The nature of the war being waged against Israel changed, perhaps irreversibly, this week. Processes that have been developing for more than four years came together this week and brought us to a very different military-political reality than that which we have known until now.

The face of the enemy has changed. If in the past it was possible to say that the war being waged against Israel was unique and distinct from the global jihad, after the events of the past week, it is no longer possible to credibly make such a claim. Four events that occurred this week - the attacks in the Sinai; the release of Osama bin Laden's audiotape; the release of Abu Musab Zarqawi's videotape; and the arrest of Hamas terrorists by Jordan - all proved clearly that today it is impossible to separate the wars. The new situation has critical consequences for the character of the campaign that the IDF must fight to defend Israel and for the nature of the policies that the incoming government of Israel must adopt and advance.

The two attacks in the Sinai were noteworthy for several reasons. First, they were very different from one another. The first, which targeted tourists in Dahab, was the familiar attack against a soft target that we have become used to seeing in the Sinai over the past year and a half. The attack against the Multinational Force Observers was more unique since it only has one past precedent.

In an article published last October in the journal MERIA, Reuven Paz explained that the al-Qaida strategist Abu Musab al-Suri supported the first type of attack. His follower, Abu Muhammad Hilali, wrote last September that in waging the jihad against the Egyptian regime there is no point in attacking foreign forces or Egyptian forces because such attacks will lead nowhere. He encouraged terrorists to attack soft targets like tourists and foreign non-governmental organizations on the one hand, and strategic targets like the Egyptian gas pipeline to Israel on the other. In both cases, such attacks would achieve political objectives. Opposing Hilali's view is Zarqawi's strategy. As one would expect from al-Qaida's commander in Iraq, Zarqawi upholds attacks on foreign forces.

The foregoing analysis is not proof that two separate branches of al-Qaida conducted the attacks. But the combination of approaches this week does lend credence to the assessment that al-Qaida is now paying a great deal of attention to Israel's neighborhood. And this is a highly significant development.

Until recently, Israel, like Jordan and Egypt, did not particularly interest al-Qaida. When bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and his military commander Saif al-Adel merged their terror organization, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with al-Qaida, they adopted bin Laden's approach which dictated suspending their previous war to overthrow the Egyptian regime and concentrating on attacking America and its allies. In the same manner, when the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi joined al-Qaida, he was compelled to put his wish to overthrow the Hashemite regime to the side. Israel was not on the agenda.

But today everything has changed. Israel, like Egypt and Jordan, is under the gun. Bin Laden himself made this clear in his tape this week. By placing Hamas under his protection, bin Laden made three moves at once. First, he announced that the Palestinians are no longer independent actors. Second, he defined the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority as a part of the liberated Islamic lands where al-Qaida can feel at home. Third, he hitched a ride on the Palestinian issue, which is more popular in the Islamic world than the Iraq war, where al-Qaida is apparently on the road to defeat.

For his part, Zarqawi already announced his plan to go back to his old war and work to topple the Hashemites (and destroy Israel) last November, after he commanded the Amman hotel suicide bombings. Back then Zarqawi announced that Jordan was but a stop on the road to the conquest of Jerusalem.

In his video this week, Zarqawi emphasized that the destruction of Israel through the conquest of Jerusalem is one of his major goals. Both he and bin Laden made clear that from their perspectives, the war against the US and the war against Israel are the same war.

On the level of strategic theory, bin Laden and Zarqawi both expressed al-Qaida's long-term strategy that Zawahiri laid out last year to Jordanian journalist Fuad Hussein. Zawahiri explained then that there are seven stages to the jihad before the establishment of the global caliphate. According to Zawahiri, the global jihad began in 2000 and will end in 2020. Today we are in the third stage, which includes the toppling of the regimes in Jordan, Syria and Egypt and the targeting of Israel for destruction.

While al-Qaida today is setting its sights on Israel and its neighbors, the arrests of Hamas terrorists this week in Jordan show that for their part, the Palestinians are working to advance the global jihad. The Hamas attempt to carry out attacks in Jordan points to a change in Hamas's self-perception. They have gone from being local terrorists to being members of the Islamist axis, which is led by Iran and includes Syria, al-Qaida and Hizbullah.

A week after Zarqawi carried out the attacks in Amman last November, Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki met with the heads of Hizbullah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP and DFLP-GC in Beirut. At the end of the summit, Ahmed Jibril declared, "We all confirmed that what is going on in occupied Palestine is organically connected to what is going on in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon."

A week later, Hizbullah launched its largest Katyusha rocket attack on northern Israel since the IDF withdrew from south Lebanon in May 2000. Two weeks later, Islamic Jihad carried out the suicide bombing outside the shopping mall in Netanya. Shortly thereafter, Zarqawi's al-Qaida operatives launched another barrage of Katyushas on northern Israel from Lebanon.

Similarly, on January 19, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted a terror summit in Damascus attended by the same cast of characters. The same day, Islamic Jihad carried out a suicide bombing in the old bus station in Tel Aviv. And on April 18, the day before last week's suicide bombing in the old bus station in Tel Aviv, Ahmadinejad presided over yet another terror summit in Teheran with the same participants. And, again, shortly after the summit, al-Qaida struck in the Sinai.

Zawahiri's seven stages of jihad go hand in hand with a 60-page text written by Saif al-Adel sometime after the US invasion of Iraq. Adel deposited his manuscript with the same Jordanian journalist last year. Adel, who has been operating from Iran since the battle of Tora Bora in November 2001, is reportedly Zarqawi's commander in Iraq and al-Qaida's senior liaison with the Iranian regime.

In his manuscript he laid out al-Qaida's intentions for the third stage of the jihad. He explained that the organization needed new bases and was looking for a failed state or states to settle in. Darfur, Somalia, Lebanon and Gaza were all identified as possible options.

As the American author and al-Qaida investigator Richard Miniter puts it, "US forces together with the Kenyans and the Ethiopians have pretty much prevented al-Qaida from basing in Somalia or Darfur. That left only Lebanon with all its problems with its various political factions, overlords and the UN. But then suddenly, like manna from Heaven, Israel simply gave them the greatest gift al-Qaida ever received when Ariel Sharon decided to give them Gaza."

Israel, he explains, provided al-Qaida with the best base it has ever had. Not only is Gaza located in a strategically vital area - between the sea, Egypt and Israel. It is also fairly immune from attack since the Kadima government will be unwilling to reconquer the area.

Moreover, as was the case with Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gamaa Islamiyya terrorists who merged with al-Qaida in the 1990s, the Palestinians today constitute an ideal population for al-Qaida. They already support jihad. They have vast experience in fighting. And if it only took Hamas two weeks in office to get all the other terror groups - from Fatah to the Popular Resistance Committees to the Popular Front - to pledge allegiance to it last week, Hamas's co-optation by al-Qaida shouldn't be very difficult.

Al-Qaida today is building its presence in Gaza, Judea and Samaria gradually. It drafts Palestinian terrorists to its ranks and provides them with ideological indoctrination and military training. In November, for instance, a terror recruiter in Jordan who had drafted two terrorists from the Nablus area to al-Qaida's ranks and instructed them to recruit others, informed them that he intended to send a military trainer from Gaza to train them. The two, who were arrested in December, had planned to carry out a double suicide bombing in Jerusalem.

Last May, the first terror cell in Gaza announced its association with al-Qaida. When Ra'anan Gissin, then prime minister Ariel Sharon's spokesman, was asked to comment on the development by a foreign reporter, he presented the government's position on the issue as follows: "There is some evidence of links between militants in Gaza and al-Qaida… but for us, local terrorist groups are just as dangerous."

On the face of it, Gissin's arrogance seems appropriate. After all, what do we care who sends the bombers into our cafes and buses? But things don't work that way.

As the attacks in Egypt, the arrests in Jordan and the bin Laden and Zarqawi messages this week all indicated, we find ourselves today in a world war. The Palestinians are no longer the ones waging the war against us. The Islamist axis now wages the war against us through the Palestinians. The center of gravity, like the campaign rationale of the enemy, has moved away.

Today, the decision-makers who determine the character and timing of the terror offensives are not sitting in Gaza and or Judea and Samaria. They are sitting in Teheran, Waziristan, Damascus, Beirut, Amman and Fallujah. The considerations that guide those that order the trigger pulled are not local considerations, but regional considerations at best and considerations wholly cut off from local events at worst.

This new state of affairs demands a change in the way all of Israel's security arms understand and fight this war. The entire process of intelligence gathering for the purpose of uncovering and preventing planned terror attacks needs to be reconsidered.

A reconfiguration of political and diplomatic strategies is also required. Talk of a separation barrier and final borders, not to mention the abandonment of Judea and Samaria to Hamas sound hallucinatory when standing against us are Zarqawi who specializes in chemical and biological warfare; bin Laden who specializes in blowing up airplanes; and Iran that threatens a nuclear Holocaust.

Who can cause Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Tzipi Livni and Yuli Tamir to take the steps required to protect Israel from the reality exposed by the events of this past week?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In the aftermath of Monday's massacre in Tel-Aviv, IDF commanders recommended that the government officially recognize reality and declare the Palestinian Authority an enemy entity. They argued that such a declaration would facilitate IDF targeting of PA institutions, leaders and military forces that are presently transitioning to Hamas rule.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his colleagues Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz rejected the army's recommendation, arguing that they wish to preserve the international support they claim Israel now enjoys in the aftermath of the massacre (although with Italy's incoming leader Romano Prodi chatting on the phone with Ismail Haniyeh and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw expressing his deep desire to speak with Hamas, it is unclear what international support they are referring to). Rather than strike the PA, our leaders announced their intention to seek a UN condemnation of the attack.

Yet even assuming that Israel now enjoys some level of international support, the government's decision still raises the question: What good is that support if to preserve it Israel is required to refrain from taking actions that could protect its citizens from massacre? The government's preference for international declarations of sympathy over national security indicates that our leaders are in the grips of a deep conceptual confusion over what its actual responsibilities are.

But Israel's leaders are not unique in their confusion. Over the past few years another country targeted with international calumny for its actions against the global jihad has confused its desire for international support with its responsibility to safeguard its national security and international interests. This country is the United States.

Over the past few months not a day has gone by without Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad letting loose some threat against the US, Israel or global security. Barely a day has gone by without Tehran taking some action to show how desperately the mullahs need to be taught some manners by the 101st Airborne or Golani.

Given Tehran's constant provocations and the seriousness of the threat it poses to international security, it would make sense for states to be lining up to support US action against Iran. And yet today not even Britain is willing to support the use of force against Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. The question is why. How is it that aside from Israel, no state today is willing to contend with the obvious danger emanating from Tehran?

IN A nutshell, the reason that the international community is unable to contend with the threat Iran poses to international security is because today's dominant international institutions are constituted in a manner that protects those who endanger international security at the expense of those they target with aggression.

Today, most states in the world are neither stalwart US enemies like Iran and North Korea, nor stalwart US allies like Israel, Poland, Australia and Britain. They can roughly be divided into two groups.

First there are the states that do not share the US's perception of the threat of global jihad and those that believe that America's loss is their gain. China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, and - depending on the weather - France, Norway, Sweden and Belgium are members of this group.

The second group is comprised of states that do share the US's perception of the threat Islamo-fascism presents to international security. States in this category have two main reasons for not wishing to join the US today in contending with Iran. First, some of these states assume they can sit on the fence and still enjoy an American security guarantee. This group of free riders includes Canada, Mexico, the Philippines and Western European states, which - again depending on the weather - sometimes include France, Belgium, Norway and Sweden. Second, many states are simply unconvinced the US has the staying power to win this war and as a result are unwilling to risk the potential repercussions of joining forces with America. This group includes states like Singapore, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Holland and Indonesia.

As was the case three years ago when the US worked to build an international coalition ahead of its invasion of Iraq, today its attempts to build a coalition against Iran suffer from two critical weaknesses. First, the US is not making a distinction between states that have no interest in helping it and those who wish it to succeed. Indeed, Washington seems more intent on currying the favor of inherently hostile states like China and Russia than in engendering the support of inherently non-hostile states like Holland, Denmark, Singapore and even Britain.

Second, the US is seeking to build its coalitions within the framework of the UN and NATO, which are institutionally incapable of advancing US interests. The UN is controlled by countries like China and Russia that do not share the US's perception of threats to global security, by states that believe their fortunes are improved by US failure like Egypt, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and by states like France that believe that they can get away with opposing the US because America will protect them anyway.

NATO was established in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union. It remained relevant until the end of the Cold War because the nations of Western Europe wanted the US to protect them from Soviet invasion and the US wanted to prevent Soviet expansion. But today, in the absence of the Soviet Union, NATO has no real importance. In the 1990s it was hoped that the alliance would be able to reinvent itself as a US-led international security organization. But in light of France and Turkey's refusal to participate in the war against the global jihad, NATO has been rendered incapable of playing a role in today's international security environment. So against Iran today, like against Iraq three years ago, the US is unable to use NATO as the basis for an international coalition.

IN LIGHT of these realities, it is clear that if the US wishes to build an international coalition against Iran, it must fashion a new international organization that will provide incentives to countries like Germany and India to fight alongside the US. Three years ago, the US successfully convinced some 40 countries to join its campaign against Iraq. But that coalition of the willing was never institutionalized. Its members - like Spain and Italy - were free to come and go as they pleased.

As a result, it cannot be relied on today against Iran. While the task of building a new institutional framework for international action against Iran - and perhaps against Syria and North Korea in the future - seems daunting, the US has vast military and economic and cultural resources that it can offer as convincing incentives for joining.

Like Israel, the US is sensitive to the positions of Western European countries. Due to its historical ties and cultural affinity with Europe, it views these countries as it natural allies. And so European opposition to US (or Israeli) actions carries weight domestically that opposition from counties like Indonesia or Pakistan lacks. Unfortunately, Western Europe does not share the US perspective on the global jihad. Whereas for the US, the threat is largely external, for Europe with its large, growing and increasingly radical Muslim minorities, the global jihad is principally a domestic issue.

In testimony before the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month, US Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried explained that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a separate front and a unique threat to the US in the war against the global jihad. In his words, "While Islamist extremism is a global phenomenon, we find the nature of the problem in Western Europe to be distinct - both in its character and its potential to threaten the United States." European jihadists present a potential direct threat to the US (and Israel) due to their ability to travel with EU passports. But the indirect threat they pose to the US and Israel through their growing ability to influence European policy towards the global jihad is a far larger problem.

Two recent incidents exemplify this growing threat.

Last week, Jan Schoonenboom, a Dutch researcher who works for the government-affiliated Scientific Council for Government Policy, published a report recommending that the Dutch government relax its position on Islamic Sharia law. In his words, "We should not be so spastic about Sharia," which he claims can be "very much to the advantage of women's rights." Schoonenboom further recommended that the Dutch government adopt "an adventurous foreign policy" which would involve taking a more strident view against the US, Israel and Russia's actions in Chechnya. He also suggested that the Netherlands support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hizbullah and Hamas.

Schoonenboom did not hide the fact that his main motivator was fear. In his words, he is motivated by "a real fear of dangerous developments. Do we want to go on living in a land that is plagued by fear of attacks? A cultural change is needed here. The Netherlands cannot save the world, but we can try to influence EU policy." While Schoonenboom was drafting Holland's declaration of surrender to Osama bin Laden and his friends, the heads of the EU were working on a new Muslim-friendly official lexicon. From now on terms like "jihad," "Islamic terror," and "Islamo-fascism," will be expunged from the vocabulary of EU officials in order to prevent any unnecessary insult to the sensitivities of European Muslims.

To prevent Europe's increasingly inexorable transformation into Eurabia, the US is in need of institutions capable of launching what Fried referred to as a "battle of ideas," in Europe. At a time when the universities, media and movie industries in the US and Europe (and Israel) devote their energies to demoralizing their publics, there is an urgent need for new institutions and cultural networks that will be capable of instilling Europeans with a willingness to fight to preserve their way of life.

IRAN POSES an unacceptable threat to both Israel and the US. It is true that both countries have the wherewithal to effectively target Iran's nuclear installations unilaterally. But both the US and Israel recognize that the costs of such unilateral action will be very high. And so both have a clear preference for acting within an international coalition of states.

The developments in Europe represent a looming danger to Israel and the US that in the medium and long terms will be far greater than Iran's nuclear weapons program. Both Israel and the US have a distinct interest in seeing Western European countries act now to protect their culture and heritage. The longer they wait the greater the probability that Europe's ultimate civil clash with its Muslim minorities will spur a renewal of European fascism.

The international system, as presently constituted, only exacerbates the threats to global security constituted by Iran and Europe's increasingly radicalized and burgeoning Muslim minorities. In order to contend with these threats, the US must cease looking to the existing system for solutions and turn its energies to building new institutions specifically fashioned to contend with them.

For its part, Israel - which of course has no ability to build an alternate international system - must stop confusing its national interests with the interests of the international system whose current structure ensures its consistent support for Israel's enemies.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Muhammad Abu al-Hawa was a 42-year-old father of eight when he died last Wednesday night. As Israeli Jews were beginning our Pessah Seders and retelling the story of our exodus from Egypt and our rebirth as a free nation, Abu al-Hawa was being tortured by Fatah terrorists. As we ate our Seder meal, he was shot seven times. As we called out "Next year in Jerusalem," Abu al-Hawa's body and car were torched.

Abu al-Hawa was tortured and murdered because he stood accused of committing what the Palestinians consider a capital crime. Eight young children were orphaned last Wednesday night because their father allegedly sold an apartment building in Israel's capital city to Jews. The building in question is located in Jerusalem's A-Tur neighborhood, just above the Temple Mount on the Mount of Olives.

Muhammad Abu al-Hawa was buried in a makeshift cemetery on the road between Jerusalem where he lived, and Jericho where he was murdered. His body was buried there because the Palestinian Authority's mufti in Jerusalem, Ikremah Sabri, has barred all Muslims accused of selling land to Jews from being buried in a Muslim cemetery.

When the PA was established in 1994, the first "legal" step its chairman Yasser Arafat and its justice minister Freih Abu Medein took was to declare null and void all laws that had been in force until that date. After plunging Palestinian society into legal chaos, Arafat and Medein reinstated one law. That law was a Jordanian law which Israel had revoked in 1967. It made selling land to Jews a capital offense.

SINCE 1994, dozens of Arab Israelis and PA residents have been murdered on suspicion of selling land to Jews. Abu al-Hawa's murder - like those that preceded it - tells us several important things about Palestinian society. It tells us that like the PA today, any successor Palestinian state will be a racist, apartheid state where laws will be promulgated based solely on race and religious origin. Jews will be denied all basic human rights and Arabs who peacefully coexist with Jews will be accused of treason and made targets for murder.

On Saturday night Sheikh Raed Salah, the former mayor of Umm el-Fahm and the head of the northern branch of the Israeli Islamic Movement, spoke to an audience of some 30,000 Israeli Arabs in Kafr Kana. There he placed Abu al-Hawa's murder in the context of the Arab-Islamic strategy for conquering Jerusalem. His address, which was broadcast live by al-Jazeera, was devoted to calling for the expulsion of all Jews from Jerusalem. He called on his Arab brethren to "save Jerusalem from the hands of the Jews," promising that "Jerusalem will soon be the capital of the world Islamic nation, and it will be governed by a caliphate."

Salah's speech placed him in the company of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Sunni cleric who acts as a religious authority for both Hamas and al-Qaida. Speaking in Sanaa, Yemen, last December, Qaradawi, who chairs the Al-Quds Foundation, referred to the goal of Islamizing Jerusalem by ending coexistence with Israel as "a civilian jihad that should go side by side with armed resistance."

Today, there is no figure of authority in the Arab and Islamic world in general and in the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority particularly who would have stood up for Abu al-Hawa. For today's Arab and Islamic leaders, murders like Abu al-Hawa's serve an "educational" goal of terrorizing Palestinians into ending any ongoing relationships they may have with Israelis.

Neither Abu al-Hawa nor countless other victims before him had an opportunity to answer the charges leveled against them. According to Palestinians and to Jews involved in purchasing lands from Palestinians, in the majority of cases, the Arabs murdered for the "crime" of selling land to Jews never sold land to Jews. At most they were "guilty" of having ties of friendship or commerce with Israelis. The fact that merely having relations with Jews can expose an Arab to allegations of collaboration is enough to convince most Palestinians that they shouldn't have anything to do with Israel or Israelis. So by murdering people like Abu al-Hawa, the Palestinian leadership ensures that Palestinians will be too afraid of being killed to risk peaceful coexistence with Israel.

YET WHILE once marked as a land seller Abu al-Hawa could expect no protection from the Palestinian leadership, as a resident of Jerusalem he had a legal right to expect Israeli authorities to protect him.

Indeed, it was the responsibility of the Israel Police to protect him. Disturbingly, not only did the police not protect him, they may well have made it impossible for him to escape death.

Last month the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ordered the police to evict squatters from the building formerly owned by Abu al-Hawa who had moved in during the previous weeks. Sources intimately involved with the story allege that rather than carry out the eviction order as quietly as possible in order to minimize local Arab attention to what was already shaping up to be a difficult and dangerous situation for Abu al-Hawa, the police leaked the court-ordered operation to Israel's TV Channel 10.

Last Sunday and Monday nights, Channel 10 led its primetime news broadcasts with footage from the police operation at A-Tur. The footage showed riot police ejecting the squatters and their personal effects from the apartment building. Reporter Assaf Zohar portrayed the Arab squatters as innocent victims and the Jews who bought the building legally, guarded the building legally and moved into the building legally as arrogant bullies and greedy, wealthy fanatics.

Abu al-Hawa described Jews approaching him with a suitcase filled with cash offering to buy his apartment. He vociferously claimed that he refused their pushy offers because he would never sell to Jews. Zohar made no mention of the fact that the PA conducts extrajudicial murders of those accused of selling land to Jews.

IT WAS hard to imagine Al-Jazeera portraying Jews in a worse light than Israel's Channel 10. The fact that the building in question is located in Israel's capital city across the street from the Temple Mount apparently made absolutely no impression on Zohar.

After the Channel 10 "expose," the level of incitement against Abu al-Hawa went up several decibels in A-Tur and in the PA. Sources in the neighborhood argue that if he had been harassed by the PA before the Channel 10 broadcast, Abu al-Hawa's life was immediately imperiled in the broadcast's aftermath.

The fact that the police allowed and allegedly facilitated Channel 10's coverage of the evictions together with the decidedly anti-Israel slant of the Channel 10 story says two very disturbing things about the state of Israel's elites today. In the case of the police, it says that the one body responsible for safeguarding Abu al-Hawa's life operated in contradiction to its basic mission.

If the police had wished, they could have made it clear to neighborhood residents and PA interlopers that it was in their best interests to leave Abu al-Hawa and his family alone. Yet rather than do so, they apparently facilitated the Channel 10 coverage which made killing Abu al-Hawa a matter of honor for his murderers eager to prove their mettle as defenders of Palestinian pride and Islamic solidarity against the Jews.

For its part, Channel 10's unsettlingly biased story was noteworthy not merely because it made Abu al-Hawa an irresistible target. It was noteworthy for what it said about how Israel's elites view official Palestinian anti-Semitism. By leading their primetime news broadcast night after night with a seven minute segment that portrayed Jews moving into a building in Jerusalem as wealthy, exploitative trespassers, Channel 10 showed that its editors, producers and reporters accept the anti-Semitic basis of Palestinian claims against Israel.

That is, these representatives of the Israeli elite classes believe that the goal of establishing a Palestinian state justifies nullifying the right of Jews to own land in areas that the Palestinians claim are theirs.

There is little doubt that the combined capabilities of the police, the IDF and the Shin Bet could easily render it all but impossible for Palestinians to carry out their "law" dictating the murder of those who sell land to Jews. They could also make it clear to the Palestinians and the Israeli Arab leadership that they have no choice other than to abide by Israeli law in Israel's capital. That is, Israel has the physical and intelligence capacity to win this war for the maintenance of survival of the Jewish state against its domestic foes rather handily.

Unfortunately, for Israel to win this war, it first needs to accept that it has a right to fight it. And when our elites adopt the racist Palestinian narrative of the war and present it to the Israeli public as an objective truth, accepting that Israel has a right to fight this war becomes a Herculean effort.

Abu al-Hawa's torture and murder is the result not only of the barbarism that reigns supreme in Palestinian society. It is also result of the fact that supporters of that barbarism reign supreme in Israeli society.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

This week Iran presented the US with the ultimate challenge and Washington must now make a decision. Is it fighting to win?

Since the September 11 jihadist attacks on the US mainland, President George W. Bush has stated repeatedly that the greatest threat to global security is the specter of rogue regimes and terror groups acquiring weapons of mass destruction. At his January 2002 State of the Union address, the president declared that the regimes of Iran, North Korea and Iraq comprised an axis of evil and a central goal - indeed the most crucial goal - of the US-led war was to prevent them from acquiring or maintaining arsenals of weapons of mass destruction.

If we accept Bush's definition of the aims of the war, then five years on, the inescapable conclusion is that the US and its allies, such as they are, are losing this war and losing it badly. Iraq's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was not captured by US forces who heroically brought down Saddam Hussein's regime three years ago this week. It vanished before they arrived.

Israeli intelligence reported before the US-led invasion that starting in late summer 2002 Saddam's WMD arsenal was shipped by truck convoy to Syria. Recently, documents seized from Iraq after the fall of the regime were released to the public. Those documents revealed that under the direct command of former Russian prime minister and KGB boss Yevgeny Primakov, Russian Spetnaz forces oversaw the transfer of Iraq's WMD to Syria ahead of the US-led invasion. These reports have been corroborated by Saddam's Air Vice Marshall General Georges Sada.

So rather than being destroyed or secured, Saddam's WMD arsenal was simply moved from one rogue regime with intimate ties to terror organizations to another rogue regime with intimate ties to terror organizations.

As for North Korea, 10 months after Bush labeled the Stalinist regime in Pyongyang a member of the axis of evil, North Korea announced that it had systematically breached its 1994 agreement with the US not to develop a nuclear arsenal and had harvested plutonium from some 8,000 spent fuel rods at its Russian-built Yangbon reactor. Immediately after the North Koreans admitted their duplicity, the US acknowledged that China, Russia and Pakistan had all actively assisted North Korea in developing its nuclear weapons program behind America's back.

So Bush was being played for a fool. A year after the September 11 attacks, America learned that neither its enemies nor its purported allies took Washington's war goals seriously. North Korea thumbed its nose at Bush, and Pakistan, China and Russia willfully betrayed him.

The Bush administration reacted to the ruin of its Asian strategy by pretending that it hadn't failed. Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and other top administration officials lauded Pakistan for its commitment to preventing North Korea from acquiring nuclear capabilities even as it became public knowledge that Islamabad had transferred centrifuges for uranium enrichment to the North Koreans. They said that China and Russia both knew that a nuclear-armed North Korea was inimical to their national interests and to global security even as neither Beijing nor Moscow expressed the slightest regret for their assistance to North Korea's nuclear program and gave no pledge to cease that assistance.

The Bush administration continued to negotiate with the North Koreans through the six-party framework with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia with the aim of convincing North Korea to stop developing nuclear weapons. Last February, this continued attempt to maintain a failed policy was exposed in all its preposterousness when North Korea announced that it had nuclear weapons. Again the US refused to acknowledge that its policy was a failure.

Last September, the US agreed to a South Korean proposal to offer North Korea aid and security guarantees in exchange for a commitment by Pyongyang to turn back the clock on its nuclear program. Pyongyang responded in November by cutting off all talks in the six-party forum.

This week, the US tried again to engage North Korea at a symposium in Tokyo. Pyongyang reacted by threatening America with destruction. North Korea's Defense Minister Kim Il Chol said last Saturday that in the event of a US strike on the country, North Korea, "will mobilize its political-ideological might and military potentials built up generation after generation and mercilessly wipe out the enemies and thus viciously conclude the stand-off with the US."

The US chief negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, responded to Pyongyang's call to obliterate America by saying, "We've got the right format, the right deal on the table - the September deal - so we have to be a little patient and realize that this is the right approach."

But the right approach to what? It may be the right approach for allowing North Korea to humiliate the US while expanding its nuclear arsenal and selling missile technology to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia and anyone else who wants it. It is the right approach for placing Washington at the mercy of Beijing, which Washington believes is the only country capable of forcing North Korea to improve its behavior. It is also the right approach for ensuring that Russia, China and Pakistan believe that they can betray the trust of the US whenever it suits their purposes. It is the right approach to take, that is, if the US wishes to fail in its mission of preventing rogue regimes from acquiring and maintaining weapons of mass destruction.

It is not, however the right approach for ending North Korea's nuclear adventure. It is not the right approach for forcing North Korea to stop selling ballistic missiles to anyone who wants them. And it is not the right approach for destroying Pyongyang's ability to threaten the US and its allies with nuclear attack.

North Korea is a frightful place. It is led by a fanatical regime that carries out a systematic, monstrous genocide of its own people. It is fully capable of acting with deliberate malice and devastating depravity on an international level.

But it is alone. It has no vital natural resources that make it an attractive trading partner to states throughout the world. It does not lead, nor does it purport to lead a global movement of Stalinist millenarianism.

It is not like Iran.

IRAN ANNOUNCED this week that it is a member of the nuclear club. Over the past five years this new member of the nuclear club has become the undisputed leader of the global jihad. It controls Hizbullah and Islamic Jihad. It has open and warm ties with al-Qaida. It has transformed Hamas and Fatah into its clients. Syria has become its vassal. It controls the majority of Iraq's Shi'ite politicians and militias. It is feared by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It is respected and revered by European Muslims.

With the largest proven reserves of natural gas in the world and huge deposits of crude oil, Teheran is flushed with oil and gas profits and has recently signed multi-billion dollar oil and gas deals with China. It has close business relations with Europe and Russia. It is a member of OPEC. And it is led by men who believe that they are living in a messianic age which demands apocalyptic behavior on the road to divine victory on earth.

Iran, the single greatest enemy of the US and everything it stands for, which has repeatedly stated its goal of destroying America and erasing Israel from the map of the world, is now on the verge of acquiring a nuclear arsenal. It already has delivery systems capable of launching nuclear strikes against Israel and most of Western Europe. Through its own Revolutionary Guards units, Hizbullah and its other terror clients, it has been actively warring against the US for 27 years.

Iran made its fastest leaps towards nuclear capabilities since the September 11 attacks. When in late 2002 Iran's secret nuclear facilities in Natanz, Arak and Isfahan were revealed to the world, the US reacted not by moving to destroy this emerging threat which it acknowledged to be the greatest threat to its own national security and to the security of the world. It reacted by backing Britain, Germany and France's attempts to appease the mullahs into giving up their nuclear weapons program.

The Europeans' diplomacy never had any chance of ending the Iranian program. Iran did not embark on it nuclear weapons program in order to be bought off but in order to have a nuclear arsenal. Yet Washington complemented the Europeans' worthless summitry by clearly signaling that Iran had no reason to worry about US military intervention. This it did by studiously ignoring the fact that Iran was actively warring against US forces in Iraq and flooding Iraq with its agents, spies and weapons.

To date, the US's official policy for contending with Iran is to seek redress in the UN Security Council. That is, the US has placed the responsibility for meeting what it has itself admitted is the greatest threat to global security in the hands of nations that do not share its assessment of Iran.

By seeking Security Council action on Iran, the US has delegated the power for contending with the Iranian nuclear threat to China and Russia which have both assisted Iran in developing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Like its policy towards North Korea, the US's policy towards Iran serves not to thwart Teheran's nuclear aspirations but to facilitate them. It serves not to expand America's options for contending with this grave and gathering threat to its national security and global interests, but to limit them.

After the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush was revered by Americans and lovers of liberty around the world. His soaring rhetoric and stated determination to fight for all that is good and sacred in this world won the hearts of millions and instilled in them the hope that the great battle for civilization had been joined by a force capable of defending it.

America is the greatest nation on Earth and it does have the ability to defend the world against regimes like Iran and its allies. It can prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. It can take those weapons out of North Korea's hands. It can bring Damascus to its knees and force it to cough up Iraq's arsenal of pathogens. And no, military might is not the only way for it to accomplish these tasks.

But America cannot, and it will not accomplish any of these goals if it continues to abide by strategies and frameworks that serve only to strengthen its enemies and permit its "allies" to behave perfidiously. It cannot and will not defend the world from evil, demonic regimes like Iran's if it continues to allow the likes of the EU, Russia, Egypt and China to undercut its will at every turn.

This week Teheran threw down the gauntlet. The greatest battle of this war - the battle to prevent the world's most dangerous regime from attaining the most dangerous weapons known to man - has begun. The moment has arrived for President George W. Bush to make clear if he is, in the final analysis, the leader of the free world or its undertaker.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

IAF helicopters attacked Palestinian terror training camps in Gaza last Saturday and Sunday in an attempt to thwart the Palestinians' rapidly intensifying Kassam rocket offensive on southern Israel. The targeted camps are new blots on the blighted Gazan landscape. They were established shortly after Israel expelled 8,000 of its citizens from their homes in Gush Katif and razed their communities ahead of the IDF retreat from Gaza last summer. The camps were established on the ruins of the communities of Slav and Neve Dekalim.

The Palestinian rocket offensive on southern Israel and the establishment of terror training camps on the ruins of Israeli settlements are incontrovertible proof that the Israeli strategy of "disengagement" has failed utterly and completely. During the 38 years of Israel's presence in Gaza, even when things were at their worst, the area never constituted much more than an irritant to Israel's national security.

Now, with Hamas in charge and al-Qaida, Iran, Hizbullah, PA militias, Islamic Jihad and Fatah terror-crime mobs running rampant, Gaza has become more than an irritant. Today, Gaza has become a base for global jihad and a source for constant and intensifying destabilization throughout the region. The current rocket offensive from Gaza - for which Israel has yet to come up with any effective response short of invasion - has placed some of Israel's most sensitive national infrastructures under constant attack. The daily shelling of the communities around Gaza imperils the economic viability of southern Israel.

Whereas one of the basic rationales given for the "disengagement" was that Israeli presence in Gaza was the main source of friction between Palestinians and Israelis, what is now clear is that Israel's presence in Gaza was a source of stability.

Speaking to Newsweek last weekend, Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert set out his plans for the future. Olmert declared his intention to push forward with his "convergence" plan in Judea and Samaria. He will forcibly expel tens of thousands of Israelis from their communities and vastly curtail Israel's military control of the areas. And he expects America to support him by financing the resettlement of some 80,000 Israeli refugees and recognizing Israel's self-declared borders. That is, he desires American support for an Israeli implementation of the Gaza expulsions and retreat on a mass scale in the strategically vital areas of Judea and Samaria.

TODAY, THERE are two paradigms for contending with the Palestinian conflict with Israel. The first one is to negotiate a peace treaty with the Palestinians in which they will get land and sovereignty in exchange for promising to live at peace with Israel. In a word, this paradigm is the paradigm of appeasement.

The second paradigm involves an Israeli retreat from Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem in exchange for nothing whatsoever from the Palestinians. That is, the second paradigm is the paradigm of surrender.

The appeasement paradigm failed at the Camp David summit in July 2000 when the Palestinians refused to accept an Israeli offer of almost everything they say they demand - Gaza, Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem including Judaism's most sacred site, the Temple Mount. Rather than accept the deal which would entail recognizing Israel's right to exist in rump borders, the Palestinians went to war.

Instead of accepting the appeasement paradigm's failure, the Israeli Left together with the Arab League, the EU and the US government attempted to artificially resuscitate it. Through a series of reports - Mitchell, Tenet, Zinni and then eventually the road map - the international community and the Israeli Left have maintained the fiction that appeasement is still an option. This is why, even today, when Olmert has moved to the surrender paradigm, he still pays lip service to appeasement by stating that he is willing to negotiate with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas even though Hamas is running the show.

Yet lip service aside, Olmert and his cohorts are fully committed to the surrender paradigm and they are gunning for the Bush administration to dump appeasement and join their bandwagon. As Olmert put it to Newsweek, "I understand that if [the retreat and expulsion plan from Judea and Samaria] will be accepted as a contribution to a Middle East with less violence and terror, we will be able to reach an understanding with the American government about some measures of support that can be essential for the success of this move."

Unfortunately for the Bush administration, as the Gaza model shows, backing Olmert's plan will mean that the US will be giving its support to a strategy that has no chance whatsoever of making a "contribution to a Middle East with less violence and terror." To the contrary, Olmert's surrender paradigm has made a contribution to violence and terror.

So what is the Bush administration to do? Its current paradigm of appeasement has no chance of succeeding and Olmert's paradigm of surrender is also a recipe for failure.

LUCKILY, appeasement and surrender are not the only options available for stabilizing the Middle East and diminishing levels of violence and terror. In the current issue of the Middle East Quarterly, Dan Diker and Pinchas Inbari outline a paradigm that has a better chance of success than either appeasement or surrender.

Their article, "Re-energizing a West Bank-Jordan Alliance" notes that Israel and Jordan today share a cardinal interest in ensuring that Judea and Samaria do not follow the Gaza model. As they demonstrate, there is reason to believe that from this convergence of interests, a strategy can emerge that will be capable of succeeding where appeasement and surrender fail.

The Jordanian regime is today subject to two sources of turbulence that have the potential to destroy it. First there is Iraq. Iraq's political and military instability wreaks havoc on Jordan which is economically dependent on its eastern neighbor. Jordanian terrorist and al-Qaida commander in Iraq Abu Musab Zarkawi has targeted the Hashemite regime. Al-Qaida has cells throughout Jordan. Al-Qaida operatives attacked Eilat with Katyushas from Akaba on August 19 and they targeted Amman itself in the hotel bombings last November.

Al-Qaida's spread from Iraq to Jordan is now, in the wake of Israel's retreat from Gaza being followed by its spread to Gaza and Judea and Samaria. As Jordanian diplomats explained to Diker and Inbari last September, Jordan is deeply opposed to Olmert's proposed Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. In their view, such a retreat would cause a spread of Gazan and Iraqi style chaos to Judea and Samaria. Such chaos could easily endanger the Hashemite regime.

UNTIL 1988, Arabs in Judea and Samaria were Jordanian citizens. Fearing that the Palestinian uprising which began that year would destabilize his kingdom, the late King Hussein renounced Jordan's claims to sovereignty over the areas. Yet Jordan has remained actively engaged in the areas. Some 70 percent of Jordanians define themselves as Palestinians and most Jordanians have family in Judea and Samaria. Trade between the two banks of the Jordan is intense. King Abdullah's wife Rania is a Palestinian. In naming their son Hussein the crown prince of Jordan, Abdullah has effectively transformed the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan into the Hashemite-Palestinian Kingdom of Jordan-Palestine.

Inbari and Diker believe that the Jordanian regime may be willing today to entertain a strategy of federating or confederating with Judea and Samaria. The advantage of such a policy for the Palestinians is that as citizens of overwhelmingly Palestinian Jordan, they would no longer be stateless. The advantage for Israel and Jordan would be that the threat that the PA's chronic instability poses to both states' security would be remedied by the presence of two sovereigns - at peace with one another, with decades of military cooperation behind them, and a shared interest in destroying all vestiges of Islamist terror cells in the area - in charge.

Although they do not discuss the issue of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria in their article, there is no reason to think that a confederative or federative arrangement that would place Jordan in charge of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria would necessitate any limitation on the right of Israel to remain responsible for the Israelis who live in the areas. Clear and straightforward arrangements regarding citizenship and security responsibilities for both the Palestinians and the Israelis can be reached with little more than a handshake given the depth of Israel and Jordan's shared interests.

ONE OF the main reasons that the notion of Palestinian statehood - upon which the appeasement and surrender paradigms are based - is acceptable to Israelis is because it is believed that if the Palestinians are given sovereignty they will begin to behave like a responsible member of the community of states. Sadly, events of the past 13 years have proven repeatedly that conferring the Palestinians with the accoutrements of statehood - including sovereignty in Gaza -- exacerbates Palestinian support for jihad and instability.

With Hamas in charge of the PA and global jihadist terror groups backed by Iran on the march in Gaza and Judea and Samaria, further empowerment of the Palestinians will endanger the survivability of Jordan and Israel. But as Inbari and Diker show, other options exist. If the Americans wish to support an Israeli policy that will, as Olmert says make "a contribution to a Middle East with less violence and terror," they should suggest that he consider switching his paradigm to one that has a chance of achieving that goal.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On Monday, Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that part of Ukraine's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal may well have found its way to Iran. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians agreed to transfer the Soviet nuclear arsenal that remained in Ukraine after its independence to Russia. According to Novaya Gazeta, some 250 nuclear warheads never made it to Russia and are thought to have been sent to Iran instead. The report further noted that the warheads will remain operational until 2010.

Responding to the report, Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia's deputy defense minister and the chief of General Staff said, "Russia's General Staff has no information about whether Ukraine has given 250 nuclear warheads to Iran or not."

It is impossible to assess the accuracy of the report. The Ukrainian government has dismissed its allegations. Russia may well have invented the story to shift media attention away from the growing awareness that Russian support for Teheran, Damascus and Hamas effectively places it in the enemy camp in the US-led war against global jihad.

But whether this particular report is true or false, there is no doubt that the danger to Israel and the rest of the Western world emanating from Iran and its allies is growing by the day. In recent testimony before the US Congress, John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, said that the danger that Teheran "will acquire a nuclear weapon and the ability to integrate it with ballistic missiles that Iran already possesses" is a cause "for immediate concern."

Also this week, as the Web site Regimechangeiran noted, the American Foreign Policy Council published a report quoting Western intelligence sources asserting that Iran is in the process of assembling intermediate range ballistic missiles with a range of 4,500 km. The extended range will enable Iran to hit almost all of Western Europe with nuclear warheads. The sources further maintained that Iran is already in possession of at least one nuclear bomb.

EVEN IF both Negroponte's testimony and the council's report are perceived by some as alarmist, this week Iran itself continued to make every effort to convince the world that assessments like these are grossly understated. Iran conducted an enormous naval exercise called "Great Prophet" in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman. Almost every day of the exercise Iranian forces demonstrated new radar-evading ballistic missile systems.

While Western defense establishments have had tepid responses to Iran's show of force, the regime built on its provocations Wednesday when the supreme commander of its Revolutionary Guards, Maj.-Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, issued a thinly veiled threat to close the Straits of Hormuz - the narrow waterway through which 40 percent of the world's oil passes.

Iran's recent financial maneuverings also indicate general preparations for global war. The Swiss newspaper Der Bund reported the Iranian regime recently withdrew $31 billion of its gold reserves and foreign exchange from European financial institutions. Additionally, this week Iran renewed its gasoline rationing for the general public.

While President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's poisonous and apocalyptic rhetoric has caused the Western world to step away from him, Teheran is far from isolated. To the contrary, today it perceives itself and is perceived by others as the leader of a regional Islamist axis.

In February Canada's Globe and Mail published a report in which Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hizbullah member of the Lebanese parliament, declared that on January 20 the Islamist axis was formally cemented in Damascus. The parley which brought about the entente was led by Ahmadinejad and attended by axis members Syrian President Bashar Assad, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal, Islamic Jihad chief Ramadan Abdullah Shalah and the commanders of PLO breakaway front groups. Iraqi Shi'ite terror chief Muqtada al-Sadr also pledged his allegiance to the axis. The jihad summit took place five days before the Palestinian elections and on the same day a suicide bomb exploded in Tel Aviv.
 

Damascus's response to the establishment of the axis and to Hamas's electoral victory has been dramatic and disturbing. It has harshly curbed all liberal political opposition to the Ba'athist regime. Voices of such dissent were empowered by the firm international position taken against Syria during the UN investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri last year. Today many opponents of the regime are in prison. At the same time, Assad's Alewite minority regime, that has been radically secular since its establishment in the 1960s, is beginning to open up to Islamist forces.

Michael Slackman, the New York Times correspondent in Damascus, reported the change in the general atmosphere on Wednesday. He explained that current situation reflects "at least in part a growing sense of confidence because of shifts in the Middle East in recent months, especially the Hamas victory in Palestinian elections, political paralysis in Lebanon and the intense difficulties facing the United States in trying to stabilize Iraq and stymie Iran's drive toward nuclear power." So in a nutshell, members of the Islamic axis believe that they are on the march and that America and Israel are on the retreat.

Although not present at the January jihad powwow in Damascus, al-Qaida is intimately engaged in this Iran-led Islamist alliance. Britain's Sunday Mirror reported that today al-Qaida forces operate within Iran's Revolutionary Guards units in Iraq. Both the IDF and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas admitted last month that al-Qaida units are operating in Gaza. Also last month, Israel announced the arrest of two Palestinians from Judea and Samaria who were planning to carry out attacks on Israel for al-Qaida.

Lebanon's government has also acknowledged a growing al-Qaida presence in largely Palestinian enclaves. Al-Qaida has carried out attacks against both Jordan and Israel from Jordan and against both Israel and Egypt from its entrenched bases in the Sinai. Its commander in Iraq, Iranian ally Abu Musab Zarqawi, has made it clear that al-Qaida has now made attacking Israel one of its top priorities.

This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces now control Hizbullah's posts along the border with northern Israel and are developing an advanced intelligence gathering network for spying on Israel. A senior IDF commander told the paper that Hizbullah posts built and fortified by the Iranians just meters away from the international border are "now Iran's front-line with Israel. The Iranians are using Hizbullah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it."

No doubt in an attempt to do something about it, this week Northern Command conducted an enormous exercise which, according to the IDF Spokesman's Office, tested "deployment of regular and reserve forces to the front, establishment of bridgeheads, airlift of forces and supplies from the rear to the front, deployment of forces on various missions, the operation of logistics centers in the field and the provision of varied operational responses to the activities of terrorist organizations on the Lebanese front."

By prominently posting a detailed report of the exercise on its official Web site, the IDF was clearly attempting to signal Iran that Israel is prepared for whatever awaits us.

Unfortunately - with all due respect to the IDF - Israel's enemies, who know that the IDF is wholly subordinate to the political leadership, no longer take its signals seriously. From Gaza to Teheran our enemies are acutely aware of the weakness of our political leadership and its unwillingness to contend with them. Today, the policy of the government is to take no account of any events occurring beyond our indefensible pre-Six Day War boundaries and to defame anyone who suggests they bear examination.

FOR MORE than two years, the Israeli government and media have told the public that no matter how our enemies threaten us, they can do us no harm because America is protecting us. Protected by America, Israelis are told that we have no reason to fear the consequences of IDF retreats and the transfer of vacated lands to Hamas.

Sadly, this promise is largely untrue. The Bush administration today is bogged down in a swamp of strategic paralysis and political distress that prevent it from designing clear policies regarding the war against global jihad.

American policy towards the Palestinians is case in point: One day the Bush administration announces that it is cutting its ties with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and the next day it demands that Israel keep the borders with Gaza open and promises to find a way to give direct aid to the Palestinians that somehow will not strengthen Hamas.

As to Syria, the stubborn stance the administration maintained towards Damascus during the months of Detlev Mehlis's investigation of Hariri's murder has been replaced by no stance. Aside from finger pointing at Damascus, Washington offers no plan for ending Syrian support for terrorists in Lebanon, the PA and Iraq.

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal noted that during her weekend pit stop in Baghdad, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came down publicly against Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari's bid to maintain his position in the next government. Rice and her British counterpart, Jack Straw, announced their governments' support for Finance Minister Adel Adul Mahdi, who serves as the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which is known to have strong relations with Teheran.

Rice's heavy-handed interference with Iraq's democratic processes goes hand in hand with the administration's decision to open direct negotiations with Iran for the first time since the Khomeini revolution in 1979. On Saturday, direct US-Iranian negotiations on the stabilization of Iraq are scheduled to begin. And as if the Bush administration's decision to legitimize Iran's destabilizing position as a power broker in Iraq weren't enough, on Tuesday German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier met with Rice in Washington and urged her to open a direct dialogue with Iran on its nuclear weapons program.

All of these recent developments demonstrate that the members of the Iran-led Islamist axis are actively pursuing and indeed progressing in their quest to encircle Israel and entrap the US. This they accomplish - both separately and together - while Israel and the US insist on doing everything they can to prevent any possibility of effectively meeting the rising threats. There is no doubt that the political leadership of at least one of these states has to snap out of its policy fog immediately. Our enemies have no consideration for our desire to ignore them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday the first jihadist government since the Taliban ascended to power. The induction of the Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority has created a new dynamic in the Middle East.

Today a force openly supportive of global jihadist organizations like al-Qaida and Hizbullah, allied with Iran, dedicated to the complete Islamization of Palestinian society and committed to the eradication of Israel now reigns in the Palestinian Authority.

To date, Western governments have limited their response to Hamas's rise to power to endless debates and statements regarding their desire to create mechanisms that will allow them to continue to give the Palestinians billions of dollars a year and to maintain their official ties with the Hamas-led PA through the office of PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Exemplifying this trend last week were Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and US President George W. Bush. On election night, Olmert entreated Abbas to open negotiations with Israel.

In an address last Wednesday, Bush said, "I weep about the suffering of the Palestinians," while maintaining that the "US government has got aid that goes directly to people. And I know that we'll continue to call upon governments in the region to support the Palestinian people."

At base, the Western world's desperate search for a way to give the Palestinians its money shows two things about the West. First it shows that Western governments from Washington to Paris to Jerusalem understand that Hamas is not the same as Fatah. They know that there is something that fundamentally differentiates today's situation in the PA from that which existed before the January 25 elections. Yet on the other hand, the fact that the West searches for ways to continue aiding the Palestinians in spite of the fact that they just elected Hamas to lead them indicates that the West is unclear why the Palestinians' choice should change the way its governments do business.

SO IN the interest of clarifying the situation, it is necessary to examine what Hamas actually is. In the first instance, Hamas is a jihadist organization rooted, like al-Qaida, in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. Hamas was founded in 1988. Its covenant defines the goal of Hamas's jihad as the eradication of Israel.

Towards this end, the notion of negotiating a peace treaty with Israel is completely ruled out. As the covenant states, "There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad."

The Hamas covenant places great emphasis on the need to indoctrinate the Palestinian people in the cause of jihad. Raising the banner of jihad, "requires the propagation of Islamic consciousness among the masses, locally [in Palestine], in the Arab world and in the Islamic world. It is necessary to instill the spirit of jihad in the nation, engage the enemies and join the ranks of the jihad fighters."

Hamas's covenant is important because its tenets are upheld and given concrete meaning in Hamas's electoral platform published in January. That document places its greatest emphasis on Hamas's intention to use its political power to Islamize the PA government apparatuses and to bring about the total mobilization of Palestinian society for jihad. The platform stipulates that Hamas will revise the PA's criminal code and constitutional laws to ensure that "Islamic Sharia law will be the principle source of legislation in Palestine."

Since its electoral victory, Hamas has targeted nightclubs, bars, Westernized women and homosexuals in Gaza. Its platform backs these moves and future suppression of Western norms when it states, "We will foster respect for all views that do not deviate from the people's beliefs and their cultural heritage." Women are targeted specifically with the promise that they will be instructed in the ways of Islam to "familiarize" them with their "independent identity which is based on chastity and commitment."

In promoting and proselytizing jihad, Hamas will "support mosques and mosque facilities" and "ensure that places of worship serve both a missionary and educational role in society." And the educational role of the mosques, like the role of schools and the media, will be to preach jihad. Hamas explains that its goal is to "improve our citizenry" with the goal of helping them "resist cultural normalization." The media under Hamas will receive "guidance... so that they serve to elevate the Palestinian people and foster their perseverance and resistance."

The fact that Hamas publicly places its greatest emphasis on indoctrination is borne out by its decision to appoint Dr. Nasser Al-Din Shaar deputy prime minister and minister of education. Shaar is the dean of the Sharia Law department at A-Najah University in Nablus. He is the senior government minister in Judea and Samaria, with the PA's prime minister, foreign minister and interior minister all located in Gaza.

In an interview with Ma'ariv last month, Shaar, whose university has seen several of its students become suicide bombers, not only refused to acknowledge the virulently anti-Semitic content of the PA's school and university curricula, he accused Israel of corrupting Palestinian society. In his words, "We know that the government of Israel and its intelligence services are trying to oppress the Palestinians, for instance by distributing narcotics and pornography."

WHILE MAHMOUD Abbas is seen as the great white hope of the West, for Hamas it appears that his main purpose is to buy time during which they will complete the Islamization and militarization of Palestinian society. Acting as a fig leaf to a West addicted to the Palestinians, Abbas will enable Hamas to mobilize the Palestinians for the next round of jihad as it builds up its arsenal - which is already formidable.

Last Tuesday a Katyusha rocket was launched for the first time on Ashkelon. Since Israel's abandonment of the international border between Gaza and Egypt last September, al-Qaida operatives from Iraq and Hizbullah operatives from Lebanon have established bases of operation in Gaza.

Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers have begun assisting Hamas commanders in establishing, arming and training a new jihadist army. That army, which will be called the Murbitun, will be modeled after the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Hamas is also taking steps to co-opt Fatah terrorists and bring them into its government with the aim of Islamizing Fatah. Its Interior Minister Said Siam appointed Khaled Abu Hilal, one of the commanders of Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group, as his ministry's spokesman. Siam also cancelled the Fatah-instituted ban on beards in the PA security services.

The West is operating under the assumption that the Palestinians will stop supporting Hamas if they stop giving their money to the PA. But Hamas seems to invite the aid cutoff. Its electoral platform pledged that it would "Reject all donations that come with conditions or ask us to concede any of our inviolable principles."

HAMAS'S RISE to power renders it all but impossible to deny the connection between the insurgency in Iraq and the global jihad in general and the Palestinian war with Israel. Indeed, in his first statement as foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahar attacked the US claiming, "America is committing big crimes against the Arab and Islamic countries."

Yet as Hamas prepares for war on all levels, Israel is about to form a government led either by Kadima or Labor whose politicians insist on pretending that there is no problem here. Kadima's plan to remove Israeli communities and IDF forces from Judea and Samaria is based on an abject refusal to admit that the areas abandoned will be taken over by Hamas. Furthermore, as Olmert has repeatedly stated, Kadima refuses to acknowledge that Hamas is even a threat to Israel.

For its part, Labor believes that it is still possible to negotiate an agreement with the Palestinians in spite of the fact that they elected Hamas to lead them. Labor believes that Abbas, who has never lifted a finger to fight terrorism and has been incapable of making any constructive steps toward peaceful coexistence with Israel, is a viable partner for negotiations. As well, its leaders have expressed a willingness to negotiate with Hamas.

The Taliban's rise to power was greeted by indifference from the international community. Every once in awhile, Mullah Omar and his buddies would be caught stoning women to death or blowing up Buddhist monuments and would receive global reprimands for a few days.

Although it was shunned by all countries except Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Taliban's global isolation did not seem to inhibit its commitment to jihad. In the end, the Taliban were only forced to change the way they did business when the US military brought down their regime after they enabled the September 11 attacks.

Is there anyone willing to draw any lesson from the last jihadist government in their dealings with the newest one?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.