A core question arises from last weekend's Arab League summit in Damascus. Boycotted by half the league's members, the conference demonstrated the depth of Egyptian and Saudi opposition to Iran's rise to prominence in the Arab world. So too, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's ostentatious participation at the summit showed the strength of Iran's strategic ties with Syria.

The question that arises from the summit is if Egypt and Saudi Arabia are willing to discard even the semblance of Arab unity in order to make clear their opposition to Iran, why do they support Hamas?

Hamas is an Iranian proxy. It receives its arms, training and orders from Teheran. Its leaders reside in Syria. Given their open opposition to Iran, and their increasingly open opposition to Syria as Iran's client, wouldn't it make more sense - from their perspective - to boycott Hamas?

The reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia support Hamas in spite of its client relationship with Teheran is that for Egypt and Saudi Arabia, support for Palestinian terrorists trumps opposition to Iran. If they are forced to choose between fighting Iran and collaborating with Iran in support of Palestinian terrorists, they will always choose the latter. This is why they are spearheading negotiations between Fatah and Hamas towards the reestablishment of a Fatah-Hamas unity government. This is why Egypt enables Hamas and Iran to use its territory as their weapons supply route.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia think supporting the Palestinians is more important than fighting Iran because the Palestinians fight Israel. As the heads of the so-called "moderate Arab" camp, Egypt and Saudi Arabia hate the Jews more than they fear the Iranians.

The central question then for policymakers in Washington who are trying to deploy a successful strategy for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and asserting regional predominance is how can the Palestinian war with Israel be defused so that the “moderate” Arab states will be forced to join them in confronting Iran?

THE CONSENSUS answer that the US has come up with is to pressure Israel to make massive concessions to the Palestinians. It is argued that such concessions will appease not just the Palestinians, but more importantly, they will appease the US’s "moderate" Arab supporters in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. As this thinking goes, if Israel can be forced to cough up big enough concessions quickly enough, then the Palestinians will quiet down and the Egyptians and Saudis will be sufficiently satisfied with the "progress" being made to direct their attentions to confronting Iran.

This argument was elucidated this week by Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton in an interview with the Jewish Exponent. Clinton claimed that the Oslo negotiating process between the PLO and Israel which her husband embraced as his central Middle East policy from 1993 through 2000 brought levels of violence down between Israel and the Palestinians and so engendered regional stability.

In her words, "I think what we did in the '90s was beneficial in a strategic way and led to a period where, at times, there were no attacks being made, no suicide bombings and no deaths." She then went on to criticize the Bush administration which during its first term in office did not pressure Israel to restart negotiations towards Palestinian statehood with the PLO. Clinton added that she would consider opening negotiations with Hamas if she is elected president.

Clinton's argument is notable for two reasons. First, it accurately reflects not only her view, but the view now being pushed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in her bimonthly visits to Israel. As she made apparent in her visit to Israel this week, Rice believes that the only way to reach an agreement is for Israel to empower Fatah and give Hamas a pass. So too, in her clear support for Egypt's negotiations with Hamas, Rice shows that the Bush administration is already holding indirect negotiations with Hamas.

THE SECOND reason that Clinton's argument is notable is because it has been so obviously disproven by reality. During the years that her husband was applying massive pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians, terror levels against Israel eclipsed anything Israel had seen since the 1950s. In the 15 years which preceded the 1993 Oslo accord, 216 Israelis were murdered in terrorist attacks. In the seven years of the Oslo peace process, 286 Israelis were killed. Indeed, it was only in 1994, when Israel was first transferring territory to PLO control and the Palestinian Authority was building its armies that Israel suffered its first suicide bombing.

During the six years of the Palestinian uprising from 1987-1993, 172 Israelis were killed. During the first six years of the Palestinian terror war against Israel which Oslo produced, more than 1,100 Israelis were killed. Violence levels dropped not because of peace talks, but because of Israeli offensive operations against the Palestinians.

As Yasser Arafat told Palestinian audiences throughout the 1990s, his goal in the Oslo process was to gain the military and political means to continue his war against Israel. Arafat's confidante Faisal Husseini made this Palestinian perspective explicit with the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000. Speaking to the Arab media, Husseini said that for the Palestinians, the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse" against Israel. They came to Israel bearing the promise of peace with the premeditated aim of using Israel's willingness to make peace as a means of launching a new round of war whose aim was the political and military destruction of the Jewish state.

THE OSLO process which Clinton praises and Rice apes with her Annapolis process brought the Palestinian issue, which had been buried throughout much of the 1980s to the forefront of the pan-Arab social consciousness and political agenda. This it did to the detriment of other salient issues like Iran's steps towards regional hegemony, Egyptian and Saudi repression of liberal forces in their countries, and, during the 1990s, Saddam Hussein's systematic breach of UN Security Council sanctions.

Here it is worth noting that the pinnacle of US success in building an Arab coalition against a rogue state came in 1990. The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, which saw the entire Arab world united with the US against a fellow-Arab regime, came not in the midst of a Palestinian-Israeli peace process. It came when there were no diplomatic negotiations whatsoever between Israel and the Palestinians or between Israel and any state.

THERE ARE two principal reasons that the advent of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations weakened pan-Arab interest in working with the US against common threats. First, because the Oslo process empowered terrorists, terror attacks increased. Each terror attack received massive, supportive coverage in the Arab media.

Second, since the Oslo process placed terrorists in charge of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians found themselves ruled by murderers who had no interest in economic development and opposed liberalization and democracy. As a consequence, the Palestinian economic situation went from one of sustained growth to one of massive depredation. The footage of Palestinian terror attacks and Palestinian economic privation shown daily in the pan-Arab media eclipsed coverage of every other issue. And since the US is viewed as Israel's ally, it engendered unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism in the Arab world.

So if the Palestinian-centric model embraced by the US to build an Arab coalition against Iran works precisely to undermine such a coalition by bringing to the forefront the one issue that the Arabs and the Iranians agree on, what would an alternative model of policymaking look like?

The Achilles heel of the US's current strategy is its reliance on Egyptian and Saudi support. Since Egypt and Saudi Arabia prefer fighting Israel to confronting Iran, a better policy for confronting Iran would be to base a US coalition on states that prefer fighting Iran to fighting Israel. Regionally, Israel, Lebanon and Iraq fit this model.

IF THE US were to shore up these allies and stiffen their resolve to confront Iran rather than divert its attention to a policy which simply serves to galvanize Arab attention and energies against Israel and away from Iran, the US would pose a more imposing threat to Iran. It would also push the Iranian threat to the forefront of political discourse in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Such a revised policy would involve not only shoring up Israeli, Iraqi and Lebanese willingness to confront Iran and Syria. It would also involve scaling back US involvement in the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Such a scaling back could only be successful if at the same time as it disengaged from the negotiations process between Israel and Fatah, Washington also gave Israel a green light to defeat Hamas in Gaza. Such an Israeli operation would both end the specter of an Iranian takeover of Judea and Samaria and remove Iran's ability to reignite the Palestinian conflict at will.

Obviously, to advance such a policy option, the US would have to confront an Israeli government that has embraced the incorrect logic of the current failed strategy of winning Arab support for confronting Iran by forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. So too, it would have to confront an Iraqi government that is afraid to confront Iran, and a UN that seems to have abandoned its previous willingness to acknowledge Syria's culpability for the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

It would also have to ensure that Israel's military defeat at the hands of Iran and Hizbullah in 2006 will not repeat itself. That defeat enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over south Lebanon and acquire an even more sophisticated arsenal than it had two years ago.

Replacing the current failed strategy of squeezing Israel in the hopes of winning the support of unreliable Arab allies for confronting Iran will no doubt be a controversial move. It will win the Bush administration no fast friends in Europe or on American university campuses. It will even anger the Israeli Left which now sues for peace with Syria.

The only advantage to be had from basing America's strategy towards Iran on building a US-led anti-Iranian coalition comprised of states that prefer to fight Iran than to fight Israel is that such a policy has the potential of actually ending Iran's increased domination of the Middle East and of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Since my article appeared last week, I have been inundated with requests to help support the organization. Some people have asked to join. Others have asked to contribute.

For those who wish to join the Guardsmen, contact Ro'i Sonnenberg. His phone number in Israel is 054-638-3998.

As to contributions, the group is just completing the process of registering as a non-profit organization in Israel. Today they are opening a legal trust account where donations can be transferred. This is an account administered by an attorney. It is the legal way for non-profits to receive donations during the period that they are forming. Later in the day I will update this post with the bank account number where contributions can be directed.

As for tax exempt donations in the US, the Guardsmen is now in the process of determining which US 501C3 organization is best suited to act as their US counterpart. If you have suggestions, email them to me and I will place the group in contact with your suggested group.

 As for the Guardsmen's activities, well, here's a chronological update.

Apparently in response to the confrontation which I reported on from March 21, Arab Beduin sumbitted a complaint with the police against J. claiming that he threatened them with an M-16 and stole some of the calves. The only problem with their complaint - aside from being fabricated -- is that they claim that the altercation occurred on the opposite side of the moshav and at the same time that J. was with me waiting for the police to arrive in response to his complaint that the Kablawis had sent their horses to his father's cattle pasture land.

Also on March 21, in an attempt at revenge, marauders destroyed 1.5 km of fencing around J.'s father's grazing areas and fields.

BUT while the Beduin and local Arabs begin targeting him, he and his Guardsmen have been quite active. On March 28 J. held a conference for ranchers in the Galilee to make them aware of the Guardsmen's activities and to get them involved.

On Staturday night, March 290, in anticipation of the projected Arab riots for Land Day, J. organized 65 volunteers from the area and from the Ein Prat pre-army leadership academy to stand guard in three key areas. They arrived Saturday night and patrolled throughout the night and will continue to patrol all day today.

The two men, who live in Maaleh Rehavam south of Bethlehem were arrested on February 22, 2004. The day before their arrest, the brothers were serving as IDF-trained and armed security guards in their community. They were called by Baruch Feldbaum, the head of security at the neighboring Sde Bar community to assist him in dispersing an illegal gathering of Bedouin in land adjacent to Sde Bar.

Feldbaum’s concern over the gathering was heightened because Bedouin shepherds are suspected of having carried out a number of unsolved terrorist murders in the area. These include the murder by stoning of 14-year-olds Kobi Mandell and Yosef Ish-Ran on May 8, 2001. Feldbaum feared that the Bedouin were conducting surveillance of the community ahead of a future attack.

Armed with their IDF-issued M-16 rifles, augmented in Yitzhak’s case by a handgun, the Halamish brothers rushed to the scene. Once they arrived the two were surrounded by some twenty rock and club wielding Bedouin. In an attempt to disperse the hostile crowd, and enable the Halamish brothers to escape unharmed, Feldbaum shot a warning shot into the ground. Yitzhak Halamish similarly shot a warning shot in the air with his handgun. The two brothers then pushed their way out of the crowd.

Later in the day, the Bedouin filed a complaint with the police against the three guards. They alleged that Feldbaum and the Halamish brothers all shot at them with their rifles and beat them with their fists.

The issue of who was telling the truth was not a purely subjective question of whom to believe. When the police arrested the Halamish brothers, they also seized their rifles. The Halamish brothers had both denied ever shooting their rifles at the scene. Had the police wished to objectively weigh the credibility of the two sides, they could have conducted ballistic tests of the rifles to determine whether or not they had been used. But they did no such thing. Rather, they indicted Feldbaum and the Halamish brothers for aggravated assault and sent them to trial.  

Feldbaum was found guilty based on his admission that he shot his rifle. He was sentenced to nine months in prison. His sentence was later reduced to six months community service by then president Moshe Katzav.

Given their denials of ever shooting their rifles, the Halamish brothers were convicted based on the magistrate court judge’s decision to believe the Bedouins accusations and reject their defense. In his ruling, Judge Amnon Cohen did not take the police’s decision not to conduct ballistic tests of their weapons into consideration. His convictions were upheld on appeal to the Jerusalem District Court. The Supreme Court refused to consider the case.

Attorney Yoram Sheftel, who represented the brothers on appeal, focused his arguments on the police’s refusal to conduct ballistic tests of their rifles. According to Sheftel, in standard criminal cases, police refusal to examine potentially exculpatory evidence is grounds for an automatic dismissal of charges. In convicting the Halamish brothers and upholding their convictions, Sheftel argues that the courts ignored standard criminal procedures.

Today, with the courts closed to them, the Halamishs’ only hope for avoiding prison is a presidential pardon.

SUPPORTERS OF the Halamish brothers have launched an interesting campaign to lobby for clemency. They have asked for US citizens to call the office of Israel’s military attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and demand that the IDF advance their pardon requests with the Justice Ministry and the President’s office. Since the Halamish brothers were effectively acting as soldiers while performing their security responsibilities, their supporters contend that the IDF is honor-bound to defend them.

But the campaign doesn’t stop there. Supporters have also asked US citizens to contact their Congressmen and ask them to send inquiries about the case to the embassy. Finally, they have asked US citizens to contact the State Department and complain that the State Department’s Human Rights report on Israel is silent on the government’s abuse of Jewish civil rights.

The notion of running a campaign for an Israeli presidential pardon of Israeli citizens in the US is alarming for what it says about the Halamishs’ supporters’ perception of Israeli democracy. Specifically, as Datya Yitzhaki from Pidyon Shevuim who has spearheaded the campaign argues, they believe that domestic pressure will have no impact on either Israeli political leaders or on the justice system because in their view the Olmert-Livni-Barak government feels no need to account for its actions to Israeli citizens. Indeed, they contend that the only force that can hold the government and the legal system accountable is international pressure and fear of international condemnation.

Organizations like Women in Green, and Pidyon Shevuim who are running the campaign cite as precedent the case of Tzvia Sariel. Sariel, 18, was arrested last December on assault charges. She was accused of attacking Arabs who entered her community of Elon Moreh on December 4. Sariel was incarcerated for three and a half months.

On March 5, the allegedly assaulted Arabs appeared in Kfar Saba’s magistrate court and recanted their accusations against Sariel. One claimed that since he is illiterate, he had no idea what he was signing when he signed his complaint against her. Yet, despite the fact that the prosecution’s case fell apart in front of her, trial judge Nava Bechor ordered a continuance until April 4 and sent Sariel back to prison for another month.

An outcry ensued and activists in the US began calling the embassy and the State Department. On March 19, Bechor dismissed charges against Sariel and sent her home. Her supporters believe that without their US campaign, Sariel would still be sitting in prison for a crime that she didn’t commit.

DEPRESSINGLY, activists fighting against civil rights abuses of right wing opponents of government policies are probably on to something. Through their own actions, Israel’s leaders show daily that they are willing to ignore strategic imperatives and their domestic political opponents. Their actions show that indeed, the only pressure that seems to get them to change course is international pressure.

Take Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for example. Since assuming office two years ago, Livni has repeated at countless public appearances that Israel supports a “two-state solution.”  By couching her government’s support for the establishment of a Palestinian state in these terms, Livni implicitly, (and often explicitly), argues that Israel – which has existed for sixty years and whose legitimacy is rationally inarguable – can only exist legitimately if a Palestinian state is established. By making this assertion Livni effectively places Israel’s right to exist on the negotiating table.

And yet, for his part, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly repudiated Israel’s right to exist. By agreeing to negotiate the “two-state solution” with a man who rejects Israel’s right to exist, Livni, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and their colleagues are effectively saying that what reality exposes, and Israel’s citizenry supports is irrelevant. The Palestinians alone can confer legitimacy on Israel. And of course, as Abbas has made clear repeatedly, they never will.

In a speech this week to the foreign press corps, Olmert similarly demonstrated that the only support he is interested in securing is foreign support. During the course of his remarks, Olmert claimed that he wishes to conduct negotiations with the Syrian regime towards the surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria. Olmert’s statement came just days after President Shimon Peres publicly opposed such negotiations on strategic grounds. In remarks Sunday during a joint press appearance with visiting US Vice President Richard Cheney, Peres explained that Israel has no interest in conducting negotiations with Syria because, “If the Golan is given back, it will boost Iran's influence in Lebanon and the territory will effectively be under Iranian-Syrian control.”

But when he spoke approvingly of talks aimed at surrendering the Golan Heights to Iranian-Syrian control, Olmert was not concerned with strategic realities. He was similarly unconcerned with what the Israeli public – which opposes such negotiations – believes is in Israel’s national interest.

When Olmert made that statement he was interested in what the international, overwhelmingly anti-Israel media would think and write about him personally. And so he went on record supporting an initiative that undercuts Israel’s national interests.

Finally, there is Barak’s behavior in advance of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s arrival in Israel on Saturday night. When Rice was in Israel on March 4, she pressured the Olmert-Livni-Barak government to abandon efforts to secure southern Israel from Hamas’s missile campaign in favor of a ceasefire with the Iranian proxy movement. Eager to please her, the government ordered IDF forces to beat a speedy retreat from Gaza.

Today, although the government continues to restrain the IDF, the cease-fire is a joke. Over the past two weeks alone, the Palestinians have launched more than a hundred rockets and mortars at Israel. They have further augmented their attacks with sniper fire against Israeli farmers tending fields along the border with Gaza. Hamas is openly using the respite to replenish its arsenals and expand its control over the lives of Gaza’s citizens. Moreover, unopposed by Israel, Hamas has succeeded in forcing Egypt to release Hamas terror masters from jail, and has convinced Fatah to negotiate the reestablishment of a unity government with Hamas.

Rice is expected to continue pressuring Israel to let Hamas continue to attack at will. She is also expected to attack Olmert, Livni and Barak for the IDF’s counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria.

In an effort to pre-empt her assault, Barak announced this week that Israel will allow the PA to import some 25 armored personnel carriers from Russia and deploy hundreds of Fatah forces in terror-infested Jenin. He also agreed to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians in Judea and Samaria.

Barak knows full well that these actions will imperil Israel’s security. His own people refer to the moves as “calculated risks.”

He knows full well that opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu was right when he warned on Wednesday that “those weapons will be turned against IDF soldiers.” He knows that by curbing counter-terror operations he will imperil Israeli civilians. But here too, Israel’s inherent right to self-defense and the government’s sovereign duty to secure the country and its citizens is ignored by the government in order to win points with foreigners whose interests are far from identical to Israel’s.

THE HALAMISH brothers’ supporters are not people who reject Israel’s legitimacy. They certainly would never deny its right to defend itself. Indeed, they are among the most vocal opponents of foreign onslaughts against Israel.

It is a sad commentary on the state of Israeli democracy that patriotic Israelis have come to the disheartening view that their only chance of receiving justice in Israel is to take their campaign to foreign governments. By inducing them to feel this way, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is taking another step towards the delegitimization of Israeli sovereignty.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Building homes for Jews in Jerusalem, the ambassador intimated, is a provocative act that will endanger prospects for peace with the Palestinians. Consequently, the ambassador suggested, Jews will just have to leave the city.

“Sometimes people do have to move to a different location,” he explained. “They cannot always stay close to their families.”

Also during her visit, Rice will call for Israel to ease up on its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria in order to ratchet up the Egyptian-sponsored, U.S.-supported negotiations toward a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas. Moreover, Rice is expected to pressure the Olmert-Livni-Barak government to move ahead with destroying Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria that have been built since 2001.

Rice will take these steps as she calls for Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria to abide by their obligations to the 2003 “road map” plan for the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem. She will note that such actions are in accordance with the joint Israeli-Palestinian declaration announced at the conclusion of December’s Annapolis conference.

All of Rice’s moves will come against the backdrop of intensified negotiations in Yemen between Fatah and Hamas toward the reestablishment of their unity government. That government collapsed last June following Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip. It was the collapse of the unity government that enabled Rice to organize the Annapolis conference, which was based on the assumption that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas would fight Hamas and refuse to reunite forces with the Iranian and Syrian-sponsored jihadist movement.

Rice’s visit next week, then, will be a direct continuation of her last visit here on March 4. At that time, Rice forced the Olmert-Livni-Barak government to end IDF offensive operations against Hamas in Gaza. As the Israeli media have since reported, Hamas is exploiting the cease-fire to augment its control over all aspects of life in Gaza and to expand its arsenal and military capabilities against Israel.

To cite just one example, Hamas has reportedly completed its takeover of 8 out of the 22 medical facilities in Gaza. Through actions such as this, it is rendering the civilian population completely dependent on its Islamist largesse to receive basic services.

Rice’s visit comes ten days after Lt. General William Fraser’s trip to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Fraser was appointed by Rice to act as judge of Israeli and Palestinian compliance with the road map in accordance with the Annapolis declaration. Fraser’s visit was boycotted by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who absented himself from the meeting with Fraser and Fatah Prime Minister Salam Fayyad due to the overtly anti-Israel positions adopted by Fraser and his colleagues during Rice’s visit. Fraser reportedly attacked Barak and the IDF for scuttling his plans to expand Fatah military control over Judea and Samaria by insisting on fighting terrorists in the areas.

Fraser, like Rice, attacks Israel while stubbornly ignoring clear evidence of Fatah involvement in terror and Abbas’s open radicalization in the lead-up to the March 29 Arab League summit in Damascus where Fatah and Hamas leaders are expected to announce their efforts to reinstate their unity government. Indeed, even when US officials acknowledge that Fatah is not fighting terror effectively, they assert that the remedy is to give Fatah more arms and control over more territory.

Rice’s heavy-handed policy toward Israel amounts to a betrayal of Israel on two levels. First, as Rick Richman wrote last week on the American Thinker website, Rice’s current policy of demanding that Israel dismantle Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, freeze all building activities for Jews beyond the 1949 armistice lines including in Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs, and refrain from taking any major offensive actions against Palestinian terror groups is a complete betrayal of President Bush’s signed April 14, 2004 pledge to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon.

Bush’s letter, which came after Sharon laid out his plan to destroy all Israeli communities in Gaza and withdraw Israeli forces from the region and to similarly destroy Israel communities in northern Samaria, made clear that the U.S. views a Palestinian commitment to combat terror, end incitement and dismantle terror groups and cells as the first stage of any further peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Bush also explicitly stated that the U.S. did not think it reasonable to expect that Israel would remove itself to the 1949 armistice lines in any future peace.

In advancing the Annapolis summit, Rice openly betrayed Bush’s written pledge to Sharon, which was followed by a Congressional resolution in June 2004 explicitly approving the letter’s contents. Rice has delighted in this betrayal by claiming that the Annapolis platform broke the “tight sequentiality” dictated by the road map. That “tight seqentiality” dictated that before Israel would negotiate a final peace with the Palestinians, the Palestinians would first cease to harbor, support and train terrorists, end their war against Israel and end their anti-Israel incitement activities.

It should be noted that in betraying the word of her boss, Rice was amply assisted by the feckless Olmert-Livni-Barak government. In an effort to divert public attention from the government’s incompetent leadership during the Second Lebanon War, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his colleagues sought to shore up their support base among Israel’s leftist elites by renewing negotiations with Fatah.

Naively, Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Barak assumed that their willingness to engage Rice’s obsessive interest in advancing negotiations would satisfy her yearning to be viewed as a peacemaker. They may have been under the impression that for Rice the negotiations are as much of a public relations stunt as they are for them. Certainly they must have expected that she would exhibit an understanding of Israel’s security predicament, surrounded as it is by Iranian proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria and a radicalized Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Yet this was not in the cards. Rather than acknowledge reality, Rice has pushed on with her policies to the point where not only Bush’s own commitments to Israel fail to constitute a bar against her actions, human decency and basic logic have been discarded.

In her race to establish a Palestinian state, Rice has not only failed to recognize the threat posed to Israeli security -- and indeed to global security -- by the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the terror and jihad-laced Fatah movement. She has also embraced the wholly false and morally outrageous claim that the construction (or existence) of Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines is as much a threat to peace as Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis and anti-Israel incitement at all levels of Palestinian society, both in Hamas and Fatah dominated areas.

In an attempt to preempt Rice’s expected animosity in her upcoming visit, Barak announced he would scale back IDF counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria by taking down a roadblock and easing the travel of Palestinian businessmen and senior officials. The fact that such moves imperil Israeli security was made clear on March 18. That day, senior Fatah official and former interim PA president Rauhi Fattouh was stopped at the Allenby Bridge crossing point from Jordan as he attempted to exploit his travel privileges to import contraband into the PA. Israeli security forces seized 3,000 cellular telephones hidden in his vehicle.

Israeli officials’ continued attempts to appease Rice are not only counterproductive because of the immediate security breaches caused by such appeasement. By showing that they will bow to Rice’s pressure, which is exerted in contempt of signed U.S. commitments to Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government signals both to the next U.S. administration and to the Palestinians that they have no reason to abide by their word to the Jewish state.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Moshav Tzipori, in the Lower Galilee, is a microcosm of the history of the Land of Israel. A regional capital under King Herod, Tzipori was the seat of Jewish learning and the preservation of the Torah through some of the most tumultuous periods of Jewish history.

After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, refugees from Jerusalem fled to the Galilean town. Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, who presided over the writing of the Mishna, or oral law, moved to Tzipori from Beit Shearim, and it was there that he codified the six books of the Mishna and died.

The Jews of Tzipori revolted against the Roman Emperor Constantine, refusing to accept Christianity and the city was destroyed. The Jews later returned during the Islamic period. On and off, for the next millennia, Jews settled, were forcibly removed and resettled the city several times under various conquerors of Israel.

During the 1948 War of Independence, the ancient city was the site of a major battle between the new Israel Defense Force and the neighboring Arab villages assisted by invading forces from Syria and Lebanon. The Arabs were routed. In 1949, Moshav Tzipori was founded.

LAST FRIDAY afternoon, the struggle for Jewish control of Tzipori, the Galilee and the Land of Israel as a whole continued on the ancient ground. On that quiet afternoon of Purim, under the blistering sun, three horses stood happily grazing in a field of shrubs and grasses. The only problem with the otherwise pastoral scene was that the horses belong to Arab squatters from the Kablawi clan. In recent years, the Kablawis have built themselves an illegal village of some 20 houses masquerading as storage containers on stolen Jewish National Fund land adjacent to Tzipori's fields. The horses, who entered through a hole cut into the field's fence, pranced about and ate, destroying the field that was painstakingly cultivated for the moshav's cattle herds.

The farmers and ranchers of the Galilee, like their counterparts in the Negev are at wits' end. Fearing Arab riots or political condemnation by the Israeli Left, Arab leaders, the Islamic Movement and their allies abroad, the police and the state prosecutors have simply stopped enforcing the laws against the Galilee and Negev Arabs. Surrounded by increasingly hostile and lawless Arab and Beduin villages, local Jews' livestock and crops are continuously plundered.

They are faced with three equally unacceptable options for contending with this state of affairs. They can do nothing and let their livelihood and lives' work be destroyed. They can pay protection money to Arab criminal gangs, who in exchange agree not to rob them. Or they can try to sell off their lands and abandon agriculture altogether.

The obvious recourse - filing a complaint with the police - is an exercise in futility. Thousands of complaints are filed each year. Almost none of them end in indictments or trials. Most of the files are closed by the police due to "lack of public interest."

ON FRIDAY, the field in question belonged to a cattle rancher named Haim Z. Over the past few years, Haim has filed more than 250 complaints against local Arabs from the Kablawi family and from neighboring Arab villages like the Islamist stronghold Mashad with the police. None have ever gone anywhere. Last year, a helpful police officer recommended that Haim simply start paying protection money.

Last year Haim told his son that he had had it. The son of the moshav's founding generation, Haim said that he just couldn't go on anymore. The state's refusal to protect Jewish property rights had forced him to devote all of his energies to playing cat and mouse games with Arab poachers. He couldn't invest in his herd. He couldn't develop his land. All he could do was sit by and watch as year in and year out, his lands were plundered, his cattle stolen and the work of his life and his father's life was destroyed.

HIS SON, a 23 year old soldier in one of the IDF's elite commando units decided that it was up to him not only to save his father's farm, but to stem the tide of Arab infringement on Jewish land and property rights. Due to his position in the IDF, his name is classified. We'll call him J - for Jew.

In response to his father's desperation, J. took a storage container to a hilltop that overlooks Tzipori's fields, the surrounding Arab villages and the access routes to the moshav's fields. He placed a sofa, a bookshelf full of Jewish history books, religious texts and philosophy classics, and canned food inside and moved in during his furloughs from the army. Rather than hang out with his friends, he began standing guard. He confronted every Arab he caught infiltrating the moshav's fields, and both filed complaints with the police and chased them away.

Given his impossible schedule, J. enlisted his friends to help out. The sons of other desperate farmers, who also serve in combat units, they joined him enthusiastically. Within months, J. had set up an organization of more than a hundred young volunteers - soldiers, college students, and high school students from his moshav, other moshavim in the lower Galilee and surrounding non-agricultural communities.

He called the organization, Hashomer Hayisraeli Hahadash - or the New Israeli Guardsmen. The original Hashomer, or Guardsmen was established in the Galilee in 1909 for the same purpose - protecting Jewish farming communities from Arab marauders who demanded protection money from the farmers. It was the progenitor of the Haganah, which in turn, became the Israel Defense Force.

As J. puts it, "We're not simply a security service. We see ourselves as a new movement. Our activities rest on three foundations: securing the land, expanding our operations throughout the Galilee and the Negev, and teaching Zionist and Jewish values to our members, our communities and the general public."

TZIPORI, ONE of the stops of the Cross Israel Hiking Trail, is a popular destination for school groups, youth groups and just regular hikers. J. has organized visits to his guard post for thousands of hikers over the past year. During their visits the hikers listen to lectures about the New Guardsmen, about the Jewish history of the Galilee and the development of agriculture in the area, and topics of general interest provided by local residents, politicians and professors.

Friday afternoon, after noticing another encroachment on his father's field, J. called the police at the Nazareth police station. Joined by two of his fellow guardsmen, who are also sons of farmers and soldiers in commando units, they waited in the sun for over an hour for the police to arrive and planned their moves. They approached the horses with reins and bits.

"We will seize the horses and bring them back to our stable. If the Kablawis pay the damages, then I'll give them back, if not, I'll sell them," J. explained.

As the young men approached the horses, Yasser Kablawi, the head of the clan appeared. According to Haim, over the past year, the Kablawis have trampled his fields with their animals on more than 20 occasions.

Haim, who arrived at the scene some 10 minutes before the police made their grand appearance turned toward Kablawi and said, "Why are you doing this?"

"This land belongs to the JNF, not to you," Kablawi said.

"Why are you lying? I sat in your home with the JNF inspector months ago, and he told you straight that this is my land. You know you are stealing from me, and you're doing it while you're illegally squatting on JNF land. You've caused me tens of thousands of shekels in damages by trampling my fields today alone, and you know it."

By the time the police arrived, J. and his friends had roped one of the horses. Kablawi was joined by three grandsons and four sons. J. was joined by another seven Guardsmen. It was a standoff.

THE POLICE, who were informed of the presence of a journalist at the scene, acted with some resolution. After speaking with the JNF inspector, they explained to Kablawi that he could either sign a statement acknowledging that the land belongs to Haim and that he would be arrested if he trespassed again, or they would allow Haim to seize his horses. Kablawi signed.

J.'s activism is not just a personal quest to save his father from economic ruin. "If it were just about me and my family, my brother and I could take care of the thieves. They'd leave us alone. But then they'd just move on to our neighbors. It isn't about one family. This is a question of control over the land of Israel. The state is weak. We need to be strong if we want to remain here."

Last month, J. registered the Guardsman as a non-profit organization. He has a grand vision for the future.

"In the space of just a few months, I have brought in thousands of people, exposed them to our mission. I have more than a 100 volunteer guards. We have reduced theft by 80 percent.

"I want to raise money to buy night vision goggles and some all terrain vehicles to do proper patrols. I'd like to be able to give students scholarships so that they can guard and study at the same time. I've been in touch with farmers and ranchers in the Negev and they are anxious for us to expand to the south. I believe that within five years, the Guardsmen can end the protection rackets."

BACK IN June 2005, then vice premier Ehud Olmert gave an American audience his opinion of the Israeli people. "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies," he whined.

Young people like J. and his colleagues, secular, yet deeply rooted Jewish sons and daughters of Galilee and Negev farmers, like their religious friends prove everyday that Olmert was not speaking for his countrymen. Whatever messes Olmert and his colleagues in the government still manage to make before they are finally thrown from office, it is absolutely clear that these young people and millions like them are willing and able to clean them up for themselves, their countrymen, and for the next generation of Jews in the land of Israel.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US Vice President Richard Cheney's visit to Iraq on the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom was given scant coverage in the media. And yet it may go down in history as a pivotal moment in the transformation of post-Saddam Iraq into a beacon of democracy and freedom in the Arab world.

Hours after Cheney's departure, the Iraqi presidency council announced that it had approved the Iraqi parliament's provincial elections law. This long-awaited act will facilitate Iraq's development into a federal state and so cement the grassroots-level political progress that has made such strides in the last year as a result of the revised US counter-insurgency or "surge" campaign.

Five years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, with the majority of Americans convinced that the decision to invade Iraq was wrong, it is worth recalling that the decision to go to war in Iraq was immensely popular. In March 2003, 72 percent of Americans supported Bush's decision to invade the country and topple Saddam Hussein's regime. Moreover, public support for military action against Iraq was not an ephemeral phenomenon or simply a function of post-September 11 bellicosity.

Since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Americans overwhelmingly perceived Iraq as a hostile country and Saddam Hussein specifically was seen, properly, as a US enemy. Throughout the 1990s there was bipartisan support for regime change in Iraq and indeed, regime change in Iraq was the stated policy of the Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton himself nearly went to war with Iraq in 1998 when Saddam suspended UN weapons inspections in the country.

At the same time, support for military action to propel regime change in Iraq was always controversial. Even after the September 11 attacks, and in the lead-up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the public debate was fully engaged. Opponents of the strategy, who straddled both sides of the partisan divide, were outspoken in their criticism of the move even when public support for invasion was overwhelming.

After the Iraqi insurgency began in full force in 2004, the tenor of public debate on the Iraqi campaign became shrill, and largely irrelevant to the policy questions raised by the insurgency. Rather than discuss how to improve the situation in the country, opponents of the war devoted their energies to demonizing Bush and the war's supporters both within and outside the administration. The debate that ensued did not relate to how to win, but rather to who was to blame for the chaos increasingly engulfing the country.

The debate progressed in this fashion for three long years. For three years, opponents of the war demonized President George W. Bush and his supporters, and for three years, proponents of the war sought to minimize the importance of the insurgency in the hope that by denying its force, they could somehow wish it away.

The military strategy they chose for contending with the insurgency was based on their own denials of its strength. US forces were stationed in large bases outside population centers and only made their presence known when they went on specific raids based on specific intelligence. The hope was that by having a "small footprint," no one would notice they were there and would simply leave them alone. Of course, the consequence of the strategy was that the US essentially surrendered Iraqi villages and urban neighborhoods to the insurgents, and the Iraqi military forces they were training had no reason to take them seriously.

AS BUSH acknowledged this week in his address marking the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the decision to change the US strategy in Iraq was borne of desperation. By the end of 2006, with the Democratic victory in the Congressional elections, it was simply no longer possible to hide the fact that the US was surrendering the country to the jihadists.

In his words, "A little over a year ago, the fight in Iraq was faltering. Extremist elements were succeeding in their efforts to plunge Iraq into chaos. They had established safe havens in many parts of the country. They were creating divisions among the Iraqis along sectarian lines. And their strategy of using violence in Iraq to cause divisions in America was working - as pressures built here in Washington for withdrawal before the job was done."

For Bush then, the decision to take a gamble on the surge was the consequence of a real fear that the most important decision he made as president was about to go up in flames. For proponents of the war, the necessity of the surge - which adopted classic counter-insurgency doctrine by moving US forces out of large bases and into population centers to win the trust of the public and mobilize them to help flush out the insurgents - was dictated by their need to maintain their own credibility. Like Bush, they had staked their reputations on the war in Iraq. They understood that denial was no longer an option. To maintain their credibility, the US would actually have to engage in a long, hard slog.

Gen. David Petreaus, who commands coalition forces in Iraq, has frequently warned that military success in Iraq is not a long-term strategy for stabilizing the country. While inarguable, the fact is that without military success, which to date has enabled some 62% of Iraqis to say that they regard their security situation as good, there would be no way for Iraq to become politically stabilized.

The fact that today the Iraqi people are feeling optimistic about the future of their country is a consequence of the US's new surge strategy. The reason that the Iraqis are willing to make the hard choices necessary to facilitate Iraq's long-term political stability and liberalization as a multi-ethnic state is because today they believe that the US will not abandon them to the whims of their neighbors in Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia and the Shi'ite militias and al-Qaida cells in Iraq.

THE POSITIVE trends being seen today in Iraq are made all the more apparent when they are viewed against the situation in the Palestinian Authority.

Whereas Iraqi support for attacks against US forces has been declining steadily for the past year, in the PA, support for attacks against Israelis is at an all-time high. So too, while Shi'ite support for Shi'ite militias has dropped from 36% last spring to 22% today and support among Sunnis for the anti-al-Qaida "Awakening Groups" stands at 73%, support for terrorists among the Palestinians is steadily increasing: 84% of Palestinians support this month's massacre of yeshiva students in Jerusalem; 64% of Palestinians support the missile campaign against southern Israel.

In Iraq, the presidency council was forced by the US to accept the provincial election law to stabilize the country. The law is the result of a grassroots initiative of the Iraqis themselves. In contrast, in Palestinian society, leaders jockey for public support by increasing their radicalism. Fatah leader and PA President Mahmoud Abbas is today attempting to gain public support by adopting policies that are openly hostile to Israel and are based on a rejection of peaceful coexistence between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

This week The Jerusalem Post reported that Abbas has approved a plan to call for so-called Palestinian refugees to besiege Israel's borders with Lebanon, Gaza, Syria and Jordan on Israel's 60th Independence Day in May. The plan also calls for Americans, Europeans and Canadians of Palestinian descent to converge on Israel by air and sea that day in an attempt to force Israel to accept millions of foreign-born Arabs into the country.

This plan makes clear that as far as endgames are concerned, Abbas envisions a future without Israel that bears little distinction from Hamas's strategic aim of destroying the Jewish state. Not surprisingly, then, Abbas and his associates in Fatah are intensifying their efforts to reinstate a Fatah-Hamas government throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza ahead of the Arab League summit in Syria scheduled for March 29.

In the midst of all of this, the Democratic-controlled US Congress approved a Bush administration request to transfer $150 million to the PA's treasury. This move was a reflection of the bipartisan support enjoyed by the Bush administration's efforts to oversee negotiations between the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and Abbas towards the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem by the end of the year. 

The root of the great disparity between Bush's willingness to gamble on the surge to prevent failure in Iraq and his unwillingness to change course on his policy towards the Palestinians when it is clear that his strategy of establishing a Palestinian state is only strengthening jihadists is found in the absence of public debate in Washington on the feasibility of the US Palestinian strategy. The fact is that for the past 15 years, since the US first embraced the PLO as a peace partner for Israel, there has been no significant political debate in the US regarding the reasonableness of the strategy of appeasing the Palestinians by pressuring Israel not to defend itself from attack and empowering the Palestinians with financial assistance and military training.

AND, OF course, the same is true in Israel. It is unclear whether the Americans have prevented Israeli leaders from accepting that the two-state paradigm is a failed paradigm, or if Israeli leaders have convinced the Americans not to accept the failure of the paradigm. Probably both have contributed to the current policy paralysis in Jerusalem and Washington alike.

What is clear is that in the absence of such a debate, unlike the situation in Iraq, no significant bloc of policymakers or politicians in Washington feels like it has a stake in the policy's failure. As a consequence, year in and year out, the US promotes a policy that has no chance of succeeding. And year in and year out, as the Palestinians become increasingly supportive of jihad, administration officials make increasingly absurd statements about the need to empower them still further. So it is that this week US Ambassador Richard Jones told the Post that Jews will just have to leave Jerusalem because the US opposes building Jewish neighborhoods beyond the 1949 armistice lines in the city and young families cannot afford increasingly expensive existing housing in the city.

One could say that the tentative progress of democracy in Iraq is the consequence of an engaged, democratic debate in America that forced people to make decisions and forced the administration to contend with reality.

It is similarly due to the absence of such a debate about the failure of the US's attempts to appease the Palestinians that forces of terror and tyranny are on the rise in Ramallah and Gaza as Israel debates mindlessly about whether residents of the South will just have to live with daily missile attacks in their living rooms and kindergartens and massacres in their schools, or whether something lasting might be done about it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

My book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad is OUT.

Click on the link to order from the publisher. Or you can order it on Amazon.

Great reading for yourselves and all your friends, family, casual acquaintances, nodding acquaintances and complete strangers who you happen to pass on the street!

Buy it, read it, and let me know what you think. 

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s so I have a bit of local interest in Senator Barack Obama’s race for the White House.

Obama and his family live in my old neighborhood, Hyde Park. My siblings and I all attended our local public high school – Kenwood Academy. Obama’s wife Michelle went to Whitney Young High School. The city swimming championship was always held there. My older brothers were members of Kenwood’s swim team. Aside from its swimming pool, I never saw much of Whitney Young. It was a magnet school. But my parents always said that didn’t mean much. All of Chicago’s public schools were basically horrible.

Kenwood was reclassified an academy rather than a regular high school sometime in the 1970s. It was the principal’s way of expelling the gang members from the school. In the Chicago public school system, if you attended an academy and weren’t passing your classes you could be expelled. I understand that the distinction was removed a couple of years after I graduated in 1987, and the school rapidly declined to its previous status as a gang and drug infested flophouse for adolescents. The year after I graduated, in a sign of what was happening, the school authorities installed metal detectors at all the entrances.

When I went to Kenwood, the school was 85 percent black and 15 percent other. The others were mainly white with a sprinkling of Asians and Latinos. Going to school there probably gave me a somewhat skewed view of the reality of race relations in America, because the only bigotry I experienced was black bigotry against whites.

I was one of the only white girls on the track team and my coach was quite a black bigot. She made every white girl on the team run the mile and two mile. Only the black girls could sprint. It didn’t matter to her that I was better at the 200 than the mile. When I asked to run sprints, she just said, “No, that’s not for you girl.” So I quit.

I was in 9th grade in the lead-up to the 1984 presidential elections. Most of the kids in the school were fired up about Jesse Jackson’s candidacy. I was personally offended by their support for a man who referred to New York as a “hymietown,” and I let my feelings be known. I don’t think that anyone thought worse of me for saying I didn’t support a man who was anti-Jewish. But then, it never occurred to me to care. If they had thought worse of me for standing up for my rights as a Jew, then that was their problem, not mine.

At any rate, I remembered my exchanges with my classmates about Jackson today as I read Obama’s speech about race and his pastor Jeremiah White. It was an excellent speech as far as it goes. But it left me feeling very uneasy about the quality of Obama’s character.

I was 13 years old when I stood up alone to all my classmates and told them that I thought they should be ashamed of themselves for supporting an anti-Semite for president. I was a child. But Obama came to Wright as an adult. And as an adult, he sat through 20 years of Wright’s anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-American vitriol and said nothing. Indeed, until just a few months ago, he was honoring him as his spiritual mentor.  What does that say about him?

As a child, I thought that my track coach was discriminating against me because I was white and so I got up and left. When he -- as an adult -- heard his pastor spewing poison, he never said anything and he didn’t quit.

It can be argued that there is a difference between how I reacted to black bigotry and how he reacted to black bigotry because I was an outsider and he was an insider. I wasn’t trying to become a member of the black community. I was simply demanding to be treated with respect as a non-black by blacks who happened to be the vast majority of my classmates and teachers.

But then, here’s another example.

In January, I spoke at an anti-jihad conference in Dallas, TX. It was organized by a group called the America Truth Forum. Basically, it was a conclave of an anti-jihad public with anti-jihad speakers. That is, we were all members of the same ideological community – or so I thought when I agreed to attend.

One of the speakers on my panel was an older man named Paul Williams. I had never heard his name before. He approached me before the panel and flattered me, saying that I was the best writer around. So it goes without saying that I was not ill-disposed to him.

But then he began to speak; and pure poison came out. He began his remarks by telling the audience of mainly religious Christians that some woman had told him that he is a prophet. That already had me questioning his character. But then he went on, giving incorrect statements about Muslims. Rather than provide information about jihadist doctrine or infiltration of American mosques, he simply began demonizing Muslims as a group. They became this amorphous “other” incapable of individual choices or actions. It was bigotry pure and simple.

And so, I walked off the stage and out of the hall. I didn’t return until he finished speaking and when I returned, I refused to shake his hand or have anything to do with him.

I saw that the audience had given him a standing ovation and so I began to wonder if I shouldn’t simply return the check I had received from the organizers and leave. But I decided to stay and to challenge him.

And that is what I did. I quietly and forcefully explained why what Williams said was wrong, un-American, and in defiance of both Christian and Jewish values and approaches to human beings. And, as luck would have it, I received an even larger standing ovation than Williams did.

The point here is that I didn’t nod my head to fit in, or treat him politely simply because we sat on a stage together. And I didn’t surrender the floor to him. We were supposedly on “the same side,” but his statements were so contrary to what I believe that it occurred to me that I’d rather be shopping with Nancy Pelosi than sitting through his hateful nastiness.

And I write all of this not to puff myself up. I don’t think I did anything extraordinary by standing up to Williams or to my classmates and teachers in high school. I think that it is how people should behave particularly if they are smart enough to understand that ideas are important. And Obama is certainly smart enough to understand that ideas are important.

Obama’s denunciation of Wright’s bigotry amounts to too little too late. The time to stand up to him wasn’t now, when his association with Wright is sinking his hopes for the White House. The time to have stood up to Wright was when Obama was just another member of his church. If he truly believes in what he says he believes, he should have walked out of Wright’s church or grabbed Wright’s microphone and told his fellow churchgoers that Wright was wrong and that they mustn’t hate. In twenty years of attending Wright’s church, why didn’t Obama once stand before his fellow church members and tell them that they mustn’t hate their country and their fellow Americans?

The fact that he didn’t, and the fact that he upheld this man until just a few months ago as his spiritual mentor and still refuses to condemn him and his deeply flawed character tells me everything I need to know about Barack Obama. I think that he is an opportunistic, weak man. I hope and pray that he doesn’t become President.   

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's speech in German before the Knesset this afternoon will be the culmination of what the Israeli media has referred to as an "historic" three-day state visit to Israel. The day before Merkel launched her "historic" visit, Der Spiegel reported on the "historic" visit of another German to Afghanistan.

That visit ended on March 3 when the visitor in question, known as Cüneyt C. from Bavaria and also known as Saad Ebu Furkan blew himself up in front of a US guard post in Khost, an hour's drive from the border with Pakistan where the German-Turk underwent terror training. Two US soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded after being trapped beneath the rubble, making C. Germany's first successful suicide bomber.

Although the first German to kill US forces, C.'s associate, Sadullah K. a young German from the state of Hesse died trying. K. was killed in October in a US airstrike along the Pakistan-Afghan border after he also underwent training in Pakistan. Both men belonged to the German-based Islamic Jihad Union. The IJU made headlines in September when German investigators rounded up the leaders of an IJU cell which was planning massive attacks against American targets in Germany. These leaders - also Germans - were in contact with both C. and K. who escaped the police dragnet and made it to Pakistan after travelling through Turkey and Iran.

And of course, Germany's reputation as a home for al-Qaida-like jihadists was burnished by Saudi and Egyptian nationals who studied in Hamburg several years ago. Led by Muhammad Atta, they enjoyed German hospitality while planning the attacks they carried out in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

MERKEL, WHO presents herself and her country as Israel's greatest friend and supporter in Europe, will no doubt ignore this story in her Knesset speech. She will doubtlessly also not mention that her country is Iran's largest importer. She might mention that last year Germany did cancel a half of its loan guarantees to German firms doing business with Iran. But she won't mention that the move has had almost no impact on trade volume. In a recent report on German firms in Iran, Reuters interviewed British businessman Robert Mills, who runs DHL's operation in Teheran. DHL, the express delivery firm is a unit of the mail and logistics group Deutsche Post.

Mills gushed about the booming business his firm is doing in Iran, in spite of the international sanctions. Mills said the tonnage handled by DHL jumped by 50 per cent in the last two years and the company has doubled its turnover in Iran since 2005 on the back of rising imports of everything from telecommunications equipment to car spare parts.

Like Mills, other businessmen representing German firms reported booming businesses and expanding opportunities in spite of UN sanctions. Business managers reported that their earnings have doubled and tripled in the past two years.

Iran's faith in its German business partners is apparently unlimited. Why else would it be considering listing $92 billion in shares of its energy holding company on the Frankfurt stock exchange? As MEED, the Middle East Business Intelligence Report reported Sunday, with over 1,700 German firms operating in Iran, the fact that Germany recently broke off banking ties with Iranian banks is not viewed as an obstacle to listing the firm on the Frankfurt exchange. A spokeswoman for Deutsche Borse, the company which manages the exchange told the journal that it would have no objection to listing the Iranian firm.

GERMANY'S actions toward Iran cannot be squared with Merkel's rhetoric of support for Israel and commitment to Israel's security. Both Germany's actions and its pro-Israel rhetoric can only be understood when seen through the lens of power politics - which is the lens that informs European policymakers in their decisions relating to Israel, Iran, the Middle East, and indeed the world as a whole.

Power politics are a function of two main components - the threat of war and violence, and economic leverage. From the Europeans' perspective, the Arab world and Iran wield both weapons of power politics against them. Through restive, increasingly radicalized Muslim minority populations in Europe - like C. and K. and their IJU colleagues in Germany and Pakistan - the Islamic world holds the threat of terror over the heads of European leaders. And through oil, they point the ultimate commercial gun at Europe's head.

Neither the EU nor any single European state has managed to put together a coherent or rational domestic policy for contending with the threat posed by Europe's Muslim minorities. And so, the issue has been deflected to the realm of foreign policy. There, combined with the oil threat, the Europeans have contended with Arab and Islamic pressure by opting to appease them. This they do by attacking Israel, supporting the Palestinians, and preventing the disarmament or political defeat of Hizbullah in Lebanon.

The Europeans act as they do for a combination of reasons. First, they have no real military capacity to either defend themselves or attack the Arab and Muslim states which foment rebellion among their own Muslim minorities. Second, they have no wish to use their collective commercial power. If they were interested in the latter of course, they could paralyze the Iranian economy in weeks simply by cutting off their trade with Teheran. And third, as the ultimate military free riders, they trust that the US or Israel, which are both more directly threatened by Iran's nuclear program than they, will take out Iran's nuclear installations for them.

THE EU'S appeasement policies have been made clear through their actions as the commanders of UNIFIL forces in Lebanon since the Second Lebanon War. It was Israel's hope that European forces, which make up the majority of the 15,000 UNIFIL forces in south Lebanon, would prevent Hizbullah from rearming after the war and, perhaps, help to strengthen the pro-Western Siniora government against Syrian, Iranian and Hizbullah attempts to overthrow it. Yet the opposite has occurred. Since the war, and under the blind eyes of the Europeans, Hizbullah has rebuilt its forces. Three years after the March 14 demonstration which fomented the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon, the Siniora government is paralyzed and the March 14 Movement is demoralized and in disarray.

The Germans provided the public with one of the most absurd displays of European hypocrisy and mendacity on February 29. That day, Germany transferred command over UNIFIL's naval contingent to Italy. After deploying a force of four ships and 2,400 men to the Lebanese coastline in 2006 with the expressed purpose of preventing Hizbullah's rearmament, Germany devoted most of its efforts to complaining about Israeli overflights of Lebanese airspace and provoking the IAF by launching German helicopters into Israeli airspace without prior coordination.

And yet, at the command handover last month, German Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung announced, "We can guarantee that no weapons were smuggled by sea." For its part, Hizbullah has clearly been unimpressed by Germany's naval power. It has registered no complaints against Germany's navy, something it would have done if any of the 13,000 boats the Germans claim to have inspected were actually carrying its weapons. Significantly, while Hizbullah was downright friendly to the German navy, it went into a near apoplectic fit of rage when, the same week that the Germans transferred command to the Italians, the USS Cole anchored off Lebanon's coast.

While Merkel will ignore her country's economic support for Iran and its military weakness and decision to embrace appeasement of the Arabs at Israel's expense as a national and continental strategy during her address to the Knesset, she will wax poetically about her nation's support for the so-called "peace process" and Palestinian statehood.

Merkel of course, knows full well that Israel's presumptive Palestinian "peace partner" the Fatah movement is a terrorist group. She also knows that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's presumptive interlocutor for peace, Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is neither able nor interested in establishing a Palestinian state that will live at peace with Israel. She also knows that if the so-called peace process brings about a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, that state will simply be a terror state that will stand at the side of the terror state that was established in Gaza in 2005.

AND YET, rather than confront Merkel and her European colleagues with these known facts, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government prefers to play along with the farce. In their view, all of this is immaterial. The Israeli government's European policy is to appease the Europeans by helping them to appease the Arabs.

If the Olmert-Livni-Barak government were to pause to consider what they are doing they would recognize that they have missed the entire point. They have ignored the power politics that inform Europe's decision-makers' policy moves. Were they to recognize them, they would recognize their appeasement policy for the disaster it has become.

If Israel were to play the power politics game, it would understand that it must do three things. First, it must use its own considerable economic leverage to force individual European firms to decide if they are willing to forego Israeli technology in favor of Iranian export markets which make up only one percent of European foreign trade. Second, they would ensure that the Europeans understand that Israel will use its considerable military power to defeat its enemies. And finally, it would use its political weight to expose Europe's humanitarian and pro-peace rhetoric as a hypocritical sham. That is, Israel would work to change the Europeans' calculations of their own interests.

But of course, in the media frenzy of feel good German-Israeli friendship that has characterized Merkel's visit, none of this is likely to occur this week. And in the appeasement frenzied political climate that has gripped Israel since 1993, it is hard to imagine anyone stopping to realize that we are the only ones who take the Europeans at their word.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

To understand the strange twists that Hamas's war against Israel has taken over the past week, it is instructive to cast a glance at the current situation in Pakistan. For in their dealings with Hamas, the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government have apparently been operating in accordance with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's playbook.

In a radio interview this week, Michael Leiter, the director of the US National Counter-Terrorism Center, noted that al-Qaida today is stronger than it was two years ago. This development, he explained, is a consequence of Musharraf's decision to sign peace accords with the Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border.

The first agreements in North and South Waziristan were signed in September 2006. They involved the removal of Pakistani military forces from the areas, and the release of 2,500 Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners from Pakistani prisons.

The Waziristan accords made the area the Taliban's and al-Qaida's first safe haven since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Freed from the need to defend themselves against the Pakistani army, al-Qaida and the Taliban immediately turned their attention to Afghanistan. Within weeks of the signing ceremony, cross-border raids from Pakistan tripled.

And so began a devastating calculus. Systematic breaches of the accords by the Taliban were ignored. But any anti-Taliban operations launched by Pakistan or US forces in Waziristan or anywhere else in Pakistan were met with massive brutality.

Speaking to CNN recently, Michael McConnell, the Director of US National Intelligence, concurred with Leiter's dim assessment. McConnell noted that from its safe havens in Pakistan, al-Qaida has reconstituted itself as the central command post for global jihad. "They have the leadership that they had before. They've rebuilt the middle-management and the trainers. And they're recruiting very vigorously," he said.

These American acknowledgments of the consequences of Musharraf's "peace process" with the Taliban come rather late in the game. When he first signed the accords, Musharraf pretended that the Taliban were not involved, claiming that the accords were with "tribal leaders."

Musharraf's statements were obvious lies, and yet the US decided to pretend along with him. In September 2006, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said, "The [Waziristan] agreement really has potential to work... Talibanization will not be allowed in the area of or in the cities near the tribal region."

The State Department had no excuse for believing Musharraf because by the time Boucher made the statement, Musharraf had already released the 2,500 al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners.

But American praise for the agreement didn't end with Boucher. President George W. Bush also endorsed it.

After the Waziristan accord, between March and August 2007, Musharraf's representatives signed similar surrender agreements in the Bajaur, Swat and Mohmand agencies. Some commentators, like Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, have argued that US public support for the accords stemmed from the administration's unwillingness to criticize Musharraf lest he be ousted from power.

But now, with the Taliban and al-Qaida in control of massive swathes of Pakistan, Musharraf is about to cede power. And the civilian coalition government set to replace him has made clear its desire to end all residual Pakistani military operations against the Taliban.

In a taste of things to come, on Thursday Pakistan lodged a strong protest with the US over a US air strike in Waziristan that killed five civilians. According to The Associated Press, thousands of protesters on Thursday shouted "Death to America," and, "Anyone who is a friend of Musharraf is a traitor."

The spillover effect of the Talibanization of Pakistan's frontier in Afghanistan has been so dramatic that that even the UN is recognizing that NATO's military actions need to be stronger and more effective. Speaking before the Security Council on Wednesday, UN Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno said, "We face an insurgency that has proven to be much more resilient than we expected and more ruthless than we ever imagined."

As Pakistan-watchers like military analyst Bill Roggio warned at the time, the consequences Musharraf's "peace process" were eminently foreseeable. And yet, the Bush administration refused to see them. The administration, which based its entire strategy for contending with Pakistan on its complete support for Musharraf, preferred to allow the Taliban and al-Qaida to reconstitute their strength than to accept the fact that its Musharraf-based strategy had failed.

Today, the Bush administration's treatment of Hamas's control of Gaza follows the same pattern. Since the Iranian-sponsored jihadist group seized control of Gaza from Fatah last June, Hamas has transformed the area into a safe haven for local and global terrorists. In Gaza today, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah forces share space with al-Qaida, Hizbullah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence officials.

The only way to overthrow the Hamas regime and end Gaza's status as a hub for global jihad is for Israel to conquer the Strip. But such an operation is antithetical to the US administration's sole strategy for contending with the Palestinians and their war against Israel. That strategy, of course, is to champion Palestinian statehood by backing Fatah and its leader, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Since enabling Hamas to take control of Gaza, Abbas has insisted that an Israeli takeover of the area would weaken his standing with the Palestinians, who overwhelmingly support Hamas. And since supporting Abbas is the only plan the administration has, it is willing to accept Hamas control of Gaza.

This was made clear this week when, in the aftermath the latest round of Hamas's missile war against southern Israel, the US openly supported Egyptian efforts to negotiate a Waziristan-styled cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas that would take the option of an Israeli invasion of Gaza off the table indefinitely, and so safeguard Hamas's control over the area. At the same time, it is publicly pressuring Israel to make massive concessions to Fatah in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, to "strengthen Abbas" and facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem by the end of the year.

It has been argued that Musharraf signed the accords with the Taliban because he feared his political opponents in Islamabad who demanded an end to his military dictatorship more than he feared ceding control over large swathes of Pakistan to the Taliban. It would seem that in negotiating with Hamas and Fatah, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is following a similar cost-benefit analysis. It fears its political opposition in the Likud and the prospects of elections it will surely lose more than it fears abandoning the security of southern Israel to the whims of Hamas and Iran and more than it fears pledging to surrender Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah-Hamas-Iran.

Yet, since the Israeli public does not, by and large, share the government's view, the government is simply lying about its policies. On Monday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak both loudly denied that Israel was conducting cease-fire negotiations with Hamas. On Tuesday, an unnamed senior government official acknowledged that a cease-fire agreement with Hamas had been reached. Also on Tuesday, Olmert visited hospitalized Israelis, wounded by Hamas missiles, and told them that it is impossible to defend them.

On Tuesday, the Winnipeg Free Press's Israel correspondent Samuel Segev provided another reasonable explanation for the US-Israeli decision to abandon their rejection of Hamas. Segev reported that during US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to Cairo last week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak relayed a joint Egyptian-Saudi threat to abandon the so-called Saudi peace initiative from 2002 unless the US and Israel agree to accept Hamas control of Gaza and negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas.

The Saudis and Egyptians further demanded that this cease-fire agreement pave the way for the reinstitution of the Hamas-Fatah unity government that was formed in Mecca in March 2006.

Perhaps in preparation for his reunification with Hamas, Abbas has recently issued a series of statements that make a mockery of his supposed commitment to peaceful coexistence with Israel. In his latest foray into anti-Israeli incitement, Abbas reacted to the IDF's counterterror raid in Bethlehem on Wednesday in which four senior terror commanders were killed by calling the Israeli action "a barbaric crime." One of the targeted terrorists was Hizbullah-linked Mahmoud Shehada, who the Palestinians identified as the mastermind of last week's massacre of eight students at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem.

Abbas's office released his statement while Abbas was addressing the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Dakar, Senegal. There, a week after Shehada sent Jerusalemite Ala Abu Dhaim to kill Jews studying Torah in Jerusalem, Abbas accused Israel of ethnically cleansing Jerusalem of Muslims.

Hamas is playing its cards wisely. It refers to its cease-fire with Israel as a tahadiya, which translates roughly as a temporary cessation of violence that can be ended at any time.

Hamas also demands control over the international border with Gaza. It claims that it will allow Fatah personnel to be stationed at the border crossing with Egypt, but only Fatah forces that it approves. That is, it will only allow Hamas loyalists in Fatah uniforms to man the border. Moreover, Hamas announced that it would allow European monitors to return to the border crossing, but only if they live in Gaza or in el-Arish, rather than in Israel as they did until they were withdrawn in June. That is, Hamas will allow EU monitors to return, but only if they do so as Hamas hostages.

Finally, Hamas insists that it will only abide by the cease-fire if its supply lines with Egypt are opened and if Israel also opens its own land passages to Gaza for goods and persons. That is, Hamas also demands that Israel accept responsibility for the welfare of Gaza's residents.

Just as was the case when Musharraf began negotiating with the Taliban, so too, with Hamas in Gaza it is clear what the outcome will be. Hamas will continue to gain strength in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria. More and more Israelis - and Palestinians who don't want to live in a jihadist caliphate - will pay for the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Bush-Rice policies with their blood.

The US will seek to divert attention from its acceptance of a safe haven for global jihad in Gaza by changing the subject. Rice is doing so already by attacking Israel for permitting Jews to build homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and by pretending - as Rice did in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday - that Abbas remains committed to peace and that peace is possible with an Iranian-controlled Hamas enclave in Gaza.

As Musharraf did in Pakistan, so in Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government simply seeks to hide what it is doing by lying to the public. Like Musharraf, apparently Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Barak hope that their lies won't run out until after the next election is held.

But of course, they will. Using lies to hide a strategy of surrender to jihad didn't work for Musharraf. It won't work for them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Last Thursday, a 28-year-old IDF non-commissioned officer was killed by a roadside bomb along the border with Gaza. A Beduin from the South, he served as a combat tracker. At his funeral, his cousin said, "He did everything he could to convince [Beduin] youth to enlist in the army to serve the state. He said his service was hard, but he chose to defend his country." Another cousin noted that almost all the men in their family serve in the IDF.

At his family's request, his name was not released to the public. He was buried in a non-military funeral.

The family's request stemmed from fear that the Israeli Arab leadership or terrorists from the Palestinian Authority would take revenge on its members for their service to the State of Israel. Their fear of violent attack outweighed their desire to have their hero receive the public honors he so richly deserved for sacrificing his life for his country.

Contrast the fortunes of this family to those of an Arab family in Jerusalem who also lost a son last Thursday.

Last Friday, hundreds visited a traditional Muslim mourning tent in Jerusalem's Jabel Mukaber neighborhood to pay their respects to the family. The tent was adorned by hundreds of posters of the dead man's face. It also was also decorated with Hizbullah and Hamas banners.

The tent was erected to honor Alaa Abu D'heim. In a scene taken from a Russian pogrom, Thursday night D'heim entered Mercaz Harav Yeshiva and massacred eight boys and young men as they studied Torah.

D'heim's family did not fear retribution from their fellow Arabs. His neighbors did not demonstrate against his crime. The Israeli Arab leadership did not credibly condemn it.

Yet the lack of protests did not necessarily mean that his crime is supported by all Arabs in Israel. Sunday night, Channel 2's Suleiman Ashafi interviewed a young man outside the tent who said, "If I had known that he was planning to attack people, that he was planning to carry out a terrorist attack, I would have shot him in the head myself." The young man, like the Beduin soldier's family, requested not to be named. He used his hand to hide his face from the camera. He too, was intimidated. He too feared he would be attacked for voicing his condemnation of D'heim and his implied support for Israel.

WHAT IS going on in Israeli Arab society? What are the implications of the tangible fear among those Arabs who support Israel and the unabashed willingness of the Israeli Arab leadership to defend the likes of Hamas, Fatah and D'heim in their terror war against Israel? Is Israel's Arab minority - which comprises 20 percent of the population - lost?

In the 1996 electoral campaign which pitted Binyamin Netanyahu against Shimon Peres, Netanyahu appointed former foreign and defense minister Moshe Arens to run the party's campaign for the Arab vote. Arens succeeded in bringing the Likud candidate five percent of the overall Arab vote. His labors were credited with bringing victory to the party in that photo-finish race.

In the aftermath of Thursday's massacre, Arens warns that it is wrong to view Israeli Arabs as a monolithic block. Indeed they are an ethnically and religiously diverse population.

To start with, Israel's 100,000 Druse, who accepted compulsory military service for their young men in 1949, are fully integrated in Israeli society. Indeed, the rate of Druse military service is higher than it is among Jews. Another sign of Druse societal integration is their birthrate. Whereas in 1948, the Druse birthrate was higher than the Muslim birthrate, today it is equal to the Jewish birthrate.

Like the Druse, Arens notes that the Circassians also accepted obligatory military service for their sons and they too are integrated into Israeli society. Many of the members of the Israel-allied South Lebanese Army who fled to Israel in the aftermath of Israel's precipitous withdrawal from south Lebanon in 2000, have been welcomed in Circassian villages in the North even as they were blackballed in Muslim Arab villages.

Then there are the Israeli Beduin. Although Beduin are Muslims, due to their unique cultural traditions, Beduin have historically perceived themselves as distinct from the other Arab Muslims in Israel.

Their unique traditions are in the process of disappearing however. Arens recalls that 20 years ago, most Beduin encampments had no mosques. But today, every encampment has at least one mosque. And they are all run by the pro-Hamas Israeli Islamic movement. Similarly, the teachers in Beduin schools are overwhelmingly non-Beduin Israeli Arabs. Like the preachers in the mosques, they educate the youngsters to view themselves as Palestinian Arabs and to abandon their Israeli identity and loyalty to the state.

Although the Beduin have never been obligated to serve in the IDF, traditionally, the majority of their male youths volunteered for service, both as trackers and as regular combat soldiers. Due mainly to the indoctrination of the Islamic movement, the number of Beduin youth volunteering for military service has been decreasing drastically in recent years. Radical imams and teachers bar IDF recruiters from speaking to the youth.

Numbering 200,000, Beduin comprise some 25 percent of Israel's Muslim population. Most live in the South but some 70,000 live in the North and they have been less affected by the Islamic indoctrination campaign. In the North, traditional levels of Beduin enlistment in the IDF have been maintained.

Then there are the Christian Arabs. As one Israeli Arab colleague, (who also asked not to be identified), notes, Israel's Christian Arab population is the only flourishing Christian community in the Middle East. From Iraq to Syria to Jordan to Egypt to the Palestinian Authority, Christians find themselves under assault by authorities and Islamic gangs. In Israel, in contrast, the Christian population has grown steadily in recent years.

FINALLY THERE are the Israeli Arab Muslims. Since the 1994 establishment of the PA, the Israeli Muslim leadership has been radicalized. That leadership currently consists of Arab members of Knesset, the Israeli Arab Higher Follow-up Committee, the Islamic Movement and so-called Arab human rights organizations. All of these leaders and organizations have worked steadily to undermine the Israeli Arab Muslims' sense of attachment to the State of Israel and to intimidate dissenting voices into silence.

While their intimidation efforts have been successful, it is far from clear that their indoctrination efforts have won over the Israeli Arabs. Recently, the government announced its intention to encourage Israeli Arabs who don't serve in the military to perform national service. The organized Israeli Arab leadership has worked studiously to undermine the program.

Yet a poll carried out by University of Haifa last month revealed that 75 percent of Israeli Arabs between the ages of 16 and 22 support voluntary national service. The poll also found that the vast majority of the Arab public is unaware of the national service. 77.4 percent overall and 79.6 percent of youth said they know little or nothing about the program. Moreover, the poll found that once given basic information about conditions in the national service and its goals, not only were Israeli Arab youth supportive of the idea, but so were 71.9 percent of all Arab men and 83.8 percent of all Arab women. In contrast, some 80 percent of members of Arab political parties opposed national service.

Arens believes strongly that the government must launch a serious, directed hearts and minds campaign among Israeli Arabs. The very fact that nearly 80 percent of Israeli Arabs know nothing about the government's national service initiative is proof that the government is neglecting the Arab sector.

Arens contends that the place to direct such a campaign, at least in the short term, is among the Beduin. Israeli Beduin are the most impoverished ethnic group in Israel. Particularly in the South, they lack basic sanitation services. Their education system is appalling. And economic and academic opportunities for advancement are largely absent. Beduin who serve in the army receive no post-army assistance from the government.

Arens spearheaded a private initiative with Ben-Gurion University in the Negev to provide them with post-army educational opportunities, but the program was cancelled. In short, demobilized Beduin soldiers come home with nothing to show for their service to the country and so have no way of countering the Israeli Arabs who indoctrinate the youth to pan-Arabism and jihad. Indeed, often their only choice is to join Beduin crime rings that run smuggling and protection networks throughout the South.

Arens suggests that at a minimum, the IDF should set up day care centers and kindergartens for Beduin children staffed by soldiers from the IDF's soldier-teacher's unit which works in underprivileged communities. As defense minister, Arens sought to make military service compulsory for Beduin and he believes that such an initiative would still meet with success among the northern tribes. But his successors, bowing to the Arab political leadership, scuttled his initiative.

Obviously, for Arabs loyal to Israel to feel comfortable expressing their support for the state, the current atmosphere of intimidation must end. The Knesset must pass laws outlawing the openly treasonous Islamic Movement and Arab political parties that reject the authority and legitimacy of Israel. Arab leaders who incite violence must be dealt with harshly by the legal system.

As Arens notes, the natural pull of Israeli Arabs is towards the Palestinians. But that doesn't mean that their loyalty to Israel has been lost. It has not. To stem the tide, Israel must launch a twin campaign to help those Israeli Arabs who support the state and to encourage them to intensify their integration into Israeli society. And it must take concerted action against those radical leaders and organizations that work to undermine those bonds.

The current situation, in which Israeli Arab heroes fear attack, and Israeli Arab traitors are extolled must be turned on its head.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left many Israelis and supporters of Israel scratching their heads in disbelief this week.

Rice arrived in Israel in a week marked by Fatah-incited violence against Israel and Israelis, both in Judea and Samaria and within sovereign Israel.

On Monday, a well organized group of hundreds of Arab thugs threw rocks at Jewish motorists in Jerusalem. A dozen hoodlums nearly lynched two municipal inspectors when, after blocking traffic on Salah a-Din Street with burning tires, they stoned the inspectors' vehicle and began shattering their windshield with a metal pipe. The two escaped by the skin of their teeth.

Outside Hebron, an Israeli was attacked by yet another mob and escaped alive only by opening fire at his assailants.

In another incident, Fatah forces murdered a Palestinian and seriously wounded an Israeli outside of Hebron. The US-financed group claimed its operatives lured the Israeli to the scene.

In Ramallah and Hebron, thousands of Fatah members rallied in support of Hamas and its missile offensive against the western Negev. Israeli Arabs also escalated their verbal and physical assaults on Israel and Israeli Jews, in a series of demonstrations that culminated in a mass demonstration in support of Hamas that took place on Tuesday evening in Umm el-Fahm.

In Judea and Samaria, Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas referred to the IDF's operations in Gaza as an attempted "holocaust." He praised terrorists, suspended negotiations with Israel and reiterated his refusal to recognize Israel. His deputies and associates echoed his incendiary remarks and also spoke in support of armed attacks against US forces in Iraq.

Then there is Egypt. Last Monday, two days before Hamas escalated its missile offensive against southern Israel, Egypt released 21 Hamas terrorists from custody in el-Arish. Twelve of the men had reportedly been detained while carrying weapons and attempting to cross into Israel to carry out terrorist attacks. On Monday, they were escorted to Gaza by scores of Egyptian security officials and handed over to Hamas.

One might think, in the face of Fatah's obvious support for Hamas's efforts to destroy Israel, that Rice might have begun to question her devotion to Palestinian statehood and support for Fatah. It might have made her question her refusal to support an Israeli bid to retake control over Gaza's border with Egypt. Indeed, in light of Iran's deep involvement in Hamas's missile offensive, it might have even occurred to Rice that an Israeli reoccupation of Gaza would weaken Iran and so put a damper on its efforts to take over Lebanon and Iraq.

But none of these developments had any impact on Rice, or for that matter on her boss President George W. Bush. Ignoring Fatah's obvious involvement in terror and increasingly overt support for Hamas's missile war against Israeli civilians, Bush overrode a congressional ban on the transfer of $150 million to Fatah. Similarly, in her visit to Egypt this week, Rice announced that the administration was overriding a congressional decision to block the transfer of $120m. to Egypt due to its refusal to prevent Hamas weapons smuggling operations from Egypt.

In her joint press conference with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Rice acted as though nothing notable had transpired over the past two weeks. Rice announced that the US will be giving $148m. to UNRWA in 2008 - this despite the fact that UN refugee camps in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria and Jordan are all hotbeds of terror recruitment, training and indoctrination. She ignored Hamas's widespread popularity in Palestinian society, called for Israel to step up its humanitarian aid to Gaza, and defended the Palestinians as victims. As she put it, "Hamas... in effect, holds the people of Gaza hostage in their hands."

Ignoring Abbas's open support for Hamas against Israel, Rice claimed that he had agreed to return to the negotiating table and insisted that the only way to end violence is to establish a Palestinian state. She then intimated that in the midst of Fatah's open support for Hamas's Iranian-supported open war against Israel, she expected Israel to take action to demolish the communities its citizens have built in Judea and Samaria, claiming, "We do need to have improvements on the ground. We do need to have the parties meeting their road map obligations."

SOME ISRAELIS and supporters of Israel attribute Rice's irrational championing of Palestinian statehood to anti-Israeli bigotry. These voices cite Rice's penchant for drawing parallels between white supremacists in the pre-Civil Rights movement era American South and Israeli soldiers carrying out counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria. By repeatedly invoking this morally and factually perverted comparison, they claim that Rice exposes a deep-seated animus towards the Jewish state and its citizens.

But there is another possible - in fact more likely - explanation for Rice's behavior. It is quite possible that Rice has simply isolated herself from all information and all persons bearing information that might force her to change her policy course.

In an investigative report on the Hamas takeover of Gaza last June, Vanity Fair reporter David Rose recalls Rice's reaction to the terror group's electoral victory. Speaking to reporters at the time, Rice said, "I've asked why nobody saw it coming. I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing."

What is remarkable about this statement is what it says about the insulated nature of Rice's world. Indeed, it is a veritable echo chamber. In Israel, this writer, as well as The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh warned that Hamas was likely to win those elections. So did esteemed Israeli diplomatic and military leaders like former UN ambassador Dore Gold, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon and many others. In the Bush administration, David Wurmser, who at the time served as Vice President Richard Cheney's Middle East adviser, similarly warned that Hamas would likely win. Other senior voices in the administration voiced concern as well.

Some three million Israelis who opposed the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip warned repeatedly that the withdrawal would serve to empower Hamas and other terror groups. Withdrawal opponents also warned that if Israel ceded control over the international border with Egypt, the border would become a terror highway, and that Katyushas would rain down on Ashkelon.

But Rice ignored all these warnings and either ignored or sidelined those sounding them. Reveling in the warm embrace of State Department careerists like R. Nicholas Burns, David Welch and others, Rice helped to torpedo UN ambassador John Bolton's Senate confirmation hearings. Other dissenters met similar fates.

It is not only toward Israel and the Palestinians that Rice insists on operating in a policy vacuum. Her stewardship of other central issues is also marked alternately by a studied silencing of dissenting views and outright neglect of US national interests in favor of a perception of "progress" that doesn't exist. State Department policies toward North Korea and Iraq are glaring examples of this overarching trend.

The Washington Post reported this week that the State Department toned down its human rights report on North Korea. The report claimed that Glyn Davies, principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asia and the Pacific, e-mailed Erica Barks-Ruggles, deputy assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, last Friday asking for changes in the language on North Korea. The e-mail suggested that "given the secretary's priority on the six-party talks, we can sacrifice a few adjectives for the cause."

Those six-party talks ran aground on December 31 when North Korea failed to abide by its commitment to fully disclose its nuclear inventory and its proliferation activities. In light of this state of affairs, Jay Lefkowitz, Bush's special envoy to North Korea on human rights, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington last month that the six-party talks had failed, and that the US should reconsider its policy toward North Korea.

Rice's response to Lefkowitz's argument was marked by mean-spirited hysteria. Rather than contend with the substance of his argument, she belittled Lefkowitz. "He's the human rights envoy," Rice told reporters. "That's what he knows. That's what he does. He doesn't work on the six-party talks. He doesn't know what's going on in the six-party talks and he certainly has no say in the six-party talks."

One of the oddest aspects of Rice's diplomatic activities is how little time she devotes to Iraq. Iraq, after all, is the face of Bush's foreign policy and in the final analysis, Bush's legacy will be determined not by what he does to Israel or the Palestinians, but by what sort of Iraq he leaves behind. Yet apparently Rice couldn't care less about Iraq.

In a scathing memo sent last month to US Ambassador in Baghdad Ryan Crocker, Manuel Miranda, a senior Republican attorney who spent the past year overseeing the embassy's office of legislative oversight, noted a complete disconnect between the US military's valiant efforts to cultivate the formation of a secure, democratic Iraq and the State Department's incompetence in advancing this central US policy. Miranda described a puerile embassy staff, bereft of institutional memory from year to year, which ignores Iraqi society and treats the democratization drive as an annoyance rather than as the central objective of US policy in Iraq.

In his words, "In this excuse-making culture, the State Department has been an albatross around the neck of the coalition command."

As Miranda put it, "This past year, the State Department and the embassy have been led by two misguided premises: First, the obsessive aim that the embassy be turned into a 'normal embassy,' and, second, that the State Department cannot be faulted for the things that the government of Iraq is not doing."

The fact is that this is Rice's policy. It was Rice who, in November 2006, began claiming that Iraq's failure to transform itself overnight into a properly run federal state was solely the responsibility of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Miranda noted that rather than cultivate a habit of liberalism by reaching out to Iraqis as the military does, the State Department has sufficed with training law enforcement officials and kibitzing with lawmakers. In his words, "With a few exceptions by the military and a few other recent efforts, we have ignored the Iraqi Bar, the twenty-six [Iraqi] law schools and the development of the culture [of liberalism] beyond the areas associated with arrest and prosecution."

WITH ONLY 10 months left in office, unless Bush swiftly forces Rice to change course, these and other policies pushed by Rice in spite of their obvious failures will either blow up in her face, or in the face of her successor. And of course, it isn't only her legacy that will be harmed by her irresponsible insulation. The lives of tens of millions of people will be imperiled by her hidebound policies.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The police claim that they had received no intelligence information warning of an impending attack in the capital. But there were several indications that one was about to occur. On Saturday night I was walking in a park above the Old City at dusk. Suddenly a crowd of Arab teenagers appeared and started yelling Allah Akhbar. My big, barking dog scared them away. They were not serious but they were the harbinger of what came next.

Two days later mobs of Arabs attacked Jewish motorists in the city and nearly lynched two municipal inspectors whose car they assaulted with rocks and crow bars while trying to force them out of their vehicle. The pair escaped by the skin of their teeth as they swerved out of range and managed to drive away. I hate to think what would have happened if the Fatah-incited mob had attacked their tires instead of their windshield

Between Iran, Egypt, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah, Fatah and the Israeli Arab leadership, the incitement level this week was so high, that the violence level crossed a Rubicon. It was only a question of when and where the bullets and bombs would start exploding not whether or not they would.

So the Palestinian Arabs and their friends have decided to murder Jews studying Torah in Jerusalem. They decided to go to the heart of the religious Zionist movement and open fire knowing the sort of passions such an attack will provoke. Apparently the terrorist was a Jerusalemite. One television channel reported that he lived in Jabel Mukhaber – a neighborhood abutting Armon HaNatziv. Not surprising.

The third stage of the Palestinian jihad against Israel has been germinating for months and now it is taking off. And the role that Israeli Arabs will play in this round will likely be an expanded one.

I have a theory I have been working on regarding the applicability of the US counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq to Israel’s war with the Palestinians. More and more I am reaching the conclusion that the place to launch a serious, directed hearts and minds operation is not among the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria, but among Israeli Arabs. They have to be given an opportunity and a reason to abandon their jihadist leaders and discredit them. They are the Arab population most open to such a campaign.

Eight yeshiva students murdered while studying Torah in Jerusalem. And Olmert, Livni, Condi, Bush and all their friends and supporters want to give these people Jerusalem. What do they see when they look in the mirror?

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government's latest exercise in saber-rattling has ended with customary haste.

Sunday Palestinian terror forces maintained their rocket and missile offensive against Israel, shooting 40 rockets, including upgraded Katyusha missiles at Sderot, Ashkelon, Netivot and surrounding areas. Whereas in 2005, 25,000 Israelis lived within Palestinian rocket and missile range from Gaza, the past week has shown that the number has expanded at least tenfold since then.

Monday morning, the limited IDF ground component that was deployed in Gaza on Saturday abruptly suspended operations and pulled out. The pullout came just hours after senior IDF officials announced that the forces in Gaza were about to be augmented by additional forces and Defense Minister Ehud Barak told senior military commanders, "The time has come for action. Hamas is responsible and will pay a price."

IT IS obvious that in suspending Operation "Hot Winter" in Gaza, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government essentially crumpled in the face of pressure from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush. Sunday night the White House issued a press release demanding that Israel end its operations in Gaza and return to the negotiating table with Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas.

FOR THEIR part, Abbas and his Fatah underlings have been outspoken in their support for Hamas's missile and rocket offensive against Israel. Sunday they organized joint Fatah-Hamas rallies in Hebron and Ramallah where rioters called for Israel's destruction, burned Israeli and American flags and then attacked IDF patrols and the security fence.

Truth be told, the US may have done Israel a favor preventing the escalation of operations. This is not because an offensive against Hamas's Iranian built war machine in Gaza is not vital. This is so because Operation "Hot Winter" was bereft of operational logic. Its strategic ends were unclear and, to the extent they were enunciated at all by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Barak, they bore no connection to the operations on the ground which were so limited in scope that they were incapable of achieving any long-term objective.

In one form or another, Olmert, Livni and Barak all said that the goal of Operation Hot Winter was to end the Palestinians' missile and rocket campaign against the Western Negev generally and against Ashkelon in particular. They intimated as well that the strategic objective of the campaign was to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza, and reinstall a Fatah government. Beyond that they said that they sought to kill or capture Hamas's leadership.

But the Olmert-Livni-Barak government gave the IDF insufficient tools to achieve these grandiose plans. They only allowed the IDF to deploy one infantry brigade and two partial tank battalions. They refused to expand the operation to a divisional sized force, which would still have been too small to achieve any significant or long-lasting results. The limited geographical scope of the IDF operation - in a 2-3 kilometer zone in northern Gaza - had no impact of Hamas's ability to continue to shoot off rockets and missiles whose ranges run from 5-25 kilometers. In short, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government enunciated operational and strategic objectives that it clearly had no intention of achieving.

TODAY THE Gaza Strip is a terror state run by an Iranian proxy. Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005, Hamas and its terror partners in Fatah and Islamic Jihad have built terror armies along the model of Hizbullah. Hamas forces have received training in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. They have built up formidable arsenals of Katyusha and Kassam rockets as well as anti-tank missiles. And, according to Fatah and other sources, they have been augmented not only by Iranian, Syrian and Hizbullah operatives. Al-Qaida has also built up a presence in the area.

This combined force successfully overwhelmed Egyptian forces along Gaza's border with Egypt in January. Its current capacity has rendered extensive portions of southern Israel exposed to missile and mortar attacks. And unless it is routed militarily, its capabilities will only grow.

Israel has limited options to contend with the present and growing threat. For the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, the easiest solution would be to have someone else fight Hamas and its allies for Israel. But no such proxy force exists. Both the Americans and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government operate under the assumption that Fatah is a reasonable proxy. But experience has shown that this is not the case. From September 2005 when Israel withdrew its forces until June 2007 when Hamas ousted Fatah from power, Abbas and his US-trained forces did nothing to curb Hamas's growing power or limit Iran's growing control over Hamas. Confronted by Hamas forces last June, Fatah forces cut and ran rather than fight and those who remained were largely integrated into Hamas's burgeoning army. Since June, Fatah has shown no willingness to confront Hamas. And over the past week of Hamas's escalated missile offensive, Fatah stood foursquare with Hamas against Israel.

THEN TOO, the notion that an international force could be deployed in Gaza to protect Israel from the growing terror army at its doorstep similarly lacks credibility. At no time has any international force - whatever its composition - ever been interested or capable of defending Israel against Arab terror or military offensives - whether from Gaza, from Lebanon or indeed from Egypt or Syria. And there is no reason to believe that this historic state of affairs will change significantly in the future.

In the absence of proxies, Israel has two options going forward. First, it can incapacitate Hamas and second it can try to deter Hamas. To incapacitate Hamas, Israel must launch an operation aimed at cutting off Hamas's logisitical supply lines through the border with Egypt. It must fight Hamas forces on the ground with the aim of defeating them, and it must kill or capture Hamas's senior and mid-level leadership. Given that like Hizbullah, Hamas and its state-sponsors will seek to regenerate any diminished capacities by rearming and promoting new leaders, these operations must be continuous. Consequently, to incapacitate Hamas, and so secure southern Israel, Israel requires a continuous military presence in the Gaza Strip.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government has repeatedly rejected the redeployment of IDF forces to Gaza for any significant length of time. But they have never been called on to explain why the current state of affairs, in which an Iranian-proxy army with al-Qaida components is permitted to grow in close proximity to its civilian centers is preferable to such a long-term military presence in Gaza.

AS TO deterrence, it is unclear that it is possible to embrace deterrence as a strategy without first establishing a continuous military presence in Gaza. To succeed, deterrence must be based upon a credible threat to exact a cost for aggression that Hamas is unwilling to pay. In sending its leadership to ground while encouraging Gazans to confront IDF forces and "martyr" themselves, Hamas made clear that it views the sacrifice of its leadership as an unacceptable cost for its aggression. And yet, without forces on the ground in Gaza, the IDF lacks the intelligence necessary to conduct a wide-scale and successful assault on Hamas's leaders. So today, Israel lacks the capacity to base its operations in Gaza on a deterrence model.

There is an additional option which the government seems interested in adopting which is to conduct a new offensive every so often, when attacks foment a public outcry for action. It is far from clear though that this option is less costly either militarily or politically than maintaining a continuous presence in Gaza. Given Hamas's continuously expanding capabilities, each such operation will exact a large cost in the lives of IDF soldiers who will be required to repeatedly fight their way into Gaza. Moreover, each time Israel returns to Gaza it faces renewed international condemnation for taking action. A continuous presence in Gaza would not incur such costs.

Both Rice and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government argue that a renewed military presence in Gaza is a poor option because it would render negotiations towards the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem non-viable. But then, if those negotiations were successful, they would lead to the imposition of a Fatah-Hamas terror state which would not only not protect southern Israel from missile and rocket attack, it would expose central Israel to similar aggression.

It is unclear then, why the strategic aim they seek to achieve would leave Israel better off than an operation aimed at incapacitating Palestinian-Iranian terror forces and safeguarding Israeli territory from attack.

OTHER VOICES argue that a continuous Israeli presence along the Gaza-Egypt border would make it impossible for Israel to completely disengage from Gaza by enabling the Palestinians to link up with Egypt instead of Israel for electricity and other supplies. Israel, they claim, would still be perceived as responsible for Gaza and for the welfare of its Hamas-supporting population. These voices fail to ask a simple question: In whose eyes would Israel be considered responsible for Gaza's population?

The issue of Israel's responsibility under international law for the welfare of Gazans is an open one. Israel is not obligated to advance the aims of the Palestinians by accepting such responsibility. Beyond that, whether foreign governments perceive Israel as responsible for Gaza is not something that Israel can determine. The most it can do is seek to divest others of such a perception by explaining why it is not responsible for the welfare of Gaza's population.

By sending insufficient forces willy-nilly into Gaza over the weekend while conducting aerial bombings of empty buildings, Olmert, Livni and Barak showed that they have learned none of the lessons of the Second Lebanon War. Indeed, Barak showed that he has learned nothing from his experience as prime minister at the start of the Palestinian terror war in September 2000, when he responded to the lynching of Israeli reservists in Ramallah by bombing empty buildings and making empty threats to Yasser Arafat while begging him to take the Temple Mount.

How long will this unacceptable state of affairs be allowed to continue?

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.