By all accounts, New York millionaire Morris Talansky cut a sympathetic figure in Jerusalem's District Court on Tuesday. As he described the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash he gave to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert since he first met him in the early 1990s, he convinced his audience that truly the only thing that concerned him was the welfare of the Jewish people.

He melted reporters' hearts with his protestations of pure intentions as he described how he let Olmert use his credit card to pay for luxury hotel suites in the US and fancy vacations in Italy. He never expected, in a million years, to receive any personal benefit from his largesse.

Olmert, you see, was his hero. He worshiped the Jerusalem mayor who covets shiny pens and fancy watches and expensive cigars. He would do anything for him, because as far as Talansky was concerned, a happy Olmert with a Havana between his jaws, a Mont Blanc in his hand and a Rolex on his wrist was good for the Jews.

Talansky cuts a slightly less flattering figure, and shows a slightly less idealistic side of his personality, in a New York courtroom. It was to the US District Court in Manhattan that Talansky and his fellow high rollers turned when they decided to sue Israel Aerospace Industries for its refusal to sell satellite images from Israeli spy satellites to Hugo Chavez's government in Venezuela.

Talansky and his fellow businessmen own a minority share in the Israeli firm ImageSat. IAI is the majority shareholder. ImageSat sells satellite images from Israeli spy satellites to foreign governments. And Talansky - who cares so much about Israel that he stuffed Olmert's pockets with cash for 15 years - and his associates think it is unfair for IAI to refuse to sell those images to Venezuela. The fact that Chavez is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Latin American amigo, they claim, shouldn't affect their ability to make a buck.

But of course, Talansky never wanted anything but the best for Israel - that is for Olmert. And he never expected to receive anything in return for his concern from Israel - that is from Olmert.

Last week Ma'ariv reported that Olmert had contacted an Israeli diplomat in Venezuela and asked him to expedite a proposed $18 million deal between Chavez's government and ImageSat but the Defense Ministry nixed the deal for some inscrutable reason. Olmert, of course, had only the purest of motives. And even if you don't believe that only the good of Israel informed his actions, well, Olmert denied the Ma'ariv report so it's probably all lies, anyway. As for the letter Olmert sent to Colombia's defense minister encouraging him to contract ImageSat for his satellite images, well, it was for the good of the order. It had nothing to do with his envelope man.

Herein lays the problem with the Talansky envelopes: On the one hand we have an American Jewish Zionist who wants only the best for Israel. One the other hand we have an American businessman with links to Israeli defense contractors who thinks that Israel's military concerns shouldn't affect his profit margin.

In both cases we have a prime minister with a penchant for bad judgment on just about every strategic and policy issue that has come across his desk since he came into office. And we have a prime minister who is the subject of five separate corruption probes, who happily stuffed his pockets with Talansky's cash, who revels in decadent, conspicuous consumption, and whose closest aides and colleagues are also subjects of criminal corruption probes or have already been indicted in criminal corruption probes.

In this state of affairs, Israelis are forced to consider the possibility that Olmert may not be making bad policy decisions because he is incompetent, but because bad policy is good for his pocket stuffers. And this is an untenable situation.

It is possible that the Talansky affair may finally sink Olmert and his government. If Haaretz and PR guru Reuven Adler don't succeed in replacing Olmert with his fellow incompetents Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, there is a chance that Israelis may finally have an opportunity to elect a new Knesset and a new government.

But as an early election becomes a more distinct possibility, it is worth considering the connection between the electoral system and the ability of men like Olmert to rise to the pinnacle of Israel's political pyramid. For it is not simply Olmert's political wiles that enabled him to get elected and then stay in office for more than two years despite losing a war, wrecking Israel's strategic alliance with the US and allowing Israel to be attacked with rockets from Gaza. Olmert is a product of Israel's dysfunctional electoral system.

FROM A legal perspective, Israel's electoral system was made for men like Olmert. Over the years, the Knesset has passed draconian laws that limit to nearly nothing the legal contributions that donors can make to political campaigns. At the same time, the Knesset has left in place enormous loopholes that permit politicians to raise almost unlimited funds in unofficial contributions, or "soft money."

As it stands, then, the system favors those who are constitutionally disposed to operate at the edge of the law - that is, people like Olmert.

Since Israel's campaign finance laws were written for angels, and since politicians are mere mortals, most elected officials are vulnerable to scrutiny of their finances. This places the state prosecutors and judges in a position of enormous power over politicians. They know that they can fully expect to find something on everyone if they just look hard enough. And since an indictment suffices to force an elected official from office, the state prosecution has the power to fire elected officials at will.

This wouldn't be too bad if the state prosecution and the judiciary weren't so politicized. But they are. Since justices and prosecutors make no secret of their radical leftist ideological platform, legally challenged politicians like Olmert and former prime minister Ariel Sharon understand that the best way to avoid legal scrutiny is to advance the political agenda of the legal fraternity.

These problems could be remedied easily by legislative action. Were the Knesset to pass laws to reform campaign finance laws, and assert oversight of the state prosecution and the judiciary, many of these problems could be solved. But the Knesset is powerless to act.

As things stand, the Knesset, which is supposed to be the sovereign repository of the people's will, is by far the weakest branch of government. It has no power to place checks or balances on either the judiciary or the government.

The Knesset's relative weakness is a function of Israel's proportional elections system. This system - whereby voters select a party rather than individual candidates at the ballot box - promotes the political fortunes of the corrupt and the weak at the expense of the honest and strong. Similarly, it prolongs the lifespan of coalition governments with a tendency toward corruption and failed policy-making, at the expense of coalition governments informed by principle and the national interest.

Israel's proportional electoral model enables a plethora of parties to be elected in each general election. Inevitably, at least one party gets into the Knesset that has no chance of ever being elected again. In the current Knesset, that party is the Gil Pensioners Party. Once a one-term party's legislators come to terms with the fact that they will never be reelected, they become free-floaters, motivated not by principle but by maximizing their personal gains from their brief political careers. A one-term party's legislators tend to repeatedly sell themselves to other parties bidding for their loyalty throughout their term in office.

Then there are the bloc parties - such as Shas - which have no allegiance to any particular political philosophy but always vote as a disciplined bloc. Back in the day, US president Lyndon B. Johnson defined an "honest politician" as someone who "stays bought." The existence of bloc parties like Shas in Israeli politics encourages politicians to act "dishonestly," from LBJ's perspective.

Like the free-floaters, bloc parties are constantly for sale. Unable to "buy" them outright, coalition leaders are forced to "buy them off" at every critical juncture lest they bolt the government and force the national political leaders to accept early elections. In the case of Shas, every national crisis foments a coalition crisis in which the prime minister is forced to buy Shas's loyalty anew.

IF THE enduring presence of free-floaters and bloc parties tend to corrupt coalition politics, the way that politicians are elected to office tends to corrupt the entire political system.

Party ballots are a blunt instrument for voters. Voters translate their vote into a choice among party leaders. Since there is no direct vote for back-benchers, party leaders are vested with enormous power to determine the identity of Israel's lawmakers. Their preferences are far different from those of the general public.

Unlike the public, political leaders are uninterested in having their parties' back benches populated by leaders informed by their principles. Such back-benchers, after all, have a tendency to revolt against their party leaders when they make unprincipled or bad decisions. This was the case for instance with then-Likud MK Uzi Landau's attempt to block former prime minister Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza.

The party leaders' power to select Israel's legislators ensures that most of the country's lawmakers will be weak, corruptible and controllable. And there is nothing that the public can do about it. And if this weren't bad enough, there is the fact that all MKs are elected from national lists. The absence of electoral districts in Israel means that no lawmakers are in any way accountable to constituents - only to their party leaders and to varying degrees to their party members. Acting against the public will to curry favor with political bosses is the most reasonable course of action for a politician.

It is due to the low quality of lawmakers elected by Israel's dysfunctional system that the Knesset as a body lacks the public legitimacy to enact the sort of electoral and constitutional reforms necessary to clean up politics and check Israel's imperial legal fraternity. And it is also due to the low quality of Israel's lawmakers that the MKs are uninterested in enacting these crucial reforms.

Olmert's pockets full of cash may finally bring about the much awaited political accounting. But until the flaws of Israel's political system are remedied, there can be little doubt that Israelis will continue to wonder whether our leaders make their decisions in good faith or out of allegiance to their pocket padders.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was presented to the world as a strategic bid to enhance prospects for peace between the Palestinians and Israel. Proponents of the move argued that removing all Israeli civilians and military personnel from Gaza would take away the source of Palestinian grievances. Once fully appeased, the Palestinians would be forced to behave responsibly, abjure terrorism and build their state -- first in Gaza, and then in Judea and Samaria as well.

This was the pretext of Israel’s withdrawal. But it wasn’t the subtext. The subtext of the withdrawal – telegraphed to both Israelis and the international community – was that the withdrawal would cause the demise of Religious Zionism at the hands of the leftist progeny of Labor Zionists. That is, the operation wasn’t about peace with the Arabs. It was about cultural supremacy within Israel.

The Religious Zionist movement is up in arms over the ruling, which its leaders are calling an act of aggression and halachic malfeasance. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, who heads the hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikvah and is considered a leading rabbinic authority in Religious Zionist circles, called Sherman’s ruling “a desecration of God’s name” and said that if it is not overturned he would set up independent conversion courts outside the aegis of the Chief Rabbinate.

Arguments against an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights are so self-evident that they simply fly off your tongue. But that doesn't mean that it is unnecessary to make them. This is especially the case when supposedly serious people like former IDF chief of general staff Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dan Halutz - co-architect of the strategic disaster which was the Second Lebanon War - advocate withdrawal in exchange for "peace."

So here goes.

Since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Golan Heights has been Israel's quietest, most stable border. This is largely the case because the Syrians know that from the Golan Heights, the road to Damascus is wide open.

An Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights would destabilize the border by removing Israel's offensive deterrent capacity against Syria. Since nature abhors a vacuum, Israel's deterrent capacity would be transferred to the hands of Syrian dictator and Iranian proxy Bashar Assad and his henchmen. Additionally, in the wake of an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights on the heels of Iran's consolidation of its hold over Lebanon, Assad's regime will be triumphant. His decision to cast his country's lot with Iran will be perceived an act of brilliant statecraft.

While there is no certainty about how long it would take before Syria took advantage of the new situation to initiate aggression against Israel, it is clear that an Israeli withdrawal would raise tensions dramatically. And those tensions would find the remainder of Israeli territory more vulnerable to an Iranian-Syrian attack than ever before.

Today Syria already has the capacity to attack all of Israel with its Scud and Nodong ballistic missiles. But while these missiles can terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, their guidance systems are generally assessed as too primitive to enable them to be successfully deployed against tactical and strategic targets. Possession of the Golan Heights would enable Syria to use more conventional armaments to precisely target IDF positions, arms depots and attack formations throughout Northern Israel. So one of the consequences of Israel's handover of the Golan Heights would be a steep rise in the price in blood that a post-Golan Heights-withdrawal-Israel would be forced to pay to win any future military contest with Iranian proxies Hizbullah or Syria. Indeed it would dwarf the heavy price that Israel paid for victory in 1967 and 1973.

And the cost of an Israeli relinquishment of the Golan would not be paid by Israel alone. With Syria in control of the Golan, Damascus and its allies in the Iranian axis would be even more willing to assert themselves in battlegrounds like Iraq. Their renewed will to fight would limit still further the possibility that the US could remove its forces from Iraq without risking the prospect of Iraq being forced into the Iranian axis.

Moreover, with Israel's strategic options massively curtailed as a result of its surrender of the Golan Heights, the Iranians would have far less cause to fear that Israel would launch a counter-attack in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel or a preemptive attack against Iranian nuclear installations.

IN HIS statement Saturday in support of Olmert's announced intention to give Assad the Golan Heights, Halutz said, "For real peace one must be willing to pay a real price." While this is no doubt a true statement, it is completely irrelevant. Everyone knows that Israel won't get a "real peace" from Assad. Indeed it won't even get a pretend peace from Assad.

To understand why Israel can expect to receive absolutely nothing from Syria in exchange for the Golan Heights, one needs to look no further than Syria's last big peace treaty with a neighbor. In 1989, Syria agreed to withdraw all its troops from Lebanon under the Taif Accord that ended Lebanon's civil war. Needless to say, Syrian troops continued their illegal occupation Lebanon for the next 15 years and still today continue to block Lebanese independence by arming Hizbullah.

Or consider Israel's "successful" treaty with Egypt, under which Egypt received the entire Sinai Peninsula in exchange for signing a peace treaty with Israel. Due to Egypt's willingness to sign the deal, Hosni Mubarak's dictatorship has been hailed as a moderate and friendly regime by the US and Israel alike. And yet, short of going to war against Israel, since it signed its peace treaty, Egypt has done just about everything in its power to endanger Israel's security.

At the cabinet meeting Sunday, Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin warned the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government that Hamas has missiles with ranges long enough to hit Ashdod and Kiryat Gat. Diskin added that with the border between Gaza and Egypt breached, time is working in Hamas's favor. With every passing day of Israeli inaction, Hamas brings in more and more advanced weapons.

Aside from Iran, which is the major source of Hamas's weapons, Egypt has done more than any other country to enable Hamas's missile war against southern Israel and its takeover of Gaza in general. As MK Yuval Steinitz has noted repeatedly over the past several years, those missiles didn't just magically appear at the Egyptian-Gaza border. Those Iranian weapons are transported in ships through Egyptian waters that dock at Egyptian ports. The weapons are then offloaded onto trucks and travel overland across the country before reaching Gaza.

Egyptian security forces could intercept these weapons at any point along the way. But they pass through unmolested because Egypt wants Hamas to have those weapons to attack Israel and to keep the border destabilized.

And if this is what Israel gets from our supposedly moderate Egyptian friends, what can Israel expect to receive from our radical Syrian enemies? Here it bears noting that Syria is still preventing the International Atomic Energy Agency from sending inspectors to check out the site of the North Korean-built nuclear reactor in Syria that Israel destroyed last September 6. And again, if this is how Syria treats the UN, how will it treat Israel after Israel relinquishes its ability to threaten the Syrian capital?

GIVEN ALL of these self-evident drawbacks of Olmert's proposal to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, it is obvious that the plan is ridiculous. Similarly, in light of the massive danger such a withdrawal would entail, withdrawal advocates like Halutz are exposed as complete fools.

But the fact that this is true does not diminish the chance that Israel may still give up the Golan Heights if those who advocate this policy remain in power and continue to enjoy public respectability. Reality has counted for little in Israel's political and strategic discourse in recent years.

The lunacy of transferring control over south Lebanon to Hizbullah in 2000 and of giving Gaza to Fatah and Hamas in 2005 was just as obvious as the lunacy of relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria in 2008. Moreover, the lunacy of transferring control over Gaza and Judea and Samaria to the PLO was obvious to anyone with eyes to see in the 1990s. And yet, even though all the opponents of these strategic fiascos made these arguments until they were blue in the face, Israel still withdrew.

All along and still today, standing against these voices of sane reality were voices preaching utopian peace. Men and women like Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Shulamit Aloni, Tzipi Livni, Yuli Tamir, Sheli Yachimovich, Amnon Shahak, Uri Saguy, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and their chorus of "peace" operatives in the media castigated all proponents of reality-based policymaking as nothing more than fear-mongering fanatics and enemies of peace almost indistinguishable from the likes of Hizbullah, Hamas and all the rest.

And of course the voices of reason were correct every time and never thanked for their wisdom. Indeed, they continue to this day to be condemned as fear-mongering fanatics.

And in spite of the fact that the utopian peace junkies have been wrong every single time, they are still the first to be put on television and the radio to advocate Israel's capitulation on every conceivable front. Even as the cemeteries fill up with the charred corpses of Israelis killed because of their utopian madness, they are still feted as experts and wise men and elder statesmen.

The one hopeful sign of change is found in the Israeli public's reaction to the current malformed public debate about Olmert's new plan to give Assad the Golan Heights. In the past every time a government launched negotiations or simply called for unilateral surrender of land opinion polls showed an immediate jump of some 20 percent in public support for the initiative. Today's polls suggest that public support for a withdrawal from the Golan Heights has decreased since Olmert announced he is negotiating their surrender.

If during past negotiations and planned withdrawals, politicians enjoyed the support of 45 percent of Israelis for their moves, today Olmert has the support of only 22 percent of Israelis for his plan to give up the Golan Heights.

The fact that Israelis are reacting negatively to people like Olmert and Halutz and their advocated withdrawals for "peace," may simply be a consequence of the public's contempt for these men specifically. That is, it is possible that the public would be more supportive of capitulation to Syria if more popular leaders like former prime minister Ariel Sharon were advocating it.

But it is also possible that the public has finally had enough of these utopian gasbags and their capitulation agenda. One can only hope that this is the case. Because while Israel will not be destroyed if its leaders are stupid enough to relinquish the Golan Heights, without the Golan Heights, Israel's chances of survival in the long term will be vastly diminished.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Iran's man in Damascus, Syrian President Bashar Assad, has just had the best week of his career as dictator. Everywhere he cast his gaze he was greeted by massive victories. Most were courtesy of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his colleagues in Kadima, the Labor Party and Shas.

Monday morning, it was already clear that the sun was shining on Damascus when Vice Premier Haim Ramon acknowledged that in direct contravention of the government's own binding decision, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is conducting negotiations with Iran's Palestinian proxy Hamas.

The day after Ramon's announcement, Defense Minister Ehud Barak went down to Egypt to conclude a cease-fire agreement with Hamas through the group's Arab sponsor - Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The terms of the accord require Israel to stop fighting Hamas. Hamas has pledged to decrease the number of rockets, missiles and mortars it shoots at Sderot, Ashkelon and surrounding communities. During its bombing hiatus, Hamas will build its army and bring in still more weapons and fighters from Iran through Egypt.

Once the cease-fire agreement is finalized, Hamas and Fatah will immediately reunify their forces. Since Israel has now accepted Hamas as a legitimate force, it will have no call for arguing against Fatah doing the same. Through the new Hamas-Fatah government, Hamas will maintain its military control over Gaza and expand its control over Judea and Samaria and the US-trained and armed PA militias. With Hamas formally ensconced in power, Western states will line up to recognize it and remove it from their terror lists. Israel will be forced to continue provide food, water, fuel, medical care, electricity, jobs and consumer markets for the Palestinians.

HAMAS'S GREAT leap forward on Monday and Tuesday would have been enough to put a smile on Assad's face but then along came Wednesday and turned that smile into a glow of unqualified delight. For on Wednesday, Syria regained effective control over Lebanon and was restored to its position of honor in the Arab world. Washington too, was compelled to forego its legitimate hostility.

Syria's road to Beirut was paved Wednesday by the Saniora government's official surrender of power to Hizbullah. In the "agreement" mediated by Qatar - one of Iran's Persian Gulf affiliates - Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora ceded control over the Lebanese government to Hizbullah, which now has a cabinet majority. This couldn't be better news for Syria.

Hizbullah has acted as Damascus's chief defender in Lebanon since Lebanon's now defeated March 14 democracy movement forced Syrian troops out of the country in March 2005 after Damascus masterminded the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Hizbullah's takeover of the Lebanese government will enable Syria to again treat Lebanon as its colony. Hizbullah's control of the Lebanese government has also guaranteed that Beirut will stop supporting the UN's investigation of Hariri's murder and this is deeply significant for Damascus.

With the termination of the UN inquiry comes the termination of Damascus's international isolation. Since the regime in Damascus is no longer in danger of being convicted of murder, it will be impossible for Western governments to argue that it should be overthrown or even sanctioned for its criminal behavior.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak (née Peretz) government is at least partially to blame for Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon.

By refusing to fight the 2006 war with Hizbullah to victory, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government paved the way for the Iranian proxy group's takeover of Lebanon. Last week the Olmert-Livni-Barak government had the option of acting to prevent Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon. In deciding to do nothing, it enabled Hizbullah's putsch in West Beirut and Tripoli and through them, its assertion of control over the whole of Lebanon.

So between Monday and Wednesday, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government enabled Iran's proxies and Syria's terror clients to entrench their control along its northern and southern borders. And that isn't all it did.

JUST AS the Saniora government was signing its unconditional surrender to Hizbullah in Doha, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office released its announcement that Israel is negotiating the surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria through Turkish mediators.

Ankara and Damascus released identical announcements of the talks at the same time as Jerusalem. Although the official scripts were serious in tone, once they were out, Syrian spokesmen could not restrain their glee. Members of Assad's ruling clique rightly bragged that Israel's acceptance of Assad as a legitimate negotiating partner makes it impossible for the Sunni Arab states and the US to boycott Damascus.

So just two months after the Lebanese, Saudis, Jordanians and Egyptians boycotted the Arab League summit in Damascus as a sign of their rejection of Syria's Iranian controllers and of Damascus's support for the Hizbullah takeover of Lebanon, thanks to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, Syria is again a full-fledged and respectable member of the international community. The US and Iran's Arab foes now have no choice but to accept Syria.

Israelis such as retired generals Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Uri Saguy have close personal relations with IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Barak and have been pushing for a withdrawal from the Golan Heights for some 15 years. Their argument for moving ahead in recent years has been that by offering the Golan Heights to Syria, Israel will pull Syria out of Iran's sphere of influence. Opponents of negotiations such as Mossad chief Meir Dagan have argued that such negotiations will have just the opposite effect.

As Syria's ecstatic reaction to Israel's announcement demonstrated, the Saguy-Shahak-Barak-Ashkenazi crowd is completely wrong and Dagan is completely right. By negotiating with Syria while it is firmly entrenched in the Iranian axis, Israel has not moderated the regime. It has legitimized Syria's presence in the Iranian axis.

That is, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's embrace of Syria as a credible negotiating partner and Olmert's statement Wednesday evening that he supports giving Syria the Golan Heights - even as the Assad regime hosts Hamas and a dozen other genocidal jihadist groups; as Syria acts as Hizbullah's partner and logistical base and the main entry point for jihadists into Iraq; and with Damascus having effectively rendered itself Iran's Arab colony - mean that Israel has legitimized Syria's behavior. Now that Syria has received Israel's stamp of approval, the other Arabs and the US have no excuse for continuing to oppose it.

IN ISRAEL, news of Olmert's embrace of Syria was greeted with derision by the public. According to a Channel 2 poll conducted after Olmert's office announced its negotiations with Syria, 70 percent of Israelis oppose surrendering the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace. Fifty-eight percent of Israelis believe that Olmert is only conducting negotiations to divert the public's attention away from the latest corruption probe being carried out against him.

It is deeply frustrating that Olmert, who led Israel to defeat in war in 2006 at the hands of Hizbullah; who has allowed southern Israel to become a free fire zone for Hamas; who is under five separate criminal investigations for financial corruption and influence peddling; and who is conducting talks with the powerless Fatah terror group toward the surrender of Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Hamas, now is pushing an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria. And all the more depressing is the fact that he is getting away with it.

Many supporters of Israel cannot understand how it is that Olmert and his colleagues - principally Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni - have managed to stay in power. Throughout their two-year tenure in office, Olmert and his colleagues have displayed nothing but incompetence bordering on idiocy in their conduct of Israel's foreign affairs. They have caused enormous damage to Israel's strategic ties with the US by refusing to contend with Iran's Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian clients and proxies or with Iran itself. Why, these supporters of Israel ask, is the Olmert-Livni-Barak government still in power?

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government has three main assets that make it all but impossible to topple and set a date for new general elections. The first asset is Olmert's complete and utter lack of shame, coupled with his unbridled opportunism. Olmert is a man who will stop at nothing to remain in power. He will lose the war with Hizbullah and refrain from defending southern Israel. He will imperil the North by facilitating Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon and its rearmament. He will imperil Jerusalem and the center of the country by negotiating the surrender of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem. He will do all of this and more if that is what it takes to stay in power. And by his estimation that is what needs to be done because to stay in power he needs to maintain the support of the post-Zionists who control the media, the Labor Party and the State Prosecution. All these make up the government's second asset.

Former prime minister Ariel Sharon exposed and exacerbated the underlying corruption of Israel's political classes by doctrinaire leftists who control the media and the State Prosecution when in late 2003 he responded to the corruption probe being carried out against him and his sons by announcing that he would expel all Israelis from Gaza and hand the area over to the Palestinians. For his efforts on behalf of the radical Left, Sharon received a "Get Out of Jail Free" card and was hailed as a visionary leader.

Already on Sunday - after Ramon announced the government's negotiations with Hamas - Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz said the current probe into suspicions that Olmert received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from American businessman Morris Talansky will take months to conclude. The implication was clear: Olmert is free to go ahead with all negotiations toward land giveaways.

The fact that Olmert's announcement of his talks with Syria was synchronized with the release of new details of his alleged criminal activities made a lot of reporters snort. The opportunism was too blatant to ignore. And yet, the heavyweights at Haaretz and their water-carriers at state television didn't bat a lash as they launched into impassioned defenses of Olmert. Ignoring the general glee in Damascus, Channel 1's diplomatic reporter and Olmert cheerleader Ayala Hasson said the announcement couldn't be "spin" since Syria released its announcement of the talks the same time Olmert's office did. And of course, Hasson explained sagely, Syria wouldn't want to do Olmert any favors.

Labor ministers such as Peace Now cofounder Education Minister Yuli Tamir said that obviously Labor will be compelled to stay in the government now because the "peace process" must not be sacrificed for anything - even if it means that a crook remains in charge.

The Olmert-Livni-Barak government's final asset is the fact that the Right was decimated in the 2006 elections. Without Shas and some breakaways from Kadima, there is simply no way to bring down the government. The votes aren't there. And Shas isn't going anywhere. Olmert made sure of that by approving 286 building permits for new homes for Shas voters in Beitar Illit on Wednesday afternoon.

So Olmert and his cadres remain in power and all of Israel suffers. But at least Syria's happy. And so is Iran. And so is Hizbullah. And so is Hamas.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

Spin doctors were relabeled "strategists" in the early 1990s. And as Mark Steyn wrote last week in National Review, "Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies."

The latest attitude to be flouted as policy is indignation. Specifically, Democratic Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama's furious indignation at President George W. Bush's address before the Knesset last week where he celebrated Israel's 60th anniversary and extolled the US's alliance with Israel. Beyond praising the Jewish people's 4,000 year-old devotion to the Land of Israel and to liberty, Bush used the speech to warn against those who think that Iran and its terror proxies can simply be wished away through appeasement.

As the president put it, "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided. We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history."

To Israeli ears, Bush's words were uncontroversial. Israel is beset by enemies who daily call for its physical annihilation and while doing so, build and support terror forces who attack Israel. For most Israelis, the notion that these enemies can be appeased is absurd and deeply offensive.

The only strong reaction that Bush's remarks provoked in Israel was relief. In spite of the Bush administration's own participation in the six-party talks with North Korea, its support for the EU-3's feckless discussions with the mullahs, its paralysis in the face of Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon, and its support for the establishment of a Palestinian state run by Fatah terrorists dedicated to Israel's destruction, at the very least, standing before the Knesset, Bush effectively pledged not to allow Iran to acquire the means to conduct a new Holocaust.

From an Israeli vantage point then, it was shocking to see that immediately after Bush stepped down from the rostrum, Obama and his Democratic supporters began pillorying him for his remarks. Most distressing is what Obama's reaction said about the Democratic presidential hopeful.

OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.

Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement. Indeed, Obama claims that conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the likes of Ahmadinejad is the right way to be "tough."

But is this true? Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country's enemies and done so to the US's advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.

But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy's offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled. More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And - most importantly of all - Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.

Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs. So from the very beginning, he wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.

Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.

SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama's pledge represents a massive act of appeasement. And since it is Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program that would bring a President Barack Obama to the table, his policy would invite nuclear blackmail by other countries by signaling to them that the US rewards nuclear proliferators.

But even if Obama and his supporters were right and negotiating with the ayatollahs was not by its nature an act of appeasement, the question remains whether it would be possible to reach a deal with them that would not endanger US interests or US allies a la Neville Chamberlain at Munich.

Since the EU-3 began negotiating with the Iranians four years ago, the Iranians have made clear at every opportunity that while they welcome negotiations, they will never give up their nuclear program. Over the weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei again repeated that there is no deal that anyone can offer Iran that would move the regime to give up its nuclear aspirations and nascent arsenal. So there is no deal to be had.

Iran's support for terrorism and its nuclear aspirations make confrontation with the US inevitable. Since there is no way that in the midst of presidential negotiations the US would confront Iran, by pushing for such summitry, Obama is conceding to Iran the US's right to choose when and how the confrontation will begin.

IN MANY ways, Obama and his allies call to mind the influential American newspaperman H.L. Mencken. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Mencken was the most influential writer in the US. He was an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic agnostic, a supporter of Germany during World War I, and a fierce opponent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. He also opposed American participation in World War II.

In his biography of Mencken, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, Terry Teachout argues that the reason Mencken did not think it was worth fighting Hitler's Germany was because Mencken simply couldn't accept the existence of evil. He could see no moral distinction between Roosevelt, who he despised, and Adolf Hitler who he considered "a boob."

There are strong echoes of Mencken's moral blindness to Hitler's evil in the contemporary Left's refusal to understand the nature of the threat posed by Iran and its terror proxies. And Bush made this clear in his speech to the Knesset when he said, "There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong."

Obama's supporters seek to silence these echoes by pointing to Obama's life story as Obama told it in his two autobiographies, Dreams From my Father and The Audacity of Hope. His supporters‚ argue that since his life story is unique, his decision to appease the Iranians is uniquely wise. Yet the most interesting aspect of his life story is how little is actually known about it.

As the New York Times noted in an article Sunday about Obama's career as an autobiographer, "In the introduction [of Dreams from my Father], Mr. Obama acknowledged his use of pseudonyms, composite characters, approximated dialogue and events out of chronological order."

That is, the man who is supposedly uniquely qualified to appease and so adopted an attitude of indignation at Bush's condemnation of those who seek to cut deals with evil men, is also rather cavalier about facts. Justifying Obama's fast and loose treatment of the truth about his past, his editor Deborah Baker explained that Obama's attitude was more important than the facts or, in her words, "The fact is, it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn't make up."

LIKE HIS life story, Obama's policies are not based on facts, but on his attitude. And his attitude, like Mencken's in the 1930s, is based on a naïve and arrogant belief that the worst thing that can happen is to have someone who talks about evil in the White House.

Peter Osnos, Obama's former publisher told the Times that Obama's meteoric rise to the pinnacle of politics is due in large part to his gift as a storyteller. In his words, "It's almost all based on these two books, two books not based on a job of prodigious research or risking one's life as a reporter in Iraq. He has written about himself. Being able to take your own life story and turn it into this incredibly lucrative franchise, it's a stunning fact."

Indeed, it is stunning. And frightening. It says that in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance. It is a world in which indignation can be summoned as readily (and perhaps more easily) for partisan political attacks as for delusional dictators' open preparation for genocide. And it is a world in which it is more important to discuss "healing" emotional wounds than devising policies capable of coping with an ever-more-dangerous international coalition of murderers.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It only took Hizbullah a week to bring the government of Lebanon to its knees. The Saniora government's decision Wednesday to cancel its decisions to ban Hizbullah's independent communications system and sack Hizbullah's agent from his position as chief of security at Beirut Airport constituted its effective acceptance of Hizbullah's preeminent role in Lebanon.

What is interesting about Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the elected government in Lebanon is that after his forces defeated their foes, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to retreat to their customary shadows. Why didn't Hizbullah just overthrow the government? Understanding why Hizbullah refused to take over Lebanon is key not only for understanding Hizbullah but also for understanding Hamas, Fatah and the insurgency in Iraq.

A compelling answer to this question is found in David Galula's classic work, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Galula, who died in 1967, was a lieutenant colonel in the French Marines. He served as a company commander in Algeria during the FLN's insurgency there. Counterinsurgency Warfare, which he wrote in 1964, is based largely on the French experience in Algeria and Indochina and on Chinese Communist revolutionary theory. Galula provides a clear and concise description of insurgent or revolutionary movements, their strategies and tactics. Conversely he provides clear guidance for counterinsurgents for defeating them.

As Galula explained, one of the main advantages that insurgents have over the governments they seek to overthrow is their lack of responsibility for governance. Far from seeking to govern the local population, the goal of insurgents is simply to demonstrate through sabotage, terror and guerrilla operations that the government is incapable of keeping order. And it is far easier and cheaper to sow disorder and chaos than to maintain order and secure public safety.

In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.

Hizbullah and its Iranian overlords wish to have full use of Lebanon as a staging area for attacks against Israel and the US. They wish to maintain and expand Hizbullah's arsenals. For this they need unfettered access, and if necessary, control over Lebanon's borders, its seaports and airport.

They need to raise and train Hizbullah's army and cultivate Hizbullah's loyal cadres among Lebanon's Shi'ites to fight Israel. And so they need to cultivate loyalty and dependency among Lebanon's Shi'ites to use their villages as launching pads for attacks on Israel, as cover to hide from Israeli counterattacks and as recruitment centers to fills their lines with fighters.

Over the past week, Hizbullah secured this freedom through its successful attack on the Saniora government. Today no one will utter a peep of complaint as Hizbullah imports ever more sophisticated weapons systems from Syria and Iran. No one will say a word when Hizbullah openly asserts control over the border with Israel, or places its commanders in charge of Lebanese army units along the border.

Galula argues that the primary goal of insurgents in the early stages of their long campaigns is to secure the support of the local populations. In light of this, it could be claimed that by attacking the Saniora government and its supporters, Hizbullah was acting against its interests. But we are no longer in the early stages of Hizbullah's insurgency. At this advanced stage of its game, Hizbullah considers the sentiments of Lebanese Druse, Christians and Sunnis irrelevant. None has the power to challenge its primacy.

HIZBULLAH'S REFUSAL to take responsibility for the country that it effectively controls confounds the logic that has guided Israeli governments since 1993. From the onset of the "peace process" with the PLO in 1993, through the IDF's withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's current transfer of control over the Palestinian cities in Samaria to Fatah militias and curtailment of IDF counterterror operations in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, successive Israeli governments have argued that Israel can compel its non-state foes - the Palestinians and Hizbullah - to end their asymmetric warfare and take responsibility for public order by retreating.

The repeated assertion is that once Hizbullah and the Palestinians were placed in charge of territory, and didn't have Israel to kick around anymore, they would transform themselves from insurgents into respectable civilian authorities that would be compelled to abandon war in favor of building economies and keeping public order.

The basic problem with this Israeli strategic assertion is that it ignores the basic interests of the other side. Hizbullah and the Palestinians have no interest in instilling order in the territories they wrest from Israeli control. They wish to use those territories to continue their war against Israel and use the local populations to advance their war efforts. To the latter end, their aim is not to develop local economies but to foster dependency among the local population. The only ones permitted to become prosperous in areas they control are their senior officials. The masses are made dependent on the insurgents for their basic welfare services. And through the provision of welfare, the insurgents indoctrinate the locals to their cause. That is, successive Israeli governments have failed to recognize the simple fact that the absence of Israeli control on the ground can no more compel Hizbullah, Hamas or Fatah to act responsibly and peacefully than the hapless Saniora government can compel Hizbullah to accept its authority.

Galula explained that the starting point of all insurgencies is finding and advancing a political cause or ideology. "The best cause for the insurgents' purpose is one that by definition can attract the largest number of followers and repel the minimum of opponents," he wrote.

In both Lebanese and Palestinian societies, and indeed throughout the Arab world, that cause is the destruction of Israel.

Recognizing the inherent hostility of its enemies' cause, until 1993 Israel used classic counterinsurgency tactics to defeat them. It sought to instill order in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and in its security zone in South Lebanon and to a large degree, it succeeded. The Palestinian uprising of 1987 was fairly tame and by 1991, it was defeated and discredited. South Lebanon, under Israel's security umbrella and controlled by the South Lebanese Army, was the most prosperous area in civil war-wracked Lebanon.

But then the Israeli peace movement took over. At base, its goal is to legitimize the cause of Israel's enemies, delegitimize Israel's own cause and so force the government and Israeli society to capitulate to our enemies in the interest of "peace." By 1993, the peace movement had asserted its ideological preeminence over Israel's governing classes and so inserted Israel directly into the trap of insurgent ideology.

Galula explained, "The [insurgent] cause must be such that the counterinsurgent cannot espouse it too or can do so only at the risk of losing his power." Israel cannot successfully embrace its enemies' cause because their cause is Israel's destruction. Yet that is essentially what Israel has done for the past 15 years.

IN THE Palestinian case, the thinking has been that Israel can compel the Palestinians to accept its right to exist by giving the Palestinians a state. Yet here too, Israel has failed to acknowledge the nature of its enemies or the rationale of their cause. Both the Palestinians and Hizbullah are supported by states whose support for them stems from what is perceived as their role as the vanguards of the global jihad. Israel is perceived by Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others as the Little Satan who must be destroyed in order to bring down the Great Satan - America.

Writing in the 1960s, Galula's insurgents were largely sponsored by the USSR and Communist China. They fought in the name of global Communism in its war against capitalism and imperialism. This global nature of local insurgencies barred all possibility of reaching an accommodation between insurgent and counterinsurgent. As Galula explained, "A local revolutionary war is part of the global war against capitalism and imperialism. Hence a military victory against the local enemy is in fact a victory against the global enemy and contributes to his ultimate defeat." This statement is equally true if Communism is replaced with Islam and capitalism and imperialism are replaced with democracy and Zionism. Given the crucial role of the war against Israel in jihadist ideology, there is no way the insurgents can reach an accommodation with it. All Israeli retreats must be perceived as capitulations.

On the surface, Hamas's takeover of Gaza from Fatah militia tends to argue against Galula's thesis. If Hamas wants to sow chaos then why did it run for office and so presumably tether itself to territorial and economic responsibilities? The fact is that neither Fatah nor Hamas have used their control over territory and local populations to facilitate order. To the contrary, under both Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority has refused to accept responsibility for anything. It has required Israel and the West to finance, feed and care for its population while it builds terror armies and indoctrinates Palestinian society to the cause of Israel's destruction. If in Lebanon the central problem is that the Saniora government is no match for Hizbullah, in the PA the central problem is that everyone is Hizbullah. And in the unlikely event that Fatah's leaders were to accept Israel's right to exist, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has far less power to take action against Hamas than Saniora has against Hizbullah.

President George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted that the antidote to insurgencies is freedom. And there is much truth to this claim. One needs only to look to the stunning developments in Iraq over the past year - where Shi'ites and Sunnis are standing up to insurgents and the Iraqi government is conducting a successful counterinsurgency in Basra and Baghdad to see that liberty can trump jihad. Yet the difference between Iraq and Lebanon and the PA is that the US military in Iraq is combating insurgents and thereby enabling Iraqis to choose liberty. Until 1993, Israel fought Palestinian insurgent groups and enabled rank-and-file Palestinians to make that same choice. And until 2000, Israel enabled residents of South Lebanon to choose freedom as well. Israel only failed in the end because it convinced itself its enemies had justice on their side.

What we learn from Hizbullah's retreat to the shadows, from Hamas's use of Gaza as a launching pad to bomb Israeli maternity clinics and schools, and Fatah's jihadist kleptocracy, then, is that there is no way to force insurgents to change their nature through retreat or by empowering and legitimizing them. The only way to enable freedom to trump jihad is for forces of freedom to take control of insurgent enclaves, defeat them and so empower local populations to choose to be free.

In Iraq, the US military is bravely advancing this nearly Sisyphean task. In South Lebanon, Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the only force capable of successfully defeating the jihadist insurgents is Israel. Until it does, Hizbullah, Hamas and Fatah will continue to sow chaos in their societies, terrorize Israelis, and confound the Israeli peace movement by refusing to take responsibility for their people.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

How to support the New Israeli Guardsmen

For those of you who are in Israel or are coming to Israel and would like to join the New Israeli Guardsmen, their contact person is Ro’i Sonnenberg. Ro’i’s phone number is 054-638-3998.

For those of you who wish to contribute directly to the organization, you can transfer funds through your bank to:

The New Guardsmen Organization (ארגון השומר החדש)

Bank HaPoalim – Afula – Branch #727

Account # 370172

If you are interested in contributing, please email me – caroline@carolineglick.com; so I can forward your emails to the group. As I wrote in my column, J., the head of the New Israeli Guardsmen is a soldier in an IDF commando unit and so publishing his name is prohibited.

The New Israeli Guardsman had a big day last week on Yom Haatzmaut (May 8th). A week before Yom Ha’atzmaut, their leaders got wind of the Israeli Arab leadership’s intention to organize a mass march on Moshav Tzipori that day to demand the Arab’s “right of return” to Tzipori’s lands and to commemorate the so-called “Catastrophe” or Nakba of Israel’s founding.

In anticipation of the Israeli Arab assault, the New Israeli Guardsmen organized hundreds of volunteers to come to the moshav for Yom Ha’atzmaut. The volunteers spread out along the perimeters of the moshav, had barbeques and sang songs and generally had a great time while carrying out their deadly serious task of protecting the moshav from assault. The basic idea -- which was correct -- was that the more people on the scene, the smaller the chance that the Arabs would go through with their plans.

As a result of the massive Jewish presence at the moshav, the Arabs -- organized by anti-Zionist Arab members of Knesset Wassel Taha from the Balad party and Muhammed Barakei from the Hadash party -- were forced to hold their demonstration in the forests off of the moshav’s land.

There in the woods, the Arab MKs gave incendiary speeches praising Hizbullah and calling for attacks on Jews. It should be noted that the former head of the Balad party, Azmi Bishara fled Israel last year. He was about to be indicted for spying for Hizbullah during the war in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. According to the police, Bishara was providing Hizbullah with targeting information to use in attacking Haifa and other northern cities in the midst of the war.

Most of the Arab demonstrators dispersed at around 3 pm. But incited by the MKs’ speeches, several hundred Arabs began marching to Tzipori in the late afternoon. On their way they were confronted by a contingent of policemen. They physically assaulted the police with rocks in what became a full-blown anti-Jewish riot. In the ensuing clash, five police officers were wounded. Six demonstrators were placed under arrest for rioting. The police were forced to use tear gas to disperse the rioters.

It is absolutely clear that had it not been for the actions of the New Israeli Guardsmen, given the incendiary nature of the Arab speakers and rioters, Tzipori’s lands would have been assaulted by the Arabs. As it was, due to their success in bringing out hundreds of supporters, the Arabs only marched on the moshav in the afternoon, and when they came, most of the demonstrators who had come to the forest in the morning had already left.

When I wrote my original article, the New Israeli Guardsmen were only beginning to get organized. They hadn’t yet completed the process of registering as a non-profit group in Israel and so had no bank account where people could send donations. But two weeks ago, they finished registering and now have a bank account. I will post the account information and the telephone contact information for the group’s representatives in a separate post. I urge all of you who are looking for a good Israeli cause to support to consider helping this vital new group expand its operations and grow.

Thanks,

Caroline

I just did this phone interview for our friends at OneJerusalem.org. Here is a re-cast of their blog posting:

• Listen now to the latest exclusive One Jerusalem Bloggers Conference Call with Caroline Glick, world journalist, policy-analyst and author of, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.

• Caroline raises important points about the future of Israel, the centrality of Jerusalem, Barak Obama's anti-Israel advisers, Israel's penchant for self-destruction, and what American supporters of Israel can do.

• As a columnist for the Jerusalem Post and many other publications, Glick has earned the respect and readership of leaders and thinkers worldwide.

• In a wide-ranging interview, Caroline articulates a perceptive take on the Middle East and beyond.

• Start streaming the audio, and understand why so many people are buying and reading Shackled Warrior.

• Order the book from Amazon, or if sold out, get it direct from the publisher.

• Some of the bloggers on the call: Omri from Mere Rhetoric, Ralph from the Hedgehog blog, Oceanguy, Rick Richman from Jewish Current Issues, Richard Baehr from American Thinker, David Bogner from Treppenwitz, Anne from Boker Tov, Jerry Gordon from Israpundit, Jim Hoft from Gateway Pundit, and Bennett from Daled Amos.

Jeffrey Goldberg over at the Atlantic is positively apoplectic that I dared to question his Zionism in my column last week, “Anti-Zionism at 60.” That column critically analyzed present day anti-Zionist discourse as it manifested itself – among other places -- in Goldberg’s Atlantic cover article this month entitled “Will Israel Survive?”

Goldberg made his fury known in his blog on the Atlantic’s website.

I focused on Goldberg’s article in my column because in my view it is a typical example of the anti-Zionist boilerplate often espoused by Jews with an unhealthy relationship to their Jewishness. Brushing aside the majority of Israelis who are not leftists, Goldberg set up his “Israeli national dialogue” as an conversation between leftist political opportunists represented by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and radical leftist ideologues represented by non-Zionist Israeli author David Grossman.

I found this bookending of the national debate between two leftists appalling and insulting both to the Israeli public and to my intelligence. Then too, this biased, preconceived limiting of Israel’s national discourse led inevitably to Goldberg’s perverse conclusion that Israel is doomed because it is morally damned.

In his defense against my critique, Goldberg took another cue from the radical leftist, anti-Zionist playbook. Rather than contend with the content of my arguments, he attacked me personally. My arguments are unworthy of note because I am “a far right columnist.” Then too, just in case his readers needed to know why that is bad, Goldberg explained that I “represent a certain strain of mainly-American Jewish [that is, not authentically Israeli] thinking: She believes that all criticism of Israel is illegitimate; she believes Jews who disagree with her are traitors to her cause; and she conflates the settlement movement with the entire Zionist project.”

Truth be told, I couldn’t care less what Goldberg thinks of me. I certainly bear him no grudge for feeling unhappy that I said he is anti-Zionist. Beyond that, I am very proud of my American Jewish heritage, just as my Moroccan, Persian, German, Yemenite, Polish, French, British, Kurdish, Argentine, Canadian, Mexican, Bulgarian, Tunisian, Libyan, Iraqi and Rumanian Jewish friends and colleagues in Israel are all proud of their own distinct heritages. Israel is after all a country of immigrants and each group has made its own unique contributions to Israeli culture and society.

The only reason I think it is worthwhile to note his attack on me is because his little rant is emblematic of the way that the Left has for so long worked to silence debate in Israel and about Israel. Specifically, the Left has two arguments. First, regardless of what the non-leftist says, the Left’s rejoinder is that the person is “a far rightist” and therefore unworthy of note. That is, nothing any non-leftist says matters because the very fact that the person is not a leftist renders his or her view irrelevant. This of course is the view Goldberg clearly enunciated in his article where he included only the views of opportunistic and true believing leftists in his conversation.

Second, the Left has only one answer to every single argument. If you say that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza was a disaster which empowered jihadists, the Left’s response is to blame the settlements. If you say that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon was a disaster which empowered jihadists, the Left’s response is to blame the settlements. If you say that Israel is not facing a demographic threat to its democracy and that the view that it is facing such a threat is based on PLO propaganda, the Left’s response is to say that the settlements are responsible and therefore there must be a demographic threat.

In short, the settlements, the settlers and everyone who doesn’t hate them or even – heaven forbid – supports them, is the cause of absolutely everything that happens in the Middle East. As long as they are around, they are responsible. And if, as in the case of Gaza, they are gone, the settlers qua refugees are still responsible because people who are not leftists and therefore are irrelevant insist on pointing out that it was a strategic error of the first order to throw them out of their strategically situated communities and to transfer their lands to the Hamas and Fatah terror groups.

The only thing notable, and actually sort of well nice, about Goldberg is that he apparently isn’t a very good leftist. New to the anti-Zionist game, he didn’t know that he was supposed to ignore me. I am irrelevant aren’t I? So what are you getting so bent out of shape about? Don’t sweat it Jeff. Andrew Sullivan thinks you’re just brilliant. David Grossman patronizes you and Avrum Burg thinks you're a legitimate voice. Take it easy.

Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the pro-democracy forces in Lebanon this past week was eminently foreseeable. But that doesn't make the violent overthrow of the forces of freedom in that country any less of a tragedy. And the fact that Hizbullah's coup was predictable does not mean that it was inevitable.

A great many forces had to turn their backs on Lebanon's democratic forces in order to enable Hizbullah's easy triumph. A great many actors had to turn a blind eye to Hizbullah's Iranian and Syrian-financed rearmament over the past two years. A great many actors had to ignore and so exacerbate the inherent weaknesses of the March 14 movement and the Saniora government it produced. A great many countries and international bodies had to accept the fiction that the Lebanese military takes its orders from the elected Lebanese government.

And alas, over the past two years, most of the supposedly pro-democracy, anti-Iranian, anti-Syrian and anti-Hizbullah governments of the world have turned blind eyes to all these things and so paved the way for Hizbullah's takeover of the country.

Three years ago, backed by the US, the one-and-a-half-million-member strong March 14 movement successfully shamed Syria into withdrawing its military forces from Lebanon and so ended their 18-year occupation of the country. As of Monday morning, the March 14 movement's leaders were effectively Hizbullah prisoners. Sa'ad Hariri and Walid Jumblatt, as well as Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, had publicly submitted to Hizbullah's humiliating conditions for a ceasefire.

Jumblatt has been the March 14 movement's gadfly opposing Lebanon's steady transformation into an Iranian-Syrian proxy through Hizbullah. Sunday he laid bare the powerlessness of the movement when he begged Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah to spare his followers in the Shouf Mountains. Speaking under Hizbullah siege from his home in Beirut, Jumblatt said in a television interview, "Through the LBC I address Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: If you have a personal issue with me, that's fine. But we cannot allow attacks on the people of Al-Jabel [i.e. Druse villagers in the mountains around the capital city]. We must all work for a ceasefire with the army, and leave personal issues aside."

Jumblatt made his plea for the lives of his people after he was obliged to instruct them to lay down their weapons and place their faith in the Lebanese army on Sunday afternoon. Yet the army, under the command of General Michel Suleiman has refused to protect them. Apparently Hizbullah's campaign against the Druse is a vicious one. For Sunday, even Hizbullah's Druse collaborator Mir Talal Arslan requested that the Lebanese army intervene. For their part, Jumblatt's followers in the Shouf mountains were waging a desperate defense of their villages and pleading with the world for assistance. So far, no one has answered their calls.

OBVIOUSLY, JUMBLATT knew that he couldn't trust Suleiman's army. If he had, he wouldn't have begged Nasrallah to have mercy on his people. And he was right, for since Hizbullah began its violent takeover of Lebanon last Wednesday, it has done so with the full cooperation of the Lebanese army. When Hizbullah forces raided, set fire to and destroyed Hariri's Future News newspaper offices and Future TV station, they did so with Lebanese army escort. Suleiman's forces did not reopen Hariri's pro-democracy media outlets after they ordered Hizbullah forces to leave the streets of Beirut over the weekend. They did not confront Hizbullah forces in Tripoli or Tyre. And now they are allowing the Druse to be destroyed.

And of course, the Shi'ite-dominated Lebanese army rendered Hizbullah the victor in its coup when the generals announced they would not carry out the Saniora government's anti-Hizbullah decisions from last Tuesday. The army reinstated sacked Hizbullah agent Brigadier General Wafiq Shuqeir to his position as head of security at Beirut's Hariri International Airport. It similarly bowed to Hizbullah by announcing it would take no action to shut down Hizbullah's independent telecommunications system, which is run by Iran and linked to Syrian intelligence.

Suleiman's collaboration with Hizbullah is not new. It was exposed during the 2006 war with Israel. Lebanese forces actively assisted Hizbullah forces in their war with Israel. They painted Israeli targets for Hizbullah missile squads. They collaborated in Hizbullah's missile attack on the INS Hanit. They paid pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war.

Since 2006, Lebanese military forces deployed along the border with Israel under UN Security Council Resolution 1701 have reported IDF movements to Hizbullah. They have enabled Hizbullah to transfer arms and deploy fighters to the villages bordering Israel. They have permitted Iran and Syria to transfer massive quantities of arms to Hizbullah throughout the country. These arms transfers enabled Hizbullah's missile arsenal to triple in size from pre-war levels.

Then too, there was Suleiman's supposedly successful campaign against Syrian-backed al-Qaida forces in Nahar el Bared refugee camp last summer. Suleiman allowed the fighting to go on for 33 days rather than storming the camp. He allowed most of the Syrian-backed, al-Qaida-affiliated Fatah al Islam terrorists - including their commander Shaker al Abssi - to run away to Syria.

WITH THIS history, it should have been clear long ago to anyone paying attention that far from being a national institution which serves Lebanon's democratically elected government, the Lebanese army is just another militia. And it also should have been clear that in the absence of a loyal, subservient army, the Saniora government was little more than a lobbying group.

Yet many colluded to ignore this reality. First of course there is Israel. The Olmert-Livni government has upheld Resolution 1701 and its prescribed deployment of the Lebanese army to the border with Israel as their crowning achievement in office. They have to maintain the fiction that the Shi'ite-dominated Lebanese army opposes Hizbullah control over Lebanon in order to keep up the appearance that Resolution 1701 was a good deal for Israel.

Moreover, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have upheld the fiction that UNIFIL's 15,000 ground forces and naval detachment are actually deployed in South Lebanon to defend the Lebanese government and Israel from Hizbullah and to prevent Hizbullah's rearmament and redeployment. In line with this fantasy, rather than take effective action to prevent Hizbullah's rolling takeover of Lebanon, Livni and Olmert have sufficed with issuing complaints to the UN regarding Hizbullah's massive rearmament and redeployment along the border. Again, actually contending with reality would involve acknowledging their own incompetence.

At the outset of the war two years ago, Olmert announced rightly that Israel held the Saniora government responsible for Hizbullah's aggression. Olmert's announcement was reasonable because at the time, Hizbullah was a full member of the Saniora government which effectively acted as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. Yet the US would have none of it.

In the early days of the war, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanded that Israel take no action against the Saniora government which she claimed - wrongly - was a credible US ally. Largely as a consequence of Rice's demand, and of the Olmert-Livni government's refusal to target Hizbullah and Hamas training and logistical bases in Syria, the Olmert-Livni government's plan for fighting against Hizbullah lost its strategic rationale. From then on, Israel's defeat was just a matter of time.

AFTER THE war, the US was given an opportunity to actually support democratic, anti-Iranian-Syrian forces in Lebanon by supporting the Saniora government when Hizbullah abruptly bolted the ruling coalition and backed by Iran and Syria attempted to take control of the government by assassination and terror.

The US could have taken action against Syria or Iran. But instead it sought to appease Iran and Syria in the hopes that they would temper their support for insurgents in Iraq. The pinnacle of this US abandonment of the March 14 movement was Rice's decision to invite Syria to participate in her peace confab at Annapolis last November.

Both the US and Israel's silent acquiescence to Iran's takeover of Lebanon through Hizbullah complements their acceptance of Iran's takeover of Gaza through Hamas.

Again, in an effort to hide the failure of their signature policy of withdrawing IDF forces from Gaza and expelling 10,000 Israeli civilians from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005, the Olmert-Livni government has refused to take action against Hamas's Iranian backed regime in Gaza. Then too, just as it protected Hizbullah during the 2006 war by siding with Saniora, who was then keeping house with Nasrallah, so too, today, the US protects Hamas by siding with Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas who kept house with Hamas until Hamas threw him out of the house last summer and who has been desperately seeking to reunite with Hamas ever since.

With Egypt's Intelligence Minister Omar Suleiman's visit to Israel Monday, the Olmert-Livni government exposed the depth of its recognition of the Hamas regime in Gaza. Suleiman came to present the government with the ceasefire agreement Egypt has negotiated with Hamas. The agreement will bar the IDF from overthrowing Iran's Palestinian proxy and enable Hamas to keep its Iranian armed, trained and funded army. Hamas's Katyusha rocket attack on Ashkelon Monday morning signaled clearly where that ceasefire will lead.

And yet, the Olmert-Livni government embraces it. And the Bush administration supports it.

During his festive visit to Israel this week, President George W. Bush is expected to celebrate the US's strategic alliance with the Jewish state. It is a great tragedy that the strategies this alliance has advanced in recent years have paved the way for Lebanon's demise and for Israel's encirclement by Iranian proxies.

The tragedy is only heightened by the fact that this outcome was eminently avoidable.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Israel's 60th Independence Day is an excuse for the international media to weigh in on the state of the Jewish state. Given the anti-Israel bias of most of the international media, not surprisingly, most of the reports reveal less about Israel's status at 60 than they reveal about how anti-Zionists perceive Israel at 60.

Two critiques - both cover stories of major magazines - stand out in this regard. In Canada, Maclean's magazine's May 5 cover pictures three Israeli soldiers struggling to raise the national flag. The headline reads, "Why Israel Can't Survive."

In the US, the cover of The Atlantic Magazine's May edition sports a Star of David painted in Palestinian colors of red, black and green ensconced in a PLO flag. The headline asks, rhetorically, "Is Israel finished?"

The authors of the two articles - Michael Petrou in Maclean's and Jeffery Goldberg in The Atlantic come to their subject from different angles. Petrou writes as an emotionally disengaged observer. Goldberg, who made aliya in the 1980s, writes as a disillusioned Zionist who abandoned Israel and moved back to America. Petrou writes of Israel's certain demise with amoral detachment. Goldberg's dispatch is a deeply emotional attempt to justify his decision to abandon Israel.

PETROU'S ARTICLE begins optimistically enough. He asserts that at 60, Israel can handle all the security threats that come its way, including Iran's nuclear weapons program and Hizbullah's missiles in Lebanon. Yet despite its military strength, Petrou says that Israel is nonetheless doomed for it has no way of contending with what he proclaims is the greatest threat: the Palestinian demographic time bomb.

By Petrou's estimation, "Within one or two decades, the number of Muslim and Christian Arabs will surpass the number of Israeli Jews (including Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself). When that happens, if there is still no Palestinian state (and in the absence of large-scale ethnic cleansing), Israelis will be forced to choose between two futures. Their country will either be Jewish, but not democratic - in other words, a Jewish minority will control a land mostly inhabited by Palestinians - or Israel will be democratic, but not Jewish, because Arabs will form the majority in what will become a binational state."

While well written, Petrou's piece is a journalistic embarrassment. For his central contention is a fabrication.

The Arab demographic time bomb is a fiction. It was created out of whole cloth in 1997. That year, the Palestinian Authority's Bureau of Statistics published data from a falsified census which claimed that there were 3.8 million Palestinians living in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The PA projected population growth of some 4.7 percent per year - far higher than any other place on earth. At that growth rate, the PA claimed that by 2015, the Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would be some 5.8 million and that together with Arab Israelis, who number some 1.2 million, they would comprise the majority of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

In January 2005 a group of Israeli and American researchers published an in-depth analysis of the PA data. They compared the census with birth and death records published by the PA's Health Ministry, and education records of children entering first grade published by the PA's Education Ministry. They compared immigration rates published by the PA with immigration records compiled by Israeli authorities at the international borders. They compared population statistics with voter rolls in the 1996 PA elections. Their findings were remarkable.

They discovered that the PA had counted as residents hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lived abroad. It double counted Arab Jerusalemites. It assumed high immigration rates when in fact except for 1994, the PA has experienced net emigration every year. The PA inflated birthrates and deflated death rates. It ignored the tens of thousands of Palestinians who had immigrated to Israel.

ALL IN ALL the American-Israeli Demographic Research Group discovered that the PA's census data was exaggerated by some 50 percent. Its researchers discovered that there were only 2.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza, Judea and Samaria in 2004. They found that Israeli Jewish fertility rates are higher than Palestinian fertility rates in Judea and Samaria and the Jewish fertility rates are converging with Israeli Arab fertility rates. Fertility rates in Gaza are similarly declining steadily. So too, Israel's net Jewish immigration rates are positive and rising. Most striking, the researchers found that Israel's Jewish majority west of the Jordan River has remained remarkably steady since 1967. Today Jews make up a 3:2 majority over Arabs in Israel, Gaza and Judea and Samaria. Jews comprise 67 percent of the population of Israel and Judea and Samaria and nearly 80 percent of the population within sovereign Israel.

The AIDRG's initial and subsequent reports have received significant attention in Israel. Had he wished, Petrou could easily have accessed its work on the Internet. But that would have upset his conclusions.

Petrou's story reveals a consistent message of many anti-Zionists. That message is that no matter what Israel does, it remains essentially powerless, just as Jews were powerless for 18 centuries in exile. It is meant to demoralize Israel's supporters by telling them there is no point in trying to prevent the inevitable. And it is meant to console Israel's detractors. They needn't worry. Israel is on its way out.

WHILE GOLDBERG too, makes use of the PA's phony demographic data, his argument for Israel's demise is not about demography. It is an indictment of Jewish power. If Petrou's Jewish state is doomed because it is powerless just as Jews have always been, Goldberg's Jewish state is doomed because it has sinfully deviated from Jewish history by being powerful.

Goldberg set up his article as an indirect dialogue between far-leftist novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the Second Lebanon War and Olmert - who Grossman blames for his son's death. Goldberg served as the moderator. Goldberg's decision to focus his analysis on Grossman was a revealing one. While Grossman enjoys a pride of place among the radical leftist elite, he is a marginal figure in Israeli society. Yet by Goldberg's telling, Grossman is a giant. As he tells it, Grossman's son's death in war, "became a national tragedy." Yet this is untrue.

Goldberg likes Grossman, because like Goldberg, Grossman doesn't feel comfortable with Jewish power. Goldberg notes approvingly that during the course of the Second Lebanon war, Grossman held a press conference with fellow radical leftist novelists A.B. Yehoshua and Amoz Oz demanding that Israel not launch a ground offensive in Lebanon. Goldberg ignores the fact that their call was widely ignored by the general public and to the extent that their press conference evoked a response, it was a negative one.

Goldberg recalled that after that press conference, Grossman told him, "Force [against Hizbullah] will fan the flames of hatred for Israel in the region and the entire world, and may even... create the situation that will bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East to an all-out regional war."

What is bizarre about Grossman's statement is that it was made while Israel was in the midst of a regional war. The war was fought by Hizbullah forces but it was directed by Iran, and Hizbullah was armed and equipped by Syria with Russian assistance. Today Grossman, who advocates negotiations with Iran's Palestinian proxy Hamas, is none the wiser and no less isolated from mainstream Israeli opinion. Yet Goldberg misleads his readers by claiming that Grossman's views are mainstream and influential.

Goldberg's assessment of Israel as destined to fail is predicated on two ideological opinions which imbue both his narrative and his analysis. First, he claims that Israel's decision to build communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines is the reason that the Arabs refuse to make peace with it. That is, it is Israel's fault that there is no peace. Arabs are not actors, they merely react to Israel. Second, and more fundamentally, Goldberg argues because Israel is powerful, it is necessarily immoral.

Far from a moral argument, Goldberg's second assertion renders his analysis a moral perversion. For him, there is no distinction between actors only between their relative military power. It is military strength, or the absence of military strength, that determines if a nation should be supported or delegitimized. In his mind, there is little difference between a powerful Israel and a powerful Germany. Both are destined to use power to advance evil. By the same token, since America is militarily powerful, its campaign in Iraq is evil and since al-Qaida in Iraq is militarily weak, it is a victim, and good, just like the Palestinians.

Goldberg's view is just as familiar as Petrou's. As Prof. Ruth Wisse from Harvard University wrote in her recently published book Jews and Power, throughout the years of Jewish powerlessness in 18 centuries of exile, many Jews confused their tragic and lamentable existential condition for a moral virtue. They reviled Zionism with its message of Jewish empowerment because they refused to recognize that power can be used to advance both good and evil, depending on the identity of those who wield it. For Goldberg, then, it is the very success of Zionism in empowering Jews that makes it unacceptable.

In the end, the unifying factor in Petrou's and Goldberg's anti-Zionism is that both ignore Zionists. For Petrou, Zionists are irrelevant because they are doomed to fail whoever they are. For Goldberg, Zionists are no more than symbols. They cannot be moral because they are powerful.

Israel's success is a testament to the enduring ingenuity and strength of the Jewish people as moral actors. The longevity of anti-Zionism is a testament to the fact that no matter what Israel's accomplishments, there will always be those who fail to see them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Another ordinary week has come and gone in southern Israel. Bombarded by rockets from Hamastan in Gaza, residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and nearby towns watched as their national leaders conducted negotiations by proxy with Hamas to release hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails and consolidate Hamas's weapons supply lines by suspending Israeli counter-terror operations during a "cease-fire." Between trips to the local bomb shelter, they watched Israeli trucks deliver fuel and supplies to Hamas in Gaza in the morning and they watched Hamas store the fuel and supplies in depots near the border in the afternoon. In the evening they watched news reports echoing Hamas's claims that Israel is depriving Gazan hospitals of fuel and Gazan civilians of basic foodstuffs.

Wednesday night they tried having a Yom Hashoah ceremony in Sderot but it was interrupted by incoming rockets. For its part, Hamas marked the Holocaust with a documentary series claiming that the genocide of European Jewry was a satanic Jewish plot to cull the Jewish population of its handicapped and to manipulate the world media.

Hamas captured headlines this week with its allegation that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian woman and four of her children in an explosion in Bet Hanoun in Gaza as the IDF targeted Hamas terrorists from the air. The IDF conducted two investigations showing that the woman and her children were killed by something else: a secondary explosion caused by bombs the Hamas terrorists - one of whom was her husband - were carrying at the time the IDF targeted them.

Hamas's allegations that the IDF killed four children and their mother were reported by both the international and Israeli media as facts. Those "facts" were only questioned when the IDF began its probes. Neither the local media nor the international media thought the fact that the source of their accounts was Hamas should make them question the veracity of the initial reports.

When its spokesmen are not busy accusing Jews of planning genocide and Israel of killing mothers and children, Hamas devotes its efforts to accusing Israel of killing sick Palestinians by refusing to let them into Israel for free medical care. As no good deed by Jews goes unpunished by the UN, early last month the World Health Organization punished Israel for admitting more than 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza for free medical care during 2007. Echoing Hamas propaganda, the WHO accused Israel of causing the deaths of 33 sick Palestinians between October 2007 and March 2008. They died, the WHO claimed, due to the Jewish state's heartless refusal to allow them into its hospitals.

The WHO report made no mention of the fact that Hamas now controls the hospitals and clinics in Gaza. No mention was made of the fact that Israel bears no responsibility for providing health care to non-citizens from enemy territories, or of the fact that there is no place in the world where such care is provided other than Israel. No mention was made of Hamas intercepting and hoarding hospital supplies for propaganda purposes. No responsibility was assigned to Egypt - the other country bordering Gaza - which does not admit any Palestinian patients. The report never questioned the credibility of its Gazan sources.

As Andrea Levin, the executive director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) noted this week in The Jerusalem Post, it was only due to the quick and detailed response of Israeli officials refuting Hamas's allegations that Israel wasn't widely condemned for murdering sick people.

The most interesting aspect of these media reports is that for the most part, the news agencies reporting Hamas's wild allegations don't even have correspondents in Gaza. Hamas's habit of kidnapping Western - even pro-Hamas - reporters caused most Western media outlets to remove their correspondents from Gaza more than a year ago. The Israeli media have not had correspondents on the ground since Israel withdrew from Gaza in September 2005.

Yet the same media outlets that realized Hamas is too radical to be trusted to respect their own reporters' lives refuse to question the veracity of Hamas's stories and are more than willing to credit these stories as fact well past the point of professional embarrassment. Indeed, no media outlet - either Israeli or foreign - has ever asked whether it even makes sense to run Hamas's propaganda in the first place. They have certainly not bothered to inform their audiences that the source of their stories is a genocidal terror group that is currently waging a missile campaign against Israeli civilians whose goal is to terrorize and kill them just because they are Jewish.

BUT THEN, the media can perhaps be forgiven for their refusal to admit that their reports from Gaza are generally nothing more than terrorist propaganda for they are far from alone in their refusal to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's regime. From Jimmy Carter to the Bush administration to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, denial is the order of the day.

Carter defends his decision to meet with Hamas's leaders in Syria and Judea by noting that the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group won the Palestinian elections. Since a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas and still support it, the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group is legitimate, Carter argues. Certainly no peace agreement can be reached without it.

But then as Hamas clarified just after its leaders met with Carter, any deal it may reach with Israel is merely a tactic in its ongoing war to destroy Israel. So while it may be true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible without Hamas, it is absolutely true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible with Hamas.

Far from demonstrating the necessity of negotiating with Hamas, Hamas's popularity shows the futility of attempting to coax peaceful coexistence out of a Palestinian society committed to its neighbor's destruction. Yet just as the media and Carter refuse to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's terror regime, so the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge the significance of its broad-based popular support among Palestinians.

In her remarks Tuesday before the American Jewish Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that Palestinian society today overwhelmingly supports Israel's annihilation through terrorism when she said: "Increasingly, Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age. And I'm not that old, but I'm a lot older than most of the Palestinian population."

But then, after acknowledging that most Palestinians do not support peaceful coexistence with Israel, Rice argued that Israel must give them more land, more guns and more money because as she sees it, now is the time for a Palestinian state and leaders need to "make hard decisions confidently for the sake of peace and for the sake of their people."

Rice went on to explain that this appeasement must be done while enabling the Hamas regime in Gaza to remain in place. As she put it, "The only responsible policy is to isolate Hamas and defend against its threats, until Hamas makes the choice that supports peace."

So from Rice's perspective, not only must Hamas not be defeated, it would be irresponsible to even try to defeat it. The only "responsible" policy for Israel is to allow Hamas to continue stockpiling arms and building its army while trying to reach a cease-fire with it. Then too, as far as Rice is concerned, Israel must curb its counterterrorist operations in Judea and Samaria, dry out Israeli communities there and in post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods and allow US-trained and armed Fatah militias (who are also terror-supporting) to deploy in Palestinian towns and cities by the thousands. This, she believes, is the best way to make Hamas transform itself into a peaceful political party willing to live at peace with Jews.

AS FOR Israel, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government clearly agrees with Rice, for it is following her policy.

Wednesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert refused to comment on his government's involvement in cease-fire talks with Hamas during the security cabinet meeting. When pointedly confronted by Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter about his apparent decision to allow Hamas to remain in charge of Gaza with its Iranian trained and armed terror army, Olmert simply said that it would be inappropriate to discuss such things.

Thursday, The Jerusalem Post reported that the government is enthusiastic about the proposed cease-fire agreement with Hamas, strangely claiming that it may pave the way for a second and unrelated agreement in which Israel ransoms hostage Gilad Schalit from Hamas captivity by releasing hundreds of terrorists.

Then too, the government claims triumphantly that Hamas has agreed to have Fatah forces deploy at the international border with Egypt. But since both Hamas and Fatah enjoyed a nearly unimpeded flow of weaponry through that border when Fatah was responsible for it, it is far from clear why this would be a positive development.

The simple truths that the media, Jimmy Carter, the Bush administration, and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government are all unwilling to acknowledge are that Hamas is a genocidal terror group sworn to Israel's destruction and that it represents the will of the majority of Palestinians who elected it to office in 2006 and who continue to support it today.

This plain reality demonstrates that there is only one responsible policy for Israel to follow and for the international community to support if they are truly interested in peace between Israel and the Palestinians. That policy is for Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime. Only when they are forced to pay a real price for their support for terror and jihad - as opposed to being rewarded for it with further Israeli land giveaways - will the Palestinians be forced to reconsider that support. Only when they realize that terror will get them nowhere - as opposed to anywhere they wish - will the Palestinians be forced to accept Israel as an unchanging reality with which they must live in peace.

Dichter's condemnation Wednesday of his government's pro-Hamas policies was not the first time the Ashkelon resident and former head of the Shin Bet has argued that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's policies are dangerous for the country. And Dichter, together with Transportation Minister and former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, who has similarly criticized the government's policies as dangerous, could end the current situation if they had the courage to act on their convictions. Were they to band together with eight of their colleagues in Kadima's Knesset faction and leave the government, they would bring on new elections.

Yet so far, they have refused to take action. Until they do, Dichter, Mofaz and their colleagues are enabling Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak to continue endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of Israelis through their bluster and appeasement of Hamas. Until they do, they are as guilty as the media, Carter, the Bush administration and their government colleagues of whitewashing and protecting Hamas to the detriment of their country and to the cause of peace.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.