Wednesday was a difficult day. First, on Wednesday morning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel's annihilation. Then, a few hours later, a Palestinian terrorist blew up at a felafel stand in Hadera and murdered five Israelis.

Israel's responses to these events revealed as much about its strategic confusion as Ahmadinejad's speech and the bombing revealed about our enemies' strategic clarity.

In the case of Iran, Israel's response was well-conceived and executed. In calling for the annihilation of Israel - a UN member state - Iran stands in grave breach of the UN Charter, which stipulates that member states must foster peaceful relations with one another. And so, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom ordered Israel's ambassador at the UN to demand Iran's expulsion from the world body. Israel's emissaries throughout the world rapidly pointed out the fact that with its nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missiles and its active support for global terrorism, Iran is not just Israel's problem. It constitutes a clear and present danger to global security.

In sharp contrast to Israel's clear, understandable and constructive response to the Iranian threat, the government's response to the bombing in Hadera was marked by confusion, defeatism and absurdity.

How is this the case? First it should be recalled that in the immediate wake of last week's terror attack at the Gush Etzion junction, the Aksa Martyr Brigades - the terror group belonging to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party - issued an announcement claiming responsibility. Oddly, in the hours that followed, IDF commanders and government ministers denied Fatah's claim and insisted that Hamas, not Fatah, had carried out the attack that murdered three.

Although no evidence was ever presented to back up this claim, let's assume that it is true. Still, the question arises: What does the fact that Fatah claimed responsibility tell us about Abbas's Fatah party, on which Israel and the US are currently pinning all their hopes for peace and security?

After Wednesday's bombing, the Iranian-sponsored Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. As is their habit, the terrorists claimed that the massacre of Israeli civilians was their response to the IDF's killing of their terror commander Luai Sa'adi in Tulkarm earlier this week.

But then something interesting occurred.

In Gaza City, masked Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists held a joint press conference where they claimed joint responsibility for the bombing. A Fatah spokesman further announced that any attack against Islamic Jihad will be viewed as an attack against Fatah as well. Disturbingly, no Israeli newspaper other than The Jerusalem Post reported on the press conference.

And that isn't all. Like the government, the Israeli media also ignored the fact - reported again exclusively by the Post's Khaled Abu Toameh - that in the same IDF raid where Sa'adi was killed, Majed al-Ashkar, a senior Fatah terror commander, was also killed. The Israeli Hebrew-speaking public has not been informed that the two had spent the past several months establishing joint Fatah-Islamic Jihad cells throughout Judea and Samaria and Gaza.

FOR HIS part, Abbas, whom the Sharon-Peres government and the Bush administration uphold as Israel's partner in peace and the fight against terrorism, has been making some interesting moves. Abbas has told the Americans and the Israelis that he is working to end Fatah terrorism by integrating the Aksa Martyrs Brigades into the Palestinian security forces.
 

But on Wednesday night, Channel 2's reporter in Gaza interviewed three such "former" terrorists as they stood in position outside the ruins of the community of Neveh Dekalim. The flag flying from the top of their tent was that of the Aksa Martyr Brigades. One man was in uniform and the other two were wearing civilian clothes. All were brandishing the same AK-47 rifles they received as terrorists. All claimed that they are still part of the Aksa Brigades.

As one Palestinian source noted to the Post, the fact that Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists are now operating in the same cells raises the prospect that Islamic Jihad operatives will infiltrate the Palestinian security services by claiming to be Fatah terrorists. As members of the security forces, these murderers will receive training at the hands of Russian security personnel who are now operating in Gaza.

And that's another thing. According to recent press reports, as the multitudes of foreign terrorists entered Gaza after the IDF abandoned the Philadelphi Corridor linking Gaza to the Sinai last month, Russian security forces also quietly entered the area. Without any prior coordination with Israel, the Russians set up shop in Gaza, where they claim to be training Palestinian security forces which they also wish to arm with armored personnel carriers and other weapons systems.

Given Russia's intent to sell advanced anti-aircraft missiles to Syria and its continued support for Iran's nuclear program, the deployment of an unknown number of Russian security personnel in Gaza is an unwelcome strategic development that is liable to have disastrous and far-reaching consequences. Abbas himself spent a formative period of his terror career as a KGB underling in Moscow while he received his doctorate in Holocaust denial at the Soviet Institute for Oriental Studies in the 1960s.

Apart from all of this, the attack in Hadera on Wednesday showed - yet again - that the security fence that the Left touts as the ultimate antiterror weapon is worthless. Officers in the Central Command claimed that the bomber was able to enter Israel by going through one of the several dozen gates in the fence. These passages were set up to enable both Israelis and Palestinians to pass through the fence legally and can be easily exploited by terrorists.

Even if Israel were to seal the gates (a move that would induce immediate protest from the Palestinian "human rights" camp), the terrorists would still find a way to infiltrate into Israel. As they did two years ago on the Trans-Israel Highway, they can dig a tunnel. Or as they did four years ago along the fence separating Israel from Lebanon, they can build a ladder. Since the time of the Assyrian Empire 2,700 years ago, there has never been a defensive wall that cannot be breached by an enemy with sufficient will to do so.

IN THE aftermath of the bombing in Hadera, and in the face of the integration of Fatah and Islamic terror groups, Abbas's continued collusion with terrorists, Russia's uncoordinated deployment in Gaza, and the unraveling of the fence as a defensive strategy, what did the government do on Wednesday night?

It declared "war" on the Islamic Jihad.

In so doing, the government maintained its earnest denial of all the essential components of Israel's current security reality. The government stated at the outset that the IDF's offensive against Islamic Jihad must necessarily be limited to prevent the operations from weakening the irreplaceable Abbas. And so, on the Gaza front, the "war" was immediately reduced to a renewal of the IAF's sound and light show over Gazan skies and the artillery corps' renewed pummeling of open fields in northern Gaza.

As for operations in Judea and Samaria, without knowing how many terrorists will be rounded up or killed in the coming days, it is already certain that their arrests or deaths will make no lasting impact on the terrorist infrastructure in the area. This is so because the IDF, in attempting to carry out the mission it was given by the government, is acting against a problem that doesn't exist while ignoring the problem that does exist.

The Sharon-Peres government, like every other leftist government since 1993, insists on making a distinction between "good" terrorists from Fatah and the Palestinian Authority and "bad" terrorists from the Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Yet the Palestinians themselves make no such distinctions.

Since Yasser Arafat signed his accord with Hamas in Cairo in November 1994, the PA and Fatah have enthusiastically and continuously cooperated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The fact that in all the PA's calls for the release of terrorists from Israeli prisons, it has never distinguished between Fatah terrorists and Hamas or Islamic Jihad terrorists is just one clear example of this cooperation. Wednesday's bomber, for instance, was supposedly from Islamic Jihad and yet he was recently released from an Israeli prison as part of a "confidence-building measure" aimed at strengthening Abbas.

During Binyamin Netanyahu's three-year tenure as prime minister, as well as during the period from the Passover Massacre in 2002 through Arafat's death in November 2004, Israel actually did have a clear and constructive policy towards the Palestinians that in many respects was similar to its policy towards Iran. It was the policy of the Right.

During these two periods, Israel dropped its artificial and self-defeating distinction between "good" terrorists and "bad" terrorists and held Arafat and the PA responsible for all acts of terrorism emanating from the PA. But with Abbas's rise to power and Sharon's final transformation from a rightist to a leftist, Israel again sunk into strategic ambiguity.

Indeed, more than anything else, the government's "declaration of war" against Islamic Jihad is just new evidence of the fact that no matter what happens, the Israeli Left will never learn from its mistakes. Rather than contend with reality, it justifies its policies with defeatism and non sequiturs.
As the security fence strategy collapses, we are told that we will just have to live with terrorism. In the face of the active collaboration between Fatah and Islamic Jihad and the PA and Hamas, we are told that we must strengthen Abbas.

Tragically, the Right today is in no position to enunciate policy options based on its clear understanding that terrorists must be defeated, not coddled and negotiated with. After Sharon splintered his Likud party, defeated his political camp and pummeled his support base by adopting the policies of the Left, the Right is in shambles.

Sharon's opponents within the Likud are so confused in the aftermath of their failed attempt to advance the date of Likud primaries that they cannot contend with Sharon, let alone the Palestinians. Knesset members from the National Union and the National Religious Party have been missing in action since the expulsion of the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria.

At the grassroots level, activists are too busy devouring the leaders of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, whom they blame for failing to prevent the expulsions, and hating the IDF for carrying out the expulsions, to pay attention to what the Palestinians are doing.

As with the delusional Left, so too the Right, in its weakness, is showing that it has no ability to learn from its mistakes and prefers to sink into neurotic self-obsession rather than act responsibly by pointing out a sane path for Israel to embark upon.

Ironically, Iran is a major beneficiary of Israel's willful strategic blindness. For even if Israel's responsible diplomatic moves against Teheran actually expedite the mullocracy's international isolation, Ahmadinejad can be satisfied with the fact that his Palestinian foot soldiers are destroying Israel for him.

Originally published in The Jeruasalem Post.

Today may well be the beginning of the end of Syria as we know it. The UN's German investigator Detlev Mehlis is set to submit the findings of his investigation of the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri to the UN Security Council today.

The German magazine Stern reported this week that Mehlis will finger several high-ranking Syrian officials as having been involved in the murder. For their part, the Americans and the French are reportedly preparing draft sanctions resolutions against Syria that could be passed in the Security Council as early as next Tuesday.

What happens in Syria is of acute interest to Israel. Our neighbor to the north has been in a formal state of war against Israel for the past 58 years. Since 1982, Syria has been the chief architect and enabler of the Hizbullah terror war against Israel from Lebanon - a war which Israel lost in May 2000. Syria has also been one of the chief state sponsors of the Palestinian terror war against Israel (which Israel is losing).

Given our legitimate stake in the future of Syria, it would seem natural for Israel's political and military leaders to be making clear, forward-looking pronouncements of Israel's national interests as they regard the events now unfolding. Yet disturbingly, statements by Israel's leadership have been both shallow and strategically misconstrued.

Israel's basic line is that the government is against regime change but supports a change in the policy of the Assad regime that will end Syria's sponsorship of Lebanese and Palestinian terrorism against Israel.

There are two strategic fallacies inherent in this statement. The first fallacy is that stability in Syria serves Israel's interest. We are told that the strongest force in Syria after the current regime is the Muslim Brotherhood. Were the Muslim Brotherhood to take over Syria, we are told, the situation for Israel would be far worse than it is today.

But why would this necessarily be the case? Under the "stable" Assad regime, Syria supports the terror wars being waged against Israel. Under a "chaotic" regime of the Muslim Brotherhood, Syria would support the terror wars being conducted against Israel.

So why should we care? Then too, whereas the Ba'athists, who provide safe haven for terrorist groups from al Qaida to Ahmed Jibril wear Western business suits and therefore enjoy a reputation as rational actors that the West can do business with, the Muslim Brothers, who wear gowns and turbans enjoy a reputation as radicals whom the West cannot do business with.

As a result, current international pressure on Israel to restrain its actions to defend itself against Ba'athist Syrian aggression would likely be diminished were the Ba'athists to be replaced by the Islamists. So again, it is unclear why Israel has any interest in regime preservation in Syria.

The second fallacy at the heart of Israel's perception of the maelstrom now seizing Damascus is that it is possible to tinker with the status quo in the Arab world while preserving its basic contours. There may have been something to this view before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. But four years later, it is both false and dangerous. Until America was attacked, it was US policy to maintain the status-quo in the Arab world. But in the wake of those attacks, US policy was stood on its head.

As President George W. Bush has repeatedly stated, and as the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have borne out, the US now sees social dynamism and flux rather than stability as the means to achieve its strategic aims in the Arab and Muslim world. It is not simply that the regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq were overthrown and that Syria may well be the next in line. From Cairo to Riyadh to Amman to Rabat, no Arab regime today remains firmly in control of its destiny. In this historic and geo-political context, for Israel to state a preference based on a no longer relevant status quo is to miss the central regional reality of our times.

Israel's stubborn indifference to the enormous impact that Iraq's transformation into a dynamic, multiethnic quasi-constitutional proto-democracy is having on the Arab world writ large is merely the most blatant manifestation of our intent on preserving our strategic blindness. What we are missing is an appreciation of the fact that while it remains true that the overwhelming majority of our neighbors hate us and wish to see our country annihilated, it is equally and more significantly true that while we sleep, the Arab world is undergoing its most significant change since our neighbors' post-colonialist dictatorships were founded in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the context of the emerging realities in our region, what should Israel rightly base its strategic logic on? We are not America. We do not have the ability to influence how our neighbors' political and social forces will align themselves. But we do have control over defining our expectations of our neighbors and of incorporating those expectations into our political consciousness, our military operations and our diplomatic policies in a manner that will cause these expectations to form the strategic foundations and the tactical guideposts for Israel's actions.

Israel's expectations must be based on the principle that the conduct of good neighborly relations with the Jewish state is not a matter of choice but an international legal duty. When Arab states reject Israel's right to exist and support violent attacks against it, they are transgressing the law of nations. As such, Arab regimes should not expect a prize from Israel for desisting from their criminal behavior.

There are two principle sources of Israel's strategic befuddlement. First, the strategic line that Israel has adopted since the 1993 inauguration of the Oslo process with the PLO is unilaterally dictated by the Left.

The Israeli Left bases its world view on two incorrect assumptions. First it assumes that at base, the Arab world is unchanging. Second, it assumes that given the stasis of the Arab world, Israel must change and it must do so by internalizing, accepting and justifying the Arab world's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist.

The latter assumption then informs Israel's attempts to appease these "static" Arab regimes by transferring territory to the same rejectionist yet inherently "stable" regimes in exchange for their empty declarations to cease their support for wars - conventional and unconventional - against Israel.

The fact that Israeli security and political sources are now expressing concern that a tamed Assad or an outwardly pro-Western replacement regime may foment immediate US pressure on Israel to give Syria the Golan Heights in exchange for "peace" is a result of our strategic confusion due to our internalization of the Left's strategic fantasies.

Were we to understand that the Syrians, not we, are the ones who must change their behavior, we would not be particularly worried. It is Israel's legitimate right to demand and expect Syria to change before we even begin to consider any arrangements relating to an alteration of the current status of the Golan Heights.

The second reason why Israel's strategic conversation has been brought to the point where our leaders cannot explain to themselves, to the public or to the international community what our national interests are is because the Israeli Right, which enjoys the support of the majority of Israelis, is incapable of independent thought.

For the past twelve years, the Israeli Right has reduced its strategic thinking to reacting to and opposing leftist initiatives. In so doing, it has enabled a continuous erosion of its ability to construct policies -- an erosion that has enabled a right-wing prime minister to mainstream the radical Left's post-Zionism.

Today the Israeli Right has an opportunity to change this disturbing state of affairs. The separation fence in Judea and Samaria - whose creation is a consequence not of Israel's security imperatives but of the government's adoption of the defeatist ideology of the Left which claims that Israel ought not defeat terrorism - is about to be built around Jerusalem's southern flank in Gush Etzion along a route that will endanger the long-term survival of the settlement bloc and expose its residents to unremitting terrorist attacks from the territories outside of the fence.

Opposing this dire and strategically unjustifiable future is the fact that Ariel Sharon has repeatedly declared that he secured American support for Israel's permanent control of settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria which he himself has stated include Gush Etzion.

In light of all this, the Israeli Right now has an opportunity to unify its forces not by objecting to the route of the fence but by rejecting the fence - which only advances the defeatist world view of the appeasement-guided Left - completely. In rejecting the fence, the Right should set forth the demand to extend Israeli law and jurisdiction to Gush Etzion.

This move is based on a number of strategic assertions. First, the demographic situation in Judea and Samaria is different from that in Gaza. The Israeli population in the areas is growing faster than the Palestinian population. Were Israel to annex today all of Judea and Samaria, Jews would make up two thirds of the population of the state.

Aside from this, there is absolutely no reason for Israel to accept the racist Palestinian demand that any land it receives must be Jew-free. That demand is but a manifestation of the continued Palestinian rejection of Israel's right to exist.

Third, this move asserts that there is no reason for Israel to pay any price whatsoever for a Palestinian cessation of their terror war against Israel. Until the Palestinians themselves undergo a societal change that brings them to the point where they forswear violence, Israel must do what it can to strengthen itself and advance its national interests.

Finally, in the absence of a credible opportunity for peaceful relations with the Palestinians, Israel has the right to take such actions as necessary to secure its citizens and national interests unilaterally, regardless of how such acts may impact internal Palestinian politics. And Israel's national interests involve strengthening Jerusalem's southern flank in Gush Etzion.

Nationally, a campaign to apply Israeli law to Gush Etzion could have an electrifying effect on Israel's public debate. It would be the first opportunity since 1993 for the Israeli public to be exposed to a plan that is based on Israel's national interests rather than those of the delusional Left and of the unstable Arab autocracies that insist we have no right to our state. Aside from that, a campaign to apply Israeli law on Gush Etzion would be the first time since Oslo that the Right would unify in support of its own program rather than in opposition to the Left's programs.

Israel's strategic ignorance that has manifested itself so clearly in relation to developments in Syria is the result of a national intellectual failure that has grown larger and more dangerous with each passing year. A concerted campaign to apply Israeli law to Gush Etzion and to reject the strategically misconceived separation fence will be a first and necessary step outside the strategic trap in which we are currently ensnared.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

When the Sharon government decided to expel all Jews from Gaza, their communities' physical isolation and the fact that they were fenced-in and thus geographically limited, eased the work of the evacuation forces both during the planning and implementation of their mass expulsion.

Today for residents of Judea and Samaria as well as for those on the Left who seek their uprooting, the successful expulsion of Gazan Jews has raised a number of questions regarding the government's plans for erecting the security fence around communities in the areas. On the one hand, residents of settlements not included in the fence route contend with the fact that from the perspective of the political Left – including the Sharon-Peres government and the Supreme Court – Israel is less than likely to demand the inclusion of their communities within the borders of sovereign Israel in any future peace deal with the Palestinians. For those whose communities are included in the fence route, the question becomes what the route of the planned fence says about the government's intention to enable their growth and prosperity and to guarantee their security.

When addressing non-leftist audiences, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon loudly extols his commitment to the preservation of what he refers to as “settlement blocs” in Judea and Samaria. Sharon ostentatiously points to the letter he received from US President George W. Bush in April 2004 where the subject of Israel's final borders is vaguely discussed. The letter is presented as a sort of trophy meant to prove Sharon's Zionist bona fides to the majority of Israelis who categorically reject the return to Israel's indefensible frontiers along the 1949 armistice lines. Yet beyond his evocations of non-existent American guarantees and vague declarations of fealty to Israel's right to our ancestral lands in Judea and Samaria, Sharon has never specifically delineated what he means when he refers to settlement blocs.

Given Sharon's silence on the subject, the best way to test his intentions is to visit the proposed route of the security fence in Gush Etzion – one of the settlement blocs that Sharon insists will always remain part of Israel. Work on the security fence around Gush Etzion, located just south of Jerusalem, is scheduled to begin immediately after the High Holy Days.

Three disturbing conclusions arise from a survey of the proposed route. First, in spite of Sharon's protestations to the contrary, the route of the fence shows that he has no intention of preserving the entire settlement bloc. Many of the communities inside of the Gush Etzion Regional Council – like Karmei Tzur in the south and Nokdim and Tekoa in the east – are excluded from the fence route. Aside from that, the route gives priority to Arab property rights over both Jewish property rights and the security needs of the 50,000 Israelis who live in the area. The following examples illustrate this disturbing truth.

The community of Bat Ayin does not have a security fence. Distinct from the other communities in Gush Etzion, Bat Ayin was conceived and developed along the view that its best guarantee of security and prosperity is for its land to be settled sparsely along the wide expanse of the Judean hills rather than densely and in a limited geographical area.

This view has enabled the community to grow and secure itself rather well. Yet, the route of the security fence will artificially wreck Bat Ayin's ability to protect itself. The planned route places the fence no more than a couple of dozen meters outside the houses of the community's residents on the incline separating their homes from the wadi below. The route excludes the hilltop immediately across the valley from Bat Ayin and so puts the homes of the residents within assault rifle range of terrorists. Fenced into their community, the residents will have no ability to deter attackers or to pursue those who shoot from outside the fence.

Aside from that, the land that is set to be placed on “the Arab side” of the fence includes 400 dunams of privately owned Jewish land bought for Gush Etzion by the JNF in the early 1940s. As well, thousands of dunams of state land, cultivated by the JNF, is set to be transferred to “the Arab side.” The effective mass seizure of these lands is justified by the government as a way of ensuring that the residents of the small Arab village of Jabah (which is controlled by Hamas), will be able to cultivate a few dozen dunams of olive groves.

Today Gush Etzion is connected to sovereign Israel by Route 367 which connects it to the center of the country, and by Highway 60 which connects it to Jerusalem. Route 367 today runs south of Jabah.

The plans for the security fence involve investing some NIS 100 million in order to move Route 367 to Jabah's north. This is to be accomplished in order to connect Jabah to the Arab village Beit Tzurif (which is also controlled by Hamas), and to leave both villages out of the fence route. The new road will be located on a narrow mountain ridge beneath Jabah and all motorists traveling along the road will immediately be exposed targets for any terrorist wishing to shoot a Jew from the village. As Daniel Winston from Bat Ayin puts it, “We'll be like fish in a barrel.”

As to Highway 60, across from the northern entrance to Efrat is a hilltop that controls the highway. The route of the security fence is set to transfer control over the top of this hill to the Palestinians. As a result, anyone entering Efrat from Highway 60 will be exposed to attack.

Last month Gush Etzion's Regional Council sent a letter to the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria laying out the residents' concerns regarding the proposed route of the fence. The response they received in a letter dated September 20 from the Civil Administration's legal adviser was as revealing as it was alarming.

“The goal of the security fence is to prevent penetration into these communities, and is not being designed to prevent shooting at the communities,” the legal adviser noted. But the sad truth is that the current route does not simply not prevent shooting attacks, it invites them.

When residents of Kibbutz Kfar Etzion – the original community in Gush Etzion, which was built in the 1930s, destroyed by the Jordanian Legion in the War of Independence and then rebuilt in 1967 – were given the details of the proposed route of the fence, they published a declaration on September 24 where they stated, “The proposed route of the separation fence around the communities of Gush Etzion is a terrible solution that harms both Jews and Arabs. As a result we are relinquishing it and ask to substitute it with alternative security methods that are being planned for communities in Judea and Samaria.”

Following Kfar Etzion's declaration, the heads of the regional and local councils of Gush Etzion, Beitar Illit and Efrat met this week and published their own statement. There they announced they are “demanding that the Minister of Defense not conduct any work on the route of the security fence until the debate between the area residents and the security establishment has been completed.”

In addition to the government's approved fence route, the ultra-leftist Council for Peace and Security, which is financed by the European Union and the New Israel Fund and headed by Major Gen. (res.) Danny Rothschild, has its own proposed route for the security fence around Gush Etzion.

The council's route is relevant because on several occasions in the past, the council has petitioned the Supreme Court and demanded changes in the government's route. Its past petitions have been warmly received by the politicized court that has adopted its routes in spite the IDF's strenuous assertions that they endanger Israel's security. The court has defended its decisions by adopting the council's view that Palestinian property rights should be given priority over Israel's security and Jewish property rights.

In the council's proposed route, the security fence would surround Efrat on the east and west effectively turning it into a ghetto. Indeed, the route would ghettoize all the Jewish communities in the region and connect them to one another by narrow corridors, transferring all the outlying areas to Arab control. In spite of the vast differences in geography and topography, the council's route would effectively transform Gush Etzion, on the southern border of Jerusalem, into a second Gush Katif – fenced-in communities with no ability to expand.

Shaul Goldstein, the head of the Gush Etzion Regional Council, believes that the residents must try to cooperate with the IDF and the government in an effort to change the proposed route of the fence. In his view, if Gush Etzion follows the line set out by residents of Kfar Etzion and rejects the fence completely, the result will be to dry up industry, investment and tourism in the region. Goldstein also fears that in the absence of the fence, prospective new residents will opt not to move to the area and current residents will opt to move away out of fear that the area will be uprooted in the future.

At the same time, Goldstein believes that if the government does not change the proposed route of the fence, Gush Etzion will have no choice other than to reject the fence in its entirety because of the security threats that emanate from the current route. In such a scenario, the residents of Gush Etzion will be forced to fight a political battle against the widespread assumption that all areas not located within the route of the fence will eventually be transferred – Judenrein – to Palestinian control.

Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months, the dispute over Gush Etzion's fence will have long-term significance for the future of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria as well as in east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. As the battle unfolds three things will become clear. First, the Sharon-Peres government's attitude towards the fence route will clarify what the government's actual intentions are in terms of preserving and enabling the security and prosperity for Sharon's so-called “settlement blocs” in Judea and Samaria.

Second, the IDF's stance regarding the fence route and its willingness, as the statutory body responsible for ensuring Israel's security, to stand up to the Supreme Court in defense of Israel's right to defensible borders (which necessarily must be beyond the indefensible 1949 armistice lines), will establish a precedent for the long-term dispute over all Israeli claims to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.

Finally, in the wake of the failure of the leadership of the Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to prevent the destruction of the communities in Gaza and northern Samaria this summer, the political strength of these leaders vis-a-vis the government and state on the one hand and the public on the other is again about to be tested. No matter how the battle pans out, its results will form the basis for all future battles regarding Israel's sovereign borders. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

With Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip now a fait accompli, the question of whether the move was a mistake or not is no longer salient. The fact of the matter is that the withdrawal from Gaza created a new strategic environment for Israel and the central issue today is how Israel will contend with the strategic realities that are now taking form.

Ahead of the expulsion of Gazan Jews and the withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza in August, the government pledged that it would respond dramatically and ferociously to any and all terror attacks emanating from post-withdrawal Gaza. When these warnings were challenged by the terrorist rocket barrage on the Western Negev that immediately followed the completion of the withdrawal, Israel failed to make good on its threats. Israel ignored the first salvo and then moved on to pound empty buildings and fields. No one can seriously claim that the sound-and-light show that the IDF produced constituted the kind of response to the massive rocket and mortar offensive against Sderot and the agricultural communities bordering Gaza that will deter future attacks. As was the case with Israel's tepid response to Hizbullah and Palestinian terror attacks on its territory from southern Lebanon after the precipitous IDF withdrawal from the security zone in May 2000, so today with Gaza, Israel's screeching speech and small stick have absolutely no credibility with either the Palestinian Authority or with Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad.

It is true that Hamas subsequently suspended its attacks on the Western Negev. But there is little indication that this short-term suspension of attacks has anything to do with IDF counter-attacks. Hamas has an organizational interest in keeping Gaza quiet in the run-up to the planned general elections for the PA's legislative council in January. Like Hizbullah ahead of the Lebanese elections last June, Hamas wants quiet ahead of the elections so it can claim to have been the power behind Israel's retreat. At the same time, Hamas has made it brutally clear to the PA that it will not accept any move to curb or constrain its military forces. The PA, for its part, has accepted Hamas's stance.
Israeli intelligence has no doubt that Hamas and Fatah will ratchet up their terror activity after January.

Aside from having lost all deterrent power against the various Palestinian terror factions and the PA's security forces in Gaza, Israel has also lost complete control over Gaza's border with the Sinai. It is true that there have been almost no press reports of weapons smuggling and terrorist infiltration from the Sinai into Gaza in recent days; however there are three clear indicators that the lack of reportage does not correspond to a lack of news. First of all, whereas in the weeks immediately following Israel's withdrawal there were journalists stationed all along the border zone, currently, there are no news teams there to speak of. And so, the lack of reportage about continued infiltrations of the breached border may very well be a function of the fact that no one is on the ground to report them.

ADDITIONALLY, the government's warnings last week for Israelis not to enter the Sinai and for all Israelis in the Sinai to immediately return home were the result of intelligence reports regarding a Hamas plot to kidnap Israeli tourists in the Sinai. The plot was to kidnap Israelis in Sinai and spirit them into Gaza where their captors would demand the release of jailed terrorists in exchange for their hostages. The fact that the plot involved cross-border traffic is a clear sign that the border remains open for terrorists.

Finally, as Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom noted in a radio interview over the weekend, Egypt has taken no effective steps to seal the border. Disputing earlier dismissals by the IDF, Shalom noted that the Palestinians have smuggled anti-tank and shoulder-launched missiles into Gaza from Egypt. Shalom's statements jibe well with earlier reports that Kais Obeid, the former Israeli Arab who now heads Lebanese Hizbullah's liaison with Fatah terror cells in Gaza, Judea and Samaria spent 36 hours in El-Arish meeting with Fatah terror commanders in the wake of Israel's withdrawal from the border zone. The fact that Egypt has allowed senior terror operatives to travel freely and openly in its territories is substantive proof that like Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, President-for-life Hosni Mubarak has absolutely no interest in sealing the border or in ending terror traffic and communications between Gaza and Sinai.

The open border with Egypt has significant strategic ramifications for Israel. Before the withdrawal, Israel could allow traffic between Gaza and Israel and Judea and Samaria because it controlled all the international passages. Today, in the absence of such control, the question of how persons and goods originating in Gaza can travel to Israel and Judea and Samaria takes on a completely different strategic significance. Today Israel has much less ability than it did five weeks ago to know where individuals crossing between Gaza and Judea and Samaria have been, whom they have met with and what weapons they have at their disposal.

And the security fence that Israel is building to prevent terrorist infiltration into its major cities is of no use against the emerging threat. It is no longer principally suicide bombers that we have to contend with -- although they remain a significant threat. The security fence that Israel is now constructing will be useless against missiles, rockets and mortars.

It is not at all insignificant that a new al-Qaida cell in Gaza just distributed its first leaflet over the weekend. Al-Qaida, with its global reach, has the ability, once seeded in Gaza to bring enormous resources in weapons, technologies and financing that can easily alter the terror nexus that comprises Israel's strategic environment. In the absence of control over the international border, again, the risks that Israel incurs by allowing any entry of people and goods from Gaza into Israel or Judea and Samaria are of a completely different order than the ones it incurred by enabling such traffic before the withdrawal.

ALL OF this means that Israel must reexamine its entire strategic rationale for contending with Palestinian and international demands for enabling traffic from the Gaza Strip into Israel, Judea and Samaria. Today, free passage from Gaza to Judea and Samaria constitutes an open conduit for international terrorists into the Israeli heartland, with no Israeli supervision whatsoever.

Disturbingly, from the reports of the negotiations now being conducted between the government and the Palestinians, with the involvement of the US, the EU and the so-called Quartet's envoy James Wolfensohn, it appears that the government is completely ignoring the new strategic reality.
Vice Premier Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz are behaving as though Gaza's open border with Egypt is of no concern. In spite of the fact that the Palestinian Authority has smuggled more weapons and ammunition into Gaza from Sinai than Hamas since the IDF withdrawal from the border, at the IDF's urging, the government agreed Sunday to enable the PA to receive ammunition from Egypt. And rather than maintaining that given the open border with Egypt, Gazans cannot be allowed into Israel or Judea and Samaria, the government is bending over backwards to enable such traffic to be reinstated. "In honor of Ramadan," the government Sunday reopened the Karni cargo terminal in Gaza.

On a simplistic level, the strategic environment that has emerged since Israel's withdrawal exposes the lie behind the government's euphemism for the move. There is no such thing as "disengagement" from an enemy that remains at war with you. The question is, now that Israel has lost all deterrent power over Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, and the international border has turned into a terrorist freeway to Israel's heartland, when will the government begin to reckon with the new threats to Israel's security that have emerged?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

One of the most disturbing side effects of the five-year-old Palestinian terror war against Israel is the wave of global anti-Semitism that arose in its wake. The fact that the new anti-Semitic wave is rooted in the Left rather than the Right is shocking for the majority of Western Jewry, which for generations has been politically aligned with the Left.

The main manifestation to date of the institutionalization of leftist anti-Semitism has been on the international legalistic front at the UN and its protean chorus of international human rights organizations. But on January 2, the trial of Zionism and World Jewry will be enacted not in an international legal forum of questionable credibility but in a Federal District Court in Virginia. There, two former senior staffers from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, will be tried on charges of "conspiracy to communicate national defense information to people not entitled to receive it," which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The two are suspected of having received classified information from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and of having passed this information to Naor Gillon of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

As Eli Lake points out in the current issue of The New Republic, "prosecution of this kind is unprecedented." And yet, given the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic build-up it received since word of Franklin's investigation was leaked in August 2004, it would seem that this unprecedented case, which ascribes criminality to lobbyists engaged in work that Washington lobbyists and journalists engage in on a daily basis, is simply a step forward in the five-year assault on Israel and its advocates among World Jewry.
 

Almost as disturbing as the decision to prosecute Rosen and Weissman is the meek reaction that their indictment has elicited in the American Jewish community. Rather than launch a concerted and indignant public defense of these men, the organized Jewish leadership has remained mainly silent.

For its part, AIPAC fired both men and has disassociated itself from them. Pathetically, the pro-Israel lobby has sought to deal with the prosecution of its now former employees by symbolically separating itself from Israel. At its annual conference last April, for the first time since its founding, the group refrained from singing Hatikva at its dinner.

Sadly, no attempt to disassociate themselves from Rosen and Weissman will mitigate the damage that their prosecution has and will continue to cause for American Jews. Very simply, if these men are found guilty next winter then all Americans who seek to lobby the US government on behalf of Israel will be placed under scrutiny.

BUT PEOPLE in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and in Israel we have our own brand of anti-Semitism and our own anti-Zionist show trials. In Israel, the international Left's rejection of the Jewish state has caused an abandonment of Zionism by its Israeli fellow travelers. Israeli leftists – first at the fringe and subsequently in its mainstream establishment – have accepted the view propagated by the international Left that Israel has no right to exist or to assert its sovereign rights as a Jewish state.

Case in point is the trial of Avri Ran that is set to begin in the Kfar Saba Magistrate's Court next Tuesday. Ran, a rancher in Western Samaria, is accused of aggravated assault against two Arabs who infiltrated his cultivated clover field this past March with a tractor. Ran's case exposes two of the central pathologies of the Israeli Left – its activists' campaign to criminalize Jewish sovereignty and its establishment's acceptance of their right to do so. If these pathologies are not contended with, they have the potential to endanger the survival of Israel as the Jewish state.

Over the past decade, Ran has become a symbol of almost mythic proportions of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. For his supporters Ran is a symbol of all that is good and right about Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel. For his detractors Ran is a symbol of the hated religious Jewish settler. Ran earned his position as a symbol legitimately.

Ran is the father of the settlement ideology that Jews must expand our settlement of the Land of Israel by squatting on strategic hilltops in Samaria and Judea that are classified as state land and cultivating them. Since he moved to Samaria 12 years ago, Ran and his family have built four hilltop settlements west of the community of Itamar. In each case, Ran financed his moves with his own money and protected his settlements without assistance but in full coordination with the IDF.

Seven years ago, Ran established the "Eternal Hills" ranch and has turned it into the largest organic farm in the country. The closest Arab settlement to "Eternal Hills" is Hirbat Yanoun, a tiny Arab community whose population had dwindled to two people by early 2003. Indeed, the entire region of Western Samaria is almost empty of Arabs.

The fact that Ran had apparently hit on a successful manner of settling the land caused a furor in the radical Left. Since the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war five years ago, extremist Israeli leftist organizations like Ta'ayush and Rabbis for Human Rights have taken an active role in inciting Arab violence against Israeli settlers and security forces. In the case of Hirbat Yanoun, Ta'ayush members along with foreign volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement moved into the all-but-abandoned village at the beginning of 2003 with the intent of convincing the residents who had left to return.

Their provocations of Ran began almost immediately afterwards. In February 2003, Ta'ayush member David Nir and two foreign volunteers came to the ranch. They were met there by an IDF detachment that they had secured by claiming that they needed to enter the ranch in order to reclaim a video camera and cellular phone they claimed they abandoned the day before. Alerted to the infiltration of the radical Leftists, Ran and his employees ran to throw the trespassers off their property. In the event, Nir claimed that Ran attacked him and bludgeoned him with the butt of his rifle. Ran was arrested and charged with aggravated assault.

In March 2004, Ran, supported by the testimony of three of the soldiers, was acquitted of the charges against him. In her ruling, the judge claimed that Nir's allegations were contradictory and lacked credibility. The judge further stated that Nir "was very passionate in his testimony and I fear that his testimony was stained by a lack of objectivity towards the defendant and that he would not hesitate to point an accusatory finger at him even if the defendant was not involved in the incident."

More disturbingly, the judge noted that the state prosecution had called for the three soldiers' testimonies to be discounted "because their behavior at the event is testimony 'to the sympathies of their hearts' and therefore are not worthy of trust." The notion that Israel's state prosecution can argue that a citizen's political sympathies should in any way discount his credibility as a witness is simply shocking to anyone who believes that justice should be meted out in courts of law without prejudice.

But the fact of the matter is that the view of the prosecution, like the actions of Ta'ayush generally and Nir specifically, has not been influenced by the 2004 judgment. On March 20, 2005, immediately after Ran was alerted that two Arabs had entered his clover field with a tractor and were poised to destroy a year's crop two months before the harvest, he went down to deal with the trespassers with three of his workers. According to his indictment, Ran immobilized the tractor by pulling out its electrical cables and punched the tractor's operator. The other three men are accused of hitting the other infiltrator with a rifle butt.

Before Ran could say Jack Robinson, out popped Nir with Arik Asherman from Rabbis for Human Rights with a video camera (they now claim that their film mysteriously disappeared), and a detachment of police immediately arrived on the scene and proceeded to arrest Ran for aggravated assault.

Although no one disputed that the land in question was cultivated by Ran, and that he owns the farm, the police never questioned the two Arabs as to what they were doing on his field with a tractor. They claimed that the owner of the field asked them to work it, but they never produced this mysterious owner or named him. Israeli law says that a property owner or leaser may use reasonable force to protect his property, and yet, the question of trespass was never raised by anyone except Ran. Instead, the police, the state prosecution and the Supreme Court have repeatedly stated that pending the conclusion of his trial, which is only set to begin next Tuesday – seven months after the altercation – Ran must be prohibited from entering Judea and Samaria lest he repeat his assaults against Arabs and radical leftists who maliciously trespass his property.

FOR THE past seven months, the question of whether Ran can or cannot be released, and under what conditions, pending his trial has been heard in no less than eight separate tribunals. In the latest ruling last week, Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut decided in favor of the state prosecution that insists that Ran manifests a danger to the public and must be jailed pending the completion of his trial. In her ruling, Hayut noted Ran's "ideological zealotry" as one of the reasons for her decision to incarcerate him. In this, Hayut shows that from her perspective, there is a legal significance to a person's ideological motivations for his supposedly criminal actions.

In many respects, Ran's trial, like Rosen and Weissman's trial, is supposed to be a forum for determining whether he is guilty of criminal activity. However, given the ideological basis for the prosecution's pursuit of Ran, both in this case and in the case brought against him by David Nir two years ago, and in light of the prosecution's refusal to even look into Ran's complaint of trespass, his trial, like that of Weissman and Rosen, has become much greater than the sum of its parts.

The question that will be raised before the magistrate's court next Tuesday will quite simply be whether a Jew in the Land of Israel has a right to defend his land against those who seek to maliciously trespass his property. That is, the entire idea of Zionism is about to be put on trial.

As Ran himself put it in a television interview last July, "In the Supreme Court I understood that the legal system is willing to take views and a political situation and to manipulate them to advance processes that suit its own interests. I understand that what I am saying is terrible. There is a civil war going on here. But it isn't a war between brothers and it isn't being fought by both sides."

No, as in the case of the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman so in the case of Avri Ran, this war is being fought against the Jews by those who have internalized the anti-Semitic view that Jews have no right to defend themselves.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.