Last week's reports that during Operation Cast Lead Israel bombed truck convoys in Sudan transporting medium-ranged Fajr-3 missiles to Gaza from Iran couldn't have come at a better time for outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Even as defense officials were following standard practice of neither confirming nor denying the reports, Olmert was bragging like a teenage boy.

In an address at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya last Thursday Olmert crowed, "We are operating in every area in which terrorist infrastructures can be struck. We are operating in locations near and far and attack in a way that strengthens and increases deterrence. It is true in the north and in the south. There is no point in elaborating. Everyone can use their imagination. Whoever needs to know, knows."

Unfortunately, Olmert's bravado doesn't stand up to even the flimsiest scrutiny. What about the weapons smugglers along the Philadelphi corridor? More than Sudan, Philadelphi - Gaza's international border with Egypt - is the choke point of weapons transfers from Iran to Gaza. And along that border, during his three years and two months in office, Olmert has failed to even temporarily cut off the flow of Iranian arms entering Gaza. Throughout his tenure as prime minister, Israel never once launched a sustained operation aimed at blocking Hamas, Fatah and their sister organizations in Gaza from transporting ever more lethal weapons systems into the area through its border with Egypt.

THIS WEEK EHUD OLMERT will finally leave office. Ironically, the cause for his early departure from power - the multiple criminal probes being conducted against him - has nothing to do with his actual performance as prime minister. That is, the failures that brought him down were not his failures in office, but his private failings which predated his rise to power.

Israel's political memory is notoriously short. In the space of a few short years, politicians' past failures in office are frequently forgotten by their parties and the public. Consequently, Olmert can easily assume that if he is able to fend off the multiple felony indictments awaiting him on his return to private life, he many one day soon return to lead us.

It is due first and foremost to the prospect of Olmert one day returning to politics that it is critical to consider his actual record of service as prime minister. Only by understanding what he has done over the past three years and two months can we ensure that he will be properly remembered for what he is: the worst prime minister Israel has experienced to date. Only by recognizing his tenure in office as an unmitigated disaster for the country will we be able to avert the danger that he may one day return to office.

Olmert's failure to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza at the Philadelphi corridor and his attempt to obfuscate this failure by exaggerating the strategic significance of the reported IAF strikes in Sudan are his stock in trade. Olmert, as the only prime minister to have led the country in two wars in one term of office, does not hesitate to use force to project an image of fearless manliness to the public. And as the only prime minister to have led Israel to defeat in war - and indeed, in his case, in two wars - Olmert is the only prime minister to have wielded the sword with utter strategic incompetence.

OLMERT ENTERED office in January 2006 pledged to unilaterally surrender Judea, Samaria and large areas of Jerusalem to the Fatah terrorist organization. Olmert was both politically and ideologically committed to the Left's belief that wars are unwinnable and consequently enemies need to be appeased rather than defeated.

In light of his political predisposition, both Lebanese and Palestinian aggression presented Olmert with a difficult political challenge. In both Lebanon and Gaza, Israel had previously adopted his strategy of preemptive appeasement by unilaterally surrendering territory to its enemies. Hizbullah's and Fatah/Hamas's post-surrender aggression exposed Olmert's political platform as both wrongheaded and dangerous.

Beyond the political embarrassment Olmert suffered in the wake of both Hizbullah's 2006 aggression and Gaza's post-withdrawal transformation into an Iranian-controlled jihadist hub, he had to contend with the public outcry against their unprovoked and unrelenting attacks. In both July 2006 and in December 2008, the public demanded that Olmert defend the country by using force to defeat our enemies. Yet even in the face of the public outcry, Olmert remained ideologically committed to the belief that war is inherently futile.

Olmert's ideologically driven political and strategic mind-sets caused him to prosecute both wars as little more than mindless, violent engagements with enemy forces. In Lebanon, IDF units were sent into tactical battles that lacked any operational objectives.

The strategic aims that Olmert announced at various stages of the war in Lebanon - first to defeat Hizbullah and, later on, to "send Hizbullah a message" - were strategically illogical since they lacked any connection to the manner in which IDF forces were deployed. Absent an order to conquer southern Lebanon and defeat Hizbullah as a fighting force, the IDF could not hope to defeat Hizbullah.

Given Hizbullah's commitment to Israel's destruction and its complete subservience to Iran, there is no way for Israel to deter the group. As a result, the only "message" Israel conveyed was one of military incompetence and ideological weakness.

Although the public responded to Olmert's performance in outrage, for Olmert the outcome of the war in Lebanon was the best of all possible worlds. By failing to accomplish any strategic objectives through fighting, Olmert was able to continue to argue for preemptive appeasement in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem as well as on the Golan Heights.

Olmert brushed aside the public's demand for his resignation by emptily, arrogantly and repeatedly pledging to correct his own mistakes. But of course, given his political and ideological blinders, he was incapable and unwilling to do so.

The IDF's improved tactical performance in Gaza two years later showed that to the extent it was able, it did learn from its mistakes in Lebanon. In contrast, Olmert's strategic leadership of Operation Cast Lead demonstrated that he remained committed to the same wrongheaded and dangerous strategic outlook with which he had led the country to ignominious defeat in Lebanon.

DIPLOMATIC ACTIVITIES UNDER Olmert were motivated by the same ideological dictates as its military engagements. Consequently, their results were equally disastrous.

By any objective measure, Israel's greatest diplomatic challenge for the past three years and two months has been to build an international consensus around the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. And yet, contending with Iran was nowhere near the top of our diplomatic agenda under Olmert. Indeed, Olmert and his deputy and successor as leader of the Kadima party outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni never developed any coherent position on Iran at all.

Instead of concentrating diplomatic efforts on convincing the nations of the world to prevent Iran from acquiring the means to destroy the Jewish state and to dominate the region and the oil economy, Olmert concentrated his diplomatic efforts on strengthening the Fatah terrorist organization against the Hamas terrorist organization.

This goal - which is the central component of Olmert's appeasement-based mind-set - required him to lead his colleagues and subordinates in ignoring certain basic facts about Fatah. Israel needed to ignore the fact that Fatah rejects its right to exist and openly calls for its destruction. Israel needed to ignore Fatah's continued direct involvement in terror attacks against it and its complicity with and support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad attacks. Israel had to ignore Fatah's cozy ties with Hizbullah, Syria and Iran and the leadership role Fatah occupies in the international diplomatic offensive and political war against the Jewish state.

Due to Olmert's willingness to turn a blind eye to Fatah's belligerence, the effect of his diplomatic efforts has been the legitimization not only of Fatah but of all of Fatah's allies and supporters. That is, the effect has been to legitimize all of our enemies and encourage them to maintain and expand their campaigns on every front.

In the case of Fatah for instance, by refusing for three years and two months to confront it on its involvement in terror, Olmert paved the way for its current campaign to prosecute IDF soldiers as war criminals in international tribunals. Moreover, due to Olmert's refusal to acknowledge Fatah's lead role in terrorism, he paved the way for the current state of affairs where Fatah forces are now being trained and armed by the US military.

BY DESTROYING the IDF's international reputation as a world-class fighting force by twice committing it to war and twice refusing to allow it to fight to victory, and by transforming the Foreign Ministry into a mouthpiece for Fatah and the PLO while ordering it to ignore Iran, Olmert wrecked Israel's reputation as a steady and reliable strategic ally in Washington. Moreover, he weakened its supporters both in the US capital and throughout the world by effectively accepting the lie that Israel itself is responsible for the radicalization of the Arab and Islamic worlds and that only by cutting it down to size will the West be able to moderate the behavior of jihadists from Teheran to Karachi to Baghdad to London.

Olmert's massive incompetence has had another victim: the country's social fabric. Not only has his studied inability to defend the country attenuated many Israelis' faith in the state's ability to defend them, Olmert's refusal to countenance the public's demand that he resign after the war in Lebanon and his insistent postwar attempts to give away Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Fatah while wrecking the strategic alliance with the US have sown confusion and discord. This discord has led to a deepening of social and political fissures at a time when - due to the rising Iranian threat which he studiously ignored, and the steady delegitimization of Israel's right to exist that he engendered - we need to be united as never before.

To sum up then, Olmert's ideological and political commitment to appeasement, his personal arrogance and his contempt for his countrymen have made his tenure an unrelenting and unmitigated disaster for the country. Today, rather than acknowledge his failure, Olmert is using the disclosure of IAF attacks in Sudan as yet a new way to obfuscate the fact that for three years and two months he has failed to adequately protect the state.

It is in light of this that it is imperative that the public understand his record. For in the final analysis, it is not simply our ability to ensure that Olmert never returns to lead us that stands in the balance. Our wherewithal to survive with the strategic wreckage he has laid before us depends on our capacity to understand and remember the dimensions of Olmert's incompetence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Once it is sworn into office, Israel's new government will immediately have to go on a diplomatic offensive.

This month, under Egyptian sponsorship, Hamas and Fatah began negotiating the formation of a Palestinian unity government that, if agreed upon, will run the affairs of the Palestinian Authority. From what can be gleaned from media accounts of the proceedings, it is clear Hamas will control the government and Fatah will operate as a junior partner responsible for keeping up international monetary support for the PA. Hamas will not recognize Israel. And Fatah and Hamas militias will be unified in some manner and end all cooperation and coordination with Israel.

In short, if formed, the new Palestinian government will be nothing more than a Hamas-Fatah terror consortium committed to waging continuous war against Israel.

By all accounts, the international community, including the Obama administration, will recognize and support this government if and when it is established. Egypt halted the talks last week and sent emissaries to Washington and Brussels to secure American and European support for it.

General Omar Suleiman, head of Egyptian intelligence, flew to Washington to meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit jetted off to Brussels where he made the same case to EU foreign policy boss Javier Solana. That their missions were successful was made clear by the announcement that the Hamas-Fatah negotiations were to resume this week.

Moreover, after meeting with Gheit, Solana threatened the incoming Netanyahu government that it will suffer international isolation if it does not join Europe, the U.S. and the Arab world in embracing the establishment of a Palestinian state as its chief goal in office. In doing so, Solana signaled that as far as Europe is concerned, the nature of the Palestinian government is immaterial. The only side that will be blamed for Palestinian aggression will be Israel.

In Washington too, things are going Hamas's way. President Barak Obama's Middle East mediator, George Mitchell, has called for the administration to support a Hamas-Fatah government. Former senior officials with close ties to the administration like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft and Lee Hamilton are publicly calling for U.S. recognition of Hamas.

Given the increased likelihood that the U.S. (and the EU) will recognize Hamas, one of the swiftly emerging challenges for the incoming Netanyahu government will be how to contend with the new reality.

As it stands, the incoming government is operating at a severe deficit. Both outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and outgoing Foreign Minister (and Kadima leader) Tzipi Livni have made it clear they will side with the U.S. and Europe against their own government.

Livni joined the campaign to isolate the incoming government when, like Solana, she claimed Netanyahu's refusal to endorse the so-called "two-state solution" rendered him an extremist with whom she could not cooperate.

On Sunday evening Olmert attacked outgoing Defense Minister (and Labor Party leader) Ehud Barak for his willingness to join the Netanyahu government. In Olmert's words, "Anyone who consciously walks into a government that does not believe in two states for two peoples is likely to force Israel into an isolation it has not seen since its establishment."

Statements like these from Kadima's leaders make it difficult for Netanyahu to withstand claims by the likes of Scowcroft, Mitchell and British Foreign Minister David Miliband that the time has come to recognize Hamas. But even with the likes of Olmert and Livni siding with foreign governments against him, Netanyahu will still have one option -- and he will have to use it.

Netanyahu and his government will have to exert unrelenting pressure on the U.S. and individual European governments to end their recognition of Hamas. He and his colleagues will need to make constant reference to Hamas's terror activities and to it genocidal covenant. They will have to repeatedly recall its ties to Iran and its likeness to al Qaeda. They will need to condemn calls by the Israeli Left to recognize Hamas and use the bully pulpit in Israel to attack their political opponents for working against the interests of the state.

We have been here before. In December 1988, prodded by the incoming Bush administration and the American Jewish Left, the lame duck Reagan administration opened a dialogue with the PLO, which it claimed had accepted Israel's right to exist and foresworn terror.

Following the U.S. move, the Shamir government used every opportunity to point out that the PLO had not given up terrorism and had not in fact accepted Israel's right to exist. The pressure the Israeli government exerted on the Bush administration compelled it to break off ties with the PLO in June 1990 after the PLO committed a terror attack in Israel.

The country that in the end legitimized the PLO was Israel - with the September 1993 Oslo agreement - not the U.S. When then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO and brought Yasir Arafat to Gaza, he did more than pave the road to the White House in gold for Arafat. By telling the U.S. to embrace the PLO, Israel found itself without recourse when -- in the space of just a few weeks from the euphoric signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden -- the PLO resumed its war against Israel, transforming the areas Israel had transferred to its control into the largest terror training bases in the world.

After Oslo, discrediting the PLO meant discrediting the Israeli Left, which embraced the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians. Since the Left has dominated most Israeli governments since 1993 and has retained control over the media, this was a non-starter. And so even when Fatah - the PLO's governing faction -- openly colludes with Hamas, as it is currently doing in the negotiations toward the formation of a Hamas-dominated government, the Israeli Left feels compelled to uphold it as legitimate and to overlook its hostile behavior.

The most stunning example of the Israeli Left's refusal to criticize Fatah came last week when Fatah security chief Muhammad Dahlan gave an interview to PA television where he explained the nature of the PLO/Fatah's deception of Israel.

Fatah, Dahlan explained, has never recognized Israel. In his words, "We [Fatah] are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist. Rather, we are asking Hamas not to do so because Fatah never recognized Israel's right to exist."

What Dahlan's remarks made clear is that the PLO's recognition of Israel was an optical illusion. Without its constituent factions, the PLO is an empty shell. And its constituent factions did not recognize Israel. Dahlan then explained that the Hamas-Fatah government will operate under the same principle. Hamas will join the PLO. Hamas will form a government with Fatah. Both terror groups will recognize PLO agreements with Israel and both will continue to wage war against Israel as Hamas and Fatah - rather than as the Palestinian government.

It might be thought that Dahlan's admission of premeditated and continuous bad faith would have elicited a strong reaction from Israel. But no such thing occurred. Aside from the Jerusalem Post, no Israeli media outlet mentioned the interview. Neither did any Israeli leftist politician.

And this makes sense. Acknowledging what Dahlan said would require a parallel Israeli acknowledgement that Israel's strategy for the past 16 years has been based on a complete lie. It would also make Israel even more unpopular internationally since Fatah is the toast of every town in the Western world.

It is this state of affairs that must be avoided at all costs with Hamas. Israel must give no quarter in this debate. And who knows -- if it holds the line on Hamas while pointing out the significance of Fatah's collusion with the Iranian proxy, perhaps by the time the next terror campaign inevitably commences Israel will have finally begun to erode Fatah's international reputation.

Originally published in The Jewish Press.

Tuesday's riots in Umm el-Fahm and the debate which accompanied them are emblematic of one of the greatest challenges facing not only Israel, but much of the Western world today. Far-Right Jewish Israeli political activists held a peaceful demonstration in the radical Arab-Islamist dominated city of Umm el-Fahm in the Galilee under heavy police protection. Thousands of Arab Israelis supported by far-Left Jewish Israeli political activists reacted with violent rioting. And the media blamed the violence on the peaceful Jewish Israeli demonstrators.

Tuesday's demonstration, which was led by former followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane MK Michael Ben-Ari, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, was supposed to take place last December after the High Court of Justice upheld the activists' legal right to march through the city. But the police blocked it, claiming they could not guarantee the marchers' security. Only after again being ordered by the court to let the demonstration go forward did the police relent. But they limited the march to the outskirts of the city.

In accordance with the police's guidelines, on Tuesday the marchers were transported to the periphery of the town in bullet-proof buses. Some 2,500 policemen deployed along the Wadi Ara highway and throughout the town to protect them. They were allowed to march holding flags and singing folk songs for a half an hour, and then returned to their bullet-proof buses.

In the meantime, thousands of local residents standing on rooftops and crowding into the streets began rioting. They threw volley after volley of rocks at the Jewish marchers and the police protecting them. They cursed the demonstrators. They cursed the police. In the end, some 15 policemen were wounded by the projectiles - including Deputy Insp-Gen. Shahar Ayalon, the Israel Police's No. 2 commander.

As far as the media were concerned, the fact that thousands of Arabs attacked the police and the lawful demonstrators was a non-story. The fact that these Israeli Arab citizens claimed to be personally insulted and injured because the demonstration "forced" them to set their eyes on their national flag was seemingly understandable. The fact that these Israeli citizens rejected Israel's flag while waving Palestinian and Islamic flags was neither newsworthy nor controversial. No one in the media asked the Arab rioters whom they felt threatened by. No one asked them why seeing Jews marching with the flag of Israel should provoke them to attack.

To the extent the media found a culprit, it was the Jewish demonstrators. They were "provocateurs" who forced taxpayers to spend millions of shekels to deploy 2,500 policemen armed with riot gear to the city. It never occurred to the media that Ben-Ari, Marzel and Ben-Gvir were not the cause of the enormous police presence. They were a danger to no one. The reason the police were forced to deploy so massively was because they believed that the Arabs would attack the Jewish demonstrators. It was the Arabs, not the Jews whom the police feared would break the law. And as it works out, they were right.

THE MEDIA'S coverage of the Umm el-Fahm riot fits into an ongoing pattern. Over the years, the local media have developed a code for reporting on Arabs - whether Palestinian or Israeli or foreign. And it is a bigoted code.

As far as Israel's media are concerned, Arabs cannot be expected to act like responsible citizens. They cannot be required to abide by the law like the rest of the country's citizens. As far as Israel's media and the rest of the political Left are concerned, Arabs are either victims or objects. They cannot be culprits or independent actors. Their will - to the extent they have one - is collective. No individual can be held accountable for his or her actions. And their will is reactive. All Arab actions are but reactions to Jewish provocations.

Many in the US and Europe have expressed surprise and indeed mystification about Avigdor Lieberman and his Israel Beiteinu party's strong third place showing in last month's elections.

And there is good reason for their confusion. Lieberman is not an easy candidate to swallow for either rightists or leftists. Right-wingers find his plan to make the Galilee and parts of the Negev part of a future Palestinian state absurd and wrong. Leftists find his call for all Israelis, including Arab Israelis, to declare their loyalty to the state as a condition for keeping their citizenship absurd and wrong. And yet, due to the 15 Knesset seats he won from both right- and left-wing voters, Lieberman will serve as the foreign minister in the incoming Netanyahu government.

The Israel Left has demonized Lieberman as a racist for his positions on the Arabs. The anti-Israel lobby in Washington is already using their attacks to discredit the incoming government. But the fact is that fundamentally, Lieberman is little different from the Left which demonizes him.

Lieberman is a populist. He owes his popularity to the fact that he properly identified the political radicalization and increasing lawlessness among Israel's Arab citizens as the major domestic issue of our times. Lieberman is unique among politicians from both the Left and the Right in that he is the only one who is willing to confront the issue head on. And it is due to his readiness to discuss this issue that the public rewarded him with 15 Knesset seats.

Like most populists, Lieberman is not a deep thinker. As a consequence, he adopted the bigoted framework of the Left for contending with the challenge posed today by Israel's Arabs. His idea of removing the Galilee from sovereign Israel and attaching it to a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is based on the Left's bigoted assumption that Israeli Arabs cannot be expected to be loyal to the country or to act as law abiding citizens.

Lieberman's adoption of the Left's prejudiced perspective on Israeli Arabs has engendered a dismal situation where, while the debate has now been joined on the issue of how to contend with Israeli Arab disloyalty and crime, the debate that has developed is nothing more than a dialogue of the deaf.

No one talks about the need to inculcate Israeli values of liberal democracy among our Arab citizens. No one talks about blunting the power of radical leaders such as Sheikh Raed Salah, who heads the Islamic Movement's northern branch, or Arab parliamentarians who openly treat with Hizbullah and Hamas and side with Israel's enemies in time of war. No one talks about empowering Israeli Arabs who are loyal to Israel. That is, no one talks about adopting policies that could actually improve the situation.

AND THIS is a tragedy, because the situation is truly grave. Early this week a Hizbullah-controlled Israeli Arab terror group which calls itself the Free People of the Galilee claimed responsibility for the attempted car bombing at Haifa's largest shopping mall on Saturday night. That bomb, planted in a car trunk outside the mall, was large enough to have toppled the three-story mall and killed hundreds of people. Mercifully, it was discovered before it was detonated.

Since 2001, the same group has claimed responsibility for a string of murderous attacks - mainly centered in Jerusalem. It claimed responsibility for the massacre of eight students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva last year. It claimed responsibility for the first bulldozer attack in Jerusalem last year in which three people were murdered. And it claimed responsibility for the murder of several individual Jews around the Old City in Jerusalem since August 2001.

Also this week, the Jerusalem District Attorney's office announced that four Israeli Arabs have been indicted for the attempted murder of an American Hebrew University student last month. The four attacked the student as he walked through the Jerusalem Forest on the way to his dormitory. They beat him, stabbed him in the cheek, and tried to slash his throat before fleeing the scene.

And earlier this month, the police announced the arrest last month of another Israeli Arab on charges of spying for Hizbullah. The arrest of 27-year-old Ismail Suleiman from a village in the Jezreel Valley is the latest in a string of arrests of Israeli Arabs on charges of spying for Hizbullah. Last September IDF Sgt.-Maj. Louai Balut from the Western Galilee, who served as a tracker along the Lebanese border, was sentenced to 11 years in prison for spying for Hizbullah. And of course, former MK and Balad Party leader Azmi Bishara remains on the lam after he fled the country just before being charged with spying for Hizbullah during the 2006 war.

Israel, of course, is not alone in contending with this challenge. Throughout Europe, governments are forced to contend with the fact that increasingly, the greatest threat to the security of their general citizenry comes from their Muslim and Arab citizens. The only difference is that Israel alone is castigated as a racist state simply for suffering from the problem of Muslim extremism.

THIS WEEK, Philip Johnston published a column in the Sunday Telegraph critiquing the British government's new strategy for defending against Islamic terror. Johnston bemoaned the fact that the new plan pays no attention to the fact that most of the terrorists sitting in British jails, as well as the perpetrators of the July 7, 2005, bombings, are British. Whereas the new strategy concentrates on the need to fight terrorists in places like Afghanistan, as Johnston put it, "There was not a single mention of the undeniable truth that the extremists who will actually carry out atrocities live among us and need to be confronted here and now."

Johnston argued that rather than ignore the problem of increased extremism among Britain's Muslims "in the interests of 'community harmony,'" the British government should actively engage in "an unequivocal and enthusiastic espousal of British values of tolerance and liberal democracy."

That is, to contend with the growing radicalization of British Muslims, the government in London should end its policy of appeasement of radical Muslim groups, which is based on the bigoted assumption that Muslims cannot be expected to either abide by the laws or to integrate into wider society. Britain should instead embrace its own identity as a liberal democracy and require its citizens to abide by liberal democratic norms.

In Britain as in Israel and indeed throughout the free world, those norms are based on the understanding that the ability of a society to remain a free society is contingent on its citizenry's recognition that there can be no civil rights without civic duties. The Umm el-Fahm riots serve as yet another warning of this fundamental truth.

Here in Israel we face the same choice. Either we encourage our Arab citizens to fully accept both the rights and duties of citizenship or we continue - through either populism of cowardice - to facilitate their rejection of our society. If we embark on the first path, we will safeguard our national identity as a Jewish liberal democracy. If we remain on the second path, we will imperil our lives, our way of life and our national existence.

By any sane definition of armed conflict, Israel's counter terror operation in Gaza against Hamas in December and January was a fully justified, lawful and moral undertaking. The IDF abided by the laws of war. It took every possible precaution to protect civilians in Gaza. The operation was conducted for the sole purpose of protecting the one million Israeli citizens in the country's south under assault from Palestinian missiles launched by terror operatives in Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Then too, by any sane definition of armed conflict, the missile war that Hamas and its sister terror organizations in Gaza launched against Israel was unjustified, illegal and immoral. The expressed purpose of those projectiles was to kill, maim and terrorize as many Israeli citizens as possible in order to effect a disintegration and collapse of Israeli society. Schools, nurseries, and synagogues were purposely and repeatedly targeted.

The only unjust aspect of Operation Cast Lead was the outgoing Kadima-Labor government's failure to finish what it started. By pulling IDF forces out of Gaza without first overthrowing Hamas's terror regime, the government did two things which are both wholly unjust. It allowed Hamas to survive to fight another day. And by leaving the Hamas regime in place, it indirectly legitimized it.

For Israel's foes - particularly in the West - Hamas's survival has expanded its credibility. Today anti-Israel political activists no longer blink when they equate Israel with Hamas. Every day violent demonstrations are held in one Western city or another where Israel's flag is burned and torn, and the flag of Hamas - a genocidal terror group - is waved proudly. The IDF is daily castigated as a terrorist organization and Hamas upheld as a "resistance movement." Calls are made by political activists and self-declared "human rights" organizations for war crimes charges to be brought against IDF soldiers and commanders as more and more European governments consider following Britain's lead and openly advocate recognizing Hamas.

Until last week, the IDF and the outgoing government were able to minimize the significance of the post-Operation Cast Lead campaign against Israel because the operation enjoyed the support of the Israeli Left - and particularly of the media. So long as the Left remained loyal, both the outgoing government and the IDF could reasonably assume that the impact of the manufactured allegations against Israel would not harm the IDF's ability to function.

But now the media are beginning to switch sides.

OPERATION CAST LEAD was an unpleasant event for the Israeli Left and particularly for the national media which it controls. There were two main reasons for this.

First, the media were the primary supporter of then prime minister Ariel Sharon's plan to remove all Israeli military personnel and civilians from Gaza in 2005. In the lead-up to the withdrawal, the media demonized all who questioned the wisdom of the plan and who warned that its implementation would expose southern Israel to Palestinian rockets, mortars and missiles.

The Palestinians' missile onslaught against the south was incontrovertible proof of their profound stupidity.

Second, Operation Cast Lead was carried out by a leftist government on the eve of the election. Had the media even thought about criticizing it, they would have shown that Kadima leader Tzipi Livni's claim that only a war fought by the Left will be supported was a lie. To shore up votes for Kadima and Labor, the media had to swallow their pacifist pride and rally around the flag.

For their efforts, the media found themselves ridiculed by the popular leftist satire program Eretz Nehederet which portrayed them as warmongers.

It is hard to know whether the media would have kept up their vigilant support for Operation Cast Lead if Kadima had won the elections, but now that Kadima has lost, and Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu is forming the government, it is clear that the media no longer feel it is necessary to support the IDF. After all, the next battle will be led by Likud.

THE FIRST SIGN that the media were turning on the IDF came last month. It followed the well-known pattern: A far left political activist made unsubstantiated allegations against an IDF commander. The media treated the allegations as credible and demanded an investigation. In the event, Tel Aviv University Prof. Haim Ganz, who heads the Minerva Center for Human Rights, informed Ha'aretz that he wrote a letter to Prof. Hanoch Dagan, the dean of Tel Aviv University Law School, protesting his decision to hire retiring IDF Col. Pnina Baruch-Sharvit as an international law lecturer. Baruch-Sharvit was just ending her tour of duty as the commander of the IDF's International Law Division.

Ganz charged that Baruch-Sharvit had committed war crimes by giving legal authorization to IDF forces to carry out missions in Gaza, and that her presence on the law faculty was an insult to the humanitarian values of the university.

Ganz's allegations were patently absurd and libelous. But Ha'aretz was only too happy to give them credence and publish an editorial calling for her contract to be cancelled. In the end, after Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert defended her, Dagan stood by his decision to bring her onto the faculty.

The damage, however, was done. First, Ganz and Ha'aretz gave an Israeli face to the anti-Israel activists claiming that our soldiers and officers are war criminals. And second, their assault on Baruch-Sharvit will be in the minds of other IDF lawyers planning a post-military career. They will now think twice before giving legal approval to clearly legal military missions knowing they are liable to be blacklisted for defending the country.

If the storm over Baruch-Sharvit was the opening salvo, the first major media assault on the IDF came on Thursday. Here too, the campaign was a coproduction of a far-left political activist and far-left reporters.

The Yitzhak Rabin pre-military academy in Jaffa is run by the kibbutz movement. It is the only pre-military academy that is openly and avowedly leftist. Its founder and director Danny Zamir was jailed in 1990 for refusing to serve in Nablus during the height of the Palestinian uprising. In 2004 he allowed his 1990 manifesto calling for soldiers to refuse orders to be reprinted in a book Refusnik: Israel's Soldiers of Conscience which was published with a forward by Susan Sontag and a recommendation by Noam Chomsky.

In its year-long program, Rabin academy cadets are subjected to post-Zionist political philosophy that according to sources familiar with the institution indoctrinates them to believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state. In a recent conference the academy co-hosted with the Druse pre-army military academy, the Druse soldiers expressed their amazement that while they identified themselves with Israel and Zionism, their Jewish counterparts at the Rabin academy were avowedly anti-Israel.

Last month Zamir organized a conference of his former cadets who are now serving in IDF combat units. There, he encouraged these young soldiers to tell him and their war stories. In what can only be compared to a Communist group confessional, Zamir told Channel 10 that young soldiers were encouraged to view their actions in Gaza as immoral. A number of them accepted the terms of debate and described purportedly immoral acts they alleged were carried out in Gaza. In most cases, Zamir's soldiers acknowledged that they were not present on the scenes in the events they described. These included killing Palestinian women and children who entered fire zones and behaving in an unfriendly manner to Palestinian civilians whose homes the soldiers commandeered during the operation. Others characterized ethical, legal standing orders - such as the requirement for soldiers to value their lives and the lives of their comrades more highly than the lives of terror suspects - as immoral or illegal.

Zamir claims that he took these non-eyewitness accounts to the IDF and asked that they be investigated. Since he refused to provide the names of the soldiers involved in the alleged incidents and his eyewitness accounts were from soldiers who had not witnessed the accounts, the IDF officers he spoke with said they would have a hard time investigating.

UNHAPPY WITH THIS response, Zamir published the unsubstantiated accounts in his school's bulletin and gave the bulletin to two far-left reporters - Ofer Shelach from Channel 10 and Amos Harel from Ha'aretz.

In an act of unmitigated journalistic malpractice, on Friday night Shelach presented the unattributed testimonials as first-person accounts. He used actors to read out the soldiers' statements as if they were the soldiers themselves, and never told his audience that the voices they were hearing were not the voices of the actual soldiers. Then, he attacked the IDF for refusing to take these accounts seriously and for having the nerve to note that the Rabin pre-military academy is a known leftist institution. He of course didn't mention that Zamir himself served a prison sentence for refusing orders or that as recently as 2004 he contributed to a book explaining why the IDF is an immoral army.

As for Harel, he published the soldiers' statements in Ha'aretz. He then wrote an "analysis" arguing that the IDF cannot discount the statements by these anonymous voices because, in his view, the soldiers have "no reason" to lie. The fact that they present no evidence of their claims is apparently of no importance.

Now by presenting these second hand accounts of battles as fact; by presenting Zamir as a credible and objective observer; and by instructing the IDF to be ashamed of itself and mend its ways, Shelach and Harel are certainly atoning for their "sin" of supporting the army in Operation Cast Lead. Perhaps for them, that was all this was about.

But the consequences of their actions will be devastating for both the IDF and for the country. Just as Ha'aretz's campaign against Baruch-Sharvit will frighten other military lawyers called upon to assess the legality of proposed operations into refusing to make decisions, so incidents like this will make commanders in the field think twice before they tell their soldiers to protect themselves. That is, they will make the IDF a far less effective fighting force.

Internationally, Shelach's and Harel's unattributed and unsubstantiated reports will serve to legitimize the West's move towards Hamas. Already, thousands of news reports parroting theirs have been published throughout the world. And why not? What could be more damning than Israeli press reports citing Israeli soldiers? If these are the people Hamas is fighting, no wonder it wishes to destroy Israel.

Aside from the aid and comfort their reports provide to Western politicians keen to have their pictures taken with Khaled Mashaal, Shelach's and Harel's reports also place every IDF soldier and commander travelling to Europe at risk of arrest and indictment and trial on imaginary war crimes charges before the kangaroo courts springing up all over the continent. No doubt, for their efforts, Shelach and Harel can count on receiving front row tickets to the first star chamber. Lucky them.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

Sorry all, the server for the website was down for nearly four days this week. My webmaster assures me that all's well now. Thanks for bearing with me and to all of you who emailed to make sure that I'm alright, not only am I alright, I am touched by your concern!

Sorry all, the server for the website was down for nearly four days this week. My webmaster assures me that all's well now. Thanks for bearing with me and to all of you who emailed to make sure that I'm alright, not only am I alright, I am touched by your concern!

I

Column One: Hamas's free lunch

Today Hamas stands on the cusp of international acceptance. It may take a week or a month or a year, but today Hamas stands where Fatah and the PLO stood in the late 1980s. The genocidal jihadist terror group is but a step away from an invitation to the Oval Office. Two events in the past week show this to be the case.

First, last Saturday, The Boston Globe reported that Paul Volcker, who serves as President Barack Obama's economic recovery adviser, and several former senior US officials have written a letter to Obama calling for the US to recognize Hamas. As one of the signatories, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser under president George H.W. Bush, explained, "I see no reason not to talk to Hamas."

Scowcroft further argued, "The main gist is that you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process. Don't move it to end of your agenda and say you have too much to do. And the US needs to have a position, not just hold their coats while they sit down."

Congressional sources claim that Obama has selected Scowcroft to replace Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

The second reason that it is becoming apparent that the Obama administration is poised to recognize Hamas is that on Thursday, Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman held talks at the State Department with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and enjoined the administration to support the reestablishment of a Hamas-Fatah unity government to control and reunify the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

This is significant because it is becoming apparent that top administration officials only meet with people who tell them what they want to hear.

Case in point is IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi's trip this week to Washington. Ashkenazi went to the US to brief top administration officials on Iran's progress toward a nuclear bomb. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Ashkenazi's counterpart, Adm. Michael Mullen, both managed to be out of town. Defense Ministry sources say that Ashkenazi only met with National Security Adviser James Jones, who reportedly wished to speak exclusively about the Palestinians, and with Clinton's Iran adviser Dennis Ross, whose role in shaping US policy toward Iran remains unclear.

Hamas, for its part, prefers the unconditional recognition recommended by Scowcroft and Volcker and their colleagues, (who include unofficial Obama advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Lee Hamilton), over the option of forming a government with Fatah. After all, why should Hamas agree to share power with Fatah to gain international acceptance if Washington power brokers close to the administration endorse unconditional recognition of the terror group?

Scowcroft's statement that recognition of Hamas is necessary because "you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process" is indicative of how Obama's milieu views the peace process. For them, pushing hard on the peace process is more important than determining or even caring if the Palestinians involved in the said process are genocidal terror groups or not, or determining or even caring whether the said peace process has any chance whatsoever of leading to peace.

AND THE Obama view is not particularly new. After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, in the interest of the peace process, the US and the EU placed certain conditions on Hamas which they claimed it would have to meet before the West would recognize it.

The US and Europe said they would recognize Hamas if it announced that it forswore terror, accepted Israel's right to exist, and committed itself to carrying out previous agreements signed between the PLO and Israel. The Americans and the Europeans undoubtedly viewed these conditions as a low bar to cross. After all, the PLO crossed it.

The West's conditions were given with a wink and a nod. Everyone understood that the only thing it wanted was for Hamas to say the magic words. They didn't have to be true. If Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh would just tell the US and Europe what they wanted to hear, all would be forgiven. Hamas - like the PLO before it - would be removed from the US and European terror lists. Billions would pour into the bank accounts of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Damascus. The CIA might even agree to train its terror forces.

It is obvious that all that the West wanted was for Hamas to lie to it, because that is all it ever required from the PLO. After Yasser Arafat said the magic words, the Americans and the Europeans were only too happy to ignore the fact that he was lying.

When immediately after signing the initial peace accord with Israel on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, Arafat flew to South Africa and gave a speech calling for jihad against Israel, no one cared.

When Arafat destroyed the free press in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and transformed the Palestinian media into propaganda organs calling for the eradication of Israel and the Jewish people, the world yawned.

When he launched his terror war against Israel and his US-trained forces began plotting and carrying out bombings of Israeli civilians, the US announced its chief goal in the Middle East was to establish a Palestinian state.

And when Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, announced that Fatah didn't accept Israel's right to exist and considered terrorism against Israel legitimate, he was declared the indispensable and sole legitimate Palestinian leader. Indeed, when his US-trained forces surrendered to Hamas in Gaza without a fight, the US showered an additional $80 million on Fatah forces.

ON TUESDAY, Fatah strongman and the West's favorite son of Palestine Muhammad Dahlan tried to explain the facts of life to Hamas.

In an interview on PA television, Dahlan became the first senior Fatah official to openly admit that Fatah has never accepted Israel's right to exist. Dahlan denied reports that in the negotiations toward a Hamas-Fatah government, Fatah representatives are pressuring Hamas to recognize Israel. In his words, "I want to say in my own name and in the name of all my fellow members of the Fatah movement, we are not asking Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist. Rather, we are asking Hamas not to do so because Fatah never recognized Israel's right to exist."

Dahlan went on to explain how the fiction worked. Arafat was the head of the PLO but also the head of Fatah. While as chairman of the PLO he recognized Israel and pledged to end terrorism and live at peace with the Jewish state, as head of Fatah he continued his war against Israel. Dahlan even bragged that to date, Fatah has killed 10 times more Palestinians suspected of cooperating with Israel's counterterror operations (the same operations the PLO committed to assisting) than Hamas has.

Dahlan explained that all Hamas needs to do is to follow in Fatah's footsteps. It should say that the PA government accepts the West's terms, but in the meantime, those terms will remain inapplicable to Hamas as a "resistance group." In that way, Dahlan explained, Hamas will be able to receive all the West's billions in financial assistance.

As he put it, "Do you imagine that Gaza's reconstruction is possible under the shadow of this bickering between us and the international community? [Gaza reconstruction] can only be dealt with by a government... that is acceptable to the international community so that we can... benefit from the international community."

Not surprisingly, Dahlan's statement went almost completely unnoted. Only The Jerusalem Post and one or two other Jewish publications and a few anti-jihadist blogs made note of it. The US, European and pro-peace process Hebrew media all ignored it. No government spokesman anywhere in the world commented on it.

Unfortunately, though, for the likes of Dahlan and his admirers in the West, Hamas isn't interested in joining Fatah's fiction. It refuses to say those magic words. So now the West looks for ways to lower its bar still further.

THE WEST'S nonresponse to Dahlan's statements, like its growing eagerness to treat with Hamas despite Hamas's unabashed refusal to even lie about its intentions, tells us something important about what the West is actually doing when it says that its paramount interest is to advance the so-called peace process. It tells us the same thing that the West's courtship of Damascus and Teheran tells us about what the West means when it speaks of peace processes.

Syrian President Bashar Assad this week told Italy's La Repubblica newspaper that he and outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were just a stone's throw away from a peace deal last year. Last week Assad participated in what was supposed to be an anti-Iranian conference in Saudi Arabia.

Both of Assad's gestures were meant to make the Americans feel comfortable as they renew their diplomatic relations with Syria, cast aside their backing for the UN tribunal set up to investigate Syria's assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, begin pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights, and recognize Hamas.

And just as Arafat understood that after he said the magic words the West would ignore his bad behavior, so Assad knew that Washington and Paris would pay no attention when upon returning from Riyadh he announced that Syria's relations with Iran will never be weakened. He knew they will never question his false account of his indirect negotiations with Israel. He and Olmert couldn't have been a stone's throw away from a peace accord, because Assad refused to have any direct contact with Israel.

If Damascus is the state equivalent of the PLO, then Teheran is the state equivalent of Hamas. Today, as the mullahs sprint toward the nuclear finish line, the Obama administration is pretending that the jury is still out on whether or not the Islamic republic wants a nuclear arsenal. As with Hamas, so with Teheran, the Americans have dropped even the pretense of requiring a change in Iran's rhetorical positions as a precondition for diplomatic recognition. The US now pursues its diplomatic reconciliation with Teheran with the sure knowledge that this peace process will lead to Iran's emergence as a nuclear power.

So the question is, if the American and European pursuits of peace with Fatah, Hamas, Syria and Iran have not caused them to change their behavior one iota, what are the Western powers talking about when they say that it is imperative to push the peace process or engage the Syrians and the Iranians? After all, Western leaders must know that these processes are complete farces.

Sadly, the answer is clear. Western leaders are not pursuing peace in these processes. They are pursuing appeasement. They call this appeasement process a peace process for two reasons. First, they know their countrymen don't like the sound of appeasement. And second, by claiming to be championing the noble goal of peace in our time, they feel free to attack anyone who points out the folly of their actions as a warmongering member of the Israel Lobby.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

A balance of delusion exists in Israeli politics between Left and Right. On the Left, we have leaders who, when given the facts about strategic options, decide they don't like the facts and make new ones up that suit them better. And on the Right, we have leaders who, when given the facts about their political options, decide they don't like the facts and make up new ones that suit them better.

The Left's latest fantasy is its enthusiasm for a deal with Hamas that would free Gilad Schalit. By Tuesday night, Israelis should know whether or not our outgoing leftist government will agree to release between 450 and 1,000 Palestinian terrorists - including mass murderers serving multiple life sentences - in exchange for Schalit whom Hamas and it sister terror groups have held hostage since June 2006.

Schalit's plight presents two stark choices. We can surrender to all of Hamas's demands and reunite Schalit with his suffering family, or we can keep a stiff upper lip, refuse to negotiate with terrorists and wait until we receive actionable intelligence on his whereabouts and attempt to rescue him. We know what will happen in both cases.

If we surrender to Hamas's demands, we will ensure more families will suffer the same plight as Gilad Schalit's family. We know that this will happen because we have been through this process repeatedly. Every single time we have released terrorists for hostages, the result has been more murdered Israelis and more hostages. As before, the only thing we still don't know is the names of the next victims. They could be any of us. And so, in a very real sense, they are all of us.

If on the other hand the outgoing government opted for the stiff upper lip approach, we know that we would increase the chance that Schalit will be murdered. Hamas can kill him at any time. And in the event that the IDF stages a rescue raid, there is a good chance that both Schalit and his rescuers will return to their families in wooden boxes. Then again, we also know that by not negotiating with terrorists, and by keeping jailed terrorists in prison, we stand a better chance of protecting the lives of the rest of us.

Both choices, of course, are miserable ones. But they are the only choices. We can surrender or we can fight. There is no third option.

In keeping though with the Left's penchant for dreaming up imaginary choices, the Kadima-Labor government decided to negotiate Schalit's release with Hamas, but to pretend that in doing so, it is doing something other than surrendering. Rather than admit that by agreeing to release hundreds of murderers from jail he is placing every single family in the country at risk, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert describes his urgent pleadings to Hamas as a noble gesture towards the Schalit family, a gesture which supposedly gives expression to Judaism's commitment to Jewish captives. That is, he has moved the discussion of the terrorist release from the realm of reality to the realm of metaphysics.

Much to his discredit, Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to criticize the outgoing government's surrender to Hamas. There is some justification for his silence. The media is so adamant about moving forward with the release of mass murderers that were he to speak out, he would set the media against him even before he is sworn in to office. But then again, the overwhelmingly leftist media will treat Netanyahu with hostility regardless of what he does. So it seems unreasonable that he has maintained his silence on this issue.

THE ONE POLITICIAN who has been outspoken in opposing the mass release of terrorists has been MK Ya'acov (Ketzeleh) Katz, the leader of the National Union party. Together with the families of terror victims who oppose the government's intention to release their relatives' murderers, Katz has been the loudest voice in politics stridently opposing the deal. He has made clear that it will endanger the country and guarantee the murder and abduction of still more Israelis.

Katz and the National Union have it right on this issue. Indeed, they have it right on just about every major strategic issue they have championed. From their opposition to the failed Oslo process to their opposition to the failed Camp David summit, from their opposition to the withdrawal from south Lebanon and Gaza to their opposition to the failed road map peace process and the failed Annapolis peace process, the National Union has been right all along. It has always stayed true to its principles.

One might think that given the National Union's consistent track record that it would be the largest party in the Knesset. Surely voters would reward it for its wisdom. But one of course would be wrong.

The National Union received four seats in the Knesset. Its sister party, Habayit Hayehudi won three mandates. The two parties ran separately despite their ideological and cultural affinity because their members simply couldn't get along. They couldn't compromise on who would appear where on the party list.

And this is the beginning of the story.

FOR ALL of its strategic wisdom and clearheadedness, the National Union is a political home for delusional politicians. In all of its various incarnations - from Tehiya to Herut to Moledet to the National Union - the party has never been able to understand what it means to govern. It has never been able to recognize that politics is the art of compromise.

In 1992, angry that Likud under prime minister Yitzhak Shamir bowed to US pressure and participated in the Madrid peace conference, Tehiya brought down his government. In so doing, it brought in Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and brought the country the Oslo process and Yasser Arafat in Ramallah.

In 1999, angry at Netanyahu for bowing to US pressure and agreeing to the Wye Plantation accords, the National Union brought down his government. In so doing, it brought in Ehud Barak and Yossi Beilin, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the Camp David summit.

In all, the total of Israelis who have been killed due to Oslo, the withdrawal from Lebanon and the Palestinian terror war which followed Camp David comes to around 2,000. The country's weakened position today in the US and Europe as well as in the Arab world, would have been inconceivable in 1992.

In both 1992 and 1999, the National Union and its predecessors were faced with two choices. They could remain ideologically pure by bringing down their own government and so risk empowering the Left, or they could recognize that governance is the art of compromise, keep a stiff upper lip and work from within the government to mitigate the strategic damage that in their view Shamir and Netanyahu caused by bowing to American pressure.

And in both cases, the National Union rejected its real choices in favor of an imaginary one. Both in 1992 and 1999 it chose to leave the government while pretending that there was no difference between Likud and Labor. By choosing this route, it effectively committed itself to strategic as well as political blindness since it was forced to claim - wrongly - that there was no difference between Madrid and Oslo or between Wye Plantation and Camp David.

Last Friday it was disclosed that on Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu had reopened coalition talks with Kadima leader Tzipi Livni. Those talks had ended weeks ago after Livni demanded that Netanyahu agree to share the premiership with her through a rotation agreement, give her full control over strategy for dealing with the Palestinians and adopt the establishment of a Palestinian state as the primary goal of his government. All of Livni's demands were nonnegotiable and all of them, both separately and together, were unacceptable for Netanyahu. And so, he rejected them and for the past two and a half weeks has been concentrating his efforts on building a governing coalition with the right wing and religious parties.

AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN's Israel Beiteinu with its 15 Knesset seats is set to be Likud's main coalition partner. Lieberman has been the most outspoken champion of a Likud-Kadima-Israel Beiteinu coalition. This makes sense from his perspective. Lieberman is viewed both by the West and by much of the country's leftist elite as a racist. Due both to his legal worries and to the fact that his actual policy preferences of surrendering the Galilee and the Negev to the Arabs are far left of center, Lieberman cares deeply about what the Left thinks of him. In his view, the only way to be accepted as legitimate in leftist circles is to compel Likud to move to the left by bringing Kadima into the government.

In part to satisfy Lieberman - without whom he cannot form a government - and in part because he remembers that it was the National Union which brought down his government 10 years ago, Netanyahu began his coalition building talks with Kadima. They collapsed only because Livni made demands that he could not meet.

In the current round of talks, Livni has reportedly maintained her demands, but now Netanyahu is reportedly accepting them - at least partially. The question that needs to be asked is what has changed in three weeks? Why has Netanyahu decided that Livni's previously unacceptable demands are now acceptable? The only reasonable answer is the National Union. Last week Katz scuttled negotiations with Likud because it refused his demand for the Construction and Housing Ministry. On Thursday, he joined hands with Habayit Hayehudi chairman MK Daniel Herschkowitz and announced that neither of the two parties would join Netanyahu's government if he doesn't meet all of their demands, including the Ministry of Education for Herschkowitz. Without the two parties, Netanyahu lacks a parliamentary majority.

It is possible that Katz and Herschkowitz are bluffing. In fact, it is likely that they are. But what their behavior shows clearly is that Netanyahu is correct when he says that a coalition that relies on them is inherently unstable. And so, he has moved back into Kadima's orbit.

If the Olmert-Livni-Barak government goes ahead with its plans to spring hundreds of mass murderers from prison in its last days in office, the threat they will unleash will just be added to the long list of serious threats that our strategically delusional leftist government has created and expanded during its tenure in office. It would be the height of irony - and tragedy - if due to the Right's proven political incompetence, the same political Left remains in power as the main partners in the Netanyahu government and so is given yet another opportunity to ruin the country.

Correction: In my Friday column, "Intelligence and the anti-Israel lobby" I misidentified Douglas Jehl as a Washington Post editor. Jehl is an editor at The New York Times.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Ill winds are blowing out of Washington these days. On Thursday, The Washington Post headline blared, "Intelligence Pick Blames 'Israel Lobby' for Withdrawal."

The article, by Walter Pincus, described how former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles "Chas" Freeman is blaming Israel's Jewish American supporters for his resignation Tuesday from his post as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In a diatribe published on Foreign Policy's Web site on Wednesday, Freeman accused the alleged "Israel Lobby" of torpedoing his appointment. In his words, "The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency... The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views... and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors."

He continued, "I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the State of Israel. It is not permitted for anyone in the United States to say so. This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."

The Washington Post's article quoted liberally from Freeman's diatribe. It also identified the Jewish Americans who wrote against Freeman's appointment, and insinuated that AIPAC - which took no stand on his appointment - actually worked behind the scenes to undermine it.

While it described in lurid detail how one anti-Freeman Jewish blogger quoted other anti-Freeman Jewish bloggers on his Web site, Pincus's article failed to report what it was about Freeman that caused the Jewish cabal to criticize his appointment. Consequently, by default, Pincus effectively endorsed Freeman's diatribe against the all-powerful "Israel Lobby."

Pincus's reportorial malpractice wouldn't have been so problematic if his article had just been one of many articles in the Washington Post about Freeman's appointment. But, like The New York Times, the first mention the Washington Post made of the story was on Tuesday, after Freeman announced his resignation.

The Washington Post's news editor, Douglas Jehl, admitted that a conscious decision had been made to ignore the story. In an e-mail published in the Weekly Standard Jehl wrote, "We did initially elect not to write a story about the campaign against Mr. Freeman."

As the Standard's Stephen Hayes notes, Jehl's statement is notable because it shows that he and colleagues never considered whether Freeman's record was newsworthy in and of itself. That is, they never asked whether the controversy surrounding it was justified. Had they asked that question, perhaps they would have reconsidered their decision to ignore the story.

Freeman was a career US diplomat until his retirement in the mid-1990s. He served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Bush administration. In his memoirs, former secretary of state James Baker claimed that in that position, Freeman was afflicted by "clientitis." Instead of advancing US interests with the Saudis, Freeman championed Saudi interests to the US government.

In 1997, Freeman became president of the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council. There Freeman continued his outspoken support for Saudi positions against the US. In January 2009, for instance, he praised Saudi King Abdullah for coercing the second Bush administration into supporting Palestinian statehood.

Freeman castigated the Bush administration as "the world's first genuinely autistic government." Then he bragged that it was only due to Abdullah's "threat... to downgrade relations with the United States," that the administration finally announced its support for Palestinian statehood.

According to financial records made public in recent weeks, the Middle East Policy Council has received millions of dollars from the Saudi government and royal family over the past several years.

Saudi Arabia is not the only country with interests and values that conflict with US interests and values that Freeman has championed and earned a living from. Until accepting his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Freeman was a paid member of the Chinese government-owned China National Offshore Oil Company's international advisory board. CNOOC has been the target of a US Treasury probe due to its multi-billion dollar contract with Iran to develop the South Pars gas field.

As with the case of Saudi Arabia, Freeman's political sympathies go hand in hand with his financial ties. In a list-serve e-mail in 2006, Freeman criticized the Beijing Politburo for being too lax with the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. As he put it, "the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud."

As Martin Cramer, Steven Rosen and other Jewish writers have noted in their reporting on Freeman in recent weeks, Freeman's positions on Israel closely mirror the Saudi Foreign Ministry's positions. So it is that in 2006, for instance, Freeman blamed US ties with Israel for the September 11, 2001, attacks. As he put it, "We have paid heavily and often in treasure for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago, we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home."

Then, too, like the Saudi government, Freeman argues that Arab terrorism against the US is solely a consequence of US support for Israel. Were the US to abandon its alliance with Israel, all Arab terror against the US would stop.

DESPITE PINCUS'S attempt to hide it, the main reason Freeman's appointment was controversial was not the opposition it garnered among pro-Israel American Jews. The main controversy surrounding his appointment as the Obama administration's top intelligence analyst revolved around his financial and political ties to potential and actual US adversaries.

Indeed, according to Newsweek, it was these connections - and specifically Freeman's ties to the Chinese Politburo - that scuppered his appointment. According to Newsweek, the White House withdrew its support for Freeman because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was angered by his support for Beijing's repression of Chinese democracy activists, which she described as "beyond the pale." Freeman's animus towards Israel apparently played no role in the White House's decision to show him the door.

Whatever the reason for his resignation, it is a good thing that Freeman was forced to resign. It is a very good thing that the man writing the US's National Intelligence Estimates and briefing the president on intelligence matters is not a hired gun for the Saudi and Chinese governments who believes that Jewish Americans have no right to participate in public debate about US foreign policy. But while his appointment was foiled, the fact that a man like Freeman was even considered for the post tells us two deeply disturbing things about the climate in Washington these days.

First and foremost, Freeman's appointment gives us disconcerting information about how the Obama administration intends to relate to intelligence. Freeman was appointed by Adm. Dennis Blair, President Barack Obama's director of national intelligence. Blair stood by Freeman's appointment even after information became known about his financial ties to foreign governments and his extreme views on Israel and American Jews were exposed. Blair repeatedly extolled Freeman for his willingness to stake out unpopular positions.

On Tuesday, Blair appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. There he answered questions about Freeman and about Iran's nuclear weapons program. Just as he defended Freeman, so Blair defended the Islamic Republic. He claimed that there is no way to infer from Iran's satellite program that it is expanding the range of its ballistic missiles. He claimed that just because Iran is enriching uranium, there is no reason to believe that the mullahs are interested in building a bomb. That is, America's top intelligence officer is willing to take Iran's word on everything.

On the other hand, he isn't willing to take Israel's word on anything. Although he acknowledged that his nonchalant assessment of Iran was based on the same information as Israel's dire assessment of Iran, Blair scoffed at Israel's views, claiming that they are colored by the Jewish state's fears. In his words, "The Israelis are far more concerned about it, and they take more of a worst-case approach to these things from their point of view."

What Blair's staunch championing of Freeman's appointment and his casualness regarding Iran's nuclear program indicates is that like Freeman, he assumes the best of America's adversaries and the worst of its friends. This approach to intelligence analysis will be destructive not just for the US's relations with its allies, but for America's own national security.

THE SECOND disturbing development exposed by Freeman's appointment is the emergence of a very committed and powerful anti-Israel lobby in Washington. In the past, while anti-Israel politicians, policy-makers and opinion-shapers were accepted in Washington, they would not have felt comfortable brandishing their anti-Israel positions as a qualifying credential for high position. Freeman's appointment shows that this is no longer the case. Today in Washington, there are powerful circles of political players for whom a person's anti-Israel bona fides are his strongest suit.

In the weeks since Freeman's appointment first came under scrutiny, his defenders have highlighted his hatred of Israel as the reason for their support for him. Just as Pincus's post-mortem write-up of Freeman's appointment and resignation barely mentioned his ties to Saudi Arabia and China, and focused on Jews who opposed his appointment, so in recent weeks, his defenders - both non-Jewish and Jewish - have highlighted his hatred of Israel and its American supporters as the primary reason for defending it. The likes of Steven Walt, M.J. Rosenberg and Matthew Iglesias didn't try to explain why Freeman was right to support the suppression of freedom in China. They didn't support his claim that the Saudi king is among the most profound and thoughtful leaders in the world. They didn't repeat his assertion that the US had the September 11 attacks coming to it.

They felt that the fact that he raised the hackles of Americans who support Israel was reason enough to support him. Whether his views on other issues are reasonable or not was of no interest to them.

From September 11, to Russia's invasion of Georgia, from Hamas's victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections to the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that claimed Iran ended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, it is clear that in recent years, the US intelligence community has regularly substituted wishful thinking for true analysis. Freeman's appointment and the emergence of the anti-Israel lobby as a major force in Washington policy circles show that turning the US away from Israel has become a key component of that wishful thinking.

But, as they say in the world of intelligence, forewarned is forearmed.

In an interview with Teheran Times two weeks ago, Norman Finklestein, the notorious Hizbullah and Hamas supporter and all-purpose anti-Semite, called Israel a "vandal state," and "insane state," a "terrorist state," and a "satanic state."

Last week Finklestein was the keynote speaker at both Emory University and Fordham University during their weeklong annual anti-Israel hate festivals. Speaking to a cheering crowd at a packed auditorium on Emory's Atlanta campus, Finklestein claimed that Israel conducted its recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza for two reasons. These did not include Hamas's deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians, Hamas's alliance with Iran, its charter that calls for the physical eradication of the Jewish people, its illegal imprisonment of Israeli hostage Gilad Schalit, or its decision to renew its attacks against Israel after a six month period of relative restraint.

In Finklestein's view, the first reason Israel launched Operation Cast Lead was because Hamas had begun expressing interest in peace. In his words, "Hamas were being too moderate, too reasonable. They wanted a diplomatic settlement to the conflict. To Israel, this is a recurring nightmare."

The second reason that Finklestein alleged that Israel launched its offensive was because, well, Israel is just plain mean. As he put it, the operation was Israel's way of "reminding the Arabs who were [sic.] in charge." It was an attempt to "restore the Arab world's fear of Israel."

Finklestein cited an unnamed "chief military analyst" to support his claim that Israel conducted a "massacre" in Gaza and did so with malice of forethought.

According to Emory's student paper, for his libelous, wholly fallacious remarks, Finklestein received a prolonged standing ovation.

In 40 university campuses throughout the US and Canada as well as in Europe and South America, last week students marked what Palestinian terror apologists have dubbed "Israel Apartheid Week." This was the seventh such week in the US, and the fifth in Canada.

In the lead up to this annual Israel vilification week, pro-Israel students were physically assaulted at San Francisco State University and at York University in Canada by their anti-Israel counterparts. In both cases, university officials opened disciplinary proceedings against the pro-Israel students.

At SFSU, two students were arrested by police for assaulting college Republicans who held an anti-Hamas rally. The two - from the campus's Palestinian student club and its Socialist union - now insist not only that the charges against them be dropped, but that the university re-educate its students to ensure that they understand that criticizing Hamas and other genocidal terror groups is a form of prohibited hate-speech.

THE LIBELOUS assertion that Israel - the only free, pluralistic, liberal democracy in the Middle East - is analogous to apartheid South Africa first took hold at the 2001 UN-sponsored anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom at Durban, South Africa. In the action plan approved by the various non-governmental organizations that participated in the conference, activists were called on to bring about the international demonization of Israel as a racist state, and of Zionism - the Jewish national liberation movement - as a form of racism.

When Israel Apartheid Week was launched the next year, many local Jewish student and community activists in the US and Canada demanded that university authorities ban the clearly bigoted event from their campuses. To their chagrin, university presidents and administrators would do no such thing. Claiming that doing so would restrict academic freedom, the propaganda war against the Jewish state went forward and grew. And, in its wake, the freedom of pro-Israel students on college campuses throughout the West has become increasingly constricted and threatened.

Both through formal speech codes barring criticism of anti-Israel propaganda and violence, and through academic and physical intimidation of pro-Israel students by an increasingly vocal and aggressive coalition of pro-Palestinian professors, Muslim and leftist students, Israel's supporters on university campuses find themselves under assault. Today, seven years after the Durban Conference, Israel Apartheid Week has become a mainstay on the academic calendar, nearly as taken for granted as Homecoming Week and mid-terms.

The use of the term "apartheid" to describe Israel was a deliberate move on the part of Israel's enemies. It was aimed at neutralizing the capacity of Israel's supporters to defend the Jewish state and attack its enemies. Case in point is the campus debate which preceded Israel Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto. The student paper published two topical opinion pieces on the upcoming events. One asserted that Israel is an apartheid regime. The other argued that Israel isn't an apartheid regime.

On the surface, this seems fair enough. But it is nothing of the sort. Israel is the only free country and free society in the region. Pinning its defenders down by confining discussion of the region to the pros and cons of a complete lie serves to only obfuscate the depravity of Israel's enemies, not to enlighten the public about Israel.

While Israel provides the full rights of citizenship to its Arab minority, Jews are denied the rights of citizenship in every Arab League member state, and the Palestinians' fundamental demand is that no Jew be permitted to live in a future Palestinian state.

Then too, while Israeli women enjoy full equality under the law, women and girls in the Arab and Muslim world are systematically subjugated and enslaved. Muslim men who wantonly murder their wives, sisters, mothers and daughters can expect to receive little to no punishment for their crimes. The same holds for men who abuse their female relations. For their part, women in the Muslim world have either no legal rights to citizenship and civil rights or those rights are severely limited.

Gays, blacks, migrant workers, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists are systematically persecuted for their sexual preferences, their skin color and their religious beliefs. Even dogs feel the wrath of these societies where, since they are considered "unclean," children and adults alike routinely engage in their torture and killing.

But under the full protection of self-described liberal university professors, administrators and presidents, and due to the indifference of groups like the World Council of Churches, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization of Women, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, anti-Israel propagandists have been allowed to co-opt the language of liberty to advance the political fortunes of terrorists who aim to destroy liberty.

THE ACTIVE and passive support conferred on anti-Israel leftists and Muslims by these officials and groups has provided them with the ideological cover to take their activism to the next level: anti-Jewish violence aimed at intimidating states, universities, businesses and private organizations into cutting off all ties to Israel. Evidence of the success of this campaign is rife throughout Europe today.

In just one notable instance, for the past week Israeli tennis players, Amir Haddad and Andy Ram have been suffering the consequences of the Left's collusion with these anti-Jewish groups in Sweden. Haddad and Ram competed in the Davis Cup tennis championships in Malmo, Sweden.

In an article in Yediot Ahronot on Sunday, Ram wrote, "In my entire athletic career, I have never before experienced such hatred and such a mixing of sports with politics."

In spite of repeated entreaties by Israel, Swedish authorities refused to move the games from Malmo to Stockholm. With its enormous Muslim population, in recent years Malmo has been the site of some of the worst Islamic violence against non-Muslims - and particularly Jews, women and girls - in the Western world.

Due to threats of violence against Ram and Haddad, Swedish authorities barred fans from attending their tennis matches. As they played their opening match in an empty stadium on Saturday, thousands of violent Muslims and leftists rioted against police and attempted to break down the barriers protecting the stadium with the stated aim of killing Ram and Haddad.

The protesters claim that their desire to murder Israeli tennis players is due to Operation Cast Lead. But this is pure propaganda. Their desire to murder Ram and Haddad stems not from Israel's military actions to defend its citizens from murder, but from the protesters' hatred of the Jewish state. And that hatred stems from the same source as their misogyny, their hatred of the US and their support for the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A 2005 Swedish government report indicated that in 2004, incidents of rape had increased 50 percent throughout the country. A Malmo police report noted that 68 percent of the rapists were minorities. As Islamic scholar Robert Spencer has noted, Islamic teaching views rape as a legitimate act against women and girls who behave in "non-Islamic" ways. In much of Scandinavia as well as in Muslim neighborhoods in France, women have begun wearing veils in order to protect themselves against roving gangs of Muslim young men.

The defilement of women and girls, like gay bashing, has nothing to do with IDF operations in Gaza. It has to do with the pathological nature of the cultures that condone and encourage the violence, and the Western governments and intellectuals who make excuses for it.

ALL OF THIS is hidden away from the public thanks to Western liberals' willingness to accept the legitimacy of events like Israel Apartheid Week. Due to the complicity of leftist authorities, the international discourse about the Arab and Islamic world and the cultures they have produced is diverted to false allegations against Israel.

Any attempt to point out that Hamas is genocidal; that Iran stones women to death, and systematically executes homosexuals; that Saudi Arabia is the most repressive society on the planet; that Egypt permits and indeed encourages female genital mutilation; that Jordan does not prosecute fathers, sons, husbands and uncles who murder their female relatives; is attacked and delegitimized. Those who raise these issues are accused of hating Muslims and of being secret Zionist agents.

So too, Islamic violence in the West is swept under the rug. For example, to date, no mainstream US media organ has reported that in Buffalo, New York Muzzamil Hassan decapitated his wife Aasiya on February 12 after he stabbed her to death. Just a few years earlier that same mainstream media had embraced this murderer as a paragon of Islamic moderation after he established Bridges TV network, which was supposed to show the American public how moderate Islam is.

For some reason, the same media don't consider it noteworthy that their moderate Muslim poster boy chopped off his wife's head a week after she filed for divorce. Certainly, no connection can be drawn between her ritual slaughter and Islam.

Sunday was International Women's Day. Throughout the West, feminists spent the day congratulating themselves for their great sacrifices for women's rights.

Last Wednesday Saudi authorities arrested a woman for driving. Her arrest drew no protest from her Western sisters. Obviously, they were too busy defending Finklestein's freedom to disseminate lies about Israeli women to ignorant college kids to care.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Compare and contrast the following three events: At the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors meeting on Wednesday, George Schulte, the US ambassador to the IAEA, pointed an accusatory finger at Syria. Damascus, Schulte said, has not come clean on its nuclear program. That program, of course, was exposed in September 2007 when Israel reportedly destroyed Syria's North Korean-built, Iranian-financed al-Kibar nuclear reactor.

In its report to its Board of Governors, the IAEA stated that in analyzing soil samples from the bombed installation, its inspectors discovered traces of uranium. The nuclear watchdog agency also noted that the Syrians have blocked UN nuclear inspectors from the site and from three other suspected nuclear sites.

Reacting to the IAEA report, Schulte said that it "contributes to the growing evidence of clandestine nuclear activities in Syria."

He added, "We must understand why such [uranium] material - material not previously declared to the IAEA - existed in Syria, and this can only happen if Syria provides the cooperation requested."

On Tuesday, at a press conference in Jerusalem with outgoing Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, visiting US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the Obama administration is sending two senior envoys to Damascus. Their job, as she put it, is to begin "preliminary conversations" on how to jumpstart US-Syrian bilateral ties.

Clinton's statement made good headlines, but she was light on details. On Wednesday, hours after Schulte accused Syria of covering up its illicit nuclear program, US Sen. John Kerry helpfully filled in the blanks about the nature of the Obama administration's overtures to nuclear-proliferating Damascus. In an address before the left-leaning Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute in Washington, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who just returned from a visit to Syria, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, said that the purpose of US overtures to Damascus is to appease Syrian President Bashar Assad.

If in the past, both American and Israeli policy-makers interested in engaging Damascus have made ending Syria's alliance with Iran a central goal of their proposed engagement, Kerry dismissed such an aim as unrealistic. In his words, "We should have no illusions that Syria will immediately end its ties with Iran."

Indeed, as far as Kerry is concerned, Syria's role in these talks is not to actually give the US anything of value. Rather, Syria's role is to take things of value from the US - and of course from Israel.

Kerry proposed that in exchange for Syrian acceptance of the US's offer of friendship and Assad's willingness to negotiate an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights, America should consider "loosening certain sanctions" against Syria. Doing so, he claimed, will also be good for the US economy because it will open new opportunities for US businesses.

ON THE surface, the disparate statements by Schulte, Clinton and Kerry present us with a puzzle. In Geneva, Schulte noted that Syria is a nuclear proliferating rogue state that has refused to cooperate with UN inspectors. And in Jerusalem and Washington, Clinton and Kerry ignored Syria's dangerous actions, and advocated a policy of appeasement.

At the same IAEA Board of Governors meeting this week, the agency reported that Iran has produced more than a thousand kilograms of low enriched uranium - enough to build a bomb after further enrichment. That enrichment can be completed by year's end with Iran's 5,600 centrifuges. Moreover, between the Russian-built, soon-to-be-opened nuclear reactor in Bushehr and the illicit heavy water reactor in Arak, Iran will have the capacity to build plutonium-based bombs within two years.

Commenting on the IAEA's report on Iran, Adm. Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that Iran has enough uranium for a bomb. Seemingly contradicting Mullen, Defense Secretary Robert Gates claimed that there is no reason to worry about all that uranium because Iran won't have a bomb for some time, given that the uranium it possesses is not sufficiently enriched to make a weapon.

For his part, US President Barack Obama is receiving guidance on contending with Iran from former Congressman Lee Hamilton, who co-authored the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report published in December 2006. That report called for the US to coordinate the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq with Iran and Syria - the principal sponsors of both the Shi'ite and Sunni insurgencies in the country. It recommended that the US purchase Syria's good will by pressuring Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to Damascus, and Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to Hamas. It recommended that the US win Iran's trust by accepting it as a nuclear power and pledging not to overthrow the regime.

In an interview last month with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, Hamilton reiterated those recommendations. He claimed that the starting point for US-Iran discussions is for the US to "state our respect for the Iranian people, renounce regime change as an instrument of US policy, seek opportunities for a range of dialogue across a range of issues, and acknowledge Iran's security concerns and its right to civilian nuclear power."

Hamilton assured Ignatius that these recommendations have been adopted by the White House.

ALL OF the above show that there is no contradiction between what the Obama administration understands about Iran and Syria and the policy it has adopted toward them. Specifically, as Schulte's and Mullen's statements make clear, the administration is aware of the dangers that both Iran and Syria constitute to global security. And as Clinton, Kerry, Gates and Hamilton all make clear, the administration's policy for dealing with those dangers is to change the subject and hope the American public won't notice or mind.

To this end, the administration is now asserting that Iran and Syria - the two most active agents of regional instability - share the US's interest in a stable, democratic Iraq. And owing to their sudden devotion to stability, Obama's surrogates tell us the Syrians and Iranians will support the new anti-Syrian and anti-Iranian Iraqi democracy and even protect it after the US withdraws its forces from the country.

Then, too, as both Kerry and Clinton made clear, the administration plans to ignore Syria's support for Iraqi, Palestinian and Lebanese terrorism, its nuclear proliferation activities and its massive ballistic missile arsenal, as well as its strategic alliance with Iran. Rather than confront Syria about its bad behavior, the administration favors a policy based on making believe that in his heart of hearts, Assad is a liberal democrat who aspires to peace, and hope, and change.

But the core of the administration's campaign to ignore Iran's nuclear program - as well as Syria's - is its unrelenting quest for the big payoff: Palestinian statehood.

This week Iran staged yet another "Destroy Israel" conference in Teheran, replete with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's trademark Holocaust denial, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's ritual castigation of the Jewish state as a "cancerous tumor," and the US as a treacherous enemy, and Ali Larijani's threat to attack Israel's suspected nuclear sites. The conference enjoyed a newfound sense of international legitimacy, taking place as it did just after burka-clad Annette Bening's goodwill Hollywood celebrity visit to the mullocracy.

THE GENOCIDAL pageantry in Teheran elicited no significant response from Clinton and Kerry. They had bigger fish to fry. While the administration and its supporters seem to believe that the US has no right to make demands on Iran and Syria, which, they assert, are both just advancing their national interests, for them Israel is a completely different story. As Clinton and Kerry demonstrated this week, the administration and its supporters will not stop making demands on Israel.

Kerry justified Syria's continued alliance with Iran by saying that Syria should be expected to "play both sides of the fence [with the US and Iran] as other nations do when they believe it is in their interests."

But Israel has no right to similarly take what action it deems necessary to secure its interests. In Kerry's view, the time has come for the US to show that it is serious about Palestinian statehood, and the way to do that is to force Israel to block all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria.

In his words, "On the Israeli side, nothing will do more to make clear our seriousness about turning the page than demonstrating - with actions rather than words - that we are serious about Israel freezing settlement activity in the West Bank."

He also called for the US to compel Israel to open its borders with Gaza. And he said that from his perspective, it is unacceptable for the incoming Netanyahu government not to embrace establishing a Palestinian state as its most urgent goal.

Clinton joined Kerry in his efforts to compel the Jewish state to ignore its national interests in the cause of the higher goal of Palestinian statehood. Like him, she attacked Israel for not handing control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. And like Kerry, she stated repeatedly that her greatest goal is to establish a Palestinian state.

Clinton's unique contribution to that great "pro-peace" endeavor this week was her outspoken criticism on Wednesday of the Jerusalem Municipality's decision to enforce the city's building and planning ordinances equally toward both Jews and Arabs. That policy was made clear this week when city inspectors destroyed illegal buildings in both Jewish and Arab neighborhoods.

Since as far as Clinton is concerned, Israel will one day be required to throw all the Jews out of East, South and North Jerusalem to make room for what she believes is the "inevitable" Palestinian state, Israel has no right to treat Arabs and Jews equally in its soon-to-be-inevitably divided capital city. Arabs should be allowed to break the law at will. When Israel insists on enforcing its laws without prejudice, Clinton condemns it for being anti-peace.

Kerry argues that by forcing Israel to give its land to the Palestinians, the US will be promoting regional stability by doing the bidding of anti-Iranian Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But even if putting the screws to Israel makes Cairo and Riyadh happy, their happiness will have no impact whatsoever on Iran's nuclear weapons programs or on Syria's proliferation activities. That is, Israeli land giveaways will have no impact on regional stability.

And that's precisely the point. The Obama administration has no intention of preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power or Syria from maintaining its alliance with the mullahs. The White House seeks far more modest ends.

Provoked by the Palestinians' escalating missile campaign, on Sunday evening the Ashkelon Parents Association voted not to send their children to school on Monday.

Ever since the outgoing Kadima government ended Operation Cast Lead in Gaza on January 20, the Palestinians have steadily stepped-up their missile war against Israel. Over the weekend the IDF acknowledged that six weeks later, daily Palestinian missile barrages against Israel have returned to pre-Operation Cast Lead levels. Moreover, the IDF warned that over the past six weeks, Hamas and its sister terror groups have rebuilt their missile arsenals both through imports of Iranian arms from Egypt and through local production lines. They have also brought in fairly advanced anti-aircraft missiles capable of shooting down IAF helicopters.

The proximate cause for the decision to close down schools was the weekend missile strike against a high school in Ashkelon. The direct hit caused massive damage both to the school and to surrounding apartments. IDF inspectors assessed that the Grad missile the Palestinians used in the attack had been locally upgraded. Its warhead was two and a half times bigger than usual.

As Ashkelon's children settled into their living rooms instead of their classrooms on Monday morning, a few hundred kilometers to the south representatives from 80 countries and international organizations convened in Sharm el-Sheikh to pledge billions of dollars in aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza. The US, represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, pledged $900 million in assistance.

Also on Monday, The Jerusalem Post reported that the US is curtailing its military aid to Israel. Under new Pentagon guidelines, the Ministry of Defense must give a detailed accounting of how it uses every item it purchases with US aid money. As a consequence, the Defense Ministry issued new instructions to the IDF that from now Israel's purchases from the US will be limited to defensive armaments and systems aimed at preserving its "qualitative edge" against its enemies.

TO UNDERSTAND HOW it came to pass that six weeks after Operation Cast Lead, the US has joined the nations of the world in funding Hamas and is curtailing its military assistance to Israel, it is necessary to understand Israel's domestic politics. Specifically, since as Israel's leaders during Operation Cast Lead Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are responsible for Israel's current predicament, it is necessary to understand their Kadima party's operating rationale.

The main rule of politics that has guided Kadima since its founding in November 2005 is never be perceived as failing. For the past three years, with the active collusion of the local media, Kadima has managed to control the flow of information to the public and so successfully covered up the abject failures of its strategic policies. Its success in last month's elections is testament to its extraordinary capacity to spin and obfuscate information.

THIS KADIMA PRACTICE was first implemented in the lead-up to the 2006 elections. At the time, the media worked with Kadima to suppress information about the strategic significance of Hamas's electoral victory in the January 2006 Palestinian Authority elections. They also blocked reportage and public discussion of the massive build-up of Iranian-supplied arms in Gaza following Israel's withdrawal from the area in September 2005, and the transformation of Gaza's disparate terror cells into Hizbullah-trained and styled paramilitary brigades.

The need for the cover-up was obvious: An open discussion of post-withdrawal developments in Gaza would have demonstrated to the public that Kadima's signature policy of unconditionally surrendering land to the Palestinians was, to put it mildly, insane.

Both the Palestinian cross-border operation in June 2006 that led to the kidnapping of Cpl. Gilad Schalit to Gaza, and Hizbullah's similar raid in July 2006 that fomented the summer war in Lebanon demonstrated the dire consequences of Israeli land giveaways. Neither the onslaught from Gaza nor the war from Lebanon would have happened if Israel hadn't left Gaza in 2005 and Lebanon in 2000.

For Kadima it was clear that to survive the events of the summer of 2006, it needed to develop a story line to hide the truth. In Lebanon, hiding the truth meant choosing defeat over victory.

For anyone with even a vague notion about strategy, it was clear at the time that the only way to protect northern Israel from Hizbullah was to deny Hizbullah the use of southern Lebanon as a base of operations. To do that, Israel needed to conquer and maintain control over southern Lebanon. Nothing else could end the Iranian proxy's ability to rain its missiles down on Israel. And given the jihadist nature and foreign command of Hizbullah, Israel has no capacity to deter the paramilitary force.

For Kadima's leaders however, a reconquest of south Lebanon would involve recognizing that their land surrender strategy was wrong. Their governing rationale would be discredited.

So instead they opted for defeat. Rather than fight Hizbullah to victory, they attacked their domestic political opponents by claiming that only warmongers would support a reconquest of south Lebanon. In so doing, they discredited the only viable strategy for victory while sending IDF forces to Lebanon to fight battles whose sole purpose was to run down the clock until the US stepped in and negotiated a truce with the terror army.

The US-mediated ceasefire, which legitimized Hizbullah as a political force and paved the way for its rearmament and takeover of the Lebanese government, was a disaster for Israel. But for Kadima it was a great success. Livni spun the ceasefire as a massive diplomatic accomplishment for herself and Kadima. The willing media went along with the fiction.

Although all the spinning in the world couldn't convince the public to support Kadima's planned unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria, Kadima was able to salvage the gist of its defeatist strategy. By pretending that Israel hadn't failed in Lebanon, and defending the view that victory isn't an option, Kadima deftly replaced its unilateral surrender strategy with as strategy of surrendering land in the framework of a "peace process" with the pro-terror, corrupt, unpopular, and anti-Israel Fatah-led PA in Ramallah. That "peace process" in turn kept the land surrender policy on the table by asserting that the main obstacle to peace is Israel's unwillingness to give its land to the Palestinians.

A SIMILAR PATTERN unfolded with Kadima's handling of Operation Cast Lead. Here too it was clear to any semi-sentient observer that the only way to defend southern Israel is to reconquer Gaza. For as long as Hamas controls territory it will use it to fight Israel. And given Hamas's subservience to Iran, its jihadist ideology and its Syrian-based leadership's distance from the front, it is obvious that Israel has no capacity to deter Hamas.

But for Kadima, which owes its existence to its leaders' execution of Israel's 2005 pullout from Gaza, acknowledging that Israel has no option other than reasserting control over Gaza was not an option. Then too, a reconquest of Gaza would discredit Kadima's new-old signature issue of giving away Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

And so, rather than fight to win, Kadima again fought for US intervention. Livni and Olmert claimed again that only warmongering extremists supported reconquering Gaza, and announced that Israel's goal was to deter Hamas. For its part, the media blocked all discussion of whether or not it is possible for Israel to deter Hamas and cooperated in demonizing anyone with the temerity to note that the only way to secure southern Israel is to control Gaza.

Then, as elections approached, Kadima declared that deterrence had been achieved and pulled IDF forces from Gaza. They told us that the continued Palestinian missile offensive against the south was nothing more than the last gasps of a defeated foe. And the media went along with them.

In the lead-up to the elections, the international diplomatic backlash against Israel was underplayed and the strategic meaning of Hamas's continued missile war was widely ignored by both Kadima and the media.

NOW, AS THE LIKUD-LED rightist bloc is forming the next government, information about Israel's actual situation is finally being reported. Not only did Israel not deter Hamas, the inconclusive end of the campaign has paved the way for a massive diplomatic onslaught against Israel and a diplomatic campaign to legitimize Hamas.

Today Israel is being blamed for Hamas's war against it.

Kadima's favorite Palestinian "peace" partners in Fatah are leading an international campaign to indict IDF commanders as war criminals.

While last weekend's bombing of yet another Israeli school was met with international indifference, international leaders lined up to have their photographs taken outside the UNRWA school in Gaza that the IDF attacked in January after Hamas combatants used the building as a missile launching pad against Israeli civilians.

Then there is the US-backed international campaign to force Israel to surrender control over its borders with Gaza to Hamas. Last week Clinton joined her European counterparts in demanding that Israel permit cement, aluminum tubes and other missile components to enter Gaza in order to alleviate the "humanitarian suffering" of the poor Gazans. Furthermore, like Europe, the Obama administration supports the establishment of a Hamas-Fatah government.

IN THE MEANTIME, Kadima pretends that there is nothing to worry about. As The Jerusalem Post reported on Friday, both Livni and Olmert refuse to actively oppose the international campaign to criminalize IDF commanders because doing so would involve criticizing Fatah leaders with whom they claim to have such wonderful ties. Similarly, the Obama administration cannot be criticized because that would mean that Kadima has failed to maintain US support for Israel.

And that's the point. With its policy of never acknowledging failure, Kadima's strategy for dealing with the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead has been on the one hand to ignore what has happened, and on the other hand, to blame Likud for what is transpiring.

Rather than attack Hamas and Fatah in international forums and so defend Ashkelon's schoolchildren at least diplomatically, Livni devotes herself to attacking Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu for refusing to back Palestinian statehood.

Netanyahu's view is clear. Surrendering control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem to the Palestinians will endanger Israel. For as long as that remains the case, it is impossible to support Palestinian statehood.

Likud's position is indisputable. But it is also a denunciation of Kadima's governing strategy. So Livni denies the truth to advance her party's interests and condemns Likud for recognizing reality.

In so doing, she has paved the way for an international boycott of the Likud-led government. The Palestinians and their allies throughout the world are already arguing that there is no difference between Likud and Hamas since both of them reject the so-called "two-state solution." Clinton is expected to demand that Netanyahu publically endorse Palestinian statehood during her visit here.

As we absorb the spectacle of world leaders lining up to give their money to Gaza while Israeli schoolchildren are forced to stay home from school, we must understand how we got here. We are here because Kadima has placed its political success above Israel's security.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.