One of the foundations of the free market is rational choice theory. That theory assumes that private individuals generally make decisions that maximize their profits and utility and do so far better than any collective organization or bureaucracy. Rational choice theory stands or falls on the availability of information. Without the free flow of information, people are unable to make rational choices.

In Israel, as the country's steady economic growth and high placement on just about every significant global economic index shows, the economic liberalization reforms enacted by former prime minister and finance minister Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu have been a complete success. The Israeli economy is the envy of a Europe that suffers from stagnation and decline.

Yet inside of Israel, the country's economic success is a well-kept secret. Most Israelis operate under the impression that the country is on the verge of economic ruin - that poor people are starving, that sick people are going without proper medical care.

The reason that most Israelis believe that the country is teetering on the brink of an economic disaster is because the Israeli media have consistently reported an economic narrative that has absolutely no relationship with reality. So, while international investors line up to invest in the Israeli economy, Israeli citizens look to socialist politicians and pundits to save them from their capitalist nightmare of success.

Just as they underplay Israel's economic success to advance their socialist economic agenda, the Israeli media distort coverage of Israel's increasingly dangerous strategic environment to increase public support for their defeatist, left-wing world view. In both endeavors, the media are supported and abetted by the legal system.

Events on the northern front and in Gaza over the past few days demonstrated that Israelis are denied a free flow of accurate information regarding their national security. On Monday, Ha'aretz reported darkly, "Iran has transferred to Lebanon rockets that reach Beersheba."

The report stated that the Iranians recently provided their proxy Hizbullah with Zelzal-2 rockets capable of hitting every major city in Israel.

Yet while this report is true, it is neither startling nor earth-shaking for anyone who has been closely observing developments in south Lebanon over the past few years. The recent shipment of Zelzal missiles does not constitute a departure from well-formed Iranian, Syrian or Hizbullah policy patterns.

The first time that a shipment of Iranian Zelzal rockets to Hizbullah was reported was in early 2003. Just as this week it took the media one day to forget about this Zelzal shipment, in 2003, the reports received almost no attention. At the time the Israeli media and the government were busy convincing the Israeli public to support the road map which was then being written by Yossi Beilin and Tony Blair.

Like the 2003 report before it, the meaning of this week's report is clear. Iran today is perched on Israel's northern border. Against the backdrop of Iran's nuclear weapons program and its ballistic missiles capabilities, Iran's presence on the northern border dramatically impacts Israel's national security posture. If before the IDF's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000 Hizbullah and its state sponsor constituted a challenging, bloody tactical threat to Israel, today they are a strategic threat. In short, this week's story about the Zelzal missile shipment reveals what a terrible mistake Israel's retreat from south Lebanon was.

But the Israel media - which was the engine behind the Barak government's decision to retreat from south Lebanon six years ago - have no interest in informing the public of the magnitude of their error. So rather than provide any context for Sunday's Katyusha rocket attacks on northern Israel, our media luminaries argued among themselves about irrelevancies such as whether the Iranian puppet Islamic Jihad or the Iranian puppet Hizbullah fired the rockets on Sunday morning.

If the media had any interest in serving their primary function of informing the Israeli public about its current situation, they could ask why Israel is sitting back and allowing Hizbullah to acquire the means to attack all of Israel's major cities. If we know that the missiles were delivered, why didn't we blow them up at the airport or in their silos?

Since the 1950s, Israel's military doctrine has dictated that the IDF is responsible for ensuring that our enemies do not acquire the means to cause us strategic damage. This was the rationale that stood behind the Sinai Campaign in 1956, the Six Day War in 1967, the strike at the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 and countless other operations throughout the years.

But rather than receiving context or meaningful debate about our emerging strategic challenges, the public is fed a diet of empty-headed drivel. Our media know-it-alls idiotically inform us that far more IDF soldiers were killed in Lebanon when the IDF was deployed in Lebanon than have been killed in Lebanon since the IDF withdrew from Lebanon. No one bothers to explain that in the future many more soldiers will likely be killed in Lebanon to neutralize the strategic threats that have emerged in that area because soldiers who prevented the Lebanese tactical challenge from becoming the current strategic threat were removed from the country six years ago.

JUST AS the already forgotten report on the Zelzal missile shipment showed how ill-advised the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was, this week two reports revealed a no less disturbing situation in the abandoned Gaza Strip. Tuesday, as the socialist economic gurus in the media and the government argued in favor of slashing the IDF's budget in light of the withdrawal from Gaza, we were informed that the IDF returned to Gaza two months ago.

Palestinian terrorists Tuesday morning videotaped Israeli forces in the ruins of the Israeli community of Dugit attacking a Palestinian terror squad as it prepared to launch a Kassam rocket on Ashkelon. On Wednesday the IDF admitted that it has been deploying commandos in Gaza to prevent rocket and missile launches for the past two months. That deployment had been kept secret to prevent the public from learning just how ill-advised last year's retreat was. The need to deploy ground forces in Gaza today proves unequivocally that the only way to defend Ashkelon and the other communities bordering Gaza from attack is by deploying IDF boots on the ground in Gaza.

Just as they distorted their coverage of the Katyusha attacks on northern Israel on Sunday, to prevent the public from absorbing the significance of the IDF ground operations in Gaza, the media concentrated its coverage of the deployment of ground forces in Gaza on irrelevant side issues. All the media turned their attention to the recently released Palestinian terror propaganda film. That film regaled Israeli TV viewers with footage of poor terrorists dying of their wounds just before they had the opportunity to attack Ashkelon with their rockets.

Also on Tuesday, Channel 10 reported the unsurprising fact that the new Hamas army that purportedly was raised to end the chaos on the streets of Gaza, is actually devoted to fighting Israel. Channel 10 showed its viewers a Hamas promotional video showing its terrorists graduating from basic training.

The reporter made much of the fact that the terrorists were pictured receiving orders from imams rather than their Iranian-sponsored Hamas "military" commanders. It is not clear why we should care that the terrorists giving the orders are wearing gowns rather than camouflage, but one thing we should care about immensely was glossed over by Channel 10. The announcer on the propaganda film declared that Hamas's allies in the east and west are anxiously waiting for the Hamas soldiers to join them in battle. The point of that statement is unmistakable: Hamas perceives itself as part and parcel of the forces for global jihad and does not limit its sites to waging war on Israel or to waging that war alone.
 

The fact that the same day the video was broadcast, Israel announced it had arrested a British national who admitted to membership in Hamas demonstrates that far from being a Palestinian nationalist group, Hamas is a member in good standing of the global jihad army that takes its orders from Teheran. But Channel 10 didn't think that aspect of the story held any interest for its viewers.

PRIME MINISTER Olmert and his associates claim that in giving Kadima the most seats in the Knesset, the Israeli public declared its support for Olmert's plan to relinquish Judea and Samaria to Hamas. But when one assesses the quality of the information that the public receives, the only conclusion it is possible to reach is that Israel is suffering from market failure in the realm of information flow and processing.

This market failure is exacerbated and maintained by constraints placed on public debate by Israel's legal establishment. Two separate events this week brought home this disturbing reality. First, on Monday, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz announced the opening of the trial of right-wing activist Nadia Matar for the alleged crime of "insulting a public servant."

Matar was indicted after she sent a letter to Yonatan Bassi, the head of the Disengagement Authority, where she compared him to the Judenrat in the Holocaust. Mazuz's decision to indict Matar for her written expression demonstrates how legal authorities have seized for themselves the power to determine the limits of public debate in a manner unheard of in other free societies.

In a related incident, President Moshe Katsav pardoned the heads of the now banned Arutz 7 radio station for having committed the crime of broadcasting without the approval of the Supreme Court. The media reacted to Katsav's decision with hysteria and rage. Indeed, the media have reacted more calmly to the government's decisions to release hundreds of convicted terrorists from prison than to the president's decision to pardon Arutz 7's management team.

The story of Arutz 7 is demonstrative of the legal system's willingness to twist and distort law in order to make it impossible for alternative voices to be heard by the public. In its ruling on Arutz 7 in 1998, the Supreme Court dismissed a law passed by the Knesset that gave Arutz 7 a license to broadcast. The Court argued strangely that by granting Arutz 7 the right to broadcast, the Knesset had harmed regional radio stations that would have to operate in a world in which Arutz 7 exists.

When one sees how news is distorted and truth is hidden from the Israeli public; when one understands how the legal system in Israel constrains permissible speech, one sees that while the Israeli economy may be chugging along, the public consciousness of the Israeli body politic has fallen victim to a premeditated failure of the marketplaces of information and ideas. If the Israeli people wish to survive in an increasingly dangerous strategic environment, ways must be found immediately for these failures to be corrected or circumvented.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Fresh from her tete-a-tete with PA leader Mahmoud Abbas last week, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni instructed her press flack to tell her fellow cabinet ministers to remain mum on Abbas's latest "diplomatic" gambit. In the words of her communications director Shai Ben Maor, Abbas's decision to turn a document written by convicted Palestinian murderers and attempted murderers sitting in Israeli prisons into the centerpiece of his diplomatic policy is "an internal Palestinian issue" and so Israel should not be weighing in on it.

What is the context of Abbas's new initiative regarding which Israel is supposed to have no official position?

After receiving the Bush Administration's full-throated endorsement during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's visit to Washington, DC last week, Abbas sprang into action. Following Bush's characterization of Abbas as a man who "favors and speaks for peace and negotiations," Abbas - who has never lifted a finger and indeed pledged never to lift a finger to fight Hamas, Fatah or any other terrorist organization - announced that he has a new plan.

Abbas's plan has two central components. First, he wants to get the PA's Hamas government to accept the document authored by convicted murderers and attempted murderers. Second, Abbas wants Israel to allow him to raise, arm and field a new militia with 10,000 soldiers to supplement the 20,000 soldiers Abbas already hired in the lead-up to the Palestinian elections in January.

Both the Israeli and the international media have referred to the convicted terrorists' declaration as a "peace plan." London's Daily Telegraph's summation of what its editors considered the main points of the declaration represents more or less what all the mass media organs in Israel and abroad have been saying.

The Telegraph's report claims that the plan has six main components. In its words, those components are: "A negotiated settlement with Israel if the Jewish state withdraws from land occupied since the 1967 Middle East war; continued resistance, focusing on peaceful means, on land occupied since 1967 - the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem; an independent Palestinian state on all land occupied since 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital; a unity Palestinian government uniting all factions, including Hamas and Fatah; guarantee the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes inside Israel and the release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israel; speeding up efforts to incorporate Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which has negotiated past interim peace accords."

IF ONE were to take these terms at face value, perhaps this could be seen as a step forward. But just the barest scrutiny shows that what the jailed terrorists announced was nothing more than a new restatement of their declaration of war against Israel and a recommitment to their goal of destroying the Jewish State.

It is true that the document speaks specifically of Israel's retreat from Judea and Samaria as well as Jerusalem. Yet led by convicted mass murderer, Fatah head and darling of the Israeli Left, Marwan Barghouti, the terrorists reiterated the "liberation of the land," that is, all of Israel, as their real objective.

The Telegraph's assertion that the "resistance" to Israel is supposed to be largely by "peaceful means" leads a reader to assume this means that the terrorists are calling for an end to terrorism.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In six separate clauses of the declaration, the terrorists make clear their continued commitment to carrying out acts of terrorism against Israel as part of their strategy for destroying the Jewish state. Those acts of terrorism are supposed to be conducted in conjunction with civil disturbances, negotiations with Israel run by Abbas (something that Iran and its client the Palestinian Islamic Jihad does not accept), as well as an international diplomatic campaign in cooperation with NGO allies intended to delegitimize and demonize Israel.

Far from calling for an end to terrorism, the terrorists called for the establishment of a new joint terrorist organization called the "Popular Resistance Front" that is to be composed of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah terrorists. As they put it in their declaration, this new group's job will be "to lead and engage in resistance against the occupation and to unify and coordinate action and resistance and to form a unified political reference for the front."

It is unclear what the difference will be between this proposed terrorist organization and the Popular Resistance Committees that Barghouti and his Hamas and Islamic Jihad colleagues formed in the months that preceded the outbreak of their terror war in September 2000.

The Telegraph notes that the imprisoned terrorists insist that Israel accept the so-called "right of return" of the so-called "refugees," but the newspaper, like its Israeli media counterparts, fails to recognize the true significance of this repeated demand. These murderers are demanding that in exchange for a temporary cessation of terror attacks against its citizens, Israel agree to its national destruction. The so-called "right of return" is a demand that Israel accept the unimpeded immigration of millions of hostile, foreign- born Arabs to its sovereign territory.

THESE MURDERERS devote an inordinate amount of attention in their declaration to detailing their desire to incorporate Hamas and Islamic Jihad into the Abbas-led PLO. They repeatedly call for unity between the "nationalist and Islamic" factions. That is, they call for unity in their ranks for the purpose of advancing their war for the destruction of Israel.

Finally, in a decidedly self-serving fashion, the convicted murderers emphatically call for their own release from Israeli jails and see their release as "a sacred national duty."

In short, much as one would expect, convicted Palestinian mass murderers from various terrorist organizations met in an Israeli prison yard to recommit themselves and their followers to their war for the destruction of Israel. And, much as one would expect, the international and Israeli press presented this declaration of war as a peace plan.

ABBAS TOOK the media by storm with his bold declaration last Thursday that if Hamas does not accept the prisoners' declaration within 10 days he will bring it before the Palestinian public as a referendum. "What a bold effort!" the press exclaimed excitedly. Buoyed by his success, Abbas announced the second half of his plan. In order to ensure Hamas realizes that he means business, Abbas renewed his demand that Israel allow him to receive arms and ammunition for his loyal troops. He further announced his intention to increase the size of his current personal army - Force 17 - from 2,500-3,000 men to 10,000 men.

There is very little new in the convicted terrorists' declaration or in Abbas's embrace of their declaration. Abbas has been embracing declarations of war against Israel since he joined Fatah as Yasser Arafat's deputy in 1959. There is also nothing new about Abbas's demand that Israel either supply him with arms or enable others to supply him with arms even though such arms and ammunition have been directly involved in the murder of scores of Israeli citizens since 1996.

What is new is the response of Israel's government.

Since 2000, the government has refused Palestinian requests for guns and ammunition. Yet, last week, Olmert's government allowed Abbas to receive arms and ammunition for Force 17 from Jordan and Egypt. Not only did the government allow forces committed to Israel's destruction to receive arms and ammunition, well placed sources claim that Defense Minister Amir Peretz's office was the source of the misinformation campaign that has dubbed the prisoners' declaration of war a peace plan.

In misleading Israel's citizenry about the content of the murderers' war declaration and in enabling the rearmament and quadrupling of the size of Abbas's personal army, the Israeli government and the Israeli and international media have also been egged on by the Bush Administration. US military envoy to the Hamas-led PA, General Keith Dayton has reportedly been a major supporter of Peretz's desire to arm Abbas's men. The Americans have been pushing to have this militia deployed in northern Gaza where its members will purportedly stop Kassam missiles from being fired at Israel even though Abbas, their commander has adopted a plan that calls for continued attacks against Israel.

It is hard to find polite words to describe an Israeli government that embraces enthusiastically a declaration of war against its country and enables its enemy to arm and field armies that have been trained to kill its citizens. It is hard not to view US support for the so-called "peace plan" as a repudiation of the Bush Doctrine.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Wednesday Canada's National Post published an error correction. Last Friday, the newspaper's lead story reported that the Iranian parliament had approved legislation that would compel Jews to wear a yellow strip, Christians to wear a red strip and Zoroastrians to wear a blue strip on their clothes.
The story fomented an international storm. Yet it turned out that the story was untrue - or jumped the gun. The Iranian parliament did pass legislation expressing its intention to install a compulsory Islamic dress code for the country's subjects, but it did not characterize the required attire.

On its Web site last Friday the National Post asked its readers to submit their opinions on the question, "Is Iran turning into the new Nazi Germany?" And after the story was published, Canada's new prime minister, Stephen Harper, reacted to the story saying that Iran "is very capable of this kind of action."

In Wednesday's edition, National Post editor Douglas Kelly wrote, "We apologize for the mistake and for the consternation it has caused." For its part, Canada's organized, pro-Islamist Muslim community is demanding that Harper apologize for his statements. Akbar Manoussi of the Ottawa Muslim Association threatened Harper with voter backlash in the next elections for his statements. In his words, "The next time [Harper] goes to get the vote he will find out what people think of him." Manoussi went on to say that Harper's statement "sends a message that he doesn't get his information right."
 

The entire episode could be chalked up to a tempest in a teacup - just another distorted news story that exaggerated recent developments. The Iranian parliament passed a law appointing a committee empowered to determine a national dress code appropriate for the return of the 12th imam -- the Shi'ite messiah - a return that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes is imminent. And as Harper rightly noted, the Iranian regime is more than capable of calling for religious minorities to wear distinctive garments reminiscent of the Nazi era. The National Post received bad information and believed it because it jibed with the character of the regime in Teheran.

Yet the National Post story last Friday, and the storms it caused both before and after its inaccuracy was brought to light, point to a much greater problem than any single Iranian decision regarding what Iranians of various religions must wear.

Last Friday Harper said, "It boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the Earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany." His statement exposes one of the central deficiencies of the West's response to the global jihad, whose command post is currently headquartered in Teheran.

Since the Vietnam War era, a disturbing notion has been accepted by wide swathes of the peoples of the Western world and has become a writ of faith among Western academic and governing elites. That notion is that the last just war was the Second World War and that the last enemy that deserved to be defeated utterly was Nazi Germany. Only Hitler constituted an implacable foe. This conclusion, which was seamlessly grafted onto the pacifist worldview of the radical Left in Europe and the US in the 1960s, and of the Israeli Left in the 1990s, holds that still today, the only enemy that the West can conscionably fight is Adolf Hitler.

By this logic, if Ahmadinejad and his friends say that Jews have to wear a yellow star on their outer garments, then that means that Iran today is the new Nazi Germany and if it is the new Nazi Germany then all people of good conscience have to declare war on Iran.

But the converse is also true. If Ahmadinejad doesn't start sporting a Hitler mustache, if Jews aren't prohibited from entering public parks and if there is no Wermacht or S.S. and no gas chambers, then there is no reason to fight Iran. In fact, in their absence, the only moral thing to do is to negotiate with Iran with an aim of appeasing it because the Iranians aren't Nazis and so an understanding must be reached.

It is in this context that one must judge Wednesday's summit in London between US, Russian, Chinese, British, French and German officials on the issue of Iran's nuclear program. The emissaries met to discuss which package of prizes to award Iran.

Germany, France and Britain propose awarding Iran a light water nuclear reactor and nuclear fuel that will of course serve peaceful purposes only because Iran will commit itself to ceasing it uranium enrichment activities. The Europeans also wish to include a warning to Iran that if it doesn't stop enriching uranium it will face very, very mean and tough sanctions. The Europeans foresee, for instance, denying Iranian nuclear scientists visas to foreign countries.

The Russians and the Chinese object to the Europeans' proposal because they oppose any sanctions on Iran. The Americans support the Europeans' negotiations with the Iranians but have refused their proposals that the US open direct negotiations with Iran and commit itself to not taking action to overthrow the Iranian regime.

The non-Nazi Iranians refuse to have anything to do with the European proposal. Teheran made its displeasure with Europe known on Tuesday when it tested its Shihab-3 ballistic missile that with its range of 1500 kilometers covers most of Europe.

On Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said that any attempt to curb Iran's nuclear program would be considered an act of aggression against Iran. In his words, anyone who dares to commit such an act "will be faced with a lasting and historic slap."

The thing of it is that the question of whether or not Iran is the new Nazi Germany is wholly irrelevant. Iran today is the engine of the global jihad war machine and it is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons which it has already pledged to use in order to commit genocide. With or without jackboots, Iran is a clear and present danger to the Western world. Yet rather than acknowledge this reality, the leaders of the Western world are allowing and indeed insisting that since Ahmadinejad isn't Hitler, his venality is besides the point, with the point being that he must be appeased.

THIS DISASTROUS Western preference for only fighting Hitler even though he has been dead for 61 years is part of a general culture where appearances are more important than substance. This culture held sway this week in Washington during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's visit. Olmert carefully chose the image he sought to sell to his American hosts. The one he chose was Israel's classic frontier image as "plucky little Israel."

In his speech before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, and during his meetings with administration officials on Monday and Tuesday, Olmert strove to be perceived as the natural and legitimate heir to the image of Israel as an independent, strong and bold young country. In his address before Congress, Olmert said, "Our two great nations share a profound belief in the importance of freedom and a common pioneering spirit deeply rooted in optimism. It was the energetic spirit of our pioneers that enabled our two countries to implement the impossible. To build cities where swamps once existed and to make the desert bloom."

While this statement is true, it is not relevant to the policy issues that Olmert placed before the US government this week. On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Olmert expropriated the image of Israeli pluckiness and toughness earned by his predecessors for their brave and stubborn insistence on standing Israel's ground before our enemies. Yet unlike his predecessors, Olmert is not willing to stand alone if necessary to secure Israel from attack and destruction.

Olmert invoked Israel's pioneering spirit to win American support for his plan to retreat from Judea and Samaria and effectively surrender the areas to Hamas and its Iranian and al-Qaida sponsors. He wrapped himself in the courageous legacy of the Israeli warriors who risked their lives to defeat Israel's enemies, in order to gain American support for a plan that will enable those same enemies to establish a base for global terror in Judea and Samaria.

If we are to judge by appearances, then Olmert's exploitation of Israel's past pluck was successful. In an Orwellian acrobatic act, President George W. Bush referred to his surrender plan as "bold."

Luckily, while imagery may have won the day this week, its victory was far from overwhelming. Even as Olmert received his warm welcome at the White House, the first seeds of change began to sprout. Ahead of last summer's withdrawal from Gaza, The Wall Street Journal refused to publish op-eds that opposed the plan. Tuesday, the Journal published an opinion column by former CIA director R. James Woolsey under the heading "West Bank Terror State."

Woolsey maintained that the Gaza withdrawal, which paved the way for Hamas's ascendance to power and enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for global terrorism, had "utterly failed," and that Israel should not receive US backing for compounding the failure in Judea and Samaria. Woolsey also registered his opposition to the uprooting of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria concluding, "A two-state solution can become a reality when the Palestinians are held to the same standards as Israelis - to the requirement that Jewish settlers in a West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state would be treated with the same decency that Israel treats its Arab citizens."

And Woolsey was not alone. While the Israeli media continue to block serious discussion of the consequences of the Gaza retreat and the likely consequences of a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, over the past two weeks in newspapers and radio programs throughout the US that debate was opened. US lawmakers and administration officials who were exposed to this debate raised serious concerns about the wisdom of Olmert's plan to the premier in private meetings throughout his three-day visit.

This unprecedented scrutiny no doubt played a role in Olmert's decision to tone down his rhetoric on the wisdom of retreat and to push back his timeline for implementing his surrender plan until after Bush leaves office. As recently as last week Olmert had maintained that the mass expulsions of Israeli citizens from their homes and the retreat of IDF units must be implemented before Bush leaves the White House.

Like the uproar over the Iranian Nazi dress code or lack thereof, the problem Olmert's plan presents is that its image and its content are unrelated. Ahmadinejad is not Hitler. But this is immaterial. He is a distinct, Jew-hating genocidal dictator on the cusp of achieving the wherewithal to kill on an unprecedented scale. He can and should be defeated because of who he is, not because he is a new Hitler.

Olmert presented himself this week as the heir to the legacy of Israeli heroism. Yet he came to Washington seeking support for his plan of capitulation. His plan must be rejected to preserve the legacy of that heroism.

The key to winning the war against the global jihad is to encourage Western societies - and first and foremost among them Israel - to stop looking for S.S. uniforms before they shoot. It is only after we regain the understanding that enemies come in all shapes and sizes that we will stop luxuriating in the delusion that the memory of past strength will suffice to protect us against current dangers.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

If all goes as planned, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert meets today with US President George W. Bush in the White House, several thousand protesters from around the US and Canada will be across the Mall by the US Senate protesting Olmert's visit. These will not be the standard Israel haters from the Left or the Islamist crowd. They will be neither neo-Nazis nor Communists. Rather the planned protest is being organized by Israel's staunchest Jewish and Christian supporters.

The people getting on buses to travel to Washington to protest Olmert's visit believe that Olmert's planned withdrawal from some 95 percent of Judea and Samaria and partition of Jerusalem are suicidal for Israel and will have a devastating impact on US national security. As they note in their press release, Olmert "seeks to secure the approval of President Bush to carry out more Jewish expulsions and giving over of land to Hamas (a Teheran-sponsored terrorist group), actions that totally undermine America's war on terror."

Voices from inside of the Bush Administration claim that Olmert's planned withdrawal is "a done deal." The relevant administration officials argue there it would be futile for the US to register any objection to Olmert's plan because Olmert and his government are wholly committed to carrying it out.

But the "plan" is anything but a done deal. The mass expulsion of Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria has not begun. The security fence whose completion is supposed to precede the enactment of the mass expulsions is far from complete. Indeed its route has yet to be finalized. The IDF has made no plans of any kind for defending Israel from the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. Top level Jordanian government officials have voiced serious concern to US lawmakers, Israeli officials and the media about the ramifications of Olmert's plan for the survivability of the Hashemite regime. It is simply disingenuous to say that it is too late for the US to consider opposing Olmert's plan.

ASIDE FROM that, over the past 58 years, the US has never considered anything that Israel has done to be "a done deal" if it hasn't agreed that it should be a done deal. In 1956 for instance, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula. Then prime minister David Ben-Gurion got on the radio and announced joyously that Israel would never leave the Sinai. Washington had other ideas. Several days later, after some overtly hostile strong arming from then president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his advisors, Ben-Gurion got on the radio and announced that Israel would be withdrawing from the Sinai forthwith.

In 1999, Israel finalized an agreement to sell three Phalcon spy planes to China. The Chinese started making their payments. Then president Bill Clinton summoned then prime minister Ehud Barak to the White House for urgent consultations the day before a planned visit to Jerusalem from China's leader, and Barak cancelled the deal. So there is no credibility to the claim that the US cannot stop an Israeli government from doing what it has its heart set on doing.

THE QUESTION is not whether the US can weigh in on the issue. The question is whether the US should intervene. To determine the answer to this question it is important to keep certain truths in mind. First, Olmert maintains that the election results that propelled him to the Prime Minister's Office were proof that he has public support for his planned withdrawal. Yet, as Hillel Halkin pointed out this month in Commentary, the elections were anything but a referendum regarding Olmert's plan.

The election results, which gave Olmert's Kadima faction less than a quarter of the seats in the Knesset, were a sign that Israel's body politic is unraveling. The electorate's fragmentation was made clear both by record low voter turnout and by the dismemberment of the major parties like Likud and Labor and even Kadima to the benefit of sectoral parties like Shas, Yisrael Beitenu and the Pensioners Party. During the campaign Kadima registered its greatest losses of support after Olmert began discussing his plan to withdraw from Judea and Samaria.

Yet even if Olmert did not receive a mandate for his withdrawal plan from the Israeli voters, he is the legally elected prime minister. In the eyes of many of Israel's supporters in America, it is wrong for the US to second-guess the wisdom of the Israeli leadership. While in theory this position is correct, it comes apart at the seams when the ramifications of Olmert's plans for US national security are taken into account.

Knowledgeable sources in Washington policy circles maintain that in the two weeks preceding Olmert's visit to Washington, Israeli officials were asked to allay American concerns regarding the security consequences of Olmert's plan. Specifically, Israeli officials have been called upon to explain how Judea and Samaria will be prevented from following the model set in Gaza when Israel's retreat enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for international terrorists along similar lines to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.

Israel's military attache in Washington, Maj. Gen. Dan Harel was reportedly sent to the White House to dispel these concerns. It should be recalled that Harel commanded last summer's retreat from Gaza. Harel was lionized at the time by the Israeli media for successfully implementing the mass expulsion of Israeli civilians from Gaza while averting civil war.

Yet Harel has never been called to account for the fact that he made no plans for Israel to defend itself from the threats that - as foreseen - arose from Gaza and from the Sinai in the aftermath of the retreat. Because of his failure, IDF forces in the Southern Command were left without contingency plans for contending with the transformation of Gaza into a base for global jihad and without adequate means to secure Ashkelon and the other communities bordering Gaza from the daily missile, rocket and mortar attacks to which they have been subjected since the retreat.

This is relevant because Harel reportedly told his US interlocutors that they have no reason to worry about the consequences of Olmert's plan because it only involves the mass expulsion of Israeli civilians from Judea and Samaria. The IDF, he said will retain its current positions in the areas.

WHETHER OR not Harel realized it at the time, he was not being wholly truthful to his American audience. Even if the plan today is for the IDF to retain control of the areas in which the civilians are set to be expelled, and to retain their present deployments, any educated observer of Israel's political and cultural dynamics will attest that there is no way that this can happen.

If Olmert expels tens of thousands of Israeli citizens from their homes, he will destroy the entire domestic rationale for the IDF deployment. As was the case in Lebanon, radical leftists within Israel will rise up and demand a full retreat. For its part, the nationalist camp will become so alienated by the expulsions that in the best case scenario, its members will simply cease to identify with the state. They will not support any military activities in the heartland of Jewish civilization that the state ethnically cleansed of all Jewish presence.

Aside from this, whether the IDF remains or not, the Israeli destruction of Israeli towns and villages will be broadcast throughout the world and be celebrated - rightly - as a strategic victory of jihad. Zionism isn't about the IDF, it is about Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel. Israeli destruction of Israeli villages in the Land of Israel is the death of Zionism and our enemies know it even if we insist on denying this basic truth.

AND SO we return to our starting point. Olmert will meet Bush today and present to him a plan that will unravel Israeli society, which was already dangerously fragmented by the withdrawal from Gaza.

He will present to him a plan that is based upon the anti-Semitic notion that Jews should be prohibited from living in certain places because they are Jews, and the perverse notion that a Palestinian state founded on the principle of lebensraum and racial purity because by definition no Jews will be allowed to live in Palestine, will be capable of living at peace one day with the Jewish state.

Olmert will present a plan that provides a strategic victory to the forces of global jihad in a war they wage not only against Israel but against the US and the Western world as a whole. These forces will feel that they are on the march because they will see Israel destroying itself under the gun of their terror and enabling the establishment of yet another base for global terrorists.

Given all this, the question of whether or not the US should object to Olmert's plan is superseded by the question of how the US should make its rejection of this plan known to Olmert and whether its objection should similarly be communicated to the Israeli public.

Any ambiguity on this issue to Olmert; any retreat behind disingenuous statements about "done deals," will be nothing less than the revocation of the cardinal US strategies for winning this war: the advance of liberal values and the denial of bases of operation to global terrorists.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

You have to give them credit. The Palestinians outdid themselves this week. In the framework of the maelstrom over the presumed financial crisis of the Hamas-led PA, the supposedly "moderate" Fatah organization, led by supposedly "moderate" PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, decided to threaten America and Europe. In a leaflet published by Fatah's Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Gaza, the group announced, "We won't remain idle in the face of the siege imposed on the Palestinian people by Israel, the US and other countries." They went on to threaten, "We will strike at the economic and civilian interests of these countries, here and abroad."

On Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, the announcement was greeted by many with contempt and anger. This, of course, is a remarkable combination the week before a scheduled vote on legislation that would bar all direct and indirect US assistance to the PA.

Since 1994, the PA has always been supposedly on the brink of a financial and humanitarian catastrophe. But what is interesting about the current financial crisis is Abbas's behavior. In a departure from his normal diffidence, this week Fatah leader Abbas did not try to soften the impression that his underlings sought to make on the West. Rather, he strengthened it.

In a speech before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Abbas warned that if the EU did not renew its underwriting of the PA's budget "there will be an explosion of anger, and this would lead to a chaotic situation of which we cannot foresee the results." Translated into regular English, Abbas told his European audience: "Your money or your life."

Yet even as he was directly blackmailing the Europeans, Abbas didn't forget his manners. In a style that befits Yasser Arafat's deputy of some 40 years, Abbas provided his victims with the opportunity to feel good about giving in to his threats. If you give me your protection money, he said, you will be able to wrap yourselves in the robes of the saviors of the poor, popular Palestinian people by preventing a "humanitarian disaster."

And so, from the editorial board of Ha'aretz to the continental press, all the enlightened humanitarians now express their deep concern for the fate of the PA's 165,000 employees who have not received salaries for nearly two whole months. Human rights organizations from the UN to Amnesty International have expressed their deep-seated fears for the fate of the poor Palestinians who haven't been paid.

The thing of it is that for all of their shrieks and whines, there has never been a group of more self-sufficient people on the verge of a humanitarian disaster than the Palestinians. They're swimming in money. If the PA suffers from a "humanitarian disaster" it will be wholly and completely self-induced. Since its establishment in 1994, the PA has received more aid per capita than any other group of people in the world has ever received - more than the victims of genocide in Sudan or Rwanda, more that the victims of the tsunami in Asia, more than the Iraqis or the Afghans - more than anyone.

As the researcher Arlene Kushner pointed out in an article published this week by Ynet those miserable unpaid PA employees include some 4,000 Palestinian terrorists who Abbas placed on the PA payroll. Terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons get $4 million a month. Several million more go to paying the families of dead terrorists. Kushner quoted former PA and Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan admitting that of the $10 billion in international aid that the Palestinians have received over the past 12 years, some $5b. has gone missing.

Abbas, who politely warns against "explosions," himself controls up to $1b. that he prefers not to use to save his people from that "humanitarian disaster" he's so bent out of shape about. As Kushner reminds us, in 2002, Salam Fayyad, who then served as the PA's finance minister, set up the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) in an attempt to prevent Arafat from absconding with all the PA's money. At least $700m. should still be deposited in the PIF which had been valued at $1b. in recent months.

Abbas, who bemoans the poor Palestinian doctors and teachers that have not received their March salaries, decided last summer - against the expressed warnings of the International Monetary Fund - to give significant pay increases to the PA's employees. Civil servants were given raises of some 15-20 percent and militia members were given raises of 30%-40%. Kushner notes that at the time of Arafat's death in November 2004, his grieving widow Suha refused to unplug his respirator until Abbas and then PA prime minister Ahmed Qurei agreed to her demands for a significant cut of her husband's personal wealth which was assessed at some $3.1b. Apparently it hasn't occurred to anyone that Arafat might have liked to use that money to avert a "humanitarian disaster" among his beloved people.

EVEN WITHOUT Kushner's data, the Palestinians themselves demonstrated this week their contempt for the West and its "humanitarians" who concern themselves with the Palestinians' dire financial straits. On Wednesday, the PA deployed its newest 3,000-man militia. The militia, comprised mainly of Hamas terror operatives and operatives from the Popular Resistance Committees made up of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah terrorists, made its first appearance in Gaza. Its troops were all decked out in new uniforms and shiny rifles.

Perhaps all 3,000 are volunteers. Perhaps the men paid for their own uniforms and weapons. If there are Palestinian patients dying because their hospitals can't afford to maintain dialysis equipment, maybe the PA should be asking the new Hamas militia for a loan or a contribution.

If the deployment of its newest army weren't enough to send a clear signal of its sentiments to its deeply concerned donors, the Hamas-led PA appointed Popular Resistance Committees commander Jamal Abu Samadana to command the new force. Samadana also commanded the terror attack against US Embassy personnel in Gaza in October 2003.

While the Palestinians' supporters in Europe and Israel still refuse to acknowledge what the Palestinians are clearly signaling with their newest armed force, Arafat's former paymaster Fuad Shubaki, now in Israeli custody, openly admits that under Arafat the PA siphoned off millions of dollars from the tax revenues that Israel transferred to it and millions more in international assistance to fund terrorist cells and operations.

These Israeli leftists and Europeans unabashedly describe themselves as humanitarians and urge the payment of salaries of people whose job it is to kill them. For their part, the Palestinians couldn't be any clearer. As a spokesman for Fatah's Abu Rish brigades (also commanded by Abu Samadana) put it this week, if the money doesn't start flowing again, the Palestinians will open a "new intifada," which will be a "merciless intifada that will destroy everything."

PERHAPS THE most distinguishing group characteristic of the Palestinians is the fact that no matter what they do or say, they never have to pay a price for the choices they make. In spite of their blackmail, threats and corruption, their war for the annihilation of Israel, and perhaps above all, their mocking contempt for the collective honor of Israel and the West, the Palestinians' victims line up to support them in their "just struggle against the illegal Zionist occupation."

This fact was made breathtakingly clear at the end of April when, in a move that can be likened to a metaphorical rape of the concept of "international law," Amnesty International published a statement defining as a breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention the US, Israeli and EU decision to abide by their laws (and international law forbidding aid to terror organizations) and end assistance to the Hamas-led PA. Not surprisingly, Amnesty cited no clause in the Convention that supports the preposterous claim that the contracting parties to the convention are obligated - or even permitted - to fund terrorist organizations. What is notable here is that Amnesty has determined a new standard that claims that taking steps to force the PA to be responsible for its actions is an offense against the law of nations.

Not to be outdone by Amnesty, the EU is fervently brainstorming to find a way to finance the Hamas-led PA's budget in spite of the fact that its own laws prohibit financing Hamas. In the wake of Abbas's "explosion" speech, the EU's External Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said, "We are well aware of the urgency of the situation in the Palestinian territories. We have to get the parameters right and then we have to get the donors and the partners to accept what we will set up."

For its part, what most concerns the World Bank these days is that the US and Israel might place sanctions on companies or agencies that continue to do business with the PA. Because of this, the bank is demanding that Israel and the US provide "explicit assurances" that they will not impose sanctions on such companies or agencies.

In truth, as far as Israel is concerned the World Bank and the EU have little to worry about. In the aftermath of last week's meeting of the so-called Quartet, where it was agreed that the EU would formulate a way to bypass European and US laws prohibiting the transfer of monies to Hamas, both Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Amir Peretz announced varying degrees of willingness to resume tax revenue transfers to the PA in some form of "humanitarian assistance," to the PA.

Although on Sunday the government did not vote to resume such financial transfers that amount to some $50m. per month, members of Congress have reported that Israeli officials were encouraging them to water down their draft legislation that will place a total ban on direct and indirect assistance to the PA. These Israeli government officials maintain that Israel is interested in the transfer of "humanitarian aid," in the hopes of averting that much feared "humanitarian disaster." Many members of Congress and senators who have received such entreaties from Israeli officials and been urged to support Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's plan to withdraw from Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem are puzzled by what they view as an Israeli attempt to finance and surrender to Hamas.

In a lecture last week in New York sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, former IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon explained that Israel suffers from a weak national leadership. In his words, "We don't need Chamberlains, we need Churchills." Ya'alon further explained that Israelis had been manipulated by Palestinian lies that have caused us "to ignore reality."

As the members of Congress listen to Olmert address them next Wednesday; and as they vote on the proposed ban on aid to the Hamas-led PA, they would do well to keep Ya'alon's message in mind and not fall into the same trap.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last week, as he presented his new government to the Knesset, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proclaimed that the scattered Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria present a threat to the country and so they must be destroyed.

If what Olmert says is true, then no patriotic Israeli or friend of the Jewish state can countenance the continued existence of these communities. Doing so would be tantamount to providing aid and comfort to Israel's enemies.

A central question for those who care about Israel and believe that its national security is crucial in the global war against Islamofascism thus becomes: Is Olmert correct when he states that scattered Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are a threat to Israel's existence?

Olmert and his political associates provide two justifications for this assertion. First, they claim that protecting these communities is a drag on the resources of the IDF. They argue that the military would be able to significantly cut back on its operations and troop levels in the areas if it didn't have to protect them.

Second, they claim that the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria create friction with the Palestinians, and that this alleged friction is the root of Palestinian and Arab resentment of Israel that motivates them to wage war against the Jewish state.

According to this reasoning, if these communities were destroyed the Palestinians would lose interest in fighting Israel and so, more than terrorism, these communities are the reason that peace has eluded the region. Yet when one examines these twin justifications, it becomes apparent that Olmert's claims are incorrect. Far from being a drag on IDF resources, the isolated Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are a tactical and strategic asset for the IDF. 

Today, of all the thousands of IDF forces stationed in Judea and Samaria, only some 300 troops are dedicated to protecting the Israeli communities in the areas. Most of the communities that depend on IDF protection are located in the Jordan Valley, along the international border with Jordan. The rest of the forces in Judea and Samaria are stationed there in order to protect Israel's major cities - Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, Afula, Netanya and Beersheba - from attacks by terror forces operating in Judea and Samaria.

ISRAEL'S MILITARY doctrine has always recognized the necessity of defeating Israel's enemies before they are able to reach Israel's population centers. Israel is such a small country, and its urban areas are so densely populated that it has always been understood that our enemies must not be allowed to operate in our cities.

This view was vindicated between 1994 and 2002, when Israel transferred its control over Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority. Throughout those years the IDF drastically curtailed its operations in the areas. As a result, for the first time since the 1950s Israel's enemies were able to consistently attack its civilian population centers, causing an unprecedented civilian death toll. This trend was reversed only after Israel's counter-terrorist offensive in Judea and Samaria in April-May 2002, when, during Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF reasserted its control over the Palestinian towns and villages in Judea and Samaria. The drop in the Israeli urban civilian casualty rate since then is the direct result of the IDF's maintenance of that control in a manner than enables it to continuously curtail the seeding and growth of terror cells in the areas.

In Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF reached the city of Nablus in one day. It was able to do so because it launched its operations against the city from the isolated Israeli communities of Elon Moreh, Yizhar and Itamar - all of which Olmert intends to destroy. The communities, and all others like them, constituted friendly, fortified and stable forward operating bases for the IDF.

If the IDF had not had these communities, it could easily have taken seven to 10 days of heavy fighting for the IDF to have been in a position to launch its offensive against Nablus. That fighting would have been over control of the highways.

In Lebanon in the 1990s and in Gaza from 2000 on, the IDF surrendered control of the highways to Hizbullah and the Palestinian terror units. Once it lost control of the highways, it garrisoned its forces in static, fortified locations and so surrendered the initiative to its enemies. In both Lebanon and Gaza the IDF suffered its highest casualties from roadside bombs and attacks on convoys.

The IDF has not suffered a similar fate in Judea and Samaria since 2000 because of the isolated communities in the areas. When Israeli families are driving in unarmored cars, the IDF cannot very well limit itself to armored convoy traffic. To a degree, it is the presence of the Israeli civilians in the areas that has forced the IDF to maintain control of the roads. And it is this IDF control of the roads that is most responsible for keeping suicide bombers out of Israel's major cities.

EVERY MONTH IDF forces intercept dozens of Palestinian terrorists at roadblocks. The Hawara checkpoint outside Nablus on the road to Itamar, for instance, has been the site of hundreds of such intercepts. By stopping them at Hawara and in other isolated spots in close proximity to isolated Israeli communities, the IDF saves the police the need to try to find the terrorists in Jerusalem or Netanya and has saved the lives of countless Israelis who would otherwise have been murdered.

Proponents of destroying the Israeli communities in Gaza argued that by removing them Israel would gain the tactical benefit of shorter defensive lines. Yet far from conferring a tactical advantage, the shortening of the lines caused by the destruction of the communities of Gush Katif gave the tactical advantage to Israel's enemies.

Israel's chief advantages over the Palestinian forces are its superior technology and firepower. But these advantages are neutralized by our enemies' ability to carry out their attacks from among a civilian population that Israel is unwilling to target.

Gush Katif constituted an irresistible target for the Palestinians. In attempting to attack its communities, the terrorists were forced to separate themselves from the protective shield of their civilian populations and so exposed themselves to IDF guns. In most cases, they were killed.

Now that Israel has no communities in Gaza, it is unable to effectively separate terrorists from the general population, and so its operations against terror cells are both ineffective and open the IDF to condemnation by the Israeli and international Left.

IN THE SAME manner, the isolated communities in Judea and Samaria have been the site of countless terrorist operations. Some, like the massacres of the Shebo family in Itamar and the Gavish family in Elon Moreh in 2002, have been murderously successful. Most have failed at great cost to the terrorists.

In all cases, the Israelis who live in these communities have demonstrated a heroic willingness to place themselves at risk and accept losses to ensure the security and well-being of the country as a whole.

Last Friday the PA's Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said, "From Lebanon to the West Bank, the Zionist enterprise is in retreat." Haniyeh contrasted this perceived retreat with what he views as the rise of the Palestinians on all fronts. He singled out Arab Israelis for special commendation for refusing to accept the existence of Israel within the 1949 armistice lines.

Against statements like Haniyeh's, Olmert's assertion that the existence of isolated Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria is a root cause of the Palestinian and Arab war against Israel today is exposed in all its strategic blindness. Far from moderating the Palestinians, Israel's retreat from Gaza last summer radicalized them and their allies throughout the Islamic world by fanning their faith that Israel will one day disappear completely.

At the end of the day, Israel will achieve peace only when the Palestinians and the Arab world in general accept the fact that Israel will never be wiped off the map and so agree to peacefully coexist with the Jewish state. By asserting that the commingling of Jews and Arabs in Judea and Samaria is a cause of the war, Olmert is saying that there is no chance of ever coexisting with the Arabs. In so doing, he is effectively telling Israel's worst enemies that they are right - that the Jews are retreating and will eventually disappear if they keep fighting.

In light of all of this, it is terrifyingly clear that Israel's new prime minister has placed as the centerpiece of his government's goals the implementation of a policy that is based on mythology and will lead not to the enhancement of Israel's national security and the strengthening of the forces fighting the global jihad, but to the destabilization of Israel's national security and a strategic defeat for the nations, led by the US, that are fighting the war against Islamofascism.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a long, rambling missive to US President George W. Bush this week. It ended on a somewhat ominous note that seemed to some Islamic scholars to constitute a declaration of war against the US. Ahmadinejad wrote, "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems."

After declaring the death of the ideals on which the United States is founded, Ahmadinejad explained that "people around the world are flocking towards a main focal point - that is Almighty God." He then challenged Bush, "Do you not want to join them?"

Experts on Islam in Washington have noted that since Ahmadinejad advocates Islamic fundamentalism as the only true religious path, his question to Bush was in fact an ultimatum to convert to Islam or face the consequences. Islamic scholar Robert Spencer put it carefully on his weblog Jihad Watch when he wrote, "this letter could be - but is not necessarily - a prelude to an attack."

Ahmadinejad's letter was delivered on Monday. One would think that if the Bush administration was concerned about the signals Teheran was sending that Bush and top administration officials would be at pains for the next several days to ensure that Iran and the rest of the world understood that the US would not be surrendering any time soon to the dictates of its sworn enemies.

Sadly, the opposite occurred.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the EU's foreign policy chiefs at the UN for a summit of the so-called Middle East Quartet. The meeting was the first official gathering of Quartet members since the popularly elected Hamas government assumed power in the Palestinian Authority and Ehud Olmert formed his government in Israel. It was dedicated to the question of how to continue to give the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid even though they just elected an international jihadist organization to lead them.

Notably, at the same time that Rice was meeting with her colleagues in New York, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal was meeting with his colleagues in Qatar. Seated at a dais with terror preacher Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi and Islamic Jihad commander Ramadan Abdullah Shalah, Mashaal called on the Arab and Islamic world to send Hamas "weapons, money and men." Mashaal reassured his audience, explaining that their "weapons, money and men" would be a force for good in the world because Hamas is engaged in "resistance, not terrorism."

It should be noted that for years Mashaal has been cultivating Hamas's ties with Iran. Ahead of Hamas's election in January, in one of his almost monthly trips to Teheran, Mashaal reportedly told the Iranian leadership that he wants Iran to view Hamas as a Palestinian version of Hizbullah. That is, like Hizbullah, in exchange for Iranian weapons, money and training, Hamas will act as Teheran's client and subordinate its actions to Teheran's command hierarchy. Iran accepted his offer.

And so, the day after Ahmadinejad wrote his war letter to Bush, Rice was meeting with her associates figuring out a way to give the Hamas-led Palestinians millions of dollars of US taxpayers' money.

While administration officials insist that Rice's decision to agree that the EU can formulate an artificial mechanism to continue to flood the PA with international monetary assistance is not an American okay to flood the PA with international monetary assistance, in fact it is just such an okay. Israel's announcement Wednesday that it would be resuming the transfer of tens of millions of dollars of tax revenues to the PA is proof that Tuesday's Quartet meeting did conclude with a green light to renew Western monetary assistance to the PA.

RICE'S DECISION to enable the funding of the Hamas-led PA is significant, and indeed disastrous for two main reasons. First, by so acting, the Bush administration is ignoring strategic realities that present immediate dangers not only to Israel but to the US as well.

Against the backdrop of Ahmadinejad's letter this week and his constant threats against the US and its allies in recent weeks and months, it is clear that Iran perceives itself as being in a state of active war against the US. It is also a fact that Hamas is now an official client of Teheran. As an Iranian satellite, an empowered and emboldened Hamas is no longer just an Israeli concern. Hamas today can and ought to be perceived as an enemy of the US as well - an enemy to whom the Bush administration just pledged $10 million in medical assistance.

Indeed, even before Hamas subordinated itself to Teheran, the movement was in a declared state of war against America. On December 17, 2001, Hamas published a joint declaration with the Islamic Jihad in which it declared, "Americans are the enemies of the Palestinian people," and Americans "are a target for future attacks." Hamas's rhetoric has customarily been imbued with virulent anti-Americanism. Hamas has financed Palestinian members of al-Qaida and in at least one instance, in 2003, it trained a naturalized Canadian citizen from Gaza in terrorist tactics for the purpose of having him carry out attacks in Canada and the US. Fortunately, Israeli security forces arrested him before he was able to carry out his mission.

As Matthew Levitt points out in his copiously documented and detailed new book, Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, in 2004 the FBI admitted that Hamas has the capabilities to carry out attacks in the US. In August 2004, a Hamas terrorist was arrested while taking pictures of the suspension cables of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

In its present capacity as an Iranian client there can be no doubt that Hamas's willingness to take action against the US has increased. Its interest in expanding its activities beyond Israel has been on full display in recent weeks in Jordan. For the second time in so many weeks, on Wednesday a Jordanian government spokesman announced the unearthing of Hamas weapons caches in the kingdom, including Iranian-made rocket launchers. The spokesman also announced that Hamas is seeking to recruit Jordanian nationals to undergo terror training in Syria and Iran. The spokesman referred to Hamas's activities in the country as posing "a major threat to the national security of the country."

And yet, even as Hamas devotes all its energies to building up its arsenal and swelling the ranks of its jihadist forces, the US has answered the frenzied call for more aid to the Palestinian people sounded by the usual suspects in the EU, the UN, and (it must be said), the Israeli media.

To Hamas's calls for the destruction of Israel and the defeat of the US, Rice answered on Tuesday by declaring that the goal of the Quartet meeting was "to provide assistance to the Palestinian people so that they do not suffer deprivation and do not suffer an humanitarian crisis." Rice then proceeded to pledge $10m. in in-kind US medical aid to the Palestinian health system, which was widely reported to be short of money for dialysis treatments despite the fact that Israel allowed four truckloads of medical supplies into Gaza this week.

The US and its Palestinian-obsessed European counterparts and the Israeli government claim that the hundreds of millions of dollars they are about to provide the Palestinians in "direct aid" will not benefit the Hamas-led PA. But of course this is incorrect. Firstly, the EU is already making clear that their Hamas-evading mechanism for funding the Hamas-led PA will facilitate the payment of salaries of PA employees who are supposed to be getting paid by Hamas. That is, the EU will be paying Hamas's bills directly.

Secondly, every cent transferred in "direct aid" to the Palestinians is money that will prevent Hamas from failing. Every well-fed Palestinian welfare case will be a vindication for the Palestinian people's decision to vote Hamas into power. Every penny of Western and Israeli aid tells them that they may both escalate their war against Israel while officially joining the global jihad and eat well on the Israeli/ American/ European dole.

THIS BRINGS us to the second disturbing aspect of the US decision to bow to EU, Russian and UN pressure and open the dam of international aid to the Hamas-led PA. Indeed, it brings us to the disturbing nature of the Quartet to which the US belongs. The fact is that in its decision this week to bow to Quartet pressure and enable the renewal of aid to the Palestinians (after a six-week hiatus), like in its decision in 2002 to agree to the establishment of the Quartet in the first place, the US continues to pin its Middle East policy on a fiction that it is possible to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians through Israeli concessions and land giveaways to the Palestinians.

When the Quartet was founded to "advance the peace process," the peace process had already died. The peace process ended in July 2000 when the late Yasser Arafat rejected Israel's peace offer and the sovereign state of Palestine the offer entailed in favor of war. From then on, all hope of peace in our generation was extinguished as the Palestinian jihad against Israel opened its current round.

The purpose the Quartet was founded to advance was the shunning of reality, in the hope that if reality was rejected strenuously, that reality would change. This was the context in which the Quartet members, with the help of Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres, wrote their road map peace plan that the Bush administration shoved down Ariel Sharon's throat in May 2004.

In the end, the Quartet's refusal to countenance the reality of war caused Israel to choose the capitulationist policy of unilateral surrender of territory to the Palestinians. Viewing the behavior of Israel and the Quartet, the Palestinians rationally assessed that terror and war were winning strategies and thus elected Hamas to lead them. Now, in light of Hamas's refusal to keep up the fiction of a peace process, the Quartet has engaged itself in a new enterprise. Recognizing there is no chance for a peace process until Hamas ceases to be Hamas, the Quartet is now convincing itself that Hamas is not Hamas.

In short, the US on Tuesday recommitted itself to a Middle East policy that has no connection to reality and thus no chance of ever succeeding. Indeed, failure is inevitable.

It has been argued that the American capitulation to EU, UN and Russian pressure to fund Hamas was undertaken to secure their support for US efforts in the UN Security Council against Iran. If so, then the deal the US struck is both delusional and counterproductive. It is delusional because Russia, Kofi Annan and key EU member states such as Germany will not provide the US with backing for any measure that could possibly succeed in preventing or delaying Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. And it is counterproductive because the fact is that by aiding Hamas, the US aiding Iran.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It would seem that the IDF's General Staff has lost its collective mind. On Independence Day last Wednesday, at the annual ceremony at the President's House honoring outstanding IDF soldiers, Sergeant Hananel Dayan, upon receiving his decoration, saluted IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, but refused to shake his hand. When asked by President Moshe Katzav the meaning of his action, Dayan explained "My family was expelled from Gush Katif."
 

Members of the audience at the ceremony had no idea what was happening on the stage. The incident was over before it began. It would have been easy for Halutz to shrug the incident off. But he chose not to.

After Dayan descended the stage, he was accosted by Maj. Gen. Elazar Stern, head of the IDF's Manpower Division who berated him for his action. Stern demanded an apology. Dayan refused to provide one.

Stern later claimed that the IDF would have shrugged off the incident were it not for the presence of the media at the ceremony. Yet this claim is ridiculous. Had the IDF ignored the episode, the media would also have ignored it. In the "worst case" scenario, a reporter would have asked Halutz to comment on Dayan's action. Halutz would have said that it is understandable that those whose families were forced out of their homes in Gaza during the withdrawal last summer have hard feelings about what happened. Case closed.

But rather than ignore the minor incident, the IDF went bananas. Stern held a disciplinary hearing for Dayan on Thursday, even though Dayan had violated no IDF regulation. Dayan's brigade commander then expelled him from his unit and barred him from serving in any combat unit. Stern is now considering revoking Dayan's award for outstanding service.

The IDF's decision to react to Dayan's expression of his personal sentiment by crushing him with the full weight of the General Staff is indicative of a serious problem that has repercussions for both Israel's continued national viability and the IDF's continued capabilities as a fighting force.

Halutz, Stern and their subordinates accuse Dayan of having brought politics into the army by expressing his personal anger over what the IDF did to his family last August. It is true that Dayan's grief over the expulsion of his family is shared today almost exclusively by the Right, but that fact does not make his expression of his opinion either a crime or an act of politicization of the IDF. On the other hand, the generals' hysterical reaction to his refusal to shake Halutz's hand indicates that the politicization has already occurred.

Today, the national religious sector makes up some 15 percent of the overall population, yet its sons make up more than 30 percent of combat soldiers in the IDF. Soldiers from the national religious camp make up a plurality of cadets in combat officer training courses and a majority of soldiers in most commando units.

SOME 60 percent of NCOs in combat units graduated from national religious high schools and last year, 80 percent of company commanders in Golani infantry brigade were from the national religious camp. National religious officers are similarly overrepresented - by a ratio of between 2:1 to 4:1 in all combat units to the level of battalion command in the IDF. During the course of the Palestinian terror war since September 2000, 30 percent of soldiers killed in action were from the national religious camp.

The IDF's implementation of the expulsion orders last summer caused a sea change in the way that Israelis from the national religious camp perceive the IDF. The brutal police commanded evacuations of protesters at Amona last February - which left more than 300 demonstrators wounded - only widened the rift.

In an interview with Haaretz last week, Halutz claimed that there has been no decrease in levels of volunteerism of members of this sector since last summer. Yet members of the General Staff claim that his statement was misleading. The decreased motivation and ruined morale is evident today mainly in reenlistment rates. Company and battalion commanders are increasingly refusing to reenlist when their contracts end in anticipation of orders to carry out further withdrawals and expulsions.

RATHER THAN contend with this situation with the necessary self-interested sensitivity in light of the damage a breach of relations with the religious Zionist camp will cause to the IDF as a fighting force, Halutz has been going out of his way in recent months to publicly chastise, insult and alienate this public. Several months ago, referring to the violence at Amona and the protests last summer against the expulsions from Gaza, Halutz described the protesters as "poisoners of wells."
On Holocaust Memorial Day he accused them of belittling the Holocaust for using the slogan "We won't forget and we won't forgive" regarding the expulsions last summer, although the same slogan has been used by the Left numerous times in the past. Halutz has held publicized meetings with members of the extremist Left wing group Machsom Watch but rudely refused to meet with Col. (res.) Moti Yogev, the former deputy commander of the Gaza Division who was wounded by police at Amona.

Halutz recently appointed Brig. Gen. Tal Russo as his personal emissary to the national religious sector to try to build bridges between religious leaders and youth and the IDF. IDF sources claim that Russo's appointment was the result of successive opinion polls that showed that the national religious camp despises Halutz. Russo has been going from community to community talking with rabbis and youths aged 16-18 to convince them to maintain their motivation to serve. Yet actions like those taken against Dayan directly undercut Russo's work.

UNFORTUNATELY, a recent report indicates that perhaps Russo's mission is a mere feint. According to Middle East Newsline, a news service that specializes in coverage of the IDF, Stern recently revised the IDF's guidelines for recruitment. In light of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's intention to expel tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes in Judea and Samaria, the IDF no longer believes that soldiers from the national religious camp are trustworthy. So, according to an officer in the Manpower Division quoted in the report, the IDF will now limit the recruitment of religious soldiers. The shortfall will be made up by juvenile delinquents who are currently barred from serving in combat units.

Over the past several months, a significant number of religious youths have received notices in the mail informing them that their IDF service had been cancelled just days before they were scheduled to show up at the induction centers. In most cases, the youths were scheduled to begin infantry basic training and were caught completely by surprise. When in some cases the youths pulled strings to reinstate their conscription, they were forced to undergo lengthy interrogations by Shin Bet officers who grilled them about their spiritual connections to the Land of Israel and their willingness to participate in expulsions.

Taken together, the IDF's treatment of Dayan; its new recruitment guidelines and Halutz's anti-religious rhetoric reveal a dangerous politicization of the IDF. It seems that today, with Hamas now in charge of the Palestinian Authority and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz now in charge of Israel, the IDF views Israelis rather than Arabs as its principal threat.

Halutz and Stern, in criminalizing actions like Dayan's while minimizing the significance of the Hamas takeover of the Palestinian Authority are sending a clear signal of where they believe the IDF should be devoting its energies.

The IDF General Staff's decision to attack religious Zionists is perhaps the most disturbing development in Israel's recent past. Israel is in the middle of a war -- a war it has given its enemies every reason to believe they are winning. The result of Halutz and Stern's goading of the national religious camp is already being felt as its members make increasingly unrestrained statements regarding their unwillingness to fight for the country. If the current trend is not quickly reversed, not only will the IDF itself degrade its fighting capabilities by rejecting its best soldiers and recruits. It will be transformed into a force charged not with defending Israel against its enemies, but with defending the government against its political opponents.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

One of the great advantages of the digitalization of communications is that today, everyone who has a computer has access to information about events occurring all over the globe. A person sitting in their home in say, Jerusalem, can read everything from the Washington Post to the Bellingham Herald from Bellingham, Washington. Sitting anywhere in the world that has an Internet hook-up, a person today can be clued into events taking place from Paris to Timbuktu.

There can be no doubt that this accessibility has democratized communications. Private citizens have gained independence from the editorial preferences of the editors of their local newspapers. But the vastly expanded availability of information has caused a new problem. An individual who follows a public debate in a foreign country may think that he understands what is happening there by reading that country's local papers or popular Web sites every day. And yet, because he is thousands of miles away, he may well misunderstand the significance of what he is reading. Almost like a child's game of "Telephone," the information he accesses from his computer may be misleading because it is written for the locals, who in addition to reading their newspapers, also breathe the same air as their local reporters.

An example would be an Israeli who, sitting in his apartment in Tiberias, kept abreast of events in the US by reading The New York Times on-line. From such a reading, that Israeli could conclude that the US was losing the war against the jihadists in Iraq and was on the verge of retreating. He might also be under the impression that President George W. Bush was about to be impeached by Congress for having "lied" about the threat that Saddam Hussein constituted to the US in March 2003. Finally, such a reader might have the impression that the US economy was sliding into a recession because of the sharp rise in gasoline prices.
 

If that person were not a private individual, but say, the government of Britain, the assessment that the US was about to bail out of Iraq and impeach Bush would necessarily lead to certain conclusions about how Britain ought to be thinking about its foreign policy.

The problem, of course, is that a reading of The New York Times does not provide an individual or government with a clear understanding of what is happening in the US or of the significance of various debates now raging in the media. For a person to understand what he is reading in the Times, he needs to be able to understand the cultural context in which the articles are being published. Without a cultural awareness of the US, he will be incapable of assessing the value of the information he now accesses on the Internet.

The same, of course, is true of Israel. Israel's political debate is consistently hyperbolic. Israelis who listen to statements by their leaders know that they have to discount much of what they hear as exaggerated showmanship. For instance, from 1982 up until Ariel Sharon became prime minister in 2001, the Israeli Left routinely called him a warmonger, a right-wing extremist and a murderer. But no one really thought that any of this was true. Israelis understood this to be par for the course for the Israeli political debate.

Yet, for foreigners watching events in Israel and listening to this internal dialogue, it couldn't have come as more of a shock when, as prime minister, Sharon suddenly began calling for Israeli withdrawals from Judea, Samaria and Gaza and carried out the withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria last summer. After all, for years they had been reading of Israelis calling Sharon a clone of Genghis Khan. So here, as with the foreigner watching America, the familiarity afforded by access to local debates can lead to greater misunderstandings.

Because of this, it is important for all countries, when assessing what others are doing, to think first and foremost about how various moves can impact their interests. The domestic policy debates carried out in foreign countries should not form the basis of their decision-making.

IT IS important to note our propensity to misunderstand other peoples' national debates today because in three weeks, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will arrive in Washington, DC to present his plan to withdraw Israeli civilians and military forces from much of Judea and Samaria with the hopes of securing American support and funding for his plan.

Olmert's planned withdrawal presents a dilemma for Washington. On the one hand, the US traditionally has supported Israeli withdrawals from territories that Israel took over in the Six Day War, and Olmert's plan aligns with this customary preference. On the other hand, the US is now fighting a war against the global jihad and one of its primary goals is to prevent the establishment of new bases for jihadist forces.

Israel's withdrawal from Gaza this past summer fomented Hamas's rise to power in the Palestinian Authority and enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for al-Qaida, Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. An Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will exacerbate the current situation exponentially.

Were the Americans to base their policies on what they hear in the Israeli media, they might conclude that Israel will be destroyed if it doesn't vacate Judea and Samaria tomorrow. What they would miss is that the debate in Israel about retaining control over Judea and Samaria or relinquishing control of the areas to Hamas has nothing to do with Hamas, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, or any other consideration that might be called strategic.

What is hard to understand from reading Israel's media is that the country is in the midst of a culture war. Leftist secular messianists, who have replaced their peace god which Yasser Arafat destroyed six years ago with a withdrawal god, are pushing for the Judea and Samaria withdrawal as part of their offensive against religious Zionism which is headquartered in the Israeli settlements of Judea and Samaria that Olmert's plan will destroy.

Similarly hidden from the view of an outside observer of Israel's political scene is the fact that religious Zionists are responding to these attacks by pouting and threatening to take their anger out on the IDF. They threaten not to serve in the army or volunteer for officer training just to show the messianic leftists that they are nobody's fools. They can endanger the country just as well as the Left can.

ISRAEL HAS had next to no debate either on the strategic consequences of the Gaza withdrawal or on the likely security consequences of a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Such a debate would note that the Gaza withdrawal was a failure on every level. It would also raise the likelihood that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will cause an inflow of terrorists and missiles that will place all of Israel's major cities as well as its major highways, seaports and Ben-Gurion Airport within missile range from Hizbullah forces in Lebanon and Palestinian forces in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

Aside from that, such a debate would no doubt draw attention to the fact that a jihadist takeover of Judea and Samaria would cause an immediate danger to the Hashemite regime in Jordan. To date, Israeli military control of Judea and Samaria has made it difficult for Palestinian jihadists to threaten Jordan. But if Israel retreats, there will be no one stopping them from joining forces with their counterparts on the east bank of the Jordan River.

And so, an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would cause the destabilization of America's two most stable and reliable allies in the Middle East.

Fuel and other vital materiel for US forces in Iraq would no longer be able to be safely transported overland from Israeli ports through Jordan into Iraq due to the instability of both Israel and Jordan. This would increase American dependence on ports in the Persian Gulf. This increased American dependence would embolden Iran to cause the US Navy repeated headaches in the Straits of Hormuz.

Judea and Samaria would be used as a terror training base for jihadists who would go on to fight not only Israel, but US forces in Iraq.

Aside from that, just as Israel's retreat from Gaza convinced the Palestinians that terror pays and so brought Hamas to power, an Israeli retreat from Judea and Samaria leading to the destabilization of both Israel and Jordan will be perceived by the Arab and Islamic worlds as a strategic victory for the forces of jihad. From Paris to Haifa to Islamabad to Baghdad, to Dearborn, thousands will answer the call to jihad.

By the same token, with the momentum on the side of the jihadists, the US and its allies will experience unprecedented difficulty in attempting to convince Arab and Muslim governments, opinion makers, intellectuals and activists to support them. Political and cultural leaders who today support the US's strategic goal of bringing democracy and liberalism to the Arabs and Muslims worldwide will be cowed into silence. After all, whether the US likes it or not, the Arab and Muslim worlds perceive Israel as an American client state and as a result, an Israeli retreat is seen as an American retreat. If Israel is weakened, America is weakened.

OLMERT HAS put a price tag of $10 billion on his withdrawal plan. Many Israeli economists have claimed that this is a gross underestimate of the actual cost of the massive withdrawals he has planned and the dislocation of between 50,000-100,000 Israeli civilians. Nonetheless, Israel's new prime minister is hoping that the Congress will agree to have US taxpayers cover the bill. Olmert is also hoping that the Bush administration will recognize the lines of his proposed retreat as Israel's political borders.

America has not hesitated to force Israel to change course in everything from building settlements, to not responding to unprovoked missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, to cancelling weapons sales to places like China when the US believed that its national security interests were harmed by Israel's action. Generally, Israel's leaders have abided by American requests. Sometimes, when they felt that Israel's national well-being or their political fortunes were at stake, they did not.

While listening to the Israeli media's coverage of Israel's political debate could lead a foreigner to believe that retreating from Judea and Samaria is necessary for Israel's future, in fact what they are hearing is one side of a domestic culture war. And Israel's culture wars should be of little interest to foreign governments trying to assess their own interests, just as what The Nation or Mother Jones thinks about al-Qaida should have no bearing on how foreign governments perceive the threat that the global jihad constitutes for their nations.

Olmert's withdrawal plan will be devastating for Israel's national security. But that's Israel's problem to deal with. We elected this government and we will pay the price.

The US has no reason to support this plan that harms its most important interests in the region, and in the war against the global jihad. When Olmert comes to Washington, the first question his hosts should ask him is how can he expect them to support a plan that advances the cause of global jihad?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a friendly gesture to Germany. Speaking on state television, Ahmadinejad said the Germans should not feel guilty because, "a certain number of Jews were killed during World War II." He bemoaned that "today an intelligent people is still a hostage of World War II," arguing that Germany "still doesn't have the right to have independent policies or proper defenses."

It is possible that Ahmadinejad's statement absolving Germany of guilt for its liquidation of European Jewry in the Holocaust is part of a general charm offensive on his part towards Germany. Two weeks ago, Germany's Deputy Minister of the Interior August Hanning returned from discussions in Teheran with the announcement that ahead of the World Cup soccer championship next month, Iran will release a German citizen it has held since he inadvertently entered Iranian territorial waters last year.

Perhaps in exchange for Iran's presidential pardon for the Holocaust and the release of his German hostage, Germany has agreed to host Ahmadinejad in Germany if he decides to attend the Iranian national team's opening game against Mexico in Nuremberg. Germany has also agreed to coordinate its actions to secure the games with the Iranian government. As Hanning told Tagesspiegel newspaper last month, "When the Iranians fear a threat, they will tell us their reasons. Then our evaluation will flow back to Teheran."

Iranian regime opponents in Germany are concerned that in negotiating this agreement, the Iranian regime is working to delegitimize its exile opponents by spreading misinformation about them. Former Iranian soccer players, who represented Iran in the 1978 World Cup had planned to protest Iran's inclusion in the games. Speaking to the Associated Press, former soccer player Hassan Nayeb-Agha said, "Don't let the Iranian regime misuse the World Cup [to gain international legitimacy] in the same way that Hitler did with the Olympic Games in 1936."

While Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said last month that Ahmadinejad would be welcome to come to Germany to watch his team's matches, he has also made clear that - except from the man who is working to make Hitler's dream of a world without Jews or America come true, his entourage and press corps - Germany will take a strong stand against anyone who endangers the order and honor of the games.

To this end, Germany has suspended the Treaty of Schengen that abolishes border obstacles for EU citizens traveling among EU member states in order to prevent fanatical soccer fans from Britain, Poland and Holland from entering Germany for the games.

In addition, while as Schaeuble put it, Ahmadinejad can "naturally… come to the matches," Ahmadinejad's German supporters will be prevented from demonstrating their support for him. Indeed, in spite of Germany's problems with its large and increasingly radical Muslim minority, Iran's radical Muslim leader enjoys a considerable support base among white Germans. Germany's fascist NPD party enthusiastically supports Ahmadinejad and the Teheran regime for their Holocaust denial and their calls for Israel's destruction. Last month NPD's office in Leipzig announced its members' intention to rally in support of Iran during Iran's game against Angola scheduled to take place in Leipzig on June 21. But against these German neo-Nazis, the German government will show no tolerance. Shaeble himself angrily announced, "Germany will fight with might and main against rightist extremist ambitions before, during and after the World Cup!"

GERMANY'S refusal to isolate Ahmadinejad goes hand in hand with its appeasement of Iran's nuclear ambitions. Last Thursday Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier restated his country's position that the US should open direct negotiations with Teheran about those ambitions. His statement came two days after Iran's official news agency reported that in a meeting with Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that Iran "is prepared to transfer the [nuclear] experience, knowledge and technology of its scientists."

That is, Germany again tried to get Washington to commit itself to ruling out taking military action against Iran's nuclear installations two days after Iran announced its intention not only to develop nuclear weapons, but to share those weapons with others.

From a strictly legal perspective, Ahmadinejad should be arrested when he sets foot on German soil. As Israeli attorney Ervan Shahar noted in his petition to Germany's federal prosecution this past February, Ahmadinejad commits a felony under German law every time that he denies the Holocaust. Shahar requested that the prosecutors enforce German law and indict Ahmadinejad in abstentia. Doing so would force Germany to issue an international arrest warrant against the Iranian leader and so make him liable for arrest any time he stepped foot on European soil.

Unfortunately, as Germany has shown both by not acting on Shahar's request, and by refusing to bar Ahmadinejad entry to Germany next month, Berlin is unwilling to levy any sanction against Iran for its pursuit of nuclear weapons which, as Ahmadinejad has repeatedly made clear, it seeks in order to annihilate Israel - that is, to finish the job that Hitler started.

Germany's refusal to place any sanction on Iran is disturbing, because as German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel argued in the Transatlantic Intelligencer last December, "If there is a western nation today that has the means to confront [Iran's nuclear weapons program] with effective sanctions, it is Germany."

Kuntzel notes, "Germany is today by far the most important supplier of goods to Iran and its exports are increasing at a steady 20 percent per year. In 2004, German exports to Iran were worth some €3.6 billion. At the same time, Germany is the most important purchaser of Iranian goods apart from oil and Iran's most important creditor."

GERMANY'S behavior toward Iran is a clear sign that for all its Holocaust memorializing, for all its anti-Nazi legislation, and for all its protestations of friendship with Israel and the Jewish people, Germany has not learned the lessons of the Holocaust.

The main lesson of the Holocaust is not that war is bad and must therefore be avoided at all costs. The main lesson of the Holocaust is that evil is bad and must be fought with every effective means. By trading with Iran and protecting Iran from those who point out its obvious dangers not only to Israel but to the entire world, Germany is protecting evil and thus advancing its cause.

The Germans are acting in a morally blind and thus immoral fashion when they apply the lessons to the Holocaust only against neo-Nazis. In pretending that the only way that the Holocaust can repeat itself is for Adolf Hitler, Jr. to become Chancellor of Germany, the Germans give themselves license to ignore Hitler's actual reincarnations.

In mindlessly - yet patronizingly - squawking that all violence is bad and all peace is good, the Germans allow themselves the odious privilege of impugning the honor, nobility and morality of Israelis and Americans who fight Islamofascists by pretending there is no moral distinction between our soldiers and Islamofascist fighters who incinerate innocent people. They pretend it is possible to appease a murderer like Ahmadinejad, just as 70 years ago, at the 1936 Olympics others maintained that Hitler was someone who could be trusted to keep his word.

TODAY, ON Remembrance Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers, we bow our heads in gratitude as we commemorate the thousands of Israeli soldiers who have died protecting the people of Israel. As we reflect on their service and sacrifice for our freedom and safety, we need look no farther than Germany - to the cowardly and treacherous behavior of our former oppressors, who claim today to have learned the lessons of their evil while they shield new evil - to know how precious and sacred are the memories of our fallen warriors and how crucial the strength of our people, our state, our society, and our army are today, to ensure that our survival will never again be dependent on the goodness of others.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.