Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has finally found a mission she can sink her teeth into. This week Israel's would-be prime minister declared that she will leave no stone unturned in her quest to commute the sentences of two Israeli drug dealers just condemned to death by a court in Thailand.

Yigal Mahluf and Vladimir Agronik were arrested in Bangkok last December while in possession of some 23,000 Ecstasy pills. Livni has promised that she will take their case all the way to the King of Thailand if she needs to.

Livni's decision to champion degenerates appears to be just another example of what happens when a government has no sense of priorities. Indeed, she seems to have no idea what her job is. Rather than use diplomacy to advance the national interest, Livni uses diplomacy to help two criminals who have harmed Israel's reputation. More tellingly, she embraced these national embarrassments the same week she chose to do nothing as Israel was repeatedly condemned for its crime of existing at the UN General Assembly.

As it does every year, this week the UN marked the General Assembly's November 29, 1947 decision to accept the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state with a full schedule of events bemoaning that decision and decrying the existence of Israel. If Livni had any sense of priorities, she would have used the week as a means of delegitimizing the UN, which is today the largest and most powerful anti-Semitic organization in the world.

She would have ordered Israel's ambassadors in places like Thailand to use the week as a way of persuading foreign governments to stop supporting the UN's anti-Semitic agenda. But instead, her ministry announced that it was going to ignore the UN this week. There is no point, the Foreign Ministry said, to defending the country when the cards are stacked against us. The notion that Israel can win by losing never seemed to occur to Livni.

ARGUABLY MORE disturbing than Livni's failure to grasp the purpose of diplomacy is what her embrace of drug dealers tells us about what she values, and what the government she represents values. Livni's actions on behalf of Mahluf and Agronik call to mind the government's decision to free unrepentant baby killer Samir Kuntar and four other Hizbullah terrorists and hand over the bodies of 200 Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian terrorists to Hizbullah, in exchange for the bodies of murdered IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser this past July.

Livni, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and their colleagues presented their decision as a testament to their commitment to IDF soldiers. But in their self-praise they conveniently forgot that their actions empowered Israel's enemies and so increased the chance of war. Far from a testament to their dedication to IDF soldiers, their decision increased the chance that countless soldiers and civilians will be killed in another war.

As with the bodies-for-terrorists swap last summer, so with the clemency-for-drug-dealers this week, Livni exhibits a consistent moral obtuseness in her repeated habit of placing the interests of the few above the general interest of the country. And then after abandoning the common good, she cynically presents her devotion to the few as proof of her patriotism and leadership skills.

While Livni's actions lend to the conclusion that the government lacks any sense of priorities, the truth is far more disturbing. The fact of the matter is that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government lobbies for drug dealers and frees baby killers not because they don't know what they are doing. They advance these absurd policies to divert public scrutiny away from their actual priorities - which are truly dangerous.

One of the government's main priorities is to inculcate Israel's vital national institutions with its perverse view of the national interest. Doing so will ensure that Israel suffers from the government's legacy of incompetence and failure long after it is gone.

Take the IDF for instance. Last week the Prime Minister's Office leaked a classified document to Haaretz which detailed the view of senior military brass that Israel should give the Golan Heights to Iran's best Arab friend Syria. By placing its national security in the hands of Iran's Arab proxy, the General Staff claims absurdly that Israel will be better off because Assad will disavow the very ties to Iran to which he owes Israel's willingness to give him the Golan Heights.

More than anything else, the leaked document showed that despite all the added training that soldiers have undergone since the Second Lebanon War, and all the talk about learning the lessons of that war, the IDF is still led by politicized generals who are willing to sacrifice the nation's security if it makes them popular with the leftist media.

Top commanders like Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, OC Military Intelligence Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin and their underlings are the legacy of this government which promoted them. Their unreasonable and frankly dangerous willingness to trust Assad exposes an ugly truth: If Hizbullah (which thanks to Livni, Olmert, Barak and their strategically challenged IDF subordinates has tripled its military strength since the 2006 war) renews its war against Israel tomorrow, there is no reason to believe that the IDF would be any more successful in defending the country and defeating Hizbullah than it was in 2006.

The corruption of the IDF General Staff by incompetent and opportunistic leaders exposes clearly some of the massive challenges that will face the next government. But those challenges pale in comparison to the strategic disaster that Olmert, Livni and Barak are preparing for their successors.

IN ITS waning days in office, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is seeking to tether the next government to a set of policies that when taken separately and together empower the country's enemies, destroy Israel's strategic importance as a US ally and make it impossible for Israel to defend itself either diplomatically or militarily.

During his visit last week to Washington, Olmert set out his agenda for his last months in office. First, he is ceding massive amounts of territory to the Palestinians. And second, he is seeking to commit the next government to ceding still more territory to the Palestinians.

Over the past few months, Olmert has been rolling back all of the IDF's military successes from Operation Defense Shield in 2002. He is transferring control over Judea and Samaria to Palestinian militias and restraining IDF operations in the areas to such a degree that within a short period of time, the Palestinians will be able to rebuild their terror infrastructures in the areas. This week Bethlehem was the latest city surrendered to the Palestinians and from which the IDF will be all but barred from operating. Hebron, Jenin, and Nablus have already been handed over to Fatah.

Olmert's massive land giveaways are being carried out with absolutely no public discussion. They are being billed as a way to "empower" weak, lame-duck Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. But the fact is that they simply set the course for Hamas's takeover of Judea and Samaria.

As for Hamas, while Olmert was in Washington, he sent his emissary Amos Gilad to Cairo to negotiate an extension of Israel's one-sided cease-fire with Hamas. The cease-fire that Gilad secured this summer did four things. It enabled Hamas to stage a massive build-up of its military capabilities in Gaza free from any threat of Israeli attack. It surrendered the military initiative to Hamas. It paved the way for Hamas's international legitimization. And it committed Israel to cease its counter-terror operations in Judea and Samaria six months later.

This last devastating aspect of the cease-fire is the least discussed. Hamas demanded that in return for its limitation of rocket and mortar offensives against southern Israel, Israel cease its counter-terror efforts not only in Gaza, but in Judea and Samaria as well. Israel balked but reportedly agreed to curtail its activities in Judea and Samaria in six months.

In the intervening six months, Israel has set the conditions to do just that. By transferring control over Palestinian cities to Fatah, which is no match for Hamas, Israel has not only curtailed its own operations. It has set the conditions for a Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria in the coming year.

But this not all Olmert is doing. Aside from actually handing over territory to the Palestinians, Olmert is striving to commit Israel's next government to ceding still more territory including all remaining portions of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians. With Livni's full support, Olmert is attempting to conclude a US-guaranteed agreement with Abbas that will make such Israeli concessions binding on his successors.

If the next government tries to disavow Olmert's 11th hour surrender talks, Olmert is setting conditions that will make it all but impossible for the country to disengage from his commitments without wrecking its relations with Washington. During his visit to the US capital, Olmert sought to formalize his view that Israel is a US client state rather than a US ally and so render it all but impossible for a future Israeli government to stand up to US pressure.

Olmert's declared goal in his meeting with President George W. Bush was to have Bush provide a meaningless pledge that the incoming Obama administration and the Congress will honor Bush's already proffered empty pledge to provide Israel with financial handouts for the next decade. By presenting his request for handouts - in the midst of the gravest financial crisis to hit the US economy in decades - as his chief concern, Olmert cast Israel as a strategic liability and welfare case and so tried to undermine any residual US support for Israel as a strategic ally and asset for Washington.

AND THIS isn't all. While Olmert surrenders Israel's military initiative to its enemies on all fronts and wrecks Israel's most important international alliance, he seeks to take away Israel's long-term capacity to defend itself from future military and diplomatic assaults. With his enthusiastic embrace of the so-called Saudi peace plan, Olmert is committing Israel to accepting the Arab narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Saudi plan is predicated on the wholly mendacious claim that there has never been any Arab aggression against Israel - only Israeli aggression against Arabs and legitimate Arab resistance to Israel. With Olmert now giving his stamp of approval to the Saudi plan, he is denying the country its moral right to defend itself both militarily and diplomatically.

In the coming weeks, as the elections draw near, the Israeli public will be subject to countless mini-crises of the magnitude of the plight of Livni's drug dealers to convince the public that she is a competent leader. Some of these crises will be aimed at obfuscating the fact that she is a full partner in Olmert's agenda. But no matter what their proximate cause, all of these crises will serve the wider aim of hiding the government's real priorities and actions from the public.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US President George W. Bush has six weeks left in power. If he acts fast, that may be enough time to secure his place in history - at least in terms of the Middle East.

Bush's initial reactions to the Sept. 11 attacks were a rare display of political and intellectual courage. Gazing at the rubble of the World Trade Center, Bush recognized that the primary failure of US policy towards the Arab and Islamic world until that day was found in the predisposition of his predecessors to slavishly maintain a Faustian bargain with tyrannical Arab regimes in the interest of maintaining "stability." That bargain committed the US to providing military assistance and political backing to authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab and Islamic world in exchange for cheap oil for the West.

What Sept. 11 showed Bush was that the "stability" the US had purchased was an illusion. As the US propped up dictators, their subjects fumed under the chains of state terror and economic privation. For millions of frustrated young men, the only outlet for resistance open to them is the mosque. There they are indoctrinated in the ways of jihad and mobilized to fight for Islamic global domination.

In the months that followed the attacks, Bush radically changed the course of US Middle East policy by pledging American support for the democratization of the Arab and Islamic world. Bush announced that from then on, the US would no longer blindly follow its duplicitous client states but would support voices of democracy and freedom in the Middle East no matter where they came from.

Bush's message did nothing to endear him to the likes of the Saudis and the Egyptians. The Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference attacked Bush's freedom agenda and indignantly argued that it would be impossible for them to reform their ways for as long as the US maintained its support for Israel - the sole democracy in the region.

THEN THERE was Europe. Until Bush came around, Europeans had delighted in showing off their false multicultural and humanitarian credentials built on buying off terrorists, attacking Israel and giving the Palestinians billions of euros in foreign aid. Bush's freedom agenda exposed their deceit and their cowardice. They were appalled.

Implicit in Bush's view was the understanding that the US's most stable allies - and indeed only stable allies - are fellow democracies. And this understanding necessarily led Bush to the conclusion that Israel is the US's most dependable and valuable ally in the Middle East.

Bush's views were nothing short of sacrilege not only for the Arabs and the Europeans, but for Washington's foreign policy establishment, headquartered at the State Department and the CIA. For the men and women of these bureaucracies, Bush's recognition that the Arab regimes they championed were the primary source of regional instability and anti-Americanism was a repudiation of everything they worked for. More disgraceful, in their view, was his open embrace of Israel - the mortal foe of all their Arab friends - as the US's most trustworthy and strategically vital ally in the region.

All these forces joined together almost immediately to scuttle Bush's freedom agenda for the Arab world. In country after country, Bush's message of democracy was watered down to nothingness.

In post-Saddam Iraq, rather than embrace democratic champions like Ahmed Chalabi, the foreign policy bureaucracy in Washington foisted strongman and former Ba'athist Ayad Allawi on the newly liberated country. The State Department and the CIA allowed Iran and Syria to freely subvert Bush's freedom agenda by buying politicians, building militias and fomenting the insurgency.

Iraq was Bush's central foreign policy initiative. And it is for his work in Iraq that he will chiefly be remembered. Today the battle for Iraq is all but won. But it was only won after Bush realized in 2006 that if he continued following the advice of those who rejected his goal of a free Middle East, the US would be forced from Iraq in defeat.

IN LEBANON in March 2005, when more than a million pro-democracy Lebanese citizens staged the Cedar Revolution and ousted Syrian forces from their country, Bush's battle for freedom was finally joined by the Arabs themselves. To secure the gains of the Cedar Revolution, Bush needed to work with Israel to protect the pro-Western Siniora government.

As Israel's failure to defeat Hizbullah in 2006, and as the US's championing of the UN ceasefire resolution which facilitated Hizbullah's takeover of Lebanon showed, neither Israel nor the US was willing to protect Lebanon's democrats. Today, with the forces of democracy defeated after Hizbullah's violent takeover of the government in May, rather than decry this state of affairs and work to undo it, Bush has chosen to deny it. And not only does he deny it, he exacerbates it. Bush welcomed the "stability" that Hizbullah's takeover has facilitated. And today he is arming the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese army with tanks and other heavy arms. That is, in Lebanon, Bush has adopted the very same Faustian bargain he rejected in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Bush's confused and self-defeating policies towards Lebanon are a direct consequence of his policies towards Israel and the Palestinians. In 2002, Bush recognized that the root of the Palestinian conflict with Israel is not Israel's continued control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem but the absence of Palestinian leadership willing to live at peace with Israel. Moreover, he recognized that the US's primary role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not to mediate a dispute the Palestinians are unwilling to reconcile, but to stand by Israel as America's main ally in the region.

Bush's views earned him the enmity of the Arabs, the Europeans, the Washington elites and the Israeli Left. And together they undermined his policies and isolated him until less that a year later, he abandoned his positions. In mid-2003 he set aside his demand for a reordering of Palestinian society and his decision to side with Israel. In their place, Bush joined the Arabs, the Europeans, the UN and the Israeli Left in making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his Middle East agenda. As with Lebanon, here too Bush's acceptance of the establishment's position came at the cost of eschewing Israel as a US ally.

BUSH'S UNWILLINGNESS to carry through on his freedom agenda in the face of unrelenting opposition from Europe, the Arabs and his foreign policy establishment is what has prevented him throughout his presidency from contending with the greatest source of volatility and danger in the region - Iran. Largely as a consequence of the ambiguity and weakness of his policies on Iran, it is likely that one of the most prominent legacies of Bush's Middle East policies will be a nuclear-armed Iran.

With just six weeks remaining to his tenure in office, much of what Bush will leave behind him has already been determined. But there are two things he can still do that will impact greatly both the world he leaves behind and how he is judged by history: He can take action against Iran's nuclear program, and he can embrace Israel as an ally by pardoning four men who have been persecuted for assuming the alliance exists.

On the surface, these two agenda items couldn't be more disparate. By neutralizing Iran's nuclear installations Bush would save the lives of millions of people. By pardoning Jonathan Pollard, Larry Franklin, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, he would save the lives of four people.

But the fact of the matter is that the two issues present Bush with the same challenge. They both require him to find the courage to embrace the vision that he tried but failed to realize in the early years of his presidency.

By attacking Iran's nuclear installations - or by permitting Israel to fly over Iraq to attack Iran's nuclear installations - Bush will do two things. He will bolster the US-Israel alliance. And he will demonstrate that the stability engendered by the status quo is antithetical to US interests.

Until now, Bush has been prevented from taking action in Iran by those who insist that the status quo in Iran and throughout the region is preferable to every other alternative. This was the view that propelled Washington's foreign policy establishment to oppose Israel's independence 60 years ago and has caused them to continue to oppose accepting Israel as an ally to this day.

To maintain the predominance of this view, over the years its proponents have persecuted individuals who reject it. In 1985, when Jonathan Pollard was arrested for transferring classified information to Israel, he was not treated like a man who had transferred secrets to a US ally. He was treated like a man who had transferred secrets to al-Qaida. His sentence of life in prison was meant to serve as a deterrent for anyone who dared question the view that Israel is nothing more than an albatross placed around the US's neck by a powerful American Jewish lobby and by dimwitted politicians.

Whereas Pollard's fate was sealed long before Bush entered the White House, Franklin, Rosen and Weissman's nightmare began under his watch.

In 2006, former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin was sentenced to 12 years in prison for seeking the assistance of two AIPAC lobbyists - Rosen and Weissman - in bringing the threat posed by Iran's nuclear weapons program to Bush's attention. By speaking with Rosen and Weissman, Franklin was behaving as countless government employees behave. He was prosecuted not for sharing information with the men, but for mistakenly assuming that his view of Israel as a US ally was shared by the powers-that-be in Washington.

Weissman and Rosen are in the midst of a long, costly, drawn-out trial and stand charged with mishandling classified information under a statute that has not been enforced since World War I. For more than four years they have been treated as criminals for doing nothing more than their job as lobbyists - for a lobby that was founded on the understanding that the US and Israel are strategic allies.

The Bush who understood that a stable tyranny is a threat to a vibrant democracy knew that Iran had to be defeated and its regime overthrown. The Bush who celebrated the shared values on which both the US and Israel are founded knew that those who seek Israel's destruction will also never peacefully coexist with the US. If that Bush is still around, the time has come for him to act on those understandings. Before he leaves office he should embrace Israel as an ally and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Not only will he secure the lives of millions of people. He will also secure his place in history.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

A Somali pirate and a former US defense secretary are flying to London for vacation. One of them is stopped at immigration at Heathrow airport and arrested  on suspicion of committing war crimes. Which one do you think it was?

On Tuesday, Somali pirates, sailing in little more than motorized bathtubs, armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, and sustained by raw fish and narcotics, successfully hijacked the Sirius Star, a Saudi-owned oil tanker the size of a US aircraft carrier. The tanker was carrying some $100 million worth of crude oil. News of its capture caused global oil prices to rise by a dollar a barrel.

The next day, Somali pirates attempted to hijack the Trafalgar, a British frigate, but were forced to flee by a German naval helicopter dispatched to the scene. They did manage to hijack a Chinese trawler and a cargo ship from Hong Kong. They nearly got control of an Ethiopian ship, but it, too, was saved by the German Navy that heeded its call for help in time.

Piracy is fast emerging as the newest old threat to stage a comeback in recent years. Over the past week and a half alone, 12 vessels have been hijacked. And according to the International Maritime Bureau, in the three months that ended on September 30, Somali pirates attacked 26 vessels, capturing 576 crew members. Britain's Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) assesses the ransoms they netted at between $18m. and $30m.

And with financial strength comes increased military sophistication. The US Navy expressed shock at the pirates' successful hijacking of the Sirius Star. The pirates staged the hijacking much farther from shore than they had ever done previously.

Beyond the personal suffering incurred by thousands of crew members taken hostage in recent years, piracy's potential impact on global economic stability is enormous. In the Gulf of Aden, where the Somali pirates operate, US shippers alone transport more than $1.5 trillion in cargo annually.

One of the unique characteristics of pirates is that they appear to be equal opportunity aggressors. They don't care who owns the ships they attack. On August 21, Somali pirates hijacked the Iran Deyanat, a ship owned and operated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards-linked Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line (IRISL). In September, the US Treasury Department designated IRISL as a company that assists Iran's nuclear weapons program and placed it under stiff financial sanctions.

Iran Deyanat's manifest asserted that its cargo included minerals. Yet shortly after the pirates went on board they began developing symptoms such as hair loss that experts claim are more in line with radiation exposure. According to reports, some 16 pirates died shortly after being exposed to the cargo. Just this week, a second Iranian ship - this one apparently carrying wheat - was similarly captured.

Then, too, in September, pirates seized the Faina, a Ukrainian ship carrying 33 Russian-made T-72 tanks. The Ukrainians and Russians claimed that the tanks were destined for Kenya, but it later emerged that they may have been seized en route to Sudan. So, ironically, in the case of both the Faina and the Deyanat, pirates may have inadvertently saved thousands of lives.

THE INTERNATIONAL community is at a loss for what to do about the emerging danger of piracy. This is not due to lack of capacity to fight the pirate ships. On Monday an Indian naval frigate, the INS Tabar, sank a pirate "mother ship" whose fleet members were attacking the Tabar in the Gulf of Aden. NATO has deployed a naval task force while the American, French, German and other navies have aggressively worked to free merchant ships under attack by pirates.

As David Rivkin and Lee Casey explained in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the problem with contending with piracy is not so much military, as legal and political. Whereas customary international law defined piracy as a threat against all nations and therefore a crime for which universal jurisdiction must be applied to perpetrators, in today's world, states are unwilling to apprehend pirates or to contend with them because they are likely to find themselves in a sticky legal mess.

In centuries past, in accordance with established international law, it was standard practice for naval captains to hang pirates after capturing them. Today, when Europe has outlawed capital punishment, when criminal defendants throughout the West are given more civil rights than their victims, and when irregular combatants picked off of battlefields or intercepted before they attack are given - at a minimum - the same rights as those accorded to legal prisoners of war, states lack the political will and the moral clarity to prosecute offenders. As Casey and Rivkin note, last April the British Foreign Office instructed the British Navy not to apprehend pirates lest they claim that their human rights were harmed, and request and receive asylum in Britain.

THE WEST'S perverse interpretations of human rights and humanitarian law, which bar it from handling one of the most acute emerging threats to the international economy, is a consequence of the West's abdication of moral and legal sanity in its dealings with international terror. In the 1960s and 1970s, when international terrorism first emerged as a threat to international security, the West adopted international treaties and conventions that tended to treat terrorism as a new form of piracy. Like piracy, terrorism was to be treated as an attack on all nations. Jurisdiction over terrorists was to be universal. Such early views were codified in early documents such as the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft from 1970 that established a principle of universal jurisdiction over aircraft hijackers.

Similarly, in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the US, the UN Security Council passed binding Resolution 1373, which also compelled member states not only to treat terrorists as illegal combatants who must be universally denied any support of any kind, but to take action against anyone involved with or supporting terrorists in any way. That is, as in piracy, the tendency of states contending with terrorism has been to view it as an act requiring universal jurisdiction, compelling all UN member states to prosecute offenders.

And yet, over the years, states have managed to ignore or invert international laws on terrorism to the point where today terrorists are among the most protected groups of individuals in the world. Due to political sympathy for terrorists, hostility toward their victims, or fear of terrorist reprisals against a state that dares to prosecute terrorists found on its territory, states have managed to avoid not only applying existing laws against terrorists. They have also refrained from updating laws to meet the growing challenges of terrorism. Instead, international institutions and "enlightened" Western states have devoted their time to condemning and threatening to prosecute the few states that have taken action against terrorists.

The inversion of international law from an institution geared toward protecting states and civilians from international lawbreakers to one devoted to protecting international menaces from states and their citizens is nowhere more evident than in the international community's treatment of Hamas-controlled Gaza.

One of the reasons the international community has failed so abjectly to take reasonable measures to combat terrorism is because international terrorism as presently constituted is the creation of Palestinian Arabs and their Arab brethren. Since the 1960s, and particularly since the mid-1970s, Europe, and to varying degrees the US, have been averse to contending with terrorism because their hostility toward Israel leads them to condone Palestinian Arab terrorism against the Jewish state.

THE INTERNATIONAL community's treatment of Hamas-controlled Gaza epitomizes this victory of politics over law. Both the US and the EU have labeled Hamas a terror group. That designation places Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, under the regime of UN Security Council Resolution 1373.

Among other things, Resolution 1373 requires states to "freeze without delay funds and other financial assets or economic resources of... entities owned or controlled directly or indirectly by [terrorists]."

That is, the resolution requires UN member states to end all financial and other support for Hamas-controlled Gaza.

The resolution also requires UN member states to "cooperate [with other states] to prevent and suppress terrorist attacks and take action against perpetrators of such acts."

This means that states are required to assist one another - and in the case of Hamas, to assist Israel - in combating Hamas and punishing its members and supporters.

While it can be argued that given the absence of a binding legal definition of terrorism, states that do not designate Hamas as a terrorist organization are not required to abide by the terms of 1373 in dealing with Hamas, it is quite clear that for states that do recognize Hamas as a terror group, 1373's provisions must be upheld.

And yet, the EU and the US have willfully ignored its provisions. They have steadily increased their budgetary support for the Palestinian Authority while knowing full well that the Fatah-led PA in Judea and Samaria is transferring money to Hamas-controlled Gaza to pay the salaries of Hamas employees.

More disturbingly, the US and the EU as well as the UN demand that Israel itself sustain Hamas-controlled Gaza economically. The UN, EU and the US have consistently demanded that Israel provide Gaza with fuel, food, water, medicine, electricity, telephone service, port services and access to Israeli markets, in spite of the fact that international law actually prohibits Israel from providing such assistance, and in fact arguably requires Israel to deny it.

Recently, supported by the UN, and in connivance with Hamas, European leaders began supporting illegal moves to end Israel's maritime blockade of Gaza, which was established to block weapons and terror personnel from entering and exiting the area. Expanding this trend, this week Navanethem Pillay, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for Israel to end its blockade of the Gaza Strip, perversely calling the blockade a breach of international and humanitarian law.

This inversion of the aims of international law - from protecting states and innocent civilians from attack to protecting aggressors from retaliation - has brought about the absurd situation where terrorist ideologues and commanders such as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi are feted in Britain while retired Israeli and American generals are threatened with arrest. Germany welcomed Iranian President and genocide proponent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit and indicted former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for crimes against humanity. Belgium allows Hamas and Hizbullah supporters like Dyab Abu Jahjah, who calls for attacks against Jews, to operate freely, but indicted former prime minister Ariel Sharon for crimes against humanity.

The consequence of this absurd state of affairs is obvious. The international law champions who argue that international humanitarian law provides a nonviolent means for nations to defend themselves against aggressors have perverted the purpose and meaning of international humanitarian law to such a degree that the only way for nations to protect themselves against pirates, terrorists and other international rogues is to ignore international law aficionados and secure their interests by force.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

US President-elect Barack Obama has properly sought to maintain a low profile in foreign affairs in this transition period ahead of his January inauguration. But while Obama has stipulated that the US can have only one president at a time, his aides and advisers are signaling that he intends to move US foreign policy in a sharply different direction from its current trajectory once he assumes office.

And they are signaling that this new direction will be applied most immediately and directly to US policy toward the Middle East.

Early in the Democratic Party's primary season, the Obama campaign released a list of the now-president-elect's foreign policy advisers to The Washington Post. The list raised a great deal of concern in policy circles, particularly among supporters of the US-Israel alliance. It included outspoken critics of Israel such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as national security adviser under president Jimmy Carter, and Robert Malley, who served as a junior Middle East aide to president Bill Clinton. Both men are deeply hostile to Israel and both have called repeatedly for the US to end its strategic alliance with Israel.

In the months that followed the list's publication, the Obama campaign sought to distance itself from both men as the president-elect's advisers worked to position Obama as a centrist candidate.

Brzezinski was cast aside in February when he headed a delegation to Syria to meet with President Bashar Assad. The purpose of his "fact-finding" mission was to castigate the Bush administration for its refusal to pursue Syria as an ally, and to decry Damascus's international isolation caused by its support for the insurgency in Iraq, its strategic alliance with Iran, its support for Hizbullah as well as Hamas and al-Qaida, its illicit nuclear program and its subversion of the pro-Western Lebanese government.

To Brzezinski's dismay, his mission was overtaken by events. The depth of Syria's support for terror was graphically displayed during his visit when arch-Iranian/Lebanese terrorist Imad Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus the day after he called on Assad.

Although he was a junior staffer in Clinton's National Security Council, since 2000 Malley has used his Clinton administration credentials to pave his emergence as one of America's most outspoken apologists for Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Immediately after the failed July 2000 Camp David peace summit, Malley invented the Palestinian "narrative" of the summit's proceedings. While Clinton, then-prime minister Ehud Barak, and Ambassador Dennis Ross, who served as Clinton's chief negotiator, have all concurred that Yasser Arafat torpedoed the prospects of peace when he refused Barak's offer of Palestinian statehood, Malley claimed falsely that Israel was to blame for the failure of the talks.

In succeeding years, he has expanded his condemnation of Israel. He insists that not only Palestinian aggression, but Syrian, Lebanese and Iranian attacks against Israel are all Israel's fault. The Obama campaign distanced itself from Malley in May after the Times of London reported that he was meeting regularly with Hamas terror leaders.

As the election drew closer, the Obama campaign expanded its efforts to present its candidate as a foreign policy moderate. Moderate foreign policy advisers such as Ross were paraded before reporters. Both Obama and his surrogates insisted that he supports a strong American alliance with Israel. Obama abandoned his earlier pledge to withdraw all US forces from Iraq by 2010. He attempted to temper and later deny his public pledge to hold direct negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions.

Due in large part to media credulousness, Obama's new image as a centrist was widely accepted by the public. And it is likely that he owes a significant portion of his support in the American Jewish community to the campaign's success in distancing Obama from men like Brzezinski and Malley.

BUT NOW that the campaign is over, it appears that as his critics warned, Obama's moves toward the center on issues relating to the Middle East were little more than campaign tactics to obscure his true policy preferences.

Two days after his election, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius gave a sense of the direction in which Obama will likely take US foreign policy. And, apparently directed by Obama's campaign staff, Ignatius based much of his column on his belief that Obama's foreign policy views have been shaped by his "informal" adviser, Brzezinski.

Based on what Brzezinski and Obama's "official" campaign told him, Ignatius wrote that the two major issues where Obama's foreign policy is likely to diverge from Bush's right off the bat are Israel and Iran. Obama, he claimed, will want to push hard to force Israel to come to an agreement with the Palestinians as soon as he comes into office. As for Iran, Obama plans to move immediately to improve US relations with the nuclear-weapons-building ayatollahs.

As for Malley, an aide of his told Frontpage magazine this week that acting on Obama's instructions, Malley traveled to Cairo and Damascus after Obama's electoral victory to tell Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Assad that "the Obama administration would take into greater account Egyptian and Syrian interests."

In a related story, Hamas terror operative Ahmad Youssef told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that in the months leading up to his election, Obama's advisers held steady contacts with the leaders of the terror group in Gaza, and had asked that Hamas keep the meetings secret in order not to harm Obama's chances of being elected.

Both Obama's transition team and Hamas leaders were quick to deny Youssef's statements. Yet, together with the earlier Times of London story about Malley's contacts with Hamas and the new revelations about Malley serving as Obama's unofficial Middle East envoy, the Al-Hayat report has the ring of truth.

Even more foreboding than these reports are statements by Obama's foreign policy advisers regarding his plans to open direct contacts with Iran. On Wednesday The Washington Post reported that Obama intends to move quickly to seek an accommodation with Iran regarding Afghanistan. Obama's advisers assert that such a deal is possible because as far as they are concerned, the Shi'ite Iranians oppose Sunni jihadists just as much as the US does.

But the facts do not support this view. Top US and British military commanders have asserted repeatedly that Iran is a major sponsor of the Taliban and al-Qaida in their war against the Afghan government and NATO forces in the country. Since 2006, Iran has provided advanced weapons, money and political support to the Taliban and al-Qaida insurgents in the country.

The Obama team's rejection of the demonstrated reality of Iran's support for the Taliban and al-Qaida in favor of a policy based on the fantasy that it is possible to cut a deal with the ayatollahs will undoubtedly not be his last move in the mullahs' direction. It will likely be quickly followed by an offer to conduct direct, high level talks with Iran's leaders about their nuclear weapons program.

What is most disturbing about Obama's emerging foreign policy is not simply that it ignores the reality on the ground - a reality that clearly demonstrates that Iran and its Syrian, Palestinian and Lebanese surrogates are implacable foes of Israel and America and therefore not interested in being appeased. It is also not just the fact that it sends a signal of American weakness to Iran and its proxies just as Iran reaches the nuclear threshold. And Obama's emerging foreign policy is not merely disconcerting because by speaking with Iran and its proxies, Obama will be legitimizing the genocidal regime in Teheran.

WHAT IS most alarming about Obama's emerging foreign policy toward Iran and its proxies on the one hand and Israel on the other is that it will cause actual harm to the Jewish state.

By pressuring Israel to cede land to Syria and the Palestinians, Obama's apparent foreign policy will provide Iran with still more territory from which to attack Israel both through its terror proxies and with its expanding ballistic missile arsenal. By embracing the Syrian regime in spite of its support for terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its subversion of Lebanon, the incoming Obama administration will embolden Syria to increase its subversion of Lebanon and Iraq, while strengthening its ties to Iran still further.

As for direct talks with Iran itself, the question immediately arises, what could Obama offer Teheran in exchange for an end to its nuclear program that Bush hasn't already offered?

What it can offer is Israel.

Over the past few years, Obama's top nuclear nonproliferation adviser, Joe Cirincione, has repeatedly advocated placing Israel's nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table and offering it up in exchange for an Iranian pledge to end its nuclear program. Defense Secretary Robert Gates - whom Obama is considering retaining - insinuated in his 2006 confirmation hearings that Iran is only building nuclear weapons to defend itself against Israel. Gates, it should be recalled, has been instrumental in convincing Bush not only not to attack Iran's nuclear installations, but not to support an Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear installations.

What is profoundly distressing about statements by men like Cirincione and Gates is what they tell us about the strategic reasoning informing the incoming Obama administration. Their views echo those voiced by advocates of American abandonment of Israel such as Professors Steve Walt and John Mearshimer. Walt and Mearshimer argue that Iran is not a threat to US interests or to global security because in the event that the mullahs acquire nuclear weapons, they are likely to view them merely as a deterrent against Iran's enemies. And as a result, Iran will respond as the Soviet Union did to a deterrent model based on mutually assured destruction.

This view is contradicted by Iran's open advocacy of Israel's destruction, and its declared willingness to absorb a nuclear attack in return for destroying Israel. But assuming that this is how the Obama team views Iran, they should be the last ones advocating Israeli disarmament. Because if this is their view, then by their own reasoning, Israel's presumed nuclear arsenal is necessary to deter Teheran from attacking. And if as Cirincione advocates, Obama intends to place Israel's nuclear arsenal on the negotiating table, he will effectively be giving Iran a green light to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.

All of the Obama team's post-election/pre-inaugural foreign policy signals place Israel's next government - which will only be elected on February 10 - in an extraordinarily difficult position.

It is not just that their positions make clear that the Obama administration will do nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Obama team's pre-inaugural signals indicate strongly that Israel's next government will need to strike Iran's nuclear installations before two rapidly approaching deadlines.

The strike will have to occur before the mullahs enrich sufficient quantities of highly enriched uranium to produce nuclear bombs. And Israel will need to neutralize Iran's nuclear program before the Obama administration begins implementing America's new foreign policy.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Two weeks ago, the Palestinians and their anti-Zionist Israeli and international partners finally produced a smoking gun. They had a videotape of evil settlers brutally attacking poor, defenseless Palestinians as they innocently picked olives with their enlightened supporters in a grove by the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron.

The local media went into a feeding frenzy. The footage led the television news broadcasts. Photos taken from the video were plastered across the front pages of the newspapers. Radio talk show hosts denounced the criminal settlers and celebrated the guileless Palestinians and their heroic Israeli supporters. The Olmert-Livni-Barak government was quick to weigh in, promising stiff punishment for the Jewish fascists involved and a curtailment of their supporters' civil rights.

In the weeks that have followed, and with elections looming, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have stepped up their attacks on the evil right-wing extremists. At Saturday night's memorial ceremony/political rally for slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv, Barak called right-wing activists "cancers." He claimed that they are a "threat to democracy." And he pledged, "We will uproot this evil from within us."

The crowd loved Barak's statement. The few audience members who might have booed him had already been beaten and arrested by police for disturbing the peace. A handful of anti-leftist activists from the student group Im Tirtzu came to Rabin Square carrying signs decrying leftist demonization of the Right. The police beat them and carted them off before the rally began.

If it were true that settlers are marauding around Judea and Samaria beating innocent Palestinians, perhaps it would be possible to understand this assault against the Right. But as it works out, the videotape that was supposed to be the definitive proof that settlers are violent criminals was a fabrication. It was simply the latest anti-Israel snuff film brought to us by our friends at Pallywood Productions. These are the same creative filmmakers whose previous credits include the fabricated IDF shooting of Muhammad al-Dura, the Jenin massacre that wasn't, the Kafr Kana massacre that wasn't and a host of other notable blood libels.

The inconvenient truth that these activists remain liars was exposed at the remand hearings of the settlers accused of beating the Palestinian olive harvesters. As the NFC news Web site reported exclusively on Sunday, the Palestinians showed their film as evidence against the arrested offenders in two separate hearings before two different judges at the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court. And at each hearing, after viewing the film the judges concluded that through heavy editing, the video had inverted reality. Both stated that it was impossible to know who began the fight - the Palestinians and their Israeli and foreign supporters who beat the settlers, or the settlers who walked to the grove on Shabbat carrying nothing but their prayer shawls and hit them back.

The judges also noted that one of the Palestinians threw a large rock at the back of one of the settlers after he and his friends had disengaged from the fight. The judges expressed anger and amazement at the police for failing to arrest the Palestinian who had clearly attacked the Jewish defendant without provocation.

IT GOES without saying that the local media have chosen to ignore the court's exposure of the latest hoax. The truth doesn't fit their anti-right-wing narrative and so it isn't being covered.

What the local media and politicians such as Barak and Livni who seek to criminalize the Right for political gain refuse to acknowledge is that their embrace of these lies not only harms the settlers, it harms the country as a whole.

Although from the rap they've gotten from the political Left and its supporters in the media, it seems like right-wing extremists are both numerous and powerful, the fact of the matter is that the number of right-wingers who reject the authority of the state or would take the law into their own hands is tiny. And they are politically isolated both at home and abroad and have no money.

In stark contrast, the anti-Zionist, Israeli Left is an integral part of a well-funded international movement actively engaged in waging political warfare not against the settlers, but against Israel as a whole. The end of this political war is Israel's destruction. The anti-Zionist Israeli Left advances this destruction both by directly assisting terror groups and by indirectly assisting terror groups through activities aimed at delegitimizing Israel's right to defend itself.

The clear collusion between both Israeli and international anti-Israel leftist activists with terrorist groups like Hamas is nowhere more evident than in the terror-supporting International Solidarity Movement's newest spin-off, the Free Gaza campaign. On Saturday, this group broke the IDF's sea blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gazan coast for the third time in recent months by sailing a ship filled with rabidly pro-jihadist and anti-Israel European politicians from Cyprus to Gaza.

According to a credible source with close ties to the operation, the Free Gaza campaign works closely with Israeli far-left groups including Anarchists against the Wall, Gush Shalom, Gisha, Machsom Watch, New Profile and Women in Black. These organizations are generously funded by the US-based New Israel Fund, by European governments and by anti-Israel church groups like the Quakers. The Free Gaza campaign's first ship, which arrived in Gaza in late August, was led by Israeli anti-Zionist activist and former lecturer at Ben-Gurion University Jeff Halper.

The Free Gaza campaign is a clear assault on Israel's national security. Under the banner of "human rights," this new ferry service between Cyprus and Gaza is meant to compromise the country's ability to combat terror operations and to provide political support for Hamas. Crew members and passengers on board these boats meet with Hamas terror commanders in Gaza and coordinate future missions.

Their newest campaign is to prevent the navy from interdicting fishing boats. Hamas and other terror groups make wide use of fishing boats to import weapons and transport terror personnel from abroad into Gaza. By demonizing the navy for interdicting fishing boats, and in open collusion with Hamas, the activists provide political cover for weapons transfers and jihadist maritime traffic into and out of Gaza.

To date, Israel has chosen not to intercept the Free Gaza campaign's boats out of concern that taking such necessary action will prove a public relations disaster both at home and abroad. And this concern is reasonable. But by taking no diplomatic or military steps to prevent this terror-supporting traffic from continuing and expanding, the government allows these Israeli and European terror supporters to strengthen Hamas's war machine and legitimize Hamas's objective of destroying Israel.

Official Israel's failure to act against this breach of its security is directly related to its support of Israeli anti-Zionist groups when they direct their guns at the Israeli Right - rather than Israel as a whole. As a practical matter, it is difficult for the government to show that the Free Gaza campaign actively supports the war against Israel when it willingly embraces the bona fides of the Free Gaza campaign's supporters when they attack settlers, or when the government adopts these organizations' false assertion that the Right is the greatest threat to the country.

By the same token, it is difficult for the government to discredit films purporting to demonstrate the human rights plight of Gazans as Pallywood propaganda flicks when the government accepts these films as accurate when their culprits are right-wing activists.

BUT WHILE the domestic Left sees a distinction between its right-wing opponents and the country as a whole, the international community sees no distinction between the two. Indeed, the international community has used the cover that official Israel provides anti-Zionist activists for their settler vilifying activities in order to advance the cause of criminalizing Israel as a whole.

Case in point is what has become known as the Durban II conference in Geneva. Durban I, it will be recalled, was the UN's 2001 "anti-racism" conference in Durban, South Africa. The conference, which took place the week before the jihadist attacks on the US, was an anti-Semitic hate-fest. The American and Israeli delegations walked out as Israel and the Jewish people were castigated as the greatest human rights abusers, genocide committers, apartheid propagators and general all purpose bad guys in the entire world.

The Nazi-like propaganda emanating from the conference led to violent attacks against Jews all over the world. Durban I's resolutions also provided the policy blueprint for much of political warfare that has been waged against Israel by so-called human rights groups ever since. These include the violent demonstrations against the security fence organized by anti-Zionist Israeli groups, the Free Gaza campaign they support, and the international boycotts against Israeli exports and academics they advocate.

Today, the UN is busily organizing its follow-up conference that will be held next year in Geneva. As the watchdog group Eye on the UN reported over the weekend, the conference's organizing committee just met and approved most of the resolutions it is set to adopt at Geneva. These resolutions again castigate Israel as the chief violator of human rights in the world. Israel is accused of committing genocide, crimes against humanity and being an apartheid state. It is also condemned as the most serious threat to international peace and security.

But of course, what starts with Israel doesn't end with Israel. The conference organizers have used the basic unanimity about Israel's criminal nature to launch an assault against the foundations of Western civilization. In addition to the numerous and repetitious attacks against Israel and Jews, the conference organizers passed multiple resolutions calling for the abrogation of freedom of expression and the criminalization of political speech in order to outlaw discussion of Islamic terrorism and block counterterror efforts in the West.

Among the conference's chief organizers are Iran, Libya, Egypt and Cuba. Iran is the vice-chairman of the executive committee responsible for planning Durban II. Much of the language in the proposed resolutions is taken directly from resolutions passed at a planning session last year in Teheran.

Israel had no hand in organizing this conference, which, following Canada, it announced it will boycott. But over the years, it could have taken actions that might have tempered or weakened the international coalition arrayed against it.

If the government had outlawed anti-Israel groups like Machsom Watch, New Profile, Gisha, Gush Shalom, Women in Black and Anarchists against the Wall, rather than tolerate them on account of their activities against settlers, it could at least have weakened their efforts. Had they been disbanded, they would have had less capacity to legitimize and assist Palestinians and Europeans who engage in political warfare against Israel on the ground.

By refusing to recognize the international consequences of their domestic battle against their political opponents on the Right, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government and the local media have strengthened Israel's enemies in their battle to destroy the country.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

With Senator Barack Obama's victory in the US presidential race, the stakes have been raised for Israel's February 10 general elections.

Whatever the Obama administration's position on Israel may be, it will not be more supportive of the country than the Bush administration has been. And over the past year, the supportive Bush administration has decided not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and not to support an Israeli effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

If Israel's next prime minister intends to prevent Teheran from acquiring the means to implement its stated aim of destroying Israel, he or she must be prepared to stand up to America. Indeed, the greatest diplomatic challenge he or she will likely face will be standing up to a popular new President Obama, supported by large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and the overwhelming majority of American Jewish voters.

Over the past few days, the two contenders for the premiership - Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu - have demonstrated their starkly contrasting views of how to deal with a potentially hostile administration in Washington.

Reacting to Obama's electoral victory on Wednesday, Livni made clear that from her perspective, the best way to deal with an unfriendly White House is to preemptively surrender Israel's national interests.

In her words, Israel's election results "must reflect the country's interest in advancing the peace process, otherwise the international community, headed by the US, will try and push us in this direction."

For their part, Netanyahu and Likud have shown that if defending Israel's national interests requires a confrontation with Washington, they will not shy away from it. Last week, Netanyahu surrogate MK Yuval Steinitz informed both US presidential campaigns that in the event that outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledges to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria, a Likud-led government will not respect his commitment.

Livni understands that she cannot win the election by preaching preemptive surrender, and so she and her colleagues are ardently seeking to change the subject. They recognize that for Livni to win, she must persuade the public that she is not the hard-core leftist she has governed as for the past five years, but a centrist. To accomplish this goal, she is seeking to distinguish herself from Labor and Meretz while still maintaining her leftist support base. And she is trying to convince voters that Likud is not a credible alternative.

Distinguishing herself from Labor and Meretz while keeping faith with the Left has been tricky for Livni, because it requires her to constantly contradict herself. She must make clear that she supports an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines and abdicates responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to the US and Europe, while appearing to reject the 1949 armistice lines and accepting that given the stakes, Israel is ultimately responsible for preventing Iran from going nuclear.

Unable to renounce policies she herself has advanced and indeed invented, Livni has opted simply to refuse to disclose her positions to the public. She refuses to tell us what she has offered the Palestinians in her negotiations with Ahmed Qurei, or how she intends to deal with Syria and Iran, claiming unconvincingly that telling us what she stands for would damage Israel's national interests.

Much to Livni's dismay, the public is already certain that she is a leftist. Consequently, her greatest challenge is convincing centrists who lean right that they cannot support Likud. To persuade them that Likud is unworthy, she seeks to define Likud as a party of extremists, hell-bent on destroying Israel's reputation in Europe and the US and on killing all hope of peace.

TO DEMONIZE Likud, Livni and her colleagues operate on two tracks simultaneously.

First and most importantly, they have instigated violent confrontations with the hardcore fringe of the ideological Right. These confrontations serve to convince the public that the far-right fringe constitutes a threat to the state.

Second, they seek to create a public perception of Likud as the sponsor of the hardcore fringe. By accomplishing this they hope to persuade the public that Likud itself is a threat to the country.

On October 25 the government ordered the police and the IDF to carry out a surprise, middle-of-the-night expulsion of well-known right-wing hard-liner Noam Federman and his family from their home in Kiryat Arba, and to demolish their home. According to eyewitness accounts, the police used excessive violence against the surprised couple and their nine children.

As could have been anticipated, the Federmans and their hot-headed, radical friends were enraged by the unprovoked onslaught. And as expected, Federman's supporters reacted by making offensive statements about the police and the IDF.

The government pounced on these statements in a bid to castigate the far right, (of which Federman and his supporters comprise a small faction), as the greatest threat facing the country. Cabinet ministers were warned that these hard-line activists may try to assassinate them, attack IDF soldiers, or commit terror attacks against Arabs. Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced he will enact draconian measures against the far right in a bid to strip its activists of their civil rights and demoralize their followers. (In the meantime, the torching of a yeshiva in Acre and a synagogue in Ramle by Israeli Arabs went unnoted by the cabinet.)

Presenting Federman and his colleagues as a strategic threat to the country will not suffice to bring victory to Livni. She must also link Likud and its leader to these far-right "enemies of the people."

To this end, Livni and her colleagues accuse Likud of rejecting "peace." Likud's extremism, Livni argues, is demonstrated by the fact that "extremists" such as former science minister Bennie Begin and former construction and housing minister Effi Eitam are joining its ranks.

Livni's strategy of projecting herself as a moderate by criminalizing the Right and claiming that there is no distinction between Likud and far-right activists is a reenactment of Olmert's strategy for winning the 2006 general elections.

In February 2006 Olmert sought to define the Right in general and Likud specifically as a coalition of extremists by provoking violence between security forces and the far-right when he ordered the destruction of a number of homes in Amona. Hundreds of policemen and border guards were deployed to Amona where they essentially carried out a pogrom against hundreds of children and teenagers who were there to defend the homes from destruction.

Initially, the events at Amona were misrepresented to the public as an example of right-wing fanaticism and violence against security personnel. Due to the media's open collusion with Olmert, it was only after the elections that the public learned the full extent of the police's premeditated brutality. In the meantime, Olmert invented a convenient right-wing bogeyman with which to scare the public and demonize Likud.

Olmert's Amona strategy, which Livni seeks to implement today, advances the political fortunes of the Left in two ways.

First, it directly promotes the fiction that Israel's chief enemy is the Right and so induces the public to feel uncomfortable supporting Likud.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Amona strategy deflects public attention from Israel's real enemies - Iran and its Palestinian, Lebanese and Syria proxies - against which Kadima has taken no effective action. In 2006, the government's pogrom at Amona removed Hamas's electoral victory in the January 2006 Palestinian Authority elections from the top of the news. Hamas's electoral triumph had laid bare the folly of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza the previous summer and demonstrated that Kadima's entire electoral platform, based on repeating that withdrawal in Judea and Samaria, was a recipe for disaster and war.

Today, with banner headlines decrying the right-wing menace filling the front pages of the papers, news of Hamas's transformation of Gaza into a new Hizbullah-stan, replete with bunkers built with concrete supplied by Israel, is relegated to the back pages.

IN 2006, Likud was in no position to counter the Amona strategy. It had just sustained a near-mortal blow when Ariel Sharon bolted the party to form Kadima. But now the tables have turned. Today it is Kadima that is in shambles. Sharon has been forgotten. Olmert resigned in disgrace. Livni failed to form a government.

Today, Likud can discredit Livni's self-characterizations as a moderate by pointing to her far-left record as foreign minister. Netanyahu can reject her characterization of Likud as a far-right party by showcasing leftists like Uzi Dayan, Dan Meridor and Assaf Hefetz who are flocking to the party together with rightists like Bennie Begin and Effi Eitam. Likud, he can say credibly, is not a fringe party - but a big-tent center-right governing party that welcomes all patriotic Israelis.

If Livni's Amona strategy fails her, she will be forced to discuss her plans to preemptively surrender to the US, the Palestinians, Syria and Iran. And for Livni, a debate about her actual plans and current policies is a recipe for defeat.

In certain respects, Livni's embrace of Olmert's Amona strategy toward the Right and her attempt to hide her far-left policies while presenting herself as a new sort of clean politician and engine of political renewal, echoes the strategy that Obama employed with such success in his bid for the White House. Like Obama, Livni wishes to convince the public to support her by not telling us who she is and what she intends to do, sufficing instead with her claim to be different from the other guys.

It is far from clear that Livni will be able to pull off an Obama-like victory. She lacks his charisma. Unlike Obama, she has a public record of far-left governance and policy failure going into the election. And unlike Sen. John McCain, Israelis trust Netanyahu more than they trust Livni to protect the country's economy.

Moreover, Obama benefited from the public support that the Democratic Party enjoyed after eight years of Republican control of the White House. In contrast, between its failed leadership in the war with Hizbullah and the corruption probes and criminal convictions of its leaders, Livni's Kadima is the discredited incumbent party. But still, all is not lost for Livni.

Like Obama, she enjoys the full support of the media in her bid for power. In the past, media collusion has repeatedly sufficed to bring leftists posing as centrists to power.

With all that is at stake in February's elections, it must be hoped that Livni's Obama strategy will fail her. Facing Iran on the one hand and a potentially hostile Obama administration on the other, Israel requires a leader like Netanyahu who understands that if preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons means butting heads with Obama, so be it.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

On Sunday Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz drove yet another stake into the country's political discourse. Last week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that despite his resignation and the fact that elections have been called for February 10, he intends to renew negotiations with Syria. He hopes to commit Israel to surrendering the Golan Heights to Bashar Assad, Iran's Arab proxy, before he is replaced by a new prime minister.

Olmert's plan to compel a future government to accept such a commitment - which is opposed by a large majority of Israelis - caused an uproar. Opposition leaders and even members of Olmert's own Kadima party claimed that as the head of a transition government, Olmert has no legal right to make such a commitment.

After all they noted, just a few weeks ago Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch announced that the transition government has no legal right to appoint new judges. Beinisch claimed that as a transition government, Olmert and his colleagues had no legal right to make decisions that will have a long-term impact on Israeli democracy and since appointing judges would have such a long term impact, they are legally barred from appointing them. If the government is barred from appointing judges, certainly it must be barred from surrendering the strategically vital Golan Heights.

But Mazuz thinks differently. Appointing judges, he asserted, is a legal action. Surrendering the Golan Heights, in contrast, is a political action, he claimed. So while the transition government may not be allowed to appoint judges, it is allowed to give Syria control over the country's water supply.

By claiming that appointing judges is a legal act and surrendering vital lands is a political act, Mazuz made a mockery of both the law and of politics. And he did so without blushing because from his perspective, both the rule of law and the powers of politicians can only be determined in light of their impact on the rule of the Left. Actions are permissible, democratic and legal when they advance the rule of the Left. They are impermissible, anti-democratic and illegal when they detract from the rule of the Left.

MAZUZ OF course is far from alone in his assault democratic norms in the service of leftist ideology and power. Beinisch herself has never shied away from hypocrisy when it serves the interest of her ideological camp of radical leftists. As Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann noted wryly, given that Beinisch herself was appointed to the Supreme Court by a transition government, her concern about enforcing the limited powers of a transition government is remarkable.

Mazuz's decision to permit Olmert to cede the Golan Heights to Syria is also extraordinary when viewed in the context of recent history. In 1999, the Supreme Court placed a temporary injunction against then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's order to close the PLO's diplomatic mission in Jerusalem at the Orient House. The court's move was a legal scandal since Netanyahu's decision was clearly legal. Israeli law bars the PLO from conducting official business of any sort in Jerusalem. The PLO carried out official diplomacy at the Orient House. The law required the government to close the Orient House.

The Supreme Court's decision on the Orient House was revealing. It showed that the court was more interested in advancing the political interests of the Left than in upholding the rule of law.Indeed, it showed that the court had willfully co-opted the language of law and democratic norms to advance its ideological interests.

When a transition government advances the Left's political interests by offering the Golan Heights to Syria, its actions are legal and democratic. When a transition government advances the Right's political interests by curtailing PLO activities in Jerusalem, its actions are illegal and anti-democratic. When a transition government advances the Left's interests by appointing radical justices to the courts before elections, its actions are legal and democratic. When a transition government harms the Left's interest by appointing leftists who aren't radical to the courts, its actions are illegal and anti-democratic.

All of this demonstrates a disturbing state of affairs. Whether they are politicians like Olmert or jurists like Mazuz and Beinisch, the Left uses the rhetoric of democracy not to advance liberal norms and the rule of law in society but to destroy them both in the interest of advancing the Left's political interests.

THE LEFT's co-optation of the language of law and democracy is not limited to geopolitics. It extends to issues of cultural politics as well. Take feminism for example. Education Minister Yuli Tamir fancies herself a great champion of women's rights. She has written about feminism and the need for women to have mandated equal representation in both public and private forums. In all of her work on behalf of women's issues, Tamir has been clear that a society's refusal to mandate full equality for women goes hand in hand with militarism and other violent and anti-liberal tendencies.

And yet, in 1996, while a visiting professor at Harvard, Tamir authored an article defending female genital mutilation in the Arab world. In the Islamic world, girls are forced to undergo clitoridectomies to deprive them of sexual pleasure and so "preserve" their "modesty." Yet Tamir argued in her article, "Hands off Clitoridectomy," published in The Boston Review, it is wrong to oppose the practice because doing so requires a rejection of multiculturalism. As she put it, opponents of the barbaric practice, "intentionally widen the gap between our culture and those in which clitoridectomy is practiced, thus presenting those other cultures as incommensurable with ours. The effect of this distancing is to disconnect criticism of their practices from criticism of our own, and turn reflection on other cultures into yet another occasion for celebrating our special virtues."

Celebrating Western virtues is a no-no for Tamir, because doing so makes us likely to defend those values at the expense of her leftist appeasement agenda. If the West judges Arab societies that mutilate women and girls objectionable, it is likely to judge appeasing them as objectionable and so reject the political message of Tamir and her comrades. And so, as she sees it, it behooves "feminists" like her to defend clitoridectomies, which she did in that article.

As far as Tamir is concerned, cutting out a girl's genitalia is no different from pulling her teeth. As she put it, "Removing a tooth is also a painful procedure, often imposed on children, and if performed in non-hygienic conditions, it can produce permanent damage." Tamir then went on to say that criticizing female genital mutilation is itself an act of misogyny because by expressing concern for the practice, critics objectify women. They reduce them to mere sexual objects.

So for Tamir the feminist, rejecting the superiority of Western culture - which allows her to freely express her demented views, vote, run for office, own property and control the fate of her genitals - over Islamic culture - which allows her to do none of these things - is more important than defending women. Indeed, she is willing to empty the rhetoric of women's rights of all intrinsic meaning to advance the interests of her radical leftist ideological platform against its rightist rivals who trenchantly criticize the mutilation of women and girls.

AND, OF course, Tamir is not alone. In the US presidential race, American feminists have lost all credibility as champions of women's rights in their support for the often pornographic, openly misogynist and unabashedly chauvinist assaults against Governor Sarah Palin. Kim Gandy, the leader of the National Organization for Women, has argued that due to Palin's opposition to abortion, she is not a woman.

Ignoring her record of service and achievement in Alaskan politics, leftist commentators and politicians have attacked her clothes, her shoes, her hair, her glasses, her children, her figure. They have insinuated perverted sexual proclivities and they have accused her of everything from harlotry to illiteracy.

In an interview with Yediot Aharonot on Friday, the leftist American novelist Paul Auster said of Palin, "There is something erotic about Palin that attracts people to her. Someone said that she reminds him of a strict schoolmarm, who wears a stripper's costume under her modest clothing. I know this might sound funny, but I think that a lot of men are attracted to her and fantasize about being with her in bed. Particularly because she is conservative and far from all these erotic descriptions, the fantasy becomes even more powerful."

Auster then warned that if Palin is elected vice president, "a lot of good values will disappear from this country and we will become an evil, ugly country."

It apparently never occurred to him that his "funny" statements about Palin are the very epitome of ugliness and the absence of values like decency, tolerance and respect for women. And that's the thing of it.

THE ESSENCE of liberal democracy - the edifice on which liberalism and the democratic form of government were built - is reasoned discourse. Reasoned discourse can only take place when words like "values," "democracy," "law," "rights" and "equality" have intrinsic meanings that all members of society accept. When the Left empties these terms of their fundamental meaning and uses them only to enhance its political power at the expense of the Right, reasoned discourse is abandoned in favor of propaganda.

When equal rights are the exclusive privilege of leftist women rather than the natural right of all women, no woman can ever trust that her rights will be preserved. When the rhetoric of law is abused to advance the political power of the Left instead of defending the cause of blind justice, the rule of law is sacrificed in the name of leftist tyranny. When the cause of a nation is ignored in the interest of the fortunes of a faction, the fortunes of that faction will be advanced at the expense of the nation.

Auster told Yediot that the political discourse in the US has become so charged that dialogue is no longer possible between leftists and rightists. In his words, "We have reached a point where the two sides are no longer capable of speaking to one another, and I view this situation as a sort of civil war. There are no weapons or shooting. This is a civil war of ideas and separate ways of thinking, and often a war of ideas is the worst sort of war."

Auster's statement is true, and it applies to the entire Western world. But it is also true that one side bears the brunt of responsibility for the absence of discourse. The side that has destroyed the meaning of democracy, liberalism, feminism and racism to castigate and criminalize its political opponents is responsible for the absence of dialogue. And until the Left is compelled to acknowledge the intrinsic meaning of words rather than use vocabulary as a tool of political warfare, it is hard to see how this situation will improve.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.