and expulsions will also serve to signal to the Palestinians and their allies that their ability to scoff at Israel's demands for action against terrorists may be smaller than they now believe it to be.

At any rate, the cynicism with which Sharon and his allies have infected Israel's political culture must end as soon as possible, and it is within the power of his political opponents to take the steps necessary to bring this about.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

There is not a single political leader in Israel who will not uphold the country's identity as the Jewish state. But what does that mean? Does the fact that Israel is the Jewish state mean that it has a unique mission in the world that distinguishes it from every other state?

The overwhelming majority of Israelis would say that the fact that Israel is the Jewish state means that Israel is a unique state and that it has a unique mission in the world. Religious Israelis believe that the establishment of the State of Israel was the beginning of the period of divine redemption and that the mission of the Jews in the redemptive age is to defend the State of Israel and to work to ensure that the People of Israel in the Land of Israel act as a light unto the nations of the world.

Non-observant Israelis will generally say that the mission of Israel is to be a homeland for all the Jews. It is a physical refuge for those in need and – at a minimum – an anchor and guarantor of Jewish identity and continuity for Jews who live in free societies outside of Israel.

In both cases, national memory – from Abraham to the Exodus from Egypt, the establishment of the ancient Jewish commonwealths in the Land of Israel, the Roman exile, the expulsions from England and Spain, the religious persecutions in various exile communities in Europe and Asia, the messianic movement of Shabbtai Zvi in the 17th century, through the debated legacy of the Emancipation in Western and Central Europe, the Holocaust and the establishment of the modern State of Israel – plays a central role in both group's basic understanding of Israel's role in the world today.

THERE IS a third group of Israelis, that finds its home on the far left, that includes leaders like Uri Avineri and Yossi Beilin for whom the Emancipation left a wholly positive legacy. For these people, Israel has no unique role in the world. Rather, it is simply an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. As a Western encroachment on Arab civilization, these deracinated Jewish ideologues believe that Israel's role is to ask for forgiveness from the Arabs for our "crime" of moving in on "their" territory. Since Israel has no particular role to fulfill in the world as the Jewish state, for these men and their followers, the national memory of the Jewish people is the primary hindrance, rather than the anchor of national progress and endeavor.

Disturbingly, it would seem that this minority view has infected the political leadership of Israel.

The public received a strong indication that this is the case on Friday when the relevant government leaders from President Moshe Katsav, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni to Education Minister Limor Livnat did not bother to attend Simon Wiesenthal's funeral in Herzliya. To understand why their absence – like the absence of every other government minister – is so distressing, it is necessary to understand what Wiesenthal was, and more importantly, what he symbolized for the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world.

SIMON WIESENTHAL, who passed away at 96 last Tuesday at his home in Vienna was a Jew of the Diaspora. The fact that he did not make his home in Israel, however, did not lessen his importance to the Jewish people. Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Holocaust, devoted his life to actualizing memory. In hunting down more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals who personally perpetrated the Holocaust, Wiesenthal personified the Jewish view that our history is not simply remembered, but lived on a daily basis. He understood that if history is viewed with passivity, then memory will be lost, and a Jewish people that lacks its memory is a Jewish people without a future.

Wiesenthal said, "For me, it is important to remember, but it is far more important to remember to act." This elegant statement is a simple elucidation of the basis for the continued existence of the Jewish people throughout history. We cannot survive without our memory, and our actions will be worthless if they are not grounded in our past.

It was because Wiesenthal personified and became a symbol of the importance of ensuring that our memories direct our actions as Jews that he was such a prominent figure in the Jewish world. Given that none of our national leaders bothered to attend his funeral, the question naturally arises, how is it that they have forgotten to remember?

The answer to the question has its roots in the deprecation of Israeli society heralded by the embrace of the PLO as a peace partner by Israel 12 years ago.

To convince Israelis that the Arab world's rejection of Israel was the result of the absence of a Palestinian state in the Land of Israel, and that a terrorist organization whose sole reason for existing was the destruction of Israel could be a partner in achieving peace with Israel, the government, under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had to tell us to forget our past.

Indeed, Peres has repeatedly berated his opponents over the past 12 years by arguing that "history is unimportant." Since Oslo, revisionist historians have rewritten school history textbooks. Among other things, they changed the history of the 1948 War of Independence to hide its central truth – that Israel fended off the joint invasion of five Arab armies whose governments' declared goal was the physical eradication of the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Instead, the new textbooks now follow the narrative of Israel's enemies, and cast the war as one of Israel's dispossession of the Arab refugees that fled the state. In the universities, Israel's so-called occupation of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip has become the focal point of academic research in the social sciences and humanities.

On a national political level, our debate since 1993 has required the denial of truth almost as soon as it passes into history. To convince the public that peace can be achieved through Israeli concessions, politicians must deny the fact that aside from the Hashemites, all Arab leaders have consistently insisted that there is no room in the Middle East for a Jewish state. To sustain the myth that Yasser Arafat and his circle of Fatah founders, like Mahmoud Abbas, are "partners for peace," Israeli leaders must steadfastly deny the terrorist past and present of Fatah and its PLO partners.

At root, we see that the decision to make "peace" the central aim of the Jewish state has negated the Jewish identity of the state. This is so not because peace is antithetical to Jewish identity but because the quest for this "peace" is rooted in lies and as such demands a rejection of national memory.

The absence of any of Israel's national political leaders at Wiesenthal's funeral is a symptom of our willful amnesia. Wiesenthal said, "There is no freedom without justice." To this it should be added that freedom grounded in justice is the only basis for real peace and that a people without a memory cannot pursue justice, maintain its freedom or attain peace.

Staring at the moral crisis in which Israel's leadership is presently subsumed from this vantage point, it becomes apparent that the present predicament can only be remedied when the Jewish people in Israel and the Diaspora internalize again the message that Wiesenthal symbolized in his life.

We are a people with a mission in the world. Our mission as Jews and as the Jewish state is predicated on our preservation of our national memory and the actualization of that memory in our lives and in the lives of the generations that come after us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In the months that preceded the forcible eviction of all Israelis from their homes and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria, and during last month's expulsions themselves, the commanders of the IDF and police responsible for the operation defined "preventing" or "not exacerbating" the "schism in the nation" as one of their principal goals.

This was all well and good, but it was beside the point. At the end of the day, the fact of the matter is that there was never any schism between the security forces and the residents of Gaza and northern Samaria. This truth was laid bare by the love that the soldiers and policemen and residents showered on one another throughout most of the operation.

If anything, the confrontation which pitted the army and the police against the residents served to strengthen rather than weaken the bonds between those who settle the land and those that carry arms to defend it. And the long-term impact that this engagement will have on both sides is something that no one today can foresee.

And yet, there is a huge and gaping schism that fragments Israeli society. And those fomenting this schism are responsible for bringing about the ill-advised and immoral decision to expel these patriots from their homes and communities, turning them over to the Palestinian terrorists who Wednesday transformed the destroyed synagogue in Netzarim into a Hamas terror museum.

In the wake of the expulsions, the fomenters of the schism were beside themselves with rage at the fact that their plan to "disengage" the nation from the settlers by destroying Gush Katif went up in smoke.

Ruminating on this state of affairs immediately after the completion of the expulsions, Haaretz columnist Orit Shochat cautioned angrily, "Soldiers who experienced the evacuation won't travel to an ashram in India because they discovered that there is an ashram next door. The same Jewish religion that they hadn't seen up close for a long time embraces them into its fold with song and a tear and a common fate.

"They have now sat arm-in-arm at the synagogues in Gush Katif, they have now felt the holiness mixed with sweat, they have now moved rhythmically and sung songs, they have stood in line to kiss the Torah scrolls, they are now half-inside."

She continued, "The army may have planned for months for the evacuation and conducted simulations of every possible scenario, but it didn't think about this scenario."

If she had replaced the word "army" with "our side," her point would have been more accurate. And what is Shochat's side? What is the side that wished so desperately for the destruction of the Jewish communities in Gaza and northern Samaria, in order to destroy the connection between those who settle the land and the rest of the country? If the sides of the schism dividing the country are not the security forces and the settlers, then who are they?

This week, the identities of the two sides of the divide were exposed to all who care to see them when on Sunday the Justice Ministry announced its decision not to indict any policemen for their actions during the Arab riots in October 2000. Twelve Arab Israelis and one Palestinian were killed during those riots, which engulfed the entire Arab sector of the country. The decision sent a shock wave through Israeli society with a force that on its face is difficult to comprehend given that the events occurred five years ago.

The shock of the decision fomented two separate discussions in the Israeli public. The most glaring aspect of those discussions is that apart from the fact that they both were carried out in Hebrew, no common thread connected them. It is in these separate conversations that we find the root of the rift in Israeli society and can identify the two sides of the societal divide.

To understand the significance of the discussions, it is necessary to first recall what happened five years ago. Following months of increased violence and extremism in the Arab-Israeli sector incited directly by the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli Islamic Movement and the Arab members of Knesset, violent riots seized the Arab sector of Israel in October 2000. During the week of riots, Arab Israelis threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli civilian cars throughout the country. Israeli motorists were dragged out of their cars on Highway 65 along Wadi Ara and beaten. An Israeli motorist was murdered when Arabs from Jasser a-Zarka threw a rock at his windshield as he drove down the coastal highway.

In the wake of the riots, the government of then-prime minister Ehud Barak went into a state of panic, concerned that the Labor Party would lose its support base among Arab Israelis. And so, rather than arresting the Arab leaders who incited the riots, banning the Islamic Movement and ending PA infiltration into the Arab sector, Barak sought to appease the very leaders who had fomented the violence. This he did by offering to establish an independent commission led by a retired judge that would investigate the police behavior towards the rioters. That commission, led by retired justice Theodore Or, was given the perverse job of focusing their investigation on the police, as if the officers had simply been firing at ducks in a shooting gallery rather than trying to contend with a violent, heavily incited mob that was paralyzing and terrorizing the country.

Once the Or Commission was established, discussion of the actual events was silenced and replaced by a surrealistic parade of policemen and politicians summoned before a tribunal to defend their actions as if they had taken place in a vacuum. And so, this week's announcement of the decision not to indict any officers in the 13 deaths was the first opportunity that the public has had in five years to actually discuss what happened in October 2000.

The first discussion of the events was the popular discussion. It could be heard mainly in radio call in shows and on Internet news sites. Regular citizens concentrated on the context of the riots, questioning the Arab claim of discrimination.

They noted that the allegation that the police treated the rioters differently from Jewish protesters, by shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at them where none were used against Jewish protesters, ignores the fact that Jewish protesters don't attack the police with rocks and Molotov cocktails. They asked how it was possible for Israel to be embarrassed over what happened in October 2000 when the policemen's lives were in danger and they were massed against the rioters in order to protect the lives of civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom were locked in their homes for days, unable to leave their cities and their neighborhoods for fear of being attacked by mobs calling out "Death to the Jews."

The other discussion of the decision not to indict the policemen was the discussion of the leftist establishment which controls the legal system, the media and the universities. As was the case with the Or Commission, in the discussion that was carried out in the universities, the Justice Ministry and the media – where the public has no voice – the debaters ignored the context in which the 13 died.

On one side were the critics who claimed that the fact that the Justice Ministry's Police Investigations Department could not find sufficient evidence to justify indictments was a flimsy excuse for not conducting trials. They claimed that the fact that the families of the dead refused to cooperate with investigators was no reason not to indict, and the fact that the investigators expected the poor families to cooperate with them was evidence of their racism.

On the other side was the Justice Ministry. On Wednesday afternoon, Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz and his deputies held a press conference to defend themselves against the attacks of the members of their club. Mazuz and his associates made no mention of the fact that refusal to cooperate with investigators is a criminal act. They made no mention of the incitement of Arab Israelis by the Islamic Movement, the PA and the Arab Knesset members. For them, the deaths of the 13 were an unmitigated tragedy. The only thing that interested them was defending their honor as champions of Arab rights to their establishment colleagues.

One of the questions that has been raised repeatedly since the expulsions of the settlers in Gaza and northern Samaria is why the commanders of the IDF and the police expected the expelled residents to violently attack them. After all, there is no official body in Israel that knows these people better than the army, which had stood by them for 38 years. Why did the army fear them as if they were the enemy?

The answer to this question has the same source as the answer to the question of who the sides of the national schism are. What became clear this week is that on the one side, we have the general public made up of secular and religious Jews, urban dwellers and rural settlers, rich and poor, civilians and the military and police, the hard core and the moderate Zionists. On the other hand, we have the powerful leftist establishment which, through its control of the media, legal system and universities, tells us what we should think and how we should act. Members of the establishment are bothered most by the rare occasions when the fact that their discourse and their rules have little connection to reality is exposed to the rest of us.

The choke-hold that the leftist establishment exerts over the nation has been the cause of the major policy and military blunders that have been made over the past generation. The fact of the matter is that the distorted picture of our reality that is created by the establishment's image makers in the media, the anti-Israeli judgments meted out by our courts and the politically motivated decisions to investigate or not investigate various politicians, social classes and suspected crimes have caused a situation where people make decisions on both private matters and national issues based on wrong information and corrupted priorities.

No, it is true, we did not learn anything this week that we didn't already know. But this week's parallel discussions exposed clearly the fact that those who guide the nation are themselves, like Shochat, alienated from the rest of us and from the reality of the world we live in with all its goodness and horror. And the narrowness of this establishment was also exposed.

The nation has many tools at its disposal to change the status of forces in this country – politics, the military, the Internet and our own creativity – in order to cut the establishment down to size. The greatest challenge that we face as a society is to harness these tools to recover our right to define our world. Only by doing so will we be able to forge policies that are relevant to the many challenges we face.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's daily talking points are becoming increasingly delusional. Standing before foreign audiences and journalists he libels his political opponents as "radical extremists" who have stolen the Likud from him. Between attacking them personally and deriding Israel's democratic process generally Sharon found the time to launch a weird rhetorical offensive against Hamas.

In New York over the weekend the premier said that Israel would not facilitate the elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council in Judea and Samaria next January if Hamas participates in the poll – although he plans to do nothing in the face of Hamas's ascendancy in Gaza. Sharon argued that to be considered a legitimate political party Hamas would first have to disarm and amend its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel.

This new plan makes sense on the face of it. After all, Hamas is a deadly terrorist organization and, as a US State Department spokesman noted, there is a "fundamental contradiction of groups wanting to keep one foot in the political process and one foot in the camp of terror."

The problem is that this fundamental contradiction describes not only Hamas but every Palestinian political party. Fatah is both the largest terrorist group and the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority. Indeed there are no Palestinian political parties of note that are not terrorist organizations. So why the sudden interest in Hamas?

If anyone had any hope that Sharon would stop appeasing Israel's enemies in the wake of the implementation of his withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza, his speech last Thursday at the UN, like his obscene attacks on his political opponents, show clearly that Sharon has no intention of stopping his appeasement bandwagon. If reelected he will make "painful concessions" in Judea and Samaria – meaning further land giveaways to Palestinian terrorists – just as he just did in Gaza.

For Sharon, then, Hamas is a convenient "enemy of peace." As opposed to Fatah, it has never tried to hide the fact that its goal is the liquidation of Israel or obfuscated its ties to state supporters of terrorism like Iran and Syria. For Sharon's campaign advisers, opposing Hamas's participation in the elections is an easy way to hide from Likud voters the fact that Sharon's entire policy is based on appeasing terrorists.

And look at what its implementation in Gaza has brought us. In the space of one week Gaza has been transformed into the largest, best-armed and best-financed terror base in the world.

THERE WERE two security justifications for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. The first was that by retreating, Israel would be setting the conditions for forcing the Palestinians to fight on a conventional battlefield. The argument was that in Israel's absence, the Palestinians would be in charge of territory and any action against Israel from that territory would be seen by one and all as a clear act of aggression Israel would be perfectly justified in retaliating against.

Unfortunately, this is not true. Since Israel's retreat we see an exact reenactment along the border with Gaza of Hizbullah's strategy in south Lebanon. There, in the wake of Israel's retreat, Hizbullah deployed along the border as the Lebanese Army stood back. In Gaza, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad have deployed their terrorists along the border and the PA militias have stood back.

And so the PA has set the conditions for plausible deniability. Mahmoud Abbas can simply say that his forces cannot control the terrorists.

Proponents of Israel's withdrawal also argued that by leaving Gaza, Israel would shorten its defensive lines. This has also worked out to be incorrect. Now, rather than securing the 240-km. border with Egypt by controlling Gaza, Israel has to control the entire border directly at the same time that its own border with Gaza remains breached.

Military sources say that building the infrastructure necessary to secure the border with Egypt from terrorist infiltrations will cost NIS 500 million. To date, the government has allocated nothing.

Aside from this, Gaza itself is becoming a strategic threat in a manner never seen before. In the space of one week, Gaza, with full Egyptian backing, has become the best armed terror base in the world.

The massive build-up in Gaza is – in a word – terrifying. In the one week since IDF forces left the area, thousands of tons of weaponry have been brought into the area. These weapons reportedly include Strella anti-aircraft missiles, Katyusha rockets, anti-tank missiles, hundreds of thousands of rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition.

The result of the massive build-up was evident at Hamas's parade in Gaza City on Sunday. The march of 10,000 uniformed, armed Hamas terrorists was the single largest Palestinian show of force ever. The PA itself has never mounted such a spectacle. Before Israel retreated, Hamas never had more than a few hundred armed terrorists marching in the streets.

And it is not just Hamas that is bringing in weapons. The PA is as well. And it is not just Hamas that is calling for a new round of war. Abbas and his associates have repeatedly threatened us that if the government does not withdraw from yet more areas of Judea and Samaria it will renew the fighting.

It is only a matter of time before an excuse is found to launch a new, even deadlier phase of their terror war.

FOR ITS part, Egypt is not the least embarrassed that it completely failed to secure its border with Gaza and has enabled more than 100,000 people to cross between Gaza and the Sinai – including terrorists from Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria. In fact, Egypt is demanding that Israel allow it to expand its role as mediator between the various Palestinian terror groups by having a military presence in Judea and Samaria.

Egypt's hutzpa is in keeping with the general international climate regarding the withdrawal from Gaza. Israel has received no support from anyone for its right to build in Judea and Samaria, or to secure borders. From Washington to London to Paris to Cairo, there is a consensus that the withdrawal and expulsion policy in Gaza was merely a first step to Israel's relinquishing of all the areas it liberated in 1967.

All this just shows that Israel is in serious trouble. Our borders are less secure than they have been since before the Six Day War. What can we do?

On a remedial level, the IDF has already begun shifting its forces to the Negev. This must be speeded up. Today, in the absence of a secure border perimeter, the only way to protect the Negev is to mass our forces along the border.

But more importantly, we need new elections. Sharon, who is the author of our current crisis, is so invested with the withdrawal and with advancing his platform of appeasement that there is next to no chance he will admit his mistake and take the necessary corrective action.

And even if Sharon were willing to admit he was wrong, his presence at the helm of the government prevents Israel from defending its need to change course to Washington.

Sharon sold his unilateral withdrawal and expulsion plan to a skeptical White House. But having bought into it, US President George W. Bush is now personally invested in the policy. He will not accept a retreat from this policy if asked to do so by Sharon – the man who got both Bush and Israel into this mess in the first place. Only a new leader not stained by this preordained disaster has a chance of turning his back on the avenue of appeasement.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Less than a week after the IDF's final retreat from Gaza, Israel's senior military brass found itself warding off attacks on two fronts.

In Gaza, now empty of all Jewish presence, the Palestinians lost no time in taking charge of events in their own special way. First came the firebombing of the synagogues.

We were asked indignantly by such paragons of virtue as PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas, "Well, what did you expect to happen?" As if it should go without saying that the Palestinians will exploit any opportunity to show us their contempt for all things Jewish.

After the firebombing came the looting of the destroyed Jewish communities. Then came the looting of the hothouses which had been bought for the Palestinians by wealthy Jews in the US who decided to buy them so that the Palestinians could reap what the expelled Israelis had sown.

Sometime between destroying the abandoned synagogues, looting the destroyed Jewish villages, tearing apart the hothouses, throwing grenades at IDF patrols guarding Moshav Netiv Ha'asara and shooting mortars at Sderot, the Palestinians discovered Egypt.

At the direction of Hamas, and with the help of PA militias and Egyptian soldiers, thousands of Palestinians crossed the wall separating Palestinian Rafah from Egyptian Rafah. Among the merrymakers, unknown numbers of terrorists crossed back and forth shuttling arms and reinforcements into Gaza in unknown quantities. IDF commanders looked on, and impotently stated that there is a high probability that al-Qaida operatives are among the newcomers. Oh well.

For his part, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz fecklessly railed against the Palestinians and Egyptians for doing nothing to seal the border. The beautiful agreement he negotiated with Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman fell apart in 30 seconds and suddenly Mofaz was faced with the meaning of retreat: When you retreat, others take over and you have no ability to stop them because you are not there. Oh well.

The Palestinians minced no words about their goals for the future. Hamas wants to liquidate all of Israel. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said on Tuesday, "We know our nation is expecting us to continue the liberation journey until the flag of Islam is raised over Jerusalem. This land should not have any Zionists on it." That is, Zahar called for genocide. Oh well.

As the IDF was attempting to make sense of the new security insanity forced upon it by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Sharon himself was ignoring the reality he created back home as he basked in the glory bestowed upon him in New York by US President George W. Bush for his "courageous" surrender to Palestinian terrorism.

Yet, before our generals had a chance to catch their breath, they received a gut punch from an unforeseen direction.

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog tried to go to London. But once his El Al plane landed he was alerted by the Israeli embassy that if he alighted at Heathrow he would likely be arrested. An anti-Zionist British-Israeli "human rights" lawyer by the name of Daniel Machover, in cooperation with the anti-Zionist Israeli group Yesh Gvul, filed a lawsuit against Almog charging him with war crimes in a British court. So alerted, Almog stayed on the plane and went home.

Triumphant, Yesh Gvul's spokesmen in Israel announced that in addition to Almog, they were in the midst of filing complaints for war crimes with British courts against eight other senior IDF commanders. Among them are former chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon and current Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz. Hearing this, Ya'alon cancelled his plan to fly to London next week.

According to Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli defense establishment is in a state of hysteria over the attacks on its senior officers. Left-wing commentators and Ha'aretz's editorial board are ecstatic.
 
Like Yesh Gvul, these extreme leftist media gurus have been arguing – without legal merit – since the late 1980s that Israel has no right to defend itself in Judea, Samaria or Gaza. Adopting the baseless Palestinian claims, these legalistic deviants say that somehow the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention states that Israel must protect the rights of non-combatants in these areas means that Israel cannot take military action to secure its nationals and its national interests beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The fact that a simple reading of the texts shows this to be untrue makes no difference to these political radicals masked as bleeding- heart liberals.

In recent years, these anti-Zionist Israelis have received aid and comfort from such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN in their quest to demonize their country and criminalize its right to self-defense. Fabricating the laws of war from whole cloth to advance their political agendas, these organizations have given the weight of law to legally meaningless UN General Assembly resolutions and human rights reports. Assigning legal power to these political groups, the extreme Left in Israel has created a fiction which many American jurists refer to today as "lawfare" or the exploitation of the rhetoric of international law to prosecute a political war against a state to politically deny it its legal right to defend itself.

Yesh Gvul is arguably a criminal organization. For years it has been running public campaigns to convince soldiers to refuse to serve in the IDF. This is a criminal offense. And yet, the State Prosecutor's Office has refused to open any investigation against its members.

This is not surprising because for years now, the state prosecution has been led by men and women – many of whom are now Supreme Court justices – who sympathize with the views of those waging "lawfare" against Israel. Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz's latest statements, where he criticized the government for deciding Sunday not to destroy the synagogues in Gaza are a case in point.

Where is the legal question here? There is none. But in a legal world where law is just a means to advance a political agenda, no one questions this unelected civil servant's right to weigh in on such issues.

Then there is the Supreme Court's latest outrage. Thursday, in an opinion written by President Aharon Barak, the court determined that the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion last summer on the legality of the security fence should be given legal weight. The fact that there is no basis whatsoever in Israeli law for giving legal weight to an advisory opinion from that politicized court of anti-Israel justices is completely unimportant. The fact that the opinion itself claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense is also irrelevant. Barak claimed that the problem was just that the ICJ hadn't received the evidential basis for Israel's security needs and as a result judged as it did last July.

Within this poisonous legalistic morass, Israel's generals now find themselves under fire. What can be done? The first thing that must be firmly understood is that the battle being launched against them in the British courts has nothing to do with law. It is simply part of the political campaign against Israel that these anti-Zionists wage as an adjunct and a complement to the Palestinian terrorists on the ground. As the Palestinians use bomb belts and rockets, these extremists use politicized courtrooms to wage their campaign for Israel's destruction.

The immediate political response to this offensive was made by Dr. Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. This week he submitted a bill to criminalize filing or conspiring to file legal claims in foreign courts against members of Israel's security forces for missions they undertook in defense of the country.

This is a welcome initiative, but it misses the larger point. For the past 12 years, Israel has abandoned the offense in the political war being waged against it. Steinitz's bill is reflective of this trend in two ways. First, without a serious reform of the State Prosecutor's Office and the manner in which justices are chosen, (today they largely select themselves), there is little chance that laws on the books will be enforced against anti-Zionist political activists who seek to destroy Israel's reputation and weaken Israel's social cohesion.

Aside from this, the initiative is defensive in nature. Perhaps these people will be prosecuted, but so what? They will still be setting the political agenda with their wild legal fantasies. Against their onslaught, the time is long past for Israel to go on the offensive. And the laws of war, as they stand are a good place to start.

Zahar's statement, and hundreds like it made by Hamas commanders over that past dozen years, proves unequivocally that the terror group is engaged in a campaign of genocide. According to the International Convention on Genocide, every state signatory must arrest and try any member of Hamas or anyone providing direct or indirect assistance to Hamas that is present on its territory.

The PA, for instance, in refusing to take action against Hamas and in paying salaries to Hamas terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails, is guilty of assisting Hamas in its genocidal campaign against Israel. As a result, any PA functionary found on the territory of any state signatory to the Genocide Convention should be arrested.

If instead of simply collecting photo-opportunities for his campaign for Likud leadership, Sharon had argued this point at the UN, his presence in New York – as Gaza is transformed into Taliban Afghanistan – would have made sense. But the fact that Sharon continues to doggedly refuse to do anything that would actually advance Israel's national interest doesn't mean that others shouldn't take on the task with as much enthusiasm as Yesh Gvul and its British bedfellows work to undermine Israel's right to exist. It isn't that in the current anti-Israel international climate such arguments – regardless of their legal merit – will make an immediate difference. But that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be made – loudly, at every opportunity.

Israel's military options for dealing with Gaza's rapid transformation into a base for international terrorism are limited in the wake of its self-inflicted defeat. What Yesh Gvul did this week was to point out the path for widening Israel's room for military maneuvering. That path is the path of political warfare.

As the shadow of Gaza grows and expands to Judea and Samaria and the rest of the country, Israel is faced with an increasingly dangerous situation. Without a concerted international and domestic campaign to defend its rights, Israel will find itself without the means to justify its right to survive.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday Israel sent a plane laden with relief supplies to New Orleans to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina. The Foreign Ministry's Web site noted that the shipment included "80 tons of food, disposable diapers, beds, blankets, generators and additional equipment which were donated from different governmental institutions, civilian institutions and the IDF."

The Web site's notice of the shipment is rather confusing. The first half of the entry announced that the IDF's chief medical officer, Brig. Gen. Yeheskel Levy, would be leading the Israeli delegation that was set to depart last Wednesday, Sept. 7.

A few paragraphs down, the same notice stated that on Sept. 8 a lower-ranking delegation, led Col. Yuval Kimhi, head of the Policy and Development Department in the IDF Home Front Command, would be leading the delegation. The Web site noted: "The contents of the shipment were chosen in coordination with the US government."

Three central questions arise from the contradictory announcement. First, why would the US ask for Israel to lower the level of a humanitarian aid delegation sent to assist US citizens in need?
Second, why would the Bush administration hold up the arrival of assistance from a close ally whose government's offer of assistance had been announced a week before? And thirdly, given the IDF Medical Corps' enormous, hard-earned experience in contending with major disasters – man-made and natural – why would the Bush administration nix the participation of IDF doctors in the humanitarian assistance effort?

According to a documented report in the online newspaper worldtribune.com the reason for the delay, and presumably for the lowering of the level of the delegation, was the State Department's unwillingness to accept Israel's assistance.

Administration officials cited by the report claimed that the State Department delayed accepting Israel's repeated offers of assistance because it feared that accepting Israel's offer would make Arab states less likely to make offers of their own.

Indeed, the report notes that in multiple press briefings last week regarding foreign assistance to Katrina victims the State Department repeatedly ignored Israel's offers. It was only on Wednesday night that the State Department released a report noting Israel's assistance.

The article quotes an administration official stating, "At one point, the administration signaled that it would accept Israeli help, but preferred that it be as part of a mission organized by the American Jewish community. There appeared to be a problem with having the Israeli flag in a foreign rescue mission in the United States."

Why would there be a problem with Israel assisting the US? How dare the administration hint that Israel integrate its assistance with that of an American religious and ethnic minority – Jewish or otherwise? Did the US suggest that the Irish or Indian governments integrate their relief assistance with relief efforts being carried out by the Irish-American or Indian-American communities? Perhaps Israel should feel grateful that the Bush administration accepted our offer at all.

After all, it refused Israeli offers of assistance in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. At that time a delegation from Zaka, the non-governmental organization of volunteers that collects body parts for identification and burial after terror attacks in Israel, was grounded at Ben-Gurion Airport when it received word that the Bush administration had adamantly rejected its offer to come to New York to help identify victims at the World Trade Center.

AT THE same time, as is the case today with Hurricane Katrina, the administration loudly applauded the "outpouring" of assistance it had received from such allies as Saudi Arabia. It took then New York mayor Rudolph Guiliani to set the record straight when, on October 10, 2001, Giuliani rejected a $10 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

Giuliani discovered that the prince had claimed that "Israeli attacks on Palestinians" were the cause of the al-Qaida bombings in the US. In rejecting the donation Giuliani said, "Not only are those statements wrong, they're part of the problem."

Unfortunately, the problem continues.

Karen Hughes, President George W. Bush's close adviser who recently began her tenure as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, last weekend gave her first public address in her new capacity to the Islamic Society of North America. As Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC noted ahead of her speech in a column in The Washington Times, the group "is a front for the promotion of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi political, doctrinal and theological infrastructure in the US and Canada."

Columnist Joel Mowbray explained in the same newspaper that the group's president has praised suicide bombers, and the organization's Web site includes articles lauding Osama bin Laden written by well-known anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.

Mowbray offers in his column that perhaps Hughes was not sufficiently briefed by her aides before she accepted the invitation to address the group. Perhaps however, she was briefed by her close adviser, Edward Djerejian, former US ambassador to Syria and the director of the James Baker Public Policy Institute at Rice University in Houston. Djerejian has for years called for the adoption of a hostile US approach to Israel within US policy making circles.

THE STORY of African-American sprinter Jesse Owens's great victory at the "Nazi" Olympics in Berlin in 1936 has always been upheld as a great symbolic victory of a multi-racial democracy against a racist totalitarian regime. Less widely known is that Owens won his fourth gold medal – in the 400-yard relay – because of anti-Semitism. Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, another African-American, were not scheduled to participate in the race. Their participation was the result of a last-minute decision by Avery Brundage, chairman of the US Olympic Committee and an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler, to remove two Jewish-American sprinters, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, from the lineup.

It is hard not to view the State Department's reticence over accepting Israel's offers of assistance to hurricane victims and victims of Arab terror on the one hand, and its enthusiastic playing up of assistance from Arab states on the other, as an historical parallel to Brundage's decision to prevent Glickman and Stoller from competing in the Olympic Games in Berlin.

The most disturbing aspect of this episode is that it shows clearly the enduring power of the darker side of America. There is the great America that stands as a beacon of freedom and democracy for the whole world. This is the America that is willing to send its forces throughout the world to defend America and bring freedom to millions who suffer under the yoke of tyranny.

But, on the other side, there is the America of special interests and of prejudice. This is the America that, at the behest of the Saudi government, announced its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state just weeks after thousands of Palestinians celebrated the destruction of the World Trade Center. This is the America that put forward a reform plan for the United Nations that makes no mention of reforming the organization's blatant, institutional discrimination of Israel.

The Bush administration is constantly declaring its revolutionary strategy of transforming the Arab world through democracy. But how can anyone take it seriously when it repeatedly humiliates the only democracy in the Middle East as it courts favor with anti-democratic, terror-supporting Arab autocracies while winking at their inherent, genocidal hatred of the Jewish people?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

They say that one picture is worth a thousand words. No doubt this is true. But what is the guarantee that those words are truthful?

On September 30, 2000, The New York Times ran a photograph that, no doubt, for the photo editor, told the entire tale of the then two-day-old Palestinian terror war against Israel.

The picture showed a bloodied, frightened youth sitting in the foreground and an irate Israeli border guard, mouth agape, standing behind him, wielding a police baton. In the background, crimson flames and black smoke plumed upward behind cement blocks.

The photo editor never questioned what it is that he was looking at. Of course, the boy was a Palestinian. The assailant was the angry Israeli policeman. After all, as an enlightened man of the world, he knew what every right thinking person knows: the Palestinians are the victim. The Israelis are the aggressors. And so, the caption under the photograph told Times readers that indeed, what the photo editor assumed, was reality.

Sadly, the thousand words told by that photograph were a thousand lies. The bloodied youth in the foreground was a Jewish student from Chicago named Tuvia Grossman. He had been dragged out of his taxi in east Jerusalem by a Palestinian mob and was beaten and stabbed to the edge of death. With his last measure of strength, Grossman screamed and ran to the nearest Israeli security forces he could find. The border guard with the baton was protecting him from the mob.

Eventually, after receiving an angry letter from Grossman's father in Chicago, the Times apologized for the error. Grossman spent 10 days in the hospital in Jerusalem and then was flown to his family in Chicago where he was confined to a wheelchair for five months as he recuperated from his many wounds.

The story told by that picture then, was the story of the prejudice of the Times' photo-editor.

In much the same manner, the images we are broadcast from Hurricane Katrina tell us a certain story. The victims, in most of the pictures, are African Americans. And the story that has emerged from these images is one of racism. The white (and Republican) Federal government, we are led to believe, waited for an unforgivably long period of time in providing rescue and relief to the victims of the terrible storm, because of the color of their skin. The pictures, like the people who are asked to tell us the story, repeat over and over again that if these had been rich whites, rather than poor blacks, the National Guard would have been called in days before to restore order to New Orleans and to evacuate the victims.

It's a wonderful story. It is easy to follow and allows angry people to feel justified in their hatred and prejudices against Republicans and against President George W. Bush. But like the picture of Tuvia Grossman, it has the singular problem of being untrue.

After the initial barrage of unfounded criticism was launched, the fact of the matter, that the city of New Orleans and the State of Louisiana did not implement their own evacuation plans in spite of the fact that the authorities all knew that the below-sea-level city could not survive a category 4 hurricane like Katrina, began to emerge.

And yet, in the meantime, a myth was born that told the easy story of racism.

What both these examples show is that in spite of what we have been led to believe by our image-inundated world, images do not speak for themselves. They speak with the voice of their creators and their distributors. Every one of us attaches our pre-existing beliefs to what we see and each of us is influenced at some level, and often deeply by the interpretations that are given to the images by those who bring them to our attention.

In Israel, the challenge of imagery is perhaps the greatest challenge that we face. It is important to recognize this fact as we enter into the era where Palestine has been established in Gaza. If we simply glance at the images purveyed to us this week, we understand how massive the challenge remains and how dangerous is will become if we do not rise to meet it.

First of all, let us recall, 12 years ago, when then prime minister Yizhak Rabin embraced Yasser Arafat and the PLO and thus embarked on the Oslo peace process, he was able to convince security hawks of the value of his policy explaining that the Palestinians, not Israel, were about to be put under a microscope. Rabin argued that if the Palestinians did not abide by their commitments to end terrorism and live at peace with Israel, then the entire world would stand by Israel's right to defend itself. Israel would re-enter the areas that it had transferred to PLO control and that would be the end of that. It was a risk, he said, but a calculated risk.

Unfortunately, events proved otherwise. The images purveyed to the world by the PLO propaganda machine were images of cruel Israeli "occupation forces" embittering the lives of the victimized Palestinians. The fact that billions of dollars in international aid were stashed in Swiss bank accounts was of no interest. The fact that the Palestinian security forces established by Arafat were twice their permitted size was cosmically boring. The fact that terror reached unprecedented levels just a year after that handshake on the White House lawn was interpreted not as proof of Palestinian duplicity, but as a justification for increasing calls for yet more Israeli land transfers and further strengthening of the wholly corrupt, and terror supporting Palestinian militias.

The same was the case when then prime minister Ehud Barak went to Camp David five years ago and begged Arafat to establish a state on all of Gaza, 95 percent of Judea and Samaria and in east Jerusalem, including Judaism's most sacred site of the Temple Mount and then threw in land in the Negev for good measure.

After Arafat tore up Barak's offer and went to war against Israeli civilians, Barak declared that now the Europeans and the Americans, and of course the Israeli Left, would accept the truth. Arafat and the PLO had been unmasked. As PA minister for Jerusalem affairs, Faisal Husseini admitted shortly before his death at the end of 2000, Oslo had been a "Trojan horse," brought in to destroy Israel from inside.

All was known, and yet the image creators and their eager audiences from London to the State Department refused to budge. As the dozens of Israelis murdered became hundreds, and then topped 1,000, with thousands more wounded and maimed, the Palestinians remained the victims, and Israel remained the aggressor.

Now, as Israel approaches the final phase of the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria, we are told again, this is the test for the Palestinians. They have sovereign territory now in Gaza. They will be forced to instill order. They can no longer claim victim status. We are no longer there.

And yet the images this week tell us, again, that this is untrue. On Wednesday, Arafat's nephew and security boss Moussa Arafat was murdered in Gaza by a mob of terrorists with automatic rifles and RPG. His son was kidnapped and is now assumed dead. The perpetrators were the Popular Resistance Committees. This is a terror group formed by Arafat in the months ahead of the war in the spring of 2000 that includes elements of Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Members of the group also serve in the official Palestinian militias.

This challenge to the Palestinian Authority's leadership was met with listless protestations by the likes of Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei. In the same manner, Palestinian forces stood by on Tuesday as hundreds of young men and teenage boys descended on the ruins of Neveh Dekalim and threw stones and attempted to mount an IDF tank. It was an act of pure aggression, meant not to destroy the tank but to create an image of Israeli aggression on the one hand, and fecklessness on the other.

After one of the attackers was killed by the tank, the Palestinians launched rockets at civilians by Kibbutz Yad Mordechai which borders northern Gaza. The press explained the story as a cycle of violence. But there was no cycle of anything, just an escalation of Palestinian violence, from throwing rocks at a tank to shooting mortars at civilians.

For Europeans and leftists in Israel and America, no matter what the Palestinians do, the images emanating from here will be interpreted as justification for further Israeli land giveaways in light of continued Palestinian victimhood.

For Arab audiences, in Palestine – nee Gaza – in Judea and Samaria and throughout the Arab world, the pictures emanating from here will tell two stories. The first is of Jewish ruthlessness and cruelty that justifies the continued massacre of Israeli civilians. The second image is one of Israeli weakness in the face of constant terror – of Israel falling apart. This image sends a message which says that momentum is on the terrorists' side. All they need to do to bring about the destruction of Israel is continue their terrorist war of attrition.
 

For most Israelis, the images tell a different tale completely. The images expose the transformation of Gaza into a new Afghanistan -- replete with warlords who terrorize their people and their neighbors; a society embroiled in chaos; and a society where Islamic fascists have the upper hand over simply corrupt, secular murderers.

The great challenge of Israel is to meet the false images portrayed by those who cling to their mendacious "narratives" of the Palestinian war against Israel with truthful ones.

Tuvia Grossman made aliya on Wednesday. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, he said, "You don't realize how many people's lives have been affected forever from terrorist attacks. Some people are wounded for the rest of their lives. Once I get settled in, I would love to assist victims of terror in any way I can."

Grossman's story, both his victimization and his stubborn loyalty and love for the Land of Israel that motivated him to return here and build a life of giving despite his terrifying experience, is the story of the Jewish people and of the Jewish state. It is this truth we must uphold and contrast against the barbarism of our enemies if we do not wish for their false images to become our reality.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday's "historic" meeting between Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri in Istanbul was immediately extolled by the local media as the "first fruits" of the disengagement from Gaza.

In his statement following the meeting Shalom said, "I wish to particularly thank President Musharraf for his courage in promoting peace and moderation in our region and in general."

In the midst of the hullabaloo about the the first public meeting between Israeli and Pakistani officials, it was hard to remember that Pakistan is the operational epicenter of the global jihad and a major proliferator of nuclear weapons technology and know-how to Iran.

Only recently, CIA director Porter Goss effectively said that US intelligence is certain that Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan. Goss explained that the US is unable to apprehend the arch-terrorist due to "sovereignty issues," – that is, Pakistan isn't cooperating.

It is unclear how Pakistan is "promoting peace and moderation" when terror training camps are operating openly in several provinces of the country. The suicide bombers who struck in Bali, in London and at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv, like the terror cell members apprehended in New York state and Virginia, underwent either indoctrination or training, or both, at al-Qaida camps in Pakistan.

In recent months, Taliban fighters have reentered Afghanistan from the Pakistan border areas. They arrived refreshed, retrained and well-armed and have been responsible for the killing of dozens of US troops and hundreds of Afghans in recent months. Pakistan's refusal to make any concerted efforts against the vast terror infrastructure openly and conspicuously operating on its territory led even The New York Times to publish a scathing editorial last month attacking Pakistan and its dictator "President" Musharraf, for refusing to take action against the Taliban. As the Times noted, "Musharraf seems to invest far more energy in explaining his government's tolerance of Taliban activities than he does in trying to shut them down."

Last March, Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, acknowledged that Pakistan, through its nuclear witch-doctor A.Q. Khan's nuclear Walmart, had provided centrifuges to Iran. At the same time, Ahmed reiterated Pakistan's abject refusal to allow any foreign government to interrogate Khan stating, "We are not going to hand over Dr. Qadeer to anyone. We will not."

EXPERTS ON Pakistan readily acknowledge that on most levels, Pakistan is a failed state. It has one of the lowest literacy rates in the world. Most children who do go to school receive an average of five years of education. As of last year, the Pakistani government invested a paltry two percent of its GDP in education and has taken no effective action against the large network of madrassas in the country responsible for jihad indoctrination of hundreds of thousands of Pakistani youngsters.

Aside from this Pakistan exercises no effective sovereign control over large swathes of its territory. The high-profile arrests and renditions of senior al-Qaida terrorists like the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and assaults on terror-ridden provinces seem to occur, as Timothy Hoyt of the US Naval War College noted in an online symposium on Pakistan, "at very convenient times for US-Pakistan relations," such as before or after the visits of senior US officials to the country.

Given this dismal state of affairs, the question should be raised: What does Israel have to gain from bestowing undeserved praise on Pakistan's rulers? There are two apparent answers to this question. One is constructive but unlikely, while the more probable alternative raises serious concerns about the priorities of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government and those of the Bush administration today.

ACCORDING TO a report by Asia Times, the Iranian regime was distraught over the meeting. The paper quoted a source close to the government of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who referred to the Iranian leaders as being "shocked to the point of being choked off."

If embracing Pakistan is part of a larger plan to internationally isolate Iran, then there is a strategic logic to holding the meeting.

At the same time, the fact is that Britain's Foreign Minister Jack Straw told journalists last Friday: "Nobody is proposing military action in regard of Iran. This is an issue that needs to be resolved and can only be resolved, by diplomatic means."

Taken together with the dubious American assertion that there is no need to worry about the Iranian nuclear program for the next decade, it is reasonable to rule out the optimistic view that the international community is working to encircle Iran. In light of Pakistan's refusal to allow US intelligence officials access to Khan, it is impossible to believe that Israel would receive any valuable intelligence cooperation from Islamabad as a result of its embrace of Musharraf.

The second explanation of the meeting is more worrisome. News reports of it claimed that the Bush administration was the primary architect of the summit which the Israeli press effusively praised as the result of the expulsion of the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration is going to great lengths to buttress Sharon to help him avert the calls for early primaries for the head of the Likud, which polls indicate he will likely lose. While Sharon ally Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledges that the government's refusal to strengthen Jerusalem's eastern borders is the result of US pressure, a senior Bush administration official explained to the Times that at next week's UN General Assembly meeting the administration will "be saying to anyone who asks us, that if your goal is Israeli-Palestinian progress, you're not going to get there by misunderstanding the Israeli political situation."

As with the bizarre 1996 summit of "peacemakers" in Sharm e-Sheikh choreographed by then president Bill Clinton in an attempt to shore up domestic support for then prime minister Shimon Peres in the lead-up to his failed election bid against Binyamin Netanyahu in the same year, the Shalom-Kashuri meeting can be seen as a return of Clinton's policy of heavy-handed interference in Israel's domestic politics, undertaken with the express aim of strengthening the forces of appeasement in Israel's body politic.

Today, the Bush administration seeks to bolster Sharon's standing among Likud voters. This it does by both delaying public pressure for further expulsions, and by exploiting the Israeli media's love of summitry and Sharon's weakness to confer legitimacy on one of the most active enablers of global jihad in the world.

DURING HIS visit to the US for the General Assembly meeting next week, Musharraf is scheduled to speak with the American Jewish Congress. For the Pakistani dictator this is a major breakthrough. In recent years more level-headed Jewish groups, like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the American Jewish Committee, have been actively engaging both the Indian government and Indian-American organizations in order to lobby the US Congress and the Bush administration to embrace the Indo-Israel alliance for the inestimable contribution it makes to the global war against terrorism.

By providing Musharraf's jihad-supporting government with a cheap photo-op, Israel is undercutting this work by conferring legitimacy on a regime that poses a danger to it through its nuclear proliferation activities, and a strategic threat to our Indian allies. At the same time Israel is helping the administration to convince a skeptical Congress of the value of the dubious benefits of the Bush administration's stubborn embrace of Musharraf, despite his refusal to act effectively to either stem his country's nuclear proliferation or combat and destroy the vast terror infrastructure that operates openly throughout his country and is used against US forces in Afghanistan.

In light of all of this, perhaps the local media was correct in proclaiming the Shalom-Kasuri meeting "the first fruits" of disengagement. We reap what we sow. When we sow defeat and surrender, we reap its bitter fruits. In this case, we have built upon our gift of Gaza to the Fatah-Hamas alliance by strengthening al-Qaida's best friend.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

SADLY, IN Israel, we have no diversity in our media and therefore, we have no public debate. The Pravda-like uniformity of the Israeli media was nowhere more apparent than in its coverage of Binyamin Netanyahu's press conference on Tuesday, where he announced his candidacy for leadership of the Likud Party against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Wednesday morning's headlines screamed out against the man the media elite wish the Israeli public to view as a demonic usurper. Yediot Ahronot published the results of a bizarre poll on its front page claiming that Sharon was ahead of Netanyahu by 31 points. The poll's oddity stems from its irrelevance. In Israel the prime minister is not directly elected. Unless Sharon leaves the Likud, where Netanyahu enjoys a firm and large margin of support over Sharon, the two will not compete in national elections. Aside from that, the poll's questions ignored the fact that Israel is a democracy and in a democracy, elections are a natural and wholly legitimate process. The first question put to the sample population is a case in point. It asked, "Do you think that the Likud ought to begin a process of dismissing Ariel Sharon?" That question, like the media's uniform portrayal of the call for new elections as an illegitimate usurpation of power, exposed its author's abject refusal to accept the plain fact that a call for new elections is not a coup d'etat. Rather, it is a wholly legitimate action in a parliamentary democracy when a political leader has lost the support of his party. The repeated, distorted polls are geared toward creating a sense among the general public that we have nowhere to turn except to Sharon and his friends on the Left. This attempt to demoralize the public is backed up by the lead columnists and political reporters in all the major newspapers and electronic media outlets who have taken it upon themselves to convince the Israeli public that Netanyahu - is their enemy. As Maariv's Ben Caspit hinted on the front page of his paper's edition on Wednesday, a vote for Netanyahu is a vote for supposedly primitive gorillas who sell vegetables in the shuk. How unaesthetic. Who would want to support the leader of a group of gorillas? Yet in all the column space devoted in the papers to demonizing Netanyahu and his supporters, one thing was brazenly absent. No attention whatsoever was paid to the points he made in his presentation on Tuesday. Netanyahu spoke at length about the lack of public debate in Israel over the most pressing issues of our times. He spoke in detail about the need to restore responsibility for Israel's security to the army rather than to the Palestinian militias and the Egyptian military. Perhaps most significantly, Netanyahu stated flatly, and for the first time since last week's expulsions, the truth that the monolithic Israeli press in its babbling leftist bubble and their champion Sharon has refused to admit: The State of Palestine was established last week in Gaza. Both the media and Sharon today speak openly of further expulsions of law-abiding Israeli citizens from their homes in Judea and Samaria and of the need for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. The general sense being propagated by the likes of Nahum Barnea in Yediot Ahronot and Yoel Marcus in Haaretz is that anyone who doesn't support continued land giveaways and expulsions of Jews for the benefit of the PLO is an extremist. The pathetic aspect of the enduring insistence of the Left that a Palestinian state can only be established after Israel has ceded all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem to the PLO is that for the past 12 years its leaders - from Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and now Sharon - have ignored the plain fact that the Palestinians themselves have expressed no interest in establishing Palestine. The Left has taken to shooting every messenger who tells them this unpleasant truth, [that their goal is to liberate Palestine - that is, to destroy Israel] a truth which lays bare the lie at the foundation of their messianic faith in the god of peace in our time. Netanyahu, for these true believers, is the ultimate messenger and thus the ultimate enemy.