Tag Archives: Lebanon

Obama’s Durban gambit

While most Americans were busy celebrating Valentine’s Day, last Saturday the Obama administration announced that it would send a delegation to Geneva to participate in planning the UN’s so-called Durban II conference, scheduled to take place in late April. Although largely overlooked in the US, the announcement sent shock waves through Jerusalem.

The Durban II conference was announced in the summer of 2007. Its stated purpose is to review the implementation of the declaration adopted at the UN’s anti-Israel hate-fest that took place in Durban, South Africa, the week before the September 11, 2001, attacks against America.

At Durban, both the UN-sponsored NGO conclave and the UN’s governmental conference passed declarations denouncing Israel as a racist state. The NGO conference called for a coordinated international campaign aimed at delegitimizing Israel and the right of the Jewish people to self-determination, and belittling the Holocaust.

The NGO conference also called for curbs on freedom of expression throughout the world in order to prevent critical discussion of Islam. As far as the world’s leading NGOs – including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – were concerned, critical discussions of Islam are inherently racist.

In defending US participation in the Durban II planning sessions, Gordon Duguid, the State Department’s spokesman, argued, "If you are not engaged, you don’t have a voice."

He continued, "We wanted to put forward our view and see if there is some way we can make the document [which sets the agenda and dictates the outcome of the Durban II conference] a better document than it appears it is going to be."

WHILE THIS seems like a noble goal, both the State Department and the Obama White House ought to know that there is absolutely no chance that they can accomplish it. This is the case for two reasons.

First, since the stated purpose of the Durban II conference is to oversee the implementation of the first Durban conference’s decisions, and since those decisions include the anti-Israel assertion that Israel is a racist state, it is clear that the Durban II conference is inherently, and necessarily, anti-Israel.

The second reason that both the State Department and the White House must realize that they are powerless to affect the conference’s agenda is because that agenda was already set in previous planning sessions chaired by the likes of Libya, Cuba, Iran and Pakistan. And that agenda includes multiple assertions of the basic illegitimacy of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination. The conference agenda also largely adopted the language of the 2001 NGO conference that called for the criminalization of critical discussion of Islam as a form of hate speech and racism. That is, the 2009 conference’s agenda is not only openly anti-Israel, it is also openly pro-tyranny, and so seemingly antithetical to US interests.

Beyond all that, assuming that the Obama administration truly wishes to change the agenda, the fact is that the US is powerless to do so. As was the case in 2001, so too, today, the Islamic bloc, supported by the Third World bloc, has an automatic voting majority. Beyond chipping away at the margins, the US has no ability whatsoever to change the conference’s agenda or expected outcome.

SINCE IT came into office a month ago, every single Middle East policy the Obama administration has announced has been antithetical to Israel’s national security interests. From President Barack Obama’s intense desire to appease Iran’s mullahs in open discussions; to his stated commitment to establish a Palestinian state as quickly as possible despite the Palestinians’ open rejection of Israel’s right to exist and support for terrorism; to his expressed support for the so-called Saudi peace plan, which would require Israel to commit national suicide by contracting to within indefensible borders and accepting millions of hostile, foreign-born Arabs as citizens and residents of the rump Jewish state; to his decision to end US sanctions against Syria and return the US ambassador to Damascus; to his plan to withdraw US forces from Iraq and so give Iran an arc of uninterrupted control extending from Iran to Lebanon, every single concrete policy Obama has enunciated harms Israel.

At the same time, none of the policies that Obama has adopted can be construed as directed against Israel. In and of themselves, none can be viewed as expressing specific hostility toward Israel. Rather, they are expressions of naiveté, or ignorance, or – at worst – deliberate denial of the nature of the problems of the Arab and Islamic world on the part of Obama and his advisers.

The same cannot be said of the administration’s decision to send its delegation to the Durban II planning session this past week in Geneva. Unlike every other Obama policy, this is a hostile act against Israel. This is true first of all because the decision was announced in the face of repeated Israeli requests that the US join Israel and Canada in boycotting the Durban II conference.

Some could chalk up the US’s rejection of Israel’s urgent entreaties as an honest difference of opinion. But what lies behind Israel’s requests for a US boycott is not a partisan agenda, but a clearheaded acknowledgement that the Durban II conference is inherently devoted to the delegitimization and destruction of the Jewish state. And by joining in the planning sessions, the US has become a full participant in legitimizing and so advancing this overtly anti-Jewish agenda.

On Thursday, Prof. Anne Bayefsky, the senior editor of the EyeontheUN Web site, demonstrated that by participating in the planning sessions the US is accepting the conference’s anti-Israel agenda. Bayefsky reported that at the planning session in Geneva on Thursday, the Palestinian delegation proposed that a paragraph be added to the conference’s agenda. Their draft "calls for implementation of… the advisory opinion of the ICJ [International Court of Justice] on the wall, [i.e., Israel’s security fence], and the international protection of Palestinian people throughout the occupied Palestinian territory."

The American delegation raised no objection to the Palestinian draft.

Issued in 2004, the ICJ’s advisory opinion on the security fence claimed that Israel has no right to self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. At the time, both the US and Israel rejected the ICJ’s authority to issue an opinion on the subject.

On Thursday, by not objecting to this Palestinian draft, not only did the US effectively accept the ICJ’s authority, for practical purposes it granted the anti-Israel claim that Jews may be murdered with impunity.

This assertion aligns naturally with the language already in the Durban II agenda, which calls Israel’s Law of Return racist. This law, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew who wishes to live here, is the embodiment of Jewish peoplehood and the vehicle through which the Jewish people has built our nation-state. In alleging that the Law of Return is racist, the Durban II conference asserts that the Jews are not a people and we have no right to self-determination in our homeland. And Thursday, by participating in the process of demonizing Israel and its people, the US lent its own credibility to this bigoted campaign.

OBAMA’S SPOKESMEN and defenders claim that by participating in the planning sessions in Geneva, the administration is doing nothing more than attempting to prevent the conference from being the anti-Jewish diplomatic pogrom it was in 2001. If they are unsuccessful, they will boycott the conference. No harm done.

But this claim rings hollow.

As Bayefsky and others argued this week, by entering into the Durban preparatory process, the US has done two things. First, it has made it all but impossible for European states like France, Britain, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, which were all considering boycotting the conference, to do so. They cannot afford to be seen as more opposed to its anti-Israel and anti-freedom agenda than Israel’s closest ally and the world’s greatest democracy. So just by participating in the planning sessions the US has legitimized a clearly bigoted, morally illegitimate process, making it impossible for Europe to disengage.

Second, through its behavior at the Geneva planning sessions this week, the US has demonstrated that State Department protestations aside, the administration has no interest in changing the agenda in any serious way. The US delegation’s decision not to object to the Palestinian draft, as well its silence in the face of Iran’s rejection of a clause in the conference declaration that mentioned the Holocaust, show the US did not join the planning session to change the tenor of the conference. The US is participating in the planning sessions because it wishes to participate in the conference.

The Durban II conference, like its predecessor, is part and parcel of a campaign to coordinate the diplomatic and legal war against the Jewish state. By walking out of the 2001 Durban conference, and refusing to participate, support or finance any aspect of this UN-sponsored campaign until last Saturday, for seven years the US made clear that it opposed this war and believed its aim of destroying Israel is unacceptable.

By embracing the Durban campaign now, it is possible that the Obama administration will water down some of the most noxious language in conference’s draft declaration. But this doesn’t balance out the harm US participation will cause to Israel, or to the Jewish people. By participating in the conference, the US today is effectively giving American support to the war against the Jewish state.

The open hostility toward Israel expressed by the Obama administration’s decision to participate in the Durban process should be a red flag for both the Israeli government and for Israel’s supporters in the US. Both Israel and its Jewish and non-Jewish supporters must openly condemn the administration’s move and demand that it reverse its decision immediately.

FOR THE past two years, the American Jewish Committee has been instrumental in convincing the American Jewish community to reject repeated Israeli requests that they call for a US boycott of Durban II. To secure US participation over Israel’s objections, the AJC even went so far as to sign a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking her not to boycott the conference.

In return for the AJC’s labors, its senior operative Felice Gaer is now a member of the US delegation in Geneva. Happily ensconced in the Swiss conference room where the Holocaust is denied, the Jewish people’s right to self-determination is reviled, and Israel’s right to defend itself is rejected, Gaer now sits silently, all the while using the fact of her membership in the US delegation as proof that the Obama administration is serious about protecting Israel at Durban II.

Whatever the AJC may have gained for its support for Durban II, Israel and its supporters have clearly been harmed.

Some might argue that no Israeli interest is served by openly condemning the White House. But when the White House is participating in a process that legitimizes and so advances the war against the Jewish state, such condemnation is not only richly deserved but required. It is the administration, not Israel that threw down the gauntlet. If Israel and its supporters refrain from vigorously criticizing this move, we guarantee its repetition.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

An urgent memo to the next government

The outgoing Kadima-Labor government’s anticipated decision to release a thousand terrorists, including several dozen mass murdering terror commanders, in the framework of a ceasefire deal with Iran’s Palestinian proxy Hamas is simply the latest troubling legacy that the Olmert-Livni-Barak government is leaving its successor.

Once the deal goes through, Hamas will be able to quickly expand the threat it poses to Israel. The jihadist group is already using the political legitimacy Israel is conferring on it to reestablish its unity government with Fatah. When that government is formed, the US and Europe will move hastily to recognize the terror group.

Hamas will use its increased legitimacy as a screen behind which it will expand its offensive capabilitiesThis is particularly true in the field of ballistic weapons.

We know this will happen because we have already seen what happened with the last Iranian proxy that Israel signed a ceasefire agreement with. Since Israel agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and brought its war with Hizbullah to an end in August 2006, Hizbullah has reasserted its political and military control over south Lebanon and has taken over the Lebanese government. Moreover, it has massively expanded its missile capabilities not only by tripling the size of its arsenal, but by tripling the range of its missiles.

In 2006, Hizbullah’s most powerful missile was a Fajr rocket with a 100 km range and a 50 kilogram warhead. Today, according to Avi Schnurr, executive director of the Israel Missile Defense Association, Hizbullah has an arsenal of Fatah-110 ballistic missiles with a range of 300 kilometers and a 600 kilogram payload.

While our media elites endlessly drone on about whether or not Likud is sufficiently "pro-peace" to satisfy Meretz and Kadima, our national discourse is ignoring the greatest threat this country faces: missiles.

Schnurr warns that today there are more missiles pointing at Israel in absolute numbers than at any other country on earth. While Israelis are properly concerned with suicide terrorism and Kassam rocket attacks, the fastest escalating threat that Israel faces come from ballistic missiles.

In addition to Iran’s Hamas and Hizbullah proxies, its client state Syria has a massive missile arsenal housed in hardened silos. Syria’s missiles are capable of attacking every square centimeter of Israeli territory. And of course, with its rapidly growing land and sea-based ballistic missile arsenal, Iran itself is the fastest growing missile threat facing Israel.

IN RECENT YEARS, rather than taking any immediate action to meet the growing threat, Israel has sufficed with launching long-term development programs that promise to provide protection for current threats in four to eight years. For instance, in response to Syria’s medium-range missiles, Israel is developing the David’s Sling anti-missile system that should be ready in eight years.

Israel could in the meantime upgrade its PAC-2 anti-missile batteries responsible for contending with medium-range missiles, with US-made PAC-3s. But the powers that be in the Ministry of Defense have decided that the PAC-3’s $100 million price tag is too high.

Indeed far from installing upgrades, Israel is downgrading its existing anti-missile arsenals. According to Defense News, Israel is planning to end its involvement in the Arrow anti-missile program because it feels the maintenance costs of its Arrow batteries are too high. So as the number of missiles arrayed against it rises, Israel has decided not to bother increasing its anti-missile defenses.

Even more alarmingly, Israel has no medium-range or long-range conventional missile arsenals. Although Israel has the domestic capacity to produce both ballistic and cruise missiles, it has never bothered to build them. Consequently, its options for contending with rapidly escalating long-range threats from places like Iran are limited to manned aircraft and its suspected nuclear arsenal.

As Schnurr relates, Israel’s decision to contend with the spiraling missile threat it faces by ignoring it extends to short-range missile threats as well. Israel has rejected relatively inexpensive existing anti-rocket and mortar systems that could provide immediate protection to Sderot among other places. It has preferred to leave Sderot and the Western Negev unprotected while awaiting the development of the Iron Dome system now being developed by the Ministry of Defense.

Israel does field advanced radar systems. The Green Pine radar is one of the best in the world and together with the X-Band radar system the US recently deployed in the Negev, Israel’s ability to detect incoming missiles is significant. The problem is that all of Israel’s radar systems are facing east – towards Iran. Last December Iran signed a strategic alliance with Eritrea that permits its Revolutionary Guards to set up bases in Eritrea, strategically located to Israel’s south at the mouth of the Red Sea. Israel has no radars pointing to its south.

AFTER YEARS OF denial, today even US intelligence agencies acknowledge that Iran’s ballistic missile program is part and parcel of its nuclear program. While most Israeli observers have devoted their energies to assessing the destructive capacity of a direct nuclear attack against the tiny country, and to the various delivery mechanisms – from the Shihab-3 missiles to Syrian Scuds to Hizbullah or Hamas death squads – that Iran could field against it in the event of a nuclear attack, the fact of the matter is that Iran has an indirect option for using nuclear weapons to attack Israel that would likely be more destructive than a direct nuclear attack. And it is an option that Iran can wield not only against Israel, but against every country in the world.

An electromagnetic pulse or EMP attack is an indirect nuclear attack. It has the capacity to destroy a target country’s electricity grids and so revert a post-industrial, technology-based country such as Israel or the US to a pre-industrial condition. If an aggressor launches a nuclear device of whatever size and detonates it above the atmosphere and in the line of site of its target country, the x-rays and gamma rays emitted by the blast will cause an electromagnetic pulse, or wave a million times stronger than the strongest radio wave. That wave, which comes in three successive stages, will destroy a country’s electrical grids and through them, its ability to function.

In 2000, concern about the EMP threat in the US caused Congress to mandate the formation of a commission comprised of the leading US experts on the issue to study it. The EMP Threat Commission’s 2004 report warned that the effect an EMP attack would have on the US’s national infrastructures "could be sufficient to qualify as catastrophic to the nation."

As Frank Gaffney, President of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, explained in his 2006 book War Footing, by destroying a country’s electrical power systems, an EMP will destroy its economy since it will wipe out its banking system. All vehicles that operate with electronic systems – that is all vehicles made since the mid-1970s – would be rendered inoperable. Telecommunications would end. A country’s ability to store food through refrigeration would end. Its ability to transport water and pump gasoline would also end.

Since almost no one would be killed in the immediate aftermath of an EMP attack, a threat of retaliation against the aggressor country would lack credibility because such an option would be politically unpalatable. But while an EMP attack would not kill many people directly, it would kill millions of people indirectly. As Gaffney notes, by wiping out a country’s ability to support itself, an EMP attack would cause mass starvation and disease.

The threat of an EMP attack was not taken seriously by US military planners during the Cold War because they were concerned with the primary Soviet threat to annihilate the US and its allies by launching several thousand nuclear warheads against them. But as nuclear and missile technology has proliferated in the post-Cold War period, and more technologically primitive countries get their hands on missiles and limited nuclear capabilities, the threat of an EMP attack as become far more acute.

In Iran’s case, the mullahs have signaled clearly through both word and deed that they find the option of attacking their enemies with an EMP attack attractive. An article published in Iran’s security journal Nashriyeh-e Siasi Nezami in 1999 identified an EMP attack as a way to defeat the US as a military power and as a state. Then too, as William Graham, who headed the US’s EMP commission explained in an interview with World Net Daily last year, Iran is openly building the capacity to carry out such an attack. Last year, Iran described a ship-launched test of its Shihab-3 missile in the Caspian Sea as "successful" in spite of the fact that like an EMP, the missile detonated in mid-launch.

More disturbingly, Iran’s successful satellite launch earlier this month makes clear that the mullahs now have the technological capacity to effectively wipe out Western civilization. Three to five nuclear bombs of any size, launched into space on satellites and detonated above the US, Europe and Asia would send Western civilization back to the 19th century. Last week Iran announced it is building seven more satellites. Yet rather than recognize that once its nuclear arsenal is online Iran will represents a threat to all nations, the West ignored the significance of the satellite launch.

The US’s EMP commission’s report explained that to defend against such an attack, it is necessary to build redundant electrical systems and have difficult-to-build replacement parts like turbines on hand to replace ones destroyed by such an attack. Since the report was published, the US has made some modest progress in that direction.

THIS IS NOT the case, unfortunately in Israel. Although as a small country, Israel has the capacity to replicate its systems relatively cheaply and quickly, the outgoing government has paid no attention whatsoever to the growing threat. As a consequence, were Iran to attack Israel with an EMP attack, Israel would be rendered defenseless and at the mercy of Iran and the Arab world. For their part, they would undoubtedly be tempted to invade the Jewish state to finish what the Iranians started.

Through IMDA, Schnurr is trying to raise awareness of the growing missile threat and recommend ways to contend with it in the Defense Ministry as well as in ministries that control critical infrastructures. He has had some modest success, but to date, no one has taken any action.

With coalition negotiations only now beginning, it is hard to believe that soon we will be led by leaders more interested in contending with the threats we face as a country. But such a government is apparently on its way. In light of the growing conventional and unconventional missile threats facing us, one of the Netanyahu government’s first actions in office must be to review and rapidly expand Israel’s offensive and defensive missile systems, and quickly move to replicate critical national infrastructures to defend against EMP attack.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Enter the Netanyahu Government

Who won the election on Tuesday night and what do the results tell us about the composition of the next government?

Israeli voters decided two things on Tuesday. First, they decided that they want the political right to lead the country. Second, leftist voters decided that they want to be represented by a big party, so they abandoned Labor and Meretz and put their eggs in Kadima’s basket.

These two decisions – one general and one sectoral – are what brought about the anomalous situation where the party with the most Knesset seats is incapable of forming the next governing coalition. Despite Kadima leader Tzipi Livni’s stunning electoral achievement, she cannot form a coalition. Binyamin Netanyahu will be Israel’s next prime minister. The Likud will form the next coalition.

But what sort of governing coalition will Netanyahu form? That is today’s sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

During the campaign, Netanyahu said he wants to form a broad governing coalition. Until Tuesday, he planned to bring the Labor Party led by Ehud Barak into his government while leaving Kadima out in the cold. It was his hope that as the odd man out, Kadima would be destroyed as a viable political entity.

The public, though, had other plans. On Tuesday, voters wiped out David Ben-Gurion’s party as a political force in the country. Labor’s senior leadership reacted to their defeat by declaring that the time has come to move into the opposition. There will be no coalition with Labor.

That leaves Kadima. If Netanyahu wants a leftist party in his government, he will need to bring in Kadima. Such a coalition would be based on a tripartite partnership between the Likud, Kadima and Israel Beiteinu.

Although Netanyahu clearly prefers such a broad coalition, it is not his only option. The other possibility is to form a government with his rightist political camp. A coalition of the Likud, Israel Beiteinu, Shas, United Torah Judaism, the National Union and Habayit Hayehudi would constitute a stable governing majority that could withstand attempts by Kadima to bring down the government in the Knesset.

THE QUESTION is which coalition is best for the Likud? The answer to that question is debatable. But to begin to understand what should drive Netanyahu’s decision, it is necessary to recognize his top priorities in office.

Netanyahu has made clear that his top priorities are preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, defeating Hamas and strengthening the economy.

Netanyahu’s free market economic philosophy is shared by Kadima and Israel Beiteinu. It is not shared by Shas or Habayit Hayehudi. The National Union is neutral on this issue. So to cut income taxes by 20 percent, as Netanyahu has pledged, a coalition with Kadima is preferable to its rightist alternative. On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that Netanyahu will probably be able to push his economic policies through the Knesset with either governing coalition, particularly if he proposes them quickly.

This leaves the issue of Iran and its Hamas proxy in Gaza. Here the situation becomes more complicated. In a conversation on Thursday morning, Likud MK Yuval Steinitz argued in favor of a coalition with Kadima by noting that as the Kadima-led government’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, and its destruction of the Iranian-financed, North Korean built nuclear installation in Syria in September 2007 show, Kadima shares the Likud’s willingness to use force against Israel’s enemies.

At the same time, Steinitz acknowledged that Kadima used force in both Lebanon and Gaza to advance diplomatic aims that are diametrically opposed to the Likud’s diplomatic aims. In Lebanon, Livni was the architect of the cease-fire with Hizbullah that paved the way for Hizbullah’s rearmament, reassertion of control over south Lebanon, and effective takeover of the Lebanese government. In Gaza, the Kadima-led government is about to agree to a cease-fire that will in the end strengthen Hamas’s grip on power and legitimize the terror group as a political force.

Moreover, unlike the Likud, Kadima has made establishing a Fatah-led Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza its most urgent strategic goal, followed only by its ardent desire to give Syria the Golan Heights. The Likud opposes both of these goals.

In contrast to Kadima, the rightist parties in Netanyahu’s voter-made coalition share the Likud’s philosophy both in terms of when to use force, and in terms of the diplomatic aims the resort to force are supposed to achieve. The rightist Knesset bloc would not agree to a cease-fire agreement in which Israel is required to release a thousand terrorists, including mass murderers, from prison. They would not agree to cease-fires that enable Hamas and Hizbullah to continue to arm, control territory or attack Israel. They would not agree to a national strategy that advocates subcontracting Israel’s national security to international forces. And they oppose transferring Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights to Arab control.

THE DISPARITY between Kadima’s and the Likud’s strategic goals makes a rightist coalition seem like the best option. But there are reasons why an observer could reasonably reach a different conclusion. The existential threats Israel faces today from Iran and its proxies are exacerbated by the fact that the West’s position on Israel is swiftly converging with the Arab world’s position on Israel. Throughout Western Europe, elite opinion has swung against the Jewish state. Today not only can Israel expect no support from Europe for its moves to defend itself from its enemies, it can be all but certain that Europe will actively seek to weaken it. The only question is what means Europe chooses to adopt against Israel.

Presently, Europe suffices with threatening to prosecute Israeli military personnel and political leaders as war criminals, levying partial embargos on the sale of military equipment to Israel, supporting anti-Israel resolutions in international forums, and refusing to end its trade with Iran. In the future, the EU is liable to end its free trade agreements with Israel, seek Israel’s delegitimization as a "racist" state, and perhaps join Russia in supplying Arab armies and Iran with advanced weapons and nuclear reactors.

As for the US, the Obama administration’s interest in courting Teheran and the Arab world place Jerusalem on a collision course with Washington. Given the high priority the Obama administration has placed on appeasing Iran, its decision to end US sanctions against Syria, and its intense desire to establish a Palestinian state, it is fairly clear that Israel cannot expect to enjoy good relations with Washington in the coming years without adopting policies that would endanger its survival.

It is common wisdom in Israel that the Israeli Left is capable of limiting the level of hostility directed against Israel from the US and Europe. Livni exploited this popular belief during the electoral campaign when she warned that a rightist government would destroy Israel’s relations with Washington. Apparently convinced by her warnings, some voices in the Likud argue that with Livni and Kadima in the government, the US and the EU will think twice before adopting openly hostile policies.

Unfortunately, this view is demonstrably false. As foreign minister in Ariel Sharon’s government during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Shimon Peres did not prevent the international Left in Europe and the US from accusing Israel of committing war crimes. The Kadima-led leftist government was unable to secure European support for Israel in the Second Lebanon War. The fact that Israel was led by the leftist Kadima-Labor government during the wars in Lebanon and Gaza did not improve the West’s negative reaction to the fighting.

The generally ignored truth is that international hostility toward Israel is driven by factors extraneous to Israel. Consequently, Israel’s governments have little ability to influence how foreign governments treat it, regardless of who forms those governments.

There is one intrinsic advantage that leftist parties bring to rightist-led coalitions. Leftist parties are capable of mobilizing the support of the domestic leftist elites for the government’s actions.

Because the Left was in the government in 2002, 2006 and 2009, the media supported Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead. And because it was in the opposition during the 1982 Lebanon War and during the Palestinian uprising from 1988 to 1990 as well as in 2003, when Sharon led a rightist coalition, the political Left colluded with the leftist elites in the media, in Peace Now and its sister groups, as well as with foreign governments to undermine the government. Since Tuesday night, both the local media elites and Kadima leaders have made clear that they will consider a Likud-led rightist government illegitimate and will work to destabilize it with the intention of overthrowing it within a year or two.

It is true that it is hard to imagine that either Kadima or the leftists in the media would oppose a decision by the Netanyahu government to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. But it is also true that they would seek to minimize any strategic advantage Israel might gain either locally or internationally from removing this clear and present danger to Israel specifically and to international security generally. In the aftermath of such attacks, Kadima would unquestionably blame the government for whatever punitive steps Washington and Brussels implement against Israel in retaliation for the attacks.

More disturbingly, in the event that Kadima leads the opposition, it is easy to imagine Livni and her cohorts in her party and in the media attacking the government for refusing to give land to Fatah in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and for refusing to surrender the Golan Heights to Syria. Kadima’s leaders will have open invitations to travel to Washington and Brussels to delegitimize the Netanyahu government’s policies toward the Palestinians and the Syrians, and more likely than not, they will use them.

On the other hand, it is far from clear that the situation would be much better if Netanyahu were to bring Kadima into his coalition. Livni can hardly be expected to set aside her obsession with establishing a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Gaza and Judea and Samaria, particularly given that she seems convinced that she won the elections.

IN SHORT, given their disparate strategic goals, as a senior coalition partner, Kadima can only be relied upon to support Netanyahu in implementing a limited set of policies. As Netanyahu considers his options for forming a coalition, he needs to answer four questions:

First, can Kadima’s cooperation be assured in the event that the government decides to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Second, will having Kadima in the government bring Israel significantly more leverage with the Americans in the run up to or the aftermath of such a strike than not having it in the government?

Third, will the Likud be weakened more if Livni attempts to advance her Palestinian policy from within the government or from outside it?

And finally, as the Likud’s senior coalition partner, will the damage Kadima causes the Likud through its devotion to Palestinian statehood and willingness to transfer the Golan Heights to Syria outweigh the advantage gained by its partnership in attacking Iran?

How Netanyahu answers these questions should determine the nature of his governing coalition.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Misguided on Iran

Among the topics that President Obama covered in his first news conference on the evening of Monday, 9 February, was Iran.

The president made several troubling statements, which is hardly surprising, given that the new administration’s entire approach to Iran is troubling.

President Obama used terms and phrases like "constructive dialogue," "engage" and "mutual respect and progress."

None of these expressions has any place in a conversation about Iran.

Iran has killed Americans for over 25 years, sponsored Hezbollah, HAMAS and Al Qaeda and has repeatedly threatened America and our allies.

In 1979 Iran invaded the US embassy in Tehran and held 52 American hostages for 444 days.

Iran was complicit in the Hezbollah Islamikaze attacks on the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in April 1983 and the US Marine barracks there in October 1983. In the attack on the Marine barracks, 241 U.S. Marines, sailors and soldiers were killed. In fact, until September 11th, 2001, Hezbollah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist organization.

During the balance of the 1980s, Hezbollah kidnapped and murdered Americans with impunity in Beirut, including CIA station chief William Buckley and Marine Colonel William Higgins.

Iran was then involved in the bombing of the US Air Force Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in June 1996, an attack in which 19 U.S. airmen were killed.

It should be pointed out that Iran is not just a sponsor of Hezbollah. Iran formed Hezbollah and has always trained and continues to train its operatives in Lebanon and inside Iran. Hezbollah basically operates as an Iranian foreign legion.

That’s why observers who have been watching Iran for years are particularly troubled by Obama’s choice of the language "financing" and "funding" terrorist organizations to describe Iran’s involvement with terrorism.

Something tells us that this specific choice of language isn’t an accident. Words are chosen carefully whenever a president speaks publicly on foreign affairs as the audience is not just the American people, but the world–and things can get lost in translation.

Iran has done much more than fund and finance terrorism. They have armed and trained Jihadist terrorist organizations and taken part directly in operations.

Just last week the US Navy intercepted a ship that was headed from Iran to Gaza with missiles and rockets on board. Even more to the point, there is considerable evidence that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operate directly with Hezbollah in some operations and some IRGC members have been killed and captured in Iraq. That’s why the US designated the IRGC a terrorist organization in its own right last year.

Of course, then-Senators Obama and Biden were two of just a handful of senators to oppose that measure when it came to a vote.

Unfortunately, President Obama’s statements during the press conference also totally ignored Iran’s role in the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan as detailed over and over by the US military, as well as Iran’s deep involvement with Al Qaeda, as detailed by the US Treasury Department within the last month.

Iran was the primary supplier of deadly EFP-IEDs (Explosively Formed Penetrator-Improvised Explosive Devices) to the insurgents in Iraq and operated training camps for those insurgents inside Iran.

Iran’s cooperation with Al Qaeda has long been the subject of much debate with naïve observers claiming that Shiite Iran would never cooperate with Sunni Al Qaeda (completely ignoring the fact that Iran and Sunni HAMAS work closely with eachother). When the subject came up in last year’s presidential campaign, I wrote an article detailing Iran’s longstanding ties to Al Qaeda. 

Iran’s relations with Al Qaeda were brought into greater focus just 4 days before President Obama took office when the US Treasury Department released a statement with regard to top Al Qaeda operatives based out of Iran.

During the course of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama insisted that Iraq was but a distraction in the war on terrorism and vowed to go after those who were truly responsible for September 11.

If he was telling the truth, then why is he choosing to engage Al Qaeda’s main state sponsor?

President Obama declared in his press conference that "there’s been a lot of mistrust built up over the years" between the US and Iran.

Given that Iran has made killing Americans its national sport and sponsoring Jihadist terrorist organizations its national pastime, why should America trust the Ayatollahs?

President Obama’s statements on Iran in his press conference do not make me feel better at all.  I feel much worse…and all Americans need to understand.

The economy is bad right now to be sure and it necessarily dominates the headlines and airwaves. But one day, we are all going to wake up, turn on the TV news and discover that the Ayatollahs have The Bomb. Our children and our children’s children will always wonder how we let it happen.

 

Christopher Holton is a Vice President with the Center for Security Policy and directs its Divest Terror Initiative and its Shariah Risk Due Diligence Project.

UK refuses Geert Wilders entry; Nat Hentoff on criticizing jihadists

Note: Geert Wilders was invited to the UK Parliament to speak at a showing of his film, Fitna (Arabic for ‘disagreement’ or ‘test of faith’). But then, a Muslim member of the UK Parliament, the powerful Lord Nazir Ahmed, threatened protests and the showing was cancelled. Word had it though that some members of Parliament had girded their loins and were prepared to reinvite Wilders and tough it out with the Muslim mobs led by Lord Ahmed. Well, that was until the really powerful decided to simply ban Mr. Wilders, a member of Parliament of the Netherlands, from even entering the UK.

 

Geert Wilders – a film producer and also a member of parliament in the Netherlands – is facing a prison term there for "insulting" Muslims. His short film "Fitna" in 2008 juxtaposed verses from the Koran with scenes of violence committed by jihadist terrorists. The Dutch appellate court refused a free-speech defense because the insults were so egregious.

If convicted, Wilders faces a maximum sentence of two years in prison. Said the defendant: "I lost my freedom already four and a half years ago in October 2004, when my 24-hour police protection started because of threats by Muslims in Holland and abroad to kill me."

I have heard from Muslims in this country that jihadists around the world have more than insulted traditional Muslim law by their fierce punishments of both non-Muslims and Muslims who have acted in speech or writing against jihadists’ reinterpretations of the Quran. Some of these protesters, exercising freedom of conscience, have been killed for their "blasphemy."

What awaits Wilders in the Netherlands may be a harbinger of what will happen if a nonbinding Dec. 18 U.N. resolution, passed by a strong majority in the General Assembly, becomes international law. The resolution urges U.N. members to take state action against (punish) "defamation of religion" and "incitement to religious hatred" caused by defamation.

The main force behind this resolution, which was sponsored on its behalf, is the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Following the combustible cartoons of Prophet Muhammad that were published in Denmark in September 2005, this organization had a key role in expanding the violent protests against those cartoons in a number of countries.

On Feb. 9, 2006, I received a copy of a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan from a longtime source of mine. He was acting against Sudan’s National Islamic Front government killing, raping and enslaving of black Christians and animists in southern Sudan. He was John Eibner, director of Christian Solidarity International, which was instrumental in rescuing many of those captives from slavery in the north of Sudan.

Eibner told Annan (as I reported at the time in the Feb. 14, 2006, Village Voice): "The role of the Saudi-based Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), representing 57 Muslim states, in creating a climate for violent confrontation over the cartoons [was shown when] the OIC set the stage for anti-free speech demonstrations at its extraordinary summit in Mecca in December 2005.

"The Muslim states," Eibner continued, "resolved – through many demonstrations – to pressure, through a program of joint Islamic action, international institutions, including the U.N., to criminalize insults of Islam and its prophet. … On the 4th of February – the day the mob violence commenced – the Organization of Islamic Conference described publication of the caricatures as acts of ‘blasphemy.’ Blasphemy is punishable by death, according to Sharia law."

Revealingly, although there was outrage when, on Oct. 17, 2005, the Egyptian newspaper Al Fagr published the cartoons on its front page, there was nothing like the furious demonstrations elsewhere until after the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit meeting in December 2005.

After the OIC’s focus on the cartoons at the Mecca summit, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon and Qatar went on to carry the inflammatory message of blasphemy. And the OIC’s grand plan to get international institutions to criminalize insults of Islam began to work. On Feb. 9, 2006, the European Union asked for a voluntary code of conduct to prevent offending Muslims. And on the same day, Annan concurred with an OIC proposal that the U.N. Human Rights Council "prevent instances of intolerance, discrimination, incitement of hatred and violence…against religions, prophets and beliefs."

Last Dec. 18, the OIC triumphed with the U.N. General Assembly’s passing of the nonbinding but rousing "defamation of religion" resolution on behalf of the OIC, which emphasized only Muslims and Islam by name as the forbidden targets of such "defamation." Pressure may well continue to enshrine this resolution into international law.

The OIC had a New York Times ad on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, "An Invitation to a New Partnership," addressed to President Obama. The organization wrote: "Throughout the globe, Muslims hunger for a new era of peace. We firmly believe that America, with your guidance, can help foster that peace, though real peace can only be shared – never imposed."

The OIC, however, was at the time fresh from its U.N. victory to actually impose silence on critics of Islamic jihadists, who have long been working to hijack the true Muslim religion. And why has the press, particularly the American press, continued to be so silent on this U.N. attack on individuals’ right of conscience throughout the world to call jihadist terrorism what it is? You might want to ask your news sources why they have ignored this global gag rule on free expression.

Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights. He is a member of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the libertarian Cato Institute, where he is a senior fellow.

This article appeared in the Washington Times on February 9, 2009.

 

Israel’s fateful choice

Tuesday’s general elections will officially end the briefest and most nonchalant electoral season Israel has ever experienced. Regrettably, the importance of these elections is inversely proportional to their lack of intensity. These are the most fateful elections Israel has ever had. The events of the past week make this point clearly.

On Monday Iran successfully launched a domestically manufactured satellite on a ballistic missile called the Safir-2 space rocket. Since the launch, experts have noted that the Safir-2 can also be used to launch conventional and nonconventional warheads. The Safir-2 has an estimated range of 2,000-3,000 kilometers. And so the successful satellite launch showed that today Iran is capable of launching missiles not only against Israel, but against southern Europe as well.

Many Israeli leaders viewed Monday’s launch as a "gotcha" moment. For years they have been saying that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to global security – not merely to Israel’s. And Monday’s launch demonstrated that they were right all along. Israel isn’t the only country on Iran’s target list.

Unfortunately for Israel, the international community couldn’t care less. Its response to Teheran’s latest provocation was to collectively shrug its shoulders.

On Wednesday emissaries of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany convened in Wiesbaden, Germany, to discuss their joint policies toward Iran in the aftermath of the satellite launch. Some Israelis argued that Iran’s provocation forced these leaders’ hands. Their reputations for toughness were on the line. They would have to do something.

Unfortunately for Israel, the emissaries of Russia, Britain, China, France, Germany and the US are more interested in convincing the mullahs that they are nice than in convincing them that they are tough.

Far from deciding to take concerted action against Iran, the great powers did nothing more than wish the Obama administration good luck as it moves to directly engage the mullahs. As their post-conference press release put it, the six governments’ answer to Teheran’s show of force was to "agree to consult on the next steps as the US administration undertakes its [Iranian] policy review."

As President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have explained, the US is reviewing its policy toward Iran in the hopes of finding a way to directly engage the Iranian government. While they claim that the aim of these sought after direct negotiations will be to convince the mullahs to give up their nuclear weapons program, since taking office the new administration has sent out strong signals that preventing Iran from going nuclear has taken a backseat to simply holding negotiations with Teheran.

According to a report in Aviation News, last week the US Navy prevented Israel from seizing an Iranian weapons ship in the Red Sea suspected of carrying illicit munitions bound for either Gaza or Lebanon. A week and a half ago, the US Navy boarded the ship in the Gulf of Aden and carried out a cursory inspection. It demurred from seizing the ship, however, because, as Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained on January 27, the US believed it had no international legal right to seize the vessel.

In inspecting the ship the US was operating under UN Security Council Resolution 1747, which bars Iran from exporting arms. The US argued that it lacked authority to seize the ship because 1747 has no enforcement mechanism. Yet the fact of the matter is that if the US were truly interested in intercepting the ship and preventing the arms from arriving at their destination, the language of 1747 is vague enough to support such a seizure.

And that’s the point. The US was uninterested in seizing the ship because it was uninterested in provoking a confrontation with Teheran, which it seeks to engage. It was not due to lack of legal authority that the US reportedly prevented the Israel Navy from seizing the ship in the Red Sea, but due to the administration’s fervent wish to appease the mullahs.

Today the ship, which was sailing under a Cypriot flag, is docked in the Port of Limassol. Cypriot authorities have reportedly inspected the ship twice, have communicated their findings to the Security Council, and are still waiting for guidance on how to deal with the ship.

ALL OF this brings us back to next Tuesday’s elections. With the US effectively giving up on confronting Iran, the entire burden for blocking Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons falls on Israel’s shoulders.

This means that the most important question that Israeli voters must ask ourselves between now and Tuesday is which leader and which party are most capable of achieving this vital goal?

All we need to do to answer this question is to check what our leaders have done in recent years to bring attention to the Iranian threat and to build coalitions to contend with it.

In late 2006, citing the Iranian nuclear menace, Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman joined the Olmert government where he received the tailor-made title of strategic affairs minister. At the time Lieberman joined the cabinet, the public outcry against the government for its failure to lead Israel to victory in the war with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hizbullah had reached a fever pitch. The smell of new elections was in the air as members of Knesset from all parties came under enormous public pressure to vote no confidence in the government.

By joining the government when he did, Lieberman single-handedly kept the Olmert government in power. Explaining his move, Lieberman claimed that the danger emanating from Iran’s nuclear program was so great that Israel could not afford new elections.

But what did he accomplish by saving the government by taking that job? The short answer is nothing. Not only did his presence in the government make no impact on Israel’s effectiveness in dealing with Iran, it prolonged the lifespan of a government that had no interest in forming a strategy for contending with Iran by two years.

In light of this fact, perhaps more than any other Israeli politician, Lieberman is to blame for the fact that Israel finds itself today with no allies in its hour of greatest peril. Had he allowed the people to elect more competent leaders in the fall of 2006, we might have been able to take advantage of the waning years of the Bush administration to convince the US to work with us against Iran.

Then there is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. If Lieberman was the chief enabler of Israel’s incompetent bungling of the Iranian threat, as Israel’s chief diplomat, it is Livni – together with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – who deserves the greatest condemnation for that bungling.

Throughout her tenure as foreign minister and still today as Kadima’s candidate for prime minister, Livni claims that she supports using diplomacy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But in her three years as Israel’s top diplomat, Livni never launched any diplomatic initiative aimed at achieving this goal. In fact, she has never even publicly criticized the European and American attempts to appease the mullahs.

Livni has remained silent for three years even though it has been clear for five years that the West’s attempts to cut a deal with Teheran serve no purpose other than to provide the Iranians time to develop their nuclear arsenal. She has played along with the Americans and the Europeans and cheered them on as they passed toothless resolutions against Iran in the Security Council which – as the Iranian weapons ship docked in Cyprus shows – they never had the slightest intention of enforcing.

As for Defense Minister Ehud Barak, as a member of the Olmert government, his main personal failure has been his inability to convince the Pentagon to approve Israel’s requests to purchase refueling jets and bunker buster bomb kits, and to permit Israeli jets to fly over Iraqi airspace. To achieve these aims, Barak could have turned to Israel’s friends in the US military and in Congress. But he did no such thing. And now, moving into the Obama administration, Israel finds itself with fewer and fewer allies in Washington’s security community.

For the past several years, only one political leader in Israel has had the foresight and wisdom to both understand the dangers of Iran’s nuclear program and to understand the basis for an Israeli diplomatic approach to contending with the threat that can serve the country’s purposes regardless of whether or not at the end of the day, Israel is compelled to act alone.

In 2006, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu took it upon himself to engage the American people in a discussion of the danger Iran poses not only to Israel but to the world as a whole. In late 2006, he began meeting with key US governors and state politicians to convince them to divest their state employees’ pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. This initiative and complementary efforts by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy convinced dozens of state legislatures to pass laws divesting their pension funds from companies that do business with Iran.

Netanyahu also strongly backed the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ initiative to indict Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an international war criminal for inciting genocide. Both the divestment campaign and the campaign against Ahmadinejad have been Israel’s most successful public diplomacy efforts in contending with Iran. More than anything done by the government, these initiatives made Americans aware of the Iranian nuclear threat and so forced the issue onto the agendas of all the presidential candidates.

Instead of supporting Netanyahu’s efforts, Livni, Barak and Lieberman have disparaged them or ignored them.

Because he is the only leader who has done anything significant to fight Iran’s nuclear program, Netanyahu is the only national leader who has the international credibility to be believed when he says – as he did this week – that Israel will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Likud under Netanyahu is the only party that has consistently drawn the connection between Iran, its Palestinian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Afghan terror proxies, its Syrian client state and its nuclear weapons program, and made fighting this axis the guiding principle of its national security strategy.

GIVEN THE US-led international community’s decision not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it is clear that in the coming months Israel will need to do two things. It will need to put the nations of the world on notice that they cannot expect us to stand by idly as they welcome Iran into the nuclear club. And Israel will need to prepare plans to strike Iran’s nuclear installations without America’s support.

More than ever before, Israel requires leaders who understand the gravity of the hour and are capable of acting swiftly and wisely to safeguard our country from destruction. Only Netanyahu and Likud have a credible track record on this subject.

For the sake of our country, our nation and our posterity, it is our responsibility to consider this fact when we enter the voting booths on Tuesday.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Pictures of Victory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Bush’s parting lesson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Iran’s Gaza diversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Defensive action

Ever since Israel launched its air campaign last month against targets associated with the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip, politicians, diplomats, military experts and pundits have been consumed with a debate over whether the Israeli assault was legitimate. The final judgment about the legitimacy of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead may ultimately be determined not by the grounds for that assault or its conduct. Rather, it may depend on how this conflict ends. History is, after all, written by the victors.

To be sure, for many in this debate, the question seems to turn largely on whether the Jewish State has taken justified – and justifiable – "defensive" action or whether it engaged in an unwarranted "offensive" attack, whose brunt is being unfairly born by innocent Palestinian civilians. For others, the issue has been whether Israel’s now combined air-, sea- and ground-assault was "proportionate" to the rocket and mortar attacks it has suffered.

By any reasonable definition, Israel’s operations in Gaza are defensive in that they are a response to the roughly eight thousand rocket and mortar rounds that Israeli sources say have been fired from the Strip into the southern part of their country over the past eight years. These attacks increased after Israel withdrew in 2005 from this tiny bit of forlorn real estate with its teeming masses living in deplorable conditions – thanks as much to Arabs who refused to resettle Palestinians elsewhere as to Israelis trying to contain suicide and other attacks from that quarter.

In 2008 alone, Israel was subjected to more than 3,000 incomings – before, during and after the six-month "cease-fire" between Israel and Hamas brokered by Egypt last summer. In fact, that so-called cease-fire amounted to nothing more than a hudna, a short-term truce associated since Mohammed’s time with a tactical suspension of hostilities that is used by the Islamic party to regroup, rearm and prepare for the next stage of murderous hostilities. Despite virtually daily incoming rounds from Gaza during the cease-fire, Israel rarely responded, affording Hamas the opportunity to follow the example of its Lebanese Shia counterpart: the Iranian-backed terrorist group, Hezbollah.

As calls for a new cease-fire in Gaza intensify, it is instructive to recall the repercussions of the insistence by the "international community" that the Israelis halt their efforts in the summer of 2006 to prevent what the media misleadingly calls Hezbollah "militants" from raining death and destruction on civilian communities in northern Israel: The self-styled Lebanese Army of God has reconstituted its terrorist infrastructure, acquired a vast new arsenal from Iran, Syria and China and consolidated its position politically.

It would be foolish in the extreme, based on Hamas’ performance during its last hudna, to expect those Palestinian terrorists to do otherwise if they are allowed to survive, thanks to the international imposition of yet another "cease-fire."

Today, there are roughly a million Israelis within range of the rockets and/or mortars in Hamas’ arsenal. Inevitably, all other things being equal, the lethal capabilities available to terrorists who vow to destroy Israel – and who, by the way, cry "Death to America" with equal vehemence – will only grow.

Such will surely be the case if the Israeli government not only agrees to a new cease-fire that leaves Hamas in place but, far worse, allows international monitors to be installed in the Gaza Strip. While the ostensible justification for the Israelis to accede to the presence of such foreign observers would be to ensure that Hamas does not engage in further attacks against Israel, in practice they wind up playing a very different role. If history is any guide, these monitors will serve as shields for Hamas’ terrorist build-up and operations, not an impediment to them.

Such has been the experience, for example, with United Nations forces in southern Lebanon, European Union monitors who were deployed for a time at the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza and even U.S.-led multinational forces deployed to monitor the demilitarization of the Sinai. In each case, activities threatening to the security of Israel have taken place under the noses of the observers. The latter have typically looked the other way, reserving their vigilance and condemnations for any evidence of Israeli infractions.

With Israel’s successful – and, yes, proportionate – insertion of ground forces into Gaza, it is in a position to dictate terms. Unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon during the 2006 war, Hamas is cut off from resupply.  It cannot now be rearmed by sea or via underground tunnels; electricity, water, phone service, medicine and food are only available at the sufferance of the Israelis.

Hamas has brought the Palestinian people nothing but grief. Unless it is saved by foreigners – including some like the European Union and United States who have condemned the organization as a terrorist group – Hamas may be unable to maintain its control over Gaza, let alone extend it to the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The last thing the Jewish State should do is jeopardize the legitimacy, let alone the strategic benefits, of its defensive campaign in Gaza by leaving Hamas in place behind international shields. The Shariah-adherent Hamas cannot and will not abandon its oft-stated determination to destroy Israel and the Jews. Allowing it to live and fight another day is to ensure that fewer Jews, and probably other freedom-loving people, will be left to do so.