Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal.

It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.

It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.

By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, it is rejecting the British state.

They are embracing a culture founded on a rejection of the culture and traditions that have formed Britain since the Magna Carta was issued in 1215. For the past 800 years, Britain has stood for individual liberty and freedom of inquiry - at least for the British themselves.

In universities like Oxford and Cambridge, it was this humanist spirit and the justified national and cultural pride it nurtured which facilitated Britain's rise to international power. By boycotting Israel, which itself embodies these British ideals, the British are abrogating their own traditions of openness. Consequently, they are destroying themselves.

AND BRITAIN is not alone in its self-destruction. Britain's rush to oblivion is part of a wider trend overtaking all of Western Europe. Take Sweden for example.

Sweden is upheld by leaders of the Israeli left like former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami (who now devotes himself to attacking the US and Israel from his academic perch in Toledo, Spain), Education Minister Yuli Tamir, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Meretz chief Yossi Beilin and former Labor chairman Avrum Burg. They extol Sweden as a social democratic wonderland which Israel must emulate.

Some 12.5 percent of Swedes are immigrants and around half of Sweden's immigrants are Muslims. Muslims will soon comprise the majority in many of Sweden's cities.

The intrepid Scandinavian blogger 'Fjordman' recently penned an essay, "Jihad and the collapse of the Swedish model" in the on-line Brussels Journal. In it he relates the significance of Sweden's Integration Act of 1997 to Sweden's national self-destruction. The act officially proclaimed Sweden "a multicultural society."

Notes to the act stated, "Since a large group of people have their origins in another country, the Swedish population lacks a common history. The relationship to Sweden and the support given to the fundamental values of society thus carry greater significance for integration than a common historical origin."

As 'Fjordman' explains, the act was nothing less than national suicide. "Native Swedes have… been reduced to just another ethnic group in Sweden, with no more claim to the country than the Kurds or the Somalis who arrived there last Thursday. The political authorities of the country have erased their own people's history and culture."

Fjordman cites authors Jonathan Friedman, Ingrid Bjorkman, Jan Elfverson and Ake Wedin who explained in their 2005 book Exit the People's Home of Sweden - The Downfall of a Model of Society, that multiculturalism, as the "dominant ideology in Sweden, which has been made dominant by powerful methods of silencing and repression, is a totalitarian ideology, where the elites oppose the national aspect of the nation state."

The authors explained that "the problem is that the ethnic group… described as Swedes implicitly are considered to be nationalists, and thereby are viewed as racists."

Like the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, multiculturalism identifies the Jews and the Americans as its chief enemies. Both must be defeated for their refusal to destroy themselves and merge into the post-national thought stream. And like their 20th century predecessors, the multiculturalists of today embrace radical Muslims who share their rejection of Judaism and Americanism.

The multiculturalists convince their societies to accept their own destruction by indoctrinating their fellow citizens through their education systems and media. A recent poll of Swedes between the ages of 15-20 showed that 90% had never heard of the Soviet gulag.

NEEDLESS TO say, the consequences of this state of affairs are not localized to Europe. As they do towards their own people, the European elites work tirelessly to subvert American and Israeli cultural confidence and to undermine every action the two nations take to combat the forces of global jihad. Whether by condemning the US incarceration of jihadists at Guantanamo Bay, claiming that Zionism is racism, attacking the US campaign in Iraq, financing Israeli anti-Zionist pressure groups and the Palestinian Authority, or insisting that Iran should be negotiated with, the EU works to compel the US and Israel to stand down rather than defend themselves and to convince American and Israeli societies that we are unworthy of being defended.

Disturbingly, rather than face up to Europe's self-destruction and give it a wide berth, led by our own post-national elites, Israel and the US are adopting the European model of cultural collapse.

The most recent example of the Israeli elites' subversion of their country is Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz's assault on the Jewish National Fund.

Since it was chartered by Theodor Herzl in 1901, financed by donations from Jews throughout the world, the JNF has purchased land to promote settlement of the land by the Jewish people. The JNF owns some 2.5 million hectares of land.

In 1961, the JNF signed an agreement with the Israel Lands Authority which authorized the ILA to manage JNF lands in accordance with the JNF charter. In 2004, the anti-Jewish Arab Israeli pressure group Adalah petitioned the Supreme Court demanding that the ILA enable non-Jews to settle on JNF lands. Adalah alleged that by acting in accordance with the JNF charter, the ILA discriminates against Arabs.

Rather than reject Adalah's claim on its face, or at a minimum cancel the 1961 agreement and enable JNF to manage its own lands, Mazuz sided with Adalah. Last week he ordered the JNF to stop operating in accordance with its charter. That is, Mazuz effectively and with no legal authority expropriated the property of the Jewish people.

In so doing, the attorney-general of the Jewish state essentially decided that Zionism is a form of racism and that the Jewish people have no special rights to the Land of Israel. No doubt the Swedes are proud of him.

The Olmert government has likewise embraced the European model of national collapse. Rather than defend Israel's citizens from our enemies and cultivate the Jewish character of the state, the government seeks to appease the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Egyptians and the Europeans at the expense of Israel's citizenry.

At the invitation of successive Israeli governments, Europeans forces are deployed today in Hebron, in Gaza and along Israel's northern border with Lebanon. These European forces have done nothing to prevent the Palestinians from arming, training and attacking Israel.

Along the Lebanese border, since last summer's war, the Europeans have similarly done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rebuilding its arsenals and reasserting its control over southern Lebanon.

And this is to be expected. As Europeans perceive their interests, they are better off appeasing the Arabs and the Iranians and condemning Israel and the US for every step we take to combat the forces of global jihad committed to our destruction.

Rather than acknowledge this reality and work to remove the Europeans from our midst, the Olmert government is exacerbating the problem. In recent weeks, the government has asked the Europeans to increase the size of their forces along the Gaza-Egypt border. Thursday, Minister for Strategic Affairs Avigdor Lieberman recommended that NATO forces be deployed in Gaza. Similarly, Minister Rafi Eitan and far-left Meretz MKs Zehava Gal-On and Avshalom Vilan are calling for Arab League forces to be deployed to Gaza. Gal-On and Vilan envision the Arabs and the Europeans jointly taking control over Gaza. For his part, Eitan is recommending that Arab armies deploy to Judea and Samaria as well.

IN THE US, the situation is depressingly similar. At leading universities, professors and students who openly support Israel and the US campaign in Iraq are hounded and isolated. In keeping with the general anti-American and anti-Israel gestalt on college campuses, last year Harvard University invited former Iranian president Muhammad Khatami to speak on campus. Harvard ignored Khatami's stewardship of the Iranian nuclear program during his tenure. His role in violently quelling the student democracy movement in 1999 and 2003 was similarly overlooked.

The Bush administration's foreign policy has likewise been Europeanized. Five years after President George W. Bush placed Iran and North Korea firmly in the axis of evil, the State Department is working overtime to appease them both. In line with this policy, on Tuesday, Iran's announcement that it had arrested five US citizens and is charging them with espionage was greeted by embarrassment and paralysis in Washington. Just the day before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had dispatched the US ambassador in Baghdad to meet with his Iranian counterpart.

The US's treatment of North Korea is perhaps even more dramatic. Rather than abandon its appeasement policy towards Pyongyang after the North Koreans breached their commitment to close their nuclear facility at Yongbyon in April, the Bush administration has redoubled its efforts to placate the Stalinist dictatorship. Not only did the US have little to say about the North Korean short-range missile tests over Japan last week. It sent its emissaries to Beijing this week to attempt to buy North Korean compliance with its breached commitment by unfreezing Pyongyangs's bank accounts in Macau. The US treasury froze those accounts when it discovered that they were being used to launder profits from counterfeit US currency and drug deals.

Then there is the US's refusal to abandon pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians. At a time when jihadists from Iraq have panned out to Lebanon and Algeria and are actively working to overthrow those countries' governments, Tuesday Rice claimed that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is "at the core of a lot of problems in the region."

During the Cold War, protected by the US military, Europeans could embrace cultural and national suicide without fearing the consequences of their actions. Now faced with those consequences, the Europeans have embraced their own destruction rather than abandon their multicultural model and its concomitant anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.

Israel and the US do not have anyone else to defend them. And in spite of the rantings of their cultural, media and academic elites, the Israeli and American people have no interest in committing national suicide. In light of this, both countries must move swiftly to end the Europeanization of their cultures and policies.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

If life were a television show then the Labor Party primaries would be a Seinfeld episode. Like Seinfeld, yesterday's primaries for Labor's top-spot were about nothing but being on the air.

The frontrunners, former prime minister and IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak, and former Navy commandant and Shin Bet chief MK Ami Ayalon, had no positions to speak of on the issues of the day. They had nothing to say about the Iranian nuclear program. They had nothing to say about Syria's daily threats of war. They had nothing to say about Gaza's post-withdrawal transformation into a mini-Taliban ruled Afghanistan replete with training bases for all the major global terror networks.

Rather than relate to the threats that Israel faces, they showed Israel their faces. They preened before the Labor voters, regaling them with tales of their glory and wisdom. And then each assembled a star-studded array of retired generals and party intellectuals and reporters to tell us how wonderful each of them are and how shallow and corrupt all of the other candidates are.

They attributed the stature of strategy to bromides about their commitment to peace, and then spoke about how and at what price they will remain in Ehud Olmert's government.

THEIR WILLINGNESS to remain in the Olmert government was key. Because that was what this primary was all about: acquiring and preserving power - for the candidates, for the Labor party and for the Israeli Left as a whole. The underlying theme of the five-month long Labor primary was that power must be maintained at all costs. The party must remain in the government because more frightening than Iran or Syria or Hamas or Hizbullah is the specter of Knesset elections.

Those elections, the candidates, their spinmeisters and media comrades all agree must be avoided because everyone knows what elections will bring. Allowing the nation to determine its government will bring Likud and Binyamin Netanyahu to power. Allowing the nation to choose it leaders means allowing the nation to reject them.

The fact that today the sole idea around which the Labor party stands united is the need to prevent Likud and Netanyahu from gaining power makes it indistinguishable from the ruling Kadima candidates list. The lengths that Kadima is willing to go to remain in power were made clear in a little item in Haaretz last week.

THE NEWSPAPER'S political commentator Yossi Verter reported on a meeting that took place at the home of a rabbi in the south who has gained a following of politicians for his ability to predict the future. A cabinet minister from Kadima was present at the meeting where the rabbi predicted that a terrible war will break out within the next month to three months. The rabbi then consoled his guests by claiming that the war will save Olmert's government.

As Verter put it, "The minister left the meeting feeling at once pessimistic and optimistic: Pessimistic because there will be war, optimistic because according to the rabbi, war means survival, that is, Olmert is sitting pretty." And unfortunately, on at least one count, the rabbi is certainly right. The probability of war in the near future is high. The fact that this is the case screams out from every quarter.

Speaking Saturday in Isfahan, one of the Iranian cities made famous in recent years for its illicit nuclear facilities, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again threatened Israel with annihilation. "Sixty year of invasion and assassination is enough," he said. "If you do not cease invasion and massacre, soon the hand of power of the nations of the region will rub you criminals with earth."

For his part, Syria's dictator Bashar Assad, who was just resoundingly reelected by a national referendum which pitted him against no one, is busily threatening Israel with war while using his al-Qaida surrogates in Fatah al Islam to overthrow the Lebanese government. As the Syrian dissident Reform Syria Party revealed this week, Fatah al Islam's commander is Shakir Absi, an until recently jailed Syrian Air Force officer. Syrian intelligence released Absi from prison and sent him to Lebanon to foment the overthrow of the Lebanese government.

Then of course there are the Iranian and Syrian Palestinian proxies, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad which are fighting a mini-war against Israel in the south. Speaking at the cabinet meeting on Sunday, Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin explained that the IDF operations in Gaza have in no way diminished the Palestinians' military capabilities. Hamas, Diskin said can turn its missiles and mortars on Ashkelon any time it wishes.

AND NOT only is the Olmert government failing to degrade the Palestinians' military capacity through limited air strikes, its feckless diplomacy has also failed to prevent Hamas's acquisition of international legitimacy. Britain, for instance has reacted to the abduction of BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza by embracing Hamas.

As British architects, physicians, vicars and professors line up to boycott Israel, the British glitterati and incoming prime minister Gordon Brown happily shared a stage with Hamas spokesman and terrorist Ghazi Hamad at a literary festival in Wales. Hamad wowed his audience by spreading lies about his non-existent efforts to free Johnston.

The British embrace of jihadists is being matched by the collapse of the US policy on the war. Over the weekend The Boston Globe reported that the US closed down the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, an interagency working group established last year to undermine the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The group was disbanded because the Bush administration has abandoned its policy of regime change in both countries. US Ambassador in Iraq Ryan Crocker's meeting yesterday with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad is just the latest evidence of this US embrace of appeasement.

Speaking of the significance of the American move, Iraqi parliamentarian Mithal al Alousi said that by opening direct contacts with the Iranians, the US "gives Iran guardianship over the Middle East."

All of these developments bode ill for Israel. And there are voices in Israel who understand this and have clear visions for defending the country against the gathering storm. While Barak, Ayalon, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the other Labor candidates spent last weekend attacking one another while committing themselves to preventing general elections, and Olmert and his political advisors mouthed talking points about the need for "stability" which can only be achieved by preventing elections, other voices eked out a message of resolve and wisdom.

IN AN interview with the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu cogently explained his strategy of using free markets to exert pressure on the Iranian regime that could lead to its overthrow. For the past six months, Netanyahu has been making frequent visits to the US to try to convince state and local governments to divest their public employee pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. Netanyahu explained that Americans across the political spectrum can agree to the principle that "a regime that promotes genocide cannot receive American taxpayers' savings . . . through European intermediaries."

In Netanyahu's view, squeezing the companies that invest in Iran's oil industries will reduce the companies' stock prices and force them to end their cooperation with Iran. The foreign pullout will paralyze the Iranian economy and force Iranian economic elites to pressure the government to end its nuclear weapons program, or perhaps bring down the government.

While it is far from clear that the divestment program, which was originally conceived by the Washington based Center for Security Policy, can in fact cause Iran to end its nuclear weapons program, it is absolutely clear that the initiative will make it more difficult for Iran to freely advance it. That is, even if it is only partially successful, the plan to end US investment in companies that enable the Iranian regime to function, will limit the regime's maneuver room.

While Netanyahu was promoting a plan to build financial coalitions against Iran, former IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon took to the airwaves back home to point to the dangers of the Olmert government's refusal to take action against Gaza.

"The problem in Gaza won't go away, and no one can solve it for us, not Egypt, or an international force," Ya'alon said in an interview with Channel 2.

While the Olmert government dithers and allows Sderot to be abandoned by residents it refuses to defend, Ya'alon said, "We have to get to the terrorists, get to their workshops and hit their infrastructure. We did it in Defensive Shield and we had our reservations before launching that operation too. You have to be blind to think entering Gaza in unnecessary."

What we see in Netanyahu and Ya'alon as well as in their colleagues is that Israel needn't be led by people who think that war is preferable to elections. We needn't be sitting by passively as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice advances James Baker's policy of selling out Israel for a temporary lull in the carnage in Iraq that could allow the US to meekly retreat. We needn't be discussing surrender of territory to regimes that are actively preparing to attack us. We needn't be listening to men who think that leadership of a country at war is nothing but a popularity contest.

Many commentators have for months ignored Labor's symbiotic relationship with Kadima and argued wrongly that the fate of the Olmert government would be decided in the Labor primaries. Given the fact that Labor and Kadima have identical interests, there was never any chance that Labor would bolt the government.

If Israelis wish to be led by men intent on defending us in our hour of peril, we need to be pressuring Olmert's other coalition partners - Shas and Yisrael Beitenu - to abandon him. If we allow these empty-headed, self-obsessed incompetents in Kadima and Labor to remain in power unchallenged, we can trust not only the rabbi's prediction of war. We can also trust that that war will be led as incompetently as the last one.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Over the past week, Ma'ariv has reported on two separate diplomatic initiatives that seem to be coming into line. First, there is the possibility that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will open negotiations with Syria on the surrender of the Golan Heights to Damascus. Second, the Jordanians are raising the possibility of forming a confederation with the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

Any analysis of the reasonableness of these initiatives must begin with two questions. First, do the relevant parties share enough common interests to enable them to reach an agreement that will be mutually beneficial? Second, do the sides have leaders who are competent to properly identify those interests and to work to advance them?

According to Ma'ariv, "The prime minister has... become convinced that negotiations with Syria and a possible peace agreement will significantly alter the regional strategic situation and facilitate the isolation of Iran and a solution to the problem with Hizbullah.

"This is especially the case," the newspaper reported, "against the backdrop of the collapse of Fatah and of [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen, and the fact that there is no chance for a diplomatic initiative with the Palestinians in the near future."

The report added that the IDF's General Staff believes that Israel can avert war with Syria by negotiating the surrender of the Golan Heights to Damascus.

So Olmert sees three reasons to engage Damascus in negotiations about an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. He believes that doing so can prevent a war between the two countries. He believes that such negotiations will weaken Syria's protector, Iran. And he is interested in negotiations because he feels he needs to do something and he can't negotiate the surrender of Judea and Samaria with Hamas.

Unfortunately, all of Olmert's rationales for opening negotiations with Syria are based on false assumptions. A review of the results of the US's current, much-less radical bid to appease Syria in Iraq demonstrates this clearly.

The insurgency being waged against US-led coalition forces in Iraq today is directed by Syria and Iran. In an attempt to decrease the dimensions of the war, last month the Americans opened direct, high-level contacts with Damascus. First, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi paid a visit to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

Pelosi, who supports a US retreat from Iraq, praised the Baathist regime and so ended the isolation Damascus has been relegated to since it ordered the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005.

Although the Bush administration condemned Pelosi's visit, weeks later it followed her lead. At the beginning of the month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a meeting with her Syrian counterpart, Walid Muallem, in Sharm e-Sheikh.

The Americans hoped that direct contacts with Syria would moderate its behavior. Unfortunately, the opposite has occurred. Far from moderating Syria, US moves to mollify it have served to embolden Syria to advance its hostile policies. In the aftermath of Pelosi's visit, the regime cracked down on internal opposition, rounding up dissidents and sentencing them to prolonged prison terms.

Rice's meeting with Muallem failed to put a damper on Syrian sponsorship of the insurgents. On Monday, a US official in Iraq said, "Our best estimate is that 85 to 90 percent of all the suicide bombers are foreign. Ninety percent plus come through Syria."

Beyond Iraq and internal dissent in Syria, the legitimacy Washington has conferred on Damascus is emboldening the Syrians to destabilize Lebanon. The Fatah Islam Palestinian jihadist group that is now leading the hostilities in northern Lebanon is a creation of Syrian intelligence. Today the Syrians are keen to destabilize Lebanon in a bid to intimidate Lebanese lawmakers into rejecting the UN tribunal which is set to try Syrian officials for their role in Hariri's assassination.

All of these Syrian actions point to the clear conclusion that the American appeasement efforts have backfired. Were Israel to similarly seek to appease Damascus, and to do so by far more radically offering to surrender the strategically vital Golan Heights to Syrian control, far from diminishing the prospects of war, Israel would likely exacerbate the likelihood of a Syrian or Syrian-sponsored strike against it.

Similarly, it is doubtful that opening negotiations on an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights would weaken Syria's relations with Iran. Why would Syria consider distancing itself from Teheran when its close alliance with the ayatollahs is what is provoking the US and Israel to mollify it?

So if offering to discuss an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will increase the probability of war and embolden the Syrians to intensify their alliance with Iran, the only remaining rationale for speaking to them is Olmert's desire to have some sort of diplomatic platform to stand on.

Here the issue of a leader's competence to advance his nation's interests through diplomatic initiatives comes into play. By expressing a willingness to imperil the security of the country by opening talks with Syria that will only radicalize Damascus still further, Olmert is demonstrating that he is incapable of responsibly advancing Israel's interests. Indeed, his willingness to engage in surrender talks with Damascus shows that he doesn't even understand what Israel's national interests are.

If Olmert wishes to prevent the coming war, he should be preparing for it. This he must do by highlighting Syria's radicalism and by neutralizing Syria's terror networks in Gaza, which would be used against Israel in any war scenario.

SO WHILE there is no possibility of launching a diplomatic effort with Syria or the Palestinians, what about the Jordanian initiative?

According to the Ma'ariv report, the Jordanian plan is based on a recognition that with Hamas in control of the Palestinian Authority, Israel has no Palestinian partner to whom it could surrender Judea and Samaria. In light of this, Israel is incapable of adopting the so-called Arab peace initiative, which demands that Israel withdraw its citizens and military forces to behind the 1949 armistice lines.

The Jordanians are offering to fill the void by replacing the Palestinians. Israel, they say, should give Jordan Judea and Samaria as part of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation under Hashemite control. In short, the Jordanians are resuscitating the view that Jordan is Palestine. King Abdullah is using former Jordanian prime minister Abed Salam Majali as his envoy to convince Israelis to accept this newest idea.

An assessment of the opportunities and threats inherent in this offer must begin with an analysis of Jordan's interests. Bluntly stated, the Hashemite monarchy finds itself firmly lodged between the Iraqi rock and the Palestinian hard place and so is in danger of being overthrown. The possibility that US forces will withdraw from Iraq without first stabilizing the country constitutes an existential threat to the Hashemites, who understand that after defeating the Great Satan, Jordan will be the next target on the Syrian- and Iranian-sponsored insurgents' list.

As to the Palestinians, since Hamas won the PA elections last year, the jihadist group, and its sister organization the Muslim Brotherhood, have seen a steep rise in their popularity in Jordan, where more than 70% of the population are Palestinians. The Jordanian offer to take over Judea and Samaria can therefore be seen as a bid to ride the Palestinian tiger in the hopes of taming the beast before it devours Jordan.

In contrast to the situation with Syria, Israel's national interests overlap those of Jordan. Israel, too, will be imperiled by a resurgent eastern front in the event of an American pullout from Iraq. Israel, too, will pay a steep price if the jihadist forces on both sides of the Jordan River unite.

Yet, given the dangers that both countries face, it would be inexcusable for Israel to even consider transferring control over the Jordan Valley to the Jordanian military. At the same time, the societal fragmentation that would ensue from an Israeli withdrawal from its heartland in Judea and Samaria would undermine Israel's ability to rally as a society against external enemies.

While the gulf between what Jordan proposes and what Israel can accept is large, the fact remains that the states' shared interests are significant enough to form the basis for mutually beneficial discussions. As MK Benny Elon has been arguing for years, Israel could offer Jordan functional sovereignty over the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. At the same time, Israel could assert its sovereignty over what the Oslo accords refer to as Area C. Area C includes all of the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, the hinterlands and the Jordan Valley.

The assertion of functional sovereignty by Jordan over the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria would include the return of their Jordanian citizenship, which the late King Hussein abrogated in 1988. Such functional sovereignty would undermine the PA's political rationale and could act as a moderating force for Palestinian society as a whole - both in Judea and Samaria, and in Jordan.

The assertion of Israeli sovereignty over Area C would preserve Israel's ability to defend itself against a resurgent eastern front. It would also be able to continue to protect the Hashemite kingdom from violent overthrow.

All in all, bearing in mind Israel's shared interests with Jordan, the Jordanian initiative can form the basis for discussions that could lead to the first agreement between Israel and its neighbors that could strengthen Israel and promote the chances of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, to the benefit of all.

BUT HERE we return to the question of leadership. Israel's ability to advance a confederative arrangement between the Palestinians and Jordan while ensuring Israel's continued control over Area C is wholly dependent on the skill of its leaders.

Sadly, it is impossible to believe that Olmert, who is willing to endanger the country by engaging Syria, would be capable of conceptualizing, let alone managing, such delicate discussions. Indeed, in all likelihood, were Olmert to begin such discussions, he would do so while running roughshod over Israel's security. And by doing so, he would cancel the possibility of reaching a mutually beneficial arrangement for years to come.

This, then, points to the greatest failure of the Olmert government. Not only is it incapable of recognizing dangers. It is also blind to opportunities. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government is incapable of learning. This is the only possible explanation for its handling of the Palestinian assault on southern Israel which has seen some 200 rockets and missiles fall on Sderot, southern Ashkelon and the surrounding areas in the past week alone.

On Sunday, the security cabinet met and discussed options for contending with the situation. At the outset, it nixed launching a large-scale assault on Gaza in favor of continuing pinpoint air strikes against Hamas leaders.

The security cabinet defined Hamas as Israel's enemy in the current campaign. The government discussed the option of transferring more arms and money to Fatah, which serves as a junior partner in the Hamas "unity" government. Such a move would simply follow the government's move last week to allow up to 500 Egyptian-trained Fatah fighters to enter the Gaza Strip.

The security cabinet's discussion took for granted that it is not Israel's responsibility to secure Gaza's border with Egypt. As opponents of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza warned, that border has served as a terror thoroughfare since the IDF withdrew its forces from the area in September 2005.

Through the border, Gaza has been inundated with advanced weaponry. Terrorists from abroad have entered Gaza at will. Terrorist from Gaza freely leave the area for terror training in Iran, Syria and Lebanon and then return.

Rather than ordering the IDF to reassert control over the border, the security cabinet considered two other options. The Foreign Ministry recommends that an international force be deployed to the area, much like the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. Defense officials think it would be better to have Egypt secure the border much as the Lebanese army now sits on Israel's northern border.

Unfortunately, all of the security cabinet's strategic assumptions are either wholly or partially incorrect. As a result, the options it adopted or continues to consider will either have no strategic impact on Israel's security predicament vis-a-vis Gaza or will adversely affect Israel's national security.

IN ITS definition of the parameters of its debate and policy options, the government displayed clearly that it has learned nothing from its defeat at the hands of Iran's proxy army in Lebanon - Hizbullah - in last summer's war.

In the first instance, by limiting its definition of Israel's enemy in Gaza to Hamas, the government obfuscates the true strategic reality which confronts it. Hamas does not fight Israel alone. It fights in full partnership with the Fatah terror group. Indeed, Fatah has carried out more terrorist attacks against Israel over the past seven years of the Palestinian jihad than Hamas. Throughout the now 7-year-old war, Fatah and Hamas have willingly collaborated in terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Fatah members, including thousands of gunmen from the official PA security forces, often also serve in Hamas. Weapons that Israel has transferred to Fatah through various PA security forces over the past 13 years have been used to murder Israelis by Fatah as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. And of course, Fatah now serves as Hamas's junior partner in the Palestinian "government."

The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government does not merely refuse to acknowledge that Fatah is also Israel's enemy. It actively supports Fatah and upholds it as Israel's ally. In this it is repeating and indeed aggravating its strategically disastrous treatment of the Lebanese government last summer.

IN THE immediate aftermath of Hizbullah's strike against the IDF position in northern Israel last July 12 which led to the abduction of reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and precipitated the war, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rightly stated that the Lebanese government is responsible for everything that occurs in Lebanon. Yet after receiving orders from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government did an about face and became a vocal supporter of the Lebanese government.

Israel upheld Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora's government even though Hizbullah is a partner in his governing coalition and its representatives serve as ministers in his cabinet. Israel supported the Lebanese government even as Lebanese military forces actively collaborated with Hizbullah units by identifying Israeli targets for Hizbullah rocket and missile units, transferring intelligence about IDF troop movements to Hizbullah, and paying pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war. Israel supported the Lebanese government even as it acted as Hizbullah's agent in the cease-fire negotiations.

During the cease-fire talks, Israel demanded that the Lebanese military be deployed to the border even though some 40 percent of its soldiers are Shi'ite and known for their sympathy and frequent collaboration with Hizbullah. Now deployed along the border, Lebanese forces have opened fire on IDF border patrols and have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah's rearming and reassertion of control over southern Lebanon.

It is certainly true that to some degree the Lebanese government's support for Hizbullah is the consequence of its weakness. Were it strong enough, perhaps it would not be so tolerant of Iran's army in Lebanon. But be that as it may, Israel's strategic analysis should be informed not by what the Lebanese government might wish to do, but by what it actually does.

IN STARK contrast to the Lebanese government, Fatah is far from an unwilling collaborator with
Hamas. Like Hamas, Fatah leaders openly call for Israel's destruction. Fatah uses the same techniques as Hamas to indoctrinate Palestinian society to seek the genocide of the Jewish people.
And yet, Israel's support for Fatah is far greater than its support for the Siniora government.

Israeli officials travel the globe ratcheting up support for Fatah. The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government bases its national policies of land giveaways on Fatah's fictional moderation. The government raises money for Fatah more energetically than it raises money for the Israeli economy. And it allows the US and the Egyptians to arm and train Fatah terrorists.

Equally alarming is the security cabinet's discussion of how to secure Gaza's border with Egypt. Rejecting offhand the notion that the IDF should secure the border, the government limited debate to finding someone else to secure southern Israel.

For the past decade, the only policy that the Foreign Ministry has had for dealing with sub-national terror campaigns against Israel is for the IDF to perform a sound-and-light show for a few days that ends with the entry of the deus ex machina in the form of a foreign force which will save the day. In advancing this policy, the Foreign Ministry willfully ignores the fact that for the past 59 years, Israel has had only negative experience with foreign forces.

These forces consistently serve as a buffer force behind which Israel's enemies arm, train and launch attacks against Israel. When Israel is forced to respond, it is roundly condemned for doing so by the same international forces behind which its enemies built their forces and launched their attacks.

By recommending the deployment of international forces in Gaza, the Foreign Ministry demonstrates that it remains in denial of the plain fact that it was the government's willingness to listen to the Foreign Ministry's prescriptive advice to conduct limited, ineffective air assaults on Hizbullah and sue for a cease-fire with international forces in last summer's war which led to Israel's defeat.

Then of course there is the issue of Egyptian forces. Here too, the comparison with Lebanon is instructive. For the past seven years, the Egyptians have been for the Palestinians what Syria is for Hizbullah. Namely, the Egyptians enable the Palestinians to conduct their war against Israel by arming them and providing them with international support. Just as the Syrians will not stop weapons shipments to Hizbullah, so Egypt will not stop shipments to Palestinian terror forces in Gaza.

FINALLY OF course, there is the issue of the goal of the current campaign. As was the case last summer towards Hizbullah, today the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has not set for itself the goal of defeating Hamas. Rather the goal of the current operations in Gaza is to send Hamas a message. Like last summer, today the government hopes that by killing a sufficient number of Hamas terrorists, it will induce the organization to stop attacking Israel.

But of course, by limiting its goal in such a way, the message that Israel is sending is not that Hamas should stop attacking Israel. By refusing to fight to victory, Israel is telling Hamas that it cannot lose, which is to say, it can go on fighting forever.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the government's refusal to understand the lessons of the last war and to apply them in the current battle is that Israel has far more options for defeating its enemies in Gaza than it had in Lebanon.

Gaza is a small territory and in contrast to Lebanon, Israel has the ability to take control of ingress and egress from the area. So too, Israel's intelligence capabilities are far greater in Gaza than in Lebanon. Furthermore, the enemy Israel confronts in Gaza is not as well-armed or well-trained as Hizbullah.

Aside from all that, Israel controls Gaza's economy. Israel sells Gaza its water and electricity. Were Israel to decide to stop selling water or electricity to Gaza, its enemies would be hard-pressed to function.

All of these relative advantages that Israel can bring to bear in Gaza would enable Israel to cause long lasting damage to all of its enemies operating in the area while minimizing losses to its forces and civilians. But to take proper advantage of any of its strategic and operational assets, the government must first learn the proper lessons of the last war. Its refusal to do so bodes ill for the future.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Monday, The New York Times reported that in just a few weeks, Iran will be capable of building nuclear bombs. The Times report, which was largely substantiated by the Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad el-Baradei, means that in just a matter of months, Israel is liable to find itself in danger of being wiped off the map.

This grave development was barely noted by the Israeli media. They were busy with other matters.

There was the State Cup soccer championship this week. And that sudden rainstorm in Jerusalem that forced the government to cancel the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the capital's liberation was a very big deal. Then, of course there is the Palestinian onslaught against southern Israel which has turned Sderot into a ghost town.

But the primary reason that the Israeli media are ignoring the rapidly gathering mushroom cloud is because Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is a master politician.

Two weeks after the Winograd Committee's interim report found Olmert responsible for Israel's defeat at the hands of Iran's army in Lebanon last summer, almost no one seems to remember there was a report. Olmert has removed his incompetence from the pubic agenda.

With no support from any quarter of the country, Olmert clings to power through his successful use of the political art of distraction. His response to the public outcry that the Winograd Committee's report unleashed was to change the subject.

Rather than contend with the calls for his resignation, Olmert turned his guns on his deputy, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. After he successfully outmaneuvered his not terribly bright and politically unsavvy colleague, the media completely forgot about the issue of his incompetence to lead and placed their spotlights on Livni's pathetic political implosion.

Last week, Olmert used the Supreme Court-ordered publication of his testimony before the Winograd Committee as an opportunity to attack the panel that he himself appointed. And again, rather than report on the dangers besetting Israel as a result of Olmert's incompetence, the media gave extensive coverage to Olmert's request to reappear before the committee.

In his most recent gambit, this week Olmert turned his guns on State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss. As UN nuclear inspectors discovered Sunday that Iran is currently operating 1,300 centrifuges at its nuclear facility at Natanz, Olmert - the seasoned attorney - had his personal attorneys send a 58-page letter to Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz requesting that he open a criminal probe against Lindenstrauss.

From the outset, Olmert and his lawyers knew that Mazuz would reject their request to investigate the comptroller for his investigation of Olmert's below market price purchase of his luxury home in Jerusalem. But that was beside the point.

As far as they were concerned, the maneuver was an out and out success. The prime minister of Israel achieved his goal: for two days, his fight with Lindenstrauss and not his unfitness to lead the country was the story of the day.

There is little correlation between Olmert's failure as a national leader and his success as a party politician. Two weeks after 150,000 people crowded into Rabin Square in Tel Aviv demanding his resignation for his failed leadership during last summer's war, the protest is all but forgotten and Olmert is sitting pretty. His governing coalition, and particularly his partnership with Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu, is rock solid.

The consequences of the disparity between his professional and political capabilities couldn't be worse for the country. Olmert, the major league politician, sits securely on his perch while Olmert, the little league leader, is plunging us into a new war, which like the last one, he is incapable of winning.

The decision to deploy a few tanks in northern Gaza on Thursday, like the decision to send a few planes to bomb a few targets over Gaza, is not part of an overall strategy aimed at defending southern Israel from rocket and mortar fire. Olmert, like his friend former prime minister Ehud Barak at the start of the Palestinian terror war seven years ago, is cynically exploiting the IDF.

Rather than give the military an order to defeat our enemies, Olmert, like Barak before him, has ordered the IDF to perform a sound and light show for the public which demands that the government defend it.

Olmert's refusal to order a serious strike in Gaza has brought about the effective abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over Sderot and the Western Negev. It is impossible to speak of Israel as a properly functioning, sovereign state when its citizens are forced to flee their homes because their government refuses to protect their lives and property.

And Sderot is not alone. Just as the opponents of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza warned, Israel's absence from the area enabled Gaza's transformation into a new nexus of global jihad. As a result of the incompetence and paralysis of the government in contending with this foreseen development, the fate of Sderot will soon become the fate of Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat.

Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Popular Resistance Committees and their friends are not all sitting in Gaza, armed to the teeth with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and tons of explosives just to kill one another. For nearly two years, the open border between Gaza and Egypt has enabled terrorists and their weaponry to flood Gaza. The increased capacity has placed an additional 200,000 Israeli citizens within range of their rockets and missiles.

The horrific images of the mothers and fathers of Sderot hiding beneath their cars with their children during rocket barrages, and jumping through the windows of buses bound for the relative safety of Beersheba - as if missing the bus would mean certain death - and then the eerie silence as a town is Israel is abandoned are impossible to abide. So too, the foreseeable prospect that these images will soon plague Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat bespeak an unbearable future.

But these are small potatoes when compared to the danger of national annihilation approaching us from Iran's nuclear installations.

While Olmert hunkers down in his office and alternatively wrecks our relations with the US; dispenses empty promises to secure the South and rebuild the North; blames everyone and anyone for his personal failures; and speaks of "the peace process" as Palestinian society self-destructs, Iran is sprinting to the doorway of the Nuclear Club. And with the government of Israel in the hands of knaves, no one is placing obstacles in Iran's path as it acquires the means to annihilate the Jewish state.

As the Times reported, when UN nuclear inspectors visited the Natanz nuclear facility on Sunday, they saw 1,300 centrifuges buzzing along, producing nuclear fuel. Another 300 are poised to begin operating next week and another 300 centrifuges are now under construction. The diplomatic source who spoke to the Times said that if it maintains its current pace, Iran will be operating 3,000 centrifuges by next month and 8,000 by the end of the year. With just 3,000 centrifuges in operation, Iran will be capable of enriching sufficient bomb-grade uranium to produce one atomic bomb per year.

Daily, the Iranians and their Hizbullah and Palestinian proxies threaten that if Iran's nuclear installations are attacked, they will retaliate by attacking Israel with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. There is no doubt that this threat should be taken seriously.

But what will become of Israel if we do not attack Iran's nuclear installations? Can anyone believe that the same Olmert who was incapable of defending northern Israel from Hizbullah last summer, and who today is incapable of defending southern Israel from the Palestinians, will be able to defend central Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran?

Olmert tells us that we have nothing to worry about because the Americans will deal with the Iranians for us. But the US's actual policies towards the ayatollahs tell a different tale. This week, the Americans reacted with indifference to Iran's swift nuclear progress. R. Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State for Policy who directs US policy towards Iran, told the Times that the newest revelations from Natanz will not affect American policy.

"We're proceeding under the assumption that there is still time for diplomacy to work," Burns said, adding that if the Iranians maintain their refusal to suspend their uranium enrichment activities, "We will move ahead toward a third set of sanctions."

And while Burns declared the US's resolve to impose a third set of sanctions on Iran after the first two failed completely to affect Iran's behavior, on Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would begin direct negotiations with the Iranians on May 28.

The only voices in Washington these days calling for military action against Iran's nuclear facilities belong to people, like former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who were forced from their positions after the Democratic victory in last November's Congressional elections.

And this brings us back to Israel - and to the prime minister who is unfit for his position but uses his stunning political acumen to cling to office. Two weeks after the Winograd Committee's report, and 10 months after the last war, it is clear that Olmert will take neither his own incompetence nor the public's rejection of his leadership into consideration.

He will not resign from his position even if 300,000 people demonstrate in Kikar Rabin. He will not resign from office even if Ashkelon's 90,000 residents are forced to flee just as Sderot's 20,000 residents are fleeing today. He will not quit even if Iran conducts a nuclear test.

Rather than go home, he will pick a fight with Livni over how best to divide Jerusalem or surrender Hebron, or with Mazuz over his right to give millions of shekels of government subsidies to industrialists who are represented by his former law partner.

Given this most disturbing reality, one must conclude that public and political pressure for Olmert to resign is futile. He doesn't care.

Rather than direct our attention at Olmert, Israelis must turn our attention to his enablers. Yisrael Beiteinu head and Minister of Non-Existent Strategy Avigdor Lieberman and his buddy, Shas leader and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Something or Other Eli Yishai, as well as Shas's religious leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef should become the objects of public pressure. They must be made to understand that if they desire a political future of any kind, they must abandon Olmert and allow the nation to elect a new government.

The enormous gap between the threats that Israel faces and the agenda of the Israeli government has become a threat to our national security. The only way to turn the tide is to hold new elections.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last week the EU-financed Peace Now organization held an "Alternative Jerusalem Day" ceremony in which it called for Israel to renounce its sovereignty over half of the city in the interests of peace.

Why anyone would believe that an Israeli surrender of the eternal capital of the Jewish people to Hamas will lead to peace is anyone's guess. It seems particularly fatuous in light of the blatantly unpeaceful results of Israel's 2005 Peace Now-supported surrender of Gaza to Hamas, its 2000 Peace Now-supported surrender of south Lebanon to Hizbullah, and the Peace Now-supported Barak government's offer to surrender the Temple Mount and other parts of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat in 2000.

Also last week, the EU-financed Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies published a survey claiming that if current trends continue, the prevailing two-thirds Jewish majority in Israel's capital city will be reduced to a 60-percent majority by 2020.

Why there is any reason to believe the doom and gloom numbers is also anyone's guess. It seems a particularly hard sell given that the Jewish and Arab fertility rates in the city (3.8 and 4.1 respectively) are nearly identical, and economic trends that now stifle Jewish population growth are reversible.

This week, the EU supplemented its NGOs' work to divide the capital by announcing its boycott of Wednesday's Knesset ceremony celebrating Jerusalem's liberation. The US also loudly absented itself from the ceremony.

For its part, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government could not hide its befuddlement. After Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski attacked the US and EU boycott, arguing, "Whoever does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel also does not recognize the State of Israel," the government stammered out a couple of bromides.

With her characteristic weakness, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stuttered that Israel's connection to Jerusalem is "indivisible." Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said nothing.

IN THEIR attack against Israeli sovereignty over the eternal capital of the Jewish people in the name of peace, the Left, the EU and the Americans were nothing if not consistent. So too was the government consistent in its stuttered response to the onslaught against Jerusalem.

Over the past 14 years the policies of Israel's governments, the Israeli Left, the EU and the US have consistently been predicated on hypocrisy. The Left claims to be working for the civil rights of Arabs, whom it claims are being discriminated against by Israel and the Jerusalem municipality. The EU claims to seek a repartition of the city along the 1949 armistice lines to advance the cause of peace. The US claims to oppose any action that would prejudice the outcome of final status negotiations toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel's governments claim that they are committed to Israeli sovereignty throughout the city and to the upholding of the rule of law.

The fact that all of these purported objectives are false was copiously documented in a report published last year by the Office for Public Inquiries for East Jerusalem. The organization, headed by Arieh King, is funded by private Jewish donors.

Entitled "Illegal building in East Jerusalem as a strategic tool of the Palestinian Authority in its struggle for the future of Jerusalem," the 61-page report and its several hundred pages of attached documents provide a neighborhood-by-neighborhood survey of illegal Arab building in the city. Contrary to the Left's repeated contention that Jerusalem's Arabs are forced to build illegally because the municipality refuses to grant them construction permits, the city approved a planning scheme that provides for the construction of 32,500 new housing units in Arab neighborhoods. This is on top of 24,000 units already in various stages of the licensing process, and another 20,000 illegal structures built by Jerusalem Arabs in the past 20 years.

The political aim of the illegal construction is made clear by its financing sources. Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the PA, Saudi Arabia and the EU have spent millions of dollars in financing illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, often on state and privately owned lands.

IN AN EFFORT to degrade the Jewish character of the city, for instance, Arabs have built homes on state-owned lands adjacent to the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives that are earmarked for future cemetery expansion.

The strategic aim of the building is apparent from its location. Much of the building has been carried out meters from strategic traffic arteries including Highways 60, 1, 4 and 443. Additionally, illegal construction has rendered the Atarot airport insecure. Israel has done next to nothing to destroy the illegal structures constructed adjacent to the only airport east of Ben-Gurion International Airport.

The illegal Arab construction, which has placed most neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the highway approaches to the city within rifle range of hostile gunmen, has been met with indifference by the Israeli governing bureaucracy. Successive governments have hypocritically announced their commitment to Jerusalem. But the King report shows that government decisions passed in 1998, 2002 and 2003 ordering government agencies to stem illegal Arab construction were never effectively implemented.

King sent his report to dozens of government offices and Knesset committees. Aside from a meeting with one official from the Justice Ministry, no one responded to his work.

AS KING'S report notes, the Left plays a key role in enabling illegal Arab building in Jerusalem employing organizations like Peace Now, Bimkom and the International Coalition against House Demolitions. The leftists claim that they are committed to civil rights and peace, yet their work undermines the civil rights of Israeli landowners and undermines peace by empowering a regime that is openly opposed to all the ideals they claim to stand for.

The PA insists that its land be empty of Jews. So too, the first law it promulgated made it a capital offense for Arabs to sell land to Jews. Dozens of Arab Jerusalemites have been murdered by the PA since 1994 for their "crime" of selling their land to Jews.

For its part, Israel keeps the city open to all faiths and facilitates Arab building.

THE EU claims that its support for the repartition of the city stems from its commitment to a peace where Israel will have secure and recognized borders. Yet, in funding pressure organizations and illegal construction, not only does the EU undermine Israel's control of its capital city, it undermines Israel's security by enabling construction along strategic traffic arteries and in sniper range of neighborhoods within the 1949 armistice lines like Sanhedria, Romema and Har Nof.

For its part, the US claims to object to any move by either Israel or the Palestinians that would prejudice the deliberations toward a final peace settlement. Yet by refusing to recognize Israel's right to its capital city, in breach of US law which does so, the Bush Administration, like its predecessors is prejudicing the outcome of those future deliberations against Israel.

The US loudly demands that legal Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, like Migron, be destroyed, and objects to legal Israeli building in Ma'aleh Adumim. All the while, it actively supports illegal Palestinian building in Jerusalem by opposing any Israeli assertion of sovereignty through the unprejudiced enforcement of its laws.

THE HYPOCRISY of all these parties is of course dwarfed by the hypocrisy of successive Israeli governments. With the exception of the Netanyahu government, every Israeli government since 1993 has enabled the Arabs to undermine the state's control of Jerusalem. While paying lip service to the city's unity, by errors of commission and omission, Israel's governments have failed to defend the property rights of public and private land owners in Jerusalem. They have allowed the PA, enemy states like Saudi Arabia and the EU to openly abet illegal building projects in the city.

Moreover, while they have used the letter of the law to justify expelling Jews from their communities in Judea and Samaria, successive governments have ignored both the letter and the spirit of the law in refusing to take concerted action to enforce the laws of the state by blocking illegal building in the capital.

So this week, as the government conducts its hollow celebrations of the reunification of eternal capital of the Jewish people which it does so little to defend, and the Left, the EU and the US emptily speak of their "peace policies," the Jewish people must stop tolerating this dirty game.

When Barak offered Arafat the Temple Mount at Camp David in 2000, Ariel Sharon reacted by stating that Jerusalem is an eternal trust given to the Jewish people and no one has the right to breach that trust.

FORTY YEARS after the city's reunification, it is the responsibility of Jews in Israel and throughout the world to stand up for Jerusalem. We must work to expose that in its support for the city's division, the Left seeks to empower a racist regime that embodies everything the Left claims to oppose, against Israel, which embodies the very rule of law and civil rights the Left purports to care about.

Similarly, Jews must call our so-called friends in Washington and Brussels to task for their malevolent, discriminatory support for the human-rights-abusing, racial supremacists in the PA over the human-rights-respecting Jews who keep Jerusalem open to all faiths and all peoples.

Finally, we must demand that the leaders of the State of Israel fulfill their duty to posterity by upholding and strengthening Zion. If they are unwilling to do so, the Jewish people as a whole must stand up and demand they resign to make room for a government that will defend our eternal capital.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In an interview last Friday with Ma'ariv, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon expressed his view that the ongoing debate in Israel regarding the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is an exercise in futility. As he put it, "We argue over what the solution is, but we still haven't agreed on what the problem is."

On the face of it, Ya'alon's statement beggars belief. It doesn't take a genius to understand what Israel's problem is. All a person has to do is take a look at Palestinian "educational" television, where Mickey Mouse exhorts kindergarteners to become mass murderers, destroy Israel, and bring about Islamic world domination, to know that Palestinian society seeks Israel's destruction and Islamic global supremacy.

And the Palestinians are not alone. The Arab and Muslim world supports their goals. The Syrian government threatens war with Israel everyday. Hizbullah and Iran issue daily calls for Israel's annihilation. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the central clearinghouses for genocidal anti-Semitism, replete with Holocaust denial and Nazi-propaganda characterizing Jews as subhuman filth who the Muslim world must unite to snuff out.

Opposing all this is the State of Israel and its citizens. Since we are not interested in being annihilated and don't like it when people insult us, it should be fairly clear that Israel must be strong in order to defend itself and to prevent our enemies from acquiring the ability to carry out their evil designs.

But as Ya'alon points out, for the past 15 years, this obvious predicament has rarely been mentioned. It certainly has not informed the policies of Israel's governments.

So it would seem that if we wish to solve our problems, the first question that must be addressed is, why are we ignoring reality?

Over the past week, three events exposed the causes of this national flight of fancy. First, last week, B'Tselem and Hamoked published a joint report entitled, "Utterly Forbidden: The Torture And Ill-Treatment Of Palestinian Detainees."

The report purports to detail 73 testimonies of Palestinian prisoners claiming to have been tortured by IDF soldiers and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) agents.

The report was extensively and dispassionately covered by the Israeli media. The fact of its publication was the first item on Israel Radio's hourly news updates for several hours running. The impression given by the coverage was that there was no reason to doubt the veracity of the report's findings.

The press reports made no mention of the fact that B'Tselem and Hamoked are radical leftist organizations with documented histories of falsifying and distorting data. No mention was made of the funding these groups receive from European countries. Representatives of B'Tselem and Hamoked were not asked why their report does not identify any of the alleged victims and so makes it impossible for the Justice Ministry to investigate any of their claims. Moreover, the media made light of the fact that the alleged victims are terrorists who were arrested and interrogated for their role in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens.

This Wednesday, another report received similar sympathetic coverage. The World Bank published a report claiming that Palestinian poverty in Judea and Samaria is the direct result of IDF checkpoints and roadblocks. Rather than substantively examine the allegations, in repeated broadcasts, Israel Radio gave the impression that the World Bank's allegations were credible.

The fact of the matter is that the World Bank's findings, as well as its methodology and sources, are grossly prejudicial to Israel. The World Bank based its claims on reports by the Israeli radical leftist organizations B'Tselem, Hamoked, Peace Now, Yesh Din and Bimkom; the blatantly anti-Israel UN Organization for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; and Amnesty International.

While placing the full measure of blame for Palestinian economic failure on the IDF, the World Bank report completely ignores the fact that the Palestinians are waging a terror war against Israeli society and that the IDF has a responsibility to defend the state and its citizens from murder. An indication of the report's extreme prejudice is found in the fact that the word "terror" is never mentioned.

The fact of the matter is that roadblocks are a vital component of the IDF's success in preventing terror attacks from being carried out in Judea and Samaria. In 2006 alone, security forces arrested 45 suicide bombers in Judea and Samaria en route to their murderous missions. Many of them were intercepted at roadblocks. Others were captured because the presence of roadblocks forced them to travel in a manner that facilitated their capture.

In placing the blame on Israel for the Palestinians' economic failure, the World Bank also ignored the fact that the Palestinian Authority is a kleptocracy. But this is not surprising.

Since the PA was established in 1994, the World Bank has played a central role in ignoring and so enabling Palestinian leaders to abscond with hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid money. Far from fulfilling their duty to oversee the use of development funds, World Bank officials have turned a blind eye to their diversion to private accounts controlled by Yassir Arafat and his deputies, who used the pilfered funds to enrich themselves and to raise terror militias.

To date, the Israeli media has not asked World Bank officials to explain why the august lending institution is operating as an anti-Israel pressure group and propaganda organ.

The professional malpractice of the Israeli media came through a second time on Wednesday when all three television stations opened their evening broadcasts with a radical leftist propaganda film.

The film portrayed a violent altercation at a roadblock near Otniel between IDF reservists and radical leftists and Palestinians who outnumbered the troops by a ratio of 20 to one. The leftists and the Palestinians were forcibly confronted by the reservists as they illegally dismantled an IDF roadblock.

It is hard to shake the impression that it was no coincidence that the group chose to assault a far-flung, lightly manned IDF roadblock on the same day that the World Bank published its report condemning the very existence of IDF roadblocks.

Whatever the case, the media glossed over the fact that group was not merely demonstrating. By dismantling the roadblock, they were actively sabotaging Israel's national security and the security of its citizens that the roadblock was erected to protect.

Treating the propaganda film as fact, the media gave the impression that the aggressors at the scene were the soldiers, not the saboteurs.

In recent years, the once ad-hoc collaboration between leftist anti-Israel and anti-American organizations and jihadist terror organizations has become premeditated. In one striking example in late March, 20 Canadian "anti-war" activists participated in a conference in Cairo along with senior members of several terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hizbullah. The expressed goal of the Cairo Conference was to forge an alliance against "imperialism and Zionism."

According to a report in The Ottowa Citizen, at a post-conference briefing in Toronto on April 27, the Canadians who participated in the conference encouraged their colleagues on the Left to cooperate with terrorist organizations. As one speaker put it, "We have to forge a more solid and more united anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist movement here to be able to have something to show our brothers and sisters [in the terrorist organizations] when we get back [to the next conference]."

These organizations and their fellow travelers in the UN and the World Bank have had an immense impact on Israeli and US policy-makers. Their disinformation campaigns have engendered the current situation where the US and Israeli governments base their policies on lies while stubbornly ignoring the reality of terror and the global jihad.

Case in point is the US State Department's recently released paper calling for Israel to dismantle roadblocks and checkpoints in Judea and Samaria and to enable free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

The report was greeted with shock by the IDF and the Shin Bet, which quickly understood that implementing it would be tantamount to signing the death warrants of countless Israelis. Not only would bombers be allowed to move at will, by enabling free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, Israel would all but guarantee that the rockets now terrorizing residents of the western Negev would also threaten residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

Despite the security services' logical opposition, the Foreign Ministry has given the US document passing marks. On Wednesday, The Jerusalem Post reported on one official who claimed that Israel should accept the US demand to dismantle roadblocks. As he put it, "The Western world, with the exception of the US, sees the roadblocks and checkpoints as a main problem here. It is considered collective punishment that bothers everyone, but only weeds out a few terrorists."

So rather than attacking those who would deny Israel its inherent right to safeguard its territory and the lives of its citizens, the Foreign Ministry, which is responsible for arguing Israel's case to the world, thinks we would be better off just letting terrorists run free and so endangering the lives of Israeli citizens. That is, the Foreign Ministry has swallowed whole our enemies' propaganda and is basing its positions on their false narratives of Israeli aggression and brutality.

Similarly, Wednesday night, rather than defend the reservists for their actions in defending the roadblock from attack, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Military Advocate General Brig.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblit hung them out to dry.

Peretz called the soldiers' behavior "egregious and deviant." IDF officials referred to the footage as "embarrassing." Mandelblit ordered an investigation of the soldiers for their actions in defending their position.

In abandoning the reservists, the three sent a clear message that they care more about being embraced by the media than about defending the honor of their soldiers and the reputation of the country.

All of this returns us to Ya'alon's observation that before we try to find solutions to our problems, we first must understand what they are.

As long as we continue to base our national debates and policies on enemy propaganda, it should surprise no one that Israel finds itself in its current dire predicament. If we are serious about solving our problems, we must liberate ourselves from hostile forces that distort our national conversation with the help of their Israeli media buddies.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the bravest and most remarkable woman of our times.

To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it.

A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls.

The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls.

On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam.

On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls.

And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out "Allah Akhbar." She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of Allah.

LATE LAST year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses - conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse.

Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran.

Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals.

Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the "true Islam." Why, she wondered were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful.

Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and think for herself were sinful and evil?

AS SHE puts it, "I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a just God - a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness - desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did unbelievers have to go to Hell?"

In her words, "The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit."
Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right.

Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform. As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and even joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a full-body burka.

But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a Muslim girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran. "Surely," she writes, "Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be worth the same as a man's?"

Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that everything the preachers had said was written in the book.

AT 21, HIRSI Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she sought and received asylum in Holland. There, she embraced Dutch society and freedoms and quickly flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant tale. She learned Dutch fluently and began supporting herself as a translator. In just four years she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and Europe and began studying political science with the creme de la creme of Dutch society at the University of Leiden.

A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In January 2003, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the conservative Liberal Party.

IN HOLLAND, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny - the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority.

Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film shows a young Muslim woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into question the reasonableness of her submission.

The film's provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004 Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali "in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful."

While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out of the country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the message was clear.

HIRSI ALI moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy.

In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity.

She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline.

So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout the Islamic world; challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold Muslim communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from oppression.

Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of death for her views.

We must understand that only when she, and people like her can walk on the streets unafraid will we have properly defended our freedom.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strikes an eerie resemblance to her predecessor Madeleine Albright these days. Rice's visit to Egypt, where she jumped at the chance to meet with her Syrian counterpart and spoke dreamily of her desire to meet with an Iranian official with direct ties to Iran's dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called to mind Albright's boogie-woogie with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

In Sharm e-Sheikh, Rice is clearly looking for a way to forge a US surrender of Iraq to its nemeses Iran and Syria. So it is that American commanders in Iraq are barred from noting publicly that the Iranian and Syrian governments are directing the war and killing their soldiers.

Rice's embrace of surrender extends to her position on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Rice and her State Department colleagues oppose both striking Iran's nuclear installations and providing assistance to regime opponents inside Iran who seek to overthrow the regime in order to prevent the mullahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. All they want to do is negotiate with the ayatollahs. They have no other policy.

So too, in recent months the US has embraced the Palestinians. Although the speaker of the Palestinian legislature Ahmad Bahar just made a televised appeal to Allah to kill every Jew and American on earth, Rice insists on transferring $59 million in US taxpayer money to the Palestinian security forces. So too, last week the State Department dictated a list of security concessions that Israel must make to the Palestinians over the next eight months regardless of whether the Palestinians themselves cease their attacks on Israel, or for that matter, regardless of whether the Palestinians maintain their commitment to annihilating the Israel and the US.

Rice's shepherding of the US to strategic defeat against the jihadists in the Middle East extends to Africa as well. In Somalia, the US now supports the unity government in spite of the fact that the Al-Qaida-backed Islamic Courts Union is a member of the government.

So too, Rice's embrace of failure extends to Asia where she accepted a nuclear armed North Korea and even agreed to give Pyongyang money.

Rice's uncontested control of US foreign policy is one of the ancillary results of the Second Lebanon War last summer.

Israel was not the only loser in that war. Its stalwart allies in Washington, who battled Rice and her State Department colleagues in support of an Israeli victory, also lost. Those supporters, commonly referred to as the neoconservatives, were led by their chief, President George W. Bush.

The Second Lebanon War placed the true nature of the global jihad in stark relief. By waging a proxy war with Israel through Hizbullah and the Palestinians simultaneously, Iran and Syria demonstrated clearly that the war against Israel is not a unique war, but rather a key battleground of the global jihad whose forces are fighting the US and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world. More than any war before, the Second Lebanon War demonstrated Israel's vital importance as a US ally. And Israel's decision not to fight that war to victory played a key role in the neoconservatives' defeat by Rice and the Washington establishment.

Today, Israel is immersed in a political maelstrom in the aftermath of Monday's publication of the interim report of the Winograd Committee's investigation of the war. Although it is impossible to know at this juncture how things will pan out, the identities and goals of the competing forces are already clear.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will not leave office voluntarily, and his party and most of his coalition partners will back him in his fight to retain control of the government.

The Labor Party, and the Left in general are trying to reenact their political maneuvers in the wake of the collapse of the peace process at the Camp David Summit in 2000. Those maneuvers kept the Left in power with its peace narrative intact.

As is the case today, in 2000 the public demanded an accounting by the government after its leftist ideology brought about a collapse of the peace process and the onset of the Palestinian terror war. Rather than respect the public's demand, the Left joined forces with then Likud chairman Ariel Sharon to block general elections. Together they placed all the blame for the failure of the Camp David summit on Ehud Barak, and formed a new unity government led jointly by Shimon Peres and Sharon.

Today, as then, the Left seeks to place all the blame for its ideological failure in Lebanon and Gaza on Olmert and to replace him with his deputy Shimon Peres. MK Ami Ayalon, the frontrunner to become the next Labor party chief, stated this outright on Tuesday.

As was the case in 2000, so too today, the Right, led by Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, is having a hard time figuring out how to force the Knesset to do the people's bidding and call new elections. Today, as then, the Right does not have the votes in Knesset to win a no-confidence vote against the government that would foment new elections.

The Winograd Report is not the cause of the current storm. The current storm is a direct continuation of the public protests which erupted immediately after last summer's war ended so abysmally. It was the formation of the Winograd Committee that suspended those protests. And it was the completion of its interim report that unleashed them again this week.

The Winograd Report's devastating critique of Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and former IDF chief of General Staff Dan Halutz for their incompetent management of the war is not particularly interesting. In pointing out their failures, the commission's members did not tell us anything we didn't know eight months ago.

Indeed, far from clarifying matters, the report's concentration on the personal failures of the three men serves mainly to strengthen the Left's push to place all the blame for the war's dismal outcome on the personal incompetence of Israel's leaders. This it does by deliberately ignoring the ideological and cognitive failure of the government and the Israeli establishment as a whole. It was this failure that led to the war and to its dismal outcome. In so constructing their inquiry, the Winograd Committee protected the narrative of the Israeli Left from public scrutiny and rejection.

At first glance the report reads like an ideological indictment. The commission wrote that a great portion of the blame for the lack of preparedness of both the government and the IDF was rooted in the belief that "the era of big wars had ended." Yet that belief did not stand on its own. It is rooted in the Left's peace ideology.

This ideology maintains that even if a country is forced to fight a war, the aim of the war is to remain at the starting gate and give the enemy what it wants, not to defeat it. The belief that the era of wars is over stems directly from the Left's ideological commitment to the belief that everyone is a potential negotiating partner.

The report demonstrates that from the outset of the war, it was this view that informed the decisions of both the government and the IDF. The report relates a notable exchange between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Halutz during the cabinet meeting on July 12 when the decision to go to war was made. Livni asked Halutz, "What is victory?"
Halutz responded, "There is no victory here….What we need to do is to respond with a sufficiently strong reaction that will call the international forces to get involved and to intervene at the proper intervention points in order to place pressure on the right forces." Livni testified before the commission that the next day the Foreign Ministry began preparing position papers setting out the government's preferred end state: foreign forces on the border separating the IDF from an undefeated Hizbullah.

The Winograd Committee members' adherence to the Left's worldview comes across clearly in their praise for UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which set out the conditions for the cease-fire.
The report maintains, "Resolution 1701 and the processes that fostered it reflect some important achievements for Israel. Hizbullah isn't sitting on the border, and its ability to initiate attacks on soldiers or northern communities has been significantly downgraded. It is possible that the decision, and the processes that engendered it, can provide an opening to positive regional developments."
By claiming 1701 an achievement, the Winograd Committee pulled the rug out from under the entire rationale of their criticism of the war. After all, the aim of war is to improve a state's position vis-a-vis its enemy.

If Israel achieved this goal towards Hizbullah through Resolution 1701, then the rest of the report's critique of Olmert, Peretz, Halutz and the rest of the government and military makes little sense. At most they are guilty of bumbling Israel to victory rather than leading us there in an orderly fashion. If 1701 was an achievement, then far from attacking them, the report should be applauding them.

The Winograd Report states repeatedly that the commission was formed due to the public's sense that the war had been lost and its concomitant demand for an accounting by the government. Yet, the public's sense of defeat is borne out by the text of Resolution 1701.

Resolution 1701 places Israel, a sovereign state, on the same level as Hizbullah, an illegal terrorist organization. The resolution gives international legitimacy to Hizbullah's continued existence as an Iranian-run sub-national paramilitary organization in Lebanon. Indeed, it makes no mention of either Syria or Iran in whose service Hizbullah fought and at whose pleasure Hizbullah exists.

The international forces that Israel was so keen to see deployed along the border today serve as a buffer protecting Hizbullah from the IDF and allowing it to redeploy its forces in South Lebanon and rearm without fear of the IDF.

So what comes across most clearly in the Winograd Report is the committee members' desire to ignore the fact that the Second Lebanon War was a war of ideas no less than a war on the battlefield.
Last summer Israel had the opportunity to expose the truth about the nature of the war being fought against it. It had the opportunity to assert itself as a vital ally of the US. It had the chance to defeat the leftist narrative of peace which claims that there is no difference between the IDF and the terror forces attacking Israeli society and so there is no reason to seek to defeat them; and which claims that the war against Israel is not connected to the global jihad.

It is too early to know how the political drama now unfolding in Israel will pan out. But what Rice's current misdirection of the war on all fronts, and the emboldening of Israel's enemies and the forces of global jihad throughout the world show clearly is that last summer Israel lost two wars, not one. And if we wish to win the next war, replacing the government will be insufficient. We also need to dump the leftist narrative of peace which brought us both our current crop of failed leaders, and last summer's defeat.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.