Whether it realizes it or not, American Jewry today stands before a precipice. It can force its way back onto stable ground, or it can fall. The chasm before which American Jewry now finds itself relates to the basic question of whether Jews in America have found a permanent, stable home in America where they are free to be Jewish or whether, in the words of former AIPAC executive director Neal Sher, they will begin to act "as though they are guests in their own country."

The recent conviction of former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin on felony charges of mishandling classified US government information and the passing of classified information to two former senior AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman is the proximate cause of the current crisis. Rosen and Weissman are scheduled to be tried  in April for misusing classified government information that Franklin purportedly transferred to them.

Franklin, who was sentenced two weeks ago to 12 years and seven months in prison for his actions, is scheduled to begin serving his sentence only after he testifies against Rosen and Weissman. If his testimony is helpful to the prosecution in that case, his sentence will likely be reduced.

THE CHARGES, both in the case of Franklin and in the case of Rosen and Weissman are unprecedented. After initial charges of transferring classified government documents to unauthorized persons were dropped, Franklin was convicted for keeping classified government documents at his home.

To understand the extraordinary nature of the US Justice Department's decision to prosecute Franklin, it should be recalled that in the summer of 2004, at the same time that the Franklin case first became public, Sandy Berger, who served as National Security Adviser to former president Bill Clinton, was charged with removing highly classified documents from the National Archives by hiding those documents in his suit pockets, briefcase and socks. During his investigation, Berger admitted to having destroyed some of those documents, which related to the investigation of the September 11 attacks that was being conducted at that time by the 9/11 Commission.

In that event Berger was charged with the misdemeanor offense of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. A court found him guilty and slapped a $50,000 fine on his wrist. Former CIA Director John Deutsch was similarly charged with a misdemeanor offense for having taken classified materials home with him after he left the CIA. Deutsch was pardoned for the act by Clinton in the final hours of his presidency.

IN FRANKLIN'S case, as in the cases of Weissman and Rosen, Justice Department prosecutors decided to indict the men under clauses of the Espionage Act - a law which has never previously been invoked. As Harvard Law Professor Allan Dershowitz notes, it is not even clear if the statute, so long ignored, actually remains law. In his words, "It is a well-established norm in the US that when a law is not enforced for many years, it ceases to be considered law."

The decision to prosecute Franklin, Rosen and Weissman under the articles of the Espionage Act, Dershowitz attests, "is the worst case of selective prosecution I have seen in 42 years of legal practice." He argues: "If every administration official who did what Franklin did - leak classified information to an ally for the purpose of influencing domestic American policy - were prosecuted as he has been, there would be more government officials in prison than at the State Department, the Defense Department or the White House."

Rosen and Weissman have been indicted for making unauthorized use of classified information. Given that the two men had no security clearances, did not work for the US government and had signed no oath to protect classified government information from unauthorized use, the decision to prosecute them places every journalist, think tank scholar and lobbyist in Washington, DC - all of whom trade daily in classified information as an accepted currency in the US capital - at risk of similar prosecution.

FROM THE background included in the three men's indictments, it is clear that Franklin was an inadvertent victim in a larger FBI probe of the senior AIPAC officials. Apparently, Franklin, who had tried to draft the two men to assist him in convincing the Bush administration to take the threat of the Iranian nuclear weapons program more seriously, walked straight into an FBI dragnet. For reasons that remain unknown, the FBI had been trailing Rosen, AIPAC's senior policy guru, for five years.

Once he was observed meeting with Rosen and Weissman, Franklin was apparently compelled by the FBI to act as its agent in a sting operation its agents orchestrated in order to prosecute Rosen and Weissman. Franklin was wired and sent to meet with the two AIPAC lobbyists armed with fabricated "classified" information relating to an apparent imminent threat to the lives of Mossad agents operating in Iraqi Kurdistan. At the behest of his FBI handlers, he urged the two men to inform the Israeli embassy of the situation. That is, although the men were subject to an ongoing FBI probe, the only reason they were caught technically breaking the law is because the FBI itself placed them in a situation where they felt that those lives were at stake.

It is unclear why the FBI decided to go after AIPAC officials. As Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations stated last week, "that two patriotic American citizens who are working for Jewish organizations, who did nothing to violate American security, should have to stand trial and be subject to the public scrutiny and public humiliation, frankly I find very disturbing and a matter that we all have to look at in a much more serious way."

DISTRESSINGLY, rather than stand by its employees, AIPAC has led the charge in publicly humiliating them. After firing them from the organization last year, its spokesman announced: "AIPAC dismissed Rosen and Weissman because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs and because this conduct did not comport in any way with standards that AIPAC expects of its employees... AIPAC could not condone or tolerate the conduct of the two employees under any circumstances."

Similarly, contrary to earlier pledges, AIPAC has ceased to pay the legal fees of the two men's defense, which are already running over a million dollars. Recent reports indicate that AIPAC was negotiating with the men's lawyers regarding future payments. But those talks failed due to AIPAC's insistence that Rosen and Weissman commit themselves not to file damage suits against the organization.

Even more disturbingly, as Sher noted in an open letter to AIPAC, large excerpts of which were published in New York's Jewish Week, in an apparent attempt to distance itself from any actions that might displease the FBI and the Bush administration, AIPAC has curtailed its lobbying efforts on Israel's behalf.

Sher notes that AIPAC has refused to involve itself in lobbying for Congressional approval of the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act placed before Congress last year.

If it were to become law, the act would compel the US government to force Saudi Arabia to cease its active support for terrorism. Given the Saudi government's leading role in both indoctrinating Muslims to the cause of jihad against the US and its leading role in financing Hamas, there can be no doubt that supporting such a bill, which the Bush administration opposes, should be AIPAC's clear responsibility. From Sher's perspective, AIPAC's refusal to involve itself in lobbying for the passage of the bill is evidence that "having given in on Rosen and Weissman, AIPAC has sent clear signals that it is willing to preserve 'access' at the expense of influence."

If AIPAC thought that by cutting Rosen and Weissman loose it would be able to dissociate itself from them, it has already been proven wrong. The Jerusalem Post reported this week that the FBI has renewed its questioning of several Jewish leaders and former AIPAC officials in the wake of the Franklin conviction.

IT IS unclear what motivated the FBI to pursue the AIPAC officials. What is clear enough, however, is that their prosecution has not only weakened AIPAC but has made all American Jews who lobby the US Congress and executive branch on behalf of Israel the objects of suspicion, and has empowered the anti-Semitic forces in the US government who insist that all Jewish activists are somehow stained with questionable patriotism.

If the American Jewish community wishes to mitigate the damage this episode has already done to its good name and reputation, it must unify behind Rosen and Weissman and insist that the charges against them be dropped. And if AIPAC wishes to continue to be viewed as the main American Jewish lobbying organization in the US capital, it should be advised by its members and by its colleagues to lead the charge.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Yesterday we awoke to a new reality: Hamas is the official leader of the Palestinian Authority and - thanks to the US and Israeli governments - the official representative of Arab Jerusalemites. If before Wednesday's poll Hamas concentrated its efforts in conducting its terror war against Israel and indoctrinating Palestinian society to support jihad, now the terror group will continue with its previous activities as the official, popularly elected government of the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas's rise to political leadership and the significance of its ascendancy for Israel must be understood on two levels. First, Hamas must be viewed in the local Palestinian context. Second, the jihadist group's political victory must be viewed in the context of regional developments.

On the local intra-Palestinian level, Hamas's decision to participate in the Palestinian political process is the result of its adoption of the PLO's traditional strategy of combining politics with terrorism.

In 1996, Hamas opted not to participate in the Palestinian elections, preferring to suffice with an operational agreement with Yasser Arafat. That decision enabled Hamas to preserve its "purity" as a terrorist organization and social movement rather than "dirtying" itself with questions regarding the management of Palestinian relations with Israel and the rest of the world.

From a local perspective, two events caused Hamas's strategic shift that brought it to run in Wednesday's elections: Arafat's death at the end of 2004 and Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria last summer. Arafat's death left Fatah without a charismatic, popular leader able to rally Palestinian society behind him and his party. Israel's decision to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria without first reaching a peace accord with the Palestinians gave credence to Hamas's view that there is nothing to be gained by recognizing Israel's right to exist, even on the declarative level.

At the same time, local dynamics alone do not explain Hamas's decision to change its strategy and run for office. Regional developments also played a major role. These dynamics were what drove Hamas to believe that if it were to run and win, it would also be able to rule in a manner that suits its long term goal of destroying Israel.

The policies of the Egyptian government and domestic Egyptian political developments constituted Hamas's first regional rationale for believing that if it were to win the elections, it would also be able to rule. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's decision to hold official contacts with the Hamas commanders, under the guise of continuous negotiations towards a cease-fire with Israel - contacts which have been ongoing for the past five years - granted Hamas political legitimacy as an independent actor both in the Arab world and in the EU (which officially sponsors the negotiations).

In addition, there is the American policy of encouraging democratization in the Arab world. That policy defines the conduct of open elections in Arab states, regardless of the identities, ideologies and practices of the competing parties, as the main component of democratizing the Arab world. Under the cover of this policy, Hamas's sister movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, was allowed to participate in Egypt's parliamentary elections last month. The Muslim Brotherhood's success in those elections, and the international legitimacy conferred on those elections, constituted and important component of Hamas's decision to run on Wednesday.

Aside from events in Egypt, Hamas's leaders are deeply influenced by events in Syria and Iran. Today both countries are led by men who have rejected the traditional policies of terror sponsors such as the late Hafez Assad, former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami and Arafat. Unlike their successors -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Syria's President Bashar Assad -- those men practiced the art of dissimulation. They hid and denied their active support for terrorism and their strategic aim of destroying Israel.

The fact that Ahmadinejad and Assad Jr. are managing to survive even as they daily challenge the West and Israel demonstrated to Hamas that a Palestinian government under its leadership will be able to survive for the long haul even if it retains its public rejection of Israel's right to exist and enacts policies that openly advance its jihadist, terrorist agenda.

THE FIRST question that Israel must ask itself is how we arrived at our current situation. Only after we understand the forces that enable radical regimes to survive and indeed to prosper will we be able to move to the question of what we are to do now.

The answer to the first question is that the current situation, characterized by the empowerment of radical elements in regional states, has come about and persists because the world powers - the US, Britain, France, Russia and China - have been incompetent in reaching a consensus that the current state of affairs cannot continue. In the case of Iran and Syria, both Ahmadinejad and Assad are betting - and so far justifiably - that the relevant international actors will not be able to muster the collective or individual will to bring them down.

Iran's daily declarative and substantive provocations of the international community in general and of Israel in particular have been met by international bluster backed by policy paralysis. Today there is no agreement - nor the beginning of an agreement - on the need to enact even the mildest of sanctions against Iran despite its resumption of its uranium enrichment activities.

Indeed, on Tuesday, British Prime Minister Tony Blair remarked, "There would be a terrible misunderstanding, indeed a terrible miscalculation being made both by the Syrian and Iranian regimes if they thought that we were interested in destabilizing those two countries." In light of statements like Blair's, it is perfectly rational for Assad and Ahmadinejad to believe that they have no reason to change their behavior.

In a panel discussion at the Herzliya Conference Sunday morning on the issue of Iran's nuclear program, Britain's former undersecretary of defense Sir Michael Quinlan asserted that short of a total invasion and occupation of Iran there is no way to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program. As a result of this assumption, Quinlan explained that when world leaders refer to Iran's program as "unacceptable" it doesn't follow that they intend to take any steps to prevent the "unacceptable" from becoming reality. Indeed, Quinlan offered the view that Iran's acquisition of nuclear capabilities is inevitable and that at the end of the day, only Israeli concessions - land giveaways to the Palestinians and unilateral Israeli nuclear disarmament - can serve to change Iran's behavior.

The Israeli panelists at Herzliya had a suitable answer for Quinlan. Retired generals Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael and David Ivry explained that a military strike against Iran's nuclear installations would not be geared towards destroying Iran's nuclear program, but to setting the program back a few years. That is, the Israelis argued that the goal should be to use force to neutralize the immediate threat while buying time to enable internal Iranian processes that could lead to the overthrow of the regime to unfold. They further argued that in the meantime, no concessions should be made to Teheran.

Last Thursday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv occurred the same day that Ahmadinejad met in Damascus with the heads of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC. This fact was yet one more signal to the Israeli government that the policy it is advocating towards Iran should be similarly adopted in the Palestinian arena given the obvious links and the complimentary nature of the two conflicts. But the signal went unheeded.

In her address before the Herzliya Conference on Monday, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni claimed that Israel's international legitimacy as a Jewish state is dependent on the establishment of a Palestinian state. Livni further argued that in the event that Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace, it must remove itself from Judea and Samaria and so work to establish that Palestinian state at all costs.

In his remarks the next evening, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made similar comments when he stated that while Israel will fight terrorism, in the event that the possibility of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians is blocked, Israel will determine its borders for itself. That is, like Livni, Olmert pledged that Israel will remove itself from Judea and Samaria.

What Olmert and Livni's messages served to communicate to Hamas was that its decision to replace Fatah as the Palestinian political leadership was a wise one. Under the leadership of Kadima, Israel acts towards the Palestinians as the Europeans act towards the Syrians and Iranians. That is, Israel's strategy towards the Palestinians today is to speak harshly while surrendering. Hamas clearly understands the game that Israel is now playing. Looking forward, if Kadima wins the March elections, and continues on its current course, Israel will be severely weakened both internationally - as the legitimacy of the most extreme elements of Palestinian society is widened - and militarily, as Israel transfers control of more territory to forces that actively collaborate with Arab states and Iran towards the destruction of Israel.

ALL THIS naturally raises the question of whether Olmert and Livni's strategy is the only possible strategy that Israel can adopt. The answer of course is no.

In their remarks at the Herzliya Conference, both Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu and former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon outlined the general contours of an alternative strategy. Interestingly, their strategy is similar to the one that Israel now claims to be advancing towards Iran.

Both Netanyahu and Ya'alon explained that given the current situation, where terrorist forces and ideology reign supreme in Palestinian society, Israel must make no concessions - either diplomatic or territorial - towards the Palestinians. Israel's influence on its enemies, both explained, stems from its ability to deter them from attacking. That deterrence was weakened by Israel's retreat from Gaza and northern Samaria. Israel must now work to regain its deterrent credibility.

Israel's deterrent powers can only be rehabilitated by a stubborn, uncompromising campaign against Palestinian terror infrastructures and chains of command. Such a continuous campaign, both men argued, is the only way to make the Palestinians realize that they have nothing to gain by continuing their war against Israel. The Palestinians' internalization of the understanding that pursuing their war against Israel will bring them no advantage is the necessary precondition for any future peace.

All of this leads to a clear conclusion. The failure of Israel's leadership is one of the most significant causes of Hamas's ascension to political power. Just as the persistence of radical regimes in Damascus and Teheran is the result of the inability of the international community to rise to the challenge they manifest to international security, so too, the empowerment of Hamas is the result of the adoption of a strategy by Israel that is based on how we wish the world to be rather than on the way the world actually is.

By the same token, Israel's ability to fashion suitable responses to Hamas's electoral victory is dependent on its citizens' willingness to choose leaders capable of accepting the realities we face and acting accordingly.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Apparently, the Olmert government's answer to the specter of Hamas's projected electoral achievement in tomorrow's elections to the Palestinian parliament is to advance the electoral fortunes and legitimacy of the imprisoned mass murderer and Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti.

On Sunday, in an unprecedented step, the government allowed Al-Jazeera and Al Arabiya reporters to interview Barghouti in his prison cell. There he extolled terrorism, explained that the Fatah platform calls for terrorism in parallel with negotiations, pressed for a continuation of the Palestinian terror war against Israel, and promised Palestinian voters and the Arab world writ large that Fatah could be counted on to destroy Israel.

Barghouti's interview followed a January 11 Al-Jazeera interview with "moderate" Fatah strongman Jibril Rajoub, who stressed that Fatah never disagreed with Hamas on the importance of continuing terrorism.

It is hard to know which move is dumber: Israel's facilitating the participation in the elections of Hamas - a terrorist organization dedicated to the annihilation of Israel - or the government's pinning its hopes for a future peace process on the victory of Fatah, an even larger terrorist organization similarly dedicated to Israel's annihilation.

IN HIS cabinet meeting on Sunday, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert instructed his ministers not to make any statements regarding the Palestinian elections ahead of tomorrow's poll, lest Israel be viewed as "meddling" in the affairs of the Palestinians. Here, as usual, Olmert missed the point. Given that all the contenders in the elections are terrorists, Israel should be taking every opportunity to point out to the world and its own citizens what these elections say about the nature of Palestinian society.

As soon as the government determined to aid the elections as if they represented a step toward the establishment of a democratic Palestinian government, Israel essentially took the position that terrorists have legitimacy. The fact that anyone would accuse Israel of "meddling" in the Palestinian elections means that the international community, led by the US, has bought into the perfidious notion that Palestinian terrorists are legitimate actors.

That Olmert fears Israel being construed as "meddling" in these elections just serves to show that he too believes there is something legitimate about people whose chief goal is the eradication of Israel and the mass murder of its citizens.

SPEAKING AT the annual Herzliya Conference on Sunday, Dr. Yuval Steinitz, chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, provided a candid depiction of Israel's strategic achievements vis-a-vis Palestinian terror. In his words, "We won on the tactical battlefield, but we have failed and continue to fail on the strategic level of the war."

Comparing Israel's campaign against Palestinian terrorism to America's campaign against al-Qaida, Steinitz explained that Israel's terror-fighting capabilities are superior to the Americans' in everything related to intelligence gathering and targeted strikes against terror commanders as well as with regard to limiting collateral damage. At the same time, on the strategic level, the US is well on its way to defeating al-Qaida, while Israel is losing its war against the Palestinian terrorists.

Today, Steinitz noted, no government in the world is willing to acknowledge any connection to al-Qaida. And after the US toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Qaida lost its main geographical base for training and indoctrinating its fighters.

Indeed, the fact that the US's dismissal of Osama bin Laden's offer over the weekend of a truce evinced no international outcry against American rejection of a "negotiated settlement" with al-Qaida demonstrates that the terror group's international standing is extremely weak.

At the same time, after five years of the Palestinian terror war, the stature of Palestinian terrorism in general, and Hamas terror specifically, has never been better. Hamas commanders, Steinitz noted, are enthusiastically feted in Cairo, Damascus and Teheran. Its leaders hold dialogues with European negotiators.

HAMAS'S EXPECTED strong showing in tomorrow's elections is leading both the international media and the EU to discover a newfound and thoroughly illusory Hamas pragmatism. Moreover, Hamas has active, open terror bases in Gaza and is openly augmenting its capabilities in Judea and Samaria. Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the Islamic Jihad enjoy a similar status.

When one considers why it is that Israel is failing so abjectly where the US is succeeding so notably, the answer cannot be found by merely comparing Israel's international weakness to America's international strength.

For the past five years successive Israeli governments have refused to fight Palestinian terrorists to strategic victory and have consciously augmented rather than constrained their abilities. In Hamas's case, Israel has encouraged Egypt to conduct continuous negotiations with its leaders while hosting them in Cairo, and has done little to disabuse the Palestinian Authority of its claim that it is acceptable to collaborate with Hamas in order to avert internecine violence in the PA-ruled areas.

ISRAEL'S REFUSAL to contend politically with the fact that both Fatah and Hamas are dedicated to its destruction stems mainly from domestic considerations. The most remarked of these is the Israeli fear that in just a matter of years there will be an equal number of Arabs and Jews living in Judea and Samaria and sovereign Israel. The argument that demographic realities will force Israel in a number of years to choose between remaining a Jewish state or remaining a democracy has been the main rationale proffered for Israel's refusal to defeat Palestinian terrorism.

Whether there was ever any logic to the argument may well be doubted. After all, territorial concessions to the Palestinian Authority have not altered the number of Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel, or the number of Jews and Arabs living west of the Jordan River.

In any event, the demographic argument was rent asunder last January, when a group of Israeli and American researchers conducted a detailed examination of the data upon which the dire forecasts were based. In a study they presented both in Washington and the Knesset and published on the Internet at www.pademographics.com, the team found that Israel had been basing its policies regarding the Palestinians on faked numbers concocted in 1997 by the PA Bureau of Statistics. The Palestinians had managed, by double-counting Arab residents of Jerusalem, counting Palestinians who moved out of the areas, inflating immigration statistics and birth rates and deflating death rates, to artificially add more than one million people to their count.

AT THE Herzliya Conference on Tuesday morning, the team's chief researcher, Bennett Zimmerman, presented its newest findings. Over the past several months, the team has analyzed Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics population forecasts for Israel and Judea and Samaria for 2025. In its new report, the team found that the ICBS ignored the fact that over the past several years, fertility rates among Israeli Jews have been rising and that fertility rates among Arabs in Israel, Judea and Samaria have been decreasing. That is, the ICSB's data do not reflect current population trends.

The team reconfigured the projections for growth among Israeli Jews and Arabs in Israel, Judea and Samaria, based on current rates, and found that most likely, in 2025, inside Israel, Jews will comprise 77 percent of the population (as opposed to 81 percent today); and taken together with Judea and Samaria, Jews will comprise 63 percent of the population as opposed to 67 percent today.

That is, while demography may well be an issue of concern, it will be more than a generation before it produces significant change, if ever. It is questionable whether a set of circumstances will ever exist where Israel would be advised to transfer territory to its terrorist enemies; certainly there is no reason to rush and do so in the face of a demographic "time bomb" whose fuse is so long-burning.

What the actual population data show clearly is that Israel's Jewish majority is secure for at least another generation, and probably well beyond that.

Instead of panicking and reaching for instant and illogical solutions to its problems, Israel has to return to a patient and steady approach to victory. It is the only way for it to destroy terror groups and allow a different Palestinian polity to emerge before determining the fate of Judea and Samaria. That, as Nobel Laureate Professor Robert Aumann noted in his speech to the conference on Saturday night, is the only way for Israel to ever achieve peace.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It's official: Anti-Semitism is "in." The decision to award the Palestinian film Paradise Now the Golden Globes Award for best foreign film tells us that Palestinian terror against Israelis has become so acceptable that it is now Hollywood kitsch.

The sight of the Jewish American diva Sarah Jessica Parker, of Sex in the City fame, excitedly announcing that a film which glorifies the mass murder of Jews in Israel was the big winner for 2005 only served to demonstrate how deep this trivialization of evil now runs.

On Wednesday, it was reported that the Jordanian border police have adopted a new policy regarding the entry of Israeli tourists into the Hashemite Kingdom. Any Israeli trying to enter Jordan will be turned away at the border if he is wearing or carrying any Jewish religious paraphernalia. This anti-Semitic policy, the Jordanian authorities explain, stems from security concerns. Jews, after all, are prized targets for terrorists. By this reasoning, stopping people with overtly Jewish appearances, or who have Jewish ritual articles in their luggage, is a friendly gesture.

The Foreign Ministry is not pleased with this newest Jordanian move. Israeli officials are reportedly trying to reverse the new orders. The Israeli protest is ironic because the government itself uses similar justifications for its policy of prohibiting Jews from praying on the Temple Mount. The government claims that Jews are forbidden from worshipping at Judaism's holiest site because allowing Jewish worship entails security risks.

It is hard to muster much righteous wrath towards the Golden Globes gang for granting their prize to a movie that extols the virtues of mass murderers of Jews. Today the official policy of the Israeli government regarding the status and rights of Jews in Judea and Samaria is itself based on anti-Semitic foundations.

Case in point is the government's handling of the Jewish "squatters" in the former marketplace in Hebron. The property in dispute is owned by a Jewish trust - the Magen Avot Sephardic Community - which purchased the land 199 years ago. Today, the Magen Avot Sephardic Community is headed by former Sephardic chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. The Community wants the property to be used to house Jews.

On the face of it, it all seems rather cut and dried. The area is directly adjacent to the Jewish Avraham Avinu neighborhood. It is owned by Jews who want its current Jewish residents to remain in place. Why would the government have a problem with eight Jewish families living in the former shops in full accord with the expressed wishes of the property's owner?

On Tuesday morning I asked Lieutenant Assaf Azoulay, the spokesman for the Judea and Samaria Division, this question during a visit to Hebron. Azoulay responded angrily, "It's an issue of the supremacy of law!" He then proceeded to shout that the Supreme Court ordered that the Jews be expelled from the former shops and the IDF's job is to implement the high court's ruling.

The problem is that the Supreme Court never held a hearing on the issue and certainly never made a decision on the matter. Palestinians did petition the court some five years ago, asking that the Jews who had "squatted" in the stores - that have been empty since 1994 and since replaced by new shops built by the Hebron municipality - be expelled. The issue was argued before the appeals committee of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria two years ago.

In their ruling, the military judges tended to accept the recommendation to allow the Jews to rent the property in accordance with the wishes of the property's owners. But the judges' common sense clashed with the state prosecution's world view. Last October, for no apparent reason, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz decided that the Jewish families must be removed from the shops no later than February 15.

And here we arrive at the main issue. In 1949, after conquering Judea and Samaria, the Jordanian regime seized all Jewish owned lands and placed them under the control of the Jordanian Custodian for Enemy Property. Jews were by law prohibited from entering the areas. In 1967, after Israel took control of Judea and Samaria, the government transferred control over the seized Jewish lands to the Custodian for Absentee Lands in the Civil Administration.

The question arises, why did the government not simply allow the Jewish land owners to reassert their rights over their lands? Israel's refusal to enable Jewish landowners in Judea and Samaria to exercise their rights over their private property constitutes an Israeli adoption of the anti-Semitic Jordanian legal regime which denied all Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria.

ON THE face of it, this past Monday those who believe that Jewish civil and property rights in Judea and Samaria should be defended scored a major victory at the district courthouse in Kfar Saba.

There on Monday afternoon, District Court Judge Navah Bechor acquitted Mr. Avri Ran of charges of aggravated assault against an Arab who trespassed onto his clover field on March 20, 2005.

Ran, the owner of the "Eternal Hills" organic ranch in Samaria, was indicted last spring on charges of aggravated assault of an Arab named Hader Masalam Abu Haniyeh from the village of Hirbat Yanoun. Since the altercation 10 months ago, Ran has been prohibited from entering Judea and Samaria. For the past five months he has been jailed pending the conclusion of his trial due to the prosecution's claim that his "ideological zeal" rendered him a danger to the public.

Ran asserted that abetted by extremist leftist activists, Abu Haniyeh and his associate Amar Abu Shehadeh trespassed on his field with a tractor with the purpose of destroying his crop two months before the harvest. He maintained that he and three of his employees had gone to the field on the morning of March 20 to prevent the two men from harming his crop. Disturbingly, both the police and the state prosecutors refused to investigate Ran's version of events. They adamantly insisted that Ran and his men had brutally assaulted the two Arabs, and accepted the Arabs' statement that Ran and his men had a history of abusing their Arab neighbors, who never caused them any harm.

During Ran's three month trial, the police and prosecution's claims against Ran and his three employees completely unraveled. At a hearing on December 1, Ran's attorney presented a film produced in November by a French television crew where the Abu Haniyeh and Abu Shehadeh gave a candid version of the events of March 20. On film, speaking to a sympathetic reporter, they explained that extremist leftist activists from Israel and abroad had distributed photographs of Ran to Arab villagers and asked them to provoke Ran by trespassing on his field and by filing complaints against him with the police.

In his court testimony, under cross examination, Abu Haniyeh admitted that accompanied by these leftist activists, Arabs from Yanoun routinely entered Ran's field with the aim of destroying his crop. Abu Haniyeh further admitted that not only had Ran "not assaulted me," but that "I was instructed that anytime that Avri was in the area, I had to exaggerate what happened and get Avri in trouble."

In her ruling, Judge Bechor noted that in his testimony before the court, Bentzi Kessler, the Civil Administration's land supervisor for the Nablus district, "stated that [Ran] has cultivated the clover field at least since 2000 and that his ownership of the area stems from his proprietorship of the area, and that land sellers to Jews are afraid to admit that he owns the land for fear that they will be killed."

The judge further noted that the police knew that Ran owned the field because Kessler "had stated his opinion on the matter in the past to two police investigators who questioned him on the issue."

Judge Bechor issued stinging criticism of the police in the Samaria and Judea district for their "tendentious" conduct of the investigation. In her closing paragraph the judge warned, "It would be hoped that in the future, the police will conduct its investigations of similar instances without being locked into preconceived notions and by truly clarifying all the sides' versions of the events."

Although, Bechor's ruling shows that there are judges in Israel who believe that the law should be enforced without prejudice, no solace can be taken from this fact. Over the past 10 months, at the insistence of the state prosecution and the police, two Supreme Court justices - Edna Arbel and Esther Hayut - saw fit to jail Ran pending the conclusion of his trial. They based their decisions on the prosecution's claim that Ran's ideological beliefs rendered him a danger to society.

Yet the protocols of his trial and Judge Bechor's judgment expose an opposite reality. Extremist leftist activists, together with local Arabs, with the backing of the police and the state prosecutors, staged a provocation with the intent of criminalizing Ran and his men who had done nothing but exert their legal right to defend their private property from trespass and destruction. The fact of the matter is that Ran, who was innocent of any wrongdoing, was jailed for five months and kept from his family and his land for 10 months.

THE REALITY that is exposed both by the Ran trial and the current dispute over Jewish property rights in Hebron is that the question of whether Jews do or do not have rights to their property is a question of policy and politics, not a question of law.

Is Israeli society ready to change the current policy? Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is betting that the answer is no. He thinks that just as anti-Semitism is "in" in Hollywood, so too it is "in" in Israel.

And so it is that as terror groups ratchet up their activities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and exact their toll in Jewish blood in Tel Aviv, Olmert is fashioning his political campaign around waging a war against "Jewish hooligans." On Wednesday, Olmert angrily ordered the police and the IDF to take "all necessary measures" to not only eject the Jews from the disputed shops in Hebron but to stop attempting to reach an agreement with them. He further instructed the military and police brass to make plans to expel Jews from eight communities that are considered "unauthorized" because the current government refuses to acknowledge the rights of Jews to build in Judea and Samaria. At the same time, Olmert has announced his intention to waive the road map's requirement for the Palestinians to destroy terror groups by expressing his willingness to open negotiations with the Palestinians even as they prepare to convene a parliament packed with terrorists.

Is Israel about to adopt a policy of fighting Jews rather than defending them against Palestinian terrorists? We'll know the answer to that question on March 28 when Israelis go to the polls and elect their next government.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

As Israel's election season moves into high gear, one key question now emerging is how much is the Bush administration planning to impose itself and its preferences on the Israeli electorate?

There are three sides to the question's increasing centrality.

The first is historic. The US has had an unfortunate habit of meddling in Israeli elections ever since the current president's father, George H. W. Bush, played a central role in getting Yitzhak Rabin and his leftist Labor party elected to office in 1992. Back then, Bush pere insinuated himself into the election campaign by abjectly refusing then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir's requests to provide Israel with $10 billion in loan guarantees to enable the country to absorb some one million Jews from the former Soviet Union.

In 1996, then US president Bill Clinton and his advisers went one step further. In attempting to secure Shimon Peres's election over Likud challenger Binyamin Netanyahu, Clinton came to Israel and actively campaigned for Peres. Alas for Clinton, Palestinian terrorism proved the decisive factor in bringing Netanyahu over the hump and securing his narrow win over Peres.

In the 1999 elections, when Netanyahu faced off against Labor leader Ehud Barak, Clinton and his associates took no chances. Dispensing with even a fig leaf of propriety, Clinton sent his own election advisers to Israel to manage Barak's entire campaign. Bob Schrum, James Carville and Stanley Greenberg created a campaign for Barak based on fragmenting the Israeli electorate and prevaricating about Barak's agenda.

They were successful. The Israeli electorate catapulted Barak to power.

REFRESHINGLY, in the 2001 and 2003 elections, the current Bush administration refrained by and large from siding with any party. This non-interference in the democratic processes of the Israeli electorate was perhaps the clearest indication of its friendly intentions and respect for the Jewish state.

Today that fine tradition of stepping back and allowing the democratic chips to fall where they may seems to have ended. Since Ariel Sharon broke off from the Likud and formed Kadima at the end of November, the administration has made it self-evident that it wants a Kadima victory and is willing to do a great deal to ensure that such a victory comes about. Since Sharon's second stroke two weeks ago, Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made it clear that in Sharon's absence they want Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to form the next government.

WHICH BRINGS us to the second side of US interference in Israeli elections. The notable aspect of this meddling is that when it occurs, the US sides only with the Left. The question is why?

The US accurately believes that its interests would be advanced by the termination of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Once, the US recognized that the conflict stemmed from an Arab refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, and thus could end only when the Arabs lost hope of ever being able to destroy Israel.

The first Bush administration adopted a more aggressive policy toward Israel, maintaining that Israel rather than the Arabs was the source of the problem, and that if Israel could be pressured to appease the Arabs sufficiently the conflict would end. This gradually morphed into a Euro-American cliche: Israeli territorial concessions and the founding of a Palestinian state on areas vacated by Israel will end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The current president entered office three months after the Palestinians launched their terror war against Israel. That war was instigated in direct response to Barak's offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 to create a Palestinian state on nearly all of the disputed territories Israel has controlled since 1967. The Palestinian rejection of this offer sounded the death knell for the Bush-Clinton appeasement policy willingly advanced by the leftist Israeli governments the US was largely responsible for bringing to power. Sadly, although reality bore out the failure of appeasement and the truth that the establishment of a Palestinian state was not the end goal of the PLO, the State Department refused to let the facts disabuse it of its institutional belief that appeasement works.

Since the current Bush administration adopted the Quartet's road map plan for Middle East peace and then rammed it down Israel's throat in May 2003, the Americans have officially readopted Israeli appeasement of the Palestinians as the centerpiece of their policy toward the Jewish state. In the weak, dependent Sharon, the White House found a willing Israeli partner in the advancement of its renewed agenda.

THE QUESTION the White House should ask itself today is what exactly it stands to gain from continuing to advance this agenda. Is Israeli appeasement really the best way to advance the US interest of ending the Arab world's conflict with Israel? What recent history has shown is that the opposite is the case. As the rise of Hamas and the fragmentation of Fatah into warring terrorist gangs in the wake of Israel's retreat from Gaza and northern Samaria - like the enhanced popularity of Hizbullah in Lebanon since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 - shows, Israeli appeasement of Palestinians and other Arab terror groups strengthens the Arab view that it is possible to destroy Israel. As that view gains strength, the Arabs' enthusiasm for the prolongation and widening of the conflict with Israel grows. And so, rather than rendering the conflict more solvable, Israeli appeasement of the Palestinians tends to exacerbate it.

So too, Palestinian behavior since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 illustrates clearly that the central goal of the appeasement strategy - the establishment of a Palestinian state - is not an aim the Palestinians share. The Palestinians have taken the billions of dollars of international aid showered upon them and diverted them to the building up of terror militias. Given a de facto state in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority has insisted on finding ways to deny its own sovereign independence and international responsibilities.

AND SO to the third side of the US policy. The result of Israeli land transfers to the Palestinians has been the transformation of those areas into bases for international terror organizations. Israeli military and intelligence sources, like the Palestinians themselves, have been absolutely clear that in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza al-Qaida operatives have set up shop in the area, joining Hizbullah and other terrorist forces already present. New weaponry has been smuggled in and training bases established.

In pushing for Israeli appeasement of the Palestinians, then, the US is aggressively pursuing the establishment of new bases of international terrorism, supported and, indeed, funded by the US. That is, the US policy of supporting Israeli appeasement and pressuring for further Israeli land handovers to the Palestinians stands in complete contradiction to President Bush's policy for waging the US-led war on international terrorism, which - in every place except Israel - works to deny bases to terrorists and undermine regimes that sponsor and support terrorism.

TO DATE, by ostentatiously inviting Ehud Olmert to Washington ahead of the general elections, the Bush administration has made clear that it hopes to see him form the next government. By pressuring Israel to allow Arab residents of its capital city to vote in the Palestinian elections next week - notwithstanding Hamas's participation in the elections and a Fatah slate dominated by terrorists and led by convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti - the Bush administration has made clear that it supports maximalist Palestinian territorial demands regarding Jerusalem and backs a Palestinian proto-state governed and dominated by active terrorist groups.

As Israelis ask just how far the Bush administration is planning to go in making itself an actor in our electoral process, the White House would be well advised to ask itself some hard questions of its own. It could start with this one: What American interest is served by the exacerbation of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the establishment of operational bases for international terrorism in the Middle East?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Since Ariel Sharon coined the term "disengagement," opponents of Israeli territorial withdrawals have complained about the Orwellian nature of the term. And yet, as hard as opponents of the leftist view that Israel's security is enhanced by Israeli land transfers to Palestinian terrorists fought against the withdrawal policy and pointed out its dangers, their warnings were no match for the concept of "disengagement."

In Israel's geographic, ethnic, and military contexts, the term "disengagement" is first and foremost a psychological concept. It is concerned not with reality but with the deep-seated Israeli yearning to escape from our hostile environment. It holds the promise that Israel can determine a border that will separate us from our hostile neighbors.

In an article published immediately after the conclusion of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria last August, Ha'aretz commentator Ari Shavit upheld the notion of the border. He claimed that the significance of the operation was that "after the era of the settlement ethos and after the era of the peace ethos, the turn has now come for the border ethos."

The problem is that a border can only be meaningful if the people on both sides of the divide recognize it and understand its meaning in the same way. Since the Palestinians do not recognize Israel's right to determine its borders, any border that Israel chooses will only operate in one direction. While Israel will honor Palestinian territorial integrity, the Palestinians will insist on their "right" to cross the border at will.

But reality is no match for psychological yearning. Israelis want to disengage.

Israelis are not unique in their desire to cut themselves off from their culturally alien - not to mention hostile - neighbors. The one-way border syndrome has stricken wide swaths of the Western world. For instance, the conflict between the US and Mexico over regulation of their border is becoming increasingly acute as the Mexican government continues to encourage its citizens to illegally migrate to the US.

Similarly, the leaders of the Arab states along the Mediterranean, such as Morocco, Tunis and Algeria, have obstinately refused repeated European requests to take steps to prevent the massive illegal immigration of their citizens into Europe.

These examples illustrate the complexity of the concept of a border when people on its opposite sides differ on their interpretations of its meaning and importance. Yet Israel's border syndrome is even more hazardous than that suffered by the Americans and the Europeans because at least the Mexican, Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian governments accept the fact of American and European sovereignty. Their conflicts are limited to divergent interpretations of what that sovereignty entails. In Israel's case, the Palestinians have never accepted Israel's sovereignty along any borders whatsoever.

The fact of the matter is that in the wake of the global jihad and the increased rejection of assimilation by cultural and ethnic minorities in Western states, among large and growing sectors of the Western societies, citizens yearn to isolate themselves from an increasingly hostile international environment. In Europe as in sectors of America, citizens ignore the war cries of their enemies and focus their energies on debating their rights in their welfare societies.

Like the Europeans, Israelis crave the luxury of ignoring the country's primary need to ensure its security and the preservation of Israel's character as a Jewish state. Sharon's coining of the term "disengagement" enabled this unrealistic desire to be transformed into a socially acceptable world view and an attractive government policy much as the abstract, amorphous concept of "peace" became the only socially acceptable aim of government policy in the 1990s.

Sharon and his political followers sold the public the belief that if Israel "disengages" from its neighborhood, then Israeli society will finally be able to turn its attentions to "truly important" issues like government welfare payments to single mothers and gay marriage.

The Israeli media has played a critical role in advancing the notion that the dream of disengagement is a realistic policy option. The local media coverage of events in the Palestinian Authority is so superficial and indifferent that an Israeli news consumer would be perfectly justified in believing that events in Ramallah, Jenin and Gaza bear little influence on his life and well-being.
Newscasters speak in the same breath of missiles falling on Ashkelon, al-Qaida attacking from Lebanon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom undercutting the authority of his party leader Binyamin Netanyahu. In the best of cases, the three stories are viewed as equally important by our newscasters. In most cases, Silvan's attempts to humiliate Bibi are covered with far greater passion and attention to detail than attempted missile strikes on the Ashkelon-Eilat oil pipeline and the increased activity of al-Qaida in Lebanon and Gaza.

AGAINST THIS backdrop of Israeli societal self-obsession, the elections to the Palestinian legislative council are scheduled to take place in 12 days. Most of the news coverage and commentary regarding these elections has focused on short-term issues: Will Hamas emerge victorious in the elections? Will Arab residents of Jerusalem be allowed to vote? Although these are interesting issues, they miss the larger reality.

That reality is that regardless of what happens in the elections, and regardless of whether Israel and the Palestinians ever renew negotiations, the contours of the Palestinian state are well known and have been known since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. The anarchy, terror, corruption, poverty and ideological commitment to the destruction of Israel that have been the consistent characteristics of the Palestinian Authority since its inception provide us with a precise description of what the realization of the vision for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict with Israel entails.

Regardless of who emerges victorious in the coming elections (if they actually take place), it is absolutely certain that the Palestinian leadership will be comprised of terrorists, terror sympathizers and terrorist organizations - because these are the only people and parties who are running. The Palestinians themselves explain that in everything relating to the desire to destroy Israel (or what the media and the international diplomatic corps refer to as the parties' "diplomatic platforms"), they see no difference between Hamas and Fatah. For Palestinian voters, the principal difference between the two movements is that Fatah is viewed as corrupt and Hamas is viewed as honest. This stark distinction has prompted even Christians to support Hamas.

And so we arrive at the main fact that we have refused to acknowledge since the Palestinian Authority was established. We already know what a Palestinian state is because we have been living next to it for 11 years.

For Israel, that state has four significant attributes. First, the Palestinian state is a failed state comparable to Somalia and will remain a failed state comparable to Somalia. The Palestinian state will never be ruled by law. It will forever be ruled by gangs that thrive on chaos. It will never fight terror, but rather will always enable terror. It will never build the physical, economic or ideological foundations upon which a healthy economy can grow but rather will continue to divert its funds to financing terrorism and will continue to indoctrinate its people in the culture of jihad. The transformation of the former Israeli communities in Gaza into terror training camps is just one example that illustrates this general principle.

Secondly, the Palestinian leadership, whether it comes from Fatah or Hamas, will always speak in two voices. When dealing with Arab and other Third World states, its members will present themselves as the leaders of the sovereign state of "Palestine" and sign accords as the leaders of that state. In their interactions with the West and in the UN, the Palestinians will claim that they cannot accept the status of an independent state because, they will claim, they are still living under "Israeli occupation." Just as on the eve of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip the PA's leaders redefined Gaza's boundaries to include the pre-1967 community of Netiv Ha'asara in order to argue that the "occupation" hadn't ended, so too if Israel were to withdraw from 90 percent of Judea and Samaria the Palestinians would argue that they remain under occupation. Were Israel to vacate east Jerusalem, the Palestinians would turn to the 1947 UN partition plan and claim that the Negev and the Galilee remain "occupied." That is, the Palestinians will claim to live under Israeli occupation for as long as Israel exists in any borders.

Thirdly, as happened in Gaza over the past few months, and as happened after Israel withdrew from the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria in the 1990s, the Palestinians will continue to use all lands that Israel vacates as operational bases for the augmentation of their terror capabilities. This week, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) Director Yuval Diskin testified in the Knesset that since Israel vacated Gaza, weapons smuggling into Gaza from Egypt has increased by 300 percent. Diskin also noted that from October to December, terror attacks and attempted terror attacks increased nearly sixfold.

In the international arena, the national interests of EU member states - securing the flow of oil imports from Persian Gulf states, placating their increasingly irredentist Muslim minority populations and continuing to challenge US power on convenient diplomatic battlefields - dictate that further Israeli withdrawals will in no way impact their position on Israel or the Palestinians. The Europeans will continue to support the "national rights" of the Palestinians regardless of their actions or Israeli attempts at appeasement. In the absence of a concerted and consistent Israeli diplomatic offensive, the Americans too will continue their current policy of pressuring Israel for further territorial concessions to the Palestinians to buy diplomatic support from the Arabs and the Europeans.

ALL OF this leads to one simple conclusion. Israel's desire for a border cannot be translated into an effective policy. The fact of the matter is that no Israeli security interest is advanced by transferring territory to the Palestinians or by continuing to support the establishment of a Palestinian state that in point of fact already exists and in point of fact will never acknowledge its own existence.

The question then is what is Israel to do? The answer lies in recalling Sharon's actions as premier before his leftist metamorphosis. In March 2002, when Sharon ordered the IDF to carry out Operation Defensive Shield in Judea and Samaria, he proved one thing. When our leaders uphold Israel's right to defend itself, the Israeli people rally behind them.

Since the Palestinians are not going to cure themselves of their national pathologies any time soon, Israel's national policies must be built not on the dream of a border that will never be recognized, but on the necessity of guaranteeing its security. Happily, Israel has the ability to defend itself.

But in order to realize our abilities, our national leaders have to make the majority of the public recognize that the reality in which we live is a reality from which we cannot disengage. The ethos of the border is a false ethos. The only national ethos that we can reasonably unite behind and prosper from for the long haul is the ethos of national security.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

What legacy has Ariel Sharon left Israel, and what will be the long-term impact of that legacy on Israel? Since the prime minister was stricken by a stroke last week, columnists and commentators have been clamoring to describe Sharon and to define the impact of his years in power on Israel and the Middle East. Disturbingly, most of the commentators have based their views of Sharon's tenure in office on a myth.

The myth of Sharon and his leadership is that over the past two years he redefined the center of Israeli politics. In The Washington Post Charles Krauthammer claimed: "Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way." Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Oren argued that Sharon "began his political career on the left, swung keenly right, and concluded in the center." Other conservative commentators, like Peter Berkowitz at The Weekly Standard and James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal's online publication, have made identical and equally false arguments.

It is true that Sharon restructured the political map of Israel over the past two years. But he did not do so by blazing a new path, with a new vision for Israeli politics, society and security. Sharon redefined Israel's political map by embracing the Israeli Left. And in so doing, as one top military official dolefully put it to me in November, "Sharon brought post-Zionism into the mainstream of Israeli public discourse."

FOR YEARS Israel has been divided between Right and Left. The Right argues that given Arab rejectionism of Israel's right to exist, Israel must take all necessary measures to ensure that it is capable of defending itself, by itself, from all threats to its security.

For its part the Left has claimed that Arab rejectionism of Israel is due to Israeli actions and, as a result, the Arabs can and ought to be appeased. To appease the Arabs the Left believes that Israel must transfer territory to the Palestinians and enable the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Until September 2000, when PLO chieftain Yasser Arafat began the Palestinian terror war against Israel, the Israeli Left claimed that the appeasement of the Palestinians had to be conducted in the course of negotiations with the PLO. After its resounding electoral defeat in 2001, the Left updated its policy. The new policy of the Left was the unilateral surrender of territory to the Palestinians.

Like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak before him, Sharon's political cachet was based on the public's perception of him as a security hawk and a patriot. What differentiated Sharon from Rabin and Barak was not so much his policies, but rather the fact that he came from the rightist Likud rather than the leftist Labor party.

Rabin's adoption of the strategically catastrophic Oslo peace process with the PLO, and Barak's cataclysmically misguided peace offers to Arafat at Camp David and Taba, paved the way for the Palestinian terror war against Israel. These policies provided Israel's enemies with the military means, the territory and the political legitimacy necessary to carry out their war.

Yet the demise of these policies did not leave Israelis without other options. In the 1996 elections, as in 2001 and 2003, Israelis turned to the Likud and the political Right for remedies. Indeed, in 2003 Sharon won his smashing victory for the Likud after militarily reentering the cities of Judea and Samaria to fight terror, and ridiculing the irresponsibility of Labor's proposed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

And then Sharon - for reasons still unknown because Sharon himself refused to explain them - took a sharp leftward turn and adopted the very policies the Israeli electorate had just so resoundingly rejected.

WHILE THE myth of Sharon as a centrist is being propagated by conservative analysts whose sympathies until Sharon's political transformation lay consistently with the Israeli Right, the people who seem most ready to acknowledge the truth are the Leftist commentators. Radical leftist Israeli novelists David Grossman and Amos Oz both embraced Sharon as a man of the Left in commentaries in The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian newspapers over the weekend. Oz wrote, "Sharon's rhetoric changed overnight. First his vocabulary began to sound like that of his rivals."

Sharon's rhetorical shift to the Left was followed by his policy shift in the same direction when, against the backdrop of ever-increasing Palestinian radicalization, he called for and carried out its reconfigured policy of appeasement by unilaterally surrendering Gaza and northern Samaria to Palestinian terrorists. As Oz noted approvingly, "They called him a bulldozer when he planted the settlements, and indeed he acted like a bulldozer when he uprooted them. The evacuation of the Israeli settlers from Gaza was a military operation. Sharon smashed the settlers in Gaza in the same blitzkrieg style in which he won his many wars."

Like Rabin's leftward shift of a decade ago and its attendant handover of territory and power to Palestinian terrorist organizations, Sharon's policies have wrought terrible consequences for Israel's security. Last Friday, even Haaretz's leftist military commentator Amir Oren acknowledged that "the disengagement looked like a failed initiative in most of its aspects."

As IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz acknowledged last week, the army today is at a loss to find adequate responses to the post-withdrawal transformation of Gaza into the largest terrorist base in the Arab world. As well, with the acquisition of an arsenal of missiles and mortars, including Katyusha rockets and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles by the Palestinians, the security fences around both Gaza and Judea and Samaria, which have long been the Left's ultimate answer to Palestinian terrorism, have been proven to be colossally misguided.

Even as it acknowledges this failure, the Left embraces Sharon, as Amir Oren put it, because of "hatred of the settlers... more than from any belief in the wisdom of Sharon."

IT IS true, of course, that Sharon has remade the political map of Israel, just as Rabin did before him. But he did not do so by changing Israelis' basic commitment to their own security. Instead he has made the success of the leftist ostrich policy of "separating" Israel from the Arabs by handing territories to Israel's enemies the central issue of future political campaigns.

Sharon's personal prestige gave the Left a new lease on life, split the Right, delegitimized his political camp both domestically and internationally and weakened Israel's party system. Today, energized by Sharon's unraveling of the Right, Israel's Left has become ever more radicalized. Last week, it was reported that Jeris Jeris, an Israeli Arab member of the Meretz-Yahad party and a former head of the Pasuta village council in the Galilee, had been arrested and charged with spying for Iran.

This is not to say that the party where Jeris hoped to run for Knesset has become a collaborator with Iran. Indeed, its leader announced that he would be happy to join a Sharon-led government. But the fact of the matter is that Meretz - which in 1992 voted for the expulsion of 417 Hamas terrorists to Lebanon - has become so radicalized that an Iranian agent felt he could comfortably operate from within its party apparatus.

The large "centrist" faction Sharon is so hailed for having discovered is little more than a collection of leftists like Shimon Peres and Haim Ramon on the one hand, and opportunistic and non-ideological Likud members like acting premier Ehud Olmert and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni on the other. Sharon has left no coherent vision for the state other than Peres's: further surrender to Palestinian terrorism based on the expulsion of thousands upon thousands of Jews from their homes, in the vain hope that strengthening the enemy will lessen the costs of its war on Israel.

WHATEVER the results of the coming post-Sharon elections may be, one thing is all but certain. Sharon's legacy of adopting the Left's vision of Israeli policy will eventually be abandoned. As was the case with Rabin and Barak before him, Sharon's adoption of the Left's view of Israel's security predicament, based as it is on false assumptions, will reach a point where its failure will no longer be deniable. When this occurs, Israeli voters will elect a rightist government. Hopefully when that happens, the Right will not be induced to repeat Sharon's mistakes.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Wednesday night ushered in a new era in Israel's political history. As we watch and worry as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dangles between life and death, one thing is absolutely clear. Sharon's massive cerebral hemorrhage on Wednesday night spelled the end of his political career. Sharon will never return to lead the State of Israel. He will never make a full recovery.

Whatever one's views of Sharon's policies and the quality of his leadership, no Israeli can feel anything but sorrow at Sharon's abrupt demise. A nation's sudden and dramatic separation from its leader is never a good thing. It is all the more debilitating when the leader in question is as popular and powerful as Sharon.

There will come a proper time to inquire into the reports we received about Sharon's health in the three weeks that passed since the premier suffered his initial stroke. Those questions will no doubt focus on statements by his spin doctors attesting to his good health and on the media's refusal to ask hard questions about Sharon's ability to continue in office after that first stroke. But now, as we enter the post-Sharon era, those questions are beside the point. The task that now besets our political leadership and the Israeli people as a whole is to focus on the country's present challenges -- for they suffer no delay.

Without a doubt, the greatest challenge facing the State of Israel today is Iran's nuclear weapons program.

Until Wednesday night, the rumor-mill running between Jerusalem, Washington and the capital cities of Europe was full of reports that Sharon planned to order an Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear installations just before our general elections at the end of March. There was nothing new in these rumors. Similar ones have been making the rounds for over a year now. In autumn 2004 for instance, it was whispered that Sharon would order such an attack on the day of the US presidential elections in November 2004. This past spring it was claimed that Sharon would give the order during the IDF's withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria. And now, for the past two months or so, rumors have circulated that Sharon was planning a strike to destroy Iran's nuclear installations just ahead of the elections on March 28.

There can be no room for doubt. The need to conduct a military strike against Iran's nuclear program increases with each passing day. The threat that Iran's nuclear weapons program constitutes for Israel is the most egregious example since the Holocaust of what happens when states and societies where anti-Semitism is of a genocidal nature are allowed to acquire the means to attack the Jews.

Israel's experience, like the experience of the Jewish people throughout its history, has taught that such anti-Semites seek out opportunities to use their acquired means to kill Jews. And now, against the increasingly tangible threat that Iran will soon acquire nuclear capabilities, Israel finds itself in an election season marked by political uncertainty and instability.

Even in the absence of domestic political chaos, any Israeli plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities is today hampered by two things. First, the anti-Semitism that is endemic in the Iranian regime is equally endemic throughout the entire Muslim and Arab world. Were Iran to carry out tomorrow President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's promise to complete Hitler's work, such an act would no doubt be met with glee throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

As well, Iran has been able to advance its nuclear weapons program in large part due to the vast increase in anti-Semitic sentiments throughout the Western world. Over the past five years, the notion that there is something acceptable about murdering Jews and seeking to destroy Israel has met with increasing acceptance among large swathes of European society and the ranks of the international Left. Today, as Israel enters the post-Sharon era, it is hindered by unprecedented diplomatic weakness, largely as a result of the prevalence of Western anti-Semitism and its concomitant demand that Israel do all it can to appease its enemies.

For Israel to be capable of carrying out an attack against Iran's nuclear installations it will need to receive US and NATO backing for the move. The majority of international security analysts agree that Israeli fighter bombers en route to Iran will need to fly over Iraqi airspace and may even need to refuel in Iraq. Turkish bases may also be necessary. Given this, Israel is today in dire need of leadership capable of handling some of the most sensitive and monumental diplomacy in its history - even if such leadership were only able to convince others to carry out the attacks in our place.

The genocidal anti-Semitism that lies at the root of Iran's quest to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons is also the source of Palestinian-led terror war against Israel. Yet, unlike the case of Iran, whose wherewithal to match its desire to destroy Israel with actual military capabilities has been uninfluenced by Israeli actions, the Palestinians' terror capabilities have been vastly expanded as a direct result of Israeli policies.

Today, as the Palestinian Authority has ceased to operate in any coherent manner; as the Egyptian border with Gaza has been open for terror traffic for three months; and as Hamas has emerged as the most prevalent force in Palestinian politics and society, it is impossible to deny that Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza and northern Samaria has vastly empowered Palestinian terrorists. Today the Gaza Strip has become one of the most active and dangerous bases for jihadi terrorism in the world.

And yet, the rapid transformation of Gaza into the most active terror base in the Arab world has not led to calls by the international community, led by Washington for Israel to take the military measures necessary to destroy the emerging threat. To the contrary: The international community, led by the Bush Administration, has greeted Gaza's mutation into what Palestinians refer to as a new Somalia, and what for Israelis and Westerners in general is more comparable to Taliban ruled Afghanistan, with ever more strident demands for continued Israeli appeasement of Palestinian terrorists. The latest testimony to Israel's unprecedented diplomatic weakness in Washington came with President George W. Bush's demand this week that Israel allow Arab residents of Jerusalem to vote in the upcoming Palestinian elections - elections in which Hamas is expected to receive a plurality, if not a majority of votes.

Amid the threat now constituted by Gaza and the rising chaos in Palestinian society generally, three weeks before the Palestinian elections Israel's defense and diplomatic establishments have no answers to give. Israel has no coherent policy to speak of for dealing with the acquisition of Strella anti-aircraft missiles or Katyusha missiles by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. It has no policy for contending with the fact that Al Qaida has now become an actor in the Palestinian areas and in south Lebanon. It has no effective policy for dealing with the repeated attacks against its vital infrastructures in Ashkelon or with assumption that the Palestinians will soon transfer their newfound capabilities from Gaza to Judea and Samaria. Israel's security brass has no policy for contending with the manifest links between the Iranian regime and Palestinian terror groups.

Our leadership's befuddlement was perhaps most sharply manifested on Wednesday by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, who in a public statement laid out Israel's conditions for opening a dialogue with Hamas.

Mofaz's statement was not merely ill-advised. It was completely irrational. Hamas, like the Iranian ayatollahs, is a terror group totally committed to the eradication of Israel. This fact was brought home clearly in an Egyptian television interview given by Mariam Farahat, aka Umm Nidal, the mother of three dead Hamas terrorists on December 21. Farahat is considered a moderate Hamas member and is a Hamas candidate in the Palestinian elections.

In a transcript published by MEMRI, Farahat, who justified the murder of all Israelis everywhere as a legitimate means of jihad, spelled out what "peace" with the Jews means for Hamas. For her, "Peace means the liberation of all of Palestine, from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] Sea. When this is accomplished - if they want peace, we will be ready. They may live under the banner of the Islamic state. That is the future of Palestine that we are striving towards."

This is Israel's current reality. Our main security challenge on all fronts is to destroy our enemies' ability to match their genocidal anti-Semitism with the means to kill us. And the carrying out of this task can only be accomplished by a leadership that truly understands that we are not to blame for our enemies' hatred and that we can do nothing to mitigate it.

The fact that Arab and Islamic anti-Semitism is met by and large by indifference from the West, which itself is suffering from a milder yet increasingly widespread form of Jew hatred, makes clear the third challenge facing Israel today: ensuring our economic independence. In the history of nations, there has scarcely been a case where the side with the weaker economy prevailed over its enemy in a war of attrition. Israel must ensure its economic vitality and independence in order to guarantee that our defense industries can continue to operate and that our military forces are properly equipped and trained. As well, in light of the rampant anti-Semitism in Western Europe, Israel must be capable of absorbing waves of Jewish immigration from Europe.

Today Israel is in the midst of a painful but successful process of economic liberalization and growth. The political instability that Sharon's departure has induced can threaten this process which is so vital to the future of the country.

In light of the critical challenges that Israel faces today, our current political instability places us in a difficult position. The fact of the matter is that Sharon's Kadima party without Sharon is nothing more than a patchwork of politicians who diverge on so many issues it is impossible to see it fashioning coherent policies. This is a cause for alarm. As well, the fractiousness of the nationalist camp that has been manifested by the Likud ministers' unjustifiable opposition to Binyamin Netanyahu's party leadership, is an additional cause for Israeli weakness at this critical juncture.

One of Sharon's greatest strengths was his ability to form coalitions of people from disparate backgrounds and political camps and move them forward to achieve goals that appeared impossible to attain. Now, with Sharon no longer leading the country, our political leaders must find a way to act in a similar manner. The future of the state depends on their success.

Originally pubished in The Jerusalem Post.

One day, years from now, after the war to defeat the global jihad has been won, historians will proclaim that the years of this war marked the darkest period in the history of Western journalism.
 

In an essay in the current issue of Commentary magazine entitled "The Panic over Iraq," Norman Podhoretz makes the case that in its biased, distorted coverage of the American-led campaign in Iraq, the Western media, or what in the US is referred to as the "mainstream media," is doing its best to ensure that America and its allies are defeated in a war that they are winning.

This, Podhoretz argues "is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal."

For the liberal American establishment, a victory in Iraq, and against the global jihad overall, will sound the death knell for the Vietnam syndrome. That syndrome, which has been internalized and espoused as a writ of faith by the mainstream media for almost 40 years, dictates that the US and its allies can only be viewed as moral powers if they renounce war even when it is being waged against them by forces bent on their destruction.

To combat the media campaign being waged against the war, the US military is taking measures to bypass the mainstream media and get news of the US forces' victories on the ground in Iraq to the attention of the general public. Public affairs officers in the Marine Corps for instance, have begun sending out press briefings to prominent military weblogs and to veterans associations.

Last week The Washington Post attempted to stir up controversy over the US military's attempt to bypass the mainstream media. In an article entitled, "Bloggers, money now weapons in Information War," the Post portrayed an invitation extended by the Marine Corps to military analyst Bill Roggio, who operates a popular military weblog called "The Fourth Rail," to embed with its forces in Iraq, as an attempt to manipulate coverage of the campaign in Iraq. The article portrayed Roggio as nothing but a military cheerleader, downplaying his field reporting and critiques of the mainstream media's reliance on manufactured stories promulgated by terrorists attacking US forces in Iraq.

There are four significant aspects to the story of Roggio's embedment with the Marines. First, in extending an invitation to him, the Marines showed that they are aware of the fact that they are losing the media battle on the home front due to the ferocity of the anti-war animus in the editorial boardrooms of America. Second, the Marines showed that they are looking for ways to bypass the obstacle of the hostile media establishment because they understand that in order to maintain the domestic support for the war - support they need to continue fighting to victory - they must get their stories to the American public.

Third, the Post's puerile reaction to the Marines' attempt to bypass their editorial chopping block shows that the mainstream media is concerned that their uniform animosity to the war may actually harm their credibility. Finally, the Marines' willingness to turn to bloggers shows that at least in the US, the Internet revolution is weakening the mainstream media's control over information.

OBSERVING THIS Homeric battle for the public's trust and support taking place in the US from Jerusalem is a cause for despair. The fact of the matter is that at least in America, there is a reasoned, impassioned debate over whether or not the media suffers from an institutional bias. And both sides are taking the steps they deem necessary to ensure that their side wins both the debate and the support of the American public.

In Israel's media culture, no such debate exists. It isn't that Israelis do not see the far-left bias of the major media outlets in the country. Everyone here knows that the press is leftist. The problem is that now that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has himself adopted the political platform of the radical Left, there is no debate about anything at all. Sharon's political opponents receive little more than a sneering brush-off from the major papers while Sharon himself is venerated from every angle in the best tradition of North Korea.

Last weekend's mass-circulation Hebrew papers are case in point. In Ma'ariv's news supplement, diplomatic "analyst" Ben Caspit wrote yet another of his nauseating hagiographies of Sharon. He romanticized Sharon's hospitalization for his stroke two weeks ago, making it appear that Sharon was a heroic figure even as he had absolutely no idea where he was when he was being wheeled into the emergency room. Caspit painted a picture of the brave Sharon, alone in the hospital until his loyal aides belatedly arrived at the scene.

"Sharon was there with himself. Completely alone. It was a refreshing change. He actually enjoyed this state of affairs, (as much as he could given his condition). His long career in the IDF and in politics has taught him that even loneliness has its advantages. And here, suddenly, he got a bit of quiet."

There's never an airsickness bag around when you need one.

Then there is Yediot Ahronot's diplomatic "analyst" Nahum Barnea. He devoted the first half of his two-page spread in Yediot's news supplement this weekend to a mind numbing, pandering interview with former Shin Bet director Avi Dichter - Sharon's latest recruit to his Kadima one-man party. Barnea, who is generally a pacifist, ignored his anti-war tendencies in this case to buck up Sharon's newest pretty boy.

He began his veneration of Dichter as follows: "Avi Dichter, 53, calls to mind Ariel Sharon at his age: Handsome, charismatic, cresting on the wave of what is viewed as his personal success in his wars against the Arabs, very assertive in his views, and free of even a speck of trust in our cousins the Palestinians. Maybe because of this Sharon likes him: he looks at him and sees a wild horse that he must tame. He looks at him and sees himself."

Last week Israel absorbed terrorist attacks on all fronts. Kassam rockets rained down on Ashkelon, Sderot and the communities of the Western Negev. Katyusha rockets were launched against cities in the North. Palestinians attacked Israelis throughout Judea and Samaria and an IDF officer was killed when he stopped a suicide bomber at a roadblock outside of Tulkarm.

The Palestinian Authority has ceased to operate in any effective way. Foreigners are kidnapped on a daily basis in Gaza. All Palestinian terror groups have called off their imaginary cease-fire. Hamas's chieftain Khaled Mashaal just rounded off a two week visit to Iran, replete with a prolonged visit to a Revolutionary Guards training base. And the IDF has acknowledged that al-Qaida has successfully seeded itself not only in Gaza but in northern Samaria.

But all of this is relegated to the back pages of the newspapers, because the only thing that Israelis need to know is that Sharon is a great man and a great leader. He's as fit as a fiddle and the fact that the physicians at Hadassah hospital lied two weeks ago to the Israeli public when they said that Sharon had suffered from a minor stroke, when in fact, as came out a week later he had a major stroke, should be of no concern to anyone.

It is a terrible thing when in a democracy as small and as vulnerable as Israel the media takes it upon itself to collude with a failed, sick leader in systematically lying to the public about the state of the country in order to advance a dangerous political agenda that has already been borne out by events as a failure.

Indeed, when the history of our times is written, the treachery of the Western media will fill future generations with disgust. And the perfidy of the Israeli media will be the source of the most extreme revulsion.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.