In his appearance Sunday before the Knesset's new anti-corruption investigative committee, State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss announced that he will be publishing his report on the government's implementation of the withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria in January.

Lindenstrauss's report is set to review the insufficient protection of the communities around the abandoned Gaza Strip; the impaired functioning of the government ministries and the government's Disengagement Authority in implementing the withdrawal and expulsion plan; and the negligent manner in which the expelled Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria have been treated since they were ejected from their homes and communities.

It is good news that Lindenstrauss is aware of the need to explore in a timely manner the way in which the withdrawal and expulsion plan was implemented. As he put it, "It cannot be that a subject so important would have to wait [to be dealt with in] a report published two years from now."

There can be no doubt that on all three issues the government acted with gross negligence on almost every level, and a fair accounting of its failures is important both to punish the officials responsible and force the relevant authorities to improve their organizations.

At the same time, it is disturbing that Lindenstrauss is apparently not planning to review one of the most alarming aspects of the implementation of the withdrawal and expulsion plan this past summer: the rampant abuse of the civil rights of opponents of the plan by the criminal justice system.

AS AVITAL MOLER of the Public Defender's Office pointed out in October in her report on the criminal justice system's mistreatment of minors arrested while participating in demonstrations against the expulsion plan, the system's treatment of the protesters was characterized by "selective enforcement of the law based on political affiliation." Moler found that "new law" was invented by authorities for the purpose of punishing arrested protesters who had yet to stand trial.

A few weeks after Dr. Moler's findings were made public, the chief public defender, Inbal Rubinstein, apologized publicly for the contents of the report after several judges pushed for Rubinstein's firing and Boaz Okun, head of the court's administration demanded she publicly apologize. Yet in testimony before the Knesset's Law and Constitution Committee on November 14, Rubinstein stated that today she would have written an even more severe report and had only distanced herself from Moler's findings because she had been coerced into doing so after being summoned for a meeting with Justice Minister Tzipi Livni.

Aside from perusing Moler's report, if Lindenstrauss wished to investigate the abuse of the civil rights of opponents of the withdrawal and expulsion plan, a good place to begin would be the report published by the Israel Policy Center and Honenu Legal Defense Association on the issue.

That report, authored by Dr. Yitzhak Klein, Attorney Yitzhak Bam and Shmuel Meidad, details 24 specific cases of gross prosecutorial, police and judicial abuse of anti-withdrawal protesters throughout Israel in the months that preceded the implementation of the withdrawal and expulsion plan.

The authors substantively prove that the abuses suffered by protesters at the hands of the judicial and law enforcement arms of the state were systemic, widespread and enabled, if not requested, at the highest levels of government.

Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz, according to the report, made it absolutely clear to state prosecutors in public remarks that they were to treat non-violent protesters as if they were involved in a rebellion against state authorities whose purpose was to destroy the state and its institutions.

On the judicial level, Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia paved the way for lower courts to detain arrestees in jail pending trial for offenses that did not meet the minimum standard for pre-trial detention either in terms of the letter of the 1996 Arrests Law, or in terms of court precedent.

Procaccia, like Mazuz, viewed the protesters' ideological motivations as a reason for their extraordinary treatment by Israeli courts.

In their review of hundreds of indictments of both adults and minors arrested for engaging in protests against the withdrawal and expulsion plan, Klein, Bam and Meidad found that in 97 out of 167 cases against minors, and in 68 out of 135 cases against adults "pre-trial detention appeared unwarranted by law."

THE NEED for a fair and thorough review of the law enforcement and judicial authorities' suspected systemic abuse of the civil rights of anti-withdrawal opponents is urgent today. This is so because the apparent selective abuse of the civil rights of religious Israelis by law enforcement and judicial authorities does not seem to have ended in the aftermath of the withdrawal and expulsion plan.

Case in point is the continued incarceration of Avri Ran. As I noted in a column last month, Ran, who owns and runs the Eternal Hills ranch in northern Samaria, was indicted last March for aggravated assault. Ran was arrested and indicted after punching a trespasser who had entered his cultivated field with a tractor with the intention of destroying his crop last March 20.

Although Ran has never been found guilty of any crime and although the action for which he is under indictment was clearly motivated by the context in which it was enacted (that is, Ran's desire to protect his property), the state prosecutors have demanded since the day of Ran's arrest that he be jailed pending trial due to his "ideology."

When Supreme Court Justice Esther Hayut ordered Ran's incarceration pending the completion of his trial last month, she too noted his "ideological zealotry" as a justification for his remand to custody. Hayut, like the state prosecution, never attempted to clarify what, if any, connection exists between an individual's political beliefs and his desire to protect his property from trespass.

Today Ran has been removed from his ranch and separated from his family for eight months on charges for which he has yet to stand trial. His trial was set to begin on October 11. The police prosecutors arrived at Kfar Saba's Magistrate's Court on the appointed date only to announce that they were not yet ready to begin a trial for which they had had seven months to prepare. Without hesitation the judge postponed the trial until December 1 - sending the untried Ran back to jail for another six weeks.

According to Ran's brother Nir, Ran has become psychologically depressed as a result of his long incarceration and his depression has led to a loss of appetite. He has lost more than 20 kilos and now weighs some 50 kilos.

On November 19, Ran's family and friends held a vigil outside Ayalon prison, where he is being held. His 10 children spoke to their father through a megaphone and told him how much they miss him. As his children spoke, prison guards entered the Torah wing of the prison and took Ran into solitary confinement. The next day he was told that he would be even more severely punished if his family and friends repeated the vigil in the future.

Amazingly, the state has apparently not limited its abuse to Ran. His son Daniel was set to be inducted into the IDF on November 14 and begin basic training in the Golani Infantry Brigade. At the beginning of the month Daniel received a letter from the IDF informing him that his military service had been cancelled. All attempts by the family to discover why went unanswered.

Finally, he was informed that he had to appear before a military psychiatrist if he wished to be inducted into the army. Daniel has no history of mental illness and no criminal record.

Since the withdrawal and expulsion plan was carried out, voices within the religious Zionist community calling for its members to "disengage" from the state have become more and more numerous. The continued abuse of the human rights of members of this sector of Israeli society adds fuel to the fire that is moving us toward social disintegration.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

There are two types of political leaders in democratic systems of government: those whose political power grows in tandem with that of their party and political base, and those whose political power grows on the back of their party and political base. US president Ronald Reagan was probably the most recent archetype of the first type of political leader. Former president Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon are textbook cases of the latter type of political leader.

Reagan's political maneuverings over the years were led by what he referred to as his 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt speak no ill of a fellow Republican." For Reagan, the strengthening of the Republican Party and the conservative camp in the US was an end in itself as well as a means towards his own political success. During his two terms in the White House, Reagan transformed American policy and politics at home and abroad and had a lasting impact on the way Americans perceived their nation. When he left office, the conservative-Republican base had become the majority camp in American politics and society. More importantly, American strength, wealth and self-assurance at home and abroad grew in concert with Reagan's political power.

Understanding that his own liberal Democratic base was the minority in the US, Clinton based his political strategy on what his former political adviser Dick Morris referred to as "triangulation." Clinton was not guided by a core principle of loyalty to party and to his political base, but by a desire to amalgamate his personal power. Clinton rallied his base by emphasizing his personal affability and by offering patronage positions and perks. He rallied conservative swing voters by implementing conservative economic, social and international policies. When Clinton left office, his political camp not only remained a minority, it was as bereft of new ideas as it had been when he entered office. While Clinton remained personally popular throughout his tenure, he left no enduring or transformational legacy on America. Indeed, if anything, Clinton's legacy is the implementation of Reagan's vision for American society.

The major difference between Sharon and Clinton is that Sharon abandoned the policies of his own rightist Likud political base in favor of those of the radical Left despite the fact that his political base constitutes the majority of Israelis. Aside from this important distinction, Sharon and Clinton's political machinations have been notably similar.

Sharon, like Clinton, has been consistent in making the consolidation and extension of his political power his singular goal as Israel's leader. This self-obsession is in many ways his most valuable political asset. It enables him to adopt policies and take steps that no politician who is concerned primarily with substantive matters like the welfare of the nation or even the political fortunes of his political party or political base would ever consider adopting. The direct and perverse result of Sharon's egocentric maneuverings is that while his position and popularity - internationally and in Israel - have never been stronger, the State of Israel has never been weaker or more derided in the international community and in the Middle East.

While Reagan transformed American politics by inspiring Americans themselves to take risks and rise to the many challenges they faced as individuals and as a country in the 1980s, Sharon has entrenched his own power by lulling Israelis into a sense of powerlessness and indifference. This he has done in two ways. First, Sharon has cultivated a persona that puts him above and at a distance from the regular Israeli "masses." In his rare public statements, Sharon has never encouraged Israelis to rise to the challenges they face. He speaks mostly of himself and his self-perceived greatness while promising his people "quiet" and "stability" - things they can expect to receive by simply keeping their heads down.

In his press conference on Sunday evening when he announced he was abandoning the Likud, for instance, Sharon used the word "stability" four times and "quiet" twice in a 10-minute address. Sharon spent the first three minutes of the speech talking about his past and the rest of the speech was devoted to castigating the Likud for daring to challenge his judgment.

Indeed the second anchor of Sharon's political power has been his systematic demonization of his party members and of his party's political support base. Sharon maintained his offensive against his voters and party by at once buying off enough Likud members with jobs and perks to secure their votes for his leftist policies and by turning every policy debate regarding the merits of his radical leftist policies into a referendum on his personal leadership. This dual strategy has worked to simultaneously corrupt the decision-making processes in the Likud and the Knesset and to cause a previously unified Likud and rightist political camp to become deeply divided and embittered.

Like Clinton, Sharon's self-obsession has been his most important political asset. Unburdened by the national interest, Sharon is unfettered in his pursuit of power by mere "inconveniences" like national security and his party's interests. This has provided him with unprecedented flexibility in forging political alliances and adopting policies that no leader who is fettered by his party ties and the national interest would dare enter into.

But even as Sharon's egomania has served him, it has also been the root of every political failure he has experienced in recent years. In April and May 2004, Sharon's self-adulation led him to believe that his party members would support his adoption of the radical Left's withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria. He lost the Likud referendum on the issue - a poll which he called for - by more than 20 points. Equally telling, ahead of this month's Labor primaries, Sharon operated under the assumption that Shimon Peres would win the race. This assumption was based not on what Labor voters themselves were saying but on the fact that Peres supported Sharon. As well, when Sharon speaks of his victory in the 2003 elections, it never seems to occur to him that no one actually voted for him - they voted for Likud. Today, Sharon's belief in his own infallibility has led him to bolt his own party and believe that he will win elections in a new party that lacks a party machinery of any kind including offices and activists.

Aside from his own delusions of grandeur, two other calculations no doubt guided Sharon in his decision to leave Likud. First, given that his popularity is built on his evisceration and demonization of his party and party members, it is far from clear that Sharon would have won a primary race for Likud leadership. Second, the Likud will not support Sharon in his hypothetical next term if he moves to continue his policy of unilateral land giveaways to Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria along the Gaza blueprint.

The fact that Likud's policies retain the support of the majority of Israelis is exposed by Sharon's need today to lie about his diplomatic plans. Sharon's campaign is based upon his pledge that he will enact no further unilateral withdrawals in Judea and Samaria. And yet, his own party members like former Labor MK Haim Ramon openly indicate that Sharon is lying and will move to carry out such withdrawals if he is elected. Ramon said in a TV interview Wednesday that Sharon will unilaterally withdraw to final borders in Judea and Samaria if Palestinian terror continues.

Against Sharon, it is clear that a strategy for victory in the upcoming elections for Likud revolves around three things. First, the Likud must elect Binyamin Netanyahu to replace Sharon as its leader. Only Netanyahu can offer a coherent alternative to Sharon while still being perceived by the public as more moderate than the right-wing parties that run to the side of Likud. That is, Netanyahu is the only candidate that the public perceives as representing what Likud as a party and political movement stands for.

Second, the Likud must base its strategy for the future on the widest possible political platform. That platform should contain no more than a few principles. These principles must contain a pledge not to transfer any territory to the Palestinians unless such a transfer of territory is to be enacted as part of a diplomatic agreement with a Palestinian interlocutor who has already taken concrete and continuous steps to democratize Palestinian society and rout out terrorists and terrorism. Aside from this, the Likud must commit itself to bringing any future agreement with the Palestinians or any other Arab society that involves the transfer of control over any amount of territory to the nation for approval in a national referendum.

Finally, and most importantly, the Likud must understand that Sharon has shaped Israel's political game in a manner that makes his rivalry with Likud a zero-sum game. In the months ahead of the implementation of Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan, Likud members clung to the belief that while Sharon may have taken every measure to decimate the Likud's political supporters, coalition partners and party members who challenged his policies, he would never dare to challenge Likud's political position as the ruling party in Israel. Today it is clear how wrong they were. The campaign against Sharon must be based on two issues: his personal corruption and his political perfidy.

In 2003, Sharon, who was then the subject of two criminal probes, was able to neutralize the issue of corruption mainly because the legal elites overplayed their hand, making the public believe Sharon's protestations that he was being victimized. Today such arguments cannot succeed. Today Sharon runs for reelection when at his side stands his son, MK Omri Sharon - a convicted felon. Omri now awaits sentencing for his conviction this month on charges of perjury and fraud that could land him in jail for several years. Omri committed all of his crimes as his father's campaign manager in 1999 and 2001. Today Omri is a candidate for the Knesset in his father's new party and remains Sharon's closest political adviser. Sharon himself remains the focus of the Cyril Kern-Martin Schlaf corruption probe.

In addition to his son's criminality and criminal allegations against Sharon himself, Sharon has proven himself to be one of the most deceitful political leaders Israel has ever had. His current pledge not to enact further unilateral withdrawals and expulsions is nothing less than a new example of his contempt for voters. There can be no doubt that he is lying today just as he lied three years ago when he ran on a platform of rejecting unilateral withdrawals and expulsions from Gaza.

The coming elections will be a defining moment in Israel's political history. Not only will they determine whether Israelis wish to base their national strategy on appeasement and retreat or national resolve and responsibility. Not only will they determine whether Israelis prefer socialist statism and economic recession or economic freedom, competition and growth. They will also determine whether Israeli voters are willing to accept the distinction between a leader who wins by making them better off, and one who wins at their expense. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Quartet's envoy and former World Bank president James Wolfensohn is reputed to be quite a deal maker. One of the deals he made as the Quartet's envoy to the region was the purchase by wealthy American Jews of greenhouses owned by the Jews who were expelled from Gaza this past summer and their transfer as a gift to the Palestinians.

Unfortunately, while the greenhouses were indeed abandoned by the Jews as the IDF threw them off their land, and they were transferred to the Palestinians, the Jews have yet to receive all their money. According to the farmers, the World Bank has deducted the value of the property looted from the greenhouses after they left Gaza from their payments.

This story is one of many that were never reported in the aftermath of the expulsions. Those expulsions, and the withdrawal of IDF forces that followed have enabled Gaza to be transformed into a new base of operations for global jihad. But aside from the foreseen strategic consequences of the withdrawal of IDF forces from Gaza, the expulsions have caused a humanitarian disaster for Israeli society. Hundreds of families have been living in hotel rooms in Jerusalem for the past three months. The largest group of refugees - some 350 families with another 150 on their way - lives in the temporary city of Nitzan.

When one enters Nitzan, at first glance it looks like a success story. The roads are largely paved. Each family lives in a red-roofed mobile home with grassy lawns all around. But dig just slightly beneath the surface and you see you are in a refugee camp. The fiberglass walls of the homes can be torn apart by a stray soccer ball. Children play in dirt plots next to moving bulldozers. Sewage runs openly between the homes. And those homes - 60 square meters for families of five and under, and 90 square meters for families with more than three children - are cramped and tiny.

Most of the families in Nitzan had lived in homes that averaged 200 square meters in Gaza.

When they arrived at Nitzan many of the refugees realized that their furniture was unsuitable and so they were forced to buy new furnishings. Although each family's belongings were packed in containers, you will see no containers in Nitzan. The Defense Ministry, which runs the camp, only allows people to have their containers for 10 days. Anyone who does not remove their container after 10 days is fined. And anyway, the summer heat combined with less than professional packing by Defense Ministry contractors left the contents of some 20 percent of the containers ruined.

THE COMMUNITIES in Gaza were self-sustaining. Most of the residents worked where they lived. Eighty percent of the residents of Nitzan, who farmed, taught in schools, owned shops and worked in the local councils, are unemployed today. The massive unemployment, together with the trauma of having been forced out of their communities, has taken its toll on the residents. Divorce rates are skyrocketing. Parents, who spend much of their days watching television and climbing the walls, have lost control of their children.

The child refugees of Gaza are perhaps the worst hit by the expulsions. Violence among the youths is high and rising. Drug abuse, which was negligible in their communities in Gaza, is on the rise. Two empty mobile homes were locked after they were found to contain drug paraphernalia. So the party moved elsewhere. Nitzan is prime territory for drug dealers looking for easy prey.

Children and youths have an almost psychotic fear of policemen and soldiers. "When they see soldiers or policemen these kids start shaking uncontrollably and become hysterical," explains Eliya Tzur, the head of the One Heart volunteer organization that has been helping the residents get reestablished.

"The Education Corps of the IDF wanted to send officers to come to the schools to talk with them. I warned them not to," Tzur, a 24-year-old college student from Jerusalem explains. "They said they weren't afraid of hostility. I explained that it wasn't hostility that I was worried about, but violence. These kids look at soldiers and see tyrants. I don't know what or how long it will take to change this."

THE IRRATIONALITY of the youths' reaction to the army and police is matched by the financial irrationality of many of their parents. They received NIS 50,000 from their overall reparations immediately after they were thrown out of their homes. Rather than save it, many bought cars they didn't need. The government deducts monthly rent for the mobile homes from the rest of the restitution package, which averages NIS 600,000 per family. The residents, without jobs, are eating away the possibility of ever having the money to build new homes for themselves.

The government has met all these problems with indifference. The Labor Ministry has yet to set up an employment office in Nitzan. There is only one social worker assigned to the Potemkin town.

Much of the property of the regional council in Gaza was disbursed to other communities. Four thousand books from Gush Katif's library are stacked up in one of the mobile homes, locked away. There is still no mikve. There is no grocery store. Buses come through twice a day and a taxi ride to the grocery store costs over NIS 100. Absurdly, when the residents moved in there was an IDF watchtower set up in the middle of the development for no reason. There are guard towers at its four corners, but they are unmanned. Theft is rampant.

One Heart organized workshops on everything from job searches to resume writing to teaching parents how to assert their authority over their children. Its volunteers scour the surrounding cities of Ashkelon and Ashdod to try to encourage businesses to employ the residents. The volunteers, who sleep on bare mattresses in an afterschool homework center they organized for elementary school children, also organized a community center and clubhouses for teenagers. When they tried to bring in a mobile home for a pizzeria, the Defense Ministry refused to allow it. Only Ministry contractors can bring in mobile homes - even though each mobile home, for no apparent reason, costs the taxpayers NIS 400,000 and the mobile home One Heart planned to bring in cost only NIS 120,000.

As the residents sink into impoverishment, someone is apparently getting rich at Nitzan. It would be interesting to know how the contracts were awarded.

INCOMPETENCE alone doesn't explain the Sharon-Peres government's treatment of the refugee population that it senselessly created. Today the refugees still want, most of all, to build new communities that will allow them to stay together with the people they have lived with all their lives. But while Sharon and Peres and Ehud Olmert grandly discuss plans to develop the Negev and Galilee, these people, who want to develop both, are shunted aside and left to disintegrate.

In its systematic demonization and criminalization of the Israelis of Gaza that preceded their expulsions, the government seemed to be begging for these people - who heroically withstood some 6,000 mortar and rocket attacks, thousands of shootings and hundreds infiltration attempts on their communities over the past five years - to do something that would prove their deprecators right. When these patriots left peacefully, deciding not to disengage from their country, Sharon and his spinmeisters were left with their tongues hanging out. The brutal indifference with which the refugees are treated today seems tinged with more than a slight hint of vindictiveness.

"Perhaps the most terrible thing about Nitzan," Tzur says, "is that we at One Heart have so much work to do here. We're just a bunch of students. Why are we necessary?"

But there's the rub. For the past 12 years the governments of Israel have been playing poker with our lives and well-being by granting land, guns and legitimacy to terrorists. The only thing that has kept this country going is the fact that the Israeli people have refused to collapse.

Once again, the vacuum created by government negligence, incompetence and vindictiveness is being filled by private citizens. One day, perhaps we will have a government that is worthy of us. In the meantime, we have no choice but to work around those who are elected and paid to serve us.

While most Israelis have been caught up in the general elections fever brought on by the election of the socialist workers' boss and radical post-Zionist Amir Peretz to the helm of the Labor Party, another contest has been unfolding in the shadows.

The long-run consequences of this other contest may very well surpass in importance the issue of who will stand at the head of the next government and by what margin Labor will be defeated in the next elections.

Last Friday, the day after Peretz's primary elections victory over Vice Premier Shimon Peres, Supreme Court President Aharon Barak went to war against Hebrew University law professor and human rights activist Ruth Gavison, who Justice Minister Tzipi Livni wishes to nominate to the Supreme Court.

In public remarks, Barak launched a stinging attack against Gavison for what he referred to as her "agenda," noting that it was "not good for the Supreme Court."

The notion that the Supreme Court appointment of Gavison - a fellow secular leftist from his university - could get Barak bent out of shape is a sign of the insularity and juridical uniformity of his court. One can scarcely imagine how he would react were the possibility of nominating a religious, right-wing jurist to the court ever raised.

Before examining Gavison's agenda some things must be understood. First, while judicial candidates are formally nominated by the justice minister, they are approved by the judicial appointments committee, half of whose members are controlled by Barak.

Over the past decade, judicial nominees have been presented by the justice minister to Barak for his approval before their names were made public or referred to the committee. That is, in almost every case over the past decade, Barak controlled the nominations and approvals processes for all nominees to the Supreme Court as well as to the magistrate and district courts. As a result, almost every judge in Israel owes his or her position to Barak.

For Gavison to be approved by the committee, one of Barak's loyalists would have to defect. And even in the unlikely event that Gavison is approved by the committee, her presence in the court would not exactly signal a major change in its views. Gavison would be just one among 15 justices - the rest of whom have been personally selected by Barak.

Given this, Barak's attack on Gavison must be seen as an act of hubris of the first order. It is a reflection of Barak's elitist view that anyone, regardless of his or her professional credentials and intellectual caliber, who does not agree with Barak's own judicial agenda, is unworthy of a court appointment. What Barak seeks is not a wise, fair and professional judiciary, but a uniform one - molded in his own image.

Barak has a twofold agenda. First, in the best tradition of French philosopher and proto-totalitarian Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Barak believes that the court should be a vehicle for foisting the world view of what he refers to as the "enlightened public" on the rest of the country. Second, Barak believes that "everything is justiciable."

That is, from Barak's perspective, the Supreme Court may and by rights ought to assert its authority over the Knesset and the government and should ensure, through its judgments on matters of policy and legislation, that the government and the Knesset do not stray from the bounds of what is legitimate.

For Barak what is legitimate is not defined by law, rather it is dictated by himself and his underlings who act as the repositories and adjudicators of the common good.

In sharp contrast, Gavison believes that under Barak's absolutist leadership the Supreme Court has overreached its mandate and has contributed to the erosion of Israel's democratic system. Gavison has stated countless times that it is of paramount importance that the court desist from supplanting the Knesset and the executive arms of the government by dictating norms of permissible actions, sticking to a strict interpretation of the laws and leaving legislation and policy making to their legally mandated bodies.

That is, Gavison objects to Barak's imperial judiciary and to the judicial activism his agenda prescribes.

Aside from that, in spite of her leftist political views, Gavison has made clear by word as well as by her public activities that she believes in the importance of the Jewish, Zionist content of Israel's national identity. Toward the end of preserving and upholding this identity, Gavison has actively and honestly engaged religious Zionist leaders over the past several years in repeated attempts to reach a meaningful consensus on the significance of Israel's identity as a Jewish state.

For Gavison it is important for the long term durability and health of Israeli society for society to be inclusive and for all the various strands of the public to have an actual stake in the future of the state.

For her opposition to secular, leftist supremacy and its normative legislation by judicial fiat, Gavison has been reviled by the members of Barak's so-called "enlightened public" of which she had previously been a prominent member.

In a hysterical and nasty broadside against Gavison, Avirama Golan, one of the high priestesses of leftist elites, wrote in her column in Ha'aretz on Tuesday, "Gavison has chosen to compromise with the settler dialogue" - something which Golan, Barak and their comrades in the "enlightened public" believe to be an unforgivable sin. In her words, "It is forbidden to compromise with [the religious Zionist] view, rather a principled struggle must be carried out against it."

The court under Barak has undermined Israel's democratic system of government in three basic ways: It has seized legislative and executive powers from elected representatives of the people; it has discriminated against Israeli citizens based on their political and ideological views and has caused this discrimination to be institutionalized in the prosecutorial practices of the state prosecution; and it has narrowed the borders of legitimate political action and debate in the state to the point where the actual results of general elections have little impact on the policies adopted by the government or the laws promulgated by the Knesset.

The net result of all of these actions has been the effective disenfranchisement of Israeli citizens and the distortion of Israeli politics and law to the point where it is difficult today to view Israel as a democracy.

Over the past year alone, in countless judicial decisions Barak's court has undermined the independence of the government and the Knesset and has discriminated against sectors of the public whose views do not jibe with the court's political and ideological prejudices.

Last month the court outlawed the IDF's practice of having Palestinians knock on the doors of wanted terrorists in order to shield Israeli security forces from attack. The court based its ruling on the Geneva Conventions even though the Knesset has never ratified their applicability to Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Also this year, in a series of rulings regarding the route of the security fence, the court has repeatedly second-guessed the Defense Ministry's judgment of how Israelis can best be defended from terrorist attack. The court based its authority to interfere with the Defense Ministry's executive authority on the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) July 2004 advisory opinion on the security fence. Yet the ICJ has no legal standing in Israeli law. Indeed, in the case of the advisory opinion on the security fence, (which has no international legal weight anywhere), the Justice Ministry rejected the ICJ's right to even discuss the matter and refused to send representatives to present arguments at the Hague.

As to the protection of the rights of citizens, the court has exhibited a consistent judicial prejudice in its judgments that is based on the ideological and religious identity of the petitioners.

In its ruling upholding the Evacuation and Restitution Law regarding the restitution of Israeli citizens expelled from their homes, businesses and communities in Gaza and northern Samaria this past summer, the court ignored the fact that the law trampled the property and civil rights of the thousands of Israeli Jews who were expelled. In parallel cases Barak has argued that Israel's Basic Law "Human Dignity and Freedom" forbids legislation that impinges upon parallel rights of Palestinians and Arab Israelis.

The prejudices of the court have been internalized by the state prosecution in two ways. First, in 1998 the government was forced to accept that all its nominations for the top positions in the state prosecution must be approved by a committee headed by retired Supreme Court justice Gavriel Bach; Barak's colleague now controls who may or may not lead the state prosecution.

Secondly, it is now expected that both the State's Attorney and the Attorney General will at the end of their tenure be appointed to the Supreme Court. As a result the state's prosecution's policies are indirectly determined by Barak who has the power to decide whether or not they will be promoted, so rather than acting as the executive arm of the government, state prosecutors today act as agents of the court.

As a result of the court's activism, the ability of Israeli citizens and elected politicians to carry out national debates on policy issues has been severely and dangerously curtailed. When every citizen knows that the government can unceremoniously stomp on the civil and property rights of Jewish Israelis but can take no action to prevent the murder of Israeli citizens if doing so impinges in any way on the civil or property rights of Arabs, it is clear that the government and the Knesset can only successfully advance policies that move in one direction: left.

The restrictions that the court has placed on the political debate in Israel by clearly delineating permissible and impermissible actions in everything from military operations, budgetary priorities, legislative initiatives, media reforms and the allocation and use of public and privately owned land has made it impossible for an open, free and democratic debate to be conducted.

In the current state of affairs, it is impossible, for instance, to discuss ways to deport non-citizens involved in acts of violence as France is now doing. It is impossible to discuss the possibility of applying Israeli law beyond the 1949 armistice lines. It is impossible to discuss the possibility of winning the war against Palestinian terror. It is impossible to discuss the equality of citizens before the law. And as a result, it is impossible for citizens to assume that the government and the Knesset, as the elected representatives of the people will work to advance the interests of the people as they manifested themselves at the ballot box in general elections.

When one wonders why it is that Israel's right-wing governments have been implementing leftist policies for the past decade, one need look no further than the imperial Supreme Court for the answer. Until the court's monopoly on power is broken, the public can hold no hope that its will as determined at the ballot box will be followed by its elected representatives. Indeed, until the judiciary is brought to heel, it is open to question whether Israel can be considered a democracy at all. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

With Histadrut general strike king Amir Peretz’s primary elections victory over Vice Premier Shimon Peres last week, the Labor Party has finally removed all its masks and officially embraced post-Zionism as its guiding ideology. By electing Peretz, the Labor Party of David Ben-Gurion has declined to the status of an anti-Zionist political party.

While Oslo and Labor’s embrace of Yasser Arafat signaled Labor’s inevitable embrace of the negation of Jewish nationalism, the party staved off its fate for the past six years by placing retired generals at the head of the party. Former prime minister and former IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak, former Labor chief and retired major-general Amram Mitzna, and former Labor chief and retired brigadier general Binyamin Ben-Eliezer along with former IDF deputy chief of staff and Labor leadership contender major-general Matan Vilna’i, all obfuscated their party’s post-Zionist platform by prominently parading their past military achievements and ranks before the public.

But all that is now behind us. With Peretz’s ascension to party leadership, Labor has become a post-nationalist, socialist party along the lines of Meretz under Yossi Beilin.

It is not a surprise that Labor under Peretz is now a carbon copy of Beilin’s Meretz. Peretz began his political career in Peace Now and achieved his first political prominence as a member of Yossi Beilin’s crew of young, radical leftist Labor party activists in what was known as the Kfar Hayarok clique whose members were groomed for eventual party leadership by Shimon Peres in the 1980s.

Along with Avrum Burg, (who failed in his attempt to take control of Labor in his 2002 race against Ben-Eliezer), and Beilin and the rest of the Kfar Hayarok crew, Peretz has for the better part of two decades consistently blamed Israel for Palestinian terrorism and for the Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist.

His line has been consistent. Like Beilin, Peretz has always contended that the only way to deal with terror is to capitulate to terrorists and that there can only be peace if Israel expels all 250,000 of its citizens from Judea and Samaria and divides sovereignty over Jerusalem. It is not coincidental that MK Yuli Tamir, (who also began her career in Peace Now and is one of the signatories of Beilin’s Geneva Accord with the PA’s former propaganda minister Yasser Abed Rabbo), is Peretz’s most enthusiastic supporter among Labor Knesset members.

In his first comprehensive statement after his victory, Peretz proclaimed that if he was elected prime minister he would form a governing coalition with the anti-Zionist Arab political parties. If Peretz becomes prime minister, there can be little doubt that he would take measures to effectively put an end to Israel as a Zionist state. Even if he were subsequently replaced by a right-wing government, as was the case with Barak and his short-lived government’s disastrous attempt to surrender to Arafat at Camp David, the damage he would cause would likely be irreparable.

IT IS a sign of the chaos into which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has plunged the Likud that all of this seems to have escaped the attention of its members. Rather than consistently pointing out the national significance of Labor’s descent into ideological bankruptcy, the Likud is squeamishly concerned about the electoral threat Peretz poses as a result of his economic demagoguery. Likud leaders warn that Peretz’s socialist populism will erode Likud support among its voters from the lower socioeconomic strata. This is particularly the case, they claim, among Sephardic Jews who have formed the bulwark of the party’s faithful since the Likud’s first national electoral victory under Menachem Begin in 1977.

As the Histadrut boss, Peretz has been the strongest opponent of Binyamin Netanyahu’s economic liberalization reforms. Peretz has consistently opposed the privatization of government companies, the break-up of economic monopolies and cartels, the lowering of taxes, curbing the growth of the welfare system and the weakening of labor unions. He supports raising minimum wage to NIS 4,700 per month, an increase that would immediately lead to a sharp rise in unemployment. He supports the mass expulsion of foreign workers from Israel, assuming, wrongly, that Israeli workers would be willing to take the low-paying jobs they now perform and assuming – again wrongly – that their employers would be willing to pay Israeli workers higher wages to perform these jobs.

In opposing every single economic reform that has been enacted over the past decade, Peretz has led general strike after general strike each of which has lost the economy billions of shekels and led to countless lost jobs and economic opportunities for the very people he claims to protect. In leading these strikes, he has ignored court orders to return to work, and he has encouraged striking workers to endanger public safety by illegally blocking highway traffic. Generally speaking, Peretz has made a name for himself by engaging in the kinds of activities that would have earned him jail time and a conviction for sedition were he to have acted thus while wearing a kippa and in opposition to Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

The economic reforms that Peretz has so thuggishly opposed are the only reason that Israel was able, at the height of the Palestinian terror war, to move out of its recession and into a period of sustained economic growth, low unemployment and low interest rates. Yet the Likud fears this radical post-Zionist because of the resonance of his calls for a reversion to the disastrous statist economy that Netanyahu so bravely shepherded the country away from. That is, what scares Likud the most about Peretz is his strident opposition to the party’s most successful policies.

THERE ARE two central causes for these perverse fears. First, Israeli politics have never been motivated by economic issues. No general election has ever been decided on the basis of the economy. Security has always been the single deciding issue in Israeli politics. As a result, there has never been a serious, sustained, popular debate in Israeli society about the nature of the economy. Israeli politicians are, by and large, wholly ignorant of economics. And so, empty slogans about “social justice” and “social gaps” have an irrational resonance among Israelis.

It is little wonder that the most emotional economic debates tend to revolve around envy. Headlines are annually made when the list of the richest Israelis and the top government salaries are made public. As a result, the deleterious effects of a state-run economy have never been properly understood. A populist, socialist bully like Peretz, who screams in defense of the rights of fattened welfare queens and bloated workers’ committees, and corrupt and incompetent public employees can gain traction for his ludicrous one-liners in such an intellectual desert.

Aside from this, in adopting the post-Zionist rhetoric and security (or insecurity) policies of the Left by accepting the so-called Quartet’s road map and implementing the ill-conceived withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria, Sharon split his own political camp on the one issue – national security – on which all its disparate factions agreed. In so doing, he lost the one coherent issue on which the Likud could stand against a radical gasbag like Peretz. In the absence of unity in the one area where it was previously strongest, the Likud under Sharon now finds itself flailing about madly looking for a way to show, not that Peretz is an anti-Zionist, but that like him the Likud too supports irresponsible populist economic policies.

In light of the fact that Peretz’s popularity is based upon his economic populism, many Likud members worry that were Netanyahu to replace Sharon as party leader the Likud would lose its Sephardic voters. This is a cowardly and self-defeating view. Were he to defeat Sharon in the Likud primaries, Netanyahu’s victory would solidify that base and reunify the various factions of the Right that Sharon has eviscerated over the past three years.

Netanyahu would be able to reinstate the Likud’s preeminence in security policy – finally uncontested by a former general at the helm of Labor. As well, Netanyahu is the only politician who feels genuine passion for a competitive, free-market economy. As such, he would be able to explain to Israeli voters why a prime minister Peretz would not only undermine our national security and long-term survival, but would also plunge us into a long-term insurmountable economic recession.

Peretz’s election to the helm of the Labor party is a defining moment in Israel’s political history. It will be a national tragedy if the clarity his election brings to the Labor party is not matched by a parallel clarity in Likud.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It would seem that the world has gone mad. Israel's security is being systematically undermined by its own government and the US-led international community. At this point it seems that the Sharon-Peres government is engaged in a perverse competition with the Bush administration to determine who can come up with the most deranged counter-terror policy.

Last week it was reported that the US has given the Palestinian Authority $4.4 million dollars to pay the salaries of terrorists from Fatah's Al Aksa Brigades. For its part, the terror group showed its gratitude to the US by becoming the first Palestinian terror organization to publicly endorse Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Then we have the latest machinations of the Sharon-Peres government regarding Israel's policies now that we have vacated Gaza.

This week the IDF announced that it was removing non-essential personnel from bases bordering Gaza. The move is being made due to information that terrorists are digging tunnels beneath the bases for the purpose of either bombing the bases or infiltrating Israel for the purpose of bombing civilians. Since the withdrawal, 16 bombs have been discovered along the new border.

As critics of the withdrawal from Gaza warned, the Palestinians have smuggled shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles into Gaza from the Sinai Peninsula. After denying these reports for six weeks, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz finally acknowledged that these missiles have in fact been brought in during testimony before the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday.

Air Force commanders, whose forces are the only ones that remain active in Gaza, told the media last week that they are revising their operational methods over Gaza in light of the presence of these missiles. That is, the IAF considers these missiles to be a threat to its aircraft.

If these missiles manage to find their way into Judea and Samaria they will threaten not only IAF aircraft but civilian aircraft taking off and landing at Ben Gurion Airport. The fact that al-Qaida - whose presence in the Sinai is enormous, according to IDF Intelligence Analysis Chief Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kupperwasser - and its Palestinian allies wish to attack Israeli civilian aircraft was made clear this summer with the Katyusha rocket attack on Eilat's international airport as well as in the 2002 attack on the Israeli jetliner in Mombassa, Kenya.

Since late 2002 when then Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna put forward the notion of a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip replete with the uprooting of Israeli communities from the area, critics of the move argued that such a plan would open Israel to grave security risks. These warnings became increasingly detailed and specific as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in late 2003 adopted Mitzna's plan after basing his campaign for the premiership on laughing at it.

Critics of the plan explained that a unilateral departure from Gaza, particularly if such a withdrawal included vacating Gaza's border with Egypt and surrendering control over the airspace over Gaza and its coastline, would enable and indeed invite international terrorists to use Gaza as a new international terror base. Critics further warned that terrorists in Gaza would transfer their center of operations to Judea and Samaria and place the major population centers of Israel at risk of rocket and mortar attacks.

The communities in Gush Katif and northern Gaza stoically absorbed some 6,000 such attacks over the past five years. In their absence, and as the critics warned, those rockets and mortars have already become the scourge of residents of some 40 communities surrounding Gaza in the western Negev. Just last week the IDF arrested two terrorists attempting to transfer rockets to Judea and Samaria.

The critics' concerns were never addressed by Sharon or any of his many defenders. Changing the subject, Sharon's champions, who included many right-wing politicians and intellectuals in Israel and the US who willingly abandoned the wisdom that had motivated them for more than a generation in order to jump onto Sharon's bandwagon, spoke of the demographic dangers to Israel's democracy. Using fabricated population data published by the Palestinian Authority, they claimed that if Israel did not disengage from Gaza by removing its civilian population from the area and withdrawing its military forces, Israel, together with Judea, Samaria and Gaza, would turn into a majority Arab geographical unit within 10 years.

Champions of Sharon's plan further argued that the great demographic disappearing act of Gazan Arabs could only be enacted if Israel relinquished control over the international borders. "The occupation will continue," they explained, if Israel maintained any control over these passages. And if the "occupation" were to continue, they continued, Israel would still be accountable for the 1.5 million Arabs in Gaza (although there are only 1 million Arabs in Gaza).

And so Israel relinquished all control over Gaza. The IDF and the police were massed for the largest operation they have undertaken in years. All the resources of the state were placed at their disposal as they trained and planned for months and months, not to fight Palestinian terror, not to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, but to expel their own countrymen from their homes and communities in Gaza.

No one ever answered the question how precisely the unilateral withdrawal would enable Israel to disengage from the Arabs of Gaza. No one ever explained how Israel would cease to be pressured by the US and the rest of the international community to enable Gazan Arabs to work in Israel or to enable their integration with the Arabs of Judea and Samaria. No one ever explained how withdrawing from Gaza would do anything other than increase the terror threat to Israel. Rather than answering these questions Sharon and his many defenders ignored them, preferring to attack the questioners by claiming that anyone who asked how the withdrawal and expulsion plan benefited Israel was clearly an extremist right-winger who probably would have murdered Yitzhak Rabin if he had the chance.

AND NOW we know why these questions were never answered. In the aftermath of Israel's withdrawal of its civilian population in Gaza, in the space of hours, Gaza was deluged with international terrorists and advanced weaponry. Contrary to bizarre statements by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to Newsweek this week, where he applauded Egypt for its work in securing its border with Gaza, military sources and Palestinian sources have repeatedly stated that the border between Gaza and Egypt remains breached and that both terrorists and weaponry continue to be smuggled into Gaza.

Given the open border between Gaza and the Sinai, for Israel to prevent the transfer of the advanced weaponry and international terrorists from Gaza into Judea and Samaria and its civilian centers within the 1949 armistice lines it can do one of two things. It can reoccupy Gaza's border with the Sinai and reinstate its complete control over the international passages leading in and out of Gaza, or it can seal Gaza off from Israel and Judea and Samaria.

Unfortunately, there is no chance that the present Sharon-Peres government, which embraced the strategically catastrophic withdrawal from Gaza as the centerpiece of its national strategy, will take either of these steps. Doing so will, after all, rightly be viewed as an acknowledgement of our leaders' colossal stupidity. And so, rather than acknowledge reality, Israel, at the unhelpful urging of the US-led international community, is compounding the damage.

Led by Mofaz and Vice Premier Shimon Peres, Israel is now negotiating the reopening of the Rafah terminal, which is the official land passage between Gaza and Egypt, with the PA, the EU, Egypt and the Quartet's envoy James Wolfensohn. These negotiations are nothing more than an obscene and pathetic joke.

Initially, Israel insisted that its security personnel be deployed at the Rafah terminal as they were before Israel vacated Gaza. The Palestinians laughed and said no. Then Israel demanded that EU security personnel control the passage in its stead and be vested with the authority to arrest terrorists entering or leaving Gaza. Both the Palestinians and the EU laughed at that one, but offered that EU personnel could be there as "observers."

Finally Israel demanded that closed-circuit television cameras be installed at the passage that would transmit real-time imagery of all those crossing through the terminal to Israel. The Palestinians again laughed and offered that they would send the footage to Israel a day or two after the fact.

The absurdity of this charade is that Israel is negotiating about the control of a terminal when it already voluntarily and unilaterally relinquished all control of the terminal. For once, it is hard not to be on the Palestinians' side in the argument.

The absurdity of Israel's position at the negotiations over the Rafah terminal is exacerbated by the fact that the talks themselves are irrelevant. Even if Israel received all its wishes in these negotiations, Israeli control over the Rafah terminal would do nothing to seal the border with Egypt.
That border remains hopelessly breached along the abandoned Philadelphi Corridor which links Palestinian Rafah with Egyptian Rafah.

While Israel has no standing any longer regarding Gaza's international land links to Egypt, it most certainly has the right to assert its own authority regarding Gaza's border with Israel and through Israel to Judea and Samaria. But here, bowing to easily surmountable international pressure, Israel is relinquishing its sovereign rights to control its own borders and, in so acting, it is relinquishing its national security.

To date, Israel has agreed to enable convoys of private vehicles, trucks and buses to travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria on a daily basis. It has agreed that the cargo and persons traveling in these convoys will undergo minimal security checks before traveling. That is, Israel has relinquished its control over movement between Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Cargo traffic from Gaza to Israeli ports is similarly to be enabled with minimal Israeli fuss. Given the vast increase in terror capabilities in Gaza, Israel's agreement to enable free passage between Gaza and Judea and Samaria - and on a level it has not allowed since the establishment of the PA in 1994 - is simply insane.

The fact that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been publicly pressuring Israel to enable such traffic is an indication that on the most basic level, the US has abandoned its pledge to work to ensure Israel's security.

And so we watch mouth agape at this stunning array of delusion and derangement. The saddest thing about watching our government and the Americans combining forces to strengthen our enemies for their next round of war is that there is no telling how many of us will be murdered before we replace them with sane leaders or events force them to regain control of their faculties.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The French are in serious trouble. They have a home-grown insurrection on their hands. In some ways - mainly in the intensity of the violence - the current insurrection recalls the 1968 student rebellion. But there is a major difference between the spring of 1968 and the autumn of 2005. In 1968 the rioting students - at least those who weren't receiving their orders from the Soviets - felt they had a stake in France and its future.

The firebombers and marauders in today's riots do not feel any significant commonality with the people they are rioting against. As Theodore Dalrymple explained in his Autumn 2002 City Journal essay, "The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris," the Muslim youth rioting today feel nothing but nihilistic or Islamic hatred and alienation from their country and their countrymen. In his words, "They are of France, but not French."

Dalrymple explained that the bloated French welfare state houses, clothes, feeds and pays its unassimilated immigrant communities in a manner that enables disaffected youth to "enjoy a far higher standard of living (or consumption) than they would in countries of their parents' or grandparents' origin, even if they labored there 14 hours a day to the maximum of their capacity."

At the same time, he observed that in the ghetto housing projects that ring the major cities of France where these rioting young men live, "The state, while concerning itself with the details of their housing, their education, their medical care, and the payment of subsidies for them to do nothing, abrogates its responsibility completely in the one area in which the state's responsibility is absolutely inalienable: law and order."

Today both the absence of law and order and the total alienation of the burgeoning Muslim immigrant population of France have coalesced in a manner and an intensity that has motivated some observers to write of the violence of the past week and a half as "the fall of France." France has fallen, these mordant observers tell us, because the multicultural overlords of the French chattering and governing classes are unable to muster the will to contend with either the problem of violence or with the problem of social alienation.

News reports of the violence quote police commanders who define the insurrection as "a state of war." On Saturday night, as the firebombers and violent mobs spread to Normandy, Philippe Jofres, a deputy fire commissioner from the area, told France 2 television, "Rioters attacked us with baseball bats. We were attacked with pickaxes. It was war."

Some fire chiefs and policemen are asking for the army to be brought in to quell the violence. Law enforcement officials and French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy have noted that there is coordination among the militants. People have been seen passing out petrol bombs and other ordnance from their cars to militants on the streets. Instructions are given by cellular telephones and Internet sites. French Prosecutor- General Yves Bot told Europe 1 he could see "organized actions, a strategy" informing the militants in the streets.

For their part, law enforcement commanders seem not to have any strategy to speak of. Their actions to date call to mind the image of feckless cat herders. The militants - at least those who are found - are chased from place to place with uninspiring results. On Saturday night, when some 1,300 cars were torched and businesses, schools and stores were ignited throughout the country, only 200 arrests were made. In light of the constant increase in the scope and volume of attacks, one can assume that those arrested were expendable foot soldiers.

It would seem that the French authorities need a two-pronged approach to dealing with their mini civil war. First they need to take control of the violence. In order to do so, they have to stop chasing the rioters and have the rioters come to them. This is necessary in order for them to gain a basic understanding of the command structure of the rival they face. There are people giving orders. There are people deciding where and what to attack. These people need to be arrested and either sent to prison or deported.

Were the police to choose tactically significant locations within the ghettos where these militants live and simply take them over, they would force the militants to confront them in an area they can control. The locations they choose should afford them geographical control over a discrete area - say one square block. As the militants attack them, reinforcements can enter the area from pre-planned routes and easily take control of the area.

In the arrests that will ensue, the police will be able to see, after confiscating the militants' cellular phones, where their orders are coming from, and move swiftly to arrest the lieutenants, who will lead them up the feeding chain. In acting in such a manner, the authorities will induce systemic shock on the militants, who will suddenly be forced to contend with a previously unfamiliar situation - French government control over "their" territory. By thus gaining the initiative, the authorities will be able to eventually achieve control over the violence.

One of the notable aspects of the violence thus far is the absence of murder. The militants have apparently decided to limit their campaign to property damage. No doubt this is because their objective is political, not military. As some Muslim leaders have explained, what they want is autonomy in their ghettos. They seek to receive extraterritorial status from the French government, meaning that they will set their own rules based, one can assume, on Sharia law.

If the militants are able to achieve this goal, even on an informal basis, then those declaring that France has fallen will be proven right. The only way for France to save itself is to prevent such a reality from occurring. If the French government accepts the notion of communal autonomy, France will cease to be a functioning state.

As Francis Fukayama argued in The Wall Street Journal last week, the French government must embrace the American notion of the immigrant "melting pot." As Samuel Huntington, quoting Hector St. John de Crevecoeur explained the term in his book Who are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, the product of the melting pot leaves behind him "all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds."

In his previous stint as interior minister, Sarkozy attempted to bring the Muslim immigrants into the mainstream French national culture by forming official French Muslim bodies. Once the violence has been quelled and the leaders of the insurgency imprisoned or deported, the leaders of these official bodies - or alternative leaders - must be vested with the ability to bring French Muslims into French society. These efforts may involve ending the French welfare system as it is presently constituted and shifting subsidies from government handouts to job training. It must certainly involve consistently asserting law and order in the immigrant enclaves.

One could ask why Israel should care what happens in France. Given France's traditional and rather obscene hostility towards Israel, a certain level of good old-fashioned schadenfreude would seem justified. But the fact of the matter is that Israel has two reasons to care about the future of France.

First, five years into this global jihad we see that while Muslim terrorists or militants in Ramallah, Paris, Jakarta, New York, New Dehli, Tikrit, Amsterdam, London, Teheran, Umm el-Fahm and Beslan may not speak to each other directly, they are certainly aware of one another's actions and successes. And were France to fall, all of us would feel the aftershocks.

Secondly, if France begins to assert its authority and responsibility for unassimilated Arabs and Muslims in France, perhaps Israel will be inspired to do the same for our Arab minority in Israel and Judea and Samaria, and thus move our country from a position of policy paralysis and defeatism to one of movement and strength.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In the year and a half which preceded the implementation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the leftist elites in Israel waged an unrelenting cultural war against the Israeli Right generally and against religious Zionists specifically. Religious Zionists were portrayed by the media, by entertainment icons, by Sharon's advisers, and by his political allies on the Left as blood-crazed zealots, parasites, and the single largest danger to Israel's well-being.

Last December, in an op-ed in Ma'ariv, Labor MK and former health minister Ephraim Sneh called for a civil war against religious Zionists. Using the American Civil War as a precedent, Sneh wrote, "85 years after its establishment, the United States of America was drawn into a cruel and destructive civil war, but the results of that war formed the democratic character of the giant country. The confrontation among [Israelis] is also unpreventable."

As the months dragged on, the attacks against religious Israelis became more and more hysterical. In July, Ha'aretz editorialized: "The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, religious Zionism's status will be different." It went on to castigate religious Zionists as "a Trojan horse that has infiltrated Zionism in order to destroy it from within." Calls like these came against the background of a constant drumbeat of hatred against religious Zionists from all quarters. The Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which was organizing the campaign against the withdrawal and expulsion plan, was unable to find a public relations firm that was willing to take it on as a client. Its leaders were told time after time by public relations executives that working with "the settlers" would wreck their reputations.
 

In retrospect, it is clear that the council had no chance of succeeding in its attempt to cancel the withdrawal and expulsion plan. As was the case with then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin with the Oslo Accords, the moment that Sharon succeeded in buying off a sufficient number of right-wing Knesset members, there was no way for the plan's opponents to prevent it from being implemented.

On the other hand, the council and the opponents of the plan in general achieved a major victory with the fact that in spite of the best efforts of Israel's leftist elites, in the aftermath of the expulsions the vast majority of the Israeli public expressed support and sympathy for the settlers.

The dignified manner in which the protesters conducted themselves prevented the Left's plan to use the expulsions as a means to bring about the delegitimization and criminalization of the religious Zionist community from succeeding.

But history did not end with the expulsions. Nor did it begin with Sharon's announcement in December 2003 that he was adopting the Labor Party's platform.

The Left has been waging its culture war against religious Zionism at least since Menachem Begin's ascension to power in 1977. Since the enactment of the Oslo process with the PLO in 1993, that war has become the main objective of the Left. It is an objective that eclipses the importance of attaining either security for the state or peace with the Arabs.

This war is nowhere more apparent than in the commemoration of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin 10 years ago today. Indeed, as the years have gone by, in the service of the culture war against religious Zionists, Rabin himself - who he actually was and what he stood for - has been all but forgotten.

Since the night he was assassinated 10 years ago, the purpose of memorializing Rabin has been twofold. First, his murder is used as an opportunity to mark the entire religious Zionist public with the scarlet letter of murder. And second, as Rabin's actual positions have been smothered by an army of far Left eulogizers, his legacy has been co-opted by these radical elites to force their political and ideological agenda on the general public in his name.

As was the case in previous years, so too, this year, Yediot Aharonot, with its monopoly share of the newspaper market, has been leading the charge to criminalize religious Israelis and to claim Rabin's legacy for the radical Left. Yediot's first assault this year came last Friday when with screaming headlines it told us that 20 percent of Israelis believe that Rabin's assassin Yigal Amir will likely be paroled someday.

Why this is shocking, or even interesting in a country where terrorists are released from prison as a routine matter, the Supreme Court has affirmed the right of convicted murderers to marry and have children behind bars and those serving life sentences can expect to be paroled in at most 20 years, is unclear. But nonetheless, Yediot thinks we should all be distressed by this state of affairs.

On Sunday, to make sure that everyone got the point, Yediot hauled out Carmi Gillon, who was the head of the Shin Bet in 1995 when Rabin was murdered. Why anyone should care what Gillon, the single worst director the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) ever had, has to say is unclear. It should be recalled that it was Gillon who oversaw the organization as it subcontracted its counter-terror operations to the PLO and thus lost almost all its counter-terror capabilities in one fell swoop. And it was on Gillon's watch that the Shin Bet failed to protect the prime minister from murder despite the fact that Amir was associated with Shin Bet agent Avishai Raviv.
 

Then again, given what he said in the interview, there is no doubt that the reason that Gillon never suffered social ostracism for his incompetence is that he can be counted on to offer up unsubstantiated allegations against the religious Zionist camp on demand. Gillon warned that Sharon's life is in danger because "rabbis" are making "halachic rulings" that set the stage for extremists to pull the trigger. The fact that Gillon offered no names of any such rabbis, and no details of any such halachic rulings is of course because there are no such names and there have been no such rulings - just as there were no such names or such rulings in 1995.

Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz made the latter perfectly clear over the summer when in testimony before the Knesset he said that there was no connection between the public criticism of Rabin in the months before he was murdered and the murder itself. But all this is beside the point.
Gillon wasn't brought out of the mothballs to present a picture of reality. He was called on to criminalize a sector of Israeli society and this he did with aplomb.

On Thursday, Ma'ariv published a special magazine devoted to the cult of Rabin's personality. The magazine included an article entitled, "The Geneva Agreement: An expression of Rabin's Legacy."

The Geneva agreement, it will be recalled, was the wildcat accord that the extreme Left, led by Yossi Beilin, signed with the PA's propaganda minister two years ago. That agreement recognizes a "right of return" of foreign-born Arabs to the Palestinian state, divides Jerusalem, and transfers sovereignty over the Jordan Valley (like the rest of Judea and Samaria) to the PLO.

The article interviews Gadi Baltiansky, the director of the Geneva initiative who claims, "People who were familiar with his policy doctrine can assume that were Rabin the prime minister today, he would arrive at an agreement that would not be different in content from Geneva."

This is a complete lie. In his speech before the Knesset in October 1995, one month before he was murdered, Rabin set forth his vision both for the years before a peace agreement would be reached with the PLO, and of what the lines of an eventual agreement would look like. In Rabin's words, during the interim period, "We committed ourselves before the Knesset, not to uproot a single settlement in the framework of the interim agreement, and not to hinder building for natural growth."

As for the final accord with the PLO, Rabin stated clearly that he opposed granting statehood to the Palestinians. In his words, "We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state." Of Israel's final borders Rabin stated, "We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines." He further stipulated that Israel would retain sovereignty over the Jordan Valley, which he said must be defined, "in the broadest meaning of that term."

The fact that the co-option of Rabin by the radical Left is based on nothing but lies necessitates the smothering of all public debate on his legacy, lest facts get in the way of the pure fiction we have been sold. And the need for squelching public debate extends not only to Rabin but to the entire policy of appeasement which he adopted with the Oslo Accords and Sharon adopted with the Road Map and later with the withdrawal and expulsion plan.

As history has shown, these plans have literally blown up in our faces. The strategic failure of appeasement was evident the moment Arafat entered Gaza in the summer of 1994 when he smuggled terrorists and munitions in his motorcade. In the years since Arafat's rehabilitation, the toll of appeasement has been some 1,500 Israeli dead, billions of dollars lost, and a constant erosion of Israel's deterrent capabilities.

The need to criminalize the religious Zionists springs directly from this harsh reality. For the Left, the only way to avoid accepting that its entire world view is incorrect is to find someone on whom to blame their failure. As the most visible opponents of appeasement, the religious Zionists are the most obvious scapegoat. The more appeasement fails, the more they are hated.

There is a danger involved in systematically alienating an entire population to the extent of criminalizing their values and beliefs. The danger is that as the legitimate and responsible leadership is demonized, it will become viewed as ineffective by its followers who will simply disengage from the society which hounds and insults them. This we see today, in the attacks on IDF units by gangs of angry teenagers on the hilltops in Judea and Samaria. These youths saw the systematic humiliation and demonization of their rabbis and the heads of the council, even as these leaders insisted that all opponents of the expulsions reject all violence in their protests and proved their commitment to non-violence by restraining their followers time after time.

There is no doubt that the leaders must meet the challenge posed by these youths and not only restrain them, but mend relations with the IDF. These relations were seriously damaged during the expulsions from Gaza and northern Samaria. It is in the interests of both sides to see them reinstated.

Democracy functions because it gives all sectors of society a voice and a stake in the national debate. When society silences the voices of responsible and law- abiding citizens, it places itself on a very dangerous course.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Gazing from across an ocean at the undoing of US President George W. Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the US Supreme Court was like gazing at Elysium.

In the public debate that erupted in the wake of Bush's announcement four weeks ago that he was nominating his personal attorney to the highest court in America, we saw what a real policy debate in a well-functioning democracy looks like. And if democracy is the best system of government known to man, then a well-functioning democratic system is the best of the best.

That is, it is paradise.

A well-functioning democracy is not a democracy that is infallible. As a system founded on the notion that people should be free, it assumes that people, being fallible will err. And so the test of whether a democracy is well-functioning does not lie in the number of mistakes that are made but in the system's ability to correct mistakes that have been made.

In nominating Miers, Bush made a mistake. Miers seemed to spring out of the thin air. She had no judicial experience. She had no known judicial philosophy. Aside from the fact that she is a crony of the president's, she seemed to have little to recommend her, first and foremost to Bush's political support base.

For the past five years, Bush's supporters have been holding their breath waiting for a chance to remake the Court by filling vacancies with justices who subscribe to the conservative judicial philosophy of originalism. Originalism is predicated on the view that constitutional interpretation must take place in the context of the Constitution itself - what it says and how it was understood by its framers. The conservative promotion of the originalist doctrine in recent years has been the result of popular outcry against the fact that since the Roe. v. Wade verdict in 1971 which foisted the legalization of abortion on an unwilling populace, liberal justices on the bench have been legislating political platforms and ideologies by judicial fiat.

Not only did Miers have no experience on the lower courts, she had no background in constitutional law and so, had no paper trail available for perusal by Americans interested in finding out what this woman who Bush was about to catapult to the Supreme Court stood for. Conservative pundits writing in the newspapers, and speaking on the radio and television went into an uproar.

As they researched her public record, they found that in past speeches she espoused views that appeared contrary to everything they stand for - not just on the issue of abortion, but on the more basic issue of how the Court should approach the law. That is, her guiding philosophy, to the extent she has one, is contrary to how conservatives in America believe that law should be conceived and adjudicated.

Aside from that, they decried the fact that the decision to nominate Miers was made in the wake of a faulty vetting process. Next to no one outside the president's immediate circle of advisors was questioned about their views of her candidacy before the nomination was made public.

For its part, the White House tried to spin the issue by pointing to Miers's attachment to evangelical Christianity. By arguing that Bush trusts her completely, the president's spin machine suggested that the Miers's nomination was about supporting the president, not about the fundamental issue of how the Court should approach interpreting the Constitution. Finally, the White House alleged that opposition to Miers was sexist and elitest. That is, the White House defended Miers not on principle, but on personality.

But the critics ignored the bait. The most fertile minds of American conservatism's public intelligentsia relentlessly stuck to the facts. With their media outlets - FOX News, talk radio, conservative newspapers and the Internet - conservatives stuck to the facts as they interpreted them. They stubbornly insisted on maintaining the debate on the level of principles - in which they passionately believe - and refused to stoop to personal attacks on either Miers - who may be a very pleasant woman - or on Bush, from whom they believe they have a right to expect more.

FOR THEIR part, Republican senators, who, like Bush, also rely on their conservative support base, made no excuses for the president and separated their view that Miers is unqualified for the Court from their overall support for Bush. The Democrats, understanding that their job is to oppose Bush, also offered no support for Miers in spite of the fact that on the face of it, she would be an ideal Republican justice for them - that is, an inexperienced rookie who tends towards their world-view.

In the end the critics won. Miers bowed out last week. On Monday Bush nominated Judge Samuel Alito to the Court. Alito, an appellate court judge, is known to be a stanch conservative and Bush's political base will undoubtedly go to the mat to get his nomination approved by the Senate.

What could be better than a situation where as a result of a reasoned, rational, intelligent and passionate policy dispute a leader is forced to back off of an unreasoned decision that is grounded not in general principle or in the fundamental philosophy he claims to believe in and around which he has repeatedly rallied his base to support him but in self-interest, egotism and cronyism?

What is a more fundamental proof than the Miers nomination and its downfall, that free debate and deliberation and an informed populace is the basis for the assertion that democracy is the best form of government because it allows for mistakes to be corrected rather than compounded?

BACK HERE in our Israeli foxhole, it seems like American democracy is not 6,000 miles away, but light years away. It isn't the ocean that separates us, but an unbridgeable chasm. Here, when in December 2003 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned his political base, strategic logic, his party's platform and ideology, not to mention common decency and announced, without any public debate that he was adopting the platform of the Left that had just been pulverized by the public in national elections, his former supporters had no ability to shape debate along rational lines.

They wrote columns, they went on television, on radio. Hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens went to demonstration after demonstration protesting Sharon's plan to expel all Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. Ministers who opposed Sharon's policy resigned their positions in the government and those who refused to resign were fired. The Likud held a referendum; Sharon lost and proceeded to ignore the vote he promised to honor.

And throughout it all, no matter what anyone did, no matter what anyone said, the Left, with its control over the media continued to crush all debate. All who opposed Sharon were castigated as extremists or inciters, or violent, criminal enemies of the people.

And even today, with al-Qaida operating in Gaza, with the border with Egypt open for terror traffic, with arms flooding into Gaza, with Judea and Samaria, as predicted becoming the new center of operations for the terrorists, the media continues to protect Sharon.

Now, when two months after they were expelled from their homes, the former residents of Gaza and northern Samaria are living in refugee camps in Netivot and Nitzan and daily are threatened with expulsion from hotels and dormitories throughout the country, when two months into the school year their children still have nowhere to enroll, it is still politically unacceptable to attack Sharon.

Any politician who suggests that he is irresponsible or worse is castigated by the media as an opportunist, and of course, an extremist. And if someone manages to squeeze a compelling point into a hostile radio interview before he is brutally cut off, the media pulls out its atomic bomb and reminds us that the entire Israeli Right assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, not Yigal Amir his sociopathic murderer.

Here in our foxhole in Israel, the nirvana that is American democracy seems like the land where the gods would play.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.