In his first week and a half in office, US President Barack Obama has proven that he is a man of his word. For instance, he was not bluffing when he said during his campaign that he would make reconstituting America's relations with the Islamic world one of his first priorities in office.

Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader was to PLO chieftain Mahmoud Abbas last Wednesday morning. And this past Tuesday, Obama gave his first television interview as president to the Al-Arabiya pan-Arabic television network.

In that interview Obama explained the rationale of his approach to the Muslim world.

"We are looking at the region as a whole and communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world, that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest," the new president said.

Obama distanced his administration from its predecessor by asserting that rather than dictate how Muslims should behave, his administration plans "to listen, set aside some of the preconceptions that have existed and have built up over the last several years. And I think if we do that, then there's a possibility at least of achieving some breakthroughs."

In short, Obama argues that the root of the Islamic world's opposition to the US is its shattered confidence in America's intentions. By following a policy of contrition for Bush's "cowboy diplomacy," and acting with deference in its dealing with the Muslim world, in his view, a new era of US-Islamic relations will ensue.

Obama's honesty was a hot subject during the presidential campaign. Many analysts claimed that he was a closet moderate who only made far-left pronouncements about "spreading the wealth around," and about meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without preconditions," to mollify his far-left partisan base.

Others argued that Obama was a man of his word. From his voting records in the Illinois Senate and the US Senate, and in light of his long associations with domestic and foreign policy radicals, these commentators predicted that if elected, Obama's policies would be far to the left of center.

Judging by his actions since entering office last week, it appears that the latter group of analysts was correct. Obama is not a panderer.

Between his $819 billion economic "stimulus" package, which involves a massive intrusion by federal government on the free market; his decision to close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay; his dispatch of former senator George Mitchell to the Middle East to begin pushing for a Palestinian state two weeks before Israel's general elections; his announcement that he will begin withdrawing American forces from Iraq; his repeated signaling that the US will no longer treat the fight against Islamic terrorism as a war; and his attempts to engineer a diplomatic rapprochement with Iran, Obama has shown that his policy pronouncements on the campaign trail were serious. The policies he outlined are the policies with which he intends to govern.

ON A strategic level, the most significant campaign promise that Obama is wasting no time in keeping is his attempt to diplomatically engage with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Teheran is the central sponsor of the global jihad. Hizbullah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are all Iranian proxies. And, as is becoming increasingly undeniable, al-Qaida too enjoys a close relationship with the mullahs.

The 9/11 Commission's final report noted that several of the September 11 hijackers transited Iran en route to the US. And in recent weeks we learned that after spending the past six years in Iran, where he played a major role in directing the insurgency in Iraq, Osama bin Laden's eldest son Sa'ad has moved to Pakistan.

Beyond its sponsorship of terrorism, due to its nuclear weapons program Iran is the largest emerging threat to global security. Together with its genocidal rhetoric against Israel, its calls for the destruction of the US, and its incitement for the overthrow of the governments of Egypt and Jordan, among others, Iran is the single largest source of instability in the region. Moreover, as US Defense Secretary Robert Gates made clear in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Iran is working actively in South and Central America to destabilize the western hemisphere.

Obama caused an uproar when during a Democratic primary debate last spring he said that he would meet with Ahmadinejad without preconditions. In subsequent months, he sought to soften his declaration. It is now apparent that his statement was not a slip of the tongue. It was a pledge.

The Iranians, for their part, have reacted to the new president with a mixture of relief and contempt. On November 6, two days after the US election, Ahmadinejad sent a congratulatory letter to Obama. Ahmadinejad's letter was considered a triumph for Obama's conciliatory posture by the American and European media. But actually, it was no such thing. Ahmadinejad's letter was nothing more than a set of demands, much like those he had set out in a letter to then-president George W. Bush in 2006.

In his missive to Obama, Ahmadinejad laid out Iranian preconditions for a diplomatic engagement with America. Among other things, Ahmadinejad demanded that the US send all its military forces back to America. As he put it, the US should "keep its interventions within its own country's borders."

Ahmadinejad further hinted that the US should end its support for Israel and withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his words, "In the sensitive Middle East region... the expectation is that the unjust [US] actions of the past 60 years [since Israel was established] will give way to a policy encouraging the full rights of all nations, especially the oppressed nations of Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan."

The Western media made much of the fact that some conservative press organs in Iran condemned Ahmadinejad for sending the letter. They claimed that this meant that Ahmadinejad himself was tempering his animosity toward the US in the wake of Obama's election. But in fact, most of the conservative media in Iran viewed the letter as an attack on Obama, whom they attacked with racial slurs.

The Sobh-e Sadegh weekly, published by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote in an editorial on November 10 that negotiations with Obama would only be worthwhile if "coexistence with a nuclear Iran and acceptance of its regional role are part of the US negotiating position."

On November 11, the Borna News Agency, which is aligned with Ahmadinejad, called Obama "a house slave."

In general, Iran's government-controlled media outlets reported that Ahmadinejad's letter was an ultimatum and that if Obama did not submit to his demands, the US would be destroyed.

This week Ahmadinejad made Teheran's preconditions for negotiations even more explicit. In statements at a political rally on Tuesday, and in a television interview given by his adviser on Wednesday, Ahmadinejad said that Iran has two conditions for engaging Washington. First, the US must abandon its alliance with Israel. In his words, to have relations with Iran, the US must first "stop supporting the Zionists, outlaws and criminals."

The second condition was communicated Wednesday by Ahmadinejad's adviser Ali Akbar Javanfekr. Echoing Sobh-e Sadegh's editorial, Javanfekr said Iran refuses to stop its nuclear activities.

Notably, also on Wednesday, the US-based International Institute for Strategic Studies released a report concluding that Iran will have a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb in a matter of months.

To summarize, Iran's conditions for meeting with the Obama administration are that the US abandon Israel (which as Ahmadinejad reiterated at his annual Holocaust denial conference on Tuesday, must be annihilated), and that Obama take no action whatsoever against Iran's nuclear program.

FOR ITS part, the Obama administration is signaling that Iran's conditions haven't swayed it from its path toward a diplomatic engagement of the mullahs. In her first statement as US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice said Tuesday, "We look forward to engaging in vigorous diplomacy that includes direct diplomacy with Iran."

And in his Al-Arabiya interview, Obama implied that the US may be willing to overlook Teheran's support for terrorism when he referred to Iran's "past" support for terrorist organizations. Obama placed a past tense modifier on Iranian sponsorship of terrorism even through just last week a US Navy ship intercepted an Iranian vessel smuggling arms to Hamas in Gaza in the Red Sea. Due to an absence of political authorization to seize the Iranian ship, the US Navy was compelled to permit it to sail on to Syria.

The most sympathetic interpretation of Obama's desire to move ahead with diplomatic engagement in spite of the mullocracy's preconditions is that he has simply failed to countenance the significance of Iran's demands. This means that Obama remains convinced that the US is indeed to blame for the supposed crisis of confidence that the Islamic world suffers from in its dealings with America. By this reasoning, it is for the US, not for Teheran, to show its sincerity, because the US, rather than Teheran, is to blame for the dismal state of relations prevailing between the two countries.

If in fact Obama truly intends to move ahead with his plan to engage the mullahs, then he will effectively legitimize - if not adopt - Teheran's preconditions that the US end its alliance with Israel, which Iran seeks to destroy, and accept a nuclear-armed Iran. And under these circumstances, Israel's next government - which all opinion polls conclude will be led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu - will have to adopt certain policies.

First, in keeping with his campaign rhetoric, Netanyahu will have to make preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons his most urgent priority upon entering office.

And second, to withstand US pressure to allow the Obama administration time to develop its ties with Teheran, (time that Iran will use to build its first nuclear bomb), Netanyahu will need to form as large and wide a governing coalition as possible. All issues that divide the Israeli electorate between Right and Left must be temporarily set aside.

In the age of Honest Obama, Israel is alone in recognizing the necessity of preventing Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state. Consequently, Netanyahu's government will need to proceed with all deliberate speed to take whatever actions are necessary to prevent Israel's destruction.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

President Barack Obama must think very highly of the Fatah terror group. In his first foray into foreign affairs after being sworn into office last week, Obama telephoned Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah and pledged his support for Palestinian statehood.

Unfortunately for Obama, Fatah is not particularly interested in statehood. On Monday, Fatah representatives met Hamas representatives in Cairo for the first time in ten months. The aim of their discussions was to determine the modalities for the reestablishment of the Fatah-Hamas unity government in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. That government was established through Saudi mediation in March 2007 and lasted until Hamas ousted Fatah forces from Gaza in a bloody Iranian-sponsored coup in June 2007.

After the meeting ended, Fatah's representative Azzam al-Ahmad told reporters his group was very excited about the prospect of reuniting with their brothers in Hamas. He also said Hamas would not agree to a cease-fire with Israel until after it had reinstated its unity agreement with Fatah. Hamas’s representative for his part said his group demands that Fatah cut off all of its negotiations with Israel in exchange for reunification.

The Fatah-Hamas meeting marks yet another demonstration that the West’s perception of Fatah as a peace-seeking, national liberation movement is wrong. Fatah’s aims are not peaceful and statehood ranks below destroying Israel on its list of priorities. To understand why this is the case it is necessary to remember what Fatah’s brothers in Hamas are interested in achieving.

Hamas is openly devoted to Israel’s destruction. It willingly placed itself under Iranian control in 2005 because, like Iran, it is uninterested in the establishment of a Palestinian state that will either peacefully coexist with Israel or replace Israel. What Hamas seeks is Israel’s destruction and its replacement with a local caliphate that will eventually become part of the Islamic caliphate that will rule the world.

Given Hamas’s commitment to destroying Israel, it is obvious that Israel's only option is to work for Hamas’s destruction. And so it is clear that for Fatah, peace with Israel means war with Hamas and vice versa. When, on Monday, Fatah’s representative in Egypt reiterated the group's preference for peace with Hamas over peace with Israel, he demonstrated that as far as Fatah is concerned, statehood is not its main priority.

Beyond that, through its desire to cultivate close ties with Hamas, Fatah acknowledges it has no chance of ever supplanting Hamas as Palestinian society’s preferred leadership. During its 2007 coup, Hamas members massacred Fatah personnel all over Gaza and humiliated Fatah’s leadership. In the aftermath of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza this month, Hamas forces executed dozens of Fatah members, accusing them of collaborating with the IDF.

These violent assaults on Fatah personnel by Hamas evoked great anger and hostility toward Hamas in Fatah’s ranks. So Fatah’s embrace of Hamas today simply demonstrates its own weakness. In spite of the billions of dollars in aid that the U.S., Europe and Israel have showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the Palestinian people themselves remain devoted to Hamas.

The significance of Fatah's preference for Hamas over Israel seems to have made no impression on the Obama administration. Last Thursday Obama officially appointed former senator George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Upon announcing Mitchell’s appointment, Obama pledged, “It is the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

In plain English what Obama was saying was that Mitchell’s job boils down to exerting massive pressure on Israel to cede Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah. Together with Gaza under Hamas control, these territories are supposed to make up the Palestinian state. We know this is the new administration’s intention because this is Mitchell’s oft-stated intention.

Since his appointment to the same job by former president Clinton in the final months of his presidency -- just as Fatah was launching its terror war against Israel together with Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- Mitchell has maintained the view that the main obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not Palestinian terror or Palestinian dedication to Israel's destruction. Rather, as far as Mitchell is concerned, the root of the conflict is Israel’s unwillingness to return to the 1949 armistice lines.

Mitchell was set to arrive in Israel earlier this week for his first “fact-finding mission” as presidential envoy. The timing of his mission - two weeks shy of the Knesset elections - raised a number of eyebrows in Israel. Consistent polling data show that Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, is set to win the February 10 elections. Like the right-wing parties that will form the basis of its governing coalition, Likud opposes an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and does not share the Obama administration’s faith in Fatah as a legitimate partner for peace.

Many in Israel are concerned that Mitchell’s pre-election visit is a bid by the Obama administration to influence the outcome of the Israeli elections by strengthening Kadima, Labor and the other leftist parties against Likud. These concerns are reinforced by repeated private statements from senior members of Obama’s foreign policy team indicating that they view the Israeli Right under Netanyahu as a great threat to their plans to force Israel to withdraw to the 1949 lines.

Both Kadima and Labor have embraced Obama’s clear ideological hostility toward Likud as an electoral asset. Since Obama took office, this hostility has become the major theme of both parties’ campaigns. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak as well as their party surrogates have repeatedly warned voters that if Netanyahu forms a coalition government he will ruin Israel’s relations with the U.S.

These statements by Kadima and Labor make clear just how difficult the next four years of the Obama administration will be for Israel. If the Left wins the elections, then Israel, submitting to U.S. pressure, is likely to expel up to a half-million Israelis from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, hand the land over to Fatah, which in turn will hand the land over to Hamas, which in turn will hand it over to Iran.

In the aftermath of such action, Israel will find itself surrounded on all sides by Iranian surrogates and lacking the means to defend itself. No doubt the Obama administration will have little interest in coming to Israel’s aid, since by that point Israel will have little residual strategic value to the U.S.

If the Right wins the elections, Israel faces four years of unpleasant relations with the Obama administration that will place an enormous strain both on Israel-U.S. relations, and on the nerves of Israeli citizens. The leftist opposition will be certain to tell the public that the Netanyahu government is to blame for the trans-Atlantic tensions with Washington. These tensions are liable to boil over into open confrontations on issues such as Iran’s nuclear program and U.S. military sales to Israel.

On the other hand, if Israel is able to muddle through the Obama years without surrendering land to Fatah-Hamas-Iran, unpleasant relations with Washington will have been a small price to pay. For with Fatah’s renewed attempt to reunite with Hamas, it is clear that any future “peace” with the group will lead only to future wars, instability and weakness that Israel can ill afford.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Last week, the IDF issued an unprecedented directive. All Israeli media outlets must obscure the faces of soldiers and commanders who fought in Operation Cast Lead. Henceforth, the identities of all IDF soldiers and officers who participated in the operation against the Hamas terror regime in Gaza are classified information.

The IDF acted as it did in an effort to protect Israeli soldiers and officers from possible prosecutions for alleged war crimes in Europe. The army's chief concern is England. In England, private citizens are allowed to file complaints against foreigners whom they claim committed war crimes. Based on these complaints, British courts can issue arrest warrants against such foreigners if they are found on British territory and force them to stand trial. Over the past few years, a number of active duty and retired IDF senior officers were forced to cancel visits to Britain after such complaints were filed against them in sympathetic local courts.

Following the IDF's move, on Sunday the government announced that Israel will provide legal assistance to any IDF veteran prosecuted abroad for actions he performed during his service in Gaza. The legal assistance will include representation, investigation of the allegations made against veterans, attempts to have the charges against them dismissed and defense at trials.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who brought the decision before the full cabinet, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and their colleagues all asserted that by committing the state to defending its warriors, they were fulfilling their sacred duty to protect Israel's protectors.

Unfortunately, both the cabinet decision itself and our leaders' statements missed the point.

LAST WEDNESDAY, an appellate court in Amsterdam ruled that the Dutch lawmaker and leader of the anti-jihadist Dutch Freedom Party Geert Wilders must stand trial for the alleged "crime" of inciting hatred against Muslims with his short film "Fitna," released last year.

In "Fitna," Wilders juxtaposes verses from the Koran with Islamic terror attacks, mosque sermons inciting believers to murder non-Muslims, and proclamations by Islamic clerics that Muslims must kill all the Jews, conquer the world and subjugate non-believers.

The second half of the 15-minute film is devoted to Holland. It highlights the massive immigration of Muslims to the country over the past 15 years, and calls by Islamic leaders in Holland to kill homosexuals, subjugate women, stone adulteresses, and take over the country. "Fitna" ends with a call for Muslims to expunge Koranic verses commanding them to conduct jihad from their belief system, and with a call for Dutchmen to defend their country, their culture and their civilization from the rising current of Islam in Europe.

All the material presented in "Fitna" is accurate. And it is also explosive. But it is hard to see how it could be illegal. By presenting the material in the way that he does, Wilders is not demonizing Muslims, he is challenging - indeed he is practically begging - his countrymen to engage in a debate about whether or not his dim assessment of Islam is correct.

Wilders has been living under 24-hour police protection since a Dutch jihadist murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh in 2004. Van Gogh was murdered after he released his short film "Submission," which described the misogyny of the Islamic world and the systematic terrorization of women in Islamic societies. Since then numerous Muslim clerics have issued religious judgments, or fatwas, calling for Wilders to be murdered.

Last month Wilders visited Israel and was the keynote speaker at a counter-jihad conference at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem sponsored by MK Dr. Aryeh Eldad. Speaking to a standing-room only crowd, and under heavy guard, Wilders argued that Israel is a frontline state in the global jihad. The war against Israel, he claimed has nothing to do with territory, and everything to do with ideology. Israel, as the forward outpost of Western civilization in the Islamic world, stands in the way of Islamic expansion. Consequently, he claimed, when Israel defends itself by fighting its enemies, it is also protecting Europe and the rest of the free world.

As he put it, "Thanks to Israeli parents who see their children go off to join the army and lie awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and have pleasant dreams, unaware of the dangers looming."

Unfortunately, the Dutch court's decision to prosecute Wilders for calling attention to the threat of jihad in Europe demonstrates that the Europeans aren't particularly grateful to their defenders. Indeed, they despise them. Films like "Fitna," and Israel's use of its military to defend its citizens from Islamic supremacists, serve to remind them of the growing threat they desperately seek to ignore. Consequently, Europeans embrace every opportunity to blame any messenger.

THE RIPPLE effects of Wilders' indictment were immediately evident. In England, the British Muslim community mobilized to prevent his film from being screened in public. "Fitna" was scheduled to be shown at the House of Lords on January 29. But last Friday, with the threat of mass Muslim riots hanging thickly in the air, the House of Lords announced that it was cancelling the event.

British Lord Nazir Ahmed called the decision to prevent the thought-provoking, factually accurate film from being shown, "a victory for the Muslim community."

WILDERS' INDICTMENT is a textbook example of blaming the victim. Wilders has been forced to live a miserable life for the past four years. He has no home. Security forces move him from place to place every single day. Since Van Gogh's murder, Wilders' entire life has become one long attempt to dodge the bullet permanently pointed at his head by radicalized Muslims in Holland and throughout the world. These would-be killers wish to see him dead not to avenge any violence Wilders committed, but rather, they believe he must die for doing nothing more than talking about Islam and how he interprets its message and meaning.

Needless to say, the Dutch Muslims Wilders caught on tape in Fitna calling for an overthrow of the Dutch constitutional order and threatening homosexuals have not been arrested for inciting hatred. Likewise, Lord Ahmed, who blocked "Fitna's" screening in the British Parliament was made a British peer after supporting the late Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 death sentence against British novelist Salman Rushdie.

AND THAT'S the thing of it. Increasingly, throughout Europe, those who point out the dangers of radical Islam are hounded - first by Muslims - and then by legal authorities. In contrast, those who seek to intimidate and physically silence them are embraced by the states of Europe as legitimate leaders of their Muslim communities.

This dismal state of affairs, where jihadists are supported and their victims are oppressed, is true not only of people like Wilders who actively fight radical Islam's encroachment on European freedom. It is also the case for people who are victimized solely on the basis of their ethnic identity.

At the same time Wilders and people like him are forced into hiding, Jews throughout Europe find themselves assaulted and under siege not because of anything they have done, but because they are Jews.

Incidents of anti-Semitic violence in Europe reached post-Holocaust record highs over the past month. Jewish children have been violently attacked in France, barred from schools in Denmark, and harassed in England, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Germany just for being Jews.

In Britain, Muslims have now taken to entering into Jewish-owned businesses and kosher restaurants to threaten the owners and patrons - just because they are Jewish. Synagogues have been firebombed and defaced. Calls have been issued in the US Muslim community on the Internet for Muslims in America to similarly intimidate Jews by entering into synagogues during prayer services and condemn worshippers for supporting Israel.

Jewish men have been brutalized by Muslim gangs in Britain and viciously stabbed in France, just because they are Jewish. In Sweden, pro-Israel demonstrators were attacked with stones by Muslims this week. Even in the US, anti-Semitic violence and intimidation has reached levels never seen before. And in almost all cases of anti-Semitic violence throughout what is commonly referred to as the free world, the perpetrators of the violence and intimidation are Muslims. They attack with the full backing of non-Muslim multiculturalists as well as neo-Nazis. The two groups, which are usually assumed to be at loggerheads, apparently have no problem converging on the issue of hating Jews.

And in almost all cases of anti-Semitic violence, the Islamic identity of the attackers has been de-emphasized or obscured by the media and by politicians, or used as justification for their crimes. In France, for instance, from the way government officials talk it, would be reasonable to assume that a dozen Muslim teenagers were provoked to viciously beat a ten-year-old Jewish girl by the IDF's operation against Hamas in Gaza.

HERE THEN, we arrive at the point that the cabinet missed on Sunday when it passed its decision to commit the government to providing legal assistance to any IDF veteran who runs afoul of European legal authorities during vacations in London and Brussels and Oslo and Stockholm. The point that was missed is that in the event that IDF veterans are charged with war crimes, even the best attorneys will be of little use. These veterans will not be defendants at legitimate trials. They will be the victims of politically motivated show-trials.

In an interview with Ha'aretz on Friday, Wilders claimed rightly that the Dutch court's decision to prosecute him was not a legal decision but a political one. And if he is convicted, his conviction won't be based on evidence. It will be based on the desire of the Dutch multiculturalists to make an example of him to appease the radical Muslims who seek his death, and intimidate any would-be disciples into keeping their mouths shut.

So too, if IDF veterans are indicted for war crimes, they won't be prosecuted based on facts. They will be persecuted to advance the prosecutors' and judges' goal of appeasing their homegrown radical Muslims who seek the destruction of Israel and who violently attack anyone perceived as supporting Israel.

Given this bleak reality, the steps that Israel must take to defend its citizens are not legal but diplomatic. Israel should announce travel advisories against all states that enable the conduct of show trials against its citizens. And it should threaten to cut off diplomatic ties with any country that seeks to persecute Israeli soldiers. Only by recognizing and pointing out what is really going on will Israel have any chance of protecting those who defend our freedom from Europeans who have decided to surrender to Islamic intimidation rather than protect their own liberty.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

It is a fundamental truth that while history always repeats itself, it almost never repeats itself precisely. There is always a measure of newness to events that allows otherwise intelligent people to repeat the mistakes of their forebears without looking completely ridiculous.

Given this, it is hard to believe that with the advent of the Obama administration, we are seeing history repeat itself with nearly unheard of exactness. US President Barack Obama's appointment of former Sen. George Mitchell as his envoy for the so-called Palestinian-Israeli "peace process" will provide us with a spectacle of an unvarnished repeat of history.

In December 2000, outgoing president Bill Clinton appointed Mitchell to advise him on how to reignite the "peace process" after the Palestinians rejected statehood and launched their terror war against Israel in September 2000. Mitchell presented his findings to Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, in April 2001.

Mitchell asserted that Israel and the Palestinians were equally to blame for the Palestinian terror war against Israelis. He recommended that Israel end all Jewish construction outside the 1949 armistice lines, and stop fighting Palestinian terrorists.

As for the Palestinians, Mitchell said they had to make a "100 percent effort" to prevent the terror that they themselves were carrying out. This basic demand was nothing new. It formed the basis of the Clinton administration's nod-nod-wink-wink treatment of Palestinian terrorism since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994.

By insisting that the PLO make a "100 percent effort," to quell the terror it was enabling, the Clinton administration gave the Palestinians built-in immunity from responsibility. Every time that his terrorists struck, Yasser Arafat claimed that their attacks had nothing to do with him. He was making a "100 percent effort" to stop the attacks, after all.

After getting Arafat off the hook, the Clinton administration proceeded to blame Israel. If Israel had just given up more land, or forced Jews from their homes, or given the PLO more money, Arafat could have saved the lives of his victims.

Mitchell's plan, although supported by then-secretary of state Colin Powell, was never adopted by Bush because at the time, terrorists were massacring Israelis every day. It would have been politically unwise for Bush to accept a plan that asserted moral equivalence between Israel and the PLO when rescue workers were scraping the body parts of Israeli children off the walls of bombed out pizzerias and bar mitzva parties.

But while his eponymous plan was rejected, its substance, which was based on the Clinton Plan, formed the basis of the Tenet Plan, the road map plan and the Annapolis Plan. And now, Mitchell is about to return to Israel, at the start of yet another presidential administration to offer us his plan again.

MITCHELL, OF COURSE, is not the only one repeating the past. His boss, Barack Obama, is about to repeat the failures his immediate predecessors. Like Clinton and Bush, Obama is making the establishment of a Palestinian state the centerpiece of his foreign policy agenda.

Obama made this clear his first hour on the job. On Wednesday at 8 a.m., Obama made his first phone call to a foreign leader. He called PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. During their conversation, Obama pledged his commitment to Palestinian statehood.

Fatah wasted no time responding to Obama's extraordinary gesture. On Wednesday afternoon Abbas convened the PLO's Executive Committee in Ramallah and the body announced that future negotiations with Israel will have to be based on new preconditions. As far as the PLO is concerned, with Obama firmly in its corner, it can force Israel to its knees.

And so, the PLO is now uninterested in the agreements it reached with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. For Israel to enjoy the privilege of negotiating with the PLO, it must first announce its willingness to expel all the 500,000 or so Israeli Jews who live in Judea, Samaria and the neighborhoods in east, south and north Jerusalem built since 1967, as well as in the Old City, and then hand the areas over, lock, stock and barrel, to the PLO.

This new PLO "plan" itself is nothing new. It is simply a restatement of the Arab "peace plan," which is just a renamed Saudi "peace plan," which was just a renamed Tom Friedman column in The New York Times. And the Friedman plan is one that no Israeli leader in his right mind can accept. So by making this their precondition for negotiations, the PLO is doing what it did in 2000. It is rejecting statehood in favor of continued war with Israel.

What is most remarkable about the new administration's embrace of its predecessors' failed policy is how uncontroversial this policy is in Washington. It is hard to come up with another example of a policy that has failed so often and so violently that has enjoyed the support of both American political parties. Indeed, it is hard to think of a successful policy that ever enjoyed such broad support.

Apparently, no one in positions of power in Washington has stopped to consider why it is that in spite of the fervent backing of presidents Clinton and Bush, there is still no Palestinian state.

SINCE ISRAEL recognized the PLO as the "sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" in 1993, the US and Israel have based their plans for peace on their assumption that the PLO is interested in making peace. And they have based their plans for making peace by establishing a Palestinian state on the assumption that the Palestinians are interested in statehood. Yet over the past 15 years it has become abundantly clear that neither of these assumptions is correct.

In spite of massive political, economic and military support by the US, Israel and Europe, the PLO has never made any significant moves to foster peaceful relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Not only did the PLO-led PA spend the six years between 1994 and 2000, in which it was supposedly making peace with Israel, indoctrinating Palestinian society to hate Jews and seek their destruction through jihadist-inspired terrorism. It also cultivated close relations with Iran and other rogue regimes and terror groups.

Many are quick to claim that these misbehaviors were simply a consequence of Arafat's personal radicalism. Under Abbas, it is argued, the PLO is much more moderate. But this assertion strains credulity. As The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh reported on Monday, Fatah forces today boast that their terror cells in Gaza took active part in Hamas's missile offensive against Israel. Fatah's Aksa Martyrs terror cells claim that during Operation Cast Lead, its terrorists shot 137 rockets and mortar shells at Israel.

Abbas's supporters in the US and Israel claim that these Fatah members acted as they did because they are living under Hamas rule. They would be far more moderate if they were under Fatah rule. But this, too, doesn't ring true.

From 2000 through June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah forces from Gaza, most of the weapons smuggling operations in Gaza were carried out by Fatah. Then, too, most of the rockets and mortar shells fired at Israel were fired by Fatah forces. Likewise, most of the suicide bombers deployed from Judea and Samaria were members of Fatah.

The likes of Madeleine Albright, Powell and Condoleezza Rice claimed that Fatah's collusion with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its leading role in terror was a consequence of insufficient Israeli support for Arafat and later for Abbas. If Israel had kicked out the Jews of Gaza earlier, or if it had removed its roadblocks and expelled Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria, or if had prevented all Jewish construction beyond the 1949 armistice lines, then Arafat and later Abbas would have been more popular and able to rein in their own terror forces. (Incidentally, those same forces receive their salaries from the PA, which is funded by the US and Israel.)

THE PROBLEM with this line of thinking is that it ignores two essential facts. First, since 2000 Israel has curtailed Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. Second, Israel kicked every last Jew out of Gaza and handed the ruins of their villages and farms over to Fatah in September 2005.

It is worth noting that the conditions under which the PA received Gaza in 2005 were far better than the conditions under which Israel gained its sovereignty in 1948. The Palestinians were showered with billions of dollars in international aid. No one wanted to do anything but help them make a go of it.

In 1948-49, Israel had to secure its sovereignty by fending off five invading armies while under an international arms embargo. It then had to absorb a million refugees from Arab countries and Holocaust survivors from Europe, with no financial assistance from anyone other than US Jews. Israel developed into an open democracy. Gaza became one of the largest terror bases in the world.

Four months after Israel handed over Gaza - and northern Samaria - the Palestinians turned their backs on statehood altogether when they elected Hamas - an explicitly anti-nationalist, pan-Islamic movement that rejects Palestinians statehood - to lead them.

Hamas's electoral victory, its subsequent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza and its recent war with Israel tells us another fundamental truth about the sources of the repeated failure of the US's bid for Palestinian statehood. Quite simply, there is no real Palestinian constituency for it.

Even if we were to ignore all of the PLO's involvement in terrorism and assume like Obama, Bush and Clinton that the PLO is willing to live at peace with Israel in exchange for Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, what Hamas's control of Gaza and its popularity throughout the Palestinian areas show is that there is no reason to expect that the PLO will remain in control of territory that Israel transfers to its control. So if Israel were to abide by the PLO's latest demand and accept the Friedman/Saudi/Arab/PLO "peace plan," there is no reason to believe that a Jew-free Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem wouldn't then be taken over by Hamas.

Given that there is no chance that Israeli territorial giveaways will lead to a peaceful Palestinian state, the question arises, is there any way to compel American politicians to give up their fantasies of fancy signing ceremonies in the White House Rose Garden that far from bringing peace, engender radicalism, instability and death?

As far as Mitchell is concerned the answer is no. In an address at Tel Aviv University last month, Mitchell said that the US and Israel must cling to the delusion that Palestinian statehood will bring about a new utopia, "for the alternative is unacceptable and should be unthinkable."

So much for "change" in US foreign policy.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

On Sunday, Israelis were witness to a cavalcade of European leaders marching to Jerusalem to have their pictures taken with outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi came to Jerusalem from Sharm e-Sheikh, where they had their pictures taken with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. In both cities, they expressed their support for Israel's decision to stop fighting the Iranian-armed, financed and trained Hamas terror regime in Gaza.

Olmert greeted the Europeans leaders as great friends of Israel and claimed that their presence demonstrated that Israel's operation against Hamas enjoyed massive international support. Unfortunately, Olmert's statements were wrong on both counts. The leaders who came to Jerusalem are not friends of Israel and their presence in our capital did not demonstrate that Operation Cast Lead enjoyed international backing.

While sufficing with paying the most minimal lip service to Israel's inherent right to defend itself, the leaders who came to Jerusalem have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel's actual efforts to defend its citizens from Hamas aggression. None have publicly recognized that Israel has a duty to its citizens to defeat Hamas. To the contrary, all have claimed that there "is no military solution" to Israel's military conflict with Hamas.

And while these leaders have repeated vacuous bromides about the "tragedy of both sides," their voters have been much less circumspect in telling the Jews what think of us. Over the past three weeks, all of their countries, and indeed, all the countries in Western Europe have hosted large-scale, violent, anti-Semitic demonstrations and riots. And rather than condemn the anti-Jewish violence and incitement at these events, the Europeans leaders who came to Jerusalem have either sought to appease the anti-Semites or ignore them.

German authorities for instance permitted Hamas supporters to wave Hamas flags at their hateful "peace demonstrations" while barring Israel supporters from holding Israeli flags or even displaying them in their windows.

In France, Sarkozy has equated his victimized Jewish community with the French Muslims who have been attacking them by claiming that his government "will not tolerate international tensions mutating into intercommunity violence."

Given their refusal to support Israel in its fight against Hamas and their publics' growing hatred of Israel and the Jews, what made these Europeans leaders come to Jerusalem? As Gordon Brown and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner made clear in their remarks in Jerusalem, they came here to advance a hostile agenda. They want Israel to acquiesce to Hamas's demand to open its borders with Gaza and to support the opening of Egypt's border crossing with Gaza. They also intend to start giving Hamas hundreds of millions of dollars in "humanitarian aid" to rebuild Gaza.

If Europe gets its way, any gains that Israel made in Operation Cast Lead will quickly be erased. So the question then arises, why did Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak agree to have them come to Jerusalem?

The short answer to this question is that Olmert, Livni and Barak view the European leaders as stage props. As they explained repeatedly since the outset of Operation Cast Lead, Israel's leaders sought to end the campaign with a "picture of victory." A group photo with Olmert, Sarkozy, Brown, Merkel, Zapatero and Berlusconi was the picture that they felt they needed. The fact that the picture came with demands that Israel cannot agree to without squandering its hard-earned gains in Gaza, is beside the point.

WHICH BRINGS us to the main point. What the parade of hostile foreigners in Jerusalem demonstrated clearly is that while the campaign in Gaza was touted by our leaders as a way to "change the security reality in the South," for our leaders, its most important goal was to change the electoral reality ahead of the February 10 general elections. Indeed, for them, the operation would have more appropriately been named "Operation Cast Ballots."

Olmert, Livni and Barak claimed that by signing a memorandum of understanding with outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and due to Egyptian good will, Israel succeeded in building an international framework to prevent Hamas from rearming. But the MOU sets out no mechanism whatsoever for interdicting weapons shipments to Gaza on the high seas. And Egypt for its part has refused to agree to take any concerted action to prevent the weapons shipments from docking in its ports and transiting its territory en route to Gaza.

The other operational goal that Livni, Olmert and Barak set for the campaign was to restore Israel's deterrence and so convince Hamas to stop firing its missiles on southern Israel. But, as Hamas's continued firing of missiles at southern Israel after Olmert declared the cease-fire on Saturday night showed, Israel failed to deter Hamas.

But while they failed to accomplish either of Operation Cast Lead's operational goals, they did accomplish - at least for now - their main strategic goal. They succeeded in not losing.

By waging Operation Cast Lead, Olmert, Livni and Barak hoped to turn the absence of military defeat into the building blocks of political triumph. The operation was supposed to secure their political futures in three ways. First, it was supposed to change the subject of the electoral campaign.

As Olmert looks ahead to retirement, and as Livni and Barak vie with Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu to replace him, all three politicians wanted the elections to be about something other than their failures to defeat Hizbullah, their failure to defend the South from Hamas's growing arsenal, and their failure to contend with Iran's nuclear weapons program. This goal was accomplished by Operation Cast Lead.

Their second goal - and perhaps Olmert's primary objective - was to erase the public's memory of Israel's strategic failure in the Second Lebanon War. This goal was partially achieved. The IDF performed with greater competence in Gaza than in Lebanon. And Israel achieved its aim of not being defeated in Gaza. As a result, the nation feels much more confident about the IDF's ability to defend the country.

THE MAIN difference between how Operation Cast Lead has ended and how the Second Lebanon War ended has little to do with how the IDF performed. The most important difference is Israel has not agreed to have an international force stationed in Gaza as it accepted (and in Livni's case, championed) the deployment of UNIFIL forced in South Lebanon. Since Hizbullah has used UNIFIL as a screen behind which it has rearmed and reasserted its military control over South Lebanon, the absence of such a force in Gaza is a net gain for Israel.

But again, if Israel permits Europe and the UN to flood Gaza with aid money - which will all go directly to Hamas - it will be enabling a new mechanism to be formed that will shield Hamas from the IDF and enable it to rebuild its arsenals and strengthen its control over Gaza.

This prospect is made all the more dangerous by the fact that Israel ended the campaign without taking control over the Gaza-Egypt border. By leaving the border zone under Hamas control, Israel left the path clear for Iran to resupply Hizbullah's armed forces with missiles and rockets. As Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin explained on Sunday, under the present circumstances, Hamas can be expected to rebuild its arsenals in as little as three months.

THE THIRD political aim that Olmert, Livni and Barak sought to achieve in waging Operation Cast Lead was to convince the Israeli public that their worldview is correct. That worldview asserts that the world is divided between the extremist Islamic fundamentalists and the moderates. They claim that the latter group includes Arab dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and democracies like Turkey, the EU, and Israel. The Kadima-Labor worldview also asserts that by surrendering territory to the Arabs, Israel will receive international legitimacy for any acts of self-defense it is forced to take in the event it is attacked from the territories it vacated.

Although the local media, with their sycophantic celebration of Mubarak and support for Israeli withdrawals have supported this view, it is far from clear that the public has been convinced of its wisdom. Between Turkey's open support for Hamas and vilification of Israel, Egypt's abject refusal to take any concrete action to end weapons smuggling to Gaza, and Fatah's fecklessness and hostility, Israelis have been given ample proof this month that the moderate camp is a fiction.

Moreover, the massive anti-Semitic riots in Europe and the US, and last week's anti-Israeli UN Security Council Resolution 1860 which the US refused to veto have made quite clear that Israel's withdrawals have brought it no sympathy whatsoever from the "moderate" camp.

Just as the goal of not losing did not bring Israel victory over Hamas, so too, Livni, Olmert and Barak's bid to use the operation to increase their political cache does not seem to have succeeded. Opinion polls taken in the aftermath of Olmert's announcement of the cease-fire on Saturday night showed that Likud has maintained, and even expanded, its lead against Kadima and Labor.

IN SPITE of its obvious limitations, Israelis can be pleased with the results of Operation Cast Lead on two counts. Although Hamas was not defeated, remains in full control of Gaza and has the ability to rebuild its forces, it was harmed. The IDF's operation did knock out its central installations, reduce its capacity to fight and killed some of its key leaders.

The second reason that Israelis can be pleased with the outcome is that it could have been much worse. The fact of the matter is that Operation Cast Lead was the most successful operation that Kadima and Labor are capable of leading.

With their capitulationist world view, they cannot bring Israel victory over our enemies. The most they can deliver is an absence of defeat. And so long as Israel doesn't allow Europe and the UN to begin transferring hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas, we will remain undefeated by Hamas.

Looking ahead to the challenges Israel's next government will face, Operation Cast Lead gave Israel between three to six months of security in the south before Hamas will be able to renew its missile offensive. It is during that time that the next government will need to contend with Israel's two greatest challenges - preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, and preventing the new Obama administration from undermining Israel's strategic position by selling out Israel's security to buy "pictures of victory" of its own with Iran and Syria.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's diplomatic spat with outgoing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been a bonanza for strategic minded gossips. Olmert says that Rice was "embarrassed" because she planned to vote in favor of UN Security Council Resolution 1860, which calls for an immediate cease-fire between IDF forces and Hamas terrorists. But, Olmert brags, he wrecked her plan by getting outgoing President George W. Bush to force her to abstain.

As far as the commentators are concerned, Olmert's puerile attack on the American secretary of state in the midst of a war shows that the he is still the same prideful, vain, motor-mouth that Israelis have come to know and despise over the past several years. Then, too, by responding with borderline hysteria to Olmert's statement, Rice has demonstrated, once again, that she remains a thin-skinned whiner.

These insights make for piquant news analyses. But they miss the most important truths that the Olmert-Rice slap-down brought to the surface. Their fight tells us two crucial things. First, it tells us that when President-elect Barack Obama enters office next week, Israel's relations with the US will be at a low point.

The US's abstention from the vote on Resolution 1860 is a stunning statement of hostility toward Israel. As former UN Ambassador Dore Gold wrote in The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Resolution 1860 is drafted in a manner that presumes moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Both Israel and Hamas - an illegal terrorist organization - must stop fighting, it says. The resolution also draws a false moral equivalence between Hamas's illegal rocket campaign against Israeli civilians and Israel's assertion of its right to close its borders to enemy traffic.

While Olmert presents the US's abstention in the vote as a major diplomatic victory for Israel, in truth it is a stunning defeat. The US was a cosponsor of Resolution 1860, along with Britain. The fact that the US sponsored such an anti-Israel resolution in the first place is a major rebuke of Israel. And the fact that Washington then allowed the deeply adversarial and dangerous resolution to pass only compounds the failure.

The second aspect of the US abstention on Resolution 1860 that is deeply disturbing is the fact that Israel's leaders say they were taken completely by surprise by the move. On a simplistic level, the fact that apparently until the last moment, Israeli officials were certain that the US was planning to veto the resolution or, at a minimum force a significant delay in voting on the measure, bespeaks a remarkable incompetence on the part of Israel's UN mission and in particular, it bespeaks a personal incompetence on the part of Ambassador Gabriela Shalev.

What were Israel's representatives at the UN doing in the days preceding the vote? Whom were they talking to? What messages were they communicating to their UN colleagues and back home that the government could have been blindsided by the US action?

And while this fiasco provides just cause for recalling Shalev to Israel, the buck on this one cannot stop with her.

Shalev is not a professional diplomat. She had no notable experience in international affairs or public diplomacy to speak of before Livni - who insisted that she would only appoint a woman to the post - sent her to Turtle Bay. Shalev receives her guidance on how to deal with the US from Livni. And throughout her tenure as foreign minister, Livni, together with Olmert has insisted that Israel's relations with the US have never been better.

But this has been anything but the case. On the issues of the most urgent importance to Israel, the US has repeatedly, and with an ever growing degree of contempt and hostility, adopted positions diametrically opposed to Israel's interests.

FOR INSTANCE, this week The New York Times reminded us that the US has refused to sell Israel refueling planes and bunker-buster bombs necessary to attack Iran's nuclear sites. The US has also consistently refused Israeli requests to overfly Iraqi airspace. The Times story reports that the administration answered Israeli requests to this effect with a hearty, "Hell no!"

And it isn't just that the Bush administration has in recent years preferred to indulge the Iraqi leadership's kneejerk anti-Semitism over supporting Israel's need to preempt threats of national annihilation. The Bush administration has also belittled those threats and so allowed them to grow. Rice pushed the US on the road toward accepting Iran as a nuclear power when she opted to join the EU-3 in their feckless negotiations with the mullahs in May 2007. Her decision was followed by the deeply mendacious US National Intelligence Estimate released in November 2007, which claimed wrongly that Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The US's coddling of Iran at Israel's expense has also included its preference for the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese government and military over Israel's national security. In the 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel, the US forbade Israel from attacking Lebanese government targets, and so left Israel with few good options for fighting Hizbullah to victory. The reason the US acted in this manner is because Rice wished to prolong the fiction that the pro-Western March 14 movement was in charge of the Lebanese government when, in fact, it was subservient to Hizbullah.

When Israel became bogged down, the US forced Jerusalem to accept a cease-fire that left Hizbullah in charge of southern Lebanon and allowed it to rebuild its arsenals and present its campaign against the Jews as a strategic victory for the forces of jihad. After Hizbullah staged a putsch against the pro-Western forces in the Lebanese government last May, rather than acknowledge that Hizbullah is now in full control over the government and the military, the US has showered Lebanon with money and guns.

As for the Palestinians, over the past three years, the US has been expansive, indeed obsessive in its support for Fatah - and through it for Hamas - at Israel's expense. Rather than recognize that the Palestinian voters' decision to elect Hamas to lead them in January 2006 constituted a rejection of the notion of a two-state solution on the part of Palestinian society, the Bush administration judged the move as an act of civil disobedience reminiscent, in Rice's view, of the US civil rights movement.

Far from cutting the Palestinians off, the US massively increased its assistance to the Palestinian Authority. For the first time US taxpayers began financing the PA's budget and so, indirectly paying the salaries of both Fatah and Hamas terrorists. Moreover, the US began a massive effort to train Fatah commandos in Jordan. With Fatah terrorists in Gaza shooting missiles at Israel alongside their Hamas terror buddies today, it is unclear what good can come of these US-trained Palestinian special forces.

IN THE face of all of this clear US hostility toward Israel, marked as well by the continued criminal prosecution of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, and former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin for their "crime" of discussing their concern about Iran's nuclear weapons program, Israel has played the role of Chicken Little.

Israel has offered no significant protest against the US's moves. It has treated Rice and her colleagues at the CIA as friends and trusted allies. And Livni and Olmert have repeatedly boasted that Israel's relations with the US have never been better, when in fact they have arguably never been worse.

It is because of the government's refusal to contend with difficult truths that Israel was caught by surprise at the Security Council last week. And due to the government's refusal to acknowledge the true state of Israel's relations with Washington, the government has given little consideration to either how to improve them, or to how to work around Washington's hostility.

This situation is liable to only get worse next week with the inauguration of President-elect Obama. Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton pledged in her Senate confirmation hearings that the new administration will immediately seek to engage Iran diplomatically. She also stated that the US intends to actively pursue better relations with Iran's Arab satellite-state, Syria. Moreover, she pledged that the Obama administration will make an immediate push to establish a Palestinian state.

Clinton's testimony makes clear that Obama's major initiatives will all involve forcing Israel to pay a price. According to a source in close contact with Obama's transition team, the first price that Israel will be pressured to pay will be the Golan Heights.

Obama has pledged that soon after taking office he will make a major speech in an Islamic capital to strengthen US ties to the Muslim world. And the source asserts that Obama intends to make that speech in Damascus. Moreover, he intends to pressure Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria as "payback" for any Syrian indication that it will weaken its ties to Iran.

While Israel must treat the US with diplomatic deference, it must also base its policies toward the US on how the US is actually treating Israel and not on fictions. There is no doubt that Israel would have handled the cease-fire diplomacy at the UN and elsewhere differently if its leaders were willing to notice that official Washington views Israel's defense of its citizens and Hamas's assaults on Israel's citizens as morally indistinguishable actions. Certainly, Israel wouldn't have been taken by surprise by America's decision to allow Resolution 1860 to pass.

THROUGHOUT HIS tenure in office, Bush has been outspoken in his warm statements about Israel. Both his advisers and the many people who have come to know him over the past eight years are unanimous in their belief that Bush truly cares about Israel and views Israel as an important US ally. He recognizes that Israel and the US share the same enemies and that our enemies seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom.

But as many of his friends and advisors have ruefully noted over the years, Bush never learned how to translate his personal views into policy. As former Pentagon official Richard Perle wrote in an article this week in The National Interest, Bush was undercut on the most crucial foreign policy issues he faced by the State Department and the CIA, which either ignored his policies or openly sought to discredit them.

As Perle described Bush's presidency, "For eight years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government - sometimes frantically - never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president's policies."

This reality has been apparent since at least the middle of 2003, and yet, Israel's leaders stubbornly refused to acknowledge it. They preferred instead to believe that Bush would never let anything bad happen to us. As if he had the power to stop it.

The passage of Resolution 1860 could be a blessing in disguise if Israel is capable of learning its principal lesson: No one, not even our friends, will fight out battles for us.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Today's war between Israel and Hamas is a remarkable case study in how leaders in democracies learn. In a nutshell, it shows that leaders only learn when we, the people, force them.

As Israel battles Hamas in Gaza, all Israelis - and first and foremost our leaders - are thinking about the war with Hizbullah in the summer of 2006. That war, which was widely recognized as a military failure, forced then-IDF chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz and then-defense minister Amir Peretz from office.

The public's refusal to forgive the IDF's operational failures in Lebanon also forced Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to finally resign from office last summer. While it is true that the proximate cause of Olmert's resignation were the criminal probes being conducted against him, had Olmert not lost the public's support and trust after the 2006 war, gifted politician that he is, he probably would have weathered the corruption scandals.

With the ghost of Second Lebanon War hanging over them, both Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi know full well that if they fail now, their heads will roll like their predecessors' did. And with this sure knowledge guiding them, they prepared meticulously for this campaign.

From intelligence, to media relations, from logistics, to command and control, operational readiness, reserve forces mobilization and doctrinal clarity, they have clearly departed from the 2006 model of incompetence and arrogance. For the past two weeks, Barak and Ashkenazi have led the IDF on a course that - while more conservative and slow than most would like - is clearly better considered than the war that Halutz, Peretz and Olmert commanded two and a half years ago. And for this the country should respect them.

UNFORTUNATELY, THE public is not as well served by its government when it comes to the diplomatic endgame for this war. And here, too, the war in Lebanon explains the difference. The IDF's failure to defeat Hizbullah was self-evident. Hizbullah, after all, continued to shoot rockets at Israel until the moment the cease-fire went into force. The public could see for itself that those responsible for the IDF's failure had to go.

But while the public could see that the IDF had failed it, they were easily misled about the government's diplomatic performance. With the help of the media, which opposed early elections that would unseat the Left, the government presented UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which set the conditions of the cease-fire with Hizbullah, as a diplomatic triumph. Resolution 1701's architect, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, was celebrated as a genius who brought Israel its only real success in the war.

Unfortunately, this characterization of 1701 was completely false. It was a massive failure for Israel. And it wasn't a case of Israel being railroaded by the Security Council into accepting a resolution against its will. Livni initiated and pushed for the adoption of 1701.

The resolution favors Hizbullah over Israel. The expanded UNIFIL force, which Israel insisted be deployed along the border, has shielded Hizbullah from Israel for the past two and a half years. Under the watchful eye of UNIFIL's European commanders, Hizbullah has tripled its missile arsenal, reasserted control over south Lebanon and taken over the Lebanese government.

UNIFIL's boundless willingness to shield Hizbullah was exposed most recently on Thursday morning. After Hizbullah's Palestinian underlings attacked northern Israel with Katyusha rockets, UNIFIL commanders called for all sides to exercise "maximum restraint."

The absurdity of the directive, after one side launched an unprovoked attack on the other, showed how horrible Resolution 1701 truly is for Israel. By advocating and then applauding this resolution, Israel authorized UNIFIL to act as the arbiter of its own right to defend itself.

The public developed an inkling of the dimensions of Israel's diplomatic failure in the Second Lebanon War last summer. After Olmert formally resigned, Barak realized that Livni was his chief political rival in their quests to lead the Left. To weaken her, Barak began explaining why 1701 is a total bust. Whereas the media had ignored similar charges from the Right for two years, Barak couldn't be ignored.

But even as Barak's criticisms began chipping away at Livni's reputation as Mrs. Competent, they never were enough to force her to either acknowledge or pay a price for her incompetence. Indeed, in spite of her unmasking, the media firmly supported Livni in her bid to win the Kadima leadership primary in September and continues to support her in her bid to succeed Olmert as prime minister.

In this context, it is not at all surprising that while the government and the IDF go to great lengths to distinguish the military campaign in Gaza from the campaign in Lebanon, until a few days ago, the government's clearly stated diplomatic aim was to achieve the same sort of cease-fire with Hamas - replete with a Gaza-based international peacekeeping force - that it achieved in Lebanon with Hizbullah.

Interestingly, today it is not personal experience but rather political rivalry that is opening up the possibility that Israel won't reenact Lebanon's diplomatic failure in Gaza.

Today, Livni and Barak both see their conduct of this war as a means of shoring up their political standing against one another ahead of the February 10 elections. Their rivalry has led them to advocate contradictory goals for the diplomatic campaign.

After spending the last two and a half years presenting 1701 as a triumph, Livni has suddenly disavowed its central pillars. Today she opposes "reaching an agreement with a terrorist organization."

Similarly, she argues that the deployment of international forces along the border is antithetical to the national interest.

Barak has conducted a similar about-face. After castigating 1701 as a "failure," Barak now seeks to reenact it in Gaza. He supports international monitors along the border with Egypt. And he has no problem reaching an accord with Hamas.

The media have made much of the disparity between the disciplined military campaign and the confused diplomatic campaign. But they have not mentioned the cause of this disparity. Again, the IDF is performing competently today because its commanders remember what happened to their predecessors. The government is incompetently handling the cease-fire negotiations because its members are certain that there will be no political price to pay for their failure.

ONE OF the troubling aspects shared by both the IDF campaign and the diplomatic offensive is that both ignore the principal cause of the war. As a consequence, Israel has ruled out the possibility of actually winning a true victory in its current fight with Hamas. Here, too, our leaders ignore the true cause of the war because they know that they will pay no price for doing so.

Israel is not fighting Hamas today because it agreed to a six-month cease-fire with the terrorist regime in Gaza last June. And it is not fighting today because Hamas decided that it wants control over Gaza's international borders.

Israel is fighting a war with Hamas today because Israel withdrew from Gaza three and a half years ago. If Israel had not withdrawn its military forces from Gaza and forcibly expelled 8,000 Israeli citizens from their homes and farms in September 2005, it would not be fighting this war today. If Israel had not withdrawn, if it had retained its forces in Gaza and retained its communities - on whose ruins the IDF now fights - in Gaza, Hamas would probably never have taken over. And even if Hamas had taken over, it would never have been able to threaten a million Israelis with missiles and rockets and mortars.

When then-prime minister Ariel Sharon and his lackeys Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni began advocating the withdrawal plan in 2003, they promised that by expelling Gaza's Jews and leaving their ruined villages to Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah, Israel would advance the cause of peace. They promised that no one would hold us responsible for the welfare of Gaza's population anymore. We could simply disengage. And if we were ever attacked from Gaza after we left, the entire world would rally to our side. No one would oppose our right to defend ourselves after we rendered Gaza Judenrein.

The many who opposed this withdrawal scheme warned that leaving Gaza would accomplish nothing that Sharon, Olmert and Livni promised. The Palestinians would become more radical, not more moderate, after seeing Israel destroy its own towns and farms. They warned that Hamas would take over, since by expelling the Jews and leaving, Israel would show that it was collapsing. And why bother negotiating with a nation that was disintegrating?

Not only would the world continue to hold us responsible for supplying Gaza with food, electricity, medical care and employment opportunities, opponents of withdrawal warned that the international community would also oppose all future steps Israel took to defend itself against Gazan aggression even more strenuously. After all, by vacating Gaza, Israel was telling the world that as far as we were concerned, we had no right to be there.

And in the time that has passed since Israel "disengaged" from Gaza, the withdrawal's opponents have been proven right, and its supporters have been proven wrong on every single issue. And yet, unlike the public's outcry after the Second Lebanon War, there has been no public call for an accounting by Olmert, Livni or any of the withdrawal's supporters. No one has paid a political price for getting this wrong. With the IDF now forced to reconquer the ruins of Netzarim to defend Gedera, Ashdod and Beersheba, there has been no public demand for a commission of inquiry into the decision-making processes that led the Sharon-Olmert-Livni government to withdraw from Gaza. Indeed, Olmert, Livni and their colleagues have been promoted for their championing of Israel's single greatest strategic error since 1993.

TODAY THE IDF owes its operational competence to the public's humiliation and sacking of Halutz, Peretz and Olmert. On the other hand, Israel's diplomatic incompetence, and our leadership's continued refusal to accept that Sharon was right when he said, "As goes Netzarim so goes Tel Aviv," is rendering a true victory over Hamas impossible.

If we are ever to get on the right path in Gaza, as well as in Judea and Samaria and beyond, our first order of business as the public must be to force the politicians who brought us to this point to pay a price at the ballot box for their blind and dangerous incompetence. It is only by humiliating them in elections that we can be sure that their successors will be too frightened to repeat their mistakes.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Since the IDF commenced its ground operations in Gaza on Saturday night, I have been hungrily eyeing my hat.

On Friday I argued that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is following the same defeatist strategy in Gaza today that the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government followed in Lebanon two and a half years ago. In 2006, the government supported a cease-fire that empowered outside actors - in that case the UN and Europe - to enforce an arms embargo against Hizbullah and to act as Israel's surrogate in preventing Hizbullah from reasserting control over South Lebanon.

In the event, as government critics like myself warned at the time, these outside actors have done nothing of the sort. The European commanded UNIFIL force in Lebanon has instead acted as a shield defending Hizbullah from Israel. Under UNIFIL's blind eye, Iran and Syria have tripled the size of Hizbullah's missile arsenal. And Hizbullah has taken full control over some 130 villages along the border.

In a similar fashion, today the government is insisting on the establishment of an international monitoring force, comprised perhaps of Egyptian, Israeli, Fatah-affiliated Palestinian, American and European officials that will monitor Gaza's border with Egypt and somehow prevent weapons smuggling. Like the cease-fire deal in Lebanon, this plan does not foresee the toppling of the Hamas regime in Gaza or the destruction of its military capacity. It ignores the fact that similar, already existing, theoretically friendly monitoring forces - like the US-commanded Multi-National Force Observers in the Sinai - have done nothing to prevent or even keep tabs on weapons transfers to Hamas.

STILL, IN spite of the government's continued diplomatic incompetence, there are reasons to think that Israel may emerge the perceived victor in the current campaign against Hamas (and I will be forced to eat my hat). The first is that Gaza is relatively easier to control as a battle space than Lebanon. Unlike the situation in Lebanon, IDF forces in Gaza have the ability to isolate Hamas from all outside assistance. The IDF's current siege of Gaza City, its control over northern Gaza, its naval quarantine of the coast and its bombardment and isolation of the border zone with Egypt could cause Hamas to sue for a cease-fire on less than victorious terms.

Indeed, this may already be happening. Hamas's leaders are reportedly hiding in hospitals - cynically using the sick as human shields. And on Monday morning, Hamas's leadership in Damascus sent representatives to their new arch-enemy Egypt to begin discussing cease-fire terms. Taken together, these moves could indicate that Hamas is collapsing. But they could also indicate that Hamas is opting to fight another day while assuming that Israel will agree to let it do so.

THE SECOND reason that it is possible that Hamas may be defeated is because much to everyone's surprise, Iran may have decided to let Hamas lose.

Here it is important to note that the war today, like the war in 2006, is a war between Israel and Iran. Like Hizbullah, Hamas is an Iranian proxy. And just as was the case in 2006, Iran was instrumental in inciting the current war.

Iran prepared Hamas for this war. It used Hamas's six-month cease-fire with Israel to double both the range and the size of Hamas's missile arsenal. It trained Hamas's 20,000-man army for this war. And as the six months drew to a close, Iran incited Hamas to attack.

So too, in 2006, Iran incited Hamas to attack Israel. That war, now known as the Second Lebanon War, was actually a two-front war that began in Gaza. Ordered by Iran, it was Hamas that started the war when its forces (together with allied forces in Fatah), attacked the IDF position at Kerem Shalom on June 25, 2006 and kidnapped Cpl. Gilad Schalit. Israel fought a limited war against Iran's Palestinian proxies in Gaza for 17 days before the country's attention moved to the North after Hizbullah attacked an IDF position along the border and abducted Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

Israel's leaders today warn against a possible Hizbullah attack. In the North, municipalities are readying bomb shelters and air raid sirens ahead of such a possibility. Most of the IDF reservists called up over the weekend are being sent to the North ahead of a possible Hizbullah attack.

But in contrast to the situation in 2006, today Iran seems to have little interest in expanding the war and so saving Hamas from military defeat and humiliation. Speaking on Hizbullah's Al Manar television network on Sunday, Saeed Jalili, the head of Iran's National Security Council, its chief nuclear negotiator and a close advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, essentially told Hamas that it is on its own.

In his words, "We believe that the great popular solidarity with the Palestinian people as expressed all over the world should reflect on the will of the Arab and Islamic countries and other countries that have an independent will so that these will move in a concerted, cooperative, and cohesive manner to draft a collective initiative that can achieve two main things as an inevitable first step. These are putting an immediate end to aggression and second breaking the siege and quickly securing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza."

In other words, Iran's response to its great enemy's the war against its proxy is to suggest forming a commission.

There are many possible explanations for Iran's actions. First there is the fact that war is an expensive proposition and Iran today is in trouble on that score. In the summer of 2006, oil cost nearly $80 a barrel. Today it is being traded at $46 a barrel. Iran revised its 2009 budget downward on Monday based on the assumption that oil will average $37 a barrel in 2009.

Over the past several months, Iran has been begging OPEC to cut back supply quotas to jack up the price of oil. But, perhaps in the interest of weakening Iran, Saudi Arabia has consistently refused Iran's requests. To date, OPEC's cutbacks in supply have been far too small to offset the decrease in demand. And the loss of billions in oil revenues may simply have priced Iran out of running a two-front terror war.

Then too, Washington-based Iran expert Michael Ledeen from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies argued on Monday in his blog at Pajamas Media website that Iran's apparent decision to sit this war out may well be the result of the regime's weakness. Its recent crackdown on dissidents - with the execution of nine people on Christmas Day - and the unleashing of regime supporters in riots against the Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi, Turkish and French embassies as well as the home of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi lends to the conclusion that the regime is worried about its own survival. As Ledeen notes Teheran may view another expensive terror war as a spark which could incite a popular revolution or simply destabilize the country ahead of June's scheduled presidential elections.

THERE IS also the possibility that Iran simply miscalculated. It believed that ahead of Israel's February 10 elections, the lame-duck Olmert-Livni-Barak government, which was already traumatized by the 2006 war, would opt not to fight. This would have been a reasonable assumption.

After all, in spite of Israel's sure knowledge last summer that Hamas and Iran would use a cease-fire with Israel to increase the size of Hamas's missile arsenal and expand the range of its projectiles while building up its forces, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government agreed to the cease-fire. And then, when Hamas announced that it would not extend the cease-fire past its December 19 deadline, Defense Minister Ehud Barak sent emissaries to Egypt to conduct "indirect" negotiations with Hamas in which Israel essentially begged the terror group to reconsider.

But then Israel responded with great force and Iran was left to make a decision. And for the moment at least, it appears that Iran has decided to let Hamas go down. As far as Iran is concerned, even a Hamas defeat is not a terrible option. This view is likely encouraged by Israel's current suggested cease-fire. After all, international monitors stationed along Gaza's borders will not serve as an impediment to future Iranian moves to rebuild Hamas.

ALAS, THERE is another possible explanation for Iran's apparent decision to abandon a vassal it incited to open a war. On Sunday, Iranian analyst Amir Taheri reported the conclusions of a bipartisan French parliamentary report on the status of Iran's nuclear program in Asharq Alawsat. The report which was submitted to French President Nicolas Sarkozy late last month concluded that unless something changes, Iran will have passed the nuclear threshold by the end of 2009 and will become a nuclear power no later than 2011. The report is notable because it is based entirely on open-sourced material whose accuracy has been acknowledged by the Iranian regime.

The report asserts that this year will be the world's final opportunity to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And, as Taheri hints strongly, the only way of doing that effectively is by attacking Iran's nuclear installations.

In light of this new report, which contradicts earlier US intelligence assessments that claimed it would be years before Iran is able to build nuclear weapons, it is possible that Iran ordered the current war in Gaza for the same reason it launched its war in 2006: to divert international attention away from its nuclear program.

It is possible that Iran prefers to run down US President George W. Bush's last two weeks in office with the White House and the rest of the world focused on Gaza, than risk the chance that during these two weeks, the White House (or Israel) might read the French parliament's report and decide to do something about it.

So too, its apparent decision not to have Hizbullah join in this round of fighting might have more to do with Iran's desire to preserve its Lebanese delivery systems for any nuclear devices than its desire to save pennies in a tight economy.

And if this is the case, then even if Israel beats Hamas (and I eat my hat), we could still lose the larger war by again having allowed Iran to get us to take our eyes away from the prize.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Caroline Glick is no stranger to the Corner crowd. She’s senior contributing editor of the Jerusalem Post and the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs at the Center for Security Policy. She’s also author of Shackled Warrior: Israel and the Global Jihad.  
 
I asked Caroline a few questions this morning about the current Mideast violence. Here’s the conversation.  
 
Q: What exactly started this latest flare-up? 
 
A: The fighting in Gaza today started about three weeks ago when Hamas renewed its rocket, mortar, and missile assault against Israel. Last June, Israel foolishly agreed to a six-month ceasefire with Hamas. Hamas used the time to have Iran double the size of its missile arsenal and double the range of its missiles, and to build up its Iranian-trained, armed, and financed Hezbollah-style army of 20,000 men. Hamas called its renewed offensive “Operation Oil Stain.” On December 17, Hamas attacked Israel with more than 80 missiles, rockets and mortars.  
 
It took Israel ten days to finally respond to Hamas’s assault, which for the first time put Israeli major cities like Ashdod, Yavne, Beersheva, and Gedera under assault.  
 
What is interesting about this latest round of fighting is that the world paid little attention to what was going on when it was only Hamas attacking Israel. People only started paying attention when Israel’s government said enough is enough and started defending its territory and citizens.  

 
Q: Is the media here in the U.S. or internationally remotely fair? 

A: When the media are only interested in what is going on when Israel defends itself, the answer is no, they aren’t fair. They don’t pay any attention when hundreds of thousands of Israelis are relegated to bomb shelters for weeks and months on end. They don’t care that Israeli children can’t go to school or day care because Hamas is targeting schools and day-care centers. They only cover the story when Israel finally decides to put an end to this crazy situation where our children are growing up underground. And this is appalling.  
 
From CNN’s coverage of events here, for instance, you could easily come away from the news thinking that Israel is attacking Gaza for no reason. The European media, and much of the U.S. media dismiss the significance of Hamas’s missile, rocket, and mortar campaign against Israel by noting that these projectiles are relatively primitive and have no guidance systems. But this misses and indeed distorts the entire point. Hamas doesn’t need advanced weapons. Its goal is not to attack specific military targets. Its goal is to attack Israeli society as a whole and terrorize our citizens. That’s what makes it such an outlaw.  
 
In fact, this random bombing of civilian targets is the very definition of war crimes. Due to their random nature, every projectile launched against Israel by Hamas is a separate war crime. And that’s the real story. But again, outside of publications like National Review and the like, the Western media have ignored this basic truth and worse, they have turned the criminal nature of Hamas’s campaign into a justification for it. 

Q: What does the fighting mean for the future of Hamas-led Gaza?

A: There are four possible outcomes for Israel’s current campaign —  two would be positive and two would be negative. The best outcome would be for Israel to overthrow Hamas’s regime and destroy its capacity to wage war against Israel or threaten Israel in any significant way. To achieve this goal, Israel would have to reassert control over Gaza. Since the Israeli government has already stated that Israel will not reassert control over Gaza, and since reasserting control would be extremely embarrassing for the current leadership, which led Israel out of Gaza with promises of peace three and a half years ago, it is fairly clear that this outcome will not be forthcoming. 
 
The next best outcome would be something analogous to the end of the 1991 Gulf War. Although the U.S. left Saddam Hussein in power after that war, it asserted control over the no-fly zones and set up a clear sanctions regime that by and large prevented Iraq from rearming and apparently prevented Iraq from reconstituting its weapons of mass destruction programs.  
 
Here too, chances that this outcome will prevail are not great because the Israeli government has already stated that it is unwilling to reassert control over Gaza’s border with Egypt which is where most of Hamas’s weapons are imported from. 
 
The third possible outcome, which is already not a good one, would be for Israel to end its current campaign and just walk away with Hamas still in charge. In due course, Hamas would reconstitute its military forces and missile arsenals and reinstate its campaign against Israel. The positive aspect of such a future is simply that, subject to domestic political constraints, Israel would be able to go in and bomb Hamas anytime it felt that threatened. Israel would be under no international obligation to avoid defending itself, beyond the regular anti-Israel pressure. 
 
The fourth, and worst possible outcome is that Israel reaches some sort of internationally sponsored ceasefire agreement whereby foreign powers the EU, the U.S., Egypt, Turkey, or whomever agree to form some sort of international monitoring mechanism to oversee Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt. The reason this would be the worst outcome is that Israel’s experience with such forces in Lebanon and in Gaza itself has been wholly negative. These international forces will never fight Israel’s battles for it. Instead they inevitably shield terrorists from Israeli attack while ignoring the terrorists’ moves to rearm, reassert political control over their populations and reinstate their assaults against Israel. Moreover, because these international forces fear the terrorists they shield, they tend to side with them against Israel and blame Israel for any violence that takes place. 
 
Unfortunately, this is the outcome that the Israeli government is now pushing for in its diplomatic contacts relating to the war in Gaza.

 
Q: A lot of critics say that Israel is just going too far in its attacks. What do you make of the charge? 
 
A: The interesting aspect of this claim is what it tells us about the success of anti-Israel propaganda. For instance, Richard Falk, the Jewish anti-Semite who the U.N.’s Human Rights Council appointed to act as its rapporteur against Israel began accusing Israel of committing war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza the moment Israel began its campaign. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch systematically fabricate international “law” backed by “eyewitness” reports from Hamas supporters in order to accuse Israel of breaking it every single time it takes any steps to defend itself, no matter how restrained. 
 
Israel has done nothing in its campaign against Hamas that could be considered going “too far.” It has done nothing in its campaign that could be considered “disproportionate.” It has targeted military targets and terror operatives.  
 
The fact of the matter is that Israel is held to standards that are discriminatory while its enemy — an illegal, openly genocidal terrorist organization — is defended and shielded from attack by the media, by self-proclaimed human-rights activists and by hostile foreign leaders like British Foreign Minister David Miliband and Turkish Prime Minister Recip Erdogan. Luckily, with some one million Israelis now under assault, Israel has decided that we just aren’t going to pay attention to their obscene attacks on our right to self-defense this time around.  
 

Q: Would you caution Israel at all? 
 
A: Absolutely. I think it would be a grave error for the government to agree to any sort of international monitoring mechanism of Hamas. If the government doesn’t want to see this war through to a complete rout of Hamas, and doesn’t want to retake Gaza’s border with Egypt, then it would be best for us to just weaken the group as much as possible while we have troops on the ground and then walk away to fight another day. We cannot trust the kindness of foreigners to do for us what we will not do for ourselves.   
 
 
Q: What does the future hold for the Palestinians in Gaza? 
 
A: Their future right now doesn’t look too attractive. These are people who overwhelmingly supported Hamas in the 2006 elections. They supported Hamas when it expelled Fatah from Gaza in 2007. And they supported Hamas when it began shelling Israel’s main port city Ashdod and big cities like Beersheva with missiles. By throwing their lot in with a genocidal terrorist group, Gazans, and indeed Palestinians as a whole, have made clear that they prefer the ravages of war to the blessings of peace. Until they change their minds, it is hard to see how they can expect to prosper morally, politically or economically.  
 
 
Q: What does the fight in Gaza tell us about the prospects for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? 
 
A: It tells us that such a process is both irrelevant and counter-productive. It is irrelevant because even in the event that there is a faction in Palestinian society that is willing to make peace with Israel, that faction will never bring about a broader rapprochement or even remain in power for long. What Hamas’s current war against Israel, its alliance with Iran and its popularity in Palestinian society tell us is that as a society, the Palestinians are not interested in peaceful coexistence with Israel regardless of what Israel’s borders are. They prefer to remain at war with Israel and to be led by terrorists. So even if the current Fatah leadership is really ready to finally lay down its arms, prosecute terrorists and reconcile to Israel, it cannot lead Palestinian society or the larger Arab world to the same conclusion. 
 
Gaza also shows us that pushing a peace process is counter-productive. In the context of such a process, Israel is expected to hand over land to Fatah. In the history of Israeli land giveaways to Fatah since 1994, there has never been a case where these transfers led to a moderation of Palestinian behavior or feelings towards Israel. To the contrary, such Israeli moves have only radicalized Palestinian society that has come to see every Israeli concession as proof that Israel is collapsing. 
 
Three and a half years ago, Israel gave its greatest concession to date when it removed all its military personnel and forcibly expelled ten thousand of its citizens from their homes and farms in Gaza and transferred the area to Fatah. Rather than moderate the Palestinians, this massive Israeli concession was seen as proof that Israel would soon disappear. Convinced that Israel’s destruction was at hand, the Palestinians elected Hamas the group most identified with the cause of Israel’s destruction to lead them.  
 
So even though Israel may make concessions to people who claim to be “moderate,” the fact is those concessions only strengthen “extremists” and so weaken Israel while strengthening jihadist groups dedicated to its destruction. Obviously, this is not something that engenders peace and stability. Rather, such “peace processes” engender only war and instability.  
 
 
Q: What should the U.S. response to the fighting be? 
 
A: Just as the U.S. supports all its allies -- from Pakistan to India to Britain to the Philippines -- in their fights against terrorist groups, so the U.S. should be supporting Israel without qualification in its fight against its terrorist foes. And indeed, just as the U.S. tells its allies not to go wobbly in their fights against terrorists, so the U.S. should be encouraging Israel to stay firm and not try to cut a deal with its terrorist foes.  
 
 
Q: Any advice to Obama? 
 
A: The thing that concerns me about President-elect Obama’s views of Israel and the Middle East is that they are heavily influenced by his advisers, many of whom are Clinton-administration veterans. And these advisers — people like Richard Haass, Aaron Miller, Dan Kurtzer, and Martin Indyk, to name just a few — have built their careers championing the failed and dangerous peace process.  
 
If Obama fails to recognize the folly of these advisers and replace them with men and women who use reality as their guide for policymaking, not only will he strengthen terrorist enemies of the U.S. like Hamas and Iran, he will weaken and endanger U.S. allies like Israel. So my advice to the incoming president would be to dump his Middle East team and replace it with advisers who have a clue.  
 
To paraphrase someone you might have heard of once or twice, I’d rather have U.S. policy on the Middle East determined by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by this team whose policies have brought about the death of thousands in their pursuit of a fantasy of peace.

Originally published in National Review Online. 

George Orwell once quipped, "The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

Since Tuesday it has become clear that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has decided to end the war with Iran's Hamas proxy army in Gaza as quickly as possible. That is, the government has decided to lose the war.

Most Israelis are unaware of this state of affairs. In an obvious attempt to bolster the popularity of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ahead of the February 10 general elections, the local media have spent the six days since the government launched Operation Cast Lead praising the government's competence and wisdom, and declaring victory over Hamas after every IAF sortie in Gaza.

What the media have declined to notice is that the outcome of the war will not be determined by the number of Hamas buildings the IAF destroys. The outcome of this war - like the outcome of all wars - will be determined by one factor only: Which side will achieve the goals it set out for itself at the outset of the conflict and which side will concede its goals?

Depressingly, the current machinations of the Olmert-Livni-Barak government demonstrate that when the fighting is over, Hamas and not Israel will be able to declare that it accomplished its goals.

Hamas reinstated its attacks against southern Israel on December 19. It did so after a six-month hiatus that it used to restock its arsenals and strengthen its military forces. As it resumed its terror offensive against Israeli cities, Hamas announced that it will continue its current round of terror war until it wins full control over Gaza's land and sea borders.

Israel, for its part, has been less clear in stating its operational goals. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Livni and Barak have said that the goal of Operation Cast Lead is to compel Hamas to end its attacks against Israel, but they haven't said how they intend to affect that outcome. They have rejected Hamas's demand for control over Gaza's land and sea borders and in turn demanded that Hamas end its weapons smuggling operations across the Egyptian border.

Somewhat disconnectedly, the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has demanded that in the event it reaches some sort of mediated accord with Hamas, an international monitoring force must be deployed to Gaza to enforce its terms. Since Wednesday, this appears to have become Israel's main demand in relation to any mediated cease-fire talks with Hamas.

As for cease-fire talks, as the IAF finds fewer and fewer targets to hit, those hypothetical talks have become the government's new focus. On Monday and Tuesday, Turkey, Egypt and the EU all began offering various truce arrangements between Israel and Hamas. On Tuesday, Israel opted to pursue the European track. On Thursday, Livni travelled to Paris to discuss it with French President Nicolas Sarkozy ahead of his trip to the region on Monday.

Apparently the government's decision to go with Europe is based on aesthetics. The Europeans have been more polite to Israel than Turkey or Egypt have. But the fact is that there is little substantive difference between any of the cease-fire offers now being bandied about.

Hamas, for its part, has accepted all of the proposals on the table, and this makes sense. The Europeans, the Egyptians and the Turks have all adopted Hamas's demand for control of its land and sea borders as a starting point. None has included any demands for Hamas to disarm, end its weapons trafficking or commit itself to a permanent cease-fire.

In an apparent bow to Israel, the EU's draft that Livni is now negotiating also speaks of the EU's willingness to deploy monitoring forces to Gaza's borders with Israel and Egypt, and presumably to its coast. The EU foresees the deployment of monitors following the model developed by the EU monitors who were deployed at the Rafah terminal two months after Israel withdrew from the zone in September 2005, and who fled in June 2007 after Hamas took over Gaza.

According to its draft cease-fire proposal, the EU has agreed to return European monitors to Rafah, and is "willing to examine the possibility of extending its assistance to other crossing points."

BEFORE THE Olmert-Livni-Barak government accepts the EU cease-fire, it is worth noting three strategic problems with what they are doing. Taken together and separately, all three will lead Israel to defeat in this confrontation with Hamas.

The first problem with the EU proposal is that it takes for granted that all of Hamas's demands must be met in full. That is, Israel is beginning these negotiations from a point of weakness whereby it has already effectively accepted Hamas's demands and conceded its own.

The second problem with the decision to accept EU mediation is that by doing so, the government is compelled to ignore and indeed justify the EU's underlying and deep-seated hostility toward Israel. The very fact that the EU accepted Hamas's demands from the outset demonstrates clearly that the EU cannot be an honest broker between the warring factions.

Here it is important to recall just what Hamas is. Hamas is an illegal terrorist organization and an Iranian proxy that is conducting an illegal terror war against Israel. The EU is arguably committing a war crime by accepting Hamas as a legitimate side to a dispute. In turn, by accepting the EU as a legitimate interlocutor, Israel itself gives credence to the view that Hamas is a legitimate actor.

On a practical level, by accepting the EU's authority to mediate under these conditions, Israel has effectively foregone from the outset any chance of achieving its own cease-fire demands. After all, to reach a cease-fire with Hamas that includes Israel's demands that Hamas end its weapons smuggling operations, forgo control over international borders and end its missile offensive against Israel, the EU would have to throw out the draft it just voted to accept. And it would have to reverse its political direction and abandon Hamas in favor of Israel. The chance that this will happen is quite close to zero.

The third strategic failure inherent in Israel's decision to negotiate a truce is Israel's demand for an international monitoring force to verify compliance with the cease-fire agreement. This demand is self-defeating because such a force will only harm Israel's national interests. This is the clear lesson of both the EU's past monitoring mission at the Rafah terminal and of UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon.

In the case of the EU monitors at Rafah, as The Jerusalem Post recalled in an editorial on Wednesday, during the period when they were deployed at the terminal, the EU monitors turned a blind eye to the very terror traffic they were supposed to be preventing. At the same time, they condemned Israel for taking any action to defend itself and downplayed the threat Hamas constitutes for Israel. In short, the EU monitors sided with Hamas against Israel at every turn.

The situation is much the same with UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. UNIFIL routinely condemns the IAF for carrying out reconnaissance flights over Lebanon aimed at keeping tabs on Hizbullah arms smuggling operations that UNIFIL does nothing to prevent. They also demand that Israel surrender the town of Ghajar to Lebanon despite the fact that it is part of sovereign Israel. Beyond that, UNIFIL forces have sat back and allowed Hizbullah to rearm and reassert control over some 130 villages along the Israeli border. Far from enforcing the UN-mediated cease-fire, UNIFIL acts as a shield behind which Hizbullah prepares for its next round of war against Israel.

IN LIGHT of all of this, it is apparent that today the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is conducting cease-fire negotiations from a position of great weakness. It has accepted the mediation of a hostile interlocutor. And its primary demand in those negotiations is antithetical to the national interest.

The fact of the matter is that negotiating with Hamas is a fool's game. There are only two ways for a state to impact its enemy's behavior. It can take away its desire to attack, or it can deny its enemy the ability to attack it.

In the case at hand, Livni, Barak and Olmert claim that the IAF strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza have been so successful that the Islamist group is now compelled to reassess its desire to attack Israel, and that this is why it makes sense to negotiate a cease-fire today. But the facts on the ground do not back this assertion.

By maintaining its demand for control over the borders, Hamas has made clear that it has not changed its calculations of its interests. And this makes sense. Israel's air attacks have not degraded Hamas's ability to maintain control over Gaza in any significant way. IAF attacks have only destroyed between five and 10 percent of Hamas's smuggling tunnels, and so Hamas can still restock its arsenals. The IAF has caused no significant damage to Hamas's 20,000-man army, which went to ground before the operation began. Hamas's military and political leaders are also all safely in hiding.

Moreover, Israel's willingness to begin negotiations based on a draft that favors Hamas shows Hamas that far from losing this war, it is winning. So why would it reconsider its desire to attack Israel?

In truth, given Hamas's commitment to Israel's destruction at all costs and its indifference to the lives of its Palestinian subjects, there is only one way for Israel to secure its territory from Hamas attack. It must destroy Hamas's ability to wage war. The only way Israel can achieve its aim is by conquering Gaza, overthrowing Hamas's regime and destroying its military forces. Since the Olmert-Livni-Barak government has already stated that it will not launch such an attack, it is obvious that Hamas will end this war with its ability to attack Israel more or less intact.

All of this leads us to a very nasty conclusion. The Olmert-Livni-Barak government now leading Israel in its war against Hamas is no different from the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government that led Israel in the 2006 war against Hizbullah. Our leaders have learned nothing from their prior failure. Indeed they are reenacting it in Gaza today.

The only thing the public can hope for, and indeed demand at this stage, is for Olmert, Livni and Barak to forego any ground operation in Gaza. There is no reason for our soldiers to place their lives in jeopardy in a campaign that the government that has already decided to lose.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.