In recent months, conservative commentators have devoted countless words to the American media's open bias in favor of Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama. Although there is no question that their criticism is accurate, it is wrong to root that bias merely in the media's leftist sympathies.

The American media's pro-Obama bias is also the consequence of their misrepresentation of outgoing President George W. Bush's record in office. And that misrepresentation, too, cannot be ascribed merely to the leftist sympathies of the media. For the media are not the source of that misrepresentation, Bush is.

Bush's record in office is the key issue in the campaign. The outgoing president's abysmal approval ratings in his last two years in power caused both parties to recognize that to win the election, their candidate had to distinguish himself as much as possible from the current occupant of the Oval Office.

In selecting Sen. John McCain as their party's nominee, the Republicans adopted this approach. Throughout his long career in Congress, McCain has served as the consummate party outsider. Yet, in his own way, and now to his detriment, he has also been loyal. And so until recently he avoided attacking Bush outright, preferring instead to ignore him.

But by ignoring the president, McCain gave Obama full freedom to define Bush's presidency in the manner that best advanced his electoral prospects. And Obama's success in defining Bush has enabled the Democratic nominee to set the terms of debate on the central issue of the campaign: how America finds itself in the situation it now finds itself, and what policies should be adopted to improve it.

Obama has successfully cast Bush's presidency as a repeat of Ronald Reagan's. Obama has portrayed Bush's foreign policy as a reenactment of Reagan's muscular, pro-American foreign policy, which was based on Reagan's belief in American exceptionalism and his willingness to disregard what America's enemies and erstwhile allies thought of US actions. Obama has also portrayed Bush's economic policies as a reenactment of Reagan's policies of free market capitalism characterized by deregulation and tax cuts.

Obama has claimed that European and Muslim estrangement from the US; the increased strength of the insurgency in Afghanistan; Russian aggression; the resilience of the insurgency in Iraq; Iran's unimpeded drive toward nuclear weapons; and every other major US foreign policy problem are the consequences of Bush's embrace of Reagan's foreign policy approach. Obama claims that the financial crisis, too, is a consequence of Bush's Reaganesque tax cuts and his general embrace of supply-side economics and the conservative preference for limited government.

By so defining Bush's record in office, Obama has been able to make a case for his own policies, which are diametrically opposed to those he ascribes to Bush.

THERE IS only one problem with Obama's description of Bush's record. It is utterly false.

During his first term, Bush's foreign policy was raft with internal contradictions and intellectual confusion. Books have been written about the two competing factions in Bush's inner circle. Vice President Richard Cheney and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld championed a Reaganesque model of statecraft. And opposing them, secretary of state Colin Powell pushed for a UN-centered, European-style foreign policy more similar to the one adopted by Bush's father.

Throughout his first term, Bush refused to side with one or the other of the factions. Instead he tried to simultaneously implement two mutually exclusive foreign policies. His indecisiveness rendered his foreign policy intellectually incoherent and doomed much that he did to failure. Bush's speechwriters were evidently more sympathetic to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view and so many of his speeches during his first term echoed Reagan's soaring rhetoric. But on the ground, Bush's policies adhered much more closely to Powell's program.

This intellectual disarray was perhaps nowhere more evident than in Bush's refusal to define the enemy in the war. The men who attacked the US on September 11, 2001, were more than simply terrorists. They had a plan and a cause: They were Muslim jihadists. And they were not the ideological fringe of the Islamic world. Their beliefs are propagated by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and are advanced in the most prestigious academies in the Islamic world.

By claiming that the enemy in the war is generic "terror" rather than a worldview embraced by millions of people throughout the Islamic world, Bush made it impossible for his advisers to develop a coherent strategy for war. He also denied the American people the tools necessary for understanding either the meaning of the struggle or the necessity of fighting it. He deprived the public of the basic intellectual framework for understanding for instance why he decided to imprison terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Bush's two-headed foreign policy made it difficult for the public to recognize that the war being waged against the US and its allies in Iraq is not simply an Iraqi struggle, but a battlefield in a regional war fueled by neighboring regimes. His intellectual confusion blinded him to the fact that his democracy agenda was harmed, not advanced, by holding popular elections in which jihadists - whose views and aspirations are inimical to the notion of human freedom - were permitted to participate.

In Bush's second term in office, and particularly since the Republican defeat in the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush abandoned the intellectual incoherence of his first term in favor of a full embrace of Powell's policy preferences now championed by his successor, Condoleezza Rice. Throughout his entire first term, and due to his refusal to adjudicate between two contradictory foreign policy visions, Bush failed to adopt any policy toward Iran. After the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush embraced the Powell-Rice policy of European style appeasement. This has been demonstrated most recently by his stated plan to open a US embassy in Teheran.

Bush's wholesale adoption of the Powell-Rice appeasement policy is also reflected in his policies toward North Korea and the Palestinians. And this week, according to statements by White House officials, he stands ready to apply it toward the Taliban, with whom he is considering opening ties.

In Bush's last two years in office, the only surviving remnant of the Cheney-Rumseld Reaganesque foreign policy has been Bush's counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. And in spite of its military success, the fact that this policy is contradicted by the president's policy everywhere else casts doubt on the durability of America's victories on the ground.

BUSH'S ACCEPTANCE of the Powell-Rice foreign policy doctrine has not been widely recognized. In large part this has been due to Bush's own refusal to tell the public that he has in fact embraced appeasement. Moreover, his reluctance to come clean with the public has been exacerbated by the media's denial of the change.

Whether due to blindness fed by an underlying hostility toward the president, or to ignorance of the significance of Bush's policies, the media have failed to report that Bush's policies today are a repudiation of the ideals and policies Bush gave voice to in his speeches during his first term. Those effectively repudiated speeches were the embodiment of Reagan's foreign policy doctrine.

The same pattern has been followed in popular characterizations of Bush's economic policies.

Aside from his tax cuts in his first term - cuts that include a "sunset" provision rendering them temporary measures rather than enduring tax reforms - Bush's economic policies during his two terms have been anything but Reaganesque. Bush has vastly increased the size of the federal government, and he has introduced massive new regulation into the US economy.

Emblematic of Bush's eschewal of Reagan's legacy on both foreign policy and economic levels is his newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The establishment of this new position - and the large bureaucracy supporting it - was how Bush chose to contend with US intelligence agencies' failure to foresee and prevent the September 11 attacks.

But like most failures in governance, the failure to anticipate, uncover and prevent those attacks was not due to an absence of bureaucracy. Rather, the failure stemmed from the ideologically-driven unwillingness of the directors of the FBI and the CIA to recognize the threat of al-Qaida and focus their efforts on tracking and capturing al-Qaida members and sympathizers. The proper response to that failure would have been to fire the heads of those agencies and replace them with people who understood the nature of the threat and were capable of contending with it.

Instead Bush decided to increase the size of the government, add a new layer of bureaucracy to the failed intelligence community and staff it with people of the same mindset as those who had failed to anticipate, expose and prevent the September 11 attacks. Not surprisingly, the newly appointed, ideologically uniform bureaucrats continued to underestimate the threats of jihadists and to fail to pay attention to any new significant trends in other areas.

It was this failed bureaucratic groupthink that produced the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear weapons program last year. That report, with its demonstrably false assertion that Teheran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, scuttled all of Bush's efforts to use economic sanctions to dissuade the Islamic Republic from building nuclear bombs and pulled the rug out from under any plan to take military action against Iran's nuclear installations in the event of the sanctions' failure.

So, too, led by officials of limited intellectual curiosity and blinding ideological cowardice now sitting atop a new bureaucracy, US intelligence agencies failed to anticipate or prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Bush's establishment of the behemoth Department of Homeland Security was yet another attempt to solve a personnel problem by creating yet another department. And just as the National Intelligence Directorate has failed to solve the problems it was created to contend with, so the Department of Homeland Security has simply continued the same failed immigration policies and domestic intelligence policies that caused the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI to fail to identify and arrest the September 11 hijackers.

In short, both in foreign and domestic affairs, Bush's record is completely at odds with Reagan's record in office. Indeed, his policies have been far more similar to those that Obama - who runs as the anti-Reagan - promises to advance than to those that Reagan adopted.

AND THIS is the great irony of the campaign season. By failing to accurately represent his policies to the public, Bush invited Obama to misrepresent his record and so wrongly ascribe Bush's failures to policies he never adopted - much less implemented. By failing to correct Obama's misrepresentation of Bush's actual record, McCain has allowed Obama to characterize him as the candidate who would continue the Bush presidency, when the fact is that the small-government policies and the relatively robust foreign policy positions that McCain has adopted render him the candidate most unlike the sitting president.

If Obama wins the elections on Tuesday, his victory will find its roots not in media bias, but in Bush's insistent misrepresentation of his record as president.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's failure to form a government proved that all roads do in fact lead to Jerusalem. It was the issue of Jerusalem that deadlocked and ultimately scuttled Livni's coalition negotiations with Shas, which demanded that she pledge not to negotiate the partition of the city with the Palestinians. Livni refused to make such a pledge. And so the negotiations failed and new elections will soon be called.

In refusing to agree to Shas's demand, Livni made clear that partitioning the city - that is, giving the Palestinians sovereignty over the Temple Mount and the Arab neighborhoods - is so central to her preferred foreign policy that she could not budge on the issue despite her obvious desire to take up residence in the Prime Minister's Office. Moreover, it showed that she believes that the bulk of her potential voters hail from the post-Zionist Left. To win their support, she had to make clear that she is one of them.

In making Jerusalem, rather than welfare payments the wedge issue in their negotiations with Livni, Shas's leaders demonstrated their recognition of the fact that defending Israeli sovereignty over the capital city is more important to their voters than increasing welfare. Had they entered a Livni government without securing a pledge to defend Jerusalem, Shas would have been hard pressed to compete with the Likud in the coming elections.

Due to the centrality of Jerusalem in Livni's failed negotiations with Shas, it is apparent that maintaining or ending sovereignty over united Jerusalem will be the central issue of the coming elections. If the Left can convince a sufficient number of voters that a united Jerusalem is a drain on the country's resources or that it is impossible to enforce Israeli law among an increasingly lawless and irredentist Arab population, then it will have a fighting chance of winning the elections.

If the Right is able to demonstrate that the problems that afflict Jerusalem are little different from those suffered by mixed Jewish-Arab cities throughout the country and are a consequence of government and municipal mismanagement and are therefore manageable, then it will win the elections.

TODAY THE problems that Jerusalem faces stem from its unique demographic character, municipal mismanagement and the clear if previously unstated intention of successive leftist governments to eventually withdraw from the Temple Mount and from the city's Arab neighborhoods.

Jerusalem's ranking today as the poorest city in the country redounds to the fact that that the majority of its residents are Arab and haredi. These two sectors by and large do not work and do not pay municipal taxes. As a consequence, the municipal tax burden falls on the plurality of Jerusalemites who work and pay taxes - mainly religious Zionists and non-observant Jews. Due to the unfair tax burden, recent years have seen a steady stream of the city's productive residents migrating to surrounding communities where the tax burden is more evenly distributed and municipal services are consequently better.

Beyond the chronic problem of under-collection of taxes, Jerusalem suffers from problems of lawlessness among its Arab residents not unlike the problems that affect all cities with mixed Jewish and Arab populations. This Arab lawlessness is facilitated on a national level by the government's refusal to order the police and the State Attorney's Office to enforce and apply the law equally to Arab citizens.

Jerusalem also suffers from unique problems with lawlessness and underdevelopment. These problems have been created by successive governments that have silently encouraged the partition of the city by both enabling the PA to field militiamen in the city's Arab neighborhoods and discouraging and indeed prohibiting Jewish building in areas the government foresees being transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. These manufactured problems have retarded development and expansion plans. They have also artificially raised housing prices for the city's Jewish residents.

One of the chief responsibilities of Palestinian militia that operate in the city has been to enforce the PA's anti-Semitic law which defines the sale of land to Jews as a capital offense. Since 1994, dozens of Arab Jerusalemites have been executed by these men and their Fatah masters in Ramallah and Jericho for the "crime" of selling land to Jews. The government has made little effort to prosecute the offenders. Since 2004, when prime minister Ariel Sharon forced internal security minister Uzi Landau to resign due to Landau's opposition to Sharon's sharp turn to the left, the police have not been ordered to rein in the activities of the militia.

Largely as a consequence of this state of affairs, Jews are prevented from living in half of the city. The scarcity of housing options for Jews is what has caused an artificial increase in housing prices that has compelled young families to migrate out of the city.

Another factor contributing to the scarcity of land for Jewish building is the government's refusal to permit the building of new neighborhoods in areas like E-1 near Mount Scopus. Commerce is stifled, among other reasons, because the government has refrained from ordering the IDF to reassert control over Atarot municipal airport and industrial zone after the Palestinians began murdering businessmen, shooting passing motorists and threatening air traffic in 2000. In essence, as the building of the separation fence within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries shows clearly, the government has been effectively enacting the partition of the city for the past several years without ever acknowledging this fact.

The government's effective support for partition is perhaps nowhere more obvious than on the Temple Mount. There, the Islamic Wakf not only incites for jihad with impunity, it is also systematically destroying the remains of the Second Temple with impunity. The abject abandonment of Judaism's holiest site by successive governments has facilitated not only the radicalization of Jerusalem Arabs from surrounding neighborhoods, like Silwan, it has also emboldened global jihadists to believe that Jerusalem - and Israel with it - will soon fall into their hands.

IN LIGHT of these difficult realities, it is a relief that Jerusalemites are likely to elect Nir Barkat as their new mayor on November 11. While the mayor of Jerusalem has only a limited capacity to solve the unique, politically-driven maladies endangering the city, he does have considerable power to solve the problems that are similar to those impacting other cities nationwide. He can compel residents to pay their municipal taxes. He can enforce building codes. And he can use his power and influence to facilitate new building while improving municipal infrastructure to encourage economic growth and population expansion.

Barkat is a 48-year-old Jerusalemite. He served as a company commander in the paratroopers, and then went on to make a fortune in the hi-tech sector. In 1999, he and his wife became active philanthropists supporting various Zionist educational causes related to the city. In 2003 he retired from his business ventures to run for mayor. His party, Yerushalayim Tatzliah (Jerusalem will succeed), won 43 percent of the vote. Barkat has served for five years as the head of the opposition in the city council. In 2005, he joined Kadima.

Last year, he broke with Kadima when he discovered that the government was conducting negotiations on the partition of Jerusalem with Fatah leaders. Emerging as a staunch defender of the city's unity, he was one of the prominent leaders of the national opposition movement which arose to demand that the government end its negotiations on the issue.

As a mayoral candidate, Barkat has assembled a candidates list for his party comprised of members of the Likud, the Gil Pensioners Party, the Green Party and Labor. They have committed themselves to a common platform pledged to defend and facilitate continued Israeli sovereignty over the entire city.

In a recent conversation, Barkat explained to me that enforcing law and order in the Arab neighborhoods while encouraging local, non-jihadist neighborhood councils to take a leadership role in their communities is one of his primary goals.

"Today we have a crazy situation in which the number of municipal inspectors assigned to a neighborhood is inversely proportional to the degree of building code violations. We have four times more municipal inspectors assigned to Jewish neighborhoods than to Arab neighborhoods which have four times more building violations. I will reverse this situation as mayor."

Barkat also intends to push hard to build a new neighborhood for young people in E-1. To date, building in E-1 has been blocked by the government which as bowed to US pressure not to build in the strategically critical area that connects Jerusalem to Ma'aleh Adumim.

Barkat also intends to encourage economic growth in the city by developing its tourist sector. He correctly identifies projects like the City of David as sites with massive tourist potential. He believes that the proper way to achieve his goal of bringing 10 million tourists a year is to develop tourist attractions that link the Old City to surrounding areas like Gush Etzion.

Barkat has a vision of setting up a council of metropolitan Jerusalem that will involve the heads of the Jewish communities around the city in its overall development plans. This he believes will encourage business growth and lead to more rational long-term urban planning and infrastructure development.

Barkat's headquarters bustle with campaign workers. Most of them are in their early 20s. They hail from both non-observant and national religious backgrounds. Their enthusiasm for his candidacy is a product of his chairmanship of the non-profit Ruah Hadasha (new spirit) organization that helps students find post-university job opportunities in Jerusalem and encourages student involvement in the city. Yakir Segev, who founded and directs Ruah Hadasha, is one of the senior members of Barkat's party.

There is no guarantee, of course, that Barkat will be able to succeed in contending with the daunting challenges facing the city. But there is no doubt that if elected, he will bring a new integrity and commitment to the office and a welcome vision for Jerusalem that is both attractive and eminently achievable. Indeed, it is the success of Barkat's vision that will put paid the notion that united Jerusalem is ungovernable.

If as the polls indicate, Barkat wins the mayoral race in two weeks, the overwhelming majority of Israelis who are committed to safeguarding Israeli sovereignty over the eternal capital of the Jewish people will find a formidable ally in city hall.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In a week and a half, American voters will elect the next US president. Their decision will impact the entire world.

Democratic nominee Senator Barack Obama now enjoys a significant lead in the polls against Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain. For McCain to win, a lot of Obama supporters will need to reassess their choice for president. This week, Obama's running-mate Senator Joseph Biden gave Obama supporters a good reason to change their minds.

In much-reported remarks to campaign donors in Seattle on Sunday, Biden warned that if Obama is elected to the White House, it will take America's adversaries no time at all to test him. In his words, "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama…. The world is looking…. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate."

Biden then continued, "And he's gonna need help….We're gonna need you to use your influence…within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

Many commentators have minimized the importance of Biden's remarks by claiming that all new leaders are tested. But this is not exactly correct. World leaders test their adversaries when they perceive them as weak. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected US president in 1952, the Soviet Union did not move quickly to test the man who had led Allied Forces in World War II. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the Iranian regime released the US hostages it had held for a year and a half.

In speaking as he did, Biden essentially acknowledged three things. First, he recognized that Obama projects an image of weakness and naiveté internationally that invites America's adversaries to challenge him.

Second, by stating that if Obama is tested a crisis will ensue, Biden made clear that Obama will fail the tests he is handed as a newly inaugurated president. After all, when an able leader is tested, he acts wisely and secures his nation's interests while averting a crisis.

Finally, Biden made clear that Obama's failure will be widely noted, and hence, "it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

IN LIGHT of Biden's dire warning about his running-mate, the central question that Americans ought to be asking themselves is whether or not Biden is correct. Is it true that Obama projects a posture of weakness and incompetence internationally and is it likely that this posture reflects reality?

Unfortunately, it appears that Biden knows exactly what he is talking about.

Take Iran for example. Obama has stated outright that if he is elected US president he will offer to conduct direct negotiations with his Iranian counterpart President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. Yet two weeks ago, the Iranians made clear that their dispute with America is not about who occupies the White House, but about the nature of the US.

Speaking to the official Iranian news service IRNA, Iranian Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor stipulated that Iran will only agree to meet with a US leader after America has bowed to Teheran's will. In his words, Iran will refuse to hold such high-level talks "for as long as US forces have not left the Middle East region, and [the US] continues its support for the Zionist regime."

Kalhor explained, "It is stupidity to hold talks without any change in US attitudes."

After naming its price, Iran has since done its best to make its preconditions palatable for an Obama administration. This it has done by claiming that it will not attack the US, it will only attack Israel.

Just after Kalhor's interview, Seyed Safavi, a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told a diplomatic audience in London that Iranian leadership circles are now debating the option of attacking Israel without attacking US forces in the region. Safavi added that chances for direct negotiations between the US and Iran will increase if Obama is elected. Alluding to Kalhor's remarks, Safavi claimed that sanctions against Iran have failed and that if the US expects Iran to stop enriching uranium, it will have to take "firm and significant" steps in Iran's direction.

Then on Wednesday, in a visit to US-ally Bahrain, the speaker of the Iranian parliament Ali Larijani gave Obama the regime's official endorsement. Larijani said, "We are leaning more in favor of Barack Obama because he is more flexible and rational."

Iran's pre-US election behavior indicates that Iran will waste no time testing Obama's mettle. Iran is behaving as if it fully expects Obama to do what his supporter Rev. Jesse Jackson expects him to do. That is, like Jackson, Iran expects Obama to end "Zionist control" of US foreign policy. And to aid the process, the Iranians are willing to leave US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan alone as they attack Israel with their nascent nuclear arsenal shortly after Obama is inaugurated.

In his remarks on Sunday Biden made clear that he does not believe that Obama will agree to use the US military to confront Iran or any other enemy. His rejection of the use of force is not due to a sense that force is not necessary. Rather it is due to his dim assessment of America's military capabilities. In his words, "We do not have the military capacity, nor have we ever, quite frankly, in the last 20 years, to dictate outcomes. … It's so much more complicated than that. And Barack gets it."

Given the Democratic ticket's belief that the US military is too weak to protect American interests, it could be expected that Obama and Biden would support strengthening the US military. But the opposite is the case. Obama has called for slashing the US military budget, cutting back the US's anti-missile programs and scaling back drastically the US nuclear arsenal. That is, although Obama has claimed that he will never take the option of the use of force off the table, by refusing to strengthen the US military which he perceives as weak, he is making certain that the US military option is ineffectual.

IN CERTAIN respects, if Americans elect Obama to lead them on November 4, they will be repeating the decision of Israeli voters who elected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to lead them in March 2006. Like Obama, Olmert ran on a platform of appeasing Israel's enemies.

In addition to his plan to curtail US military options by decreasing US military budgets, Obama's appeasement platform includes his pledge to abandon the Bush administration's sole foreign policy success in its second term by pulling US forces out of Iraq. He has also promised to exacerbate Bush's second term policy failures by expanding the outgoing administration's penchant for courting US adversaries.

In 2006 Olmert's electoral platform included a naïve and defeatist pledge to unilaterally withdraw Israeli civilians and military forces from Judea and Samaria. As for Iran, Olmert's policy was to abdicate Israel's responsibility to prevent its own destruction by relying on the Americans and the Europeans to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Biden's warning that Obama will be tested and found wanting by America's adversaries almost immediately after entering office echoes warnings by politicians and commentators in the lead-up to Olmert's electoral victory in 2006. As subsequent events showed, Olmert's critics were correct.

Olmert was tested and found wanting when in July 2006 Iran's Hizbullah proxy went to war against Israel. Just as Olmert's political opponents warned, and Israel's enemies expected, Olmert's naïve perception of international affairs, his strategic incompetence and his exaggerated view of his own importance caused him to fail abjectly when his country needed him.

Largely due to Olmert's weakness and poor judgment, Israel was defeated by Hizbullah. And Israel's defeat fomented a radical reordering of the regional balance of power in Iran's favor. Hizbullah took over Lebanon. Hamas took over Gaza. Syria is being feted by the Europeans. Iran stands in the doorway of the nuclear club.

Olmert's failure not only strengthened Israel's enemies, it caused its own allies to reassess its value. After the war, the Bush administration embraced Europe's failed strategy of appeasing Iran and the Palestinians. Washington eschewed confrontation with Teheran and has renewed its push to compel Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem despite the certainty that any territory Israel vacates will fall under the control of Hamas and Iran.

Iran will likely be the first US adversary to test Obama. And Obama will have no idea what to do. While Obama has stated repeatedly that a nuclear-armed Iran is a "game-changer," Obama's own rule book for international relations has no relevance for dealing with Iran's game.

Obama views international relations as a creature of American will. If America is nice to others, they will be nice to America. But the fact of the matter is that regimes like Iran hate the US regardless of how it behaves. The only question with strategic relevance for Washington is whether the Iranians also fear the US. And Obama has given them no reason to fear him. To the contrary, he has given them reason to believe that under his leadership, the mullahs can defeat America.

AMERICA STANDS to elect its new president in times of nearly unprecedented dangers. Iran is on the threshold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to the Bush administration, North Korea now feels free to vastly expand its nuclear proliferation activities. Oil rich states like Venezuela, Russia and Iran recognize that with global oil prices decreasing, now is the time to strike before they are impoverished. And the international economic turmoil will cause Western nations to recoil from international confrontations and so embolden rogue states to attack their interests.

For Israel, this state of affairs could not be more dire. As these threats mount, we find ourselves bereft of political leadership. Although Olmert has finally resigned, he remains in office as the caretaker prime minister until someone forms a new government. In the best case scenario, elections will be called and Olmert will remain in office for the next four to six months. In the worst case scenario, he will be replaced by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Like Obama and Olmert, Livni is perceived as weak and incompetent by Israel's enemies. Unlike Obama, Livni is judged not only by her words, but by her deeds. As foreign minister, Livni was an architect of the cease-fire with Hizbullah under which Hizbullah has taken control of Lebanon and rearmed. She is an architect of Israel's current policy of expanding the Hamas terror state to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. She is an architect of Israel's policy of doing nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The prospect of an Obama-Livni partnership in policy failure is enough to keep men and women of good faith up at night. Certainly it should suffice to convince some Obama supporters to reconsider their options.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Arab pogrom in Acre on Yom Kippur was yet another wake-up call. The 200 Israeli Arabs who shattered the windshields of 110 Jewish cars, and burned and looted dozens of Jewish businesses in the city on the eve of Yom Kippur while shouting out, "Death to Jews!" "Allah Akbar!" and "We'll kill you if you leave your homes!" couldn't have made their point any more clearly.

They don't like Jews. They don't want peaceful coexistence with Israel. They don't recognize the authority of Israel's laws. They don't accept their identity as Israeli citizens.

If the actual violence wasn't enough to clarify matters, then we have the invitations for the Arab theater festival that began on Thursday, and its program.

Acre's Arab leaders decided to organize their festival in response to Mayor Shimon Lancry's decision to postpone indefinitely Acre's annual Alternative Theater Festival. Fearing continued violence, Lancry opted over the weekend to postpone the annual event that was scheduled to take place this week.

The Arabs called their festival, "Acre Is Not Alone." In the invitations distributed to the Arab residents of the city, the organizers wrote: "We will not surrender to the emergency laws that were enacted after the settlers' [that is, the Jewish residents of the city's] attacks. The settlers are trying to enact an ethnic cleansing of the eastern neighborhoods of the city. We call on Acre's Arab residents to come to the Old City and break the siege that has been enacted against the merchants there. We are organizing these activities to preserve the importance of Acre as a center of Palestinian tourism, culture, history and geography."

So in short, "Acre is not Alone" has been organized to raise Arab awareness of Arab suffering at the hands of the Jews in Israel. Its main attractions include a movie that portrays the Arab riots in October 2000 from the perspective of the families of the Arab rioters killed by police trying to quell their violence against Jews; a one-man play fulminating on the victimization of Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian Authority by Jews; and an "artistic" narration of the plight of an Arab who left Acre in 1948 as a result of Jewish "aggression," and died in a UN camp in Lebanon.

It is important to pause for a moment and set out as precisely as possible what happened in Acre on the eve of Yom Kippur and the following night, after the holiday ended.

On Wednesday night, when as is customary, after prayers ended Jews milled about in the streets that were empty of moving cars out of respect for the holiday, Acre resident Jamal Tawfik drove into the city's predominantly Jewish Ben-Gurion neighborhood. Jewish residents claim that Tawfik was driving at high speed with his windows down and music blasting out of his speakers, in a clear provocation of the Jews. Tawfik denied the allegations.

By all accounts, some Jewish youth approached his car. Some accounts claim that a handful of teenagers hit the sides of his car. Some accounts claim that some teenagers pelted his car with stones. All accounts agree that he exited his vehicle unscathed.

Just after this altercation, a still-unidentified Arab in the Old City broadcast that a Jewish mob had murdered Tawfik via the loudspeakers of a mosque. More than 200 Arab residents then descended on the Ben-Gurion neighborhood with axes and knives. They shattered the windshields of some 110 Jewish-owned cars. They then moved into the business district and looted and vandalized the Jewish-owned stores and businesses. Despite multiple calls for help from terrified Jews, it took the police several hours to appear on the scene. And when they arrived, they did nothing to end the Arab rampage.

The next evening, after the holiday ended, the Jewish residents started a spontaneous protest against the Arab riot. Arab rioters returned.

This time, the police, equipped with riot gear, succeeded in separating the Arabs from the Jews. A group of Jewish protesters, demanding revenge, torched a handful of Arab-owned apartments in mixed neighborhoods. The Arabs continued looting Jewish businesses and attacking Jewish cars. Police arrested rioters on both sides.

In the days that followed, Arab leaders published condemnations of violence "on both sides," and asked Jewish leaders to join them in their statements. Most Jewish leaders in the city refused. As Acre's Chief Rabbi Yoseph Yashar told a reporter, "As long as they speak of the Arab rioters from the eve of Yom Kippur in the same breath as the acts of vengeance carried out by Jews in response, it will be very hard to calm matters down."

On the national political level, Kadima and Labor party leaders have embraced the Arabs' moral equivalence. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and their subordinates have all decried "acts of violence" and "lawlessness," while refraining from making any special mention of the fact that the violence was carried out almost entirely by Acre's Arabs.

Olmert went further than his colleagues. During a meeting with anti-Israel activists from the Arab sector, including the deputy head of the Hamas-linked northern branch of the Israeli Islamic Movement on Monday, Olmert claimed, "There can be no doubt that for years the Arab population has suffered from discrimination that stemmed from a variety of sources."

By making the statement to some of the most extreme anti-Israel voices in Israeli Arab society, Olmert seemingly justified the lawlessness of their followers.

The police have reacted to the Arab violence with now customary passivity. Decrying the police's belated and feckless response to Wednesday night's violence, Likud MK Yuval Steinitz minced no words: "The public security minister [Avi Dichter] and the chief of police [David Cohen] must resign. The State of Israel has become the only country in the Western world where pogroms are carried out against Jews. Physical assaults are carried out against them and against their property amid calls of 'Death to the Jews.' A police force that is incapable of defending Jewish neighborhoods requires a serious overhaul."

WHILE STARTLING, the events in Acre - and the official response to them - are not new phenomena. Last Yom Kippur, an Arab driver from Shibli in the Galilee mortally wounded nine-year-old Tal Zino from neighboring Kfar Tavor. The driver entered the community at top speed on his all-terrain vehicle. Children playing outside the synagogue ran to evade him. Tal couldn't get out of his way fast enough. He ran her over.

As Tal's mother, Haya Zino, told Ma'ariv last Friday, that incident was the first attack against Jews carried out by an Arab operating a heavy motor vehicle. In her view, the more recent murders of Jews in Jerusalem by Arab bulldozer operators are simply a continuation of the attack on Kfar Tavor that killed her daughter.

Two years ago, an Arab mob in Acre violently attacked yeshiva students dancing in the streets on Simhat Torah. The students were forced to flee to their yeshiva, where the Arabs then besieged them. Rather than disperse the crowd, the police simply helped the students escape to their homes through the yeshiva's backdoor.

And in the riots in Peki'in in October 2007, the police refused to confront the Arab mob that attacked the Jewish homes in the village. They allowed a policewoman to be held hostage for several hours and essentially begged anti-Israeli local leaders to intervene on her behalf.

THE EVER-INCREASING radicalism of Israeli Arabs, who today openly and officially oppose the existence of the Jewish state, shows the imbecility of the government's plan to "separate" from the Palestinians by withdrawing from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.

Given that Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs openly identify themselves as one society, there is no way to separate from the Palestinians.

But the fact that Israeli Arabs are indistinguishable from Palestinian Arabs does not mean that there is no way to contend with their rejection of Israel. To the contrary, it points to the only way to contend with both the Palestinian Arab and the Israeli Arab rejection of Israel: By reestablishing law and order and respect for the law both within the 1949 armistice lines and in the areas Israel took control of in 1967.

Here, it is worth pointing out that in their rejection of the authority of Israel, the Israeli Arab rioters in Acre are little different from the French Muslim rioters who set their country ablaze in November 2005. In both cases, the rioters demonstrated their abject contempt and rejection of the state in which they live, at the same time that their governments were doing everything in their power to appease them as a suffering minority.

Responding to the violence, French voters elected President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy campaigned on a law and order platform. Sadly, since taking office, he has done little to abide by his campaign pledges in this regard.

In Israel's case, no political leaders have made the connection between law and order and Israeli Arab or Palestinian Arab irredentism. Indeed, since the Arab riots in 2000, Israel has simply stopped enforcing its laws in the Arab sector. This is true not only with regard to violent crimes and treason, but also in relation to lesser offenses. For instance, polygamy is illegal in Israel. Yet, over the past decade, the prevalence of polygamy among Israeli Beduin has grown to unprecedented levels.

Last spring the government announced its intention to contend with the issue by forming committees and support groups for children of polygamous marriages and women who are involved in these illegal relationships. No thought was given to the obvious remedy of arresting the polygamous husbands and trying them for their crimes.

And this gets to the heart of the matter. While no doubt, historically, Israel has witnessed discrimination against members of its Arab sector, today, the chief form of discrimination they suffer is what US President George W. Bush has referred to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations." This of course causes both Israeli Jews and Arabs to feel contempt for the law and so increases the tendency of both Jews and Arabs to take the law into their own hands.

But more important, the pro-Arab discrimination of Israel's political and law enforcement arms has facilitated the radicalization of Arab Israeli society. Far from appeasing them, Israel has shown them that they are right to reject its authority. And their rejection of Israel - like their Palestinian Arab brethren's rejection of Israel - only increases as Israel seeks to appease them.

By opting not to assert its authority over Arabs in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, by refraining from punishing their lawlessness and aggression against Jews, and even rewarding it, Israel guarantees that yet more dangerous attacks will soon follow.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The Journal of International Security Affairs

sraeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's July 30, 2008, announcement of his intention to resign from office and the recent upsurge in internecine violence between Hamas and Fatah operatives in Gaza has thrown a monkey wrench in the Bush administration's goal of seeing Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority sign a peace treaty laying out the borders and powers of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. But even in the unlikely event that such an agreement is reached, far from stabilizing Israel's relationship with the Palestinians, it will likely have either no impact on the Palestinian conflict with Israel, or a profoundly negative one.

Indeed, even if the outgoing Bush administration and the lame duck Olmert government manage to sign a peace treaty with the increasingly powerless remnants of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, that achievement is liable to be quickly eclipsed by violence that will follow the signing ceremony. The likely upsurge in Palestinian violence against Israel, in turn, will demonstrate that the Administration's stated aim of establishing a Palestinian state—an aim which is supported by the Israeli government—has little relevance to the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Moreover, seeking such a state today will likely exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the conflict. Indeed, the aftershocks of such an agreement will make clear that both Israel and the United States are basing their policies towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on false assumptions about the nature of that conflict.

Role reversal

In 1993, when Israel first recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs, the Israeli and American perception of the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation underwent a profound change—as did both countries' chosen paradigm for resolving the conflict.

Prior to 1993, both Israeli and U.S. policies were based on the view that the root of the conflict was the Arab world's rejection of Israel's right to exist. That view was codified in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which asserted that two principles were to form the basis of any "just and lasting peace in the Middle East." The first was an Israeli withdrawal from some of the territory taken over by the Israel Defense Forces during the June 1967 Six-Day War. The second was that the Arab states must accept Israel's right to exist. While Resolution 242 was purposely vague about the extent of future Israeli territorial withdrawals, its language on the second component of a future Middle Eastern peace was explicit.

It asserted that a future Middle Eastern peace would be based on the "termination of all claims of states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders free from threats or acts of force."

Since Israel has consistently demonstrated its readiness to make territorial compromises for a lasting peace with its neighbors, it was this second condition that formed the foundation of both U.S. and Israeli policies towards the Palestinians specifically, and the Arab world generally, from the end of the Six-Day War until the onset of Israel's peace process with the PLO in 1993.

In basing their policies on the need for the Arab world to accept Israel's right to exist, successive American administrations and Israeli governments found themselves out of step with Western Europe, the Arab League, the United Nations and the Soviet Union. For these powers, the root of the conflict was not a refusal of the Arab world generally or the Palestinians specifically to accept Israel's right to exist, but Palestinian statelessness itself.1

The difference could not have been more profound. The Israeli-American view placed the burden of change on the Arabs. The European-Soviet-UN view placed the burden for change on Israel. In the former case, the underlying assumption was that the principal obstacle to peace was not Israeli claims to lands it took control of during the Six-Day War but the Arab world's refusal to accept Israel's existence. Until the Arabs changed their view, peace would be impossible.

To that the Soviets, Western Europe and the UN countered that Arab rejection of Israel was a consequence of Israel's assertion of control over the disputed territories, ignoring the historical contradiction in this claim (given that Israel only secured those territories in response to the 1967 Arab war of aggression whose stated aim was the destruction of the Jewish state).2 Consequently, they argued that the Arab world generally, and the Palestinian Arabs specifically, could not be expected to accept Israel's right to exist until the military outcome of the Six-Day War was entirely reversed. In this latter view, it was Israel, not the Arabs, which bore responsibility for the intractable nature of the conflict. And it was Israel, not the Arabs, which would have to amend its policies if peace were to be achieved.

By accepting the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian Arabs in 1993, both Israel and the U.S. essentially adopted this latter view of the nature of the conflict. A terrorist organization founded in 1964 with the goal of eliminating Israel altogether, the PLO represented the most extreme assertion of Israeli responsibility for the Arab world's refusal to accept its existence. Indeed, eternalizing that refusal was its raison d'être.

Although the agreements that Israel and the PLO signed in 1993 and throughout the latter half of the 1990s stipulated the Palestinian requirement to accept Israel's right to exist by, among other things, abrogating the articles in the PLO's charter calling for the annihilation of the State of Israel,3 no Israeli government was able to force compliance with that key commitment.4 And despite the fact that the PLO never officially accepted Israel's right to exist by carrying out the required changes to its charter, neither Israel nor the U.S. argued that the Palestinians' failure to do so cancelled Israel's responsibility to work to establish a PLO-led Palestinian state. Moreover, while the peace process was predicated on the PLO's commitment to combat terrorism, neither Israel nor the U.S. argued that the Palestinian Authority's consistent refusal to take action against terror groups in Palestinian society cancelled Israel's responsibility to work to establish a PLO-led Palestinian state.

Over the years, both the Israeli and the American commitment to the Palestinians have become increasingly explicit and increasingly urgent. Whereas until his last month in office—two months after the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel—President Bill Clinton never explicitly advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state as the aim of the peace process between Israel and the PLO,5 President George W. Bush first stated his support for its creation (via then-Secretary of State Colin Powell) during his first year in office.6

In Israel, the commitment to Palestinian statehood was only made explicit in 2000, when at the Camp David peace summit that July, then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered PLO leader Yasser Arafat a sovereign Palestinian state in the entire Gaza Strip, in ninety percent of Judea and Samaria and in the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem as well as in the Old City of Jerusalem (including the Temple Mount but excluding the Jewish and Armenian Quarters of the Old City), in exchange for a Palestinian declaration that the Palestinian conflict with Israel was over.7

Subsequently, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon argued that due to Palestinian population growth, Israel's ability to sustain itself over time as a Jewish-majority, democratically governed state will be destroyed unless the Palestinians establish a state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Sharon's assertion continues to be maintained by Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni today.8 The demographic data on which they base this view was exposed as fraudulent in 2005.9 Yet Israel's elected leaders continue to insist that unless Israel facilitates the swift establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and sections of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Arab and Israeli Arab population will outstrip Israel's Jewish population in a matter of years.

As for Washington, until November 2007, the Bush administration argued that a Palestinian state could not be formed and its borders and powers could not be determined until after the Palestinian Authority purged terror elements from its own militias and defeated terror forces operating within its territory. President Bush's landmark speech of June 24, 2002, in which he called for the Palestinians to choose new leaders who were not involved with terrorism, stated clearly that U.S. support for Palestinian statehood was conditional. The U.S. would not back a Palestinian state that was in any way supportive of terror or involved in terrorism.10

The road map peace plan, adopted by the Bush administration together with the other members of the Middle East Quartet (the EU, Russia and the UN) in 2003, is similarly explicit. The plan asserts that peace can be achieved between the Palestinians and Israel only with the creation of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem. But it also asserts that this state can only be founded after the Palestinians defeat the terror forces operating within their society, end their incitement towards Israel's destruction, and build the institutions of a working democracy. The Palestinian Authority is required by the road map to fight terror forces with the aim of defeating them in the first phase of the road map's implementation on the ground. The road map foresees the establishment of the sought-after Palestinian state only in its third and final phase.11

In November 2007, however, the Bush administration broke with that view. Its new policy is founded on the belief that Israel and the Palestinian Authority must sign an agreement spelling out the borders and sovereign rights of the sought-for State of Palestine even before the Palestinian Authority fights—let alone defeats—the terror forces operating within its territory in Judea, Samaria and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made this point clearly in a press briefing on November 4, 2007. In her words: "The real breakthrough, it was actually a few months ago now, is that for a long time, if you remember, the argument was you couldn't talk about the Palestinian state or core issues, which was in phase three [of the road map], until you had completed phase one [requiring the Palestinian Authority to fight terrorism], which got us into an extended kind of circular problem for a long time about phase one. Well… now we've broken through and they are, indeed, talking about… what's in phase three, which is the establishment of a Palestinian state."12

So over time, both the U.S. and Israel have come to view the prompt establishment of the Palestinian state regardless of the Palestinians' willingness to accept Israel's right to exist as the primary aim of their Palestinian policies. Revealingly, the urgency of the U.S. and Israeli calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state have increased in direct proportion to the radicalization of Palestinian society. The more radical Palestinian society becomes, the more intense the U.S. and Israeli desire to grant it sovereign statehood.

It takes two to tango

For their part, the Palestinians' interest in statehood has never been clear. Like their regional Arab compatriots,13 the Palestinians consistently maintain that Israel's so-called "occupation" is what hinders a peaceful resolution to the conflict. While Israel's leaders, like their American and European counterparts, assume that the Palestinian demand that the so-called "occupation" be ended is synonymous with a demand for statehood, and that the lands the Palestinians claim are limited to Judea, Samaria and the sections of Jerusalem Israel gained control over in the Six-Day War, the Palestinians have never accepted this claim. In fact, both symbolically and politically, the Palestinian Authority asserts that the areas under the so-called "occupation" include the entire State of Israel.14

This view was evident in Arafat's rejection of Barak's offer at Camp David in 2000. While Arafat never made a counteroffer, he gave three justifications for walking away from an offer that would enable the establishment of a Palestinian state. First, Arafat rejected Barak's argument that the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Jerusalem would end the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

Second, Arafat rejected the Israeli position that the immigration to Israel of Palestinian Arabs who left Israel during the 1948-49 war and their descendants would be limited to family reunification. In Arafat's words, "the right of return [of the former Arab residents and their descendants to Israel] is sacred and its sanctity is not less than that [assigned to] the holy places [in Jerusalem]."15

By couching Palestinian rejection of the Israeli offer in such terms, Arafat made clear that the Palestinian demands on Israel are not limited, and so amenable to compromise and conciliation. Rather they are unlimited, and impossible to appease. Here it should be noted that there are no Palestinian leaders who are willing to compromise on the demand that millions of foreign-born Arabs be allowed unfettered immigration to Israel. Moreover, the Palestinians are fully cognizant of the fact that such a move will destroy Israel by overwhelming its Jewish majority.16 Indeed, Fatah is no different from Hamas or Islamic Jihad—or Iran, for that matter—in its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.17

Finally, Arafat explained that he refused Israel's offer of statehood because the Palestinian conflict with Israel is not simply a nationalist quest for Palestinian statehood, but an Islamic religious struggle for domination that spans the globe. In a speech to the Arab League in October 2000 just after he had begun his terror war against Israel, Arafat asserted that that conflict was not a nationalist endeavor but a religious struggle: "A new, religious, dimension was added to the Arab-Israeli struggle. Everyone is well aware of the critical nature of this dimension, and knows how difficult it is to contain it and control its repercussions,"18 he said.

Already ahead of the Camp David summit, the Palestinian Authority had begun mobilizing Palestinian society for war.19 Young boys under the age of 16 were called on for firearms training, and incitement for violent attacks rose to new heights as major Palestinian figures began calling for or justifying armed attacks against Israeli civilians. Israel and the U.S. did not confront these calls to arms with forceful responses. Rather, they were met with the first overt U.S. and Israeli calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

President Bush's June 24, 2002, speech was the strongest U.S. statement of support for Palestinian statehood until that date. Notably, the address came at the height of the Palestinian war against Israel and in the aftermath of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, in which Israel reasserted its military control over Judea and Samaria. That operation produced massive documentary evidence that Arafat and his associates were directly involved in directing the violence against Israel. And yet, the President's speech ignored the distinct possibility that the Palestinians would not select new leaders and reject the path of terror and jihad. It included no hint of what the U.S. would do should the President's call for democratization and liberalization of Palestinian society go unheeded.

In Israel, official support for Palestinian statehood rose in the months before Arafat died in November 2004, when Hamas was beginning to eclipse the Fatah movement in popularity among Palestinian society.20 It was at this juncture that the Sharon government announced its decision to unilaterally withdraw all Israeli civilians and military personnel from Gaza.

Both Israeli and U.S. support for Palestinian statehood became effectively unconditional after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 and then ejected Fatah forces from power in Gaza in June 2007. So counterintuitively, the U.S. and Israel have become most supportive of Palestinian sovereignty as Palestinian society has become more extreme. Viewing this cycle, one might be led to the conclusion that Israeli and American policy is the equivalent of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. But this interpretation assumes a basic Palestinian interest in statehood. And the Palestinian Arab desire for a state is far from clear.

Since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, far clearer than the Palestinian Arab desire for statehood has been the Palestinian Arab rejection of Jewish statehood. Championing Palestinian Arab statehood has never been the explicit policy of either the Palestinians or the rest of the Arab world. Rather, rejecting the right of the Jewish nation to sovereignty in the land of Israel has been the consistent policy of the Palestinian Arab leadership as well as the general Arab leadership since 1917, and most pronouncedly since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Given the Palestinian Arabs' historic refusal to accept partition and in light of the radicalization of Palestinian society since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the reasonableness of viewing the Palestinian conflict with Israel as separate from the larger Arab world's rejection of Israel's right to exist is called into question. And this raises the prospect that Israel's decision in 1993, supported by the U.S., to recognize the PLO and adopt the European-Russian-UN view that the root of the conflict is the expansion of Israel rather than its very existence, was wrong and should be reversed.

Biding time in Israel…

The policy ramifications of this conclusion are clear. Until the Palestinians and the larger Arab world accept Israel's right to exist, there is no way to resolve either the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or the Arab-Israeli conflict of which it is a component part. It can only be stabilized and then managed until such a time as the Palestinians, with the support of the wider Arab world, accept Israel's right to exist and abandon their efforts and designs to see the Jewish state eradicated. In this state of affairs, it is clear that policies aimed at immediately resolving the conflict must be discarded in favor of more modest efforts that seek to end Palestinian terrorism and the links between Palestinian terror groups and outside state sponsors of terror. Similarly, these policies must be aimed at encouraging Palestinian society to accept Israel's right to exist and coexist peacefully with the Jewish state.

An Israeli policy that accepts this state of affairs would involve:

Eradicating Hamas rule in Gaza. The existence of the Hamas regime in Gaza serves both to endanger Israel's national security and to radicalize Palestinian society still further. Hamas's rule enables Iranian security personnel and Iran's Hezbollah proxy—as well as elements of al-Qaeda—to build a presence on Israel's doorstep. Hamas itself serves as an engine of radicalization for Palestinian society as a whole, and as a force that compels the Fatah movement to openly embrace jihad as its strategic path. Israel's refusal to date to take action to destroy this threat has only served to strengthen the movement and its associate Muslim Brotherhood organization in Egypt. Moreover, it has brought Gaza deeper into Iran's sphere of influence. By waging a military campaign to overthrow Hamas's regime, Israel would be making clear that this state of affairs will no longer be tolerated.

Making clear that the Palestinian Authority and the PLO have refused to abide by any of their commitments to Israel and the international community to fight terrorism, and demonstrating that the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1994 has been actively involved in enabling and carrying out terrorism. These commitments have included arresting and punishing terrorists; permanently cutting all ties with terror groups; ending all direct and indirect financial, political, cultural and media support for terror; ending amnesties for terrorists; extraditing terrorists for trial in Israel and the U.S.; cooperating with international (including Israeli) anti-terror campaigns; outlawing terror groups; and providing information regarding them to law enforcement authorities throughout the world. To date, in the interest of maintaining the peace process with the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, the Israeli government has refused to explicitly acknowledge the basic fact that the Palestinian Authority has systematically facilitated and directed terror and has refused to combat it. This policy should be reversed.

Ending Israel's recognition of Fatah, the Palestinian Authority and the PLO. In light of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority's refusal to end its involvement in and support for terrorism against Israel, Israel should reclassify Fatah, the Palestinian Authority and the PLO as terrorist organizations and make it illegal to collaborate with them in any way. So too, Israel should end its financial and diplomatic support for the Palestinian Authority.

Stopping Palestinian delegitimation of Israel and Jews. To end its designation as a terrorist organization, the Palestinian Authority should be required to end Palestinian incitement to murder Israelis and destroy Israel in the Palestinian media, school and university system, and mosques. The Palestinian Authority should likewise be required to cease actions aimed at delegitimizing Israel in international forums. It should abrogate its anti-Semitic laws, such as the law requiring capital punishment for Arabs who sell land to Jews.

For its part, and given the inherent hostility of the Palestinian Authority to the Jewish state, Israel should take active steps to end official Palestinian incitement against Israel in Palestinian society and use its voice in international forums to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority so long as it refuses to take such actions on its own. Israel should also use international podiums to explain the basis for the actions that its authorities take to end such malicious incitement encouraging Israel's destruction and the murder of its citizens.

Ending the construction freeze in Israeli "settler" communities. By enabling construction in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, Israel will signal three things. First, that the Palestinians will pay a price for their terrorism. Second, the Jews also have legitimate claims to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. And third, in the event that a democratic, peaceful Palestinian state which accepts Israel's right to exist does eventually form in those areas, it will be required to accept Jewish citizens as equal members of society, just as Israel accepts Arab citizens.

Gradually ending military rule. To enable the democratic development of Palestinian society in Judea and Samaria, Israel should gradually replace the military government now in force in those areas with the more progressive Israeli law as security is established and terror groups are disarmed. Palestinians not tainted with terrorism should be granted access to the Israeli economy and labor market. Since Israeli law allows non-citizen residents to participate in local elections, the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria should be allowed to hold local elections to select leaders who can eventually act as credible interlocutors with Israel in future negotiations.

…and reorienting policy in Washington

In an effort to stabilize the situation in Palestinian society, and to set the conditions for an eventual peace between the Palestinians and Israel, the U.S. should adopt the following policies:

Reattaching U.S. Palestinian policy to its wider foreign policy goals. U.S. support for Palestinian statehood despite the Palestinians' obvious and overwhelming support for terrorism has placed U.S. policy towards the Palestinians at variance with its fundamental policy towards terror regimes and organizations. Consequently, the most fundamental contribution the U.S. can make to stabilizing the situation in the Palestinian Authority is to align its Palestinian policy and its policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict with wider U.S. policy goals. To do so, it must end its current insistence on viewing Palestinian terrorist groups as legitimately motivated organizations to be bargained with and supported, while confronting other terrorist groups around the world.

Washington should inform the Palestinian Authority that it cannot expect to receive aid or maintain diplomatic contacts with the U.S. so long as it keeps terrorists associated with any of the recognized terror groups, including those affiliated with Fatah, on its payroll. The U.S. should begin to fully implement anti-terror legislation against Palestinian terror groups, and the President should cease the practice of automatically granting the PLO and the Palestinian Authority waivers from compliance with section 1003 of the Anti-Terror Act of 1987 which allows them to maintain diplomatic missions in the U.S. The U.S. should end all provision of military assistance and equipment to the Palestinian Authority, and it should list Fatah as a terrorist organization for so long as it continues to have active terrorist wings, such as the already-listed al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. By the same token, it should list the PLO and its component Palestinian Authority as terrorist organizations for so long as they carry under their wings active terrorist groups.

The U.S. likewise must stop falsely proclaiming the moderation and anti-terror credentials of senior Fatah officials. Such statements, which are contradicted in both the statements and actions of men like Palestinian President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister and former Hamas finance minister Salaam Fayyad, undermine U.S. efforts to wage a credible public diplomacy campaign against terrorism. They send a counterproductive message that there is such a thing as "good terrorism" which contrasts with "bad terrorism." Moreover, such American support of terror-supporting leaders actually destabilizes the region, enabling terror groups to arm, recruit members, carry out attacks against Israel, and terrorize Palestinian civilians under the protective embrace of the U.S. government.

Finally, the U.S. must begin to press its allies to act towards all Palestinian terrorist groups the way the U.S. expects them to act towards non-Palestinian terrorist groups. Rather than promote financial assistance to Fatah and the Palestinian Authority (and other Palestinian terrorist groups), the U.S. should tell its allies that it opposes such assistance. Obviously, the U.S. should also cut off its direct support for Fatah and the Palestinian Authority.

Combating Arab irredentism. While the U.S. should not presume it has the ability to force massive social change in the Arab world, it can and should take steps to break down the overwhelming Arab antipathy towards Israel and through it towards the U.S. itself. It must begin by reasserting the basic conditions of the pre-peace process years: that it cannot accept as a genuine negotiator for peace any party that does not explicitly accept the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in Israel, and the necessity for all states to accept Israel's legitimacy and oppose any belligerence (including diplomatic and economic warfare) against Israel.

By the same token, the U.S. will need to make clear that it will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state predicated on the current demand that no Jewish people may be granted citizenship in that state or that the State of Palestine can only be established after all Jews are expelled from their homes in Judea and Samaria and their communities destroyed. The establishment of such a racist state, predicated on anti-Semitism and racial exclusivity, is antithetical to American values and to the U.S.'s basic interest in a stable, multi-confessional and free Middle East.

Furthermore, the U.S. should make explicit its rejection of the Palestinian demand for the so-called "right of return" of foreign-born descendants of Arabs who left Israel in 1948-49. The U.S. should state explicitly that such a demand is irreconcilable with the cause of peace and stability in the Middle East and with the U.S. commitment to Israel's existence.

Utilizing diplomatic sticks as well as carrots. In 2002, President Bush asserted that the U.S. would not support the establishment of a Palestinian state unless that state were peaceful, democratic and engaged in fighting terror. To restore the credibility of its demands, the U.S. should declare explicitly that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority have failed to meet any of the most basic international conditions for support and that it has become apparent that the Palestinian Authority is neither democratic, nor peaceful, nor terror-fighting—and that it is not developing in a way that can lead to confidence about its embracing such moral and political infrastructure in the future. These words must be followed by deeds, including the suspension of American support for Palestinian statehood for an interim period of ten years, in order to provide the Palestinians with sufficient time to reform their society. After that interim period, a subsequent reevaluation of the Palestinian commitment to developing institutions and practices that would enable the creation of a state that meets its international commitments will be undertaken.

In this regard, the U.S. should support Israel's decision to apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria while stipulating that such a step does not mean that Israel or the U.S. are withdrawing their support for a territorial compromise, just as the application of Israeli law to Jerusalem and the Golan Heights has not precluded an Israeli willingness to compromise on their future international status.

Then too, the U.S. should announce that it no longer opposes Israeli building in Judea and Samaria. By doing so, Washington will be taking a highly significant symbolic step towards insisting that a Palestinian state must not be founded on bigotry and hatred but rather must be as hospitable a place for Jewish citizens as Israel is for its Arab citizens.

Finally, the U.S. should implement its law requiring the transfer of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and end its refusal to fully recognize Israel's capital city. Like the removal of U.S. opposition to Israeli building in Judea and Samaria, the U.S. need not accept Israel's claim to sovereignty over the entire city by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the parts of the city that have served as its capital since 1949.

Eliminating the infrastructure of the conflict. One of the reasons that the Palestinians are able to reject Israel's right to exist is because for 60 years, through the UN, the international community has been perpetuating the statelessness of Palestinian Arabs who fled Israel in 1948-49. The UN Relief Works Agency, UNRWA, was set up in 1949 for the specific purpose of preventing those refugees from being resettled. The U.S. must end its financial support for UNRWA and take steps to close the agency and end the systematic discrimination against the Palestinian Arab refugees by placing them under the authority of the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees together with all other global refugee populations.

Beyond working for UNRWA's dismantlement, the U.S. should move to close down other UN and international agencies whose sole purpose is to isolate Israel and maintain the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many such bodies were set up in the UN following the approval of the 1975 General Assembly resolution which defined Zionism as a form of racism. These bodies include the UN Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977), and the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (established in 1975). The U.S. should boycott these bodies and call for their abolition in the same manner as it campaigned for reform of UN human rights bodies. Moreover, it can advocate the abandonment of the UN regional system of country blocs until Israel is accepted as a full member of the Western European and Others (WEOG) bloc of member-nations.

Outside of the UN, current U.S. moves to abrogate the Arab economic boycott of Israel should be stepped up. Specifically, Washington should enforce its anti-boycott law on commercial relations with states like Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the Iraqi government should be pressured to end its boycott of Israel and officially terminate the formal state of war that has existed between the countries since 1948. Finally, U.S. pressure on Arab states to end support for terror groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah must be expanded to ending support for terror groups like Hamas and Fatah.

Rewriting the script

The main thrust of all these recommended Israeli and U.S. policies is that they are based upon a renewed American-Israeli acknowledgement that Israeli territorial claims to the lands it took control over in 1967 are not the root cause of the conflict with the Palestinians. Rather, Palestinian and wider Arab rejection of Israel's right to exist is the cause. The reform and stabilization of Palestinian society depends on such a reorientation. Since the Palestinians themselves have never made the attainment of statehood their primary aim, whether a Palestinian state will emerge from such a reoriented Palestinian society cannot be known. But what is absolutely clear is that there is no chance that any Palestinian state that is not a terror state at war with Israel will ever be established unless such a reform and stabilization of Palestinian society takes place first.

For 15 years, Israel and the U.S. have based their policies towards the Palestinians on the false narrative of Israeli culpability for the endurance of the Arab world's conflict with Israel. Consequently, all of their policies aimed at resolving that conflict have been predicated on false assumptions. Not surprisingly, they have not only failed to resolve the conflict, they have exacerbated it by strengthening terror forces while weakening voices of liberalism. The time has come to reassess this state of affairs, and move toward Israeli and U.S. Palestinian policies based on the true nature of the conflict.

Caroline B. Glick is the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post. She is also the senior fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. Her book, Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad, was released in the spring of 2008. Ms. Glick lives in Jerusalem.

 

1. On Europe see for instance, Bat Ye'or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 48; On the Soviet Union, see Joel Fishman, "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of the Truth to Inversion of Reality," Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2007, http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=254&PID=0&IID=1704.
2. Mitchell Bard, "The 1967 Six-Day War," Myths and Facts Online, n.d., http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/myths/mf6.html#a.
3. See, for instance, "Exchange of Letters between PM Rabin and Chairman Arafat," September 9, 1993, http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+ Peace+Process/Israel-PLO+Recognition+-+Exchange+of+Letters+betwe.htm, and "Note for the Record," January 15, 1997,http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Peace+Process/Guide+to+the+Peace+Pro cess/Note+for+the+Record.htm.
4. See, for instance, Peace Watch, "PLO Charter Wasn't Changed," Legal Opinion, April 25, 1996, http://www.iris.org.il/pncvote.htm, and interview with Fatah leader Farouk Kadumi on ANB television, November 2, 2005, www.memritv.org/clip/en/649.htm.
5. "DOCUMENT: Clinton Minutes of Proposal for Agreement Between Israel and Palestinians," Ha'aretz (Tel Aviv), December 23, 2000, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=778.
6. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Remarks at the McConnell Center for Political Leadership. University of Louisville, Kentucky, November 19, 2001, http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2001/6219.htm.
7. "A Breakthrough and Not a Breakdown," Palestinian Authority website, July 30, 2000,http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=4362.
8. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Speech to Jewish Agency Assembly, June 28, 2005,http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=25792; Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Address to the Herzliya Conference, January 24, 2006, http://www.herzliyaconference.org/Eng/_Uploads/1401olmert.doc; Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, speech at the Herzliya Conference, January 23, 2006, http://www.herzliyaconference.org/Eng/_Articles/Article.asp?ArticleID=1456&Cate-goryID=215.
9. Bennett Zimmerman, Roberta Seid, Michael L. Wise, "The Million Person Gap: A Critical Look at Palestinian Demography, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Perspectives on Current Affairs, May 7, 2006, http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspectives15.html.
10. White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership," June 24, 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html.
11. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Spokesman, "A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict," April 30, 2003, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20062.htm.
12. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "Roundtable With Traveling Press," Jerusalem, Israel, November 4, 2007, www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2007/11/94600.htm.
13. "Moussa: The Intifada Will Continue as Long as the Israeli Occupation Continues," WAFA (Ramallah), August 31, 2001, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=7995.
14. This symbolic refusal to accept Israel in any size is made clear by the PA's consistent publication of maps of Palestine that encompass the entire State of Israel. Then, too, Fatah leaders, like Hamas leaders, refer to Arab citizens of Israel as 1948 Palestinians—that is, Arabs who have been living under Israeli occupation since 1948 rather than since 1967 in the case of the Arabs from Gaza, Judea and Samaria and unified Jerusalem. See for instance, Fatah editorial, "The Eyes of the World Turn Towards Jerusalem," January 11, 2001, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=507. Moreover, the official PLO position on Palestinian statehood is that any Palestinian state must be based upon the partition plan set out in 1947 by UN General Assembly Resolution 181. See, for instance, Fatah editorial, "Actualizing Palestinian Sovereignty," September 27, 2000, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=4706.
15. Yigal Carmon and Aluma Solnick, "Camp David and the Prospects for a Final Settlement, Part I: Israeli, Palestinian and American Positions," Middle East Media Research Institute Inquiry and Analysis no. 35, August, 4, 2000, http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=ia&ID=IA3500.
16. Yotam Feldner and Aluma Solnick, "Palestinian Thoughts on the Right of Return," Middle East Media Research Institute Special Report no. 5, March 30, 2001, http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=ar chives&Area=sr&ID=SR00501.
17. "Abbas Continues Rejecting 'Jewish State' Notion," Jerusalem Post, December 1, 2007, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195546775369&pagename=JPost%2FJP Article%2FShowFull.
18. Speech by Yasser Arafat at Arab Summit at Cairo, October 21, 2000, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=4920.
19. Itamar Marcus, "This Week in the Palestinian Media," Palestinian Media Watch, August 3, 2000, http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=4384.
20. "Hamas Wins Local Gaza elections, U.S. Unimpressed," Palestine Media Center, January 29, 2005, http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=783.

Over the past several weeks, both Washington and Jerusalem have spelled out clear policies relating to the situation in Lebanon. The two policies contradict one another, and by adopting them, the US and Israel are on a collision course.

Following Lebanese President Michel Suleiman's visit to Washington last month, this past week Assistant Deputy Secretary of State David Hale and Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long visited Beirut. Hale met with political leaders and Long presided over the first meeting of the newly formed US-Lebanese joint military committee. The purpose of the committee is to train and arm the Lebanese army. To this end, the US announced it will be providing the Lebanese military with $63 million in new equipment that includes ammunition, trucks, humvees, mobile communications systems and Cobra attack helicopters.

In an interview with LBC television network, Hale stated that the US policy of supporting the Lebanese military was likely to remain unchanged after the US presidential elections in November. In his words, "There will be continuity in our policy to Lebanon… Republicans and Democrats both support Lebanon and I am confident that there is a baseline of support for US policy in Lebanon."

As for Israel, last Friday OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said that Israel's strategy for defeating Hizbullah in the next war remains what it was in the last war. Israel will seek to destroy Hizbullah by bombing it from the air. According to Eisenkot, the difference between Israel's campaign in 2006 and a future one is that next time the bombing will be more comprehensive. Given Hizbullah's domination of the Lebanese government, Israel no longer needs to be concerned about protecting a pro-Western government in Beirut. Speaking to Yediot Aharonot Eisenkot asserted, "Today there is no distinction [between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government] and there is no dilemma. The operational significance of this is that the Lebanese government is responsible for all the activities carried out within its borders."

Eisenkot's statements echo remarks made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in August. During a visit to the Home Front Command Olmert said, "If Lebanon becomes a Hizbullah state, then we won't have any restrictions in… regard [to hitting government targets]."

ONE OF the common features of both countries' policies towards Lebanon is their utter neglect of the lessons of previous American and Israeli failures in the country.

The 1983 US peacekeeping mission in Beirut is rightly considered one of the gravest failures in US military history. The stated aim of the deployment of US Marines was to help the Lebanese army assert control over the capital city and then expand its control to the suburbs of Beirut and gradually over the entire country.

The mission was to be accomplished by separating the IDF, the Christian, Druse, Shi'ite and Sunni militias and the Syrian military forces from one another. Political pressure from Washington did succeed in compelling Israel to withdraw its forces from the city. But very quickly, the US Marines on the ground realized that they were in a full-scale war and that there was no way they could accomplish the aims of the mission with the tools they had at their disposal as a peacekeeping force.

After IDF forces left Beirut, the Marines found themselves under attack from the same Syrian forces and Druse, Shi'ite and Sunni militias that had been fighting the IDF. The Christian militias, for their part, also treated the Marines the same way they treated the IDF. They used Marine positions as cover as they shelled the Druse, the Shiites and the Sunnis. The Lebanese military - weak, incompetent, corrupt, and riven by the same sectarian enmities that fuelled the war - was both unable and unwilling to take the military steps necessary to assert control over the city even with Marine assistance.

Once the futility of its strategy became clear, the Reagan administration had two options. The Americans could pull out of Beirut and support an Israeli expansion of the war to Syria and so remove the primary source of the conflict. Or, they could redefine their objective to reflect reality and order the Marines to attack Syrian positions and Syrian and Iranian-backed militias and so set the conditions that in the fullness of time might allow the Lebanese government to assert political and military control over the country.

Yet rather than reconfigure its strategy and its strategic aims to accord with conditions on the ground, Washington opted to ignore what was happening. The Marines did not receive permission to take the fight to its source, to support Israel, or even to protect themselves from the war they found themselves in the middle of.

Thus the stage was set for the attack against the Marine barracks at the Beirut airport. On October 23, 1983, an Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbullah cell attacked the unprotected Marine barracks with a massive car bomb. Two hundred forty-one Marines were killed. Humiliated, the US pulled out of Beirut with its tail between its legs. The message that it was possible to defeat America reverberated throughout the region.

The lesson of the US experience in Lebanon was clear: You cannot assume that favored actors are trustworthy or competent allies just because it is politically expedient to believe they are. Reality is what it is, and if you wish to change it, you first must acknowledge it.

ISRAEL'S 2006 war against Hizbullah in Lebanon is rightly considered the gravest failure in Israeli military history. After Hizbullah assaulted Israel on July 12, Israel announced its intention to destroy Hizbullah as a fighting force. It further announced that to ensure that Hizbullah would not threaten Israel again, Israel would demand that the Lebanese army deploy along the border with Israel after the war to prevent Hizbullah from reasserting its control over South Lebanon.

The IDF General Staff and the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government opted to accomplish these aims by bombing Hizbullah bases, command and control centers and missile arsenals from the air. Within the first three days of the war, this strategy successfully flattened the group's stronghold in Beirut's Dahiyeh neighborhood. It also destroyed Hizbullah's long-range missile arsenal. But these successes failed to impact Hizbullah's ability to wage war.

Hizbullah's commanders continued to operate. Its units continued to launch missiles and rockets against Israeli territory. Iran and Syria continued to supply the group with arms and personnel. As for the Lebanese military whose forces were supposed to be part of the long-term solution, far from opposing Hizbullah, its forces actively assisted Hizbullah in targeting Israeli cities and military targets throughout the war.

Due to Hizbullah's resilience in the face of the air campaign, it quickly became apparent that Israel's strategy needed to be replaced. To defeat Hizbullah, Israel needed to adopt a maneuver strategy that tasked ground forces with invading and conquering South Lebanon. To effect the long-term demise of the Iranian-controlled and Syrian-assisted group, Israel also needed to bomb Hizbullah-related targets in Syria. Such attacks would deter Iran and Syria from employing Hizbullah as their foreign legion in Lebanon in the future. Only after Iran and Syria had been deterred and Hizbullah had been defeated on the ground could the Lebanese military begin to act as a controlling authority in the south.

But when presented with this reality, Israel's political and military leaders refused to countenance it. They clung to the notion that airpower and Lebanese military deployment to the South could serve as the primary components of a winning strategy. Tipping their hats to the public outcry provoked by the strategy's self-evident failure, they embellished it by adding a limited ground component to the operational plan.

But since the strategy remained one based on airpower, maneuver units were provided with no clear operational objectives. With no relevant strategic frame of reference to guide them, the General Staff commanders couldn't determine how to use the ground forces. And so they were deployed willy-nilly to battles that served no operational purpose.

The failure of the country's strategic leadership to base their strategy on reality caused Israel to fail to achieve its stated objectives in the war. And Israel's failure constituted a massive victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors. With the passive support of the Lebanese military, in May Hizbullah staged a coup that won it effective control over the Lebanese government. And with the passive support of the Lebanese military, Hizbullah has rearmed and reasserted full control over South Lebanon.

For its part, unscathed by the 2006 war it effectively controlled with Iran, Syria now feels confident enough to plan a reinvasion of Lebanon. Today Syria has 10,000 troops positioned on Lebanon's northern border. Damascus is openly preparing a pretext for invasion by waging a proxy war in Tripoli through its Lebanese Salafist militias.

THE LESSONS of Israel's failure in 2006 are clear. First, Hizbullah cannot be defeated on the ground without invading and conquering South Lebanon. Second, Hizbullah cannot be defeated without attacking its state sponsors. Third, the Lebanese military will not fight Hizbullah in Israel's place.

In addition to their reliance on ignoring the lessons of their previous failures, the current US and Israeli strategies for contending with Lebanon also share an outsized estimation of the relevance of the Lebanese government. Specifically, both policies wrongly view the government of Lebanon as a relevant force in the country. They diverge only on how they relate to the government. The US believes that the Lebanese government is a credible ally. Israel on the other hand sees the Hizbullah-dominated government as its enemy.

There is ample evidence supporting both positions. But the basic reality that both Washington and Jerusalem ignore is that whether it is a friend or a foe, the Lebanese government today - as it was in 1983 and indeed since the PLO fomented the Lebanese civil war in 1975 - is completely inconsequential. Some elements of its military are pro-Western. Overall, both during the 2006 war and during Hizbullah's coup in May, the Lebanese military has facilitated Hizbullah's operations. Its former commander Michel Suleiman owes his position as president of Lebanon to the support he enjoys from Hizbullah and Syria. And regardless of its commanders' political views, the fact of the matter is that the Lebanese army is incapable of establishing and enforcing the authority of the central government over the country. Moreover, since May, Lebanon's central government exists at the pleasure and in the service of Hizbullah.

So both Israel and the US are now embracing policies that are founded on false readings of the facts on the ground and on a refusal to countenance the lessons of their past failures. As a consequence, both countries have adopted policies that are doomed to fail. Moreover, their divergent assessments of the Lebanese government place them on a collision course that can threaten their alliance.

In light of all of this, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran have good reason to be happy. When the next war erupts, rather than fighting them, their two greatest foes may well spend their time and energy fighting each other.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

In the end, the global jihad, and the West's fickle response to radical Islam's assault on its civilization, is about hating Jews. This truth, never wholly hidden from view, was exposed in all its ugliness in recent months with startling disclosures by former Italian president and Senator-for-life Francesco Cossiga.

In a letter to Italy's Corriere della Serra in August, Cossiga acknowledged that during the early 1970s, then Italian prime minister Aldo Moro signed an agreement with Yassir Arafat's PLO and affiliated organizations that enabled the Palestinians to field terrorists, operate bases and store weapons in Italy in exchange for immunity from attack for Italy and Italian interests worldwide. Cossiga also acknowledged that even when the Palestinians murdered Italians, the government still protected them. Indeed, he admitted for the first time that the largest terror attack ever to take place on Italian soil - the bombing of the Bologna train station in July 1980 which killed 85 people - was the work of PLO-affiliated terrorists from George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

At the time of the bombing, Cossiga was Italy's prime minister. Right after it occurred, he blamed the atrocity on neo-fascists. In his words at the time, "Unlike leftist terrorism, which strikes at the heart of the state through its representatives, black terrorism prefers the massacre because it promotes panic and impulsive reactions."

In August, he claimed that it was the work of the PFLP and asserted that the bomb exploded inadvertently. That is, the Palestinians hadn't meant to kill non-Jews - so Italian authorities protected them.

On Friday, Cossiga expanded on his disclosures to Corriere della Serra in an interview with Yediot Aharonot's Rome correspondent Menachem Ganz. Cossiga admitted that it wasn't just Israeli targets that Italy permitted the Palestinians to attack with impunity, but Jewish targets as well. Indeed, in at least one and probably two incidents, the Italians colluded with the Palestinians in their attacks against Jews. On October 9, 1982, six terrorists opened fire on worshippers leaving Rome's Great Synagogue. Dozens of Jews were wounded and two-year-old Stefano Tache was murdered. Hours before the attack the Italian police detail charged with securing the synagogue was withdrawn.

Then too, in December 1985, Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at the Rome airport. Ten people were killed. Another seven people were murdered in a simultaneous attack against the El Al ticket counter at the Vienna airport. According to Cossiga, Italian intelligence agencies received prior warning of the attack but didn't bother to share the information with Israel.

Cossiga explained to Yediot, "No Italian targets were hit. They attacked the Israeli airline at the airport. The murdered were all Israelis, Jews, and Americans."

Then there was the hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro off the Egyptian coast in October 1985. Palestinian terrorists led by Abu Abbas commandeered the ship. They shot wheelchair-bound American Jewish passenger Leon Klinghoffer and threw him overboard while he was still alive. The Egyptians freed the hijackers and sent them off on a flight to Libya. American jets forced a plane to land at a NATO base in Sicily. The Italians refused to permit the Americans to take the hijackers into custody and freed Abbas. The Italians cast the standoff as a victory against American bullies. But it really amounted to a surrender to Palestinian murderers. As Cossiga explained, "Since the Arabs were capable of harming Italy more than the Americans, Italy surrendered to them."

COSSIGA ALLEGES that his country's agreement with the Palestinians has recently been expanded to include Hizbullah. After the Second Lebanon War, Italy agreed to command the UNIFIL force charged with preventing Hizbullah from reasserting control over southern Lebanon and blocking its re-armament efforts. Yet Cossiga asserts, "I can state with absolute certainty that… Italy has a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL forces turn a blind eye to Hizbullah's rearmament so long as no attacks are carried out against soldiers in the force."

Ganz notes ruefully that although Cossiga's statements provoked the Italian Jewish community to demand that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi investigate the government's collusion with Palestinian terrorists, no such investigation is likely to be forthcoming. Ganz explains that Berlusconi himself is not immune to the anti-Semitism that caused his predecessors to abstain from protecting Italy's Jewish citizens. When he addresses Italian Jews, Berlusconi often calls the Israeli government "your government," and so exposes his adherence to the view that Jews are not true citizens of any country other than Israel.

The anti-Semitic belief that all Jews are Zionists and therefore all Jews are fair game in the war against Israel - itself simply another round of the age-old war against the Jews - allows anti-Semites to obfuscate the fact that their anti-Israel rhetoric is simply warmed over Jew-hatred. People like Iranian leaders Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and Palestinian terrorists from the PLO and their progeny in Hamas and Hizbullah nearly always limit their threats to "Zionists," and so pretend that they aren't actually anti-Semites.

Their razor-thin deception is eagerly embraced by their fellow travelers in the West - from university professors like Juan Cole, Steven Walt and John Mearshimer, to policymakers like Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Western decision-makers and European heads of state, and an alarming number of American politicians.

This deception is par for the course of anti-Semitism. Throughout history anti-Semites have used Jew-hatred as a way to rally their troops. By attacking Jews as the collective enemy, tyrants have given their people a convenient, weak culprit to attack to deflect criticism away from their own failures or to hide real enemies from pacifistic publics uninterested in fighting. Anti-Semitism appeals to people's basest instinct. But people don't like to acknowledge how much they hate Jews, and Jews have always preferred to deny that they are hated.

So anti-Semitic leaders have disguised their appeal to base instinct by pretending that they are actually appealing to sublime aspirations. In the case of the Nazis for instance, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels appealed to Germanic pride and love for the Fatherland. Today, the Left appeals to people's aspirations for peace and justice. It is only by permitting and indeed enabling Jews to die and the Jewish state to be destroyed that "peace" can be secured and the Palestinians can receive "justice."

THIS STRATEGY appeals to European - and to greater and lesser degrees American - policymakers for two reasons. First, as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner made clear in an interview with Ha'aretz on Friday, while the West understands that Islamic jihadists seek the destruction of Europe and the US, they believe - in part because their own anti-Semitism leads them to exaggerate Jewish power - that they will get away with coddling the Arabs and Iran because Israel will protect them.

Referring to Iran's nuclear weapons program, Kouchner said that no one is particularly worried about Iran's nuclear threat because everyone believes that Israel will attack Iran for them. In his words, "I honestly don't believe that [a nuclear arsenal] will give any immunity to Iran. First, you [Israel] will hit them before [they acquire nuclear weapons]… Because Israel has always said that it will not wait for the bomb to be ready. I think that they [the Iranians] know. Everybody knows."

What is ironic about this view is that it exposes the inversion of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Five years ago, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed told an approving audience of Islamic heads of state, "The Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

But the West's belief that Israel will protect it from Iran shows that the opposite is true. The West is absolutely certain that Israel is its proxy, and that Jews will fight and die protecting it from the forces of global terror and jihad.

THE SECOND reason the Western champions of "peace" have opted to sell Israel and the Jews out to the jihadists is because as anti-Semites, Western "anti-Zionists" fear Jewish power and therefore want us to be weak. So it is that for the past 40 years, European governments and the US State Department have bankrolled anti-Zionist groups in Israel like Peace Now, B'tselem and Four Mothers. So it is that they have blamed Israel for Palestinian terrorism. And even when Israel succumbs to all their demands for territorial withdrawals, they always manage to demand still more.

In the same interview with Ha'aretz for instance, Kouchner on the one hand praised Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for their willingness to surrender Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians, but argued that this is still not enough. Israel must also accept the free immigration of the hostile descendants of the Arabs who left Israel in 1948. That is, Israel must also agree to its own destruction in order to pave the way for "peace." In his words, "The main problem is the refugees and Jerusalem, but more the refugees. Olmert and Livni do not have the perception of this."

Kouchner for one is certain that Livni will come around to recognizing the need to allow hostile foreign-born Arabs to move here. "I think she will change. This is always the case for people that are in charge for politics and for life," he claimed.

Kouchner soothed the reporters' fears of national destruction by claiming that he's probably not talking about more than 100,000 hostile Arabs immigrants. But that's today.

If Livni does form a government and comes around to this view, leave it to the West to explain that placing "arbitrary" limits on Arab immigration is a human rights abuse, and that Israel's Zionist racism is compelling the Arabs and Iran to kill Jews and Westerners around the world.

AND THIS brings us to perhaps the greatest irony of the West's collusion with the Arabs and Iran in their war against the Jews. The logical outcome of the twin delusions of anti-Semitism - that Jews are all powerful and that the Jews must be cut down to size - is the destruction of Israel. And if that happens, the West will find itself in jaws of the Islamic jihadists they have been feeding the Jews to for four decades.

The West's subversion of the Israeli elite has fomented a situation where many Israeli leaders have embraced their anti-Semitic views of Israel. Leaders like Livni and Olmert, and the media and academia in Israel, have largely accepted the notion that Israel is to blame for the global jihad. Today these leaders uphold Jewish weakness as an ideal. The longer these Western-supported elites remain in power, the larger the chance that Israel won't attack Iran and that Israel will allow itself to be destroyed in the interest of pursuing "peace" with Palestinian terrorists.

And if Israel is destroyed, the West won't be able to depend on us Jews to fight and die for them anymore. They will be all alone.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has never been a shrinking violet. And on Monday, he made clear that he has absolutely no intention of leaving the public stage quietly.

In a Rosh Hashana interview with Yediot Aharonot, Olmert admitted for the first time that he is negotiating deals with Syria and the Fatah-led faction of the Palestinian Authority committing Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights, from dozens of neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, as well as from all or nearly all of Judea and Samaria.

Olmert noted that he is the first prime minister to state explicitly that he supports Israel's geographical contraction to the 1949 armistice lines. Indeed, none of his predecessors were ever so explicit. And his likely successor in office - Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni - loses her voice every time she is asked whether she believes that Israel should withdraw from Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and all of Judea and Samaria.

Olmert's willingness to spell out the expanse of the territorial handovers he supports makes him unique among Israel's premiers. But his stated view that Israel has no choice other than to withdraw from almost all the lands it took control of during the Six Day War has been the common view of every Israeli prime minister except Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu since 1993. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon all signaled their support for this view. Indeed, all of their central policies while in office were predicated on it.

THE QUESTION is, why has this been the case? Why is it that for the past 15 years, at a certain point in their tenures every prime minister aside from Netanyahu has come to the conclusion that Israel must turn over its land to those sworn to its destruction?

Like Rabin, Peres, Barak and Sharon before him, Olmert makes no rational argument for withdrawal. He simply asserts it. And like his predecessors, Olmert uses three rhetorical tricks to support his assertion. First, he notes the uniqueness of his position as prime minister. Olmert knows Israel must surrender its land simply because he is prime minister. Sharon expressed this most clearly when he intoned, "What you see from here, you don't see from there."

Second, Olmert and his predecessors - and his likely successor Livni - all claim that "everybody knows" that Israel must withdraw. That is, you have to be completely out of your mind not to agree with me because every right-minded person agrees with me.

Olmert made this intellectually intimidating point explicitly on Monday in reference to the Golan Heights when he said, "I want to see if there is one person in the State of Israel who believes that it is possible to make peace with Syria without conceding anything on the Golan Heights."

Finally, Olmert and his predecessors - and his likely successor - argue that it is inevitable that Israel withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines. And since it is inevitable, it might as well be done right now. As Olmert said - again of the Golan Heights, - "I put it to you, say in the next year or two a regional war erupts and we find ourselves in a military confrontation with Syria... I ask myself, what happens after we beat them? First of all we will pay a price [for victory] and it will be painful. And after we pay what we pay, what will we say to them? 'Let's talk.' And what will the Syrians say? 'Let's talk about the Golan.'"

The assertion that a prime minister knows more than regular people is true. But no secret information in the world counterbalances empirical evidence that is open for all to see. While it may or may not be true that Israel can live at peace with the Palestinians and Syrians without returning to the 1949 armistice lines, it is manifestly true that neither the Syrians nor the Palestinians are interested in living at peace with Israel. So while an interesting theoretical question, the issue of whether Israel needs to give up land for peace is completely irrelevant today.

Both the Syrians and the Palestinians know that Olmert - like his predecessors since Rabin - is willing to go back to the 1949 armistice lines in exchange for peace. And operating on this knowledge, over the past 15 years, both societies have gravitated into the Iranian axis.

Today, at the same time as Syrian President Bashar Assad holds indirect talks about an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights, he has amassed 25,000 soldiers on his border with northern Lebanon. He is rebuilding his nuclear program with Iranian money and North Korean scientists. He has pledged to the Iranians that he will continue arming Hizbullah and Hamas and that his negotiations with Olmert will be coordinated ahead of time with Iran.

As for the Palestinians, at every stage of their relationship with Israel for the past 15 years, every one of their leaders - from Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad alike - has been categorical in his refusal to accept Israel's right to exist. Moreover, insofar as Fatah is concerned, the violent conflict with Israel was supposed to have ended in 1993. In 1993, Yasser Arafat pledged that from then on, all of the Palestinians' issues with Israel would be resolved through negotiations and that terror would be combated, not fostered.

While calling for immediate territorial surrenders to enemies uninterested in peace, Olmert - like his predecessors - also claims that the risk involved in surrendering the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem is minimal because Israel is so strong. As Olmert put it, "We are stronger than they are. I tell you, Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East. We can handle all our enemies and we can handle all our enemies together and win."

Yet Olmert - like his predecessors - fails to acknowledge that if we give up the lands we took control over in 1967 we will be much weaker. And our ability to deter our enemies from joining together to attack us will be severely curtailed. He ignores the fact that it was Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 that inspired the Palestinians to attack us in September 2000. He ignores the fact that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 inspired Hizbullah to attack us in 2006. And he ignores the fact that Israel's failure to defeat Hizbullah in 2006 inspired Hamas to take control of Gaza in 2007. And in all of this, he ignores the fact that Hamas, Hizbullah and Syria are controlled by Iran.

AS FOR Iran, when the issue of Teheran's nuclear weapons program comes up, the leader who says we can beat all our enemies at once is suddenly singing another tune. Israel, "the strongest country in the Middle East," is crazy if it thinks it can defend itself against its most formidable foe.

In Olmert's view, "Part of our exaggeration of our power and our lack of any sense of proportion is found in the statements being made here about Iran... The assumption that if America, Russia and China and Britain and Germany don't know how to handle the Iranians that we the Israelis do know - this is an example of a loss of proportions."

So Olmert, like Sharon, Barak, Peres and Rabin before him, has made the determination that the only strategy that Israel can follow is one of utter defeatism and surrender. And he - like they before him - has made this strategic calculation in the face of empirical evidence that shows that whatever the costs of retaining the status quo - or of actually defeating our enemies - the cost of surrender and defeatism is surrender and defeat. That is, the cost to the country of following their lead to surrender is higher than the cost of not surrendering or subcontracting our survival to outside powers.

SO IF the view that Israel's only option is surrender has no basis in empirical evidence, what accounts for Olmert's baseless assertions?

The answer, unfortunately, is clear. Quite simply, life is easier for premiers, and much better for former premiers on the Left than on the Right.

As Olmert considers his options going forward, he knows two things. First, he knows that the international lecture circuit is eminently more generous to former Israeli prime ministers who speak ill of Israel than it is for former premiers who defend Israel. Second, he knows that if he ever hopes to return to politics, he will only be able to return as the head of the Left. His explicit statements on the need for Israeli capitulation will serve him well in both ventures.

Then there is the issue of Olmert's legal woes. While Olmert's policy decisions are the same as all of his predecessors, the circumstances in which he is leaving office are analogous only to those that confronted Ehud Barak.

Like Olmert, Barak left office under a cloud of criminal probes. And in his final months in office, he cast all remaining vestiges of strategic rationality to the seven winds in his desperate negotiations with Arafat. Despite the fact that his government had already collapsed, neither the Supreme Court nor the Attorney-General's Office told him he lacked the legal right to concede Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem. And in recognition of his embrace of post-Zionism, once Barak was out of office, all the criminal probes against him were quietly closed.

Like Barak, Olmert probably won't be around long enough to conclude the surrenders he strives for. But that doesn't mean that his statements are not dangerous for the country.

Far-left politicians and their counterparts in the media claim that Olmert is brave to speak as openly as he has. And this is true. It does take some bravery to stick your finger in the eye of the general public - which doesn't support your views.

Olmert's statements and actions, which contradict the pledges he made to voters in 2006, are a slap in the face of the Israeli electorate. Unfortunately, the public has grown all too used to such blows. Rabin, Barak and Sharon were all elected on the basis of hawkish platforms. And they all abandoned their platforms after they were elected. This constant deceit has made the public cynical and engendered a sense of powerlessness among Israeli citizens. This sense is merely exacerbated by the sight of Livni working madly to avoid standing for election by attempting to form a new government. This is all the more true given that she rests her claim to governing legitimacy on her narrow victory in a tiny primary race riven by allegations of corruption.

So by ignoring the basic reality of Israel's strategic challenges and speaking of irrelevant concessions to imaginary peace partners while demonstrating his abject contempt for the public, Olmert is causing us great harm. He is reinforcing our belief that we have no option other than deceitful leaders who ignore our rights and reality. And this is a dangerous delusion. Because the truth is that not all of Israel's leaders are defeatists. There are still leaders who put the country first. They are simply not friends of Olmert's.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.