Tuesday, did the Israeli electorate determine that Zionism is no longer relevant? The chattering class's repeated characterization of this week's elections as "post-Zionist," prompted me to return to the sources. To Theodor Herzl.

Would Herzl have understood the problems and dangers plaguing Israel today? How would the father of modern Zionism deal with the current challenges facing the Jewish people?

I found the answers in an essay on Herzl written in 1938 by Professor Benzion Netanyahu, republished in his 2003 book, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (Hebrew).

Herzl distinguished himself from the other early Zionist leaders by virtue of his ability to place the establishment of the Jewish state in the Land of Israel in the larger context of global affairs. In contrast, his colleagues at the end of the 19th century approached the issue of the Jewish state as an internal and sectoral Jewish issue unrelated to world trends, regional developments and threats to Diaspora Jewry.

Herzl's perspective drew him to the conclusion that the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state depended on simultaneous actions in the international, regional and internal Jewish arenas. Internationally, Herzl worked to achieve Turkish and European recognition and support for the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Herzl sought a legal charter for the state to ensure that the right of Jews to immigrate and take possession of the land would not be challenged as their rights were challenged in the Diaspora.

Regionally, Herzl understood that establishing Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel would provoke the local Arabs to attack them just as the presence of Jewish settlements in Europe was enough to provoke local Christians to attack them. As a result, he repeatedly stressed the need for a Jewish army charged with defending the settlers from attack.

Among world Jewry, Herzl understood that even if the international community recognized the Jewish people's legal right to establish their state in the Land of Israel, the state would not be born unless the Jews wished to establish it. And so Herzl worked to instill a national will to sovereignty and liberty among the long powerless and oppressed Jews of Europe. As Herzl explained to them, "Our proximity to Jerusalem is the same as our desire for Jerusalem. It is question of the will that beats within us. Our task [as Zionists] is to awaken this will, to strengthen it, and if possible to spur it on."

Prof. Netanyahu authored his essay as Hitler completed the remilitarization of the Rhineland and was poised to take over Austria and Czechoslovakia; Britain breached its international legal commitments to the Zionists as set out in the League of Nations Mandate and the Balfour Declaration, throwing its support behind the Arabs; the Arab terror war against the Zionists in Israel raged on with Nazi support and the Zionist leadership under Chaim Weizmann daily demonstrated its weakness and fecklessness.

Today, with the erosion of Israel's international legitimacy; the establishment of the Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority; the inexorable progress of Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Israeli elections results that gave the most Knesset seats to two parties dedicated to the mass expulsion of Jews from their homes and the handover of Judea and Samaria to Hamas, Herzl's Zionist strategy is as relevant for the Jewish people as it was in 1938.

IN SPITE of the Israeli media's best efforts, Zionism did not die on Tuesday. Although the formation of Kadima strengthened the Israeli post-Zionist Left, it is impossible to view the election results as a mandate to implement Kadima's policy of mass expulsions and military retreat from Judea and Samaria.

The nation is split in half between Left and Right. The parties that support capitulation won 54 seats and those that oppose capitulating won 50 seats.

Although both Kadima head Ehud Olmert and Labor leader Amir Peretz are capable of forming coalition governments, with the support of all seven MKs from the Gil Pensioners' Party - support that is far from assured - both have but a bare majority for the expulsion and retreat plan. Indeed, the only stable coalitions for Kadima or Labor include anti-capitulation parties. This state of affairs together with the low voter turnout Tuesday means that Kadima and its sister parties on the Left did not receive a mandate and do not have the political strength to automatically implement their expulsion and retreat plan.

So Zionism, as represented today by the Nationalist camp, is not dead. But as they did in Herzl's time, the Zionists today face difficult and complicated challenges. If Herzl's followers today follow the example he set in 1897, like him they can change Israel's current diplomatic, military and social realities. They can renew the nation's faith in itself and strengthen Israel's international posture and legitimacy. By accomplishing these goals, they will remove the threat of capitulation and loss of Jewish sovereignty for the foreseeable future and set the conditions for Israel's victory in the Palestinian terror war.

To achieve these aims, Herzl's disciples, whose most prominent political representatives are the Likud and National Union-NRP, need to operate simultaneously in the international and Jewish arenas.

Internationally the Nationalist camp needs to address three separate audiences. First, they must turn to the neo-conservative leadership in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe.

Two years ago, the Nationalist camp was abandoned by American neo-conservatives. This was largely as a result of the neo-conservatives' unqualified support for US President George W. Bush, who supported Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria in spite of the fact that his plan flew in the face of the Bush Doctrine. Today, with Sharon out of power and with the growing willingness of American conservatives to criticize the Bush administration for its apparent unwillingness to adopt and implement credible or effective policies on Iran's nuclear weapons program and the Iranian and Syrian subversion of US efforts in Iraq and Lebanon, there is a good chance that some neo-conservatives will be willing to return to their traditional support for Israel's right and duty to win the wars waged against it by its neighbors.

Second, the Nationalist camp should strengthen its ties to the American Christian Zionists whose leaders just founded a lobbying arm modeled on AIPAC which they hope to use to extend US support for the Jewish state. The Nationalist camp should help them understand that implementing Kadima's capitulation plan will harm US interests by strengthening Iran and Syria and their Shi'ite and Sunni proxies in Iraq and Lebanon; endangering the Hashemite regime in Jordan; and providing global jihadists a stable base of operations in Judea and Samaria that will endanger Israel's long-term survivability.

The anti-capitulationists should show them that the converse is also true. An Israeli victory against the Palestinian terror war will strengthen the US and its allies and weaken its enemies.

The Nationalist camp must strengthen its ties to Diaspora Jewry. Its members should explain the direct connection between the Israeli weakness and capitulation extolled by Kadima and the empowerment and legitimization of anti-Semitic forces in the Diaspora. Diaspora Jewry should be exposed to the view that when the Israeli government adopts a policy that weakens Israel, supporting that government is not the same as supporting Israel. By emphasizing the shared fate of world Jewry, the Nationalist camp will strengthen Jewish solidarity and Jewish identity among Diaspora Jewry and increase interest in aliya.

On Wednesday, the US and Canada cut off all ties to the PA following the formation of the Hamas government. Their moves were portrayed as shows of support for Israel, which indeed they were. And yet, irrespective of Israel, it is in the national interest of all states that oppose the victory of the global jihad to cut off support for the Hamas-led PA. Al-Qaida and Hamas receive funding from the same sources, are indoctrinated by the same religious authorities and view the world in the same way. The legitimization of one necessarily involves the legitimization of the other. The Nationalist camp should work to bring this point home throughout the world.

TURNING TO domestic affairs, to prevent the implementation of Kadima's capitulation plan, the Nationalist camp should conduct a continuous campaign to bring down Kadima and enlarge the Nationalist camp's political base. This needn't be particularly difficult.

Olmert is not Sharon. Any doubts that this is the case were dispelled when his party colleagues attacked him for Kadima's loss of 40 percent of its supporters during the last two and a half months since Sharon's incapacitation. Unlike Sharon, who was elevated above his colleagues, Olmert's political associates see him as a first among equals. They do not fear him and the public does not trust his word as it trusted Sharon. Olmert will need far more than a simple parliamentary majority and media backing to implement his capitulation plan.

Yet Olmert's weakness alone will not bring about Kadima's collapse. The Nationalist camp needs to preserve and widen its political base. To accomplish this, it must maintain opposition to Olmert's capitulation plan among Shas, United Torah Judaism, Israel Beiteinu and Likud voters. The voters' opposition will prevent their party leaders from risking their wrath by supporting capitulation in exchange for cabinet and sub-cabinet posts. As well, it must convince at least two MKs from the Pensioners' Party to reject the withdrawal and expulsion plan.

The Nationalist camp needs a strong and unified leadership to preserve and widen its support base. Such leadership can only emerge if the Likud and National Union-NRP Knesset factions merge. To his great credit, MK Effi Eitam from the National Union recognizes this imperative and since Tuesday night has been working quietly and skillfully to bring about the merger. Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu should immediately accept Eitam's offer. Doing so will both neutralize attempts by his Likud rivals to unseat him and ensure that the Likud remains the leader of the Nationalist camp despite its electoral defeat.

All of these actions owe their inspiration to Herzl's strategic program for establishing the Jewish state. If undertaken simultaneously by a unified, professional and dedicated Nationalist camp we can foresee that in addition to weakening an Olmert or Peretz-led coalition government and strengthening the Nationalist camp, they will enhance Israel's national security by preventing the implementation of the capitulation plan and renewing Israel's legitimacy both in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of its citizens.

One hundred years ago, Herzl and his colleagues referred to what we now call post-Zionism as a Diaspora mentality. As was the case back then, today following his Zionist strategy remains the best way to ensure the survival of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. If we heed his message, the father of modern Zionism will also be known as the father of post-modern Zionism.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Sunday evening Kadima Education Minister Meir Sheetrit extolled Kadima's "uniqueness" as the one Israeli party which "has disengaged from all ideology."

Sheetrit proudly proclaimed: "We don't have the baggage of the heritage of Ze'ev Jabotinsky or Berl Katzenelson [the ideological founding fathers of Likud and Labor] on our back. We are looking only to the future."

When the polls close this evening, the most non-deliberative election campaign in Israeli history will be brought to an end. If the opinion polls bear out, Sheetrit's party will emerge as the uncontested ruling party of Israel. How is it that Israelis are expected to embrace a party that stands for nothing?

Israeli society became alienated from ideology with the collapse of the Oslo peace process and the start of the Palestinian terror war in 2000. The bombings, calls for jihad and indoctrination of child suicide bombers all served to convince the Israeli public that the leftist utopian ideology of peace through appeasement was a lie. The messianic ideology of the religious Right was never considered.

This non-ideological atmosphere was eminently suited for Ariel Sharon. Sharon promised the Israeli public neither peace nor victory. He promised the public quiet. He told the public, "Follow me, and everything will be alright. Trust me."

And they did. They trusted him when he took them to the Right in combating Palestinian terrorists. And they trusted him when he took them to the far Left in expelling Israeli civilians and withdrawing IDF forces from Gaza and northern Samaria. They trusted him even though during his five-year tenure, Israel absorbed more civilian casualties than it had known since the founding of the state.

As his political consultants told Yediot Aharonot on Friday, if Sharon were running today instead of Ehud Olmert, he would not have announced any plan to conduct massive expulsions of Israelis and withdrawals of IDF forces from Judea and Samaria, as Olmert has. "He would have said: 'I'm the message. I'm the plan.'"

Without Sharon, his new party, Kadima, is led by undistinguished machine politicians and by Shimon Peres, the failed ideologue of the Left. They have retained Sharon's public support base first and foremost by presenting themselves as non-ideological policy wonks capable of leading the country on the basis of daily cost-benefit analyses. They tell the Israeli public that its charismatic leader has been seamlessly replaced by a bureaucratic leadership no less competent and non-ideological.

THE PROBLEM is that however wonkish Kadima's leaders may be, they are not, in fact competent. Diplomatically the promised "iron wall" of international support for their declared policy of isolating Hamas held up for less than a day. Far from enhancing Israel's security, their unilateral retreat from Gaza brought Hamas to power and enabled Gaza's transformation into a global terror base and launching ground for rocket and mortar attacks against southern Israel. And Kadima's wonks can do nothing to remedy this situation.

Since they are dedicated to continuing the implementation of Sharon's expulsion and retreat policy, they cannot admit that its implementation in Gaza was responsible for bringing Hamas to power. Similarly, they cannot admit that Hamas is a threat to Israel, since they plan to further empower it by giving it Judea and Samaria.

And if Hamas is not a threat, then there is no reason for the international community to boycott it. As well, since their only policy is the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea and Samaria, Kadima's wonks cannot recognize or address the dangers that are all but certain to greet Israel if the Hamas jihad state is extended to the doorways of every major city in Israel. They can make no note of the dangers that such a Hamas state will constitute for the Hashemite regime in Jordan and the American-supported government in Iraq.

Policies built around cost-benefit analyses based on polling data and daily State Department press briefings - while perhaps necessary for a party based on nothing - are incapable of contending with the threats Israel faces and the responsibilities the government holds toward its citizenry and its allies.

Tragically, the public is not able to see this because, with the help of the elections law and the media, Kadima has been able to obfuscate the shortcomings of its central policy and the incompetence of its leaders. Indeed Kadima has been able to make hating Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu the central issue of the elections.

NETANYAHU IS a loyal representative of Likud's traditional ideology that Israel must fight, not appease its enemies. As such, he is the only political leader who based his campaign around showing the dangers of Kadima's expulsion and retreat policy.

By making hating Netanyahu the central issue of the campaign, Kadima's leaders have succeeded in deflecting all his warnings against their only policy. As Arel Segal put it in Ma'ariv on Friday, if one takes the logical model of A; but B; so C, then the central theme of this election cycle has been, "Binyamin Netanyahu warns that we stand before existential danger. But Binyamin Netanyahu is an anxious hysteric, a demagogue and, worst of all, a skinflint. And so, Israel does not stand before any existential danger."

THE ELECTIONS law has facilitated Kadima's campaign by placing censorious limitations on political speech. In the current non-ideological atmosphere many of Israeli society's previously shared assumptions have been undermined. As a result soundbites like "Gaza has turned into Hamastan" are no longer automatically understood. Now they have to be explained.

The elections law bars political parties from buying airtime and so limits their broadcasting rights to short, state-financed commercials where they are incapable of transmitting anything but telegraphed messages. That is, the elections law blocks public debate.

Unable to communicate its ideologically-grounded policy message in its ads, the Likud was at the mercy of Kadima and the centralized media to get its messages out. It needed Kadima, because without Olmert's consent there could be no candidates' debate. It needed the media, because in the absence of paid advertising or a televised debate, only the media could provide a forum for the Likud (and every other party) to engage the public in a discussion of its policies.

Olmert, whose message can only be effectively represented by soundbites, understandably refused to debate Netanyahu and Labor's Amir Peretz. Far from providing a forum for political discussion, the media effectively blocked all debate. As Israel state radio and television correspondent Yaron Dekel noted on Sunday, the media injected itself as an actor in this campaign in a manner unprecedented in Israeli electoral history.

Indeed, many observers have charged that Channel 2 and Yediot Aharonot (which both enjoy monopoly shares of their respective markets) destroyed the Likud and created Kadima by demonizing the Likud Central Committee and Likud opponents of Sharon's expulsion and retreat policy for two and a half years; and by manufacturing public pressure and backing for the establishment of Kadima for the past year and a half.

SO IF THE polls are correct and the Israeli electorate today elects Kadima to form the next government, what can one reasonably expect will happen?

First, Kadima will eventually collapse because it stands for nothing. Ideology is defined as a systematic way of interpreting the world. Kadima's members - who come from the messianic Left and the moderate Right - do not see the world in the same way. As a result, their merger is inherently unstable. In the absence of their charismatic leader, Sharon, around whom they coalesced, Kadima has no rationale for existing except its leaders' shared desire to rule. When its members' contradictory interests and interpretations of reality inevitably bring them into conflict with one another, Kadima will break apart.

Second, because Kadima's leaders have rallied around a policy that will endanger Israel, and because they are incapable of shielding the country from the consequences of their policy, as was the case with the leftist peace ideologues, eventually the public will be unable to deny their incompetence.

Today it is hard for the public to connect the holes in the ground left by Kassam rockets raining down on Ashkelon to the looming threats to the state as a whole. The same will not be the case when rockets rain down on Kfar Saba, Jerusalem and Netanya.

Only after Kadima is brought down by its inherent contradictions and incompetence will Israel be able to address the forces that enabled its rise to prominence. When this happens, two reforms must be enacted. First, the elections law must be amended. Freedom is not enhanced when speech is restricted. Political parties must be allowed to pay for access to the public. By the same token, the centralized media must be decentralized and deregulated. State control over broadcast content and the number of media outlets must be transferred to market forces.

The campaign that concludes today owes its nature to the erosion of the organs of Israeli democracy, an erosion that has continued unabated for the past decade and a half. Although it must not be forgotten that Israeli opinion polls are chronically incorrect, if Kadima does win, only after the pathologies that have corrupted our politics are played out will we be able to take the steps necessary to protect ourselves from their inevitable consequences.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On the eve of Israel's elections, Israelis should be deeply concerned about the state of our relations with the United States.

Last week the London Review of Books published a long article under the heading "The Israel Lobby." The article was authored by two prominent American international relations and political science professors: Stephen Walt, the academic dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago.

Walt and Mearsheimer are prominent members of the "Realist" school of political science and international relations. Realists assert that states are rational actors that use the international arena to advance their national interests. For realists, states' rationality bars morality and sentiment from playing any significant role in the international affairs.

This is significant because their essay, "The Israel Lobby," and a longer version of the work published as a "Faculty Working Paper" by the Kennedy School earlier this month, completely contradicts every single aspect of the realist doctrine of international relations.

The article begins with a general accusation that since the 1967 Six Day War, US Middle East policy has been driven not by US national interests, but by Israel's national interests. In their view, "The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world." So Mearsheimer and Walt believe that for the past 40 years, the US has been acting in a manner that completely undercuts its national interest.

With this opening salvo, Walt and Mearsheimer argue that the reason that the US acts in opposition to its national interests is because for the past four decades US Middle East policy has been dictated by the "Israel Lobby." The distinguished professors define the Israel lobby, or in their conspiratorial shorthand, "the Lobby," as "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction." Members of "the Lobby" include most US media outlets; Jewish American organizations generally and AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations in particular; pro-Israel evangelical Christians; Jewish and "gentile neo-conservative" newspaper columnists; Washington think tanks - both Jewish and "gentile neo-conservative"; Jewish government officials and politicians; and "gentile neo-conservative" government officials and politicians.

Walt and Mearsheimer allege that members of "the Lobby" and their friends and professional counselors in the Israeli government and the Likud party were a "critical" factor behind the US decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime three years ago. Similarly, these forces are behind America's (unjustified and counterproductive) hostility towards Iran and its nuclear weapons program and its (incorrect) view that the Iranian program constitutes a threat to global security.

Israel, they claim, weakened the US-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War and is at least partially responsible for Osama bin Laden's decision to attack the US. ("There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel's presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.")

Israel itself is described by Mearsheimer and Walt as a colonialist, criminal state that has conducted a "long campaign to kill or marginalize a generation of Palestinian leaders," and Palestinian children, and to methodically and criminally abuse the political, legal and human rights of the Palestinians. Their Israel was born in the sin of "ethnic cleansing," a sin that has forced the Palestinians to turn to terror in order to protect themselves. Israel's nuclear arsenal forced Iran to seek nuclear weapons and "the Lobby" is now insisting that the US take military action against Iran in order to protect Israel. Although they acknowledge that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," they deny that Israel is in any danger from Iran. By supporting Israel, the racist state that kills and oppresses Arab Israelis and Palestinians and inflames the Arab and Islamic worlds in general, the US has become "complicit in [Israel's] crimes."

The two celebrated professors declare that the reports of anti-Semitism in Europe are either incorrect or wildly exaggerated and work to advance the interests of "the Lobby" and Israel. As well, they accuse "the Lobby" of silencing criticism of Israel by labeling everyone who dares to criticize the Jewish state as an anti-Semite.

In an interview this week with The New York Sun, Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, whom Mearsheimer and Walt label as an "apologist" for Israel, noted that many of the authors' claims are found in neo-Nazi Web sites. David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, called the report "excellent," and said, "It is quite satisfying to see a body in a premier American university essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started."

Although Mearsheimer and Walt politely acknowledge that "the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Dershowitz is unimpressed by their largesse. "Sorry," he says, "But it sounds very similar to me. The only difference is the Protocols are a forgery, but this [essay] is actually written by two bigots."

IT IS deeply disturbing that two prominent American professors have chosen to attack Israel and its American supporters in this manner. But only one element of their attack serves to signal a broader crisis in Israel's relations with the US. That aspect is the fact that this so-called "academic" paper does not stand any academic test. It is filled with obviously false assertions, ridiculous statements and idiotic, tendentious and absurd claims that no political science professor would dare to publicly express in any article about any other political lobby or foreign country.

For instance, the "academic" version of the paper's first footnote maintains, "The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about."

Every semi-sentient person with even an incidental knowledge of American politics knows that there is no area of human endeavor that is not represented by a lobby in the US. Walt and Mearsheimer's asinine assertion means is that every American interest group - from the elderly to the insurance industry, from the Muslims to gun owners to organic food lovers - stands opposed to the American national interest simply by existing. Any professor who made a similar assertion about any other interest group would be imperiling his career.

And herein lies the grave danger inherent their decision to publish their essay. Walt and Mearsheimer - who are both rational men - undoubtedly considered the likely consequences of publishing their views and concluded that the anti-Israel nature of their article would shield them from criticisms of its substandard academic quality. That is, they believe that hostility towards Israel is so acceptable in the US that authors of shoddy research whose publication would normally destroy their professional reputations can get away with substandard work if it that work relates to Israel.

The fact that academic works criticizing Israel are held to a lower standard than works on any other subject should elicit some response from Israel. But to date, Israel's Kadima government not only has not dealt with this state of affairs, it has insisted that the problem does not exist.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his friends in Kadima mindlessly repeat the hollow mantra that our relations with the US have never been better. They maintain that handing Judea and Samaria over to Hamas will strengthen the goodwill of the international community that Israel supposedly has enjoyed since the withdrawal from Gaza eight months ago.

If it does nothing else, Walt and Mearsheimer's screed proves the absolute stupidity of the claim that Israeli land giveaways and expulsions of Israelis from their homes increase international sympathy and support for Israel. Their article not only gives Israel no credit for coming to the brink of civil war this summer when it ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in the hopes of appeasing international opinion, it claims that Israel intended to bring about Hamas's electoral victory in January in order to force the US to continue to support it.

For their part, the Bush administration and the Europeans today continue to hold Israel responsible for the well-being of Gazans and demand that Israel feed them, and provide them with everything from electricity to emergency medical care. To earn their "goodwill," the Israeli government agreed this week to endanger Israel's national security by continuing to finance the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and by operating the Karni cargo terminal at the Gaza border as if Israel had never withdrawn.

Here is the place to mention that in 1999 I studied under Walt at the Kennedy School. It was clear to me back then, through Walt's passive-aggressive non-sequiturs about American Jews and the Israel lobby, that he suffered from an unhealthy obsession with the Jewish state.

But back then, when the Likud that he so despises was in power and the government conditioned all Israeli concessions to the Palestinians on reciprocal, measurable Palestinian concessions to Israel, Walt did not give his hostility towards Israel and its supporters such direct and crass expression either in his classroom lectures or in his publications. Rather, he does so now, when Israel is ruled by a party whose only clearly stated policy is its intention to destroy Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and transfer the areas to Hamas without receiving anything in return.

The growing crisis in Israel's relations with American and other Western societies as manifested by Mearsheimer and Walt's decision to publish their essay leads to two conclusions. First, Israeli weakness harms Israel's international standing and Israeli strength enhances it. Ironically, this conclusion arises from the realist worldview that Walt and Mearsheimer champion on every issue except for Israel.

If states seek to increase their strength through their international policies, it makes more sense for them to attack a weak state which will respond to expressions of hostility by seeking to appease the aggressors, than to attack a strong state that will exact a price for such aggression. Israeli demonstrations of international, political, military or cultural weakness open it up to ever escalating demands and expressions of animosity.

Finally, Walt and Mearsheimer's decision to publish their essay points to Israel's desperate need for a leader who understands international politics generally and American politics specifically. In World War II, the preponderance of Walt and Mearsheimer's view - that the Jews forced America to enter the war - caused the Roosevelt administration to refuse to lift a finger to save European Jewry. If, with the assistance of a weak and incompetent Israeli government, their view again becomes prominent, Israel will find itself in existential peril.

Today there is only one Israeli leader capable of rebuilding Israel's standing in the international community generally and in American society particularly. We have only one leader who is capable of bringing about a renewed delegitimization of views like those expressed in Walt and Mearsheimer's essay.

His name is Binyamin Netanyahu.

On the eve of the Knesset elections, Israel faces multiple challenges. Hamas, in appointing technocrats and terrorists to run its new government is showing that it is possible to learn from the Nazi model of governance. Even genocidal mass murderers who seduce their societies with delusions of racial and religious supremacy can receive international acclaim if they make the trains run on time.

Israel's political spectrum is divided between the Left, represented by Kadima and the Right represented by Likud. Kadima wishes to contend with the Hamas threat by making a public show of shunning Hamas while surrendering Judea and Samaria to the terror organization.

The Likud points out that surrendering Judea and Samaria to Hamas will make it impossible to defend the rest of the country. Since Likud doesn't think that Israel should surrender its right to defend itself by turning its heartland over to a global terrorist organization which together with Fatah and Islamic Jihad has already murdered over 1,100 Israelis and remains committed to annihilating Israel, it objects to surrendering any territory to Hamas.

It has been repeatedly noted in this column that the Israeli media has blocked all public debate on this issue. The media mollycoddles politicians on the Left - applauding them for mindlessly repeating the talking points they received from their public relations advisers. Politicians on the Right on the other hand are harassed, insulted and forced on the defensive for daring to suggest that expelling Israelis from their homes and transferring their land to Hamas might not be in Israel's best interest.

It isn't just issues related to Israel's national security that are shunted under the rug by our media stars as they obsess over our politicians' relative likeability and body language. All issues of concern are ignored.

A week before the elections, it seems worthwhile to look at a few of these other issues so that we will at least have some idea of what is at stake.

FIRST, WE have the economy. Of all the parties running in these elections, only two have enunciated their economic policies in any coherent manner. Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu is a free market, small government party.

Labor, led by union boss Amir Peretz who oversaw the Histadrut labor union as it plunged into bankruptcy taking several workers' pension funds with it, and held the national economy hostage to its illegal general strikes, maintains that Israel must adopt the South American socialist model that has done such wonders for the Argentinean, Venezuelan and Bolivian economies.

The front-running Kadima party has outlined no economic platform. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert both promises to continue the free market reforms Netanyahu pushed through as finance minister, and to reverse them, while his deputy Shimon Peres promises an end to "piggish capitalism."

Kadima's incoherence serves its needs in the election season because the only question that the media considers relevant or newsworthy is whether a candidate or a party expresses sufficient "social sensitivity." Translated into talking points this means that candidates are judged by the amount of contempt they level against Netanyahu for having implemented free market reforms.

While Netanyahu's reforms caused a large, sustained drop in unemployment and moved Israel from the brink of economic collapse to become the fastest growing market in the Western world, the media barrages the public with unsubstantiated, and transparently imaginary statistics proclaiming that a quarter of Israel's children are starving.

Aside from the invisible hundreds of thousands of starving kids, no one seems to care that workers just barely scraping the borders of the middle class are paying 33-40 percent income taxes, or that VAT - a regressive tax if there ever was one - is 16.5 percent. It doesn't seem to bother anyone that our markets are run by monopolists that overcharge us for everything from food to housing to banking services because they can because they are monopolists.

All the journalists who ooze "social sensitivity" never seem to make a connection between overtaxed business owners and unemployment or low wages for skilled and unskilled, educated and uneducated workers. Given the media's love affair with South American socialism, it should surprise no one that those minor parties that have something to say about the economy generally say that they hate and oppose capitalism and small government.

ASIDE FROM the economy, there is the issue of Israel's constitutional crisis. During the course of the campaign, there have been several notable episodes which illustrated the depths of Israel's constitutional morass.

First we have the interim government's treatment of the Knesset's investigative committee into police brutality against protesters at Amona last month. Acting in clear contempt of the Knesset, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz barred their senior officers from testifying before the committee. The fact that as government ministers in a parliamentary democracy they are constitutionally bound to uphold the decisions of the Knesset seems to have made no impression whatsoever on the ministers - who have the full support of the media in their law-breaking activities.

Then we have the odd decision by Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz to appoint himself arbiter of what decisions the interim government is allowed to make before the elections. Last week, Mazuz ordered the Health Ministry's medications committee, which is responsible for determining what prescription drugs should be covered by state medical insurance, to desist from convening until after the elections. It never seemed to occur to Mazuz that it might not be any of his business whether the committee convenes since absolutely no legal issue is raised by the schedule of its meetings.

Mazuz's decision to turn a committee of civil servants into a matter under his purview is just the latest in a series of dubious if not downright unacceptable maneuvers on his part that have served to empower him far beyond what any reasonable person would deem reasonable.

Following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's massive stroke in January, Mazuz invented a bit of Orwellian legalistic gobbledygook by defining Sharon's condition as of one of "temporary incapacity of a permanent character."

Mazuz had good reason to act as he did. If he had simply declared that Sharon was "permanently incapacitated" - which he is - then a complicated, multi-step procedure for selecting and approving a new prime minister and government would have been set in motion, the results of which are unclear. But by declaring Sharon "temporarily incapacitated on a permanent basis," Mazuz blocked that procedure from taking place. In so doing, he seized the power to select the prime minister from Israel's elected officials, effectively anointing himself the prime minister's sole elector.

Israel's constitutional crisis has two central characteristics - the Knesset is emasculated and the legal establishment as represented by the Attorney-General and the Supreme Court is disproportionately empowered. By all rights, this state of affairs should have been a major issue in the election campaign. Yet, it has received no attention.

Before his temporary incapacitation of a permanent nature, Sharon and his PR consultants began espousing support for constitutional reform that would transform Israel from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential democracy. Since Olmert replaced Sharon, Kadima has been all but silent on the issue.

For its part, Labor members have repeatedly voiced their satisfaction with the current imbalance of powers. This makes sense because in constitutional matters, the state prosecution and the Supreme Court routinely rule in accordance with their members' leftist political beliefs thus empowering the Left well beyond its numerical support among the public.

NETANYAHU HAS stated his preference for a reform of the method of electing Knesset members. The Likud supports splitting the ballots so that 60 members of Knesset will be selected directly by voters on a regional basis while the other 60 will continue to be elected by the proportional party lists.

There can be little doubt that a movement away from proportional elections will not only increase accountability by tying parliamentarians to their constituents, it will also eliminate some of the smallest splinter parties and so stabilize Israeli governments.

In the next few years, Israel's security, economic growth and constitutional order will all be challenged in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Sadly, because of our media's temporary bias and superficiality of a permanent nature which causes it to squelch all public debate on all the issues of the day, as we go to the ballot box next week, we will be casting votes that will influence how those challenges will be met without the least awareness of either the issues at stake or the manner in which the political parties will contend with them.

Then again, since they have never been challenged on any of these issues, most of our politicians are also unaware of them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

If a doctor treated a breast cancer patient by amputating her big toe, he would doubtlessly be kicked out of medicine. Medical quackery is punished today. Sadly, the same cannot necessarily be said of public policy malpractice.

Last Wednesday the US suffered a predictable diplomatic defeat. The UN General Assembly approved the establishment of a new human rights council to replace the existing human rights commission. The lopsided vote was similarly preordained: 170 supported the move and four - the US, Palau, Israel and the Marshall Islands - opposed it. The irony is that forming a new human rights body to replace the current one was the US's idea.

Over the past several years, the UN Human Rights Commission has distinguished itself for its subversion of human rights. With members like Cuba, Sudan, Libya and China, the UNHRC acted as a shield for human rights abusers while - in the finest UN tradition - its members named Israel the single worst human rights abuser on the planet.

This corruption of the notion of human rights caused the Bush Administration to seek the UNHRC's replacement by a new body that would make a clear distinction between democracies that respect human rights and dictatorships that abused them. This initiative was one of the central planks of the US's UN reform agenda.

Unfortunately, the Americans' noble plan had no chance of ever being implemented. The same forces that caused the UNHRC to become a refuge for tyrants were the ones responsible for establishing the new organization. Not surprisingly, the new human rights body will enhance, rather than detract from the ability of human rights abusers like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China and Iran to exploit the "human rights" label as a means of condemning the US and Israel.

So by pushing its reform agenda, the US not only did not solve its problem with the UN, it compounded it.

Also last week, the issue of Iran's nuclear program finally was brought before the UN Security Council. The referral of the subject to the council is a victory of sorts for American diplomacy. It only took the State Department three years (and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's ascension to power) to convince the Europeans that Iran's nuclear weapons program constitutes a threat to global security.

Unfortunately, this stellar achievement will have no impact on the US's ability to gain UN backing for its intention to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Both Russia and China have made absolutely clear that they will use their veto power on the Security Council to block any attempt to take concrete action against Iran.

Against this backdrop, in an interview with Fox News last Monday, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton said that Iran presents "a real test" to the council. Bolton explained, "If the UN Security Council can't deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, can't deal with the greatest threat we have with a country like Iran - that's one of the leading state sponsors of terrorism - if the Security Council can't deal with that, you have a real question of what it can deal with."

The attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 caused a sea change in the way most Americans viewed the world. From the end of the Cold War until September 11, most Americans believed that in the post-Cold War era, organizations like the UN, which for 45 years had been marginalized by the superpower rivalry, would be able to fulfill their charge of enabling and preserving world peace.

For most Americans the 1991 Gulf War was a preview of coming attractions: Under the UN banner, the nations of the world would work together to contend with threats to international peace and stability. The strength of this view obscured a continuous flow of evidence from Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the Sudan, which exposed the UN's total incompetence to fulfill its perceived mission.

For the Bush Administration, this fact only became apparent in late 2002. When a year after the attacks on Washington and New York the US failed to receive UN support for its policy of disarming Iraq, the administration made reforming the UN a central goal of its foreign policy.

Just as they forced the US to contend with the incompetence of the UN, the September 11 attacks also forced America to recognize that it had to change its policy towards the Arab and Islamic world. The attacks, which were committed by citizens of Saudi Arabia and Egypt - America's closest allies in the Arab world - showed that US-supported Arab autocracies did not foster regional stability and peace. Rather the administration understood that far from restraining the forces of jihad, the US-supported Arab autocracies inflame them.

COMING TO grips with this state of affairs, the Bush administration announced a radical departure from the decades-old US Middle East strategy: Rather than seek to enhance regional stability, the US would now cultivate democracy because only liberal, democratic regimes could guarantee the long-run defeat of the forces of jihad warring against the US and its allies.

So the events of September 11 made the US realize that its policies toward the Arabs and the UN had to be changed because far from advancing US interests, their old policies harmed them. Unfortunately, the new policies which replaced the old failed policies were incapable of solving the US's problems and so they too have failed.

It is not a lack of reform at the UN that stymies the US. It is the UN itself. An overwhelming majority of UN member states believe that their national interest is served by weakening and humiliating the US. Given this, the US has no chance of ever getting its reforms passed or its policy initiatives supported. By continuing to attempt to work within the UN rather than effectively abandoning it and establishing new organizations capable of contending with current threats, the US has entrapped itself, empowered its rivals and diminished its chances of leading effective multilateral initiatives against the forces of global jihad.

In its policies towards the Arab and Islamic world, the US has tied itself into a similar bind. Although after September 11 the administration recognized that the stability of the Egyptian, Saudi and Palestinian regimes was based on their accommodation rather than combat of jihadist forces, the steps the Bush administration took to contend with this situation so far have only exacerbated it.

To confront the fact that its closest allies were actively supporting al-Qaida, Hamas and other forces warring against the US and its allies, the administration announced that supporting democracy was its central aim in the Arab and Islamic world. This was a just and wise policy. Freedom does indeed hold the promise of eventually becoming the antidote to jihad.

The problem is that the administration sought to implement this long term policy in a manner that would satisfy the 24-hour news cycle. And so, it conflated the conduct of open elections - which can be organized quickly - with democracy, which takes years to cultivate. By pretending that elections are democracy, the administration gave the impression that Western liberalism is not a necessary precursor that guarantees open and free elections will engender democracy.

Not surprisingly, in the absence of liberal values, the elections that have recently taken place in Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq have brought about the empowerment of jihadist forces. Rather than embracing freedom, Arab voters are replacing one dictatorship with an even more dangerous dictatorship. The perverse consequence of this policy has been that the US, which so wishes to see democratic governments take root in the Arab world, has become even more dependent on the old corrupt, non-Islamist regimes that block any chance of liberal values ever being cultivated in their societies. This is the US's present predicament in the PA, Egypt and Iraq.

WASHINGTON'S QUANDARY is nearly identical to Israel's. In Israel, since the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war at the end of 2000, the same politicians who today make up the Kadima Party came to understand that contrary to the promise of the Oslo peace process, in this generation there is no chance of achieving peace with the Palestinians. In so concluding, the politicians who now lead the country understood Israel's basic problem: The Palestinians do not want a state, they want to destroy the Jewish state.

But like the Americans, Kadima's leaders - from Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres to Ehud Olmert, Shaul Mofaz and Ruhama Avraham - chose a policy that bears little connection to the country's problem and so has no chance of solving it. The politicians that now lead Kadima adopted a policy that says that in the absence of a Palestinian public interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel, Israel will create a Palestinian state without achieving peace with the Palestinians. That is, they ignored that the problem is war.

Since Kadima's policy prescription does not address the basic reality of war, the implementation of that policy last summer in Gaza not only did not advance Israel's position in the war, it weakened it. On the political level, the Palestinians reasonably saw Israel's destruction of its own communities in Gaza and the withdrawal of IDF forces from the area as a victory for Hamas. And so they rewarded the jihadist group for their success by electing them to lead the PA. On a military level, the lands Israel vacated now serve as bases for Hamas and its friends from Iran, Hizbullah and al-Qaida.

Yet, for all the similarities in their quandaries, the Americans are still better off than the Israelis. The Bush administration's decision to implement policies that have no chance of solving the problems the administration itself identified after September 11 has weakened public support for the administration. Today, the president's support base has shrunk to just over a third of the American public. Fearing defeat at the polls in the elections this November, Bush's fellow Republicans in Congress are pushing for tougher policies toward both the Palestinians and the Arab world in general.

In stark contrast, the fact that the implementation of Kadima's policy has weakened Israel has not caused the public to abandon the party - to the contrary. Perhaps owing to the disunity of the nationalist camp and its refusal to rally around its leader; perhaps due to the massive mobilization of the Israeli media and the Bush administration in support of Kadima, the Israeli public is rewarding, not punishing Kadima for harming its security.

If the opinion polls are correct, then in a week and a half the Israeli public will elect Kadima to form the next government. If this happens, then Israel will compound the damage the withdrawal from Gaza wrought on the country's security last summer as Kadima is pledged to continue implementing its dangerous and failed policy in Judea and Samaria.

So while America's democratic system serves to check misguided policymaking and forces leaders to correct their mistakes or be voted out of office, Israel's dysfunctional democracy rewards policy quacks and punishes those who point out that no matter how well one amputates a big toe, even the finest toe amputation can never cure breast cancer.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Israel's election campaign presents an unparalleled challenge to Israelis on both the Right and the Left who care about the issues challenging the country. Today, not only do they have to defend what they believe, they also have to defend their right to believe anything.
 

Last Friday, Makor Rishon published an in-depth report on the growing isolation and demonization of the religious Zionist camp. Hebrew University sociologist Tamar Elor explained that the front running Kadima Party presents an impossible challenge for the religious Zionist sector, represented most prominently by the settlers in Judea and Samaria.

"The settlers are an ideological sector. Kadima, as a party devoid of an identity, a face, a name or a path, is their polar opposite," she asserted.

While it has made expelling Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria its flagship policy, Kadima has no ideology with which religious Zionists can clash. As a result, Elor maintains that religious Zionists "cannot do anything against it. They prefer [former far-Left Meretz party leader] Yossi Sarid the idealist, ten times more than Kadima which lacks any identity."

For his part, Sarid bemoaned the superficiality of the political climate cultivated by Kadima in a column in Haaretz on Friday. Sarid exhorted Israel's intellectuals to make their voices heard arguing, "With men of letters consistently involved, it will be impossible for a reality to emerge where PR men's cannon shells roar out while the muses and their servants are silent and silenced."

Kadima's basic sales strategy is to be a party unfettered by content. Being a party that stands for nothing means that it can stand for anything any voter wishes to believe it stands for. An empty shell can be filled with anything and so can be all things to all people.

LIKUD AND Labor, like the smaller parties across the political spectrum, are at a disadvantage in campaigning against Kadima because they all stand for something. And since Kadima is not bothered by principle, it has based its campaign plan on mocking its rivals for having ideological, political, religious or social essences around which their policies are based.

The fact that Kadima, which seeks to represent itself as a party of grown-ups has more in common with Jerry Seinfeld than David Ben-Gurion was made fairly clear in a series of interviews and profiles of its prominent leaders published in the weekend newspapers. Three such articles were published in Ma'ariv.

First there was a rather creepy interview with Kadima's Deputy Minister of the Interior Ruhama Avraham who first rose to prominence in the late 1990s as then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's secretary. As the interview noted, the most consistent characteristic of Avraham's career has been her willingness to exploit, betray and undermine anyone in order to advance her career. Avraham makes no bones about her blind ambition. In her words, "No one who can't push me ahead is allowed to play the game."

Avraham abandoned her supporters in the Likud Central Committee in favor of Sharon's withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza. Sharon rewarded her by appointing her Deputy Minister of the Interior. Avraham recognized that her support for Sharon meant that "I wouldn't have a chance [of reelection] in the Likud" and so she bolted the party and joined Kadima last November.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Avraham, is that in a four page interview - where she spoke at length about her decision to change her hair color from platinum blond to honey, and about her fashion sense which she says inspired her fellow legislators to pay more attention to their appearances, and always come to her for a final check before they go before the cameras - she never once mentioned any guiding philosophy regarding the greater good.

She never mentioned why Israel is worth serving. She never discussed the dangers Israel must defend against. She only talked about herself. While admitting that when she became a mother she made a conscious decision to prefer her career to her family, "knowing my children would suffer for it," Avraham, proudly and eerily announced that she considers herself "the mother of the People of Israel."

ASIDE FROM the interview with our dear mother with honey colored hair, Ma'ariv published a profile of the founder of Kadima, advertising executive Reuven Adler. Adler, a graphic artist by training, served as one of Sharon's closest political advisors. His competitors denounce him, noting that during Sharon's premiership, Adler's PR firm, Adler-Homsky, won the advertising contracts of such plumb state-owned companies as the Electric Company, Israel Railroad and Bezeq Telecommunications (before it was privatized). His main rival, Ilan Shiloah, was quoted stating, "In the world of advertising there is no parallel to the phenomenon of moral corruption called Adler-Homsky."

As the profile notes, "Adler is credited with the transformation of Sharon's image from an extremist, aggressive right winger," (is there any other kind?), "to a warm and doting grandfather who extends his hand in peace." His advertising partner Eyal Homsky brags that Adler "created Kadima - the name, the logo, the slogan…. It's his baby."

Ma'ariv provided a fairly comprehensive picture of Adler the ad man - who tells us both what cellular telephone to buy and what party to vote for. But while the reader came away from the story knowing about his professional development and his attitude towards his work, one thing was conspicuously absent from the account: what he stands for. Not a word was devoted to what, if anything, Adler believes in other than Adler himself.

Finally, Ma'ariv - like every other newspaper in the country, led its Friday edition with its "exclusive" interview with Kadima leader and Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Although Olmert told Ma'ariv, as he told every other newspaper in the country, that he is planning to destroy many, many Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria if he becomes elected and surrender the vast majority of the areas, as well as a number of neighborhoods in Jerusalem, to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority, he did not once explain how doing so would advance Israel's national interests or thwart the global campaign of jihad.

Olmert said nothing about what Israel represents to him or how he came to believe what he says he believes in today. Indeed, one of the main qualities that he seems to want the public to value in him is his intellectual shallowness. As he noted to an over-solicitous, pandering interviewer, "There is no subject that justifies a three hour meeting."

Rather than contend with the serious issues that one would expect a prime minister to concern himself with, Olmert's most heated, impassioned comments related not to policy, but to his rival, Netanyahu.

His criticism of the Likud leader again, did not relate to a policy matter. Olmert's attacks on Netanyahu were a page taken from his deputy Shimon Peres's playbook. Netanyahu, he insinuated, was responsible for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination because he spoke at an anti-Oslo accords rally. Now, by criticizing Olmert's decision to transfer tax revenues to the Hamas-led PA and denouncing his plan to destroy Israeli communities in order to give the land they are sitting on the Hamas, Olmert alleged that Netanyahu is inciting his murder.

ISRAELIS ARE a people filled with contradictions. On the one hand, we are one of the most ideologically and historically driven people in the world. Jews came here from over one hundred countries, inspired and awakened by leaders of a different era who sent out the call to return to our ancient homeland. We have built this country up from the ruins of millennia of neglect and turned it into the most prosperous, advanced, open and free society in the Middle East while defending it against acts of aggression and war that have continued without interruption for over 120 years. We could never have accomplished any of these things if we didn't have a deep seated belief in ourselves and in our rights and responsibilities as a free people in our land.

On the other hand, we are driven by fads. Stars are elevated to the level of near deity one day, only to be forgotten the next. The same goes for everything from fashion lines to hair colors, investment priorities, marriages, politicians, nightclubs and professions. Since Sharon brought ad men like Adler in to run our politics, the same has held true for ideologies and values.

On March 28, some 3.5 million Israeli voters will be called upon to determine what they value. Will they choose substance or will they choose nothing? Will they demand leaders that model themselves after Winston Churchill or will they settle for an Israeli Jerry Seinfeld? All we can do is wait and watch.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US President George W. Bush found himself immersed last week in a political crisis of his own making. For the first time in his presidency, Americans told pollsters that they trust the Democrats more than the president on issues of national security.

There is an Israel angle to Bush's misfortunes. In fact, the nature of the mess in which Bush recently inserted himself explains a great deal about the nature of Israel's relationship with America. It also shows how that relationship is harmed by the expedient interests of both the Bush administration and the Israeli government.

Last month, the administration announced it had approved a deal to place the management of 21 US ports in the hands of the United Arab Emirates-owned firm Dubai Ports World or DPW. This caused an uproar on Capitol Hill. Citing Dubai's documented connections to al-Qaida, legislators from both parties demanded the deal's cancellation.

Rather than bowing to pressure, Bush surprised his supporters by insisting the deal go through. Accusing its detractors of anti-Arab bigotry, Bush - who has never used his presidential veto - threatened to veto any bill that cancels the DPW deal. Bush's response precipitated several investigative reports in the US media that exposed wide ranging business connections between high level administration officials - including Treasury Secretary John Snow - and DPW.

The Jerusalem Post's report last week which exposed DPW's adherence to the Arab boycott of Israel caused the administration additional headaches. It is against US law to adhere to the boycott. In a stuttered response, administration spokesmen intimated vaguely that Dubai is being pressured to end its participation in the boycott.

According to polling data, by the end of last month, only 17 percent of Americans supported the deal with Dubai while 63% opposed it. Given its enormous opposition, Bush's refusal to set the deal aside led several Republican lawmakers to openly criticize him. Indeed, Republican legislators worked steadily to kill the deal as quickly as possible to end their embarrassment.

At the same time, throughout the crisis the deal's many opponents suffered only one major setback. It came from an unexpected source: Israel.

Last week, Idan Ofer, the CEO of Israel's shipping line Zim, wrote a letter to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in which he praised DPW and expressed his support for the deal. In Ofer's words, "During our long association with Dubai Ports World we have not experienced a security issue in these ports or in any of the terminals operated by them." He added, "We are proud to be associated with Dubai Ports World and look forward to continue working with it in the future."

Given Dubai's adherence to the Arab boycott and the fact that in his letter Ofer acknowledged that Zim's ships are forced to fly under foreign flags in order to dock in Dubai's ports, opponents of the deal scratched their heads in puzzlement and exasperation at Ofer's move.

Aside from taking steps to cancel the deal, Congress placed the Treasury Department's secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which approved the deal, under a magnifying glass.

In Congressional testimony last week, Frank Gaffney, the President of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. noted that CFIUS almost never conducts full-scale investigations of deals concerning foreign companies operating in the US. Of the 1,600 deals that have come before CFIUS since it was established in the 1980s, only 26 have come under serious review.

CFIUS decided to conduct its 26th full-blown investigation just days after it approved the deal with DPW. Disturbingly, the newest investigation relates to the Israeli computer systems protection company Check Point's intention to purchase its smaller American rival Sourcefire. As the AP report of the investigation noted, "The contrast between the administration's handling of the $6.8 billion Dubai ports deal and the Israeli company's $225 million technology purchase offers an uncommon glimpse into the US government's choices to permit some deals but raise deep security concerns over others."

The deal reportedly raised the hackles of Pentagon and FBI officials. They allege that since Sourcefire's software programs are used to protect US military and intelligence computer systems from infiltration, its acquisition by Check Point will seriously damage US national security.

The storm of protest against the DPW deal tells us something about the American public's view of the Arabs. By the same token, the FBI and Pentagon's objection to the Check Point deal and their support for the DPW deal tell us something about the state of the administration's relations with the Israeli government.

CFIUS's counterintuitive treatment of the DPW and Check Point deals tells us two things about how the administration makes its decisions. First, money talks. Not only is Dubai the banking capital of the Persian Gulf, flush with oil revenues, it has become an active investor in the US. In response to the uproar over the DPW deal, the UAE announced that if the deal is cancelled, it will reconsider its stance regarding its ongoing free trade negotiations with the US. UAE officials also intimated in media interviews that they may limit its investments in the US if the deal does not go through. Their decision to cancel the deal themselves to avoid a Congressional investigation into their ties to terrorists in no way mitigates their threat to take their money out of America.

So rather than addressing Congress's concerns about Dubai's links to Islamist terror, pledging not to take any steps that might endanger US national security, apologizing for its past support for Osama bin Laden or ending its participation in the boycott of Israel, Dubai reacted to scrutiny of the deal by threatening the US with sanctions. And the administration responded to those threats by endangering its political support base and marring its credibility as a champion of national security in order to defend Dubai.

The administration's support for Dubai shows that it respects power and those who wield it. Similarly, by treating Check Point as if it were an enemy state, the administration demonstrates its contempt for weakness.

OVER THE past several years, Israel has demonstrated unprecedented weakness in its dealings with Washington. This weakness has caused a situation where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon acclaimed the Bush administration as the best friend Israel has ever had, while the administration ended Israeli participation in multiple joint military research and development projects.

The administration also demanded Israel accept encroachments on its sovereignty by forcing Israel to sign a commitment to give the US veto power over a significant share of its military exports. The economic consequence of this unprecedented step is that Israel must now receive the approval of its chief business competitor in the international arms market before concluding any major deal.

So in stark contrast to declarations by Israeli and American policymakers alike, Israel's relationship with the administration in recent years has not been particularly positive. Rather, its prominent features have been American intimidation and Israeli kowtowing. Sharon's desperate, irrational and personal need to feel accepted by Washington rendered him effectively incapable of representing Israel's interests to the administration. What Sharon craved was not substantive cooperation in war, but declarations of support in him personally by the Bush and his senior advisers.

In Sharon's absence, his Kadima party maintains the same dependence on expressions of support from the administration even when such declarations come at the price of undermining Israel's basic strategic interests. That is, under Sharon and Kadima, it has become possible to make a distinction between administration support for the Israeli government and administration support for Israel. Given this, it isn't difficult to surmise the background to Ofer's odd statement of support for the DPW deal. From all this we learn that like the Kadima government, the administration is fully capable of ignoring the US's national security interests when doing so advances its political interests.

In sharp contrast to the administration's counterintuitive and opportunistic preference for Arab despotisms over Israel, the American public follows its intuition and is generally unsupportive of the Arabs, whom Americans regard as their foes, and consistently supportive of Israel, which they regard as their ally in the war against the global jihad.

In the public's outcry against the DPW deal we saw the vast potential for changing the administration's attitude towards Israel. Just as the American public decries the notion of turning America's ports over to Arab control, so too, the American public would back an Israeli refusal to transfer control over its national security to Hamas. And just as the public's rejection of the port deal forced the UAE to cancel it, so too, were Israel to decide to assert its rights as a sovereign nation in Washington by defining victory against the Palestinian terror war as its strategic aim, it would be able to tap into deep reservoirs of support in the US that would force the administration to back its moves.

Sadly, in what can only be judged as pathological opportunism, rather than encouraging its American supporters, Israel's government underminded them by publicly siding with the administration in the Dubai port dispute. The government's behavior in this matter reflected Kadima's general policy. Kadima, like its founder Ariel Sharon, operates under the guiding assumption that Israel is weak and cannot defend itself without international support generally and American support specifically.

Like Israel's other leftist parties, Kadima assumes that the only way to receive the administration's support is by weakening Israel still further. This is why Sharon decided to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria and it is why Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert today claims that Israel must vacate most of Judea and Samaria, with the land to be transferred to Hamas, and continue enabling the transfer of "humanitarian aid" to the Hamas-led PA. That is, Kadima believes that its international support is dependent on weakening Israel and strengthening Israel's enemies. By all counts, it is right to believe this.

Today the Bush administration is aggressively backing Kadima in the elections. Last month, administration officials reportedly pressured PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to postpone the formation of the Hamas government until after the Israeli elections because they believe that doing so will help Kadima against the Likud.

In backing Kadima, a party committed to transferring lands and money to the Hamas-led PA, the US has effectively made strengthening the Iranian-backed Hamas its central aim in the region. From this it becomes apparent that Kadima's party interests are diametrically opposed to Israel's national interests.

What the adamant public opposition to the Dubai deal shows is that regardless of how the administration may presently be treating Israel, if Israel elects a different government this month, the administration will not be able to easily oppose it if it decides to actually advance Israel's national interests for a change. Indeed, as is the case with the DPW deal, if a new Israeli government projects a powerful image in Washington, accompanied by a dedication to the goal of ending the Palestinian war in victory, not surrender, the American people will intuitively support it and force the administration to support it as well.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu took a vital step towards reinvigorating Israel's democratic system. By forcing the Likud's Central Committee members to transfer their power to select the party's Knesset candidate slate to the rank and file membership of the party, Netanyahu brought about a change which optimally will make Likud Knesset members directly responsible to more than 100,000 voters rather than to 2,500 party officials.

It makes sense that a politician who bases his party's electoral campaign on the slogan "Tough on Hamas" believes that his chances of winning are increased by enhancing Israeli democracy. Yet empowering voters goes against the grain of the political trends of recent years. The direct link between the strength of a country's democracy and its ability to effectively wage war against its enemies has been swept under the rug.

From Israel to Europe to the US, one of the Left's central arguments against waging a war against jihadists has been that such a war requires enacting policies that undermine the foundations of the democratic order by impinging on citizens' and residents' civil rights and liberties. The American Left's protests against ethnic profiling and government wiretaps, the Israeli Left's protests against IDF roadblocks and the security fence, and the European Left's defense of radical Muslim minorities in the name of multiculturalism all are predicated on this contention.

There is an alluring logic to this position. Yet experience has proven that all governmental attempts to appease radical Islamists have not advanced the well-being and security of Western democracies. Rather, such appeasement policies have served to weaken Western, liberal values and threaten the viability of Western societies.

In Europe, the official reactions to the Muslim cartoon riots exposed this reality. Rather than telling the Muslims who took to the streets and called for the annihilation of Denmark and the waging of global jihad where they could shove it, Europe's leaders bowed before these violent, intolerant people while expressing contrition and sorrow over the Islamic sensitivities that had been offended.

In Britain the media refused to publish the pictures of Muhammad - out of sensitivity for Muslim feelings, of course. The newspaper editor who published the pictures in France was fired. In Norway, the editor who published the pictures was forced to publicly apologize to Norway's Muslim leaders in a humiliating public ceremony. Franco Frattini, the EU's Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security said it would be useful for the press to "self-regulate" in attempting to find answers to question of "How are we to reconcile freedom of expression and respect for each individual's deepest convictions?"

And so, the European reaction to the Muslim rampages has involved slouching towards the surrender of their freedom of speech. Not only has Europe's appeasement of radical Islam not protected its liberal values, it has undermined the democratic freedoms that form the foundations of European culture. From a security perspective, the consequence of the silencing of pubic debate on the challenge of radical Islam is that Europeans are now effectively barred from conducting a public discussion about the chief threat to their political traditions and physical survival.

In Israel, the situation is no better. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's abandonment of his policy of combating Palestinian terror in favor of his policy of appeasing it through land transfers to terrorists precipitated both the corruption of Israel's democratic institutions and the weakening of Israel's strategic and tactical positions.

Sharon's decision to uproot all Israeli communities in Gaza and northern Samaria and to withdraw Israeli forces from Gaza was made without any debate or discussion. Neither the government nor the military deliberated on the policy before it was adopted. Similarly, no public debate of the policy was conducted after Sharon publicly announced it.

Rather than convincing the public to support the expulsion and withdrawal plan by explaining its rationale and merits, Sharon and his political advisers set out to rally the public to their side by demonizing and dehumanizing the plan's most direct casualties - the Israeli residents of Gaza and northern Samaria specifically, and the religious Zionist public with which most of the residents are affiliated, generally. To maintain pubic support for the plan, the government, with the support of the state prosecution, the judiciary and the police, systematically undermined and trampled religious Israelis' civil rights through openly discriminatory law enforcement policies and judicial rulings.

It should be recalled that in the aftermath of the expulsion of all Israeli residents of Gaza and northern Samaria, the public defender's office issued a report which concluded that the government had prejudicially enforced laws against its political opponents. After being threatened by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, the state prosecution and a senior judge, Chief Public Defender Inbal Rubinstein, distanced her office from the report's conclusions.

In 1998, university students in Israel staged a nationwide strike. Erez Eshel, who today directs the Israeli Academy for Social Leadership in Kfar Adumim, led the protest movement. Eshel describes the difference between the state authorities' treatment of the university students then to their treatment of the opponents of the withdrawal and expulsion policy as follows: "During the student rebellion, for 40 days in a row, students blocked traffic on the Ayalon Highway in Tel Aviv. During the 40 days of nationwide protests, 50 students were injured and 500 were arrested. No one remained in jail for more than 24 hours. No indictments were filed against anyone.

"Elyakim Rubinstein, who served at the time as attorney-general, decided that nonviolently blocking highway traffic is a legitimate form of protest in democratic societies and therefore is not a criminal offense."

Eshel adds, "The police were extremely careful with us. The only students who were injured were those who had to be dragged off the highways. Yet, in spite of their caution, the officer who commanded the operation was pilloried by the media for even the minimal violence his forces used. Because of the media's criticism, he was disciplined and barred from dealing with the students."

Three days after last month's protests at Amona, where nearly 300 predominantly teenage protesters were injured by riot police in the space of five hours, Eshel's students visited Amona. As it happened, I gave them a lecture immediately after they returned to Kfar Adumim. The students were extremely agitated by what they heard and saw at Amona.

They met with the IDF's regional commander responsible for the area. Discussing the police violence against the protesters, one of their instructors observed, "Either the policemen were ordered by their commanders to use billy-clubs and horses to injure the protesters, or their commanders have no control over them. Either way," he added, "it is an unacceptable situation."

The IDF commander agreed with his statement and said that in his opinion an official, public commission of inquiry, with judicial powers, must be formed to investigate the police violence at Amona.

But Kadima, Israel's unelected ruling party, adamantly deflected all such demands. Not only did Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's interim government block the establishment of an official commission, on Wednesday, its ministers fomented the worst constitutional crisis in recent years by seeking to undermine the proceedings of the Knesset's investigative committee into the events at Amona. Ignoring the constitutional foundations of Israel's parliamentary democracy, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz forbade police and army commanders from testifying before the committee.

According to Israel's constitutional law, the Knesset is the country's sovereign. In their oath of office, every government minister swears to carry out the Knesset's decisions. The Knesset voted to establish an investigative committee regarding the protests at Amona. The government is legally bound to facilitate its proceedings. Impeding the committee's work by preventing police and army commanders from appearing before it is an act of contempt of Knesset. That Kadima's leaders feel comfortable trampling Israel's democratic norms should worry every citizen who values his liberty.

Neither the government nor the judiciary would dare to trample Israel's constitutional regime or the civil rights of the state's citizens if they did not enjoy the overwhelming support of the Israeli media. Just as last year it blocked debate on the government's withdrawal policy, the media now blocks all discussion of the consequences of the withdrawals.

Two weeks ago, al-Qaida's newly seeded cell in Gaza published a leaflet demanding that all foreign legations and personnel leave Gaza within one month. The terrorists announced al-Qaida's goal of installing a Taliban-styled regime to Gaza. Women who appear in public without a burka, cigarette and alcohol salesmen as well as Internet cafes, nightclubs and coffee shops where men and women sit together were all singled out as targets. The Israeli media ignored the leaflet.

Last week, the government and the media unleashed their wrath against OC Central Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh. Naveh was condemned for noting, during a briefing of foreign correspondents, that the Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria constitutes a strategic threat to the Hashemite regime in Jordan - 80 percent of whose subjects are Palestinians. That is, the media and the government launched public and personal attacks against a senior IDF commander for pointing out reality.

Naveh was ordered to write letters of apology to his Jordanian military counterparts. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni publicly apologized to her Jordanian counterpart and to anyone else who would listen. In acting thus, the government remained consistent with its policies against opponents of its withdrawal and appeasement policy. Naveh, like the opponents of appeasement, was guilty of pointing out the truth at a time when the government's official policy is to deny the truth in order to continue its appeasement policy. And so, like the opponents of appeasement, he was immediately castigated and humiliated for his deviant behavior.

Naveh so far has gotten off easy for his gaffe. Former IDF chief of General Staff Moshe Ya'alon was fired for voicing his concerns about the dire security implications of Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli forces and civilians from Gaza. Ya'alon's recent public explanations of the security costs of Israel's withdrawal have been largely ignored by the media.

So what we see with the erosion of democratic governments in Europe and Israel, and the decay of liberal values that form the basis of those governments, is that it is not the in the waging of war against one's enemies, but in their appeasement that the roots of political tyranny and intellectual serfdom are found.

And so it is that the Likud champions the public's political empowerment through the enhancement of Israeli democracy as it attempts to rally the people to its side by promising to be "Tough on Hamas." Likud understands that the increased involvement of the nation in politics through the strengthening of Israel's representative institutions is the key to both their electoral victory and Israel's victory in war.

In contrast, how does a party that has adopted a policy of surrendering to the country's enemies show its strength? By emphasizing its track record of persecuting its domestic political foes as a means of advancing its plan of appeasing Israel's enemies. And so it is that Kadima has chosen the Orwellian election slogan, "Strong leadership for peace."

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.