Is Israel Doomed?

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Israel's enemies assert that its destruction is inevitable, and those who would destroy her are cheered on by many in the West. At the same time, Western mainstream media, particularly in Europe but also major media outlets in America, do puff pieces on Israel's genocidal adversaries, slant the news to conform to her enemies' propaganda, and support the delegimitization of the Jewish state.

The Gaza War, and the response to it across the world, have underscored the threats to the state's survival, Israel's often maladaptive and self-defeating reactions, and what is required of the state to counter those who challenge her existence.

The Threats

There are obviously those eager for Israel's demise. Since the Jewish state's creation, the Arab world has wanted it to disappear and this has not changed. Promotion of Arab supremacism, which accords little if any rights to non-Muslim or non-Arab groups in what the Arabs deem their proper domain, extends beyond Israel to abuse of Christians throughout that world as well as of Muslim but non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria. That abuse has repeatedly reached the level of genocidal campaigns, as reflected not only in the slaughter in Darfur, but also in the murder of some two hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq and some two million Christian and animist blacks in southern Sudan.

In terms of genocidal incitement against minority populations, none is as graphic and incessant as that purveyed in Arab media, mosques and schools - even in countries with which Israel is formally at peace - against the Jews and Israel. The existence of Israel is seen as an intolerable distortion of the proper order of things, according to which Jews should either be dead or, at best, subjugated members of society existing at the sufferance of their Arab betters.

In recent decades, enlistment in this genocidal hatred has widened to encompass many in the broader Muslim world. Obviously, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the installation of a clerical regime that has sought to expand its influence by taking the lead in promoting Israel's destruction, has presented the Jewish state with a grave new threat. In terms of broader enmity in the Muslim world, however, the greatest factor has been aggressive Saudi export of Wahhabi fundamentalism, its preaching of virulent Jew-hatred (and hatred of other non-Muslims), and its ever increasing influence not only in once tolerant Islamic nations but also in Muslim communities in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.

To the degree that some in the Arab world, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, feel threatened by Iran, its alliance with Syria, and their protege organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, those states have interests which converge with Israel's. But this offers only very limited relief from the surrounding hostility Israel faces. Noteworthy in this regard is that Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Jordan, continue to promote Jew-hatred in their media and schools, the Saudis continue to finance many Islamist groups even as they fear and sanction others, and any constraint on Saudi hostility towards Israel inspired by fear of Iran would certainly be reversed were the Iranian threat to "moderate" Arab regimes to disappear.

In terms of Israel's Palestinian Arab neighbors, the PLO, and its dominant party Fatah, under Arafat and since his death, have been and continue to be committed to Israel's ultimate destruction. So, too, of course, are Hamas and the other Islamist parties. Whatever true moderates exist among the Palestinians have no political voice or influence.

In addition to the animosity of the Arab world, Israel is faced with much hostile sentiment in Europe, fed by traditional anti-Semitism, by leftist anti-Americanism and association of Israel with America, by perverse, ahistorical leftist twisting of the Israeli-Arab conflict into Israeli colonialists brutalizing the supposedly indigenous population, and by the European media being house organs for anti-Israel bigotry of all these pedigrees. The growing threat of radical Islam to European states, particularly as manifested within those states' immigrant Muslim populations, has in some quarters led to greater sympathy with Israel's predicament. But elsewhere, especially among the cadres of the Left, which include most of the media, this threat has had the opposite impact and inspired a wishful thinking that all would be well, Islamist hostility would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply disappear.

Nor is America immune to these distortions of reality. As the Muslim population in the United States has grown, and as it has become more radicalized, largely by Saudi promotion of Wahhabi extremism, an alliance has emerged between the far Left in this country and the forces of genocidal Islamism. Their recent joint demonstrations against Israel have included explicitly anti-Semitic "cheers," such as calls for "Jews to the ovens." Regrettably, even less extreme elements of the Left, such as some within the so-called "liberal" churches, have signed on as fellow travelers with this alliance for Israel's defamation, delegitimization and ultimate demise.

Israel is also attacked, and its very existence challenged, in the United Nations, an institution that has largely become the monster it was created to fight. The UN Human Rights Council, whose present members include such paragons of domestic civil rights as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China, Malaysia and Bangladesh, routinely excoriates Israel in terms that single out the Jewish national liberation movement as uniquely illegitimate. The UNWRA, which for six decades has been responsible for Palestinian refugees and their families, promotes genocide under the flag of the UN. UNWRA schools teach the glories of suicide bombing and martyrdom in the effort to destroy Israel, employ members of terrorist organizations on its staff, including as teachers, and serve as a conduit for recruiting children into terrorist cadres.

In addition to all these challenges to her existence, Israel faces a domestic enemy. This extends beyond those within the Israeli Arab community who identify with Israel's external enemies. In the face of living under constant siege, some among Israel's Jewish citizens, particularly within the nation's elites, choose to distance themselves from the national predicament. They choose to find fault with the state and side with her defamers and would-be destroyers, embracing her adversaries' indictments. They urge, at a minimum, territorial and other concessions to placate Israel's enemies, even at the cost of rendering the state more vulnerable, and some even argue for the dissolution of the state to mollify her enemies. Predictably, they cast their doing so not as a desire to separate themselves from their embattled fellow citizens or to appease those who would annihilate them but as embracing a higher morality.

The same hypocrisy is seen among many Diaspora Jews, who likewise endorse the indictments of those who would destroy Israel, join in defamation and delegitimization of the state, and do so while averring only the highest ethical motives. A list of American and European Jews of this ilk would fill many pages.

The widespread and implacable hatred faced by Israel is seen by some, and often characterized in the media, as virtually insurmountable. So too, according to various voices in the media, is the translation of this hatred into physical attack. If Israel has been able to prevail in the past in conventional wars, the present and growing challenge of unconventional assault - at one extreme, with weapons of mass destruction, most threateningly an Iranian nuclear arsenal; at the other extreme, incessant terror entailing rocket and mortar attacks from terrorist forces imbedded within dense civilian populations - may be, it is suggested, beyond solution.

In addition, Israel also confronts the challenge not only of the enmity of its neighbors but of their fertility as well. Palestinian population growth ranks among the highest in the world, fertility among Arab citizens of Israel is also high, and together, it is often argued, Israel faces a demographic challenge that it has no means of countering while preserving itself as both the Jewish state and a democracy.

Managing and Mismanaging the Threats

But despite all these various, serious challenges, Israel's fate remains largely in its own hands. Israel has peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan because it convinced both states that, however much its leaders or its citizens might like to see Israel gone, the price of pursuing that goal is prohibitive. There is no peace with Syria, but Syria has long refrained from direct hostile action against Israel for the same reason of not wanting to pay the likely price.

Some argue that Islamist states and parties cannot be dissuaded by such calculations because they are driven by religious zeal and are prepared to pay any price, and imply that such adversaries therefore cannot be defeated. But this thesis has not been tested.

Such regimes are immune neither to annihilation- that is, a weakening to the point where others in their societies are able to seize control from them - nor to a battering to the extent that, even if they retain control, they are rendered unable to act, at least for an extended time, on their genocidal agenda. The biggest challenge to Israel is an Iran close to achieving nuclear arms, and - while ending Iran's nuclear program by other means would be preferable - even this challenge is not without military answers.

In terms of smaller players such as Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, military dissuasion had hardly been tried prior to the current war in Gaza.

Israel, under Ehud Barak, left southern Lebanon in 2000 without assuring that Hezbollah would not fill the void there. Barak and many other Israelis were convinced that, in any case, Hezbollah would not pursue the war across the border. Despite many subsequent episodes of Hezbollah cross-border terror, including the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, Israel downplayed the threat and offered no serious response. When it did respond, in 2006, it was unprepared to do so. It then ended its campaign and acquiesced to creation of a UN force in southern Lebanon that has done nothing, despite its mandate, to prevent Hezbollah from reconstituting and greatly expanding its rocket and missile arsenal and from reestablishing itself in areas which are supposed to be prohibited to it.

Some in Israel now argue that the nation nevertheless inflicted enough damage in 2006 that Hezbollah is hesitant to restart hostilities. But it is far from clear whether Hezbollah is cowed or simply biding its time or awaiting marching orders from Tehran.

Vis-a-vis Gaza, many Israeli leaders, most notably its present prime minister, deluded themselves into believing that Israel's full evacuation of its communities and military from the territory in 2005 would be followed by quiet and would be a step towards a more general peace. The evacuation was followed instead by more rocket and mortar fire targeting Israeli towns and villages, and this assault dramatically increased when Hamas seized control of Gaza in 2007. Israel's abandonment of the Philadelphi corridor in the context of its general withdrawal opened the way to large-scale smuggling of ever more powerful rockets and missiles and other armaments into Gaza, yet Israel barely responded to either the rocket and mortar attacks or the smuggling.

Now it has responded and has done so in an impressive manner. It has not destroyed Hamas, but it is far from clear that the organization's destruction at this point is desirable. Of course, the impact of weakening the organization has yet to be seen. If Hamas continues to fire its rockets, mortars and missiles, Israel can resume its attack and weaken it further. Israel's most significant mistake may be not retaking the Philadelphi corridor, as it is highly unlikely that Egypt is prepared to stop weapons smuggling into Gaza or that any role given to third parties such as European observers would do the job.

But if Israel will respond to further smuggling by seizing the corridor, then this issue too can be addressed. Israel should adopt a zero tolerance policy with regard both to smuggling of weaponry into Gaza and attacks from Gaza. If it has the will to do so, it certainly has the means to enforce such a policy.

Similarly, while Hezbollah offers greater challenges, renewed hostilities on the Lebanese front too are manageable, if Israel has the will to address them effectively.

In fact, what has exacerbated actual problems, and created an impression of some of those problems being intractable, has largely been Israel's failure over the last fifteen years to address the challenges it faces. Too many Israelis became psychologically exhausted by the siege and deluded themselves into thinking they could end it if they only made sufficient concessions. In the Oslo debacle, they brought people dedicated to their destruction into the territories as "peace partners," armed them, closed their eyes to their "peace partners'" engagement in genocidal incitement and vicious, wholesale terror, and convinced themselves that their dead were "sacrifices for peace."

Only when they pushed for an "end of conflict" final agreement, and Arafat, despite Israel's offering to return virtually to the pre-1967 ceasefire lines, launched a full-scale terror war, did Israel begin to wake from its delusions. Yet, while it largely pacified the West Bank, it still repeated self-destructive policies in its tolerance of terror from Lebanon and from Gaza.

In addition, Israeli policies and rhetoric concerning the West Bank likewise continue to reflect dangerous delusions. A national goal of reaching an arrangement in the West Bank that entails Israel's retaining defensible borders, including the areas where almost all the so-called "settlers" live, while separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinians, would be understandable and reasonable. What is neither understandable nor reasonable is the belief that Israel can forego defensible borders and can hand ceded areas to Mahmoud Abbas's PA and have peace.

Nor is there merit to alarmist arguments that Israel must play the supplicant and hand the territories to whomever will take them, however hostile the recipient, because of the demographic challenges to the state; that it moreover must forego retaining defensible borders because doing so would also mean adding Arab citizens in numbers that would undermine the state demographically. The latter is factually untrue; Israel could pursue defensible lines while still separating itself from the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs. Most of the areas it needs to retain are, in fact, sparsely populated. And it need not be the supplicant to find a recipient, however hostile, to take what it would cede. Various models have been presented by sensible, strategically astute, Israeli thinkers of ways to move forward to ultimate separation from areas of dense Palestinian Arab population without compromising the security of the state.

Self-defeating Israeli actions over the last two decades have entailed more than the grave errors in policy decisions. They have gone beyond Israel's embrace of "peace partners" who had no interest in peace and the adoption of delusions that, despite what the other side says and does, sufficient concessions and self-reform and demonstrations of good will would inevitably win relief from ongoing besiegement. Likewise of profound negative consequence has been Israel's failure to make its case forcefully to the world. This too has been largely motivated by the desire to propitiate its enemies, to see salvation in concessions and self-reform and to ignore the nature and the dimensions of the threat.

And so the nation's leaders, and its foreign service bureaucrats, have failed to point out and protest strongly Palestinian and wider Arab indoctrination, in media, mosques, and schools, to Jew-hatred and genocide. They have failed to emphasize, as they should indefatigably, in every forum in which the nature of the conflict is distorted and Israel is pressed for concessions, that there can be no peace as long as the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and virtually every other Palestinian group and the Arab world more broadly aspire to Israel's ultimate destruction and promote this goal among their people and educate their young to it.

The government, including the foreign service, are too often mute when confronted with the most bigoted and unconscionable anti-Israel libels, distortions of reality, by Arab spokespeople or media factotums or others, even though their silence in the face of defamatory lies, or their weak and almost apologetic rebuttals, serve only to lend credence to the defamations and legitimacy to their purveyors.

The repeated emphasis by Israeli spokespeople during the Gaza War of the provocations that triggered Israel's actions, of the months and years of rocket and mortar assault from Gaza on Israeli towns and villages, the repeated assertion of the obvious point that no other sovereign state would tolerate such assault or refrain from responding forcefully, has been a step forward from past performance. Likewise, the response to misinformation and disinformation during the war - the shift, for example, from knee-jerk apologies in the face of claims of indiscriminate force to investigation of the claims and a fact-based answer supported by video and other evidence - is certainly an improvement on what has been the typical handling of such situations during previous hostilities. But there is still far to go in Israel's responsibly making its case. It has yet to publicly challenge, with a force appropriate to the animus of Israel's accusers, the routine slanderous assaults by Palestinian and other Arab leaders, by NGO's, by UN officials, by various political figures on the world stage, and by so many in the media.

To argue that Israel's fate is essentially in her own hands, in the hands of her people, is hardly to make light of the problems Israel faces. But as long as the great majority of Israelis do not succumb to the bigotry of their enemies and their enemies' fellow travelers, domestic and worldwide, as long as they remain steadfast in the conviction of the rightness of their cause - a rightness evident to any informed and fairminded observer - then, just as they have overcome dire threats in the past and indeed built a society whose achievements have been far beyond the wildest dreams of the nation's founders, the odds are well in their favor of continuing to meet whatever challenges confront them.

'Territorial Addiction' And Academic Debasement

First published in The Jewish Press

The core of the Arab-Israeli problem is Israel's "territorial addiction." So declares a December 3 Haaretz article by one Alex Sinclair.

As to the solution, Sinclair does not quite echo Haaretz's former executive editor David Landau, who urged Condoleezza Rice a year ago to "rape" Israel. Rather, he advocates a friendly but forceful stand by President-elect Obama to break Israel of its addiction - promoting, in the jargon of addiction treatment (although Sinclair doesn't use the term), less violent-sounding "tough love" instead of rape.

Implicit in Sinclair's metaphor is the conviction that Israel has no legitimate or rational claim to any part of the territories and that its seeking to retain a presence there is entirely pathological.Not for him the perspective of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the wake of the 1967 war and subsequently the starting point for all Arab-Israeli negotiations. That document calls for Israel not to return to its pre-1967 lines but rather to negotiate "secure and recognized boundaries" with its neighbors - and Resolution 242's authors explicitly declared their conviction that it would be a grievous error to push Israel back to its former lines.

Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later:

It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to...

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, noting that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure."

And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the 1967 war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries" that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

A number of subsequent presidents have reiterated Johnson's position on borders and several have done so in even stronger terms regarding Israel's need to retain some of the areas captured in 1967.

Also in the wake of the 1967 war, a memorandum written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: "From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders."

But Sinclair, in his cavalier attitude toward Israel's security, does not merely take issue with differing views; he doesn't even acknowledge them. On the contrary, he presents no evidence to rebut those views or to bolster his own position. Instead, he offers his "territorial addiction" metaphor as though it were established truth and devotes his entire piece to expanding on the metaphor.

Thus, he lists the recommended interventions that an addict's friends and family can employ to win their loved one from his or her addiction, including interventions which the addict might resist. And he declares that these actions should be a model for Obama's policies toward Israel

"Obama must tell us [after indicting Israel for its 'addiction,' Sinclair inexplicably shifts to referring to Israel as 'us'] in clear terms how harmful our activities and behavior are to ourselves, to our friends, and to those around us. He must tell us what we need to do and what will no longer be tolerated. And he must help us carry out that program."

The absence of argument, the heavy-handed elaboration, the sheer mindlessness of the piece, is even more amazing in that Sinclair is a teacher. He is identified in Haaretz as "a lecturer in Jewish education at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, and an adjunct assistant professor of Jewish education at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America."

There was a time when the essence of pedagogy was training students in how to think and write critically; how to formulate an argument and muster evidence in its defense. It entailed weaning students away from believing it sufficient simply to state one's conviction, perhaps metaphorically, and then expound on the implications of the conviction until reaching some requisite number of words.

Jews are known for often being in the forefront of developments in academia. Recent decades have seen a notable debasement in standards in the social sciences, humanities, and pedagogy. Alex Sinclair's Haaretz piece on Israel's "territorial addiction" suggests that some Jews in the area of Jewish Studies are pioneering new frontiers of academic debasement.

Creating a Desert and Calling it "Peace"

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Among deluded policies that enjoy the status of accepted wisdom, few have had the staying power of the American foreign policy establishment's slant on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The mantras on the path to Middle East peace routinely emanating from the State Department, its foreign service alumni, and private organizations, as well as government figures that tend to follow the lead of State, bear little relation to reality.

A recent addition to the literature in this vein is Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace, authored by Daniel C. Kurtzer and Scott B. Lasensky - the former himself, of course, a foreign service alumnus and seemingly the main shaper of the volume. Kurtzer is also a chief foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama.

The authors were assisted by other members of what is identified as "the United States Institute of Peace's Study Group on Arab-Israeli Peacemaking." The Study Group solicited input as well from more than a hundred interviewees, both American and Middle East nationals, with many of the Americans having State Department backgrounds.

The breathtaking muddy-mindedness of the volume's assertions regarding the conflict provides yet more grist for the foreign policy establishment's critics. It also provides more grounds for concern, particularly as Kurtzer and Lasensky's warped perspective on the path to "peace" and "security" is not offered simply as an academic exercise, nor even as a prediction of how Israeli-Arab relations will likely unfold.

Rather, it is presented as a blueprint for definitive positions that the U.S. ought to adopt and, in effect, impose on Israel. The authors assert, for example, "Washington needs to formalize and add permanence to U.S. positions on the core endgame issues of Jerusalem, refugees, security, and territory..."

Even more worrisome, Kurtzer is apparently slated to move beyond his advisory role into a senior appointment should Obama become president.

It is not that the wrongheaded claims in Kurtzer and Lasensky's book are new. On the contrary, all have been heard and seen many times before. What is special is the sheer number of them collected in one place, distilled down to their irrational essence, and presented as reflecting the collective wisdom not only of the authors but of several dozen prominent "experts."

The major premise of the book is that Arab-Israeli peace has not been achieved largely because of American diplomatic fumbling. The book's focus is on pointing out supposed American missteps and recommending fixes for the perceived problems of American efforts. The authors declare, "Opportunities were squandered, potential breakthroughs missed, and meaningful advances stalled unnecessarily."

Among the explicitly stated assumptions on which they base their argument is the belief that U.S. diplomacy must focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict because it stands in the way of America building alliances with Middle East nations around other issues. Additional unsupported claims are that there is currently a broader regional acceptance of Israel, making resolution of the conflict more achievable; that the majority of Palestinians endorse a two-state solution; that addressing the conflict will boost Arab moderates vis-a-vis extremists (with Saudi Arabia cited as an example of this); and that Israel's giving up the Golan to Syria, dismantling the settlements and returning essentially to its pre-1967 armistice lines would not directly affect the nation's security and so the U.S. should push for such Israeli moves.

But none of the authors' key premises and formulations stands up to even minimal scrutiny.

Does the Arab-Israeli conflict and support for Israel interfere with America building alliances with Middle East nations around other issues? To the contrary, if, for example, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states feel threatened by Iran and see gain in allying with the United States to address the threat, they are hardly going to be deterred from doing so by American support for the Jewish state and the fact that Israeli-Palestinian peace has not been achieved. For Arab leaders, their own interests have always trumped concerns about the Palestinians.

No doubt the authors heard from many of their Arab interviewees, and those among their American contributors who support Arab positions, that the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an obstacle to closer cooperation. But it has always been a tack of Arab leaders to deflect pressures from the U.S. on their own policies by insisting that until America pressures Israel into meeting Palestinian demands it will remain impossible for them to cooperate fully with the U.S.

The authors imply that, in fact, public opinion does impede Arab leaders from drawing closer to the U.S., and that assuaging this hostility by brokering a settlement would serve American interests. They fault past administrations for not paying more attention to the role of domestic opinion in shaping Arab policies. For example, "The Bush 43 administration... tend[ed] to turn a blind eye toward domestic constraints on the Arab side."

But anti-U.S. opinion in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt stems in no small measure from America's support for those governments, not simply from American support for Israel. In addition, rabid anti-Israel sentiment is something which Arab governments - both American "allies" and enemies - stoke, not least to distract their populations from domestic ills. Anti-Israel vitriol and anti-Semitic canards are a staple of the media, mosques and schools in virtually every Arab country. This is true even in states with which Israel is formally at peace.

There is no reason to believe that regimes which find promotion of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric so useful are prepared to give it up, even in the context of a "peace" agreement. The authors indirectly acknowledge this when they declare that a settlement would deprive such regimes of their ability to "exploit" the issue. But, of course, there is no way to stop their exploiting the issue. Even if an agreement were reached between Israel and a Palestinian government, those regimes that find demonization of Israel and the Jews useful would simply condemn Israel's Palestinian partners for betraying the Arab or Muslim cause and continue their anti-Israel propaganda as before.

But, Kurtzer and Lasensky assure their readers, there is currently a "broader regional acceptance of Israel." They reference Saudi Arabia's 2002 plan regarding the conflict, and its endorsement by other Arab states, as evidence of this.

One would think that Saudi Arabia's continued purveying of media, educational and religious materials calling for the mass murder of Jews and annihilation of Israel would give the authors some pause in their bald declaration of Saudi "acceptance" of the Jewish state. Most observers attribute the 2002 Saudi move as prompted by a wish to counter anti-Saudi opinion in the U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and Saudis accounting for 15 of the 19 perpetrators. In any case, the Saudi initiative insists on Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines and acquiescence to other Palestinian demands as a prelude to Arab states offering a vaguely defined "recognition."

The Saudis need not worry; there is no evidence that any amount of Israeli acquiescence to the various demands put forth by the Palestinians would lead the latter to agree to genuine peace. On the contrary, all Palestinian parties, including Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah and its main rival, Hamas, use their media, mosques and schools to indoctrinate their populations in the belief that the Jews have no legitimate claim to any part of "Palestine," that they are satanic usurpers, and that they and their state must be destroyed.

The authors' claim that, "Public opinion polls in... the Palestinian territories continue to show majority support for a two-state solution that ends the conflict." But this assertion is as divorced from reality as most of their other formulations regarding the conflict. There has, for example, never been a poll of Palestinian opinion in which even 20% of those questioned were prepared to give up the "right of return," the demand that all those who left pre-1967 Israel during the 1947-48 war, together with their descendants, be admitted to the state. If those polled say they would accept a two-state solution, it is clearly only under the condition that both states will be Arab.

The authors never even mention the "right of return" issue.

The absence of any serious consideration of Palestinian aims is likewise characteristic of the authors' discussion of the Oslo years. Oslo is depicted essentially as a very promising step towards genuine peace but one the Clinton administration did not effectively exploit. (E.g.: "Clinton invested heavily in Arab-Israeli peacemaking... But his policies contributed to significant diplomatic failures, and the policy process was often dysfunctional...") The authors make a passing reference to "incitement" by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority but never question whether the Palestinian leadership was actually interested in peace.

There is much to suggest it was not, including a broadcast by Arafat on the very night of the famous handshake on the White House lawn at the signing of the first Oslo agreements, in September, 1993. Speaking from Washington on Jordanian television, Arafat informed Palestinians that they should understand Oslo in terms of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)'s 1974 program. This was a reference to the so-called "plan of phases," according to which the PLO would seek to acquire whatever territory it could gain by negotiation and use that territory as a base for pursuing Israel's annihilation. Arafat referred to the "plan of phases" at least a dozen times within a month of signing the initial Oslo accords, and this "explanation" of Oslo became standard fare for him and his lieutenants. Arafat and those around him also routinely compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces grew strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries.

Anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement likewise became staples of PA media, mosques and schools.

If the authors make only passing reference to incitement by Arafat and his PA, they ignore entirely their involvement in anti-Israel terror.

Shlomo Ben-Ami was an ardent Oslo enthusiast. When Arafat launched his terror war, after the July, 2000 Camp David negotiations, Ben-Ami, then Israel's foreign minister, still hoped for an agreement and led the effort to achieve an accord via additional Israeli concessions. Some months later, even Ben-Ami acknowledged that Arafat was only pretending to endorse a two-state solution but, in fact, still "doesn't accept Israel's legitimacy."

Ben-Ami subsequently elaborated on his new insight: "For Arafat, Oslo was a sort of huge camouflage act behind which he was exercising political pressure and terror in varying proportion in order to undermine the very idea of two states for two peoples."

But no such insight is exhibited by the authors of Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace. They do not even admit the possibility of one side not being interested in peace.

To the degree that they acknowledge Palestinian policies inimical to peace, Kurtzer and Lasensky, ever clinging to their thesis that all would be well were American diplomacy properly deployed and that this must involve more pressure on Israel, entangle themselves in knotty and dangerous self-contradictions.

For example, at one point they assert that the Clinton Administration was "too soft on Arafat and the Palestinian leadership when it came to incitement..." In fact, when Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister, in May, 1996, he insisted on "reciprocity," which would entail no more Israeli concessions, territorial or otherwise, until the Palestinians adhered to the commitments they had already made, particularly regarding ending incitement and terror; and the U.S. formally accepted Netanyahu's principle of "reciprocity." But Kurtzer and Lasensky elsewhere laud Clinton for pressuring Netanyahu - at the October, 1998, Wye summit - into making additional concessions despite the PA's failure to desist from either incitement or terror, and they fault the President for not sustaining his "activist approach" at Wye.

Just as the authors refuse to address the Palestinian leadership's objectives because to do so would undermine their basic thesis, so too they fail to consider seriously challenges to Israel's security and the question of defensible borders for Israel.

They make bald and nonsensical assertions to the effect that settlements are purely discretionary for Israel and bear no relation to Israeli security, that in fact settlements weaken Israel's security. They imply Israel could return essentially to its pre-1967 armistice lines without incurring any serious security risk. They do not try to defend these claims but rather present them as obvious truths. They then suggest that a president should be "willing to push back" against Israel on matters "that do not directly relate to security" - which means to the authors, of course, the U.S. should pressure the Jewish state to dismantle the settlements and withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, since this would entail, in their view, no security risk.

Compare such assertions to the stance of the authors of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which remains the starting point for all Israeli-Arab negotiations. Resolution 242, passed in the fall of 1967, declared that Israel should return captured land and withdraw to "secure and recognized" boundaries in exchange for peace, but it did not call for Israel to cede all the captured territory. On the contrary, the authors of Resolution 242 stated explicitly that they believed Israel should not retreat to its former lines. Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines.
That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, noting that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure." And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries " that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

A number of subsequent presidents have reiterated Johnson's position on borders and several have done so in even stronger terms regarding Israel's need to retain some of the areas captured in 1967.

Also in the wake of the war, a memorandum written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff stated: "From a strictly military point of view, Israel would require the retention of some Arab territory to provide militarily defensible borders."

Israel's left-of-center Labor party, which governed for the first decade after the 1967 war and has been a partner in most subsequent governments, adopted a policy of seeking to retain key strategic regions, most of them sparsely populated - such as the Jordan Valley, the heights overlooking the valley, some strategic heights dominating the coastal plain that is home to the bulk of Israel's population, and areas around Jerusalem crucial to the defense of the city - while ceding the rest to Arab sovereignty, including those regions where the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs lives.

To reinforce Israel's claim to areas Labor sought to retain, the government pursued a policy of establishing "facts on the ground," the so-called "settlement" communities, in those areas.

The strategic challenges facing Israel have not diminished since 1967, and the geography and topography of the region have not changed. What was true then concerning the need for defensible borders, and the dimensions of those borders, is no less true today. Nor, for example, did Yitzhak Rabin think otherwise when he initiated the Oslo process and endorsed the creation of a politically separate Palestinian entity alongside Israel. Rabin, in his last Knesset appearance prior to his assassination, stated, "We will not return to the lines of June 4, 1967 - the security border defending the State of Israel will be in the Jordan Valley, in the widest sense of that concept."

The vast majority of "settlers" live in areas that are strategically vital for Israel to retain. That they live there, that facts were established on the ground, does make it more difficult for those who are hostile to or cavalier about Israel's security to push Israeli retreat to the 1948 armistice lines, and in this regard the "settlements" very much do contribute to Israel's security.

Kurtzer and Lasensky just as irresponsibly ignore Israel's basic strategic verities in their dealing with the Golan Heights as in their assertions about the West Bank. The authors declare that a Golan agreement ought to follow the model of disposition of the Sinai in the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord. But strategically the situations have few similarities. Sinai is a demilitarized hundred-mile wide buffer zone, almost entirely desert, with a mountainous spine and restricted areas of passage between east and west. Egyptian build-up for a ground assault across the desert would give Israel much warning of an attack, and the topography allows for a robust Israeli response. In addition, an American-led force guarding key mountain passes adds another layer of protection and has been able to operate essentially unharassed for more than three decades.

The Golan is a much smaller area and an elevated plateau that entirely dominates northern Israel. Syrian forces would need to withdraw far beyond Damascus for an agreement to match the demilitarization and provide the warning time Israel has in the Sinai; something to which no Syrian government would agree. In addition, any international force on the Golan would be much more vulnerable both to harassment and to being overrun in Arab-initiated hostilities than is the American-led force in Sinai.

Just how cavalier Kurtzer and Lasensky are about Israel's security is indicated not only by their failing to offer any serious discussion of the strategic challenges the country faces and what is required to address them but also by their suggestion that U.S. assurances of support ought to render Israel more willing to take risks for peace. One reality of Israel's strategic situation is that, no matter how sincere America might be in its commitment to Israel's security, the Jewish state's strategic predicament is such that any assault by its neighbors which it is unable to fend off by itself would destroy the nation long before American power could be brought to bear.

But not only are American "guarantees" to a weakened Israel impractical; they would not even be offered for very long. The more vulnerable Israel is rendered by territorial and related strategic concessions in the pursuit of peace, the more its strategic alliance with the U.S. is likely to unravel. This is because the U.S., however much its people may sympathize with the Jewish state, will not want to be in a position of coming to the aid of a vulnerable and failing Israel - to have to fight Arab and perhaps other Muslim nations, potentially including "allies," and to do so under conditions in which the objective of the confrontation is lost and the U.S. will then be seen as having been bested.

Americans sympathized with Israel from 1948 to 1967 but the U.S. only embraced Israel as a strategic ally after the 1967 war, when the Jewish state had proved its capacity to defend itself. Israel stripping itself of that capacity will render it a strategic liability to the United States and so will also inevitably entail losing its alliance with America.

Rather than pushing Israel to take "risks" for "peace," risks that might prove fatal, the more promising model for Arab-Israeli negotiations would be American-Soviet negotiations during the Cold War.

Agreements then were premised on decreasing risks, not increasing them. Missile accords were aimed at reducing inventories and at implementing intrusive inspections to verify compliance.

Decreased Israeli presence in populated Palestinian areas need not necessarily be coupled with a regime of intrusive inspections to address potential Palestinian acquisition of rockets and other weapons aimed at targeting Israeli population centers. But it ought at a minimum be coupled with Israel's preservation of defensive lines from which it could mount robust responses to violations of accords, with those accords entailing provisions explicitly granting Israel rights to such intervention.

As a Palestinian leadership emerges - unlike any current Palestinian leaders - that demonstrates a genuine desire for co-existence and builds up civil institutions necessary to construct and sustain a Palestinian society at peace, Israel could gradually withdraw its defensive lines back to permanent positions. Those positions should entail both separation from the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs and retention for Israel of defensible borders.

But, again, serious assessment of Israel's strategic needs and of the path to a genuine, enforceable peace do not figure in Kurtzer and Lasensky's arguments. Their arguments are focused rather on active American diplomacy pushing for a false peace through pressuring Israel into dangerous concessions in order to appease Israel's hostile neighbors.

One can anticipate - in an Obama administration with Kurtzer holding a senior foreign policy position - Israelis either forced to comply or sanctioned for not doing so, and then a level of unprecedented violence with Israel's very survival at risk.

No one concerned about Israel's well-being should underestimate the threat represented by Kurtzer and Lasensky's mind-set and that of their like-thinking contributors to Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace.

Partisanship and Protest

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com

Those American Jewish groups and individuals who pushed for disinviting Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin from a rally protesting Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s appearance at the UN effectively put partisan considerations above the effort to demonstrate wide and substantive American condemnation of the Holocaust-denying, genocide-promoting Iranian leader and his regime.

This blot on a segment of the American Jewish community unfortunately has a pedigree: earlier instances, including during the Holocaust, in which some community leaders have, at critical junctures, given greater weight to party allegiances than to countering genocidal regimes pursuing the annihilation of Jews.

It was hardly unreasonable that the Jewish organizations putting together the anti-Ahmadinejad rally would want to have leading figures from both major political parties speak at the event. But their plan went awry when Senator Hilary Clinton, on learning that Governor Palin would also be attending, withdrew from participation.

Whatever Clinton’s reasons, her spokesperson’s claim that she took the step because the rally had become "a partisan political event" was perplexing, to say the least. The intent of the organizers, consistent with the arrangements prior to Clinton’s withdrawal, was clearly for a show of bi-partisan agreement regarding Ahmadinejad - in this instance, by the presence of the most prominent woman in each major party.

But stranger still than the explanation offered by Senator Clinton’s office was the response of some American Jewish organizations. Perhaps one should not be surprised that the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC), an entity that exists to promote Jewish support for the Democrat Party, defended Clinton’s position. But, given the gravity of the issue at hand - protesting the leader of a regime that openly calls for the destruction of Israel, a regime that has in recent decades been the chief sponsor of anti-Jewish terror worldwide, and is aggressively pursuing the means to annihilate the Jewish state - the NJDC might at least be expected to do nothing to undermine the anti-Ahmadinejad rally. This would include not compromising the organizers seeking high-profile bi-partisan representation.

The NJDC, using its excellent party connections, could have urged that another leading Democrat attend, perhaps even the presidential or vice-presidential candidate. Instead, in a statement released by its chairman, Marc R. Stanley, the NJDC called upon the rally organizers to "withdraw the invitation to Governor Sarah Palin," essentially giving priority to a partisan agenda - blocking the participation of the Republican vice-presidential candidate - over the goal of presenting the strongest possible statement of condemnation regarding a genocidal regime.

A number of other Jewish organizational figures echoed the NJDC’s demands and the rally sponsors bowed to their pressure and acquiesced in disinviting Governor Palin and abandoning the goal of prominent bi-partisan participation.

Earlier precedents, even during War World II, for the warped priorities demonstrated by the NJDC and those other groups and individuals have sadly been all too common.

In November, 1942, information was released to the American media that some two million European Jews had been killed by the Nazis in what appeared to be a plan of total annihilation. American Jewish leaders sought to publicize the catastrophe and, with the help of prominent non-Jews, urged the government to take a number of steps that, if implemented, could have saved at least hundreds of thousands lives. But the government, in particular the State Department, consistently rejected and obstructed all rescue plans, and appeals to President Roosevelt to reverse Administration policy and initiate rescue efforts were to no avail.

The Jewish leadership continued to lobby the government for a change of direction but refrained from strong public condemnations of Administration policy. In part, this reflected fear of triggering an anti-Semitic backlash, at a time when anti-Semitism was a ubiquitous fact of life in America. But the leadership’s reticence also reflected the loyalty of many Jewish leaders to Roosevelt and an unwillingness to confront publicly his refusal to aid Europe’s Jews.

Government obstruction did not only entail refusing entry of Jews to America. State also blocked efforts to get Jews out of Europe to safe havens elsewhere.

The most obvious place of refuge would have been Mandate Palestine, which, after World War I and dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, was controlled by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate calling for recreation of a Jewish homeland in the Jews’ ancestral home.

Britain, from its receipt of the Mandate, repeatedly sought to undermine its provisions, most notably by blocking Jewish immigration. In the late 1930's, as Jews were desperate to leave Europe, Britain imposed even more draconian limits on Jewish access to the Mandate.

The attitude of the British Foreign Office towards Europe’s Jews, even after learning of the Nazi extermination program, was reflected in communications with the State Department opposing rescue efforts and referring repeatedly to, in the words of one memo, "the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued."

State Department policy converged with that of the Foreign Office, and appeals to Roosevelt continued to fall on deaf ears. When some leading figures in the Treasury Department, all non-Jews, learned of State’s policies of obstructing rescue, they were so appalled that they prepared for the Treasury Secretary a monograph entitled, "Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews," and urged his confronting the President with the report.

Roosevelt finally took some positive steps when faced with movement in Congress towards passage of a bi-partisan Rescue Resolution that would establish a rescue commission and support its operation in North Africa and neutral European nations. The Congressional measure was inspired by efforts of a group of Jews working outside the mainstream leadership, more aggressively publicizing Administration obstruction and actively seeking bi-partisan Congressional backing.

With Congressional action looming, Roosevelt, in early 1944, created the War Refugee Board (WRB) to pursue rescue measures. While the Administration essentially refused to fund the Board - it operated mainly with private funding - and impeded its work in other ways, the dedicated staffs of the Board’s offices succeeded in facilitating the rescue of some 200,000 Jews.

But many in the mainstream Jewish leadership opposed the more aggressive confronting of the Administration that led to creation of the Board. They did so, again, both out of fear of stimulating anti-Semitism and out of misplaced partisan loyalties.

A notable example of the latter occurred in June, 1944. The Republican National Convention, meeting that month, included a strong pro-Zionist plank in its platform for the upcoming election and criticized Roosevelt for not pressing Britain to open Mandate Palestine to Jewish refugees.

Rabbi Stephen Wise, the preeminent figure in the American Jewish leadership, had led mainstream efforts to promote rescue and had seen first-hand both the endless and pervasive obstructionism of the State Department and Roosevelt’s indifference and refusal to intervene. He could have used the Republican stance as an opportunity to press Roosevelt to match the Republican position and forge a bi-partisan policy of pushing Britain, then totally dependent on the United States, for a change in policy.

Instead, Wise wrote to Roosevelt condemning as "unjust" the "reference to you in the Palestine Resolution by the Republican National Convention" and assuring him American Jews would share his view. Even in the face of the annihilation of European Jews, Wise could not put the desperate need to focus on all possible avenues of rescue above his partisan allegiance to the President.

Today, the president of Iran at once insists the Holocaust never happened and promotes perpetration of another Holocaust through the destruction of Israel. That, despite Ahmadinejad's declarations and the policies of his government, some Jewish leaders, out of partisan considerations, still undermine efforts to confront in the strongest possible ways a regime promising a new genocide, is beyond shameful.

Peace Now: A Thirty-Year Fraud

First published on FrontPageMagazine.com, September 05, 2008

For thirty years, the leftist Israeli organization Peace Now has been promoting the thesis that sufficient Israeli concessions would win the Jewish state peace from its Arab neighbors and that Israel’s refusal to make the needed concessions, primarily dismantling the settlements and returning to its pre-1967 armistice lines, are the main obstacle to that desired denouement. Peace Now has been arguing this line both at home and around the world and has attracted fervent overseas followers and media kudos for its stance.

Earlier this year, as it celebrated its three-decade anniversary, the organization was found by the Israeli government to have violated Israeli law by using money ostensibly intended for an educational non-profit entity to fund instead political activities. According to The Jerusalem Post, the government finding meant, among other consequences, that the organization's American supporters would no longer be able to claim their donations as tax-deductible. Subsequent media reports have indicated additional, related malfeasance by Peace Now.

But Peace Now's fraudulent casting of itself as an "educational" entity is not the fraud referred to in the above title. That reference is, rather, to the political program pushed by the organization over the past three decades.

Peace Now came into being in the spring of 1978, about nine months after Menahem Begin had become Israel's prime minister and ended the Labor Zionist monopoly on control of the government.

Labor's tenure had included the first ten years of Israel's post-Six Day War control over the West Bank and Gaza, the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Labor's policy with regard to ultimate disposition of the West Bank had been to pursue a division of the territory that would entail retaining key strategic areas while ceding to Arab control those regions that were home to the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed in the fall of 1967, declared that Israel should return captured land and withdraw to "secure and recognized" boundaries in exchange for peace, but it did not call for Israel to cede all the captured territory. On the contrary, the authors of Resolution 242 stated explicitly that they believed Israel should not retreat to its former lines.

Lord Caradon, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations at the time and the person who introduced the resolution in the Security Council, observed some years later: "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial. After all, they were just the places where the soldiers of each side happened to be on the day the fighting stopped in 1948. They were just armistice lines. That's why we didn't demand that the Israelis return to them, and I think we were right not to..."

The American ambassador to the UN at the time concurred, pointing out that "Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure." And President Lyndon Johnson, shortly after the war, declared that Israel's return to its former lines would be "not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities." Johnson advocated new "recognized boundaries " that would provide "security against terror, destruction, and war."

The division of the West Bank envisioned by Labor entailed Israel holding onto such key strategic regions - most of them sparsely populated - as the Jordan Valley, the heights overlooking the valley, some strategic heights dominating the coastal plain that is home to the bulk of Israel's population, areas around Jerusalem crucial to the defense of the city, and the Etzion bloc, while ceding the rest to Arab sovereignty. To reinforce Israel's claim to areas Labor sought to retain, the government pursued a policy of establishing "facts on the ground," the so-called "settlement" communities, in those areas.

The Likud government elected in 1977 viewed the West Bank differently. Likud leaders questioned surrendering any of the region, given its significance as the cradle of Jewish history and faith, and they also disputed the states’s ability to defend itself should major segments of the area fall to the control of potentially hostile forces. Likud supported the establishment of Jewish communities beyond the regions which Labor sought to retain, most notably in places of historical and religious significance. (In fact, Labor, too, had allowed the creation of some such communities.)

In the context of the Israeli-Egyptian peace accord which Likud Prime Minister Begin reached with Anwar Sadat in 1978, Israel agreed to negotiate an interim autonomy plan for the West Bank and Gaza, with autonomy succeeded by a permanent status arrangement to be hammered out by the parties during the interim period. Israel and Egypt subsequently engaged in a dialogue on setting up the autonomy plan. But the talks were condemned by all other Arab parties and ultimately ended without progress. However, Likud's official policy became pursuit of Arab autonomy in the West Bank under Israeli sovereignty.

In fact, the differences between Labor and Likud supporters on disposition of the West Bank were not as dramatic as their parties’ ostensible positions suggested. Most notably, a division of the region along the lines proposed by Labor had the backing of a wide majority of Israelis, including many Likud voters. In addition, a 1984 poll asked those who favored Likud's vision of autonomy for the area under Israeli sovereignty whether, were autonomy impossible, they would prefer annexation or Labor-style territorial compromise. Fifty-two percent chose the latter; only 10 percent endorsed annexation.

But while both major parties, along with the authors of Security Council Resolution 242, believed that Israel had to retain parts of the territories for its defense, and a large majority of Israelis supported pursuit of a compromise based on principles of maximal retention of strategic areas and maximal return of Palestinian Arab population to Arab sovereignty, the founders of Peace Now viewed the situation very differently.

The organization's inception in the spring of 1978 was in the context of demonstrations against what its adherents perceived as Begin's not moving fast enough or being forthcoming enough in his negotiations with Sadat. But the organization formulated tenets concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict and disposition of the territories that transcended the Israeli-Egyptian talks.

As related by Mordechai Bar-On, himself an early member of Peace Now and author of the definitive book on the Israeli peace movement, In Pursuit of Peace (1996), those tenets included:

"The security of Israel depends on peace, not on territories...

"The government should reach peace with Egypt based on the principle of 'territories for peace' as determined by UN resolution 242...

"Israel should stop all settlement in the occupied territories. Settlements are an impediment to peace and push the Arabs away from the negotiating table."

There are a number of particularly notable aspects to these tenets. The government was, of course, negotiating on the basis of territories for peace, in keeping with UN Security Council Resolution 242. Why then did Peace Now make a point of this, unless it was really insisting that all territories be given up. That this was, in fact, the case is reinforced by the first item, which offers a false dichotomy. Indeed, the thinking in Labor since 1967, and of the authors of Resolution 242, had been that peace required some retention of territory by Israel and that a return to the pre-1967 lines would be incompatible with peace. Similarly, settlements had been established by Labor because it deemed retaining the settled areas vital to achieving an enforceable peace. Peace Now was articulating a blanket condemnation of settlements, which placed it at odds with Labor's strategic assessments and longstanding Labor policy.

The Peace Now conviction that Israel’s Arab adversaries were now receptive to peace and Israel need only make sufficient concessions was not prompted by the recent opening of talks with Egypt. In fact, Egypt was vehemently condemned and ostracized by all other Arab states for its negotiations with Israel. The rest of the Arab League continued to adhere to the principles embraced in Khartoum in the wake of the 1967 war: "no negotiations, no recognition, no peace."

The impetus to the Peace Now stance was essentially exhaustion with the ongoing Arab war against Israel and wishful thinking. Those attracted to the organization were people unwilling to reconcile themselves to the reality that Israel’s Arab adversaries were in control of deciding whether there would be peace, and that, with few exceptions, their decision, as demonstrated in words and deeds, was against Israel’s existence. The members of Peace Now instead embraced the delusion, and promoted to the wider Israeli and global public the fraud, that control of the situation was really in Israel's hands and that sufficient concessions would inexorably win peace.

Peace Now's inverting of reality is dramatically illustrated by Bar-On in his introduction to his history of the Peace Movement. He declares that it is "a moral obligation - for Israel to resolve the hundred-year conflict with its Arab neighbors." The statement is remarkable for its lack of qualification. It does not say that it is Israel's moral obligation to be alert and responsive to changes of sentiment on the other side and possible opportunities for diminishing or resolving the conflict, or even that Israel must not only react to such potential opportunities but must actively explore for them and seek to promote them. Rather, it implies that Israel is capable by its own actions of bringing about peace and that if the conflict remains unresolved it is because Israel has failed to meet its moral obligation.

Many figures in Peace Now pointed to the situation of the Palestinians in the administered territories as their reason for supporting the organization. Certainly, the Palestinian Arabs were living in ongoing political limbo, governed by a foreign state. (This was so even though a substantial portion of the bureaucrats in the territories were the same people who had held those positions under the Jordanians and who remained on Jordan's payroll. And Jordanian law continued in effect in the territories.) While Labor's position was that Israel had no choice but to await an Arab interlocutor - Jordan, in its view - who would negotiate peace with Israel in exchange for those areas the state could cede, many Peace Now advocates argued that the situation of governing an alien population was so corrosive to Israeli society that its continuation was intolerable.

But even if there was merit to assertions that controlling Palestinian Arabs with no political resolution in sight had negative ramifications for Israeli society, that of course was irrelevant to Peace Now's other, bogus claims that peace with Israel's neighbors could be won by dismantling the settlements and offering to return essentially to the pre-1967 cease-fire lines.

Consider how differently events would have unfolded, particularly over the last fifteen years, if those so concerned about disengaging from the Palestinians had not promoted Peace Now's fraudulent assertions and agenda. Imagine if, instead, perhaps under the banner of "Separation Now," they had argued that, yes, Israel had to retain defensible borders but, even though any political and military vacuum would almost inevitably be filled by hostile forces who would use evacuated territory as a base from which to attack Israel, it was nevertheless in Israel's interest - given the corrosive effects of the status quo - to withdraw unilaterally to those defensible borders and separate from the great majority of Palestinians.

Of course, others would have argued that those advocating such a move were underestimating the toll a terror war waged from ceded areas would take on Israel. Not only would many people be killed, but vital national infrastructure would be vulnerable and damaged, the economy would suffer, immigration would diminish and emigration increase, and the nation would be put at profound risk.

But at least there would then have been a national debate based on the realities of Israel's situation. Instead, under the banner of Peace Now, there ensued the apotheosis of a political agenda based on delusional, fraudulent distortions of reality, distortions that led directly to the Oslo debacle and all the bloody disasters that have flowed from Oslo.

Peace Now's conviction of an Arab side readily offering peace if Israel would only make sufficient concessions ultimately degenerated into seeing in Yasser Arafat and his PLO the partner for its envisioned peace, and nothing Arafat and his cadres did could shake the organization from this conviction.

For example, Peace Now embraced the declarations of the Palestine National Conference (PNC) meeting in Algiers in November, 1988, as the PLO definitively offering an olive branch to Israel, when in fact this was hardly the case.

At the meeting, the PNC declared the establishment of the State of Palestine with Arafat as its President. It also proclaimed that it was doing so on the basis of UN Resolution 181. This was the General Assembly resolution in 1947 that called for the creation of two states in the Mandate, one Jewish and one Arab, and that the Palestinian Arabs had rejected at the time. Resolution 181 entailed for Israel territories that were much less, and much less viable, than Israel's pre-1967 domain. (In its regrouping and responding to the war waged against it in 1947-48 by the Palestinian Arabs and subsequently by the surrounding Arab states, Israel had gained control of additional land.) It was hardly a basis for negotiation now. But many involved with the Peace Movement hailed the PNC's Algiers declaration as implicitly recognizing Israel's right to exist.

When, in the following month, Arafat, with obvious reluctance, acquiesced to American demands that he state unambiguously a renunciation of terrorism, a recognition of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, and acknowledgment of Israel's right to exist with peace and security, those within the Peace Movement embraced his doing so as additional proof of the rightness of their views and confirmation that a new era had indeed dawned.

Were these steps by the Palestinian leadership worthy of note? Of course. Did it make sense for Israel to try to discern their significance? Again, of course. It was obviously in Israel's interest to learn if these moves represented a genuine new agenda, with new objectives, for the PLO. Or were they simply made in the context of the "plan of phases" (the agenda, articulated by the organization in 1974, of acquiring whatever territory could be gained by negotiations and then using that territory as a base from which to pursue Israel’s destruction)? Were they merely steps to win legitimacy and recognition by the United States without any intention of altering the PLO's revanchist and annihilationist goals? Or - a third possibility - were they something in between, perhaps representing a power struggle within the organization concerning which of two directions it should follow?

But for the true believers of Peace Now, such questions, if considered at all, were quickly dismissed. In their eagerness to interpret evidence in conformity with their desires, they could see these events as only meaning that the PLO had indeed decided to pursue genuine peace and now all that was required was a reciprocal Israeli response. As the organization declared shortly after the PNC's Algiers conference: "In Algiers the PLO abandoned the path of rejection and the Palestinian Charter and adopted the path of political compromise..."

Counter-evidence included statements by PLO leaders, in communications with their constituents, of the organization's continued dedication to the PLO covenant and its focus on Israel's annihilation. But this was disregarded.

An example of such statements was the declaration by senior PLO member Ahmad Sidqi Dajani on November 22, 1988 that, "We in the PLO make a clear distinction between covenants and political programs, whereby the former determine the permanent strategic line while the latter are tactical by nature. We would like some of our brothers to take note of this difference, that is, of our continued adherence to the Palestinian National Covenant." Another example was the comments of Arafat's second in command, Abu Iyad, some days later: "The borders of our state noted [by the PNC Algiers declaration] represent only a part of our national aspirations. We will strive to expand them so as to realize our ambition for the entire territory of Palestine."

Similarly ignored by the true believers were Arafat's own assurances to his people of his steadfast allegiance to the "plan of phases," and evidence of continuing PLO involvement in terrorist attacks on Israel.

Bar-On, in his 470-page history of the Peace Movement, much of it devoted to the peregrinations of the PLO, never even mentions Arafat's "plan of phases." Bar-On apparently did not want it to exist and so he simply ignored it.

Peace Now’s predilection to fraudulent recasting of realities can be seen again in the organization’s response to Arafat’s embrace of Saddam Hussein following his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and to the Palestinians’ wide endorsement of Arafat’s stance and of Saddam’s threat to "burn half of Israel." Some within the Peace Movement, invested in their own comprehension of Palestinian attitudes and aspirations, were, in Bar-On’s words, "profoundly disturbed and confused" by this rallying to Saddam.

But Peace Now was undeterred from casting Israel as the obstacle to peace and Arafat as a ready partner if Israel would only treat him as such. The organization was soon attacking the government for its negative reaction to Arafat and the Palestinians’ allying with Saddam. It accused the government of seeking "to manipulate the political mistakes which the Palestinians and the PLO have made in order to advance" its own, insufficiently forthcoming, policies.

Notable also in this statement is, of course, the whitewashing characterization of the actions of the PLO and its supporters as "political mistakes." It is a depiction reflecting Peace Now’s wish to blur the Palestinians’ eagerness for a Saddam-led war of annihilation against Israel into something less threatening and more in keeping with what the "peace" camp wanted to be the aspirations of the other side. "Political mistakes" suggested Arafat and his followers were in fact seeking a resolution of the conflict along the lines proposed by the Peace Movement but were simply going about pursuing it in the wrong way.

Another illustration of Peace Now’s willful distortion of reality was its depiction of its Palestinian interlocutors, particularly those who were connected to the PLO but were not officially part of it and so did not fall under Israel’s ban at the time on Israeli contacts with the organization. Most notable among these interlocutors was Faisal Husseini.

Speaking to an Arab audience in November, 1992, Husseini declared: "We have not conceded and will not surrender any of the existing commitments that have existed for more than 70 years...We have within our Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to deal with divided Israeli society...We must force Israeli society to cooperate... with our Arab society, and eventually to gradually dissolve the 'Zionist entity.'" He expressed similar sentiments on other occasions and, after the initiation of Oslo, he characterized the Oslo accords as the Palestinians’ Trojan Horse, its means of penetrating the Jewish state in advance of destroying it.

In contrast, Bar-On, speaking of the period during which Hussein gave the speech just quoted, states, "A new generation of Palestinian leaders was emerging... Younger people like...Faisal Husseini...Most of the peace groups on the Israeli side maintained contacts with these new leaders and tried to persuade Israelis that these Palestinians could be partners in negotiations."

As for those Israelis who were not persuaded, who took Arafat and his followers at their word when they declared their goal remained Israel’s annihilation, and who interpreted continued PLO involvement in anti-Israel terror as likewise weighing against its interest in genuine peace, the true believers of Peace Now had a ready explanation. Those benighted Israelis lacked sophistication, were insufficiently educated and often devoted to a narrow-minded religious traditionalism. Consequently, they were as yet unable to get past their biases, to look beyond the superficial and to recognize the Palestinian leadership’s genuine desire for peace.

Bar-On, for example, notes that the Sephardic Jewish community in Israel tended to be more distrustful of Arab intentions and adds that this seemed, in surveys, to be related to educational level and level of religious traditionalism. He also makes the point that segments of the Ashkenazi community that were less educated and more traditional were likewise more distrustful of the possibilities for genuine peace than were Israel's elites. Bar-On concludes: "Higher learning, it is believed, exposes individuals to a wider variety of opinions, trains them in new analytical and flexible modes of thought, and enables them to relate to issues in a less emotional and more self-critical way, which leads to greater tolerance and understanding of the 'other' and of the complexity of the issues."

Entirely missed by the "peace" activists in this comprehension was, of course, the narrow-mindedness of their own assumption that their interlocutors, and the Palestinians generally, must think as they do and subscribe to their values and perspectives. This assumption is another facet of their investment in the delusion, and their promotion of the fraud, that Israeli action will determine Arab action and that Israeli reform and concessions will inevitably yield the wished-for Arab response.

Another tool used by the Peace Movement to promote its fraudulent agenda was Israel’s so-called New History. This refers to the largely bogus revisionist history that emerged mainly in the latter 1980's and whose purveyors generally advanced the thesis that Israel’s founding and early history, in particular its War of Independence, involved more egregious anti-Arab actions than had heretofore been acknowledged.

The subtext, often explicitly declared in the work of the "new historians," is that if Israelis would only recognize their culpability, see themselves as bearing much responsibility for Arab hostility, and make the proper amends and concessions, then peace would be readily attainable.

Many works have exposed the falseness of the theses advanced by the new historians. (A particularly incisive volume in this vein is Ephraim Karsh’s Fabricating Israeli History.)

This extends to the lie in new historian claims of basing their arguments on newly released archives and so presenting a more informed view of the events they discuss. In fact, the sources cited by the new historians are typically long available ones, and what is most new in their presentations are their tortured use of those sources.

One problem among the new historians noted by critics is their general failure to make significant use of available Arab sources and their presentation of Arab decision-making in very two-dimensional terms. Some critics have attributed this to these authors often not having sufficient command of Arabic. But a more basic explanation for the two-dimensional depiction of Arab decision-making is that this is consistent with the political intent of the new historians. Casting Arab actions as simply straightforward and predictable responses to Israeli actions rhetorically advances the thesis that Arab hostility should be understood as a consequence of Israeli provocations and that sufficient Israeli amends and concessions will inexorably elicit a positive response from Israel’s Arab neighbors.

Another complementary development that has likewise been embraced, like the New History, by many within the Peace Movement, including within the ranks of Peace Now, has been what is widely characterized as "post-Zionism." The adherents of "post-Zionism" have essentially argued that the Jewish accoutrements of the Jewish state, even Israel’s overt self-characterization as a Jewish state, are offensive to Arab sensibilities and that more or less jettisoning these elements of national identity are among the self-reforms Israel should undertake to win the peace readily available for sufficient concessions.

Advocates of post-Zionism have often cast their agenda of reforms as in the interest of "universalist" and "democratic" ideals. But others have explicitly declared that their enthusiasm for de-Judaizing Israel lay in the desire to appease its Arab adversaries. For example, shortly after the start of the Oslo process, David Grossman, one of the prominent Israeli literati associated with Peace Now, opined that, to see the process through to its fruition in peace, Israelis must concede to the Arabs not only geographic territories but territories of the soul. They must surrender their belief that it is of overriding importance for the Jewish people to have the military capacity to defend itself in its own land; the belief that the Holocaust was further evidence of the necessity of this; and the belief that the willingness of Israelis to sacrifice for the defense of the country, and to want to take an active role in that defense, is a virtue. They must also give up the belief that the creation of Israel represents a national return for the Jews from a long and too often horrifyingly painful exile. They must yield even their belief in the value of Jewish peoplehood.

In this statement about the need for such concessions in the service of "peace," Grossman takes steps toward setting aside the lie that his and others’ advocacy of these steps simply reflects a high-minded devotion to "universalist" and "democratic" principles. But the statement still, of course, perpetuates another lie, the fraudulent assertion - based on exhaustion with the siege and a desperate and overwhelming desire for its end - that the right self-abnegations by Israel, the right mix of territorial and spiritual retreat, can win Israel the peace it desires no matter how much the objective evidence of words and deeds by the other side indicates otherwise.

The Oslo accords marked the pinnacle of the Peace Now agenda. Israel embraced Arafat and his PLO as its peace partner and began the process of handing him control of Gaza and West Bank territories. Peace Now celebrated the accords and was silent in the face of declarations and actions by the Palestinian leadership that suggested an intention other than peace.

For example, on the very night of the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in September, 1993, Arafat appeared on Jordanian television and told Palestinians and the wider Arab world that they should understand Oslo in terms of the PLO’s 1974 progam; that is, the "plan of phases." Arafat repeated his characterization of Oslo as the first phase in the "plan of phases" at least a dozen times within the first month of signing the initial accords, and he and his lieutenants did so many times thereafter. Arafat also repeatedly compared Oslo to the Treaty of Hudaibiya, which Mohammed had signed in 628 and abandoned when his forces became strong enough to overwhelm his adversaries.

Peace Now's ignoring of such declarations was matched by its silence when Palestinian media, mosques and schools, under PLO control, incited their audiences, worshipers and students to hate Jews and dedicate themselves to Israel’s destruction. If Peace Now’s representatives broke their silence on Palestinian incitement, it was mainly to attack and condemn those Israelis who invoked such incitement as evidence that Israel’s partners were not interested in peace.

Peace Now’s silence also extended to the terror that ensued upon the initiation of Oslo and to evidence of Arafat’s involvement in the terror. In the 22 months from Arafat’s arrival in the territories, in July, 1994, to the fall of the Labor-Meretz government that had initiated Oslo, in May, 1996, more than 150 lives were lost to anti-Israel terror. This far exceeded the toll in any comparable period in Israel’s history up to then. But Peace Now and its representatives continued to insist that Arafat and his PLO were offering Israel peace and that all that was needed were sufficient Israeli concessions.

The terror was the major factor in Israel’s electing Bibi Netanyahu prime minister in the May, 1996 balloting. Netanyahu declared that Israel would make no further concessions until Arafat’s Palestinian Authority lived up to its earlier commitments to end anti-Israel incitement and terror as well as fight other Palestinian organizations engaged in terror. The Peace Movement's response to this stance was to characterize Netanyahu as obstructing progress towards "peace."

Haaretz commentator Ari Shavit, writing a year and a half into Netanyahu’s tenure, in an article entitled "Why We Hate Him," observed:

"There is a deeper motive for the hatred we feel for Benjamin Netanyahu... In the early '90's...we [Shavit had himself been an Oslo enthusiast], the enlightened Israelis, were infected with a messianic craze... All of a sudden, we believed that... the end of the old Middle East was near. The end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict...

"Hatred of Netanyahu enables us to conveniently forget that before the bubble burst, we acted like fools. We fooled ourselves with illusions. We were bedazzled into committing a collective act of messianic drunkenness. Hatred of Netanyahu also gives us a chance to forget that it was not the rise of Netanyahu that brought on the paralysis of Oslo but the paralysis of Oslo that brought on the rise of Netanyahu. The hatred permits us to keep harboring the notion that everything is really much more simple, that if we only pull back, if we only recognize Palestinian statehood... we would be able [once again] to breathe in that exhilarating, heady aroma of the end of history, the end of wars, the end of the conflict."

But Shavit’s was a rare voice in the "peace" camp. As for Peace Now, it continued to insist that Israel had ready partners and that the obstacle to genuine peace was Israel’s failure to make sufficient concessions.

Peace Now continued to hew to this fraudulent stance even in the wake of the July, 2000, Camp David negotiations and Arafat’s subsequent launch of a wide-scale terror war against Israel.

At the talks, Ehud Barak, then prime minister, offered territorial concessions far beyond what commentators had thought any government would be willing to cede. More importantly, his offer far exceeded what virtually all military observers believed prudent, given Israel's strategic challenges. According to Dennis Ross, the Clinton Administration's chief negotiator for the Arab-Israeli conflict and a key participant at Camp David, Barak was prepared to transfer to Palestinian sovereignty some 91% of the West Bank as well as all of Gaza. This included all but a small sliver of the Jordan Valley and other territory long deemed by both Labor and Likud as vital to Israel's security and survival. In addition, Barak agreed to give some pre-1967 Israeli territory to the Palestinians. Israel also offered to cede parts of Jerusalem and even compromise its sovereignty in the Old City, including on the Temple Mount.

The summit continued for two weeks. But, despite the dimensions of the Israeli offer and intense pressure from President Clinton, Arafat rejected the Israeli proposals. He did so without making any counter-offer on the territorial issues.

In addition, Arafat demanded at the summit that Israel accede to the Palestinians' so-called "right of return," the claimed "right" of all Palestinian refugees from the 1947-48 war and their descendants not only to move to the nascent Palestinian state in ceded territories but to "return" to "homes" within Israel's pre-1967 lines. The admission of millions of Arabs to Israel would, of course, grossly alter the demographics of the state and is, in effect, a formula for the dismantling of Israel as the Jewish national home, the fulfillment of Jewish national self-determination.

There is much evidence that Arafat did not go to Camp David with a view to actually negotiating with Barak. He knew Barak was determined to arrive at an end-of-conflict settlement, and Arafat had no intention of agreeing to this, no matter what Israeli concessions Barak offered. As Efraim Karsh has noted, "Had Barak not insisted on an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Arafat would have readily cashed in his concessions in return for further ambiguous pledges regarding a Palestinian-Israeli 'peace.' Yet there was absolutely no way for Arafat to [agree to a resolution of the conflict short of] the destruction of the state of Israel..."

Even Shlomo Ben-Ami, Barak's foreign minister, a leader of Israel's negotiating team at the Taba talks at the end of 2000 and still at that late date a fervent believer that sufficient Israeli concessions could win peace, conceded in June, 2001, that Arafat was only pretending to endorse a two-state solution but in fact still "doesn't accept the legitimacy" of Israel. A few months later, Ben-Ami elaborated on his new insight: "For Arafat, Oslo was a sort of huge camouflage act behind which he was exercising political pressure and terror in varying proportion in order to undermine the very idea of two states for two peoples."

But even in the wake of Arafat’s launching and continued prosecuting of his terror war, Peace Now persisted in promoting its fraudulent claims that the obstacle to peace was Israel’s wanting to hold onto some at least of the settlements and its refusal to make sufficient concessions.

To this day, and despite the ongoing incitement to Israel’s annihilation by the media, mosques and schools of Mahmoud Abbas’s PA as well as by those of the Palestinian Islamist parties, most notably Hamas; and despite the terror launched both by elements of Abbas’s PA and the Islamist parties; and despite the refusal of all Palestinian parties to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state; Peace Now continues to insist that the obstacle to peace is the settlements.

And, of course, despite UN Security Council Resolution 242 and despite all the strategic threats facing Israel, Peace Now continues to reject Israel’s having any legitimate claim on any part of the territories.

And it continues to compound its fraudulent assertion of a readily available peace with additional false claims, such as Israel’s supposed taking of privately owned Palestinian land for settlements. (For example, not long ago Peace Now asserted that 86.4% of Maale Adumim, the largest of the settlement communities, was built on privately owned Arab land. When challenged with land ownership records, it conceded that perhaps about half of one percent (0.54%) of the community’s land was privately owned by Arabs. Even this figure is highly questionable.)

Peace Now has promoted its fraudulent claims at great cost to Israel, including a cost in lives. But this has apparently been of little concern to the organization’s enthusiasts, an ugly truth that has not gone unnoticed by some in Israel. When, in the early months of his terror war, Arafat had his cadres particularly target settlers, Ari Shavit observed: "On almost a daily basis, Israeli citizens who live beyond the Green Line are being murdered by the historic allies of the Israeli peace movement, yet the movement is silent... It is a blood-chilling silence and it raises the question whether... what has been presented here as the hallowed value of universalism was not in fact only an extremely particularist value that was intended to serve the specific needs of a specific cult of enlightened human beings."

It was and is a cult that worships at the altar of self-delusion and wishful thinking and that, intoxicated with its airy visions of "peace," was and is prepared to sacrifice anyone who challenges it, no matter what evidence, what realities, he or she invokes in that challenge. It was and is a cult that has demonstrated it is willing to sacrifice even the security of the nation on the altar of its delusions and its delusion-driven, fraudulent claims.

That was Peace Now at its inception and it is Peace Now at 30.

The Secret to Olmert's Political Survival

First published in The Jewish Press

An overwhelming majority of Israelis view Ehud Olmert as an incompetent prime minister and want him gone. This has been the case for the last two years, since his gross mishandling of the Second Lebanon War. Unhappiness with him has only been compounded by his refusal to take responsibility for his failures.

In addition, Olmert is the subject of multiple corruption investigations. Despite mounting evidence against him on numerous fronts, he acknowledges no wrongdoing in this realm as well. Meanwhile, his legal problems draw more and more of his attention away from duties of state. Why, in the face of all this, is he allowed to remain in office?

Olmert continues as prime minister even as Israel is confronted with dire threats that he either refuses to address or addresses only to exacerbate. Among the latter is his cease-fire with Hamas, undertaken against the advice of Israel's military and intelligence services, an agreement that only enables the terrorist rulers of Gaza to increase their military strength and their capacity to attack Israeli communities.

Another example is his recent engagement with Syria, a step that has helped that nation break out of its isolation, with Syrian President Assad feted in Paris and pursued as a sought-after guest by other European governments. Olmert's gambit has undermined the American policy of imposing a price on the Syrian regime for its support of terror in Lebanon and Iraq and against Israel, and has compromised Israel's own vital interests vis-a-vis Syria.

Among dangerous national problems the prime minister has simply refused to address are the glaringly obvious vulnerabilities of the home front even as attacks persist in the south and war clouds gather in the north. Similarly ignored have been key recommendations of the Winograd Commission that investigated Israel's management of the 2006 war, such as its call for an urgent restructuring of the National Security Council.

Olmert continues to embrace Mahmoud Abbas as the voice of moderation in the Palestinian camp and has failed to address the realities that give the lie to his characterization of Abbas as Israel's "peace partner." Palestinian Authority media under Abbas's control continue to vilify Israel and Jews and promote violent confrontation. PA schools and media persist in indoctrinating children to dedicate themselves to martyrdom in the fight against Israel. The danger posed by this ongoing incitement is obvious, but Olmert has not deemed it worthy of public criticism or challenge.

In response to Israel's recent exchange with Hizbullah that entailed the release of Samir Kuntar, whose claim to fame is his killing of a four-year-old Israeli girl by smashing her skull with his rifle butt, Abbas extended congratulations to Kuntar and his family.

Abbas also lauded one of the terrorists whose bodies were handed over by Israel in the exchange, a Palestinian woman whose "heroic" deed was taking part in an attack that killed 36 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, many of whom were burned to death on a blown-up bus. According to Abbas, the woman, Dalal Mughrabi, should be honored for carrying out "one of the most courageous operations in Israel"; and he declared that "we want to turn Dalal's funeral into a national wedding, a major celebration.... She will always be remembered as a symbol for the Palestinian women's struggle." This, too, failed to rouse Olmert to any criticism of his "peace partner."

Olmert is likewise silent regarding the demonization of Israel and Jews in Egyptian media; instead he praises Egypt for its role as a "moderating" force. Egypt's ongoing failure to stem the smuggling of arms to Hamas in Gaza, attested to by Israeli military and intelligence services, similarly elicits no criticism or challenge from the prime minister.

learly, part of the explanation for Olmert's continuing in office lies in a coalition whose Knesset members put their personal interests, their fear of losing their seats in a new election, above the well-being of the nation.

But the problem goes far beyond the Knesset. In fact, Olmert would have Knesset backing whatever policies he pursued, as the self-interest of the MKs who support him would be the same in any case and would assure their backing.

In contrast, a wider perversion of the political system has not only allowed a man with such failures and faults to stay in office but has actually encouraged his pursuit of disastrous policies. For example, his dealings with Hamas, his agreement to a self-defeating cease-fire, and his grossly counter-productive courting of Syria's Assad, likewise at the cost of future national suffering, as well as his silence regarding incitement in PA media and Egyptian media, were not fashioned by political conviction - the man appears to have none - but by what he perceives as mollifying those who are in a position to challenge his premiership in the face of his incompetence and apparent corruption.

That wider perversion lies largely in corruption elsewhere in the Israeli body politic; in particular, a corrupt judiciary and criminal justice system and corruption in major elements of the media. The corruption in these institutions is not primarily material and venal, as that of which the prime minister is suspected, but ideological: a misuse of judicial and police powers, and an abuse of media responsibility, for political ends. But it is no less dangerous to the Jewish state for being less venal.

Among Israeli media outlets, the government-controlled electronic media have always been left-leaning and have consistently slanted the news to conform to a leftist political bias. During the Oslo years, for example, they routinely failed to report evidence of Arafat's involvement in anti-Israel terror or the persistent calls for the murder of Israelis and ultimate destruction of the Jewish state that were then, too, an omnipresent fixture of Palestinian Authority media, mosques and schools. Israeli concessions were reported and lauded; any questioning of those concessions was either ignored or noted only to be denigrated.

The same bias has prevailed in major elements of the privately owned media. At a conference in Moscow last fall, David Landau, then-managing editor of Haaretz, the newspaper of Israel's elites, openly acknowledged, indeed seemed to brag, that his paper muted its coverage of corruption charges against political figures such as Olmert and former prime minister Sharon when those leaders were pursuing policies Haaretz deemed to be advancing the "peace process." One does not have to be a political genius in Israel to know what political steps play to the prevailing media bias.

A similar bias permeates Israel's judiciary and criminal justice system, with, for example, different investigatory and prosecutory criteria applied according to the target's political views. This has always been a problem in Israel but has seemingly become more blatant since the initiation of Oslo.

One particularly noteworthy expression of this bias was the heavy-handed use of prosecutorial mechanisms and of the police to suppress protests, demonstrations, even political organizational meetings, of those opposed to the Oslo accords. Such abuse of power became even more marked in the wake of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995. Indeed, the government sought to tar the entire opposition with responsibility for the assassination and to treat Oslo's critics accordingly.

Certainly, some on the Left were troubled by this pattern. For example, Hillel Halkin, a longtime Labor sympathizer, wrote two months after Rabin's death: "Since the assassination there have been signs that the Labor government has embarked on a worrisome policy of using rarely invoked anti-'incitement-to-rebellion' laws in order to intimidate forms of protest and criticism that would be permitted, or at least considered less severe legal offenses, in most democratic countries." But this was a rare statement for voices in the Labor camp.

Nor did the terror war launched by Arafat in September 2000, and increased public disenchantment with what the Oslo-era delusions of the Israeli Left had wrought, translate into any lessening of the predilection to use the law and the tools of police and prosecutors in prejudicial ways against those on the political Right. Thus, in the summer of 2005, in advance of the dismantling of the Jewish communities/settlements in Gaza as well as four on the West Bank, the government created an entirely new and extraordinary body of prosecutorial procedures to deal with anti-evacuation demonstrators and resisters.

Among the novel guidelines was an order that cases brought against those accused of threatening a civil servant in the course of the expulsions "cannot be closed by the investigating unit because of lack of evidence or lack of public interest, but only with permission from the state prosecutor."

In an April 2007 hearing for a senior reserve officer who had tried to resist his expulsion from Kfar Yam in Gaza, Judge Drora Beit-Or, deputy president of the Be'er Sheva Magistrates Court, acknowledged, "We dealt differently with the cases from the Disengagement. We [in Be'er Sheva] dealt with many cases including minors and threats. Most of the defendants were first time offenders and all [cases] received special treatment." This included the months-long imprisonment of teenagers who had committed no crime and had no previous criminal record.

The discriminatory use of the criminal justice system to target leading opposition political figures was likewise a recurrent fixture of Labor Zionist governance that seemed to reach new levels of intensity in the context of Labor's promotion and defense of the Oslo process. Notable in this regard was the aggressive prosecutorial pursuit of Benjamin Netanyahu, after he had left office, for his allegedly having engaged in illegal activities around contracting work done at his private residence while he was prime minister and also his reportedly having kept gifts received while in office that properly belonged to the state.

In contrast, pursuit of then-president Ezer Weizman for allegedly having received large payoffs to advance left-wing political goals - with the amounts involved being significantly greater than those entailed in the allegations against Netanyahu - was much less vigorous.

The blatant political use of prosecutorial actions prompted Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to address the matter in a letter to Haaretz in August, 2000. Dershowitz noted "Israel's long history of prosecuting, often unsuccessfully, some prominent public officials, while foregoing prosecution of others." He went on: "Even those who want to see Benjamin Netanyahu prosecuted appear to acknowledge that if the same test that was applied to Ezer Weizman were to be applied to Netanyahu, there would be no prosecution"; and he warned: "It would be discriminatory in the extreme to apply a less demanding evidentiary and prosecutorial standard for Netanyahu than has been applied to other political figures in the past. Any less demanding standards would reasonably raise the specter of political partisanship and discrimination."

We have yet to see how the most recent charges raised against Olmert are handled by the criminal justice system. But the prime minister would have many precedents to draw upon if he surmised that making concessions to the nation's enemies may well win him more sympathetic treatment.

Similar politicization of governmental bodies that ought to be free of partisan bias has infected other institutions of Israeli public life in a manner that has rewarded Olmert for pursuing accommodation of Israel's enemies and contributed to his continuing in power despite the real dangers his premiership poses to the nation's well-being.

In the face of sharp public criticism concerning the government's handling of the 2006 war, the Cabinet appointed a five-member commission of inquiry to investigate and report on the war's management. The Winograd Commission, named after its chairman, issued its final report in January 2008. While the document, like the commission's interim findings presented nine months earlier, is harshly critical of the government for its conduct of the war, the final report surprised many observers by not explicitly assigning personal blame to the prime minister or recommending what ought to be the consequences for him.

When asked, a short time after the report's release, why it did not call for Olmert's resignation, one commission member, Yehezkel Dror, a professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University, responded: "If we think that the prime minister will advance the peace process, it is a serious consideration. What do you prefer, a government with Olmert and Barak, or new elections that will put Netanyahu in power?"

Professor Dror apparently recognized no problem in his political preferences influencing his work on a commission whose investigations and conclusions should have transcended partisan political considerations.

Dror has since come to regret his stance. Writing in the Forward on July 2, under the title "A Severe Verdict That Didn't Go Far Enough," he observed, "The prime minister misdirected the war, showing a serious lack of strategic thinking. Most of the blame [for the war's failures] lies with the government, and particularly with the prime minister."

Dror added, "I expected the Cabinet would resign or be dismissed after the interim report appeared.The prime minister, however, did not resign, nor was he forced to leave. I do not think this would have happened in any other parliamentary democracy. The peace initiatives, as they unfold with time, however important, seem in part to be airy improvisation, if not outright spin, lacking deep, long-term, realistic grand-strategic thinking by the prime minister based on professional political-security staff work. The prime minister stands accused of unseemly personal behavior. He is preoccupied with political survival and is distrusted by the vast majority of the public.

"Is the Winograd Commission to blame for the present sorry state of affairs? In part, speaking about my own role, the answer is yes. I regret that I did not insist on making an explicit institutional recommendation that, because of his grand failures, the prime minister should not continue to serve. This recommendation is all the more urgent and valid in light of developments since publication of our final report."

Dror's public admission of error is commendable. It also renders him virtually unique among those in Israel who have allowed partisanship to guide their behavior in positions of public service and public trust that should be above partisan bias.

But his admission is based essentially on his having seen the dangerous consequences of his error and Olmert's remaining in office. Dror does not acknowledge the larger reality that damage to the state will inevitably follow from the rot of politicizing institutions that ought to transcend narrow political considerations, even if that damage is, at least in the short term, often less dramatic than the dire straits into which Israel has been placed by Olmert's continuing on as prime minister.