Since Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora bowed to Hizbullah's demands in Doha last month and agreed to grant the Iranian-controlled, Syrian-supported terror group control over his government, Lebanon has become an official agent of a terror group. That is, Lebanon, as a state, has become a sponsor of terror. But no one seems to notice or to care.

Truth be told, on the surface the situation in Lebanon is quite complicated. There is a power struggle of sorts going on today between Saniora's pro-Lebanese sovereignty March 14th movement and Hizbullah. Even in its diminished status, the March 14th movement is seeking to compel Hizbullah to subordinate its Iranian proxy army to the government. But this is an exercise in futility.

As Hizbullah demonstrated clearly during its armed insurrection in May that led to the Doha agreement, and as it continues to demonstrate in its attacks against Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli, it is fully willing to use its militia to force its political opponents to accept its complete independence.

But then, while it is clear that the March 14th movement's leaders and supporters oppose Hizbullah's independence from central authority, it is far from clear that they oppose its terrorist operations. The fact of the matter is that none of Hizbullah's political opponents in Lebanon have anything but praise for its aggression against Israel and its clear intention to continue its war against Israel for its Iranian commanders.

MAKING THIS point this week, Lebanon's Finance Minister Muhammad Shatah, explained, "We are all in agreement that it will be crazy not to benefit from Hizbullah resistance capabilities, but the dispute is whether this will be done within the state or outside." The widespread support that Hizbullah's terror war against Israel enjoys in Lebanon was prominently displayed on July 16 when convicted baby killer Samir Kuntar and his fellow Lebanese terrorists were released to Lebanon by Israel in exchange for the mutilated corpses of IDF soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser who were killed in Hizbullah's raid on their military position in Israel on July 12, 2006.

All of Lebanon's supposedly moderate leaders were at the Hizbullah-controlled Beirut airport to accord Kuntar a hero's welcome. President Michel Suleiman embraced Kuntar - who crushed four-year-old Einat Haran's skull - and his fellow terrorists as "our freed heroes." Sa'ad Hariri, the head of the March 14th movement, referred to Kuntar's release as "an historic day of joy." Saniora hailed the corpses-for-murderers swap explaining, "The success of Hizbullah in the negotiations led by a third party is a national success for the party and for the struggle of the Lebanese because it secured national goals which Israel always refused to respect." And Druse leader Walid Jumblatt hailed Kuntar's release as "a national holiday."

HIZBULLAH'S DOMESTIC intimidation and international terrorism is enabled by the Lebanese military which refuses to confront it. And this is nothing new. During the 2006 war, when Suleiman commanded the Lebanese armed forces, the Lebanese military actively collaborated with Hizbullah units. Then, as now, Hizbullah was a coalition partner in Saniora's government.

During the war, the Lebanese military guided Hizbullah in attacking the INS Hanit along the Lebanese coastline with an advanced, Iranian-supplied Chinese C-802 missile. The Lebanese military pays pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in battle. Since the war, the Lebanese military enabled Hizbullah to reassert its control over south Lebanon, to expand its control north of the Litani River and to massively rearm.

Moreover, throughout the war, Saniora acted as Hizbullah's mouthpiece. He condemned all Israeli efforts to defend its territory from wanton aggression and championed all of Hizbullah's demands in cease-fire negotiations. By the same token, the Saniora government backed all of Hizbullah's attacks against Israel - attacks which forced a million Israelis to flee their homes or live in bomb shelters for the duration of the war.

IN JULY 2006, understanding the Saniora government's collusion with Hizbullah, Israel's immediate reaction to Hizbullah's abduction of its soldiers and bombardment of northern Israel was to hold Beirut accountable. In his first press conference of the war, just hours after Goldwasser and Regev were abducted and their comrades killed, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made this point explicitly. He declared, "This morning's events were not a terror attack. They were the act of a sovereign state that attacked Israel, without reason and without provocation. The government of Lebanon, of which Hizbullah is a part, is attempting to destabilize the region. Lebanon is the responsible party, and Lebanon will pay the consequences for its actions."

Israel's initial strategy for fighting the war was to disable Hizbullah's war machine by bombing Lebanese infrastructure targets such as highways, the airport, bridges, electricity grids and the telecommunication systems. All of these facilities enabled Hizbullah's war effort. It is possible that if Israel had in fact attacked Lebanon's national infrastructures, the blow to Hizbullah's war machine might have been strategically debilitating. In that event, the task of land forces charged with defeating Hizbullah forces on the ground would have been smoother.

But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would have none of it. Already in the earliest stages of the war, she began putting pressure on Israel not to attack Lebanese infrastructure. Her demand was formalized in the G-8 declaration three days after Hizbullah initiated hostilities.

Rice's support for Saniora's government was so strong and consistent, that she eventually forced Israel to cave to all of Hizbullah's demands in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which set the terms of the cease-fire at the end of the war. Rice defended her support by noting the democratic character of the March 14th movement and its success - with US and French support - in forcing most Syrian forces to depart Lebanon in April 2005.

Despite the Lebanese government's and military's open and active collusion with Hizbullah throughout the war, in its aftermath, US support for Saniora's government and his military expanded exponentially. In the year following the war, US aid to Lebanon grew from $41 million to $520 million. US military assistance to the Lebanese military since the war has been in excess of $410 million, making Lebanon the second largest recipient per capita of US military aid.

US military support for Lebanon grows even as the Lebanese armed forces demonstrate at every turn that they collaborate with Hizbullah. It was supplemented after the Lebanese military, under Suleiman's command, refused to prevent Hizbullah's coup in May. Moreover, the day before Suleiman gave Kuntar the red carpet treatment at the Beirut airport, Maj.-Gen. Robert Allardice, the US Central Command's director of strategy, plans and policy, visited Beirut and announced an additional $32 million in military aid.

Since 2006, the US has given Lebanon some 285 Humvees, 200 cargo trucks, helicopter parts, assault rifles, grenade launchers, anti-tank weapons and urban warfare bunker weapons. Another 300 Humvees, mobile communications systems, several hundred anti-tank missiles and coastal patrol craft are on order.

Israel has recently begun openly expressing its alarm about these weapon transfers. Given Hizbullah's now inarguable control over Lebanon and its sway over its military forces, it is all but a foregone conclusion that these weapons will likely be used by Hizbullah and its allied forces in the Lebanese army in any future war with Israel. In recent weeks, senior Defense Ministry officials have been dispatched to the Pentagon in an attempt to convince the US to stop the weapons transfers. Yet while the Pentagon was only too happy to give Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Ashkenazi an unrequested medal, it has rebuffed all of Israel's entreaties.

ALL OF this is depressingly familiar. In many ways, the Saniora government is to Hizbullah in Lebanon what the Fatah terror group is to Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. As is the case in Lebanon, the US trains, finances and arms Fatah. It supports Fatah politically against Israel, claiming that Fatah has earned its support through its moderation relative to Hamas. But as events have shown repeatedly, Fatah is a terrorist organization and is only too happy to collude with Hamas in attacking Israel and to form governments with Hamas so long as Hamas doesn't embarrass it too much.

Notably in the case of the Palestinians, the US cut off its assistance to the PA after Fatah and Hamas formed their unity government last year and only reinstated that assistance after Hamas ended the unity deal by seizing control of Gaza from its Fatah partner. In Lebanon's case, US support for the country has grown as Hizbullah's control of the government and the military have become more open. Indeed, today Rice is openly pressing Israel to surrender Mt. Dov and Ghajar village to Lebanon even though Lebanon has no legal claim to either. And this she does by claiming that an Israeli capitulation to Hizbullah's demands will strengthen Saniora who is controlled by Hizbullah - and believing that this will be a good thing.

With even the Olmert-Livni-Barak government calling openly for a revision of Resolution 1701 to curtail the Lebanese military's ability to facilitate Hizbullah's rearmament and assertion of control over southern Lebanon, and with even Britain finally classifying Hizbullah's militia as a terror group, the time has come to revisit US policy.

US JEWISH leaders and counterterror champions on Capitol Hill should begin a campaign to compel the State Department to place Lebanon on its list of state sponsors of terror. At a minimum, US military and financial assistance to the Hizbullah-controlled government should be abrogated immediately.

The current government of Lebanon is only expected to remain in power for another year. Hizbullah is expected to be the big winner in Lebanon's parliamentary elections scheduled for next year. As Lebanese parliamentarian Samir Franjieh from the March 14th movement explained in a media interview this week, "Weapons eliminate the principle of majority [rule]. In... 2005 the March 14 [movement] won a majority of parliamentary seats in the elections. The result was practically eliminated by the use of force. Having armed factions [running for elections in 2009] would limit the freedom of voters."

It is reasonable for the US to seek to support pro-Western democrats in the Arab world. It is unreasonable for the US to be bankrolling a terror-controlled regime populated by terrorists and democrats who support their aggression. This is particularly the case when the same terrorists are waging war not only against Israel, but against America's own forces in Iraq.

Olmert's July 12, 2006 declaration is still apt. Lebanon must be forced to suffer the consequences of its support for Hizbullah.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

 

Caroline B. Glick is the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and the senior fellow for Middle East Affairs at the Center for Security Policy. Her book, Shackled Warrior, Israel and the Global Jihad was released earlier this year. She took questions from National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez on Friday about Barack Obama's visit to the Mideast.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Am I wrong in saying that Barack Obama did not impress Israel?

Caroline Glick: Israelis are very caught up with our local news right now. Foremost on our national agenda are the seven criminal probes being carried out against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the political maneuvering surrounding those investigations, and the expectation of new elections or some governmental shake-up in the wake of Olmert's likely indictment on fraud charges. Consequently, Obama's visit didn't evoke any deep-seated interest in Israel.

At the same time, he didn't make any serious mistakes during his visit so to the extent he made any impression, he made a positive one. There is trepidation in Israel about the statements he has made about Iran and the division of Jerusalem and his associations with anti-Semites like Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But the media wasn't given much opportunity to challenge him on these points and so the trepidation was not dispelled. But again, Israelis by and large just weren't that into him.


Lopez: What was the point of the trip there so far as you can tell?

Glick: The point of the trip was clearly to shore up support for Obama among American Jewish voters. It is hard to know whether he was successful in doing so or not, although he certainly didn't hurt himself among those who already support him.

His repeated assertions of his commitment to Israel's security were repeatedly contradicted by the policies he wishes to adopt if elected. On the one hand he opposes permitting Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, but on the other hand, he insists that the way to make this happen is to sit down and talk to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has made annihilating the Jewish state one of his main goals in office. He says he understands Israel's need to protect its citizens from terror attacks but then he says that Israel's interests are served by strengthening the Palestinian terror groups by extending Palestinian sovereignty from Gaza to the West Bank. Gaza is ruled by jihadists from Hamas who are bankrolled, trained and armed by Iran. How are Israel's interests served by importing jihadist control to the outskirts of Tel-Aviv and to Jerusalem?

Then again, like Israeli Jews, American Jews are not too caught up in details. He said he supports Israel and got his picture taken at Yad Vashem and the Wailing Wall wearing a kippa. So he probably succeeded in pulling more American Jews into his camp of supporters.


Lopez: How close did you get to the "messiah"?

Glick: I generally try to stay as far away as I possibly can from people who say they can make oceans recede. Our paths didn't cross. In fact, I managed to be out of the country on Wednesday.


Lopez: How did the Palestinians take to him?

Glick: They were certainly gratified that unlike Senator John McCain, Obama made the trip to Ramallah and had his picture taken with Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas against the backdrop of Yasser Arafat's photograph. It is hard though to know if Obama's trip changed the Palestinians' impression of him. It is already clear, and has been for months that the Palestinians, like the Arab world (minus Iraq) prefer Obama to McCain because they view him as sympathetic to their war against Israel and their hostility towards the U.S. and the rest of the West. But he was in Israel for such a short time that it is hard to say that his visit excited anyone.


Lopez: Does he remind you of anyone?

Glick: Obama acts like a European leader in his treatment of Israel. On the one hand, he professes this profound respect for Israel and the Jews, and goes on and on about how our security is important to him. On the other hand, he espouses policies that undermine Israeli security and threaten its survival, and demands that the Jewish state become the only state that turns its other cheek towards our enemies as they try to kill us. This is the same sort of message that we hear from all Europeans leaders. And it is tiresome and insulting.

Beyond that, Obama is in a unique situation because of the adulation he enjoys from the U.S. and Western media. The media is willing to ignore all of the substantive contradictions inherent in his policy pronouncements and to base their support for him on a quasi-religious faith. I don't remember this ever happening before in an American election — at least not to the same extent. It is an interesting sociological phenomenon that is worthy of academic research. On a political level, it makes debate very difficult since Obama is treated more as a symbol than a politician. And it is hard to debate a symbol.


Lopez: What the heck happened at the Wailing Wall?

Glick: That depends who you read. In Israel, the story was presented as "an ugly Israeli" story. People were rude and heckled him at the Wall, someone removed his note. Israelis are mean and rude to visitors, end of story.

In the U.S. blogosphere especially, the story was cast as angry Jews yelling at Obama for his desire to transfer sovereignty over parts of Israel's capital city to the Palestinians.

What is clear is that Obama wrote the following prayer that he placed in the Wall, "Lord, Protect my family and me. Forgive my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will."

This was supposed to be a private benediction, and it was extraordinarily improper for someone to take this prayer and sell it to the media. On the other hand, in the world of paparazzi, the exposure of the prayer was predictable, and Obama apparently constructed the prayer for public consumption. Like everything else about his visit, this was a carefully crafted statement, designed not to ruffle any many feathers. And like this prayer, there was nothing extraordinary about Obama's visit. As you would expect from a politician, he tried to be all things to all people. And he probably succeeded.

Lopez: Were there campaign signs there?

Glick: Apparently there were a few, but the Israeli media didn't pay much attention. Again, we're basically scope-locked on the corruption investigations of the prime minister.

Lopez: Did he get his Jerusalem answer wrong?

Glick: Israelis don't support making any concessions on our sovereignty over Jerusalem and so his answer won him no support among most Israelis. But again, no one challenged him much on the issue and no one really cared that deeply about what he thinks about much of anything other than Iran.

Lopez: What is Israel looking for in an American president?

Glick: We're looking for someone whose policies reflect an understanding of the real security threats facing Israel and the United States. We're looking for a president who understands that Israel is the frontline state in the global jihad and as a consequence, it has to have support as it defends itself and acts as the frontline of the U.S. defense perimeter. That is, we're looking for a president who understands that Israel is a valuable ally and that America's national security is directly linked to Israel's because our enemies are the same. It is this sort of president that will understand that standing with Israel and strengthening the alliance isn't a matter of platitudes designed to get Jewish voter support and disposed of when constructing real policy, but, rather, a real commitment to U.S. and Israeli security needs.

Bush projected this understanding in the 2004 election which is why some 75 percent of Israelis enthusiastically supported his reelection.

Lopez: Does Obama have it?

Glick: No, Obama doesn't have it. His statements about Iraq being a "diversion" alone are proof that he fundamentally refuses to acknowledge that there is a global jihad raging, that Israel is a frontline state in the jihad and that the U.S. cannot allow jihadists to gain control of any territory and particularly territory as strategically vital as Iraq or Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Obama is a quintessential leftist who thinks that war can be wished away by blaming the U.S. for its enemies' hatred and malicious designs. This is the type of person who will push very hard not only for America to stand down from the war and ask the Iranians for forgiveness while enabling them to get the bomb, but will blame Israel for the Arab world's refusal to accept its right to exist.


Lopez: What's the best-case President Obama scenario from where you sit? Worst-case?

Glick: The best-case scenario is that Obama will be willing to learn from the Bush administration's mistakes in attempting to appease the Palestinians, the Iranians, and the North Koreans. Such an Obama administration would recognize that its liberal formulations are fundamentally misguided and abandon them in favor of reality-based policies. Given Obama's stubborn refusal to admit he was wrong about the surge and his insistence that he can strike a deal with Ahmadinejad, the likelihood of this happening is about zero.

The worst-case scenario is that Obama actually bases his foreign policy on his ideological beliefs. If he does that, he will leave Iraq prematurely and so enable Iran's effective takeover of the country through its Shiite proxies.

He will botch up Afghanistan and end up enabling an open jihadist takeover of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

He will negotiate with Ahmadinejad, giving Iran the time and political cover to complete its nuclear program and test its nuclear weapon, and he will then refuse to assist Israel in attacking the Iranian nuclear program thus escalating the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel and Iranian nuclear blackmail of the Middle East and Europe.

He will press Israel to curtail its counter-terror activities towards the Palestinians and so enable a Hamas-Iranian takeover of the West Bank. This in turn will precipitate the expansion of the missile war against Israel from Gaza to the West Bank and so place Israel's major urban centers and its international airport at risk.

While he will simply roll over a left-leaning Israeli government like the current one while protesting his enduring commitment to Israel's security, if a Likud-led government is installed during his tenure and tries to extricate Israel from the failed "land-for-peace," policy paradigm while gearing up to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, he will treat the government with hostility and strengthen the position of Israel's enemies in his administration. This in turn will weaken the social and political standing of American Jews who will find themselves under unprecedented and unjustified suspicion of disloyalty due to their support for Israel.

As in all things, the reality of an Obama presidency is difficult to predict and may well fall somewhere between these two extremes.

US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama's trip to the Middle East has been a boon for his campaign's photo archive. The past week has seen the presumptive Democratic nominee feted by the leaders of Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Obama's foreign policy pronouncements have been a source of concern in the region, particularly in Iraq and in Israel. As The Washington Post noted Wednesday, Obama's announced timeline calling for the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq within 16 months is opposed by the US commander in the country, Gen. David Petreaus, as well as by Sunni tribal leaders. Moreover, although Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki seemed to support Obama's withdrawal timeline when he told Der Spiegel Saturday that he supports a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq by 2010, he later backtracked on that statement, telling Obama that the date needs to be flexible and based on conditions on the ground.

While visiting Israel, Obama said that he is willing to use military force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But he undercut his own message by continuing to insist that he favors direct US negotiations with Iran.

As for the Palestinian conflict with Israel, Obama says that he views the peace plan laid out by former president Bill Clinton as a reasonable "starting point" for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The Clinton plan calls for an Israeli withdrawal from some 95 percent of Judea and Samaria, and the division of Jerusalem, with Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

If that is the "starting point" for negotiations, it is worth considering what the "endpoint" would be.

Then, too, as Israel's withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon demonstrated, all areas transferred to the control of terror forces become active bases for terror and jihad. Given the jihadist state of Palestinian society, how can Obama think that the reenactment of that same failed policy in Jerusalem and the outskirts of Tel Aviv will bring different results than it has in Gaza and Lebanon?

Obama presents his foreign policy plans as a way to "fix the damage" that he claims has been caused by the Bush administration's foreign policy mistakes. But the plain truth is that there is little difference between the policies he espouses and those of the Bush administration.

Indeed, any residual disparities between the Bush administration's policies and those Obama recommends were erased over the past month. As Obama works to project the image of a centrist pragmatist in foreign affairs ahead of the US general election, over the past few weeks President George W. Bush has moved sharply to the left, feverishly implementing all of Obama's most radical preferred policies.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a meeting with her North Korean counterpart, Ro Tong Il, in Singapore. The meeting followed North Korea's recent submission of an 18,000 page "declaration" of its nuclear activities.

North Korea was supposed to submit that document 16 months ago. As if tipping their hat to their own brazen mendacity, the North Korean report was printed on paper contaminated with enriched uranium that the North Koreans claim they do not possess.

Yet in spite of its lateness and its obvious mendacity, the Bush administration wasted no time announcing that Pyongyang's radioactive declaration was the major breakthrough Washington had been waiting for.

Immediately upon receiving the North Korean declaration, and while refusing to release its contents to the public, Bush announced that he is removing North Korea from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. As far as Bush is concerned, Pyongyang - which has been actively involved in Iran's nuclear program and built a clone of its Yongbyon nuclear reactor in Syria - is no longer a US enemy.

As former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "the administration has accepted a North Korean 'declaration' about its nuclear program that is narrowly limited, incomplete, and almost certainly dishonest in material respects."

For his part, Obama applauded Bush's about-face on North Korea. In his view, the only thing wrong with Bush's policy is that Bush hasn't yet met face-to-face with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Il.

BUSH'S DECISION to abandon even the pretense of seriousness in his handling of North Korea's nuclear program and its proliferation activities in exchange for a few photo opportunities is just one capitulation among many. Over the past week, it has been matched by a near-identical capitulation on Iran's nuclear weapons program - a capitulation backed up by a US nod to Teheran's quest for hegemony over Iraq.

Last Saturday, Bush broke his last remaining red line for dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program by dispatching his No. 3 diplomat, Undersecretary of State William Burns, to Geneva to meet with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in spite of the fact that Iran refuses to suspend its uranium enrichment.

From media reports of Burns' encounter with Jalili, it is fairly clear that Iran used the opportunity presented by American knee buckling to humiliate Uncle Sam for its gesture of good faith. Jalili presented Burns and his colleagues with an Iranian "none-paper."

A "none-paper" is a misspelled "non-paper" or a nonbinding position paper. Apparently, the misspelled title was just a prelude to the syntactically and grammatically incoherent Iranian essay whose content essentially boiled down to a long-winded Iranian call for the US to shove it.

Rice reacted to Iran's display of contempt with angry words this week. Rice said that Iran's paper was "not serious" and that if Teheran doesn't accept the US-European "carrots," within two weeks, the US will move to impose stronger sanctions on Iran for its nuclear weapons program.

It is far from clear though that stronger sanctions are even a remote possibility. Moscow apparently interpreted Bush's decision to dispatch Burns to kowtow to Jalili as a sign of American weakness. In the wake of Saturday's embarrassing exchange, senior Israeli defense sources told Reuters that Russia is planning to begin shipping its advanced S-300 anti-aircraft systems to Iran in September. The S-300 batteries can track 100 targets simultaneously and fire on planes 120 km. away. Once they are operational, it will be far more difficult for Israel or another military force to attack Iran's scattered, hardened nuclear installations from the air. It is hard to imagine Russia would go through with the controversial deal if Moscow believed that the US would do anything to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The day before Jalili embarrassed Burns, Bush made a move that calls into question the viability of his most hard-won foreign policy accomplishment - the independence of post-Saddam Iraq. Until last Friday, Bush had been clear that US combat forces will remain in Iraq for as long as necessary to prevent Iran from taking control of Iraq and to protect the oil-rich Gulf state from jihadists who share Iran's plan to transform Iraq into the next Lebanon.

Then last Friday, Bush signaled that perhaps staying the course is no longer his preferred policy. In a joint statement with Maliki, Bush announced that the two leaders have set a "time horizon" for transferring security responsibility over the country to the Iraqi government. While Bush and his surrogates have been quick to make a distinction between his "time horizon" and Obama's "timeline" for withdrawal, it is undeniable that by introducing a "time horizon" for withdrawal he has made it more difficult to argue against Obama's planned withdrawal "timeline."

Obviously US forces shouldn't remain in Iraq longer than necessary. But to ensure Iraq's continued independence and viability as a terror-fighting, pro-Western state, US forces will have to stay there for a considerable period. If the US commits to a "timeline" or "horizon" for leaving Iraq, it will induce Iraqis to begin cutting deals with Iran. This is the lesson of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon.

IN THE months leading up to the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, more and more soldiers and officers from the IDF-allied South Lebanese Army began defecting to Hizbullah. They saw the writing on the walls. They knew they would be no match for Iran's foreign legion in Lebanon without IDF support. And so they did what they needed to do to stay alive.

And if the US goes ahead with its withdrawal, it will find itself presented in the future with the same unenviable options that Israel faces with today's Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon.

It will either have to turn its back on Iraq - and on the memory of the 4,100 US servicemen and women who have given their lives in the Iraqi campaign - and allow Iran to take over, or it will have to reinvade the country - at much higher cost in blood and treasure than maintaining the current force in place. And like Israel's 2006 war with Hizbullah, a renewed US invasion will be carried out with far less leadership commitment and national resolve than is necessary to see that next round of war through to victory.

Then there is Bush's recent mania for the swift establishment of a Palestinian state despite the obvious fact that such a state would be a jihadist-run, Iranian-allied terror state. Here, too, there is no light between Bush's policies and Obama's policies. Like Bush, Obama is perfectly capable of visiting bombed-out Sderot and failing to notice that Sderot's fate is the consequence of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. While loudly proclaiming his commitment to Israel's security, Obama calls for an Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, and due sensitivity to the "plight" of the Palestinians who democratically elected Hamas to govern them.

This of course, is no different from Rice's repeated calls for Israel to curtail its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria and to allow Hamas to remain in power in Gaza in the interests of "strengthening" Hamas-allied, terror supporting PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

When Bush entered office in 2001, he was faced with a raging Palestinian terror war against Israel. That war was the direct consequence of his immediate predecessor's decision in his waning days in power to throw caution to the wind in a vain attempt to leave a diplomatic legacy of peace treaties that would perhaps earn him a Nobel peace prize.

In fairness to Bill Clinton though, his intellectual collapse, which occurred on only one front, was nowhere near as radical or as strategically dangerous as Bush's abandonment of prudence on all fronts. Moreover, unlike Bush's behavior, which contravenes any possible political logic, Clinton's actions were more or less aligned with the interests of his party. In contrast, Bush is personally legitimizing all of Obama's radical foreign policies and doing so to the direct detriment of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's campaign.

Bolton wrote that Bush's policies have brought about "the early start of the Obama administration." Just imagine where we will be in the second, third and fourth year of the Obama era.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On July 14, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak castigated UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the terms of the cease-fire that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Iran's Lebanese army Hizbullah, saying, "UN resolution 1701 didn't work, isn't working and won't work." He added, "UN resolution 1701 is a failure."
Resolution 1701 is indeed a failure and always has been a failure. The resolution is predicated on the false belief that UNIFIL, the UN force deployed along Lebanon's border with Israel would work together with the Lebanese army to prevent Hizbullah from rearming and reasserting its control over Lebanon after the war. Yet, under 1701, Hizbullah tripled the size of its arsenal of missiles over what it was on the eve of the 2006 war. Hizbullah now has more than 40,000 missiles. That arsenal includes new long-range missiles capable of reaching Be'er Sheva and Dimona.
Not only has Hizbullah reasserted its control over southern Lebanon under Resolution 1701, it extended its control north of the Litani River. Moreover, the military and political power Hizbullah gained under 1701 paved the way for the group's coup this past May. During its coup, Hizbullah demonstrated that it is the most powerful military force in the country. It also exposed the Lebanese military's complicity with its aggression and collaboration with its fighters.
That event then paved the way for the Doha agreement between Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and Hizbullah in June in which Siniora, and the Lebanese democrats he represented, surrendered control over the country to Hizbullah. The terms of the agreement transferred control of the Lebanese government from Siniora's democratic cadres to Hizbullah's Iranian overlords by giving Hizbullah veto power over the government's decisions.
Barak's acknowledgment of 1701's failure to curb Hizbullah's emergence as the master of Lebanon and as an unprecedented threat to Israel was the first time an Israeli cabinet member publicly acknowledged the resolution's failure. Notably, he made the statement two days before Israel collectively acknowledged Hizbullah as the victor in the Second Lebanon War by returning arch-murderer Samir Kuntar, five fellow Hizbullah terrorists and 200 bodies of Lebanese and Palestinian terrorists to Lebanon in exchange for the mangled corpses of IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, whose murder by Hizbullah on July 12, 2006, precipitated the war.
Unfortunately, in making his statement, Barak's aim was apparently political rather than substantive. He didn't offer any suggestions of how Israel should treat the Hizbullah threat that has emerged under UNIFIL's firmly closed eyes. Barak decision to point out 1701's obvious failure was nothing more than a bid to distance himself from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni ahead of what he sees as the inevitable downfall of the government as a consequence of the multiple criminal probes now being carried out against Olmert.
For the past two years, both Olmert and Livni have upheld Resolution 1701 as an unvarnished success. They have studiously refused to acknowledge that UNIFIL has done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rearming or reasserting its military control over southern Lebanon. To the contrary, they have stubbornly clung to the false view that UNIFIL and the international community can be counted on to fight Hizbullah for Israel. Each time another report comes out about Hizbullah's rearmament, all Olmert and Livni will do is sent another letter of protest to the UN.
The government's continued insistence that the international community will protect Israel from Hizbullah was most recently exposed in the Foreign Ministry's press release the day the corpses-for-murderers swap was carried out. The Foreign Ministry proclaimed, "Hizbullah persists in defying the international community….The international community must act with determination to remove this manifest threat to the civilians of both Israel and Lebanon."
Olmert and Livni have two reasons to persist with their fiction that Resolution 1701 is a strategic achievement for Israel. First, if they admit it has failed, they will be forced to acknowledge their personal incompetence in embracing – and in Livni's case taking credit for writing -- a resolution that facilitated Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon.
Beyond that, both Olmert and Livni advocate the establishment of a similar international force for Gaza, Judea and Samaria. If they admit that international forces are incapable of securing Israel's border with Lebanon, they will be compelled to acknowledge that international forces cannot be trusted to secure Israel's border with Gaza, or any future borders with Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. Since this would call into question the wisdom of their entire plan of establishing a Palestinian state, they cannot admit that resolution 1701 has failed.
It is unsurprising that Barak chose not to point out the policy implications of 1701's failure. Barak after all shares Livni's and Olmert's unwarranted faith in the international community's willingness to defend Israel so that Israel won't have to defend itself.
During his premiership, Barak justified his decision to withdraw all Israeli forces from South Lebanon and surrender Israel's former security zone to Hizbullah by arguing that UNIFIL forces would fill the security vacuum Israel's withdrawal precipitated. Then too, he supports deploying foreign forces on the Golan Heights following a hypothetical Israeli withdrawal, as well as in a post-Israeli-withdrawal Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza.
Given Barak's alignment with Olmert and Livni, Barak's sole goal in noting 1701's failure was to distance himself from Livni and Olmert ahead of the murderers-for-corpses swap that took place two days after his press conference. Barak wanted to draw attention to the fact that he was out of power during the war with Hizbullah so that he wouldn't share the blame with Livni and Olmert for Israel's defeat in that conflict.
Barak felt the need to distinguish himself from his colleagues because by supporting the prisoners-for-corpses swap, he became a full partner in that defeat.
This last point was driven home by Hizbullah chief of operations in south Lebanon Nabil Kaouk. In the aftermath of the murderers-for-corpses swap, Kaouk declared that the swap was "an official admission of Israel's defeat." The day after the swap, a poll of Arab countries showed that Hizbullah chief and Iranian servant Hassan Nasrallah is the most popular leader in the Arab world.
All of this brings us to those elections that Barak is apparently certain Israel is about to have. Barak clearly believes Olmert will not run in those elections. Aside from Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, Barak's main opponent will be Livni, whose reputation is wrapped up with Resolution 1701.
Barak's self-interested, cynical refusal to point out the policy implications of 1701's failure makes him substantively indistinguishable from Livni just as his support for the corpses-for-prisoners swap makes him as culpable for Israel's defeat at the hands of Iran's Arab foreign legion in Lebanon as Livni and Olmert.
If, when Barak's expected elections do take place, the Israeli public merely rejects leaders it feels are responsible for the country's defeat in Lebanon but continues to accept the strategy of depending on the kindness of strangers that led to that defeat, the country will not have taken any concrete steps to contend with the dangers it faces.

Unless new leaders reject the failed strategies upheld by Israel's current leaders, Israel will be unable to take the necessary steps to defend itself against the burgeoning threats that have arisen as a consequence of Olmert's, Livni's and Barak's incompetence and self-interested blindness.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Any residual doubt that Washington has decided to take no action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons dissipated Wednesday with the news that Undersecretary of State William Burns will be participating in EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana's negotiations with Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva on Saturday.

That those negotiations will fail to end or even slow Iran's progress toward nuclear weapons capabilities is a certainty. Ahead of the talks, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated for the umpteenth time that Teheran will make no compromises on its uranium enrichment activities. And so far, Iran - as opposed to Washington - has been true to its word.

Given Iran's forthrightness, there is only one reasonable explanation for the administration's decision to send Burns to meet with Jalili: The US wants it to be absolutely clear to Teheran and everyone else that it has no intention whatsoever of attacking Iran's nuclear installations.

It makes sense that Washington considers it necessary to make this point clearly. In light of the threat that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute to US national security interests, it would have been more reasonable to assume that America would attack the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities preemptively than to assume it would allow Iran to go forward with its goal to acquire nuclear weapons.

A nuclear-armed Iran would place the US military's hard-won victories against Iranian surrogates in Iraq and its tentative success in separating Iraq's Shi'ite leaders from Teheran in jeopardy. So, too, given Iran's increasingly active support for the Taliban, an Iranian acquisition of nuclear capabilities would cast doubt on America's ability to defeat the resurgent Taliban.

The US's economic well-being would also be endangered by a nuclear-armed Iran. Teheran has repeatedly threatened to attack Saudi oil platforms and endanger the oil shipping lanes in the Straits of Hormuz. And a nuclear arsenal would give Iran unprecedented power to dictate price-setting policies for the OPEC oil cartel.

Beyond all that, a nuclear-armed Iran would directly threaten US territory in two ways. First, there is no reason not to think that Teheran would use Hizbullah cells in the US to detonate nuclear devices in US cities. Iran has already shown a willingness to use Hizbullah to carry out terror attacks in the West - most spectacularly in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Second, it is widely feared that Iran is developing the capacity to launch an electromagnetic pulse (or EMP) attack against the US mainland. An EMP attack is conducted by launching a nuclear bomb into the atmosphere above a country. It needn't actually hit the country. Simply by detonating a nuclear device at sufficiently high altitude, an EMP attack can destroy the electrical grids, communications systems and military-industrial foundations of a society. Such an attack would set the US back a hundred years.

Fears of an EMP attack against the US were sparked last week by Iran's test of an advanced version of its Shihab-3 ballistic missile. The day of the missile test, William Graham, who heads a congressionally mandated commission on the EMP threat to the US, gave testimony on the issue to the House's Armed Services Committee. Graham explained that Iran has already conducted missile tests from ships in the Caspian Sea. If it acquires nuclear weapons, it will apparently have the capacity to launch a nuclear warhead capable of carrying out an EMP attack against the US from a freighter in international waters off the US coast.

While any of these threats would be sufficient to justify a preemptive attack against Iran's nuclear installations, the US still has a reasonable excuse for not conducting such an attack: Iran has made clear that if it acquires nuclear weapons, the US will not be Teheran's first target. Israel enjoys that distinction.

And since the US is Iran's second target, the Bush administration has made clear that if Iran attacks Israel, the US will launch an attack against Iran. That is, the US will fight to ensure that Iran won't be able to attack it if America moves to the head of Iran's target list. But as long as it's only No. 2, it will take no action.

The US cannot be accused of being unfair to Israel by deciding not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. After all, defending Israel is Israel's responsibility, not America's. And on this point, news reports in recent weeks have made it clear that while the US will not attack Iran, it has given Israel a "green light" for a preemptive strike on the Islamic Republic's nuclear installations. And this is no small thing.

THE BUSH administration's willingness to stand back and allow Israel to attack Iran's nuclear installations to prevent a nuclear holocaust of the Jewish state compares well with how the administration of the president's father treated Israel in the 1991 Gulf War. At that time, Israel was under threat of Scud missile borne chemical weapons attack. Although Saddam Hussein ended up not attacking Israel with chemical weapons, the threat that he would was credible. He attacked Israel with Scud missiles almost every night for the duration of the war.

Despite this obvious casus belli, the first Bush administration not only refused to politically support Israel's right to defend itself against Iraqi aggression, it took active steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iraq's Scud missile installations. Then-president George H.W. Bush refused to provide Israel with the electronic codes that would allow Israeli and US jets to identify one another as friendly aircraft. In so doing, he left open the prospect that the US would shoot down IAF jets over Iraqi airspace if Israel dared to defend itself.

So, mindful of the precedent set by his father, President George W. Bush's decision to leave the door wide open for an Israeli preemptive strike on Iran is a positive development. But an open door is only significant if someone is willing to walk through it. And it is far from clear that the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has any intention of doing so.

For an Israeli government to walk through that door, its leaders would have to be vested with a sense of national destiny and a modicum of responsibility and competence. But as Wednesday's bodies-for-murderers deal with Hizbullah demonstrated, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government has no sense of national destiny and no competence to lead the country. What Wednesday's spectacle showed is that Israel's leaders' horizons are limited to the space between yesterday's news and tomorrow's headlines.

On Wednesday, Israel received the corpses of IDF hostages Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser in exchange for baby-murderer Samir Kuntar, four Hizbullah terrorists and 200 bodies of Palestinian and Lebanese murderers. Ahead of the swap, the Almagor terror victims' advocacy group published the names of 180 Israelis who were murdered by terrorists Israel released in recent years.

As the Almagor report showed, many of the terrorists Israel released - including Saleh Shehadeh, Nasser Abu Hmeid and Abdullah Kawasmeh - became senior terror commanders, responsible for building the terror infrastructure that caused the death of hundreds of Israelis. Others, such as Matzab Hashalmon, who was released in the 2004 terrorists-for-drug dealer-and-Hizbullah-spy Elhanan Tenenbaum deal, were quickly recruited as suicide bombers. Hashalmon murdered 16 Israelis when he detonated on a bus in Beersheva a couple of months after he was released.

The government knows for a fact that Wednesday's deal will lead directly to the murder of more Israelis and to the abduction and murder of more IDF soldiers. It simply doesn't care. The Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government doesn't care about protecting the public. It only cares about tomorrow's headlines. And Wednesday's deal allowed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Eli Yishai to give speeches where they waxed poetic about Israel's loyalty to its dead soldiers and to have their pictures taken as they leaned somberly over Regev's and Goldwasser's flag-draped coffins.

They looked so impressive in those photos that it was easy for the public to miss what they had just done. The public could have easily missed the fact that in their "deeply moral, and patriotic" decision to trade Samir Kuntar - who murdered four-year-old Einat Haran by crushing her skull on a rock after he executed her father Danny in front of her - for Regev's and Goldwasser's body parts, these politicians signed the death warrants of untold numbers of Israelis. And if they go forward with their pledge to release a thousand terrorists for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit, they will sign the death warrants of still more Israeli men, women and children.

THE GOVERNMENT'S devotion to its yesterday-to-tomorrow's-headlines policy horizon is fed by the local media. Disgracefully, the Israeli media's coverage of events is so mindlessly shallow that senior journalists simply refuse to make any connection between tomorrow's threats and today's decisions. That this is the case was born out in the media's grotesque treatment of Wednesday's corpses-for-murderers swap.

In the weeks leading up to the government's decision to accept this Faustian bargain, the media cast the issue as the personal affair of the Regev and Goldwasser families and ignored completely the ramifications of the deal for the Israeli people as a whole. In their puerile depiction of the story as a personal story, the media stooped to treating Kuntar as the personal enemy of the Haran family, instead of as the enemy of the Jewish people as a whole. Refusing to note the national repercussions of the deal, the media acted as though the entire story was a struggle between opposing families: the Regevs and Goldwasser on one side and the Harans on the other. Israel as a nation was nothing but an abstract, unimportant bystander.

Given the media's refusal to cover anything that they can't personalize and trivialize, the media are incapable of adequately reporting the danger that Iran's nuclear program constitutes to Israel as a whole. And since they will not concentrate on this basic reality, the Olmert-Livni-Barak-Yishai government feels no pressure to contend with the danger. It is a non-story. And non-stories produce no policies.

Aside from that, although a successful strike on Iran's nuclear facilities would win them considerable clout with the public, an unsuccessful attack would end their political careers. And their careers are the only thing Israel's leaders are concerned with.

This being the state of affairs in Israel today, all the open doors in all the world won't help Israel in its moment of crisis. Only two things can guarantee that Israel's leaders will act against Iran. Either someone will come up with a way to guarantee success - and this is not likely; or the government will fall and the nation will elect new leaders who understand their responsibility for Israel's national destiny and are capable of walking the nation through that open door.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

At the end of the week, Saeed Jalili, Iran's nuclear negotiator, is scheduled to arrive in Geneva for yet another round of talks with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana. It is unclear what the two have to discuss.

On July 4, the Iranians sent their written response to the West's latest offer to appease them. In and of itself, the offer, made by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany and communicated to Iran by Solana, constituted a major achievement for the Iranians. It promised civilian nuclear power plants, economic assistance, new airplanes, agricultural assistance, hi-tech transfers and a freeze on the expansion of economic sanctions against the nuclear-weapons-seeking mullocracy. In exchange for all of that, the Iranians weren't even required to end their uranium enrichment activities. To get the ball of concessions rolling, all the Iranians needed to do was promise not to expand their current enrichment activities.

If Iran were ever even remotely interested in reaching a deal with the international community, this was the deal it would have taken. For the unspoken subtext of the agreement was that the international community is willing to accept a nuclear armed Iran in exchange for the mere appearance of Iranian willingness to bow to international pressure. As David Albright, president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, explained to Newsweek last week, at their current, known level of uranium enrichment the Iranians are producing 1.2 kg. of enriched uranium a day. And at this enrichment level, they will be able to produce a nuclear bomb by next year. So the international community's willingness to accept continued Iranian uranium enrichment at current levels is a clear signal of the international community's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran.

And yet, that offer still wasn't good enough for the Iranians. Their written response didn't even discuss the issue of uranium enrichment. They just asked for more concessions in exchange for nothing. And now they believe that their "counterproposal" should form the basis of this week's round of discussions.

As Iran submitted its response to the offer, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dispatched his foreign policy adviser Ali Akbar Velayati to the media to discuss Iran's interest in accepting the West's offer. The Western media and some EU officials were so thrilled by the gesture that the immediate coverage of Iran's response lent the impression that Iran had in fact accepted the offer.

IT WAS only two days later, after those same officials sat down and read what the Iranians wrote that they realized that they had been tricked. And just to be sure that there was no residual optimism, senior Iranian leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Foreign Minister Manoushehr Mottaki stated clearly that they would never accept any deal that places limitations on their uranium enrichment.

After verbally snuffing out all hopes for an agreement, Iran proceeded to show off its military prowess by testing ballistic missiles last week and augmenting those tests with verbal threats to destroy Israel and attack all US bases in the Middle East.

And still despite all of this, Solana looks forward to his meetings this Saturday with Jalili with hope for an accommodation. After Iran rejected a deal that effectively offered it acceptance as a nuclear-armed state, he still believes that the best way to deal with Iran's clear intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is to offer it membership in the World Trade Organization.

Solana's unshakeable faith that Iran can be appeased is to be expected. After all, Solana was on the first flight to Teheran to begin negotiating with the mullahs the minute that Iran's nuclear program was exposed five years ago. And he's been running the talks ever since - first for France, Germany and Britain, and then starting last May, for the US as well.

Solana cannot acknowledge that the talks have failed. He is too personally invested in them to admit that Iran has been using him as the diplomatic fig leaf behind which it has pushed forward with its nuclear bomb program.

SOLANA IS a perfect example of why the oft repeated policy mantra "there's never any harm in talking" is incorrect. The basic idea behind that assertion is that negotiations can never cause damage, they can only do good - by resolving a conflict without resorting to force. But they can and often do cause tremendous harm - and to the wrong side.

If Europe's initial justification for negotiating with Iran was that it wished to convince Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, over time that justification gave way to a more basic justification - to deny that the talks had failed. That is, after it became clear that the talks would not succeed in engendering a change in Iran's behavior, the parties involved changed their focus from Iran to themselves. The talks were about them. And if the talks failed, it wasn't because Iran refused to listen to reason. It was because the West hadn't given it a good enough offer. So just by engaging Iran and its ilk, these Westerners were transformed from Western representatives to the Iranian regime to advocates of the Iranian regime in the West.

As a result it has become nearly impossible to have coherent discussion about the Iranian nuclear program. For when the "experts" are called to tell us how to proceed in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, they instead exhort us to engage at ever higher levels with the Iranians in order to show them our good intentions toward them.

And of course, it isn't only Iran that is benefitting from the West's false belief in the harmlessness of negotiations. Iran's proxies in Syria and Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority are also prospering thanks to the West's belief that negotiations can only do good.

THE LATEST display of this Western preference for the pomp of accommodation over the responsibility of confrontation was French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean summit in Paris this week. The purpose of the parley, which Sarkozy has been trying to organize since entering office last May, was to project himself as a global leader in international affairs and to project France as an important country in Europe and throughout the world.

Although the summit - like the Barcelona and Madrid summits before it - was officially focused on building economic cooperation among the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea and Europe, its actual purpose was to propel France to the position of peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and specifically between Israel and Syria. And to do this, the success or failure of the entire conference was contingent upon Syrian President Bashar Assad's willingness to participate and sit in the same room as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

To bring Syria on board, Sarkozy was compelled to accept the Assad regime as legitimate. And to do this, he needed to ignore the nature of the new Lebanese government, Syria's role in establishing it, Syria's support for terrorism, its feudal relationship with Iran and its role in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and a host of anti-Syrian Lebanese parliamentarians and journalists over the past three years.

Last Friday, just ahead of the Paris summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora announced that he had formed his new, Hizbullah-controlled government. Saniora was compelled to abdicate control over Lebanon to Iran's foreign legion as a result of Hizbullah's violent takeover of the country in May. And Hizbullah justified its coup by noting that Saniora's pro-democracy March 14 movement in the Lebanese parliament had failed to elect a new president to replace Emil Lahoud, who completed his term last November. Of course, Saniora only failed to elect a new president because Syria and Hizbullah had murdered so many March 14 movement members of parliament that he no longer had enough votes to elect a candidate without Hizbullah's approval.

After Saniora announced his new Iranian-controlled government, Assad was quick to announce that he would be opening a Syrian embassy in Beirut for the first time ever. Assad's announcement was greeted with glee in the Elysee Palace and throughout the West. It was perceived as Syria's first acknowledgement of Lebanese sovereignty. But this is a false perception.

Syria's announcement was not a sign of moderation by Damascus but a sign of radicalization. Syria has not accepted Lebanon's sovereignty. It has accepted Iranian dominion over Lebanon. And in accepting Iran's control of Lebanon, Assad effectively acknowledged that today Syria is nothing more than Iran's Arab vassal state.

Rather than stand up for Lebanon in its hour of need, Sarkozy joined forces with the Bush administration and the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and pretended that Saniora and his pro-democracy forces are still in charge of the country. He pressured Israel to give Mt. Dov to Iranian-controlled Lebanon in spite of the fact that the territory is both vital to Israel's security and is part of the Golan Heights. And rather than boycott Syria for its role in destroying Lebanon, Sarkozy chose to embrace Assad as a peacemaker.

By doing all of this, Sarkozy argued he would place himself in a position of acting as an honest broker in talks between Israel and Syria. But of course like Solana in his constant struggle to find the right mix of concessions to convince Iran to only enrich small quantities of uranium, so Sarkozy's concessions to Syria served only to embolden Assad still further.

Assad agreed to come to Paris. But he refused to have anything to do with Olmert. And then, once he arrived in Paris, he gave an interview to Al-Jazeera explaining that he wouldn't sign a peace treaty with Israel even if it gives him the entire Golan Heights. As far as he is concerned, Israel has no right to expect him to normalize relations. And of course Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Fatah al-Islam and all the rest of the terror groups living in Damascus are simply "resistance" groups and perfectly legitimate. And by the way, Iran, he assured us, is not developing nuclear bombs to the best of his knowledge.

So in exchange for recognizing the new Iranian-controlled regime in Lebanon and embracing Syria to the bosom of civilized nations, Sarkozy provided Assad with an international bullhorn to oppose everything that Sarkozy claims to be interested in achieving. But now that he's embraced engagement as his chosen strategy for dealing with Syria and Lebanon, he can do nothing but proceed with what he started. And so he committed himself to paying a state visit to Damascus by September.

Neither Sarkozy nor Solana are at all unique. Their associates in Europe, Olmert and his ministers, the State Department and most US political leaders support negotiating with rogue regimes that refuse to agree to anything except the West's need to make more concessions to them. And all of these leaders, at a certain point, have claimed that those negotiations mustn't be endangered by more confrontational policies that might actually have a chance of advancing their national interests.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Exalting at her liberation by the Colombian military last week, former hostage Ingrid Betancourt exclaimed, "This is a miracle, a miracle! We have an amazing military. I think only the Israelis can possibly pull off something like this."

Betancourt's statement made thousands of Israelis wince.

Held hostage in the Colombian jungles for six years by the narco-terror group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, Betancourt, a dual Colombian-French citizen who was a Colombian senator and presidential candidate at the time she was abducted, obviously had not heard the news about the "new Israel."

Her statements were based on her memories of the "old Israel." She didn't know that the "new Israel" doesn't fight terrorists. The "new Israel" views fighting terrorists as an exercise in futility. Its leaders and military chiefs alike repeat endlessly the mantra that there is no military victory to be had, only a political accommodation.

She didn't know that the week before she was rescued, the "new Israel" made a deal with Hizbullah to release five senior Lebanese terrorists, an unknown number of Palestinian terrorists and hundreds of bodies of dead terrorists in exchange for the bodies of IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, who were murdered by Hizbullah two years ago.

The "new Israel" is the Israel that maintains one-sided "cease-fires" with Hamas and is poised to make a deal with Hamas by which it will release up to a thousand Palestinian terrorists in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit.

No, Betancourt, was thinking of the "old Israel" - the Israel that electrified the world when it sent its commandos thousands of kilometers to free its hostages in Entebbe 32 years ago. It was that memory of Israeli heroism that doubtless gave hope to Betancourt and her fellow hostages as they languished in FARC captivity in the jungle, malnourished, ill-treated and terrorized. The Entebbe rescue allowed them to fantasize that one day, they too would be rescued and their tormentors would be brought to justice. And last week, their dreams came true.

Betancourt had reasons beside her plight as a hostage to associate Colombia's struggle with Israel's. At the time she was abducted, both countries faced similar political and military challenges, and at the time both countries seemed to be embarking on similar paths to surmount them.

When Betancourt was kidnapped in April 2002, Colombia had just disavowed a failed strategy of appeasing FARC. To bring FARC to the negotiating table, then-president Andres Pastrana agreed to transfer control over a swathe of Colombian territory the size of Switzerland to FARC. Rather than reciprocate this peace-offering with one of its own, FARC used the safe haven to increase its recruitment of terrorists and intensify its kidnapping campaign and drug trafficking operations.

For nearly four years, Pastrana refused to disavow the phony "peace process" in spite of repeated FARC attacks. It was only in February 2002, after FARC hijacked an airliner and kidnapped its fifth lawmaker in a year, that Pastrana finally repudiated his appeasement drive.

Similarly, in 2002, Israel was in the grips of an unprecedented Palestinian terror campaign with suicide bombings going off almost daily. Then-prime minister Ariel Sharon had been elected the previous year to replace the discredited Ehud Barak as premier after the latter's appeasement strategy at Camp David had failed and Israel's eight-year-old Oslo appeasement strategy had fallen apart. When Betancourt was taken prisoner, Sharon had just launched Operation Defensive Shield with the express purpose of defeating the Palestinian terror networks in Judea and Samaria.

WHAT BETANCOURT didn't know was that since her abduction, Israel and Colombia have gone their separate ways. Under President Alvero Uribe, who was elected after her capture, Colombia has moved steadily toward full victory over FARC. On the other hand, Israel has abandoned victory as a strategic concept for contending with its enemies.

Israel's abdication of its struggle against its terrorist enemies was as swift and unmistakable as it was inexplicable. Rather than following up Israel's military defeat of the Palestinian terror machine in Judea and Samaria in 2002 with a similar operation in Gaza or with a political offensive against the PLO that Defensive Shield exposed as the central engine behind the Palestinian terror war, Sharon opted to withdraw from the fight and return to the discredited policy of appeasement that Israeli voters had twice rejected.

First Sharon accepted the so-called road map to peace in 2003. Predicated on the false assumption that the Palestinians are interested in peace with Israel and can be appeased into accepting statehood and Israel's right to exist, the road map precludes any Israeli option for victory.

When the Palestinians refused to end their support for Israel's destruction in spite of the road map, Sharon abandoned appeasement-for-peace and opted instead for surrender-for-quiet. His unilateral surrender of Gaza demoralized Israeli society, weakened Israel's democratic institutions and propelled Hamas and Iran to power in Gaza. Rather than recognize that the move had been a strategic catastrophe that called into question Israel's ability to act as an ally in the US-led war on terror, Sharon launched Kadima as a new political party dedicated entirely to appeasement and capitulation.

After Ehud Olmert replaced Sharon as premier, he brought Kadima to victory in the March 2006 election by pledging to expand Sharon's "capitulation for quiet" strategy to Judea and Samaria. When Israel's neighbors responded to that agenda with war from Lebanon and Gaza, Olmert and his colleagues were forced to return to their previous appeasement-for-peace agenda. But their refusal to countenance the option of victory over Israel's implacable foes remains the order of the day.

In contrast, the Uribe government in Colombia has never veered from its single-minded goal of defeating FARC both militarily and politically. With US assistance, Uribe has rebuilt Colombia's military into a highly competent counterinsurgency force. His counterinsurgency has brought both defeat and demoralization to FARC's doorstep. FARC's guerrilla force, which numbered 18,000 just a few years ago, has been reduced by an estimated 50 percent. Busy with their own survival, FARC's remaining forces have been unable to conduct any sustained operations against the Uribe government or rank and file Colombians in recent years. Restored security has brought economic growth and prosperity. And both have stabilized the Uribe government.

Like the Palestinians, FARC enjoys the support of the international Left and leftist governments. In FARC's case, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has been the terror group's primary military, financial and political backer. Ecuador, led by Rafael Correa's Chavez-allied leftist government, has also become a major sponsor of FARC.

In March, Uribe risked regional war to defeat FARC by raiding a FARC base on the Ecuadorian side of the border. The raid was immensely successful. FARC's deputy commander Raul Reyes was killed and his computers - carrying massive intelligence information - were seized.

As Ecuador cut off diplomatic relations and Chavez deployed troops to his border with Colombia, Uribe stalwartly defended the raid. He defended the operation even as the French government attacked him, claiming that Reyes had been their negotiating partner in their quest to secure Betancourt's release.

Israel's governments have systematically prevented the publication of information regarding Fatah's leadership role in the terror war, and its ties to Iran and Syria. They have also refused to take any action against Israeli organizations and politicians bankrolled illegally by foreign governments. In contrast, Uribe moved quickly to use the information exposed by Reyes's computers to discredit Chavez, FARC and their Colombian and foreign sympathizers.

Reyes's files showed that neither FARC nor Chavez nor pro-Chavez Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba were negotiating Betancourt's release in good faith. Understanding that she was their most powerful bargaining chip against the Uribe government, in their internal discussions, all three attested to their opposition to her release. Uribe's release of the information decreased French pressure for a deal. Chavez was further discredited and Bogota's prosecutor opened a criminal probe against Cordoba on treason-related charges.

According to media reports, the Ecuador raid also provided the Colombian military with actionable intelligence it needed to move forward with its plans for last week's rescue mission. That is, each successful raid paved the way for the next achievement.

THE ISRAELI media's response to the Colombia rescue mission has been to inflate the "Israeli role" in the mission. Numerous reports have been published in the local press about the fact that the Colombians hired retired IDF generals Yisrael Ziv and Yossi Kupperwasser to help them build up their counterterror capabilities.

Far from obscuring the yawning gap between Colombia and Israel, these reports bring Israel's abandonment of the fight into sharp relief. They show clearly that Israel's decision to capitulate has nothing to do with an inability to fight to victory. It is a failure of will rather than a failure of capacity that has brought Israel to its current cowed and humiliated condition where its media argues over how many terrorists should be exchanged for Schalit and ignores completely the very notion that he can be rescued.

And Israel could attempt to rescue him. While success is never assured, it is a fact that just as Colombia was able to find and rescue Betancourt and her fellow hostages in the jungle, so Israel could, if it dared, conduct a competent operation aimed at rescuing Schalit in Gaza. Like Colombia it could acquire the intelligence necessary to plan and carry out such a raid. Like Colombia, its forces are competent to succeed in such an endeavor.

Until last week's raid, one of the main sources of pressure on the Uribe government was Betancourt's family. Her mother and children met frequently with Chavez and railed against Uribe in their eagerness to see her released.

Speaking of her experience and of her rescue in Paris this week, Betancourt, who over the years tried to escape five times, was clear that she preferred freedom to slavery, even if it came only in death. As French philosopher Andre Glucksmann wrote in City Journal, it was freedom, not life, that she held most sacred. And while she understood her family's actions, she clearly did not embrace their pacifism as she praised Uribe for rescuing her despite the risk that the mission would fail and she and her fellow hostages would be killed.

It is hard to imagine that as a soldier, Schalit feels any differently. Why should we assume that he prefers to live as a slave rather than to die in a quest for freedom?

It is a travesty that in their inexplicable abandonment of honorable struggle against murderous foes in favor of dangerous appeasement, Olmert and his colleagues have denied Schalit the respect due a warrior and have denied the IDF the right to fight for Israel's freedom.

Last Wednesday's terror attack in Jerusalem was unique. Due to the fact that Husam Taysir Dwayat bulldozed his victims outside of Jerusalem Capitol Studios where many of the foreign television networks have their offices, his was one of only two attacks to have been caught live on camera.

The only other attack which was filmed was the lynching of IDF reservists Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche at a Palestinian police station in Ramallah on October 12, 2000. That attack, which showed the mob basking in the blood of the two men, was filmed by an Italian camerawoman from the privately owned Mediaset television station. The attack last Wednesday was filmed by the BBC whose correspondent Tim Franks witnessed the carnage from the outset through his office window.

Their film documentation is not the only thing those two attacks share. The lynch in Ramallah and the attack last Wednesday are also the only attacks that elicited abject apologies by otherwise arrogant media giants. In the aftermath of the lynch, Riccardo Cristiano, Italy's state-owned RAI network's correspondent in Israel, wrote a groveling apology to the Palestinian Authority in which he went to painstaking lengths to explain that it was not his network, but his competitor that published the footage.

In the letter which the PA published in its Al Hayat al Jadida daily, Cristiano fawned, "We always respect the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for [journalistic] work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work. We thank you for your trust, and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting. We will not do such a thing."

ON FRIDAY, the BBC published an apology for broadcasting the footage of Wednesday's carnage. The film showed an unarmed, furloughed IDF commando climb onto Dwayat's bulldozer just after Dwayat murdered Batsheva Unterman by crushing her car. It showed the soldier grabbing a gun belonging to a security guard who was unsuccessfully trying to restrain Dwayat and shooting Dwayat three times in the head. The film did not show Dwayat or any of his victims dying. What it showed was the terror of the wounded, Dwayat's murderousness and the soldier's heroism.

Yet, the network declared, "It's not normally the BBC's policy to show the moment of death on screen. These are always extremely difficult decisions to make. However, on reflection, we felt that the pictures featured on Wednesday's News at Ten did not strike the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience."

At first glance, it is not at all clear what the BBC was talking about. Its film was a journalistic achievement. Through it, tens of millions of people worldwide were able to see for themselves what a terror attack against innocents looks like from a fairly sterile angle. What did the BBC have to apologize for?

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel. To maintain the narratives, "the right editorial balance between the demands of accuracy and the potential impact on the program's audience," is one that engenders the belief that Israel is either morally indistinguishable from the Palestinians, or that Israel is morally inferior to the Palestinians.

The metaphor for the first narrative is the so-called "cycle of violence." The BBC itself spelled out this narrative in the aftermath of the lynching in Ramallah. In a program called, "When Peace Died," broadcast in November 2000, the BBC explained, "Two images captured the hatred that has destroyed the peace process in the Middle East. Mohammed al-Dura, the boy from Gaza, shielded by his father but still dying under a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers and the lynching and brutal murder of two Israeli reservists by a Palestinian mob."

The metaphor for the second narrative is the Holocaust. It was first used explicitly early on by Catherine Nay, a well-known news anchor from Europe1 network. In late 2000 Nay declared, "The death of Muhammad [al-Dura] cancels out, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air from the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto."

THE STORY of Muhammad al-Dura plays a central role for both narratives. On September 30, 2000, France 2 public television network's bureau chief in Israel Charles Enderlin aired a 57-second, heavily edited film which he proclaimed portrayed then 12-year-old al-Dura being killed by IDF forces at Netzarim Junction in Gaza. France 2 distributed the film for free to the global media and al-Dura's image became the icon of the Palestinian war against Israel. It directly incited anti-Jewish violence in Israel and throughout the world.

Questions about the veracity of the France 2 account arose immediately. An IDF investigation launched by then OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia proved through ballistic evidence that it was physically impossible for IDF forces to have shot - much less killed - al-Dura. Over the ensuing years, a handful of journalists and researchers produced a wealth of evidence demonstrating that Enderlin's story was false.

One of the researchers was a media critic named Philippe Karsenty. He asserted that the film was a hoax on his Web site Media Ratings and dared Enderlin and France 2 to sue him for libel while demanding that they release the 27 minutes of film they claimed they had of the September 30, 2000 incident at Netzarim Junction.

While refusing to release the footage, Enderlin and France 2 did sue Karsenty for libel. In late 2006, after receiving a letter of recommendation for Enderlin from then French president Jacques Chirac, and in spite of the reams of evidence supporting his claim that Karsenty presented at the trial, the court convicted Karsenty. Karsenty appealed the ruling.

The appellate court ordered Enderlin and France 2 to produce the unedited footage. Although he refused to show the footage in its entirety, from the 19 minutes of rushes that Enderlin did present, three things became obvious. First, the IDF could not have killed al-Dura. Second, the footage showed Palestinians staging scenes of fighting with imaginary IDF forces. And third, the footage showed no evidence that al-Dura had been shot or that he died that day at Netzarim Junction. On May 22, the appellate court overturned Karsenty's conviction.

IT MIGHT have been thought that the French, Israeli and international media which had for seven years supported Enderlin against the small band of independent investigators would finally abandon him. So too, it might have been thought that after seven years of defending an indefensible piece of journalistic malpractice Enderlin would finally own up to his misdeed. But the opposite occurred.

In Israel, leading left-wing commentators like Gideon Levy, and Tom Segev from Ha'aretz, Arad Nir from Channel 2 and Larry Derfner from The Jerusalem Post accused Karsenty and his allies of waging a witch hunt against Enderlain to advance their political agendas. In France, the media initially ignored the story.

Then, less than a week after the verdict, the Who's Who of the rather large anti-Israeli branch of the French media published a petition in the left-wing Le Nouvel Observateur decrying Karsenty's exhaustively documented dossier against the al-Dura story as a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign." In all, some 300 reporters and hundreds more notables signed the petition. For their part, France 2 and Enderlin announced their intention to appeal the ruling to the French Supreme Court.

In her account of the court case and its aftermath in the Weekly Standard, French journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet attributes the French media's reaction to what she sees as a uniquely French practice of never apologizing for misdeeds.

There is doubtlessly some truth to this. But arrogance is not the unique trait of the French media and elite. And given the near universality of media arrogance, how can one explain the BBC's quick apology for its broadcast of its footage from the attack in Jerusalem last week? And how can one explain Cristiano's obsequious letter to the PA in 2000?

THE ANSWER of course is that arrogance alone cannot account for the media's defense of Enderlin. If Enderlin had been caught broadcasting a libelous report about the Palestinians, the media and France 2 would have cast him off immediately. But here there is more at stake than one man's reputation. Enderlin didn't create the narrative of Palestinian innocence or at least moral equivalence. In filing the clearly false story of al-Dura, Enderlin was advancing a cause that all his anti-Israel colleagues in France, Israel and worldwide have embraced. If he goes down, their indispensable narrative is liable to go down with him.

Over the past eight years of the jihad against Israel, among countless examples, three instances of open media collusion with Israel's enemies stand out for their strategic impact on the course of events. First there is the al-Dura affair. It was followed by the mythical "Jenin massacre" in April 2002. That in turn was followed by the fabricated "massacre" at Kafr Kana in Lebanon in July 2006.

The al-Dura story solidified the Palestinian narrative of victimization by Israel just months after they rejected statehood and peace at Camp David. When the so-called Jenin massacre was reported in April 2002, the IDF was in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield. Just before the Palestinians began making allegations of an Israeli massacre, IDF forces uncovered documentary evidence proving that the Palestinian war against Israel was run by the PA and Yassir Arafat. By fabricating the massacre, the PA was saved from being delegitimized as an actor in Washington. The Israeli peace camp was also resuscitated from its death throes.

As the Winograd Commission documented in its final report on the Second Lebanon War, the media reports of the fabricated massacre of Lebanese civilians by an IAF bomber in Kafr Kana in South Lebanon caused US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to end US support for an Israeli military victory over Iran's Lebanese proxy and to pressure Israel to accept a cease-fire leaving Hizbullah intact.

Even as analyses of the reports from Jenin and Kafr Kana like the reports on the al-Dura affair clearly demonstrated that the IDF had committed no atrocities, the distorted footage put out by the media made it impossible for Israel to defend itself in the court of public opinion. Like the al-Dura affair, the media's open collusion with the Palestinians in Jenin and Hizbullah in Kafr Kana prolonged false narratives predicated on Israeli aggression just as they were about to be finally laid to rest.

So it is not merely arrogance that makes Enderlin and his colleagues unwilling to come clean anymore than it was humility that made the BBC and Cristiano apologize. Depressingly, what all of this illustrates is that the media will only give us the information they wish us to have. And that information's relationship to the truth is arbitrary at best.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

 

 

Government and police spokesmen would have us believe that the carnage in Jerusalem on Wednesday was unavoidable. Husam Taysir Dwayat, the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer turned jihadist who mowed down innocent people with his bulldozer on Jaffa Road was not suspected of links to terrorist organizations. The sociopathic, violent criminal who had "returned" to Islam over the past month raised no red flags. There was nothing to be done. No one is to blame.

If the protestations of the government and the police that nothing could have prevented Dwayat from using his bulldozer to murder three people sound familiar, it is because they are. Immediately after Ala Abu Dhaim entered into Mercaz Harav yeshiva on March 6 and massacred eight students, government and police spokesmen said the same thing. There was no way to prevent the attack. No one is to blame.

These statements are no more than easy excuses for incompetence. While it may be true that neither Dwayat nor Dhaim were members of a terror group, it is certainly true that both of these Jerusalemite terrorists operated in an atmosphere that engenders both radicalism and lawlessness. Their decisions to murder innocent people were products not only of their own evil natures, but of an atmosphere of permissiveness that naturally intensifies any latent desire to cause death and mayhem. If they had been operating in a different environment, it is possible they would have behaved differently.

Four months ago, Dhaim was able to enter Mercaz Harav by dint of his job as a driver for the Jerusalem Arab-owned transport company HaPnina.

HaPnina had a city contract to transport school children. Dhaim, who arrived at the yeshiva in a company van, aroused no suspicion when he entered the yeshiva with a large box where he hid his rifle.

After Dhaim committed his massacre, the municipality immediately tried to abrogate its contract with HaPnina. HaPnina sued and the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court issued a temporary injunction requiring the city to continue using HaPnina until the judge ruled on the case. When Judge Hagit Mack-Kalmanovich finally decided in the municipality's favor on June 13, she noted that that the company had ignored a court order to provide documentation showing that its drivers had no criminal records and were qualified to transport children.

If the municipality were more vigilant in overseeing its contractors, it could have discovered that HaPnina was employing criminals well before the massacre. Perhaps then Dhaim wouldn't have been able to enter the yeshiva.

It is a criminal offense to praise acts of murder. When hundreds came to pay their respects for Dhaim and proclaim him a hero, the police could have arrested and interrogated all of them. Among those who arrived at the Dhaim's mourning tent was Wednesday's terrorist, Dwayat. If he had been arrested then, it is possible that police would have discovered that this convicted rapist had recently become a jihadist. It is also possible that Dwayat himself would have been intimidated.

But rather than enforce the law, the police did nothing. Rather than arrest the hundreds who came to praise Dhaim, the police excused their inaction by bemoaning the fact that the due process rights of Jerusalem Arabs made it impossible to destroy the homes of Arab terrorists in the capital without proper legal authorization. That is, they justified their decision to do nothing by complaining that they can't do everything.

The police's permissive behavior is nothing new. In Dhaim's and Dwayat's Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, as in the Beduin settlements in the Negev and the Arab cities and villages in the Galilee, the police simply refuse to enforce the law. They do not patrol the streets. They do not arrest religious, educational and political leaders who solicit terrorism or incite hatred. They do not enforce building laws. They do not protect state and privately owned land from squatters. Today some 90 percent of Arab construction in Israel is carried out without permits. Whole towns in the Negev have been built on stolen state land. And the police do nothing.

As a consequence of police inaction, thieves, smugglers, terror solicitors and other dangerous criminals are allowed to operate in the open. Fearing the wrath of human rights groups on the one hand and Arab rioters on the other, the police simply do not enforce Israeli law in the Arab sector.

This police passivity manifests itself not only in times of relative calm but also in emergency situations. For instance, at both Mercaz Harav and on Jaffa Road, the police were inexcusably passive. In both attacks the terrorists were only stopped by citizens who took the initiative when the police failed to act.

On Wednesday Dwayat killed two motorists and overturned a truck before a policeman and a security guard climbed into the cab of his bulldozer. And then, instead of shooting him, the policeman simply tried to restrain him. Due to the police's refusal to shoot, Dwayat killed 33-year-old Batsheva Unterman while the policeman was standing next to him in the bulldozer's cab. It was only the intervention of "M.," an unarmed IDF commando soldier on furlough, that ended the carnage.

M. climbed onto the bulldozer, took the security guard's gun and shot Dwayat in the head three times. Another policeman only shot Dwayat after M. had already killed him.

At Mercaz Harav, it took the police some 20 minutes to show up in force. Until then, only one police officer was at the scene. And as he heard the anguished cries of teenagers being murdered, he opted not to go in and protect them. He stood outside and did nothing. Dhaim was only stopped when yeshiva student Moshe Dadon and furloughed paratrooper Capt. David Shapira killed him. As luck or providence would have it, Shapira is M.'s brother-in-law.

In failing to act against Arab Israeli lawlessness and the terror it engenders, the police are little different from the government. Like the police, the government turns a blind eye to the radicalization and lawlessness of Arab Israeli society. And when the unchallenged lawless and jihadist atmosphere leads inevitably to massacre, the government talks of how its hands are tied and makes angry, tough declarations not backed by policy. Then it quickly moves to change the subject.

The government's refusal to form a coherent policy regarding the deteriorating situation in Israeli-Arab society was exposed at the Knesset on Wednesday. There, just as Dwayat was on his killing spree, the Knesset was scheduled to vote on two bills written by opposition lawmakers after the Mercaz Harav massacre. If passed, the bills will allow the government to revoke the citizenship of terrorists and their family members and prohibit the families of dead terrorists from publicly celebrating their actions.

The government's Ministerial Committee on Legislation voted to oppose the bills some weeks ago. It only changed its mind in light of the massacre on Jaffa Road. As opposition leader and Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu noted on Thursday morning in an interview with Israel Radio, the government's support of the bills was pure political opportunism. The sudden change in its position made clear that the government has no policies, only postures.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak reacted to Wednesday's attack by loudly proclaiming their support for destroying Dwayat's home. But as Netanyahu noted, they are policy-makers, not spokesmen. Their job is to act, not to declaim about their preferences.

And yet, making loud, crowd pleasing declarations is the only policy the government has for dealing with anything. Both Barak and Olmert know that in sovereign Israel it is legally impossible to simply destroy a house without due process. Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz is still trying to work out how to legally destroy Dhaim's home four months after he attacked. If Barak and Olmert really were interested in destroying terrorists' homes, they could pass a law explicitly empowering the government to do so.

While the police could end the atmosphere of lawlessness by enforcing the laws already on the books, the government can take positive steps to reverse the trends toward radicalization in Israeli Arab society. It can pass regulations barring anti-Zionist propaganda in public school curricula and sanctioning the immediate firing of public school teachers who teach students to hate Israel. It can suspend government funding of municipalities and local councils that do not enforce building codes. It can set up well-paid community police comprised of loyal citizens. The government can prosecute Arab politicians and leaders who treat with the enemy for treason.

But not only is the government doing none of these things, it is taking active steps to legitimize Israeli-Arab rejection of the State of Israel. So it is that far from barring the study of the myth of the so-called Nakba, or catastrophe of Israel's birth, in Arab schools, Education Minister Yuli Tamir is encouraging Israeli Jewish schools to teach the lie to their Jewish students. Rather than take action against Arab leaders who actively work to radicalize Israeli-Arab society and solicit terrorism, the government bends over backwards to appease these leaders in the name of multicultural pluralism.

The government has not sufficed with seeking to appease Arab radicals by embracing their anti-Israeli propaganda as legitimate. It is also actively working to marginalize the sectors of Israeli society that support policies aimed at reversing the trend of Arab radicalization.

M., the hero of Wednesday's attack, is case in point. M., a clearly motivated, resourceful and brave soldier, is 20 years old. At his age, he should have already been in the army for nearly two years. But he was only drafted four months ago. It turns out that the IDF didn't want him. Even as IDF commanders bemoan the dwindling draft rolls as more and more young men and women evade military service, the IDF fought for two years to keep M. out of its ranks.

The IDF opposed M.'s service because in 2005 he was arrested for protesting against the withdrawal from Gaza. Charges were never filed against him. But the mere fact that he was arrested for opposing one of the stupidest and most disastrous government policies the IDF has ever implemented was sufficient to make him politically suspect.

Then, too, by Thursday morning, unnamed government sources were warning that "right-wing extremists" were planning to start attacking Jerusalem Arab neighborhoods.

It is far easier to attack imaginary enemies than to face real ones.

It is possible that both Dhaim and Dwayat couldn't have been stopped. But it is certainly true that given the environment of lawlessness and governmental flaccidity in which they operated, there were no countervailing forces in their lives that might have led these evil men to have second thoughts about murdering innocent Israelis in the name of Allah.

Political bluster will not prevent the next attack. There are policies that Israel can enact today that will make the option of mass murder less attractive to its Arab citizenry. But as Barak, Olmert and their colleagues have made clear, nothing will happen under the current government.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.