As Israel's 60th Independence Day swiftly approaches, considerations of Zionism and its discontents come to mind.

The revolutionary notion that Zionism introduced into the Jewish mindset, informed by 19 centuries of powerless statelessness, was that Jews could, and indeed ought to stand up for themselves. From the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, until the advent of modern Zionism, such a notion seemed absurd. Throughout the centuries of exile, Jews understood that their survival depended on the kindness of strangers. Zionism came and said that was no longer the case. We Jews would take care of ourselves from now on.

Given this basic Zionist assertion, it is little wonder that the Jewish elites in the Diaspora opposed the movement. Their positions in their communities were based on their ability to thrive in powerlessness. A Zionist success in rebuilding the Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel would render their skills, if not irrelevant, than far less necessary than they had been.

In a sad twist of fate, Israel's current elites are the direct descendents not of their Zionist predecessors, but of the exile elites their predecessors fought. Sixty years after statehood was declared, Israel is led by men and women who oppose Jewish power and embrace instead the Diaspora model of ingratiating themselves with foreigners through appeasement.

TAKE SYRIA for example. Last week we learned two things. We learned, definitively, that with North Korean assistance, and Iranian collusion, Syria was illicitly building a plutonium based nuclear reactor that if permitted to reach completion, would have been capable of producing nuclear weapons. We also learned that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is conducting secret talks with Syria through the Islamist and anti-Semitic government of Turkey. If those talks are "successful," they will lead to an Israeli surrender of the strategically vital Golan Heights in exchange for a peace treaty with Syria.

Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is often described as a weak fool who enjoys hanging out with murderers like Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to prove his manliness.

Assad may be foolish, but he certainly knows his enemy well enough to play the Israeli elites like a virtuoso violinist.

The day before CIA Director Michael Hayden informed Congress of the details of Israel's Sept. 6 raid in Syria, Assad began deluging the Arab airwaves with declarations of his earnest efforts to convince Israel to give him the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace agreement. Olmert, for his part, didn't deny Assad's claims, and so seemed to accept them.

Being the radical leftwing trumpets they are, the Israeli media seized on the story. The TV, radio and tabloid elites ignored the strategic implications of the raid and opted instead to badger politicians who think it would be a bad idea to surrender the Golan Heights - and with them, Israel's ability to defend itself - in exchange for a piece of paper from Assad.

The media ignored completely that Syria's decision to build that nuclear facility placed it in open breach of its treaty obligations to the international community as outlined in the Nuclear Nonproliferation treaty of which it is a signatory. How can Assad be trusted to keep his word to Israel when he was just caught breaching his obligations to the entire international community in such a profound way?

Moreover, the local media ignored what the North Korean-built, Iranian-financed nuclear reactor revealed about the nature of Assad's regime. That nuclear proliferation cooperation demonstrated clearly that Syria is not a peaceful nation but a full member of the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean axis of evil.

THE ELITISTS' passion for pieces of paper - or even just negotiations about them - is a general one. Anyone who is willing to talk about signing one, whether they are American presidents or Syrian dictators, is a friend and a partner. And anyone who questions the elitists' stubborn belief in agreements as Israel's ultimate goal in all things is an enemy of peace.

Given Syria's radicalism, it is not clear how long the elites will be able to keep up their fiction of Syrian good will and credibility. But whereas many in Israel do not trust Syria, almost everyone is Israel trusts America. So to the extent they heard, it no doubt came as a shock to many Israelis that the Bush administration is trying to cancel President George W. Bush's signed 2004 pledge to then prime minister Ariel Sharon to accept, and so support Israel's right to maintain many of the communities that it has built in Judea and Samaria and in Jerusalem since the 1967 Six Day War.

In 2004, Sharon was faced with a difficult political reality. After trouncing the Left in the January 2003 elections by denouncing Labor leader Amram Mitzna's plan to unilaterally withdraw from Gaza, in December 2003, Sharon shocked his party and coalition members by announcing that he was adopting Mitzna's reviled plan as his own.

Sharon was unable to argue with his critics who asserted that an Israeli withdrawal would mean a terrorist takeover. Israel would be handing Fatah and Hamas terrorists their biggest victory ever and convincing them that there is no reason for them to accept Israel's right to exist and sue for peace.

Since Sharon had no answers for his critics, who were merely stating the obvious, he worked to change the subject by linking the withdrawal to a piece of paper. He begged Bush to write him a letter stating that the US would not expect Israel to throw out all of the 500,000 Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods in the framework of a peace treaty with the PLO. And in April 2004, Bush presented Sharon with a letter, which while qualified, was sufficient for him to claim a diplomatic victory that could justify the withdrawal. Bush wrote, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

THE LETTER was never the stunning endorsement that Sharon and his defenders in the local media made it out to be. But it was something. Today however, the Bush administration, which has sought to bar all Jewish building in both post-1967 neighborhoods in Jerusalem and all of Judea and Samaria including major population centers, is trying to disavow Bush's signed pledge entirely.

According to last Thursday's Washington Post, Bush administration officials are doing everything they can to try to get out of the President's commitment to Sharon. Justifying the letter as an insincere piece of political maneuvering used to help Sharon expel the Jews from Gaza and Northern Samaria in 2005, they explain that the letter is no longer politically necessary. It served its purpose of drumming up domestic Israeli support for the now completed withdrawal and expulsion and ought to be set aside.

As National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley gently phrased it, "The president obviously still stands by that letter of April of 2004, but you need to look at it, obviously, in the context in which it was issued."

In a breathtakingly inconsistent claim, former secretary of state Colin Powell asserted that while the administration issued the letter specifically in order to lead Israeli voters to believe they had won an American concession, he never anticipated "that Bush's letter would be perceived as a green light by Israel for adding to the settlements."

All of this was eminently predictable. Times change, interests change and policies adapt to new conditions. This is a basic and iron rule of politics. But Israel's elites refuse to accept it no matter how many times events bear it out. Take for example the Six Day War.

The Six Day War might never have happened if the US hadn't breached the signed commitment president Dwight Eisenhower made to Israel in 1957. After forcing Israel to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, Eisenhower pledged in writing that if the Egyptians ever closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, the US would come to Israel's aid. But when, in 1967 Egypt did just that, the US had more important things to attend to. And so Israel was forced to fulfill the Zionist vision and defend itself.

IN 2005, against the advice of the IDF General Staff, Sharon opted to vacate Gaza's international border with Egypt. Abrogating Israel's responsibility to secure the lives of its own citizens in the Western Negev and beyond, Sharon amended the peace treaty with Egypt to allow Egyptian forces to deploy along the border in the hopes that Egypt would guard the border for Israel. While Egypt was only too happy to deploy its forces in the Sinai, it has refused to take effective action to prevent Gaza from becoming a hub for international terror that is armed to the teeth with advanced weapons that have flooded in since Israel withdrew from the international border. And not only do they not help Israel, those Egyptian forces further complicate the task of Israeli military planners trying to figure out how to defeat Hamas.

Israel opted to lose the Second Lebanon War in 2006 by leaving Hizbullah intact in exchange for a never serious promise that UN forces would do what the IDF failed to do - namely, secure the border and prevent Hizbullah from rearming and reasserting its control over south Lebanon. And now, lo and behold, even the UN admits that UNIFIL has failed in its mission. Hizbullah is fully rearmed, retrained and based in force south of the Litani River.

Jews, who have clung to our religion and our traditions against all odds for thousands of years, are without a doubt a stubborn people. And Israel's Diaspora mentality elitists are anything if not tenacious in their belief that Israel is better off at the mercy of others.

But of course, the elites are not the entire country. They aren't even the majority, just a powerful minority. There can be little doubt that in due time the stubborn Zionist Jews will force our elitists from power and secure our country for the next 60 years.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Tuesday was a banner day, a proud day for Jewish conspiracy theorists in America. People like Joseph E. diGenova smiled with glee as they watched 84-year-old Ben Kadish carted into the Manhattan Federal District courthouse on charges of transferring classified information to Israel 25 years ago.

He's just like Jonathan Pollard, they whooped. Another Pollard! At last, we have proof that Israel operates spy rings and SLEEPER CELLS in America! They bragged and bragged and smiled and smiled as their terrorist metaphors got wilder and wilder.

Sleeper cells? You mean agents sent to a country to lay in wait for the command to attack? Well, not exactly.

DiGenova made his name as the federal prosecutor who railroaded Pollard into a life sentence for crimes that generally should have netted him no more than a few years in the slammer. Obviously he has a way with words. And when he told The New York Times "sleeper cells," apparently he was referring to the FBI agents who went to sleep for 23 years and then suddenly woke up and decided to cart an old man out of his nursing home and charge him with capital crimes.

Both the fact that Kadish was released on a paltry $300,000 bail and the details that have been reported about his case make it pretty clear that Kadish was not a very serious spy. The sum total of his alleged actions, which occurred between 1979 and 1985, reportedly involved taking documents out of the library at the Picatinny Arsenal in northern New Jersey where he worked as a mechanical engineer and giving them to an Israeli consular official. The documents weren't highly classified because Kadish had a low security clearance.

Out of the 50-100 documents he transferred over six years, three are mentioned in the indictment. He allegedly transferred a document relating to nuclear weapons - weapons Israel reportedly already had an arsenal full of in the early 1980s. He allegedly transferred data relating to the F-15 fighter jet, which Israel already owned. And he allegedly transferred information about the Patriot missile defense system - which the US gave Israel five years later.

There is a reason that Israeli commentators are crying foul with the Kadish episode. According to the media reports, in 2004 - a period in which US-Israeli strategic ties were in turmoil due to Israeli weapons sales to China, US weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and US adoption of the anti-Israel road map - the Bush administration pressed the Sharon government to acknowledge that 20 years earlier, when Pollard was transferring documents at a rate of hundreds per week to his Israeli handlers, Israel fielded another agent as well. Presumably, it was then that Israel was forced to divulge Kadish's identity to the Americans.

According to the Israeli media, subsequent to Israel's confidential statements to US officials, Kadish was questioned by the FBI and admitted to having transferred documents to Israel. He then left the country, traveled to Israel - where he could have stayed - and came home to the US.

Most Israeli commentators and unnamed government officials angrily allege that the timing of Kadish's arrest was chosen to damage Israel's relations with the US at a key moment. In two weeks President George W. Bush is scheduled to visit Israel to participate in its 60th Independence Day celebrations. It has been widely presumed that during his visit, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government will seek to secure Bush's agreement to commute Pollard's sentence and release him from prison before Bush leaves office. Kadish, it is alleged, was arrested to block any possibility that Pollard will be released.

Given the vindictiveness that has marked the US intelligence community's attitude toward Pollard since his arrest, it is possible that fear of a presidential pardon did inform the decision to arrest Kadish now. And yet, it is far from clear that an agreement on Pollard's release was ever in the cards. Bush has expressed no willingness to consider Israeli appeals for his release and neither the Sharon government nor the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has made any real efforts to secure Pollard's freedom. Indeed, in a sign of their contempt for Pollard, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has Pollard's former handler, Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan, sitting in the security cabinet.

It is also possible that Kadish was arrested to try to force Israel to make massive concessions to the Fatah terror group in order to secure a "peace agreement" between Israel and the PLO before Bush leaves office. In the past, the US has used allegations of Israeli espionage to cow Israel into toeing its line of appeasement towards the PLO. In 1997, the Clinton administration let loose hysterical headlines about a high-level Israel mole named "Mega" who had supposedly penetrated the highest levels of the US intelligence community. The story was a complete fabrication, but it came after a suicide bombing in Jerusalem had caused then-prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to cut off contacts with Yassir Arafat.

In 2004, the US indicted two senior AIPAC lobbyists in a transparently political move, claiming that they were trafficking in classified documents to try to force the Bush administration to do something to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The lobbyists are still awaiting their trial, which is looking more and more like a farce every day. But in the meantime, the US has been free from Israeli pressure to take the Iranian nuclear program seriously for four years.

Kadish was arraigned the same day that the Los Angeles Times broke the story that CIA Director Michael Hayden would be briefing Congress on Thursday about Israel's September 6 air strike in Syria. For the past six months, the administration did everything it could to prevent any information on the Israeli air strike from getting out. In the end, Hayden was compelled to inform Congress about the details of the raid after the legislature conditioned its approval of the intelligence budget on receiving a full briefing on the air strike.

According to the Los Angeles Times report and subsequent stories, Hayden's testimony would acknowledge that US intelligence agencies failed to recognize the dangers of the North Korean-built plutonium reactor that Syria had constructed not far from its border with Turkey. It was Israeli, rather than American intelligence agencies that penetrated the facility, brought back video and physical evidence of its character, and then effectively destroyed it in a complicated air strike and commando raid.

So according to US media reports, Hayden's testimony would demonstrate two basic truths that the Jewish conspiracy theorists in the US intelligence community and the State Department are uninterested in having the public or Congress notice: Israeli intelligence is superior to US intelligence; and the US alliance with Israel is vital to US national security.

Since Israel's independence 60 years ago and especially since US-Israel strategic ties blossomed after the Six Day War, Washington has been of two minds about the Jewish state. The first, public mind is that Israel is the US's strongest and most reliable ally in the Middle East, and that the US-Israel alliance is strong because it is based on shared values as well as shared interests.

The second view is that Israel is a burden. As purveyors of this view see things, Israel is the national "Fagin." It is underhanded, pushy and untrustworthy. Indeed, as far as the anti-Semites in Washington are concerned, Israel is the source of all the US's difficulties in the Arab world and even in Europe.

For years, the purveyors of the second view have carried out an independent foreign policy regarding Israel that is completely at odds with the official US policy of embracing Israel as an ally. Indeed, the State Department has undermined every presidential attempt to treat Israel well since 1948.

Yet both the Israeli attack against the Syrian nuclear program and Israel's attitude toward espionage show how ridiculous and counterproductive that unofficial - yet consistent - US policy toward Israel actually is. In the case of the operation in Syria, protestations of the Israeli Left about not wanting to embarrass Syrian dictator Bashar Assad aside, Israel had a clear national interest in exposing the nature of the target as quickly as possible. Moreover, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had a political interest in exposing the details of the raid to the Israeli public as quickly as possible.

And yet, bowing to US demands, Israel placed draconian censorship regulations on media reports of the strike. To please the likes of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who still clings to the notion that her brilliant diplomatic skills will enable her to convince the North Koreans to give up their nuclear arsenal, Israel agreed to hide information of its vital mission and massive success from both its own people and from the global audience.

As for espionage, as the late Yitzhak Rabin once noted, every few years Israel discovers another US agent committing espionage against the state. Rather than make a big deal about it, and in spite of the fact that some of the information being stolen is deeply damaging to Israel's national security, out of a sense of comity with Washington, Israel keeps the scandals quiet and generally deports the spies.

By arresting an 84-year-old World War II veteran in an effort to place Israel under a cloud of suspicion as its military triumph in Syria is exposed to the American people, the US is sadly showing Israel once again that nice guys finish last. If Israel wants to be treated with respect by the US, the lesson of the Kadish affair, of the Syrian raid and of the Pollard affair is that Israel had better start pushing back.

The first thing it should do is arrest officials suspected of transferring classified materials to the US without authorization. It should then publish the names and details of US spies whom Israel previously caught and treated with kid gloves. Then it should publicly demand that Bush release Pollard from the prison where he rots, while the likes of Hizbullah agent Nada Prouty - who penetrated both the FBI and the CIA - is expected to receive a six-month prison sentence for her crimes.

When Bush arrives to celebrate Israel's 60th birthday, Israel's leaders would do well to show him that at 60, Israel is a grownup country. And as such, it demands to be treated with the respect due to the US's most reliable ally in the Middle East.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speaking in February of the man she knows better than anyone else does, Michelle Obama said that her husband, Illinois Senator and candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination Barack Obama, is the only candidate for president who understands that before America can solve its problems, Americans have to fix their "broken souls."

She also said that her husband's unique understanding of the state of souls of the American people makes him uniquely qualified to be President. Obama can do what his opponent in the Democratic race Senator Hillary Clinton, and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, cannot do. He can heal his countrymen's broken souls. He will redeem them.

But then, saving souls is hard work, and Mrs. Obama won't place the whole burden on her husband. He'll make the Americans work for him. As she put it, "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

At base, Mrs. Obama's statement is nothing less than a renunciation of democracy and an embrace of fascism. The basic idea of liberty is that people have a natural right to live their lives as usual and to be uninvolved and uninformed. And they certainly have a right to expect that their government will butt out of their souls.

IN CONTRAST, fascist societies, as Jonah Goldberg notes in the latest issue of National Review, are all about the notions of "unity" and "change" and melding our broken souls into a fixed, united will for change that Obama has made the core theme of his campaign. Goldberg compared "unity" with "patriotism," and explained that while the latter connotes the willingness to defend the moral values of a society, unity is bereft of any moral content. "The only value of unity is strength, strength in numbers - and... that is a fascist value. That's the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination are invincible."

Many commentators have argued that Jews in both Israel and the US have a specific reason to fear an Obama presidency. Much attention has been paid to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the anti-Semitic, black supremacist preacher who has served as Obama's spiritual guide for the past 20 years. Then too, there are Obama's foreign policy advisors who range from the viscerally hostile towards Israel (Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Samantha Power, Merrill Tony McPeak) to the messianically hostile towards Israel (Dan Kurtzer). Obama's close associations with Palestinian and pan-Arab champions and jihad apologists like the late Edward Said and Prof. Rashid Khalidi, and his stated intention to have open negotiations with Iran about the mullocracy's nuclear weapons program, his monetary ties to anti-Israel donors like George Soros and to anti-Israel organizations like Moveon.org are similarly pointed to as reasons for concern.

But the fact is that for all his associations with Israel-bashers, Obama's stated positions on the Palestinian and Arab conflict with Israel are all but indistinguishable from those of his opponent Senator Hillary Clinton. Both Democratic candidates assert that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the root of the pathologies of the Arab world. Like President George W. Bush, both embrace the Fatah terror group as a legitimate organization and acceptable repository of Palestinian sovereignty. Both have hinted that they may be willing to open negotiations with Hamas. Both argue that the establishment of a Palestinian state will be a key foreign policy objective of their administrations.

While Sen. Clinton rejects Obama's desire to openly appease the Iran's mullahs, her announced strategy for contending with the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran would not necessarily be more effective than Obama's plan to appease the ayatollahs. Last week, Clinton explained that she believes that the US's position on Iran should be based on a credible threat of "massive retaliation" in the event that the mullocracy develops and uses nuclear weapons.

THERE ARE two reasons that a deterrence model will be as ineffective in curbing Iranian aggression as Obama's appeasement model. First, as last week's 25th anniversary of the Iranian-sponsored bombing of the US embassy in Beirut recalled, Iran has been attacking the US and its allies both directly and through proxies since 1979. To date, not only has the US failed to deter such attacks, it has never made Iran pay a price for them. With this abysmal track record against a non-nuclear Iran, it is hard to see how the US can threaten a nuclear-armed Iran with sufficient credibility to make a deterrence-based strategy successful.

The second reason that basing US policy towards Iran on a deterrence model will likely fail is because Iran's leadership has made clear that is not necessarily concerned about the survivability of Iran. From Ayatollah Khomeini to Ayatollah Khamenei to Ali Rafsanjani to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's leadership has made clear that they are not Iranian patriots but global Islamic revolutionaries. Given their millenarian, apocalyptic view of their country's purpose in world affairs, there is good reason to believe that a strategy based on some form of mutually assured destruction would have only marginal impact on Iran's decision-makers.

So from a foreign policy perspective, there is little to distinguish Sen. Clinton from Sen. Obama. Indeed, there is little that distinguishes the two candidates from a domestic policy perspective. But that gets us back to the messianic business.

OPPONENTS OF Clinton claim that she is a soulless woman who will do whatever is necessary to have power, because she likes power and wants it. But if this is true it is hard to see why a power-hungry president is worse than a president who believes that he is the people's redeemer. It is hard to see why a leader who wants power because she likes power is less reasonable than a president who thinks he has a right to demand that the American people follow his lead and fix their souls in the name of unity. In the former case, opposition to the leader is a policy dispute. In the latter case, it is apostasy.

When someone wants power for power's sake, that person tends to be fairly pragmatic. In his first term of office, when former president Bill Clinton - another consummate pragmatist who liked having power - understood his wife's healthcare plan was about to be defeated overwhelmingly by Congress, he shelved the plan and cut his losses.

A messianic wouldn't do that. When a messianic leader is faced with failure, his tendency is to castigate the people, or his political opposition, or the media as evil and to continue on unmoved and bring his country down with him. President Woodrow Wilson's unpopular and unsuccessful championing of US membership in the League of Nations and former president Jimmy Carter's wooing of American enemies in the name of peace are examples of what happens when messianic redeemer types are confronted with reality.

So with this distinction between the two senators in mind, the question is, how will a President Hillary Clinton or a President Barack Obama respond after being shown that appeasement of the Palestinians has once again failed and that appeasement or deterrence of the Iranian regime has also failed once again? Given their distinct emotional makeup, it can be assumed that Obama will argue that reality is wrong and continue on - Carter-like - into the abyss and drag his country and Israel down with him. Acting in a Clinton-like way, Clinton on the other hand, would be more likely to pick a fight with Serbia - or call for a federal ban on chewing tobacco in a bid to change the subject.

What is most interesting about the danger that Obama constitutes for Israel is how un-unique it is. It is no different than the danger the prospect his presidency constitutes for America. The reason that pseudo-realist Israel bashers and messianic peace mongering Israel bashers support Obama is because they naturally gravitate towards a man on a mission to save the free world from itself.

An empowered, free citizenry will question the realism behind their decision to pretend that the global jihad is the figment of the Jewish lobby's imagination. A cowed, on its way to being redeemed by Obama's cult of personality citizenry will be in no position to argue with them.

The same is as true of domestic issues as it is of foreign policy. When the Obama/Clinton tax hikes and economic protectionism exacerbate the current US recession, under an Obama presidency, rather than debating the merits of the administration's failed economic policies, the American people will be told that they need to have more "discussions" about race to remind them how mean they are and how much they are in need of President Obama's spiritual healing. If they are again attacked by jihadists, they will be lectured by Rev. Wright's longtime follower, their president, about how black enslavement, his white grandmother, Israel, anti-abortion senators and their own "cynicism" played a role in convincing the jihadists to kill innocents.

US Jews have always had a weakness for messianic leaders and movements. Sometimes, as in the case of the civil rights movement, that tendency towards utopianism has had good results. More often it has not. In the current presidential race, American Jews, like all their fellow Americans, would be wise to consider if they are truly ready to accept Obama as their savior.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Pessah - the Jewish celebration of freedom and God's dominion that begins on Saturday night - provides a timely insight into the foundations of Jewish faith and human nature.

Jews believe in a God without form. The Jewish God is ineffable. To Abraham himself, God appeared only in visions, never in the "flesh." And yet, the story of God's deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egyptian bondage is packed with physical proofs of this consummately non-physical God.

God exposes himself to Moses in the burning bush. And then, from Moses's first appeal to Pharaoh through the parting of the Red Sea, God exposes himself and his mastery of the universe and all that is in it again and again, in progressively powerful ways.

At the Pessah Seder, Jews recount these astounding manifestations of God's existence, presence and dominion. That is, at the Pessah Seder, Jews celebrate the physical manifestations of the God we know to be formless and ubiquitous.

Why would God feel the need to reveal himself? And why do Jews, who accept an ineffable God, place so much stress on his self-revelation?

By our nature, human beings are skeptical. Before we believe something, we require proof. Whether that proof is collateral for a bank loan, burning a bush without harming it, laying waste to Pharaoh's Egypt or parting the Red Sea, the fact is that without proof, humans will not long believe. To convince the Children of Israel to accept him and his laws throughout time, God showed us signs and wonders in Egypt that were powerful enough to keep us united as his people ever since.

Contrast this natural human skepticism and the Jews' reasoned faith in God with the international and Israeli Left's engineered credulousness and blind faith in Peace.

This week, former US president Jimmy Carter arrived in the Middle East on a "peace mission." Shunned by Israel's senior political leadership for his overtly hostile positions toward Israel and Jews, Carter had to suffice with a public dressing down for his incendiary anti-Israel rhetoric from otherwise friendly, and "pro-Peace," President Shimon Peres, and visits with Israeli doves affiliated with the non-Zionist Meretz party.

From Israel, Carter continued to the Fatah-led, Israel-defended Palestinian Authority in Ramallah where he laid a wreath at the grave of arch-murderer and master terrorist Yassir Arafat, and hugged and kissed Arafat's Fatah and Hamas heirs. Both visits, of course were conducted against the backdrop of Carter's well-publicized plan to meet with Hamas terror master and Iranian proxy Khalad Mashaal in Syria.

By meeting with Mashaal, Carter is arguably breaching US law, which prohibits American citizens from assisting terror groups. His planned meeting elicited criticism from the Bush administration. His radicalism fomented Israel's informal, but fairly firm boycott of his visit. And yet, his faith in Peace being what it is, Carter brushed off his critics as men and women of little faith. For their part, Carter's Israeli allies, Yossi Beilin, David Kimche and their fellow believers in Peace embraced him. These Israelis, like Carter, are not averse to meeting with Hamas.

The fact is, while Carter may be the loudest proponent of negotiating with Hamas, he is far from alone. To advance this view in America, Carter's Jewish-American and Israeli fellow believers just set up a new lobbying group in Washington. It is staffed by former Clinton administration, Peace Now, and Democratic Party officials. It is supported by the Israeli signatories to Yossi Beilin's European-financed 2003 Geneva "peace accord" with the Palestinian Authority's former propaganda minister Yassir Abd Rabo. The new lobby, "J Street," is tasked with financing the campaigns of American politicians who are willing to sacrifice the US alliance with Israel in the interest of Peace. Presumably, it is conversely tasked with scuttling the political fortunes of US politicians who refuse to do so.

It is hard to know what to make of either the Bush administration's criticism of Carter, or for that matter the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's shunning of the former president. Legal restrictions on maintaining contacts with terror operatives aside, Carter's hostility to Israel and his enthusiastic embrace of Hamas are the logical outcome of their own policies. Indeed, several government ministers from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's Kadima party have expressed willingness to engage Hamas. And at present, through Egypt and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is negotiating with Hamas toward a temporary cease-fire that would leave the Hamas regime in Gaza intact and armed.

The basic belief that informs both the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and the Bush administration is the same as Carter's. Namely, they believe that the Palestinian war against Israel is the consequence of Palestinian statelessness. Then, too, both governments accept the Arab and European assertion that the lack of Palestinian statehood is the root cause of the Arab and Islamic world's rejection of Israel's right to exist and of the larger pathologies of the jihad-supporting Arab and Islamic world.

This basic ideological premise has been the core belief of the Israeli and American policy-making classes since the advent of the Israeli-PLO "peace process" in 1993. And in light of this premise it is hard to see how the official boycott of Hamas is sustainable or even logical. The belief that the root cause of all the Middle East's troubles is a lack of Palestinian sovereignty generally, and more specifically the view that Israel's continued control over areas it secured during the third Arab war against Israel is the root of the conflict, renders Israel solely responsible for resolving the conflict. It is Israel, after all that is blocking Palestinian control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. It is Israel that is putting up obstacles to Palestinian sovereignty.

This is the view that informed Israel's 1993 decision to embrace the mass-murdering father of modern terrorism Yassir Arafat and his PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. It was this view that caused Israel to turn a blind eye to Arafat's transformation of Palestinian society into the most jihadist society in the Arab world through the constant indoctrination of his official Palestinian media organs, education systems and mosques.

It is this view that still brings Israel's leaders to refer to Judea and Samaria as "occupied"; to negotiate the partition of Jerusalem; to outlaw Jewish building in Judea and Samaria and limit Jewish building in Jerusalem; to demonize Jewish opponents of their view as "extremists" and "enemies of peace"; and to ignore the need to defend the western Negev from the Palestinian rocket campaign in Gaza.

It is this view that causes Israel's leaders to embrace Arafat's successor and deputy of 40 years, Mahmoud Abbas, as a "peace partner" while turning a blind eye to his open support for terror and Israel's violent destruction; his Fatah party's deep involvement in terror attacks against Israel; his financial support for terrorists and families of jailed and dead terrorists; and his operational ties to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Syria and Iran.

It is this view that has caused the US to treat Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as moral equivalents of terrorism; to support the establishment of a Palestinian state that will be ethnically cleansed of all Jews; to pressure Israel to allow pro-terror Palestinian militias to deploy in Judea and Samaria and to curtail its counter-terror operations; to provide financial, military and political support to pro-terror Palestinian militias; and to pressure Israel to stop building homes for Jews in Jerusalem.

And, of course, it is this view that renders the US and Israel's current boycott of Hamas unsustainable and illogical. If Israel is to blame for the lack of Palestinian statehood, then nothing the Palestinians believe or do is relevant. The organizational separation of Hamas from Fatah is irrelevant. Hamas's subservience to Iran is irrelevant. Just as is the case with Fatah, so too, Hamas's embrace of terror as a means of advancing Israel's complete destruction is not a reason to boycott it. It is blameless. Carter is right.

To maintain their belief in Peace through Israeli capitulation as a panacea for all the Middle East's deformities, Peace adherents have been forced to replace their natural skepticism with artificial credulity. For in contrast to the Children of Israel in Pharaoh's Egypt, not only have they received no evidence that their faith in Peace is reasonable, they have seen in the terrorist murder of more than 1,500 Israelis since 1993 and in the daily incitement for Israel's destruction and massing of Palestinian terror armies of jihad overwhelming proof that their faith is unfounded. Indeed, just this week, Israel Radio reported that Abbas was planning to bestow the highest official PA honors on two female terrorist murderers jailed in Israeli prisons.

Actually, the story about Abbas's plan to publicly embrace mass murderers is instructive of how the blind faith in Peace has been maintained now for 15 years. The Israel Radio broadcast forced the Olmert-Livni-Barak government for the first time to acknowledge Abbas's support for terrorists and so placed in question the rationality of their entire policy of capitulating for Peace. At their insistence, Abbas announced he was cancelling the awards.

But as Prof. Mordechai Keidar from Bar-Ilan University pointed out in a radio interview Wednesday, the only thing extraordinary about Abbas's planned ceremony was that it was reported by the Israeli media. The PA has been annually bestowing its highest honors on jailed mass murderers. It's just that the flock of Peace faithful who run Israel's media have never reported the story before.

Yet, in spite of its leadership's and media's attempts to hide the truth from them, the Israel public has insisted on maintaining its natural skepticism and limiting its faith to its revealed God. Tel Aviv University's monthly Peace Index, which surveys the Israeli public's views on issues relating to the "peace process," showed that despite the government's and media's pro-Peace rhetoric and attempts to obfuscate reality, the majority of Israeli Jews have not accepted their views.

The majority of Israeli Jews view Judea and Samaria as "liberated" rather than "occupied" territories. They do not believe that signing a peace treaty with the Palestinians will bring peace, and they oppose destroying the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. A poll of the public's views of the government's plans to negotiate the partition of Jerusalem taken this week by Bar-Ilan's Begin-Sadat Center showed that 71 percent of Israelis oppose partitioning Jerusalem and ceding the Old City to the Palestinians.

All told then, Pessah's lesson of reasoned faith in the true revealed God over blind faith in a false God has not been lost on the Jews. And the celebration of faith and freedom that Pessah embodies should instill us with certainty that one day soon, our leaders who uphold the irrational belief in fake Peace will be replaced by others who reject it.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Speaking to IDF commanders in Judea and Samaria last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert exhorted the officers tasked with preventing Palestinians from attacking Israel while operating under civilian cover to have sympathy for them. Olmert said "Take all the Palestinians who have been stripped at the roadblocks just because of fear that there may be terrorists and terror operatives among them. Take all those who wait at roadblocks because of fear that a car bomb may drive through the same roadblock. This could be a boiling cauldron, liable to explode and cause horrible burns, and it could be something else, dependent only on your ability to act wisely and forcefully."

Since Olmert knows that IDF soldiers are as courteous as possible to Palestinians at roadblocks, his statement will have two major consequences. First it will cause a loosening of regulations at roadblocks and so impair IDF counterterror capabilities. Second, by insultingly insinuating that IDF forces are cruel, Olmert demoralized his own soldiers and reduced their willingness to accomplish their mission by hinting that they cannot expect the government to back them.

Olmert's message is just the latest action his government has taken in recent weeks that undermine the IDF's ability to maintain its military success since 2002 in defeating Palestinian terrorists in Judea and Samaria and preventing them from reorganizing.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government's decision to take down roadblocks throughout Judea and Samaria; provide immunity from arrest to wanted terror fugitives; and permit the deployment of US-backed Fatah militias in Jenin all serve to directly undermine the IDF's remarkable achievements in defeating and preventing the reconstitution of the Palestinian terror war machine in Judea and Samaria since Operation Defensive Shield was carried out in 2002. Even more disturbingly, its reported willingness to cede the Jordan Valley to Fatah in the negotiations it is now conducting with Fatah leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei indicate that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is ready to transform Judea and Samaria into a base for global jihadist forces just as occurred when Israel surrendered Gaza's border with Egypt in 2005.

That the government is squandering the IDF's hard-won achievements in Judea and Samaria is made clear in a paper on counterinsurgency warfare authored by Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror released this week by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Amidror's paper, "Winning Counterinsurgency War: The Israeli Experience," focuses on Israel's military defeat of Palestinian terror forces in Judea and Samaria during and subsequent to Operation Defensive Shield.

AMIDROR IDENTIFIES six components of counterinsurgency warfare which he deems essential for effecting military victory over irregular forces. These components are: a political decision by the government to defeat terrorism; winning and maintaining control of the territory from which terrorists operate; acquiring relevant intelligence; isolating the terror enclaves from outside supporters; multidimensional cooperation between intelligence gatherers and fighting forces; and separating civilians from terrorists. Through its actions, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government it is undermining four of these components.

After identifying what he views as the essential components of successful counterinsurgency campaigns, Amidror identifies and defines three forms of military victory. First, there is "total victory" which involves both a military defeat of insurgent or terror forces and the political reorganization of their societies from terror-supporting societies into terror-combating societies. Second, there is "temporary victory" which involves a one-off military defeat of enemy forces which is not combined with any political transformation of their societies. Finally, Amidror considers what he refers to as "sufficient victory." As he defines it, a sufficient victory involves defeating an irreconcilable foe and then preventing him from rebuilding his capacity to wage war.

Like a temporary victory, a sufficient victory doesn't entail any political transformation of enemy society, and indeed it takes for granted that such a transformation is impossible to enact. But as opposed to a temporary victory, Amidror argues that the effect of a sufficient victory can be longstanding if the victorious side is willing and able to consistently prevent enemy forces from reconstituting themselves. That is, a sufficient victory requires a continuous rather than one-off campaign.

Amidror's definition of sufficient victory leads him to conclude that contrary to the approach of the Israeli and Western Left, there is a military option for victory in counterinsurgency wars devoid of political transformation. From an Israeli perspective, Amidror's vision of counterinsurgency warfare view is reasonable and understandable.

Israel's options for transforming Palestinian society from a terror-supporting society to a terror-combating society are limited. Influenced by domestic, pan-Arab and pan-Islamic jihadist indoctrination; supported militarily, financially and politically by Arab states, Iran, terror groups and the West, the Palestinians have little reason to transform.
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MOREOVER, ISRAEL's strategic and national interests in maintaining control over Judea and Samaria could render sustainable a military strategy with no withdrawal element. This is not the case in other battlefields such as the US counterinsurgency in Iraq.

To a degree, Amidror's view that sufficient victory is possible is echoed in recent statements by US military commanders in Iraq. In a dispatch from Iraq published last month in National Review, Richard Lowry reported, "For all the security gains over the last year, American commanders believe they have hit a plateau." Absent coherent, competent action by the Iraqi government to secure and maintain the loyalty of Iraqis to the Iraqi state, like the IDF in Judea and Samaria, all US forces in Iraq can do is keep violence down to sufferable levels.

Yet in contrast to Israel's success in Judea and Samaria, the success of US counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq is the consequence first and foremost of their politically-transformative guiding principles. As Lowry noted, the 80,000 Iraqi security volunteers who now openly collaborate with US forces in counter-terror operations, "represent more or less a direct transfer of forces from the enemy's side to ours."

In Israel, the basic assumption that guided both the decision by the Rabin-Peres government to embrace the PLO and form the Palestinian Authority in 1993 and the decisions by subsequent governments to leave the PA in place and maintain allegiance to the PLO as a negotiating partner was that like the Iraqi security volunteers, and like the South Lebanese Army which supported IDF operations in South Lebanon from 1985 through 2000, PLO and Fatah forces would act as transformative agents in Palestinian society moving it from a terror-supporting society to a terror-combating society.

This view, always controversial, has been proven wrong again and again. Just last week, the PLO ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki restated the PLO's aim of destroying Israel in an interview with Lebanese television.

In Zaki's words, "The PLO... has not changed its platform even one iota." That platform, to destroy Israel in stages, remains the objective of the PLO. He continued, "In light of the weakness of the Arab nation and the lack of values, and in light of the American control over the world, the PLO proceeds through phases, without changing its strategy. Let me tell you, when the ideology of Israel collapses, and we take, at least, Jerusalem, the Israeli ideology will collapse in its entirety, and we will begin to progress with our own ideology, Allah willing, and drive them out of all of Palestine."

Israel's willingness to maintain its support for the PLO in spite of the PLO and Fatah's obvious rejection of Israel's right to exist and their continuous support and involvement in terror attacks against Israel exposes two flaws inherent in Amidror's view that it is possible to maintain a sufficient victory in counterinsurgency wars over the long term without inducing political transformation of enemy societies.

The first flaw is that it takes as a given that the will of the victorious army's government to maintain counterinsurgency operations will remain constant. The Olmert-Livni-Barak government's maintenance of the inherently adversarial Fatah terror group as a legitimate negotiating partner shows that this is not the case. The government's commitment to Fatah necessarily induces it to undermine IDF achievements in Judea and Samaria. Those achievements are inimical to the interests of Fatah and so, from the government's current perspective, they must be cancelled to please Fatah.

Since 2002, the IDF's military control over Judea and Samaria has not involved any serious efforts to transform Palestinian society on the grassroots level. It has not enhanced security for Palestinian civilians who are terrorized by terror operatives operating in their villages and towns. As Amidror notes, Israel's actions to separate civilians from terrorists in Judea and Samaria are limited to crafting operations that minimize collateral damage. But while Israel does not target Palestinian civilians, it has done nothing to prevent them from being targeted by Palestinian terrorists. And so, it has given them no option to fight those terrorists. As a consequence although militarily the situation in Judea and Samaria has been transformed over the past six years, politically, the only change among Palestinians is that they have become more radicalized.

And here lies the second flaw in his analysis. To be successful, a counterinsurgency war must have a political component that reaches out to enemy populations. While it is true that Israel has limited capacity to change the way that Palestinians think about Israel and the form their society ought to take, Israel does have some capacity. For instance, Israel could launch a hearts and minds campaign among Israeli Arabs who are both politically and demographically linked to the Palestinians.

Such a campaign would be two-pronged. First it would involve a concentrated law and order campaign whose aim would be to reassert Israel's sovereign authority in Israeli Arab areas. Second, it would secure law-abiding Israeli Arabs while delegitimizing the current anti-Israel, pro-terror leadership now in charge of Israeli Arab society and so cultivate the conditions necessary to replace that leadership with Israeli Arabs who embrace their identity as Israelis and oppose terrorism. The impact of such a campaign on the Palestinians in both Judea and Samaria would no doubt be dramatic.

Amidror makes the important point that there is no empirical data that proves the oft-repeated contention that terror-supporting societies are more willing to sacrifice for victory than terror-combating societies. As the Israeli public has shown since the Palestinians began their terror war in 2000, Israelis are just as willing, if not more willing, to make sacrifices for victory than the Palestinians. But for victory to be accomplished and secured, a military campaign needs to be complimented by a political campaign led by a political leadership that explains reality to its own public and is able to give terror-supporting societies another option.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The regime-affiliated Iranian Fars news agency published a sensational story this week. According to the Fars report, Saudi Arabia and Israel collaborated in killing Iranian terror-master Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in February. The story is important regardless of whether it is true. It is important because it says something important about the nature of Iran's relationship with Syria. Specifically, it says that Iran views Syria as a vassal state.

If Teheran were not convinced of its control of the Syrian regime, it would never have dared to publish a story that places the Assad regime in an open confrontation with Saudi Arabia. An even partially independent Syria would never go along with such an open challenge to Saudi Arabia.

Syria, of course, is not Iran's only proxy in the Arab world. There is the Hamas regime in Gaza as well. On Thursday the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released an in-depth report on Hamas's military buildup since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005. The report notes that Hamas receives arms and funding from Iran and Syria and sends its fighters for extending training at camps in Iran and Syria.

By directly supporting Hamas and by supporting Hamas indirectly through Syria and Hizbullah, Teheran has transformed Gaza into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Iran. While Hamas may have independent interests, the fact is that any independent will Hamas may have had at one time has become entirely subservient to Teheran. This is so because Teheran has rendered itself Hamas's indispensable ally and protector. Without Iran, Hamas would have no staying power.

Then there is Lebanon. The weak Saniora government, which was brought to power by the anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian March 14 Democracy Movement three years ago, is clearly no match for Iran and its proxies. Presidential elections have been held up for five months due to Hizbullah's Syrian- and Iranian-ordered refusal to agree on a compromise candidate. The Saniora government needs Hizbullah's agreement because Iran's proxies have murdered a sufficient number of cabinet ministers and members of parliament to take away Saniora's parliamentary capacity to elect a successor to the Syrian-puppet, former president Emile Lahoud.

The assassination of political opponents in Lebanon, of course, began in earnest with the March 2005 assassination of pro-Western and pro-Saudi former prime minister Rafik Hariri. This week in Washington, Sen. Arlen Specter asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to comment on an interesting Syrian offer. According to Specter, during Jordanian King Abdullah's visit to Washington last month, he suggested that Syria might be willing to rein in Hizbullah and Hamas in exchange for an offer of immunity for President Bashar Assad in the UN's probe of Hariri's murder. Rice rejected the offer, but that is not what is interesting.

What is interesting is that Syria would feel comfortable making what amounts to a confession of control over Hizbullah and Hamas. While at first glance the Syrian offer seems to contradict the assertion that Syria is an Iranian proxy, it actually does no such thing. It shows that Iran is willing to shuffle some proxies around to protect other ones. To protect Assad, for instance, Iran may be willing to have Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal temporarily decamp to Teheran or Qatar or Bahrain. While such a move would have absolutely no impact on Iran's continued control over its proxies, it could neutralize the UN tribunal's threat to the Syrian regime.

To sum up, through its proxy strategy, Iran has taken control of Syria, has paralyzed and is increasingly calling the shots in Lebanon, and has effective control over Gaza, from which it can attack Israel and Egypt at will. And of course, it is the primary sponsor of the insurgency in Iraq.

LED BY Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the Sunni Arab states are well aware of Iran's proxy strategy for attaining regional dominance, and they are not pleased. The partial boycott of the Arab League summit in Damascus last month was the Sunni Arab states' way of showing their displeasure with Iran's domination of Syria and Lebanon.

On a more operational level, this week the Syrian media reported that the Syrian oppositionist National Salvation Front run by the Muslim Brotherhood and former Syrian vice president Abd al Halim Khaddam will launch an anti-regime satellite television channel in a few months. Presumably wealthy Gulf kingdoms are bankrolling the project.

Strategically, the Sunni Arab states have voiced varying degrees of interest in building their own nuclear programs to compete with the Iranian nuclear program.

But diplomatic snubs, jihadist television stations with anti-regime bents, and loud plans to build nuclear reactors will not suffice to defeat Iran or even to slow down its bid for regional domination. And the fact is that the Sunni states are aligned with most of Iran's policies. They keep Iraq at arm's length and loudly criticize US operations in the country. They continue to back Hamas and ostracize Israel. And they have taken no substantive stands against Hizbullah's subversion of the Saniora government since the end of the Second Lebanon War.

The main reason that the Sunni Arab countries cannot contend with Iran is that their publics share Iran's jihadist ideology. And their publics share Iran's general jihadist ideology because the Sunni states have indoctrinated their publics to believe in jihad through their state-controlled media.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their Sunni Arab brothers are in no position to argue with Iran publicly or to confront Iran's Arab proxies because they can't explain to their own people why Iran's bid to destroy Israel and to dominate the world in the name of Islam is a bad thing.

The attraction of Iran's jihadist ideology for so many Muslims has also helped Teheran expand its army of proxies. Acting as the avant guard of global jihad, Iran has collected otherwise adversarial terror groups in their hours of need and has transformed them into Iranian proxies over time. After the al-Qaida leadership fled Afghanistan in late 2001, for instance, many of its leaders received sanctuary in Iran from which they continued to operate.

The late al-Qaida in Iraq commander Abu Musab Zarkawi received medical care in Iran and entered Iraq from Iran. He received his operational orders from the al Qaida leadership in Iran.

In a recent interview with the Qatari Al-Arab newspaper translated by MEMRI, Ahmad Salah al-Din, who serves as the spokesman for the Iraqi Sunni jihadist group Hamas-Iraq, alleged that al-Qaida in Iraq today is wholly subservient to Iran. Salah al-Din claimed, "We found Iranian toman [currency] at an al-Qaida headquarters that we uncovered. We have also captured Iranian weapons, not to mention audio and video recordings containing announcements by al-Qaida fighters that they had received training in Iranian military camps and that al-Qaida wounded were being transported to Iran for medical treatment."

So too, Iran has a long history of collaboration with Fatah dating back to the early 1970s, when Ayatollah Khomeini's future revolutionary leaders received training in PLO camps in Lebanon. In 1999, as Yasser Arafat geared up his terror armies ahead of the launch of his terror war against Israel in 2000, Iran began funding Fatah terror cells. Today, after sponsoring Hamas's rout of Fatah in Gaza last June, Iran no longer needs to deal with the Fatah leadership. Through Syria, Hamas and Hizbullah it controls Fatah terror cells directly.

IRAN'S POLICY of combining a proxy war strategy with a popular revolutionary ideology is almost an exact reenactment of the Soviet Union's Cold War strategy for fighting the US. Two things, however, distinguish Iran's war against the West today from the Soviets' war against the West in the 20th century. First, Iran is much less powerful than the Soviet Union was. Second, the Iranian regime is far less open to deterrence than the Soviets were.

As David Wurmser, US Vice President Richard Cheney's former Middle East adviser noted recently at an address before the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, the Iranian regime is motivated by a messianic ideology with a strong apocalyptic component. This renders useless the threat of mutually assured destruction.

The other main distinction between the Soviet war against the West and the Iranian war against the West is that the US-led West embraced a dual strategy of confrontation and containment against the Soviets. Today, the same US-led West follows no coherent strategy for contending with Iran.

The only battleground where Iranian proxies are directly confronted today is in Iraq. After the 2006 Iranian proxy war against Israel, the US largely abandoned its support for the Saniora government. Hizbullah has been permitted to rebuild its forces and its arsenal and to reassert control over much of south Lebanon and to extend its control north of the Litani River. Rather than confront Hamas, at the US's insistence, Israel has done nothing to prevent Hamas's military buildup in Gaza or even to prevent it from continuing its rocket campaign against the western Negev.

Then too, by supporting the defeated Fatah leadership, the US and Israel are indirectly strengthening Hamas. During the Arab League summit, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas announced that he spends some 58 percent of his US, Israeli and European supplied budget on paying the salaries of 77,000 officials who serve under the Hamas regime in Gaza. So by funding Fatah, which supports Hamas, Israel and the US are strengthening Iran's control of Gaza through its Hamas proxy. They are also facilitating the weaker Fatah's incremental absorption into the Iranian axis.

As for Syria, both Israel and the US consistently ignore the fact that Syria is no longer an independent actor. By effectively adopting the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group's recommendations from 2006, the Bush administration and Israel give credence to the notion that Syria will moderate its behavior if Israel surrenders the Golan Heights, and so encourage Iran to continue its aggression by seeming to reward it.

Then too, while allowing Sunni states to support the Muslim Brotherhood as a presumed counterweight to Iran, Israel and the US ignore the repeated pleas of Syrian Kurds for assistance in their campaign to overthrow the Syrian regime in favor of a federal, anti-Iranian democratic state. The Syrian Kurds receive no assistance from either the US or Israel in their own bid to set up a pro-democracy satellite television station to broadcast into Syria, even as they are violently repressed by the regime.

In the absence of a strategy of confronting Iran either directly or through its proxies, the only coherent course that remains is one of containment. But this option is raft with danger. With Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement this week that Iran is introducing 3,000 upgraded centrifuges to its Natanz nuclear installation, it is clear that international sanctions have had no impact on Iran's quest for nuclear weapons. It is also clear that if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it will be impossible to confront its proxies, who will operate under Iran's nuclear umbrella.

So as Iran progresses forward with its grand strategy for regional hegemony, the West dithers and so assists it. No wonder Ahmadinejad is always smiling.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It has taken seven months, but it appears that the Bush administration has finally buckled under Congressional pressure and is ready to give US lawmakers a full briefing on the September 6 IDF bombing raid against the North Korean-built nuclear installation in Syria. Sunday it was reported that Congress has forced the administration's hand on the issue by making its approval of the administration's intelligence budget contingent on receiving a full briefing on the raid.

Israel, which initially was upset with the administration's insistence on silencing all discussion of the Sept. 6 operation, is now reportedly unhappy with the administration's decision to release its details. The administration is expected to provide the information at Congressional hearings later in the month and Israeli Defense Ministry officials are beside themselves.

Defense officials fear that the revelation of Syria's rogue activities will push Syrian dictator Bashar Assad over the edge. They caution that today, in the aftermath of terror-master Imad Mughniyeh's assassination in Syria in February, and with heightened tensions along Israel's borders with Lebanon and Syria, Assad may view the exposure of his nuclear proliferation activities as an invitation to throw caution to the wind. He may embrace his exposure as a full-fledged member in the North Korean-Iranian-Syrian axis of nuclear proliferating, terror-sponsoring states and take actions commensurate with his status.

Both the Defense Ministry's concerns about the consequences of exposing the Israeli operation and Congress's demand that the details of the raid be revealed demonstrate important lessons about the constraints and imperatives that fighting long, complicated wars place on policymakers in democratic societies.

ISRAEL'S POSITION reflects a conflict between immediate and long-term interests. Israel has an immediate interest in dissuading Syria from attacking either directly or through any of Syria's multiple terror proxies. It also has an interest in protecting intelligence sources and methods which may be compromised by a disclosure of the operation.

Israeli politicians have no need to inform the Israeli public of the nature of the raid because among the Israeli public, there is a consensus regarding the nature of the threat that Syria poses to the country. Israelis understand that Syria cannot be permitted to acquire certain arsenals and they understand that some things are better left unreported. The Israeli public's relative sophistication on the issue did not spring from nowhere. Syria has been in a declared state of war against Israel for 60 years. And every time that Israelis have permitted ourselves to believe that Syria might be interested in ending that state of war, through their own actions the Syrians have been quick to dispel the notion.

While Israel's immediate interests are understandable, in the medium and long terms, given the rogue nature of the Syrian regime, its strategic alliance with Iran and its strategic collaboration with North Korea, Israel has its own strategic interest in exposing Syria and building an operational alliance with the US to defeat Syria and Iran in the war that they wage with North Korean assistance against Israel and the US. That medium- and long-term interest ought to outweigh immediate concerns. And the outcry in the Defense Ministry should simply be understood as an expression of dismay at the inevitable cost of building alliances.

The standoff between the administration and Congress on the nature of the Sept. 6 raid is illustrative of the second lesson for policymakers that the Syrian operation manifests. It goes to the heart of the need for policymakers in democratic societies to be open with their publics about the identity of their adversaries and of the nature of the war being waged against them in order to form a consensus about the nature of those adversaries and the need to combat them like the consensus that already exists in Israel about Syria.

SINCE SEPTEMBER, Congressional leaders have given three main justifications for their need to understand what happened on Sept. 6. First, they have argued that lawmakers and the American public have a right to understand the significance of the target in light of what it says about North Korean nuclear proliferation activities.

Last year, the US signed an agreement with North Korea. North Korea pledged to disable its nuclear installation at Yongbyon and to give a full accounting of its other nuclear installations, its nuclear arsenal and materials and its nuclear proliferation activities. The US in exchange agreed to lift financial sanctions against Pyongyang, normalize relations between Washington and Pyongyang, remove North Korea from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, and provide economic assistance to North Korea. The US is still awaiting North Korean compliance. A disclosure of the nature of the target of Israel's Sept. 6 operation in Syria, Congress argues, is essential for assessing the reasonableness of the US's current North Korean policy.

Moreover, Congressional leaders - and most prominently among them, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Peter Hokstra - have argued that by failing to give a full accounting of the IDF raid, the administration is preventing lawmakers and the US public from making an educated assessment of the nature of the threat that Syria poses to US national security interests. Syria actively promotes war in Iraq by training Iraq-bound fighters on its soil and acting as the major transit point to Iraq for jihadists. Syria is the headquarters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and several other Islamic terror groups. It is Hizbullah's logistical backbone. While all of these actions are sufficient to place Syria squarely in the camp of US enemies, its apparent nuclear proliferation with Iran and North Korea requires a reclassification of the threat posed by Syria from nuisance to strategic threat.

Finally, American lawmakers have argued that understanding the Israeli operation is essential for understanding the nature of the Iranian-Syrian-North Korean alliance. By preventing the release of details on the raid, the administration is denying Congress and the American public the ability to understand the rationale and the modes of operation of arguably the greatest threat to US national security. How can Congress support an ally like Israel if it doesn't understand why what Israel does promotes US national security interests? And how can Congress support US actions in the war if it isn't aware of the nature of the axis fighting the US?

WHAT IS most striking about the Bush administration's unwillingness to reveal the nature of the Israeli raid to Congress is how it seems to upset the administration's own war efforts in Iraq. Working together, under Iranian control, for the past five years Syria and Iran have been the major forces behind the war in Iraq. Jihadists of both the Sunni and Shiite variety enter Iraq from Syria and Iran. They receive training in both countries. They receive direction and orders from Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

And yet, rather than make clear to Congress and to the US public that the war in Iraq is not an Iraqi war per se but a key battleground in a regional war in which Iran and Syria have combined forces on multiple fronts in a bid to defeat the US and its allies, the Bush administration obfuscates that central truth. For the past five years, key administration officials have repeated the bizarre claim that Iran and Syria share the US's interest in bringing stability to Iraq and that responsibility for ending the war rests solely on the shoulders of Iraq's government rather than on the shoulders of the foreign governments who are waging the war.

The administration itself then holds a major portion of responsibility for the fact that five years after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, the majority of Americans believes that the US doesn't have an interest in what happens in post-Saddam Iraq and should simply remove its forces from the country at the first opportunity. If the administration was less concerned about obfuscating Syrian and Iranian centrality in the war, there can be little doubt that more Americans would understand why it is essential that the US not allow Iraq to fall into their hands. Indeed, a larger number of Americans would understand that Iran and Syria are waging this proxy war against coalition forces and Iraqis in a bid to advance their goal of regional dominance.

Notably the US official who has been most consistent in highlighting Iran's central role in Iraq is US Commander in Iraq General David Petreaus. Petreaus and his officers, whose job it is to win the war in Iraq, apparently understand what the administration has spent the past five years ignoring. They understand that to secure the public support necessary to fight a long war, they need to tell the American public what the war is about, who the US is fighting and what is at stake.

Last week the Iranians rejected yet another European-American offer to appease them in a North Korean-styled deal in exchange for a pause in their uranium-enrichment activities. The Iranians also introduced a new set of advanced centrifuges to their Natanz nuclear installation which are apparently better equipped to enrich uranium to weapons grade than the current 3,000 centrifuges now operating at the facility. The Iranians also promised that on Tuesday April 8 - a day they have designated their celebration of nuclear power day - they will provide more "good news" about their atomic program.

So as it wages war against the US in Iraq and against Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, supported by its Syrian and North Korean allies, Iran moves brazenly and swiftly forward in its bid to acquire nuclear weapons. And as it moves, it drags the US and Israel ever closer to a great war. The question is how can the US be expected to handle the coming conflagration when it demurs from explaining its eminently more manageable current situation either to itself or to its public?

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

The West stands by idly as its foundations are rent asunder.

Last Friday the UN's Human Rights Council took a direct swipe at freedom of expression. In a 32-0 vote, the council instructed its "expert on freedom of expression" to report to the council on all instances in which individuals "abuse" their freedom of speech by giving expression to racial or religious bias.

The measure was proposed by paragons of freedom Egypt and Pakistan. It was supported by all Arab, Muslim and African countries - founts of liberty one and all. European states abstained.

The US, which is not a member of the Human Rights Council, tried to oppose the measure. In a speech before the council, US Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Warren Tichenor warned that the resolution's purpose is to undermine freedom of expression because it imposes "restrictions on individuals rather than emphasiz[ing] the duty and responsibility of governments to guarantee, uphold, promote and protect human rights."

By seeking to criminalize free speech, the resolution stands in breach of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of that document states explicitly: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

The Europeans' decision to abstain rather than oppose the measure seems, at first glance, rather surprising. Given that the EU member states are among the UN's most emphatic champions, it would have seemed normal for them to have opposed a resolution that undermines one of the UN's foundational documents, and indeed, one of the most basic tenets of Western civilization.

But then again, given the EU's stands in recent years against freedom of expression, there really is nothing to be surprised about. The EU's current bow to intellectual thuggery is of course found in its response to the Internet release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' film Fitna.

The EU has gone out of its way to attack Wilders for daring to exercise his freedom of expression. The EU's presidency released a statement condemning the film for "inflaming hatred." Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende issued statements claiming that the film "serves no other purpose than to cause offense."

Then, too, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon blasted the film as "offensively anti-Islamic."

These statements follow the EU's quest to restrict freedom of speech following the 2005 publication of cartoons of Muhammed in Denmark's Jyllands Posten newspaper. They also come against the backdrop of the systematic silencing of anti-jihadist intellectuals throughout the continent. These intellectuals, such as Peter Redeker in France and Paul Cliteur in the Netherlands, are threatened into silence by European jihadists. And the governments of Europe either do nothing to defend the threatened thinkers or justify the intellectual blackmailers by sympathizing with their anger.

IT IS axiomatic that freedom of expression is the foundation of human freedom and progress. When people are not allowed to express themselves freely, there can be no debate or inquiry. It is only due to free debate and inquiry that humanity has progressed from the Dark Age to the Digital Age. This is why the first act of every would-be tyrant is to take control of the marketplace of ideas.

Yet today, the nations of Europe and indeed much of the Western world, either sit idly by and do nothing to defend that freedom or collaborate with unfree and often tyrannical Islamic states and terrorists in silencing debate and stifling dissent.

There are two reasons why this is the case.

First, the political Left, which rules supreme in the EU's bureaucracy as well as in most of the intellectual centers of the free world, has shown through its actions that it has no real commitment to democratic values. Rather than embrace democratic values, the Left increasingly adopts the parlance of democracy cynically, with the aim of undermining free discourse in the public sphere in the name of "democracy."

Writing of the leftist uproar against Wilders' film in Europe in Der Speigel, Henryk Broder noted that almost across the board, the European media has castigated Wilders as "a right-wing populist." As Broder notes, on its face this assertion is absurd, for Wilders is a radical liberal.

In Fitna, the outspoken legislator shows how verses of the Koran are used by jihadists to justify the most heinous acts of mass murder and hatred. His film superimposes verses from the Koran calling for the murder of non-Muslims with actual scenes of jihadist carnage. It also superimposes verses from the Koran vilifying Jews with footage of Islamic clerics repeating the verses and with a three-year-old girl saying that she learned that Jews are monkeys and pigs from her Koran classes. Fitna concludes with a challenge to Muslims to expunge these hateful, murderous religious tenets from their belief system.

While arguably, but not necessarily, inflammatory, Wilders' film serves as an invitation to Europe and to the Islamic world to hold an open debate. His film challenges viewers - both Muslim and non-Muslim - to think and to discuss whether Islam accords with the notions of human freedom and what can be done to stop jihadists from exploiting the Koran to justify their acts of murder, tyranny and hate.

As Broder notes, by calling Wilders a "right-wing populist," the Left seeks to silence both him and his call for an open discourse. The underlying message of such labeling is that Wilders is somehow beyond the pale of polite company and therefore his message should be ignored by all right thinking people. If you don't want to be intellectually isolated and socially ostracized like Wilders, then you mustn't watch his film or take it seriously. Doing so would be an act of "right-wing populism" - and everyone knows what that means.

Like all anti-democratic movements, today's political Left seeks to silence debate and so undermine democracy, first, by demonizing anyone who doesn't agree with it and then by passing laws that criminalize speech or override the people's right to decide how they wish to live.

In the EU, the Lisbon Treaty effectively regurgitated by bureaucratic fiat the constitution that was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands and was set to be defeated by the British. In Britain, Parliament has labored for years to pass a law that would criminalize insulting Islam. Then, too, one of the first actions the Brown government took after entering office last summer was to prohibit its members from talking about "Islamic terrorism."

AS IN Europe, so too in Israel, the Left goes to extraordinary lengths to undermine democracy in the name of democracy.

In just one recent example, this week leftist law professor Mordechai Kremnitzer warned the Knesset not to pass a law enabling a referendum on any future partition of Jerusalem or surrender of the Golan Heights. As Kremnitzer sees it, "If the verdict of a referendum is determined by a small majority that includes Arab voters, then a certain sector whose view was not accepted is liable to attempt to reject the legitimacy of the referendum and may fight against it violently."

That "certain sector" Kremnitzer was referring to, of course, are the Jews who oppose the partition of Jerusalem and the surrender of the Golan Heights, by a large majority.

Kremnitzer's argument is both ridiculous and self-serving. It is ridiculous because he knows that in 2004, Likud members held a referendum on the government's planned withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria. Then-prime minister Ariel Sharon pledged to abide by the results of his party's vote. But when 65 percent of Likud members rejected his plan, he ignored them. And the public's reaction, while strong, was completely nonviolent.

The only "sector" that used sustained force and intimidation in the run-up to the withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria was the government. It deployed tens of thousands of policemen to break up protests and bar protesters from travelling to lawful demonstrations, and jailed protesters without trial for months. In its overtly anti-democratic and legally dubious actions, the government was ably defended by Kremnitzer and his colleagues, who either stood by as the civil liberties of the protesters were trampled or enthusiastically defended the government's abandonment of democratic values by calling the protesters "anti-democratic."

Indeed, in his testimony Wednesday, Kremnitzer parroted that argument by claiming that referendums "are a recipe for harming democracy."

Aside from being factually and theoretically wrong, Kremnitzer's argument - like the arguments of the EU bureaucracy that sidelined Europe's citizenry by passing the Lisbon Treaty - is transparently self-serving. Like his EU counterparts, he knows full well that his support for an Israeli surrender of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights is a minority view. So his actual concern is not the health of Israeli democracy, but the power of the political Left to determine policy against the interests and wishes of the public.

THE SECOND reason that the Left acquiesces to the silencing of speech is because its members are just as concerned about the threat of Islamic supremacy as their political opponents. But unlike their opponents, they are too cowardly to do anything about it. This point was made clear, too, in the wake of the release of Wilders' film.

This week a delegation of Dutch Christian and Muslim religious leaders travelled to Cairo to speak to religious Islamic leaders. Speaking to Radio Netherlands, Bas Plaisier, who heads the Dutch Protestant Church, said the delegation's mission was to "limit the possible consequences" of Wilders' film. The consequences he was referring to, of course, are the prospects of violent Muslim rioting and attacks against the Dutch and against Christians worldwide.

Radio Netherlands reported that Plaisier "has been receiving disturbing reports from Dutch nationals all over the world, including ones about fear of repercussions among Christians in Sudan, the Middle East and Indonesia."

So the real reason the Dutch Protestant Church decries the film is not because it thinks Wilders is wrong, but because its leaders believe that Wilders is absolutely right. It's just that unlike Wilders, who has placed his life in danger to express his views, they are too cowardly to defend themselves, and so, they travel to Cairo to genuflect to religious leaders who daily oversee the preaching of hate and Islamic supremacy in Egyptian mosques. They go on bended knee to coo before those who coerced the institutionalization of Egypt's religious persecution of its Christian Coptic minority and its silencing of liberal critics of the Mubarak regime and the Muslim Brotherhood.

And that is the rub. By squelching debate - out of loathing for its non-leftist political opponents and out of fear of jihadists and the regimes that promote them - the West as a whole undermines not only its own values and foundational creeds. It also undermines the non-jihadists of the Islamic world, who, if ever empowered, would work to promote a form of Islam that does not respond to challenge with violence but rather with the discourse of reason and mutual respect for differences of opinion.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.