Tzipi Livni & Bibi Netanyahu

Wednesday - Livni's moment


Netanyahu does not believe in the peace process and is a prisoner of the Right's worldview.
- Tzipi Livni

The ideological divide between Kadima leader Tzipi Livni and Likud chief Binyamin Netanyahu can be bridged by a strong set of toothpicks. And yet Livni claims that she cannot become Netanyahu's vice premier and foreign minister because they disagree over the two-state solution. This unhelpfully reinforces the misperception, mostly among foreign critics, that Israel is primarily responsible for blocking the emergence of a Palestinian state.

The truth is that Livni and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have been energetically negotiating with Palestinian leaders to achieve just such an outcome. They offered significant and far-reaching concessions - to no avail.

Netanyahu is not keen on a Palestinian state (though it's a stretch to claim he opposes it) for precisely the reasons Olmert and Livni have failed to achieve one: The Palestinians won't compromise on borders; they insist on flooding Israel with millions of "refugees," and the nature of the sovereignty they seek poses an existential danger to Israel's survivability.

The Likud may be center-Right and Kadima center-Left, yet the argument that either leader would have to make a huge ideological leap to collaborate with the other is simply not credible.

It might be helpful if Netanyahu announced that the two-state solution is in harmony with his ultimate diplomatic vision of peace. But as things stand today, Netanyahu correctly points out, a fully sovereign "Palestine" in which the West Bank and Gaza are contiguous is just too dangerous a prospect to contemplate. Nor is it practical given the chasms within the Palestinian polity itself, and the fragility of Palestinian political institutions.

LAST WEEK, after hearing the disconcerting demands of the National Union's Ya'akov Katz, Binyamin and Sara Netanyahu rushed to see Livni and her husband, Naftali Shpitzer, at their Tel Aviv home. But by Monday, with Livni still refusing to join his government, Netanyahu initialed a coalition deal with Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman which, nevertheless, allows for flexibility over the distribution of portfolios should the Kadima leader change her mind.

Meanwhile, the Likud's coalition negotiations with Shas, United Torah Judaism, Habayit Hayehudi and the National Union drag on. Netanyahu is asking President Shimon Peres for a two-week extension to a put a government together. He's also asked Peres to persuade Livni to join it.

Her insistence on a rotation government suggests that Livni is not genuinely interested in a collaboration. She well knows that such an arrangement is unacceptable to Netanyahu, and that it worked poorly when Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir tried it in the 1980s.

She may simply not want to be Netanyahu's Number 2, having seen how limited her influence was in that role under Olmert.

Frankly, her refusal to play a senior role in Netanyahu's cabinet may make political sense. She gets to spend the next year and a half as leader of the opposition, as an "advocate of peace," and as a "voice against extremism." She's betting, too, on early elections and a more favorable outcome to finally catapult her to the number-one job.

SO THE only reasons Livni could possibly have for putting her own aspirations on the back burner to join forces with Netanyahu would be that most Israelis want her to, and that it would be good for the country. Kadima's 28 seats and Israel Beiteinu's 15, together with the Likud's 27 would make for a comfortable 70 mandates. So stable a government could work for urgently needed electoral reform, navigate the economy through the global recession and limit wasteful patronage.

It could develop coherent consensus positions on how to deal with the Iranian threat, Hamas's stranglehold on Gaza, and the Hizbullah menace from Lebanon.

On the diplomatic front, a Likud-Kadima-Israel Beiteinu government could finally articulate Israel's "red lines" with regard to the Palestinians. And with Livni back as foreign minister, the Obama administration, and our allies in the EU, would feel reassured that pragmatism, and not extremism, informs Israeli policies. Finally, the Arabs couldn't use the alibi of Israel's "extreme-right government" for their continued intransigence.

With time running out, Livni can yet demonstrate that she is not only popular at the polls, but can make statesmanlike sacrifices for the good of the country.

What would Kafka do?

Tuesday - Two funerals & a prisoner exchange


Both Jewish law and rational analysis should instruct Israel's cabinet to conclude that this country must under no circumstances release hundreds upon hundreds of murderous Palestinian prisoners as ransom for our captive soldier Gilad Schalit.

Yet, just as soft-hearted Diaspora sages of old tended to interpret Halacha creatively to enable ransoms to be paid when, prima facie, religious strictures demanded the opposite, so too, contemporary Israeli politicians, generals and spymasters are leaning toward jettisoning the no-nonsense strictures of security in order to reunite Noam and Aviva Schalit with their son Gilad.

NO PARENT of a soldier, or of a child about to enter the army, would find fault with how the Schalit family has mobilized public support for the unconditional release of over 1,000 prisoners, including the most dangerous killers incarcerated in Israel's maximum security penitentiaries, in return for their son. The Schalits have a right - nay, an obligation - to put Gilad first. Few of us can truly feel their anguish, even as Hamas refuses to confirm that their son is alive.

His torments are the last, upsetting thoughts they have before each night of fitful sleep; and they are surely the thoughts with which they arise to face yet another day of pain and uncertainty.

Gilad's parents are admirably fulfilling their role as his truest advocates. We cannot say, however, that our politicians, generals and spymasters are performing their fiduciary responsibilities equally.

The Schalits have every right to allow emotion to govern their actions. But those charged with protecting the national interest must be guided by other considerations.

AS THE cabinet meets today, the hunt is on for the Palestinians who shot dead at close range two traffic policemen Sunday night near Maswa in the Jordan Valley. David Rabinowitz, 42, and Yehezkel Ramzarker, 50, apparently stopped their patrol vehicle to assist what they thought was a motorist in distress.

Writing - before Sunday's attack - in support of an unconditional surrender to Hamas's prisoner-exchange demands, A.B. Yehoshua appealed "to the bereaved families who lost their loved ones in the terror attacks committed by some of the prisoners who may be released: Don't think only of revenge, think rather of the future of Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, which will last forever."

One might expect the Ramzarker and Rabinowitz families, as they sit shiva, to be dwelling not on revenge but on this Kafkaesque scenario: that the yet-to-be-captured killers of their loved ones will one day be released in some future, lopsided prisoner exchange.

MOST OF the men and women Hamas wants freed may not kill again directly; but these masters of the craft will mentor and inspire the next generation that will menace café-goers, bus riders, children in pizza shops, teens at Tel Aviv discos, participants in hotel Seders and motorists driving down lonely roads at night.

Untold numbers of Israeli high-schoolers yet to be conscripted may one day be called upon to undo the damage caused by the "Gilad Schalit prisoner release of 2009" - to seek out the terror chiefs again, and protect us against their evil - just as their older classmates have had to stand ready to reverse the damage of every previous asymmetrical trade, from the Jibril deal in 1985 to the Regev and Goldwasser exchange in 2008.

Granted, the terror war against the Jewish state will continue regardless of whether Israel does a prisoner deal or not. And yet setting these incarcerated exemplars of Islamist values free would doubtless provide an immense boost to enemy morale; for, paradoxically, in Palestinian mythology shahids have a "future," while those taken alive and sentenced to rot in Israeli prisons are monuments to the futility of waging war on the Zionist enterprise - provided, that is, that they are kept in those prisons, with the possibility of their release arising only when the Palestinians make real peace with the Jewish people.

WHILE THE Schalits' campaign and the Olmert-Livni government fumbles, Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu's deafening silence is sending a message of acquiescence.

Yet however the Schalit dilemma pans out, Israel must, at the very least, consider declaring a new, irrevocable and sacrosanct policy: There will be no more lopsided prisoner exchanges with terrorist organizations.

Ehud Olmert casts blame....

Monday -- A Sunday confession


Something extraordinary happened at yesterday's cabinet meeting. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blamed his government's failure to achieve peace with the Palestinians on … the Palestinians.

The premier has been obsessively hammering home the message that peace requires painful concessions from Israelis. He stressed it again yesterday.

"Israel," he said, "will need to make unprecedented dramatic and painful concessions in order to reach peace …"

But he also acknowledged that an accommodation requires Palestinian concessions - concessions, he bitterly reported, that they were not prepared to make.

Olmert has been working on a deal that would require practically a total withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Lines. Most West Bank Jewish communities would be uprooted. Strategic settlement blocs - presumably Ma'aleh Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel, all in close proximity to the Green Line - would be annexed in return for giving the Palestinians an equal amount of land in southern Israel.

On Jerusalem, Olmert has purportedly offered to transfer to Palestinian sovereignty Arab neighborhoods that encircle Jerusalem on the east, north and south. The holy places would be administered by an international body. And a tunnel or bridge would connect the Gaza Strip and the West Bank so that "Palestine" had territorial contiguity.

Where Olmert drew a firm red line was in his demand that the Palestinians abandon the so-called right of return - meaning refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants could not "return" to Israel, only to "Palestine," so as not to demographically overwhelm the Jewish state.

With his stewardship drawing to a close, Olmert publicly declared that the failure to reach a deal was "first and foremost the result of the Palestinian leaders' weakness, lack of will and lack of courage... Everything else is excuses and attempts to divert attention from the main issue.

"We were ready to sign a peace agreement; the Palestinians, to my regret, did not have the courage to do so."

WHY SAY this now? Perhaps to ensure history does not blame Olmert for the failure of the Annapolis process.

Regrettably, Olmert also sought to commit the next government to resuming negotiations where he and Tzipi Livni left off. A smarter Israeli negotiating approach, from the get-go, would have been to caution the Palestinians that failure to reach an agreement with him might leave them having to start their talks with the incoming Netanyahu government from scratch.

But let's leave in abeyance Olmert's peculiar reticence to publicly take his interlocutors to task until now, and his attempt to hamstring his successor, and ask: Why didn't the Palestinians jump at the generous deal Olmert was offering?

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a Palestinian negotiator, responded to Olmert's cabinet statement by saying that the real reason the talks failed is that Israel did not give the Palestinians everything they demanded. Plain and simple. This may be accurate - but it also means that even the most moderate Palestinians are not prepared to make the basic compromises necessary for a breakthrough.

Many mainstream Israelis might have had a very hard time going along with Olmert's concessions. Yet the thought that relatively moderate Palestinians judge even these far-reaching compromises insufficient leaves those of us who support a two-state solution disenchanted.

There are other possible reasons, beyond the one offered by Abu Rudeineh, as to why Abbas rejected Olmert's peace offer:

• The Palestinians may not be interested in a deal if the price is giving up the "right of return" and/or leaving Israel with defensible boundaries. The implication: Even moderate Palestinians still want to destroy Israel, albeit in stages.

• Abbas never prepared his people for the idea that they, too, would have to make painful concessions for peace. Implication: Either Abbas doesn't think he can sway Palestinian opinion or he thinks accepting Israel's "existence" is concession enough.

• No deal is possible while Iran casts a shadow of rejectionism over the region, Hamas rules in Gaza and Hizbullah is ascendant in Lebanon.

• Moderate Palestinians expect the Obama administration to force Israel into making concessions even Olmert thinks are too dangerous.

Whatever the reason, the outcome - Palestinian intransigence - was all too sadly predictable.

E V I L

Friday - Evil's insidious nature

Yesterday in Manhattan, United States District Judge Denny Chin accepted Bernard Madoff's guilty plea on 11 felony charges: securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, false statements, perjury, false filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and theft from an employee benefits plan. There was no plea bargain. He faces 150 years in prison.

• On Wednesday, in the southern German town of Winneden, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer went on a three-hour rampage that took him from his old high school to the center of a nearby town, leaving a trail of 15 dead, mostly women and girls. Cornered by police, Kretschmer committed suicide. German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the slaughter as "incomprehensible."

• Also in Germany, prosecutors have charged retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk with more than 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his actions at the Sobibor death camp. To face justice, however, the 88-year-old will have to be extradited from US.

• "If you had met him two days ago, you would have thought he was an average 28-year-old young man," said an acquaintance of Michael McLendon, who went berserk and killed his mother and nine others in southern Alabama, just hours before Kretschmer's rampage across the ocean.

Wherever one looks, evil - in various guises - is present: From Ireland, where Catholic extremists are killing again; to Mexico, where more than 6,000 people were slaughtered last year in the drug war; to Somalia, where pirates rule the seacoast; to Equador, which is on the road to becoming a partly-owned subsidiary of Iran in return in for power plants and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans. Move on to Iraq, where a suicide bomber killed 33 tribal leaders who were on a reconciliation walk through a market.

Closer to home, an elderly Afula couple, he a cancer-ridden Holocaust survivor, she infirm, were this week viciously beaten in their apartment by robbers.

EVIL. The term must not be bandied about lightly or irresponsibly. Yet the real thing needs to be recognized and faced down, and not merely relegated to the fields of forensic psychiatry, philosophy or theology. Because evil is so insidious, it has a way of manipulating even that which is pure to serve its nefarious ends. Thus policymakers, and the informed public, need to be alert to its presence.

Take how Hamas, whose genocidal intentions toward the Jewish state make it evil, is benefiting from the pressure campaign being waged (legitimately and understandably) by the Schalit family and (less altruistically) by much of the local media and various politicians, some of them transparently self-serving. As a consequence, perhaps, Ofer Dekel, the prime minister's aide charged with negotiating Gilad's freedom, has reportedly proposed releasing 210 of the terrorists "with blood on their hands" that Hamas is demanding. As far as we know, the "worst of the worst" have not been included - yet.

Gilad's desperately anguished parents, Noam and Aviva, who have set up a protest tent near the prime minister's residence, fear that the next government's negotiating position will be less malleable than Olmert's. They and their supporters have intensified pressure on Olmert to unconditionally free each and every terrorist on Hamas's wish list. President Shimon Peres and even Aliza Olmert have given Gilad's parents succor.

Across the street, another protest tent had folded up for lack of interest.

"We came to Jerusalem to let our voices be heard," said Ron Karman, whose 17-year-old daughter, Tal, was one of 17 fatalities of the March 5, 2003 bombing of Egged bus No. 37 in Haifa. "When we were sitting shiva, the politicians made all sorts of promises. They said their doors would always be open to us. We found those doors [of politicians and the media] closed."

Karman was joined by Yossi Mandelevich, whose boy, Yuval, 13, was on the same bus; and by Yossi Zur, whose son, Asaf, 17, was also killed there. The fathers said that they opposed the release of prisoners with blood on their hands - for the sake of other people's children.

In the waning days of the Olmert government, there is a very real danger that an emotionally co-opted public will, with the purest of intentions, pressure a discredited premier to hand evil another appetite-whetting victory.

Yesh Din

Wed. & Thursday - Israel's latest crime


To the ever-lengthening litany of Israeli wickedness - crimes against humanity, war crimes, occupation, genocide - add quarry pillaging. So says Yesh Din, a group of "volunteers who have organized to oppose the continuing violation of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory." Yesh Din says that as part of its "brutal economic exploitation" of the Palestinians, Israel has been stealing their rocks.

Much of the gravel Israel quarries for marble kitchen counters and such comes from the West Bank. "This type of activity," Yesh Din asserts, "constitutes a violation of the laws of belligerent occupation [and is] pillage."

Yesh Din wants Israel's Supreme Court to enjoin companies from transporting rocks across the Green Line because, bereft of rocks, Palestinians would find it impossible to build a state. Or, in the words of the front-page headline in Sunday's International Herald Tribune: "West Bank losing land to Israel, rock by rock."

IN FACT, the West Bank is disputed: When the Palestinians rejected the two-state solution in 1948, Jordan annexed the area. In 1967, Israel repelled a Jordanian attack and captured the territory.

The 1949 Geneva Convention - the basis for claims that Israel is violating international law - applies in cases of armed conflict between signatories to the convention. While Jordan and Israel are signatories, virtually no state recognized Jordan's annexation of the West Bank. Hence the area was and remains in legal limbo.

While Israel, de facto, adheres to the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva Convention, it has a right to quarry in the contested territory. No one suggests the quarries have been illegally confiscated or are private property.

It's legitimate to call attention to the environmental impact of quarrying or the depletion of natural resources. The territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, encompassing Israel proper and the West Bank, is one integral unit. What happens in the mountainous interior affects the coastal plain, and vice versa. The New York Times recently reported that Israel is heading toward a "serious shortage of raw building materials," noting that West Bank quarries supply 25 percent of the sand and gravel we use.

Perhaps our regulatory authorities need to do a better job of monitoring the environmental impact and economic consequences of quarrying in Judea and Samaria. But these issues are not Yesh Din's primary concern.

THE GROUP, founded just four years ago, is the recipient of considerable largesse. Funds flow, legitimately, from The New Israel Fund, Oxfam, Hermod Lannungs Fund, Jacobs Charitable Trust, The Marc Rich Foundation and the Naomi and Nehemiah Cohen Foundation. It is also supported by the powerful Israeli law firm of Yigal Arnon.

But it's the money Yesh Din gets from foreign governments that's troubling. The European Commission, the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland and the UK all want Israel out of the West Bank. We suspect they give Yesh Din money because its work helps delegitimize Israel's presence there.

Unfortunately, Israel lacks anything like America's "Foreign Agents Registration Act," which requires persons to disclose if they are "acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity."

Yesh Din's volunteers and individual contributors are doubtless sincere about promoting human rights; but this is one of several organizations funded by foreign governments that work against the interests of Israel's mainstream by chipping away at any Jewish claims beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines.

Israel's security concerns - for instance, how to prevent the West Bank from becoming a Kassam launching-pad against the Jewish state's main population centers - do not interest Yesh Din; nor does the threat of terrorist infiltration.

Not even Palestinian political intransigence, reflected in the unwillingness of relative moderates like Mahmoud Abbas to meet half-way willing Israeli partners - Yitzhak Rabin in 1993, Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ehud Olmert in 2008 - has relevance for Yesh Din: The group and the foreign governments that fund it want Israel out of the West Bank. Period.

Thus, while "promoting human rights," an organization subsidized by foreign powers encourages Palestinian negotiators to hang tough while it lobbies their interests.

Clearly, casting an avalanche of criticism at Israel's "violations of international law" is easier for Yesh Din than plumbing the ethics of its dependency on foreign powers.

It's Purim all over ...but, Jerusalem Celebrates Purim on Wed

Tuesday - Too good to be true


The deluge of good news, on a variety of fronts - coinciding with this year's Purim festival - demands we pause from our usual dreary agenda to offer praise where it is due.

To Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz, for acknowledging that he had no good reason for dragging out the indictment of former president Moshe Katsav. "I have issues with procrastination," he noted, "but this time I think I really am ready."

To former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, who admitted that "Judges should not dominate the process of selecting judges. We need a system with checks and balances," he told the Bar Association.

Law and order was further boosted when Israel's crime syndicate - moetzet gedolei ha'avaryanim - declared its constituents would no longer engage in human trafficking, extortion or the drug trade. A top mobster confessed: "We have become nothing more than Hebrew-speaking thugs. Enough!"

THE Finance Ministry deserves our esteem for promising it would pull out all stops to fast-track completion of the express rail line linking Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, making it operational by 2012.

El Al lifted spirits by announcing it would not follow Ryanair's lead of making passengers pay for the right to relieve themselves on flights. "It's clever of them to offer free bottled water while charging for the use of the toilets, but we intend to focus on long-term customer loyalty by giving economy class passengers 15 percent more leg room," said spokesman Matos Avir.

Editors of the British newspapers The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph made encouraging headlines by jointly pledging to take a more balanced stance in their coverage of Israel and leave the task of delegitimizing the Jewish state primarily to The Independent. In a related praiseworthy development, the ombudsman at the International Herald Tribune admitted that using a photograph of Arab women marching past the ruins of a bombed building in the Gaza Strip as the paper's lead photo on International Women's Day was "tendentious."

Kol Hamusika, Israel's classical station, struck a positive note by promising to play music listeners might enjoy instead of the atonal post-modern din which dominates its playlist.

We're impressed, too, that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker decided to forgo a trip to the Gaza Strip and focus attention instead on genocide in the Sudan. "Sure I could jump on the anti-Israel bandwagon," she said. "But Palestinians capture a disproportionate amount of press attention, which detracts from far more pressing issues."

SPAIN is to be congratulated for repealing a law allowing its courts to apply "universal jurisdiction" to harass Israeli security personnel involved in the 2002 liquidation of Hamas terrorist Salah Shehadeh. A Spanish legal scholar explained: "We just felt that with our history of inquisitions and persecution and false neutrality during the Holocaust, we really had no moral standing to denounce Israelis for defending themselves."

The organizers of the UN Conference on Racism (Durban II) deserve appreciation for cancelling the event because "the enterprise had devolved into a frenzy of non-governmental Jew-hatred."

HERE AT home, we are delighted by the IDF's announcement that, for the first time in decades, the West Bank will not be sealed off from Israel proper over the Purim holiday. With the notion of Palestinian Arabs blowing up buses or threatening children's Purim parades now fantastical, the need for closures is, thankfully, obviated.

India is to be commended for its pledge of $5 million to help rebuild Sderot, matching its $5 million for similar reconstruction in Gaza. To the Palestinian Authority's credit, it has rejected the cash, saying it couldn't account for billions of dollars in previously donated international contributions. "What we really need," said Mahmoud Abbas, "is not more money but a trusteeship for Palestine to help us create a culture of tolerance and respect for minority rights."

But the ultimate praise goes to Iran, which now admits that it has been working on an atom bomb, but has decided to stop as a result of a vision which came to Ayatollah Khamenei. "The Prophet sent an angel to tell me that God wanted the Children of Abraham to work out our differences amicably," he told a delirious throng in Teheran's Revolution Square.

Delirious indeed.

Avigdor Lieberman - Israel's next foreign minister

Monday - From Eban to Lieberman


Avigdor Lieberman is no Abba Eban, yet destiny - or more accurately, a fragmented body politic and an outmoded method of building governing coalitions - has decreed that the Israel Beiteinu leader will likely become this country's next foreign minister.

Eban was suave, cosmopolitan, Cambridge-educated. He made his first appearance before the UN Security Council in 1948. More popular abroad than at home, he served nine years as our ambassador to both Washington and the UN. Word that he was appearing helped fill Yankee Stadium at a Salute to Israel rally in 1956. As foreign minister during both the 1967 Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, his mellifluous voice became synonymous with the justice of Israel's cause.

Lieberman, in contrast, is far more popular at home than abroad. The foreign press labels him, not without justification, "a provocative nationalist." His party captured 15 Knesset seats (behind Kadima's 28 and Likud's 27) thanks to a demagogic campaign advocating that Israel's Arab minority prove its fidelity.

This newspaper rejects the notion that individuals who are already citizens be required to sign a loyalty oath. Fortunately, there is zero chance of Lieberman's populist rhetoric getting translated into government policy.

Of course, Lieberman would not be standing on the threshold of the Foreign Ministry had Kadima leader Tzipi Livni put country first and accepted Binyamin Netanyahu's offer to become a senior partner in his government. She was willing to serve as his foreign minister only if he agreed to serve as hers in a four-year rotation government.

Israel's previous experience with a rotation government occurred in 1984, when similarly inconclusive results led Labor's Shimon Peres and the Likud's Yitzhak Shamir to join forces: Peres served as premier for the first two years, with Shamir as his FM; the two then switched places midway. It was a dysfunctional marriage, which then US ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis said required him to deal with "two Israeli governments." Israel was left diplomatically rudderless, absent a hierarchy, and for four years its friends were at a loss to discern who spoke for Jerusalem. Netanyahu is right to reject a repeat of this nightmare scenario.

Livni's claim that policy differences over negotiations with the Palestinians are keeping her out of the government is hardly credible. What supposedly sets Kadima and Likud apart is the theoretical matter of how talks with the Palestinians should be concluded. Given that Mahmoud Abbas would not cut a deal with Ehud Olmert, the latter's generosity of spirit and political desperation notwithstanding, we fail to understand why a possible divergence of views over the precise nature of a far-off Palestinian sovereignty should, at this stage, keep Livni in the opposition. Her refusal to join the government at this time of unparalleled diplomatic, security and economic challenges will serve neither her nor Kadima.

WE ARE not enamored with the government in the making; not with Lieberman at the Foreign Ministry; not with Shas's Eli Yishai at Interior. The incoming government will have neither the ability nor inclination to pursue electoral reform or religious pluralism. It will lack the diplomatic agility necessary for creative statecraft.

Lieberman will be to Netanyahu's Foreign Ministry what Amir Peretz was to Olmert's Defense Ministry - a patronage appointment in a job that begs for a sophisticated actor of world stature and an engaging media presence - Israel's face to the world. That Livni has fallen short of these criteria does not assuage our concerns over Lieberman. While his spoken English is no worse than hers, we saw the consequences of her ineloquence during Operation Cast Lead.

IN THE aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Eban addressed the 1973 Geneva Conference: "The crisis in the Middle East has many consequences, but only one cause. Israel's right to peace… indeed its very right to live, has been forcibly denied and constantly attacked. In no other dispute has there ever been such a total denial, not only of the sovereign rights of a state, but even its legitimate personality."

Sadly, Eban's words hold no less true today than they did 35 years ago. Equally disheartening, perhaps, is that eloquence of speech and clarity of thought are no longer a prerequisite for the job of foreign minister.

The man who rules Iran: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Friday - Optimism in Teheran


It isn't everyday we're given insight into the strategic thinking of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But on Wednesday he addressed the Fourth International Conference for Support of Palestine in Teheran. Among the luminaries rumored to be in attendance was Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah.

Iranian presidents come and go; the supreme leader, who sits atop the regime's political, judicial and military hierarchy, rules for life.

Khamenei professed to be in an optimistic mood following the "amazing military and political defeats" Israel suffered in the Second Lebanon War and more recently in Gaza. Still, he was bitter about what the "Zionist criminals" did - "impaling of infants" for instance. Fortunately, he noted, "advances in technology" (read al-Jazeera) have exposed "the magnitude" of Israel's atrocities.

He denounced Muslim "pragmatists" who, in the mistaken belief that Israel was too strong to destroy, have been willing to temporarily accept its existence. And he had even less patience for those who genuinely "entertained hopes of peaceful coexistence."

After 60 years of "occupation" the "illegitimacy" of the Zionist regime stands undiminished. The Holocaust must be denied because it "served as an excuse for the usurpation of Palestine." On the bright side, he noted that Israel's image has never been more tarnished and lauded the "spontaneous" protests conducted by Israel's enemies around the world. Israel was a "fake and counterfeit nation" a "cancerous tumor" that could not be negotiated with - though some Palestinian leaders make the mistake of doing so. The only way for Muslims and Palestinians to achieve victory over the "Zionist usurper" is "resistance."

Claiming that "the question of Palestine is the most urgent problem of the Islamic world," Khamenei denounced the Obama administration for its "unconditional commitment to Israel's security." It's a policy that amounts "to the same crooked ways of the Bush administration and nothing else."

Khamenei proposed that a referendum be held of "all those who have a legitimate stake in the territory of Palestine, including Muslims, Christians and Jews" wherever they may be. He presumed, however, that just as the West did not honor the genuinely free election of Hamas among Palestinians, so too, it would not allow the future of Palestine to be determined by a worldwide plebiscite of Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Typical Western hypocrisy, Khamenei concluded.

THE IDEA that Khamenei will modify so perverted, so deep-seated, a worldview as a result of Obama administration suasion, or European economic incentives and political inducements, is risible.

For Khamenei, Israel is a cancer alright, but America, Britain and Western values generally are the carcinogens; excising Israel alone will not bring the supreme leader the global caliphate he seeks.

Thus the more propitiously President Barack Obama "engages" with Teheran, the quicker Khamenei's creed will come to the fore, and the more transparent it should be that candidate Obama's pledge: "I will do everything in my power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon" deserves to be honored.

WE MAY never know what possessed a Palestinian Arab in Jerusalem yesterday to use a construction vehicle as a weapon. We can surmise, however, that like others before him he was socialized within a religio-political milieu which encourages belligerence, victimization and martyrdom - precisely the ideals inculcated into the minds of Khamenei's own Revolutionary Guards.

For all its homicidal tendencies, there is no evidence that, at its apex, Iran's regime is suicidal. Yet its most loyal cadre has been whipped-up by a messianic dogma that blends Persian imperialism with Shi'ite embitterment - belligerence, victimization and martyrdom. One shudders to think that if Iran's nuclear ambitions aren't foiled, some overly zealous revolutionary guard might have more than a tractor at his disposal. The Soviet-era template of containment and deterrence simply won't apply.

This week, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal urged the Arabs to come together in the face of the "Iranian challenge." Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told Iran to stop interfering in Palestinian affairs. While the Arabs fret about the instability wrought by Teheran in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan they, like Europeans and Africans, are hedging their bets.

So the longer Obama takes to crystallize his policy, the harder it will be to stop the Iranian bomb.

No wonder Khamenei feels optimistic.

The Independent on Sunday

As it happens, L and I were in London this past Sunday and I would not have noticed 'The Independent on Sunday' front page if not for my good buddy RB. There we were standing in a train station coffee shop waiting to pay when RB called my attention to the piece. My first thought was: 'there they go again...' My second thought was to write this for The Post.



Thursday - Those Israeli 'death squads'


Considered part of what passes these days for Britain's prestige press, The Independent "viewspaper" has a circulation of just over 211,000. Though it sells for less than the Guardian or Times, the Sunday edition is hemorrhaging readers. The Independent caters to that sliver of readership which finds the Guardian a tad too conservative. If cash prize contests don't boost circulation, it may soon have to switch to an Internet-only format.

The daily is edited by Roger Alton; the Sunday edition by John Mullin. Simon Kelner is managing director of both editions. But The Independent's overarching animosity toward Israel has been entrenched by its Middle East editor, Robert ("I am being vilified for telling the truth about Palestinians") Fisk. Osama bin Laden personally vouched for Fisk's objectivity. By comparison, Katherine Butler, the paper's foreign editor, can only be thought of as a Zionist-sympathizer. The paper's reporter in Israel since 2004 is the genteel Donald Macintyre, its former chief commentator.

This brings us to the "viewspaper's" cover story this past Sunday: "Israel's death squads: A soldier's story" written by Macintyre in cooperation with the nebulously funded advocacy group "Breaking the Silence," which describes itself as devoted to gathering "testimonies" that expose the "depth of corruption" in the Israeli military.

The protagonist of Macintyre's rendering is a "former sharpshooter with psychological scars" who cannot be identified by name. On November 22, 2000 the soldier was purportedly part of an elite unit ordered to arrest "a Palestinian militant called Jamal Abdel Razak" at Morag Junction in the southern Gaza Strip.

Macintyre's quotes the soldier as saying that his unit was abruptly informed that Razak was on the way "and then we got an order that it was going to be an assassination [not an arrest] after all."

Razek, The Independent says, was unarmed. To complicate matters, a taxi carrying Sami Abu Laban - a "baker" - and Na'el al Leddawi - "a student" - chanced upon the scene.

The Breaking the Silence soldier continued: "They gave us two seconds and they said, 'Shoot. Fire.'" So he "fired 11 bullets into the head of the militant Razek." The "baker" and "student" along with another "militant" caught in the crossfire, were all killed. Macintyre sums up: The soldier "never told his parents what happened." Coming from "a good home," how could he?

There you have it: A front-page Independent scoop "proving" that the IDF employs death squads which kill with little compunction, both unarmed "militants" and any civilians who get in the way.

THE NAME Itamar Yefet doesn't figure in Macintyre's account. He was an 18 year-old from Netzer Hazani killed a day earlier by Palestinian snipers at the Gush Katif junction. The day Yefet was ambushed, a bus travelling in the Galilee was firebombed. And two days earlier, St-Sgt Sharon Shitoubi, 21, had been mortally wounded by enemy snipers close to Morag junction. Also around this time, three children ages 8-12 from the Cohen family, Orit, Yisroel and Tehila, each lost a limb in an attack on their school bus.

Yasser Arafat's war of attrition - the second intifada - which would claim over 1,000 Israeli lives - was underway. As IDF soldiers were seeking Jamal Abdel Razak, a car bomb in Hadera killed two Israelis and wounded 50.

FOR REASONS that remain obscured by the fog of war, the arrest operation of Jamal Abdel Razak went sour; he along with three other Palestinians were killed.

But Razak was no mere "militant." He was a senior Tanzim operative who had been imprisoned by Israel (1992-1997) and when released planned numerous bombing attacks.

Contrary to the implication left by Macintyre, all four killed were Fatah. The movement issued a statement condemning "the assassination of four of its cadre…" warning that the "blood of its sons" would be avenged.

Some may wonder why we bother taking umbrage over yet one more slanderous attack in a British press long fixated on delegitimizing Israel.

Because though anti-Israelism pervades the British media and academia, truly independent readers deserve to know the wider circumstances of Jamal Abdel Razak's demise, and that there are no "death squads" in Israel.

CLINTON IN RAMALLAH

Dear reader, Thanks for coming back. It was good to get away and nice to be back.
elliot



Wednesday Clinton in Ramallah


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to go to Ramallah today to meet with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad. She spent Monday in Sharm e-Sheikh attending the international conference for the reconstruction of Gaza, where Washington pledged $900 million in additional aid to the Palestinians. Yesterday, in Jerusalem, Clinton met Israeli leaders including Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu.

In Ramallah, Palestinians can be expected to tell Clinton that the peace process is at a crossroads: Either the Obama administration pressures Israel into making suicidal concessions - and soon - or the two-state solution is finished. They will claim that Netanyahu is insufficiently enamored with the idea of a Palestinian state. And Clinton will hear the mantra that Israel "must choose between peace and settlements."

To her credit, Clinton has not shied away from taking Hamas to task for its violent rejectionism. In Ramallah, she has a unique opportunity to take Abbas to task for his unworkable approach to peacemaking. For if Hamas is a dead end and Abbas a false hope, the two-state solution really is a pipedream.

At Sharm, Clinton praised Abbas "for his commitment to move forward with a negotiated solution." But when the two sit down together today, she needs to deliver a less sugar-coated message: Get realistic.

On Monday, Clinton said, "We cannot afford more setbacks and delays, or regrets about what might have been had different decisions been made. And now is not the time for recriminations. It is time to look ahead."

To help the process move forward, however, Clinton will need to disabuse Abbas of the notion that he can adhere to a maximalist negotiating stance in the hope that the Obama administration will deliver an Israel prostrate at the negotiating table. She will need to tell him that unless he becomes flexible - on borders, refugees and the initial contours of statehood - Palestinian prophesies about an end to the two-state solution will prove self-fulfilling.

When Abbas starts kvetching about Netanyahu, Clinton might ask why the elastic policies of the outgoing Olmert government did not elicit a "yes" from the Palestinian moderates.

Abbas continues to insist that Israel pull back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, leaving this country with a 15-18km.-wide waistline and our airport vulnerable to short-range missile attack. Strategic depth matters - especially along the coastal plain, where most Israelis live.

Clinton needs to tell Abbas to abandon his outrageous demand for the "right" of "return" for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendents to Israel proper. Netanyahu speaks for mainstream Israelis when he says that the Palestinians will also have to defer, in the short-term, anyway, some of the characteristics of statehood. For example, Israel cannot gamely cede control over the airspace and electromagnetic field between the Mediterranean and the Jordan without irretrievably jeopardizing its security.

Of course, Palestinian moderation would be bolstered if the Arab League explicitly supported compromise. Yet the League itself has presented Israel with a take-it-or-leave it offer which is, nevertheless, a good starting point for negotiations.

CLINTON urged the Palestinians "to break the cycle of rejection and resistance" - an unfortunate euphemism for anti-civilian warfare. Perhaps, by speaking even more forthrightly in Ramallah today, she can help Palestinians reverse 60 years of self-defeating rejectionism and encourage the kind of pragmatism that's historically been absent from the Palestinian body politic.

The US has made a key contribution to building Palestinian institutions with the goal of making them accountable and transparent. Much, much more needs to be done.

As the security situation has allowed, Israel has been incrementally fostering conditions - ease of travel up and down the West Bank, for instance - that enhance Palestinian dignity while massively improving the local economy.

Regarding the settlement issue, the maintenance of strategic settlement blocs - "1967-plus" - far from being "obstacles to peace," actually make a deal palatable to Israelis, the manipulative lobbying by foreign-funded groups such as Peace Now notwithstanding.

"The inevitability of working toward a two-state solution is inescapable," Clinton said. It would be better for us all were she to make clear to Abbas that nothing is "inescapable" unless the Palestinians inject some pragmatism into their negotiating position.

EGYPT & ISRAEL

Dear All,

"Going Fishing" -- hope to be back by the middle of next week.

Elliot




Countdown to 30

In a month's time, Egypt and Israel will mark 30 years since the signing of our peace treaty. Israel staged a phased withdrawal from the Sinai following the 1979 accord, giving up strategic depth, vital airspace, military bases, newly discovered oil fields and control of the Straits of Tiran - the gateway to Eilat. From the Israeli perspective, Israel gave - Egypt took. And peace was established.

But Egypt paid a stiff price for being the first Arab country to make peace with Israel. It was ostracized by the Arab world and vilified by Iran's newly installed Muslim fanatics. Anwar Sadat, assassinated in October 1981 by al-Qaida's precursors, didn't live to see the final Israeli pullback from Yamit in April 1982.

Israelis never fully appreciated, or perhaps wrongly discounted as lip service, the importance Sadat placed on a resolution of the Palestinian problem, linking it to progress on bilateral relations. "Even if peace between all the confrontation states and Israel were achieved," Sadat told the Knesset, "in the absence of a just solution of the Palestinian problem - never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists…"

Sadat vaguely embraced Menachem Begin's proposal of autonomy, but the Palestinians brushed it aside, faithful to the principle of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity. They have spared no effort since to undermine Cairo-Jerusalem relations.

Neither Begin nor Sadat set out to construct a cold peace. Perhaps, along with the disappointments on both sides, the weeks leading up to the anniversary could be used to reflect on what has been achieved - against all odds.

THERE IS much that Israelis do not understand about Egyptian policy. We never understood why, in 2000, Hosni Mubarak opposed an international administration for the Temple Mount, warning Yasser Arafat not to "give up sovereignty over Al-Haram al-Sharif."

We never really understood Egypt's lackadaisical attitude to Hamas's weapons smuggling - though by limiting the number of troops permitted along the border, the treaty does complicate Cairo's efforts to secure the Philadelphi Corridor. But even with technical support now from the US and Europe, weapons flow practically unabated.

We do not understand why Egypt is pushing a Gaza cease-fire that would further strengthen Hamas, while leaving Gilad Schalit in its clutches. But Egypt must be equally befuddled by Israel's decision to pummel Gaza for three weeks - even as Cairo explicitly blamed Hamas for instigating the violence - only to declare a unilateral cease-fire that left the Islamists emboldened.

We do not understand why Cairo refuses to allow a genuinely controlled but open border between the Strip and Sinai, stopping guns and bad guys but allowing everything else; or why it opposes port facilities in northern Sinai that could benefit Egyptians and Palestinians alike. In the long run, such a move would foster Palestinian self-determination.

Egypt is again trying to foster reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. But Palestinian unity predicated on Hamas's maximalist demands hardly salvages what is admittedly a bad situation. Why doesn't Egypt condition its efforts on Hamas meeting the demands of the international community to renounce violence, recognize Israel and abide by agreements signed by the Palestinian leadership?

Israelis can appreciate that Egypt's frosty policy toward our country is influenced by a complex set of foreign and domestic factors. Yet we don't understand why, in international forums, Egypt occasionally leads the charge against Israel; why, at home, state-controlled media sometimes promotes stereotyping of Jews.

When a rudimentary bomb went off in Islamic Cairo on Sunday, killing a French tourist, the reverberations were felt in Jerusalem. We were troubled that some ascribed the attack to "frustration" over Egypt's supposedly ineffective response to "Israel's devastating offensive in Gaza"; and that Iran's condemnation of the bombing "as serving Zionist interests" was taken at face value.

Our criticism notwithstanding, the survivability of the regime the now-octogenarian Hosni Mubarak established is a strategic Israeli interest. Egyptian war games in the Sinai earlier this month drew little comment because Mubarak's men are in command. We were delighted by the release from prison of opposition leader Ayman Nour. Yet we know that democratization absent essential institution-building and the right kind of political socialization is catastrophic.

Preliminary judgment: Thirty years of fraught relations trumps the previous 30 years of bellicosity.

Amnesty International & Israel's destruction

Tuesday -- No pardon for Amnesty


Yesterday, Amnesty International, the world's premier "human rights" brand, called for the destruction of Israel. We're overdramatizing? Were AI to get its way, the UN Security Council would impose a comprehensive arms embargo on the world's only Jewish state - but not on any of the 22 member states of the Arab League, or on Iran. Over time, Israel would find it impossible to defend itself against conventional or WMD threats stemming from hostile states or Palestinian and Islamist terror organizations.

The pretext for the embargo call was the IDF's campaign in Gaza to compel Hamas to end its bombardment of southern Israel and cross-border aggression. Over the years, Hamas has killed hundreds of Israelis in terror attacks. Apparently spearheading AI's anti-Israel crusade is the group's "principal researcher on Israel/Occupied Palestine," the London-based Donatella Rovera.

Though Israel purchases arms from dozens of sources, AI's boycott call is really aimed at the Obama administration: "Israel's military offensive in Gaza was carried out [largely] with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers' money," claimed Malcolm Smart, AI's director for the Middle East.

Either to simulate evenhandedness, or perhaps because it really is blinded by moral relativism, AI perfunctorily called for a weapons embargo against Hamas. It thus appears incapable of distinguishing between Israel and Hamas, between victim and aggressor - between an albeit imperfect Western nation which values tolerance, representative government, rule of law and respect for minority rights, and a medieval-oriented Islamist movement which mobilizes Palestinian masses to hate, teaches its young to glorify suicide bombers, and inculcates a political culture wallowing in self-inflicted victimization.

AMNESTY DOES much good work. Many of its rank-and-file members and contributors are sincerely motivated by a desire to make the world a better place. Yet beyond this good-hearted circle stands a professional cadre backed by agenda-driven money, which, we suspect, is exploiting Amnesty's good name. This cadre relies on world-class public relations and advertising firms to leverage AI's human rights brand for blatantly partisan purposes.

AI has long been under internal pressure to champion an arms embargo against Israel. Some have intimated that Jews in the organization were standing in the way. Francis Boyle, a law professor and pro-PLO activist: "You have… the very powerful role played by the Israel lobby on Amnesty International USA… Amnesty pretty much kowtows to them…" Plainly, Boyle's "very powerful" Jews have been sidelined.

AI is not some amorphous, beatific entity; it's comprised of personalities with all the usual human foibles. Everyone connected to AI needs to say whether they really oppose Israel's right to self-defense. Are we to assume that AI's International Secretariat - Irene Zubaida Khan, Paul Hoffman, Tony Klug, Susan Waltz, Jan Egeland, Menno Kamminga, Jaap Jacobson, Margaret Bedggood, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Neil Sammonds, Melvin Coleman - all support an anti-Israel arms embargo?

AI gets money from foundations such as the Sigrid Rausing Trust (which also funds B'Tselem). Does Sigrid Rausing personally want Israel to stand defenseless against Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas? Do board members Josh Mailman, Susan Hitch, Andrew Puddephat and Geoffrey Budlender?

The MacArthur Foundation, better known for its "genius awards," also funds AI. We have no idea whether its board - Robert E. Denham, Lloyd Axworthy, John Seely Brown, Jonathan F. Fanton, Jack Fuller, Jamie Gorelick, Mary Graham, Donald R. Hopkins, Will Miller, Mario J. Molina, Marjorie M. Scardino and Claude M. Steele - appreciate what could happen to six million Israeli Jews were AI to get its embargo. Does the actor Nicolas Cage, another major AI benefactor, stand behind the embargo call?

A good chunk of AI money comes from its American board - Steve Abrams, Jeff Bachman, Simon Billenness, Jessica Morris Carvalho, Mayra Gomez, Rick Halperin, Theresa Harris, Shahram Hashemi, Bill Jones, Frank Kendall, Carole Nagengast, Christianna Nichols Leahy, Dennis Nurkse, Phyllis Pautrat, Aniket Shah, Barbara Sproul, Bret Thiele and Diego Zavala. Which of them will be first to speak out against this immoral embargo call?

In calling on the US and UN to rob Israel of its ability to defend itself, Amnesty International is speaking in the name of its leaders and benefactors. Silence is acquiescence. Or they can dissociate themselves from one of Amnesty's biggest errors in judgment.

Iran, the Bomb and Obama

Monday - Obama's Plan B?


According to UN officials and arms-control experts, as of last Thursday, which of the following was true?

(a) Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb if it violates its international treaty obligations, kicks out inspectors and further refines its supply, as The Los Angeles Times reported;

(b) "Iran has slowed its uranium enrichment program," as Xinhua, the Chinese news agency reported; or

(c), "Iran has slowed the expansion of its uranium enrichment plant, but has built up a stockpile of nuclear fuel…," as Reuters reported.

Confused? That's probably what Iran and its international enablers want.

Experts deduce Iran has amassed 1,010 kilograms of reactor-grade nuclear fuel. It needs, give or take, 1,700. The Financial Times quoted UN officials as saying that "Iran has built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb" and has "produced more nuclear material than previously thought."

Are we months or several years away from a nuclear armed Iran? We can only speculate - about how much weapons-grade uranium Iran possesses; about possible clandestine bomb-making facilities; about whether Iran has built, or purchased, nuclear trigger mechanisms. There are no certainties about Iran's capabilities or intentions.

We know only that its continued enrichment of uranium is in contravention of multiple Security Council resolutions from 2006-2008.

We know, too, that Iran is guilty, under the "1949 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," of "direct and public incitement" to commit genocide.

Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has called Israel "a cancerous bacterium" and "a stain of disgrace" on the garment of Islam. While attention focuses on the hate speech of the uncouth Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was actually the former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who tied Iran's genocidal intentions to its nuclear ambitions: "The employment of even one atomic bomb inside Israel will wipe it off the face of the earth..."

IT REALLY isn't fair that Europe, Russia and China not only abdicated their responsibilities to stop Iran, but also stoked its economy and military. The international community did not muster the collective will to impose the kind of biting sanctions that could have by now compelled Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions. The world failed to exploit the leverage created by Iran's declining oil production and its need to import refined petroleum.

It isn't fair that the Bush administration bogged America down in Iraq and took its eye off Afghanistan-Pakistan. Still, this is the state of affairs President Barack Obama has inherited, and this appalling situation will get exponentially worse if Iran gets its bomb.

Only 35 days into his administration, Obama appears to have less time than anyone imagined to stop Teheran.

With meaningful sanctions seemingly dead in the water, the administration is pledged to "engagement." For this, it may wait until after Iran's presidential elections in June in the hope that Ahmadinejad will lose. It will take yet additional months to acknowledge that Ahmadinejad wasn't the problem, that the mullahs will not abandon their quest.

Could it be that Obama and his advisers know this and have already given up on preventing Teheran from getting the bomb, that their fallback position is to "contain" a nuclear-armed Iran? But an America that lacked the stomach to stop Iran in the first place will have small credibility in containing its rapacious ambitions in the region and beyond.

As part of a policy of containment, there is talk of a US declaration that an attack on the Jewish state would be viewed as an attack against the United States. How credible would that be? To undermine just such a pledge, Iran could surreptitiously transfer a nuclear device to Hizbullah-controlled Lebanon or to Hamastan. Pakistan, the only other Muslim state to go nuclear, proliferated to Iran. Teheran could be expected to carry on the tradition.

In fact, containment may simply not apply to an apocalyptic messianic regime. It is certainly not a viable "Plan B" to the prospect of a failed engagement policy. And engagement, while arguably worth a try, is no substitute for the kind of sanctions - a complete blockade, for instance - that could yet prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapons capacity that threatens far more than the Middle East.

Dubai, Qatar & Israel

Dear All,
Shabbat shalom. And thanks for checking the site.
Elliot


Friday -- Foul play in the Gulf


In yet another egregious instance of Arab men cutting off their noses to spite their faces, copies of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue featuring Israel's stunning Bar Refaeli on the cover have been removed from Dubai magazine racks.

And, after intense pressure from the Association of Tennis Professionals, Dubai has reluctantly granted an entry visa to Andy Ram to play in next week's Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships - after barring Shahar Pe'er from playing in the Women's Tennis Association tournament, affecting her earnings, if not her ranking.

International response to such anti-Israelism by the United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is the commercial center and a self-governing city-state) has been understated. The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal were critical, and the Tennis Channel cancelled plans to broadcast the Dubai women's tournament. Pe'er's fellow players, hearing about her exclusion at the 11th hour, were sympathetic but decided to go ahead and compete rather than forfeit millions of dollars in sponsors' support.

Sadly, anti-Israel frenzy has reached such proportions that in Malmö, Sweden, where Muslim immigrants comprise 25 percent of the population, the Davis Cup tennis first round tie against Israel next month will be played in an empty stadium.

Back in the UAE, the first ever "Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature," set for next week, is becoming a real page-turner owing to official censorship of Geraldine Bedell's novel The Gulf Between Us featuring a homosexual relationship set in a fictional Gulf emirate.

The Emirates, where fewer than 20 percent of the 4.4 million residents are citizens, likes to be perceived as a tolerant, pro-Western oasis. And, to be fair, the Saudi-controlled, Dubai-based satellite news channel Al-Arabiya makes a stab at modifying Al-Jazeera's radicalism. Still, public antagonism toward Israel and Western values is getting ever harder to cloak.

QATAR plays an even more duplicitous game, presenting itself as cosmopolitan while shilling for the Islamists. Back in 1996, it hosted the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and seemed to be moving incrementally toward staking out a moderate position in Arab affairs. Indeed, as late as last year, Qatar allowed Pe'er to play in a WTA Tour tournament.

But at this week's three-day annual US-Islamic World Forum in Doha, co-hosted with the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, some Arab participants echoed a refrain commonly heard from Indonesia - where US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just visited - to the Gulf States: If the US really wants to move closer to the Arab world, it will have to abandon its "near-blind" support for Israel and "overcome the veto power" of the Zionists on Washington's decision-making.

Qatar, which has the highest per-capita income in the world, has lately adopted a radically pro-Hamas foreign policy; in January, it suspended low-level diplomatic ties with Israel. Controlled by the family of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar has the peculiar distinction of being 75-percent male thanks to its outsized expatriate workforce.

Sheikh Hamad is the main financial backer of the Doha-based Al-Jazeera. While Al-Jazeera's English-language website and television take a mild tone, the main, Arabic, enterprise aligns itself with the Hamas-Iran-Syria-Hizbullah bloc. For instance, it identifies those killed in the Gaza fighting as shahids. The Muslim Brotherhood has long been a presence in Qatar, and Al-Jazeera serves as a popular, attractive platform for spreading its extremist views throughout the region.

During Operation Cast Lead, Qatar hosted a meeting of radical Arab states, plus Iran, to mobilize support for Hamas and also pledged millions of dollars for Gaza's reconstruction. The al-Thani family also played a key role in facilitating Hizbullah's incremental ascendency in Lebanon.

But Qatar is shrewd enough to hedge its bets by hosting bases of the US military's Central Command, which oversees American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The State Department considers both Qatar and the UAE - two of the world's richest countries - as friendly states.

HOW HAS Qatar, which promotes the Muslim Brotherhood and bankrolls the poisonous al-Jazeera station, succeeded in maintaining its image as a friend of the West? And how is Dubai, with its on-off boycott of Israel, able to sustain its own moderate image?

The answer is money. Lots of it. To win friends, influence people, and manipulate perceptions.

Pakistan

Wednesday - Shari'a-for-peace


The government of Pakistan signed an agreement on Monday with Taliban rebels to trade "Shari'a-for-peace." The arrangement comes after Pakistani authorities essentially lost control of the once-idyllic Swat Valley - the "Switzerland of Pakistan" - in the Northwest frontier province.

Under pressure from Washington, Pakistan dispatched 12,000 troops in what turned out to be a failed campaign to pacify a region terrorized by 3,000 Taliban fighters. The Islamists had destroyed hundreds of schools (where girls were being educated or boys were learning secular subjects); intimidated foreign teachers, beheaded policemen and murdered journalists. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled the province.

There are disturbing, though unsubstantiated, reports that India may be supporting the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan - another example, if true, of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" aphorism.

Most of Swat, roughly 100 miles from Islamabad, is in Taliban hands. Authorities also hold little sway in the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan. In short, while Pakistan is a nuclear power and has a seat in the UN, it is arguable whether it is a genuinely sovereign state.

The Shari'a-for-peace accord was reached between authorities and Taliban "moderates" led by Sufi Mohamed. What impact the deal will have on his more radical son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, remains to be seen.

In theory, the deal bolsters "moderate" Taliban and removes Shari'a law as the battle cry of the extremists. The theocratic rules to go into effect, authorities insist, will be a gentler, kinder version of Shari'a, compared to the Afghanistan strain.

The most positive spin on the deal is that it will end lawlessness and replace an unresponsive civil court system. Outlawing television, public entertainment and shaving would be a small price to pay.

President Asif Ali Zardari, whose wife Benazir Bhutto was probably assassinated by Taliban types in December 2007, has approved the Shari'a-for-peace deal. So, reportedly, did the Awami National Party, a secular Pashtun grouping. The Pashtun ethnic group comprises 15 percent of Pakistan's population, and 42% (a plurality) of Afghanistan's. The Taliban is predominantly Pashtun.

BUT MANY Pakistani modernizing elites are distressed. "This deal shows that the Pakistan military has in fact been defeated by the militants; that we are now incapable of retaining control of vast tracts of our own territory," commented a News of Pakistan editorial.

The decision to trade Sharia-for-peace appears to reflect a bad trend in the Muslim (and Arab) world whereby radicals stick to their guns, and moderates capitulate. Even if the Taliban could be satiated with "just" Afghanistan and Pakistan, these vast lands would become - even more than they already are - safe havens and launching pads for terrorism against "the infidels."

Indeed, reports claim that Osama bin Laden is currently not in some cave but in the village of Parachinar, near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, in an area that's seen Sunni-Shi'ite strife.

US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, who is just completing a tour of the region, called the Swat deal proof that India, the United States and Pakistan "all have a common threat now."

If only that were true. If only matters were that clear-cut.

The US is doing its best to keep up appearances. Anne W. Patterson, America's ambassador to Pakistan (who sometimes appears in public wearing a head covering), oversees the delivery of millions of dollars in US aid. At the same time, the US military (starting in the last months of the Bush administration) is employing unmanned aircraft to strike at terrorist targets inside the country, with the tacit approval of Pakistani authorities.

WHEN Pakistan's top general. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani - the man who controls Islamabad's nuclear arsenal and presumably still makes the final call in the shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Agency - arrives in Washington next week to meet Obama administration officials, there will be much to talk about: the release from house arrest of A.Q. Khan, and the serious proliferation risk he continues to be; the Shari'a-for-peace deal; and Pakistan's culpability in the Mumbai attacks.

Between Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, the power vacuum in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and the need to preserve relative stability in Iraq, the administration will, no doubt, want to prioritize its Middle East agenda accordingly.

Those Gaza killed and wounded: An update

Tuesday -- The first casualty of war: Truth


Which is the greater factor in getting consumers of news to believe that "1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians" were killed during Operation Cast Lead? Intrinsic anti-Israel bias - or a high degree of gullibility to manipulative international media coverage?

Put another way, do you have to be anti-Israel to believe Palestinian lies, or is Palestinian mendacity so well-constructed, so plausible, and so well disseminated by collaborative media outlets like Al Jazeera that even well-meaning people can't help but believe the worst of Israel?

These questions are prompted by some significant reporting in Monday's Jerusalem Post ("Int'l community was duped by Hamas's false civilian death toll figures, IDF claims").

Even well-regarded Palestinian pressure groups have been claiming that Israel killed 895 civilians in the Gaza fighting. Operating on the basis of such "data," coupled with a poisoned wellspring of antipathy against the Jewish state, Mahmoud Abbas has been making the case for indicting Israeli cabinet ministers and military officers for international war crimes.

Pro-Palestinian campaigners allege that two-thirds of the Arab fatalities were civilian. The IDF insists that no more than a third of the dead were civilians - and not a one was targeted intentionally. So instead of "1,300 killed, most of them civilians," we now have reason to believe, based on the IDF's methodical analysis of 1,200 of the Palestinian fatalities thus far identified by name, that 580 were combatants and 300 non-combatants.

Of these 300, two were female suicide bombers, and some others were related to terrorists such as Nizar Rayyan, a top Hamas gunman who insisted that his family join him in the hereafter.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth," said US senator Hiram Warren Johnson.

Take, for instance, Arab eyewitness accounts of the number killed at the Jabalya UN School on January 6 - some 40 dead, maybe 15 of them women and children. The IDF says the actual figure is 12 killed, nine of them Hamas operatives.

With time, perhaps, the names and true identities of each and every one of the Gaza dead - including the 320 as yet unclassified - will be determined.

One point is indisputable: Despite the best efforts of both sides, the IDF wound up killing more Palestinians unintentionally than the Palestinians killed Israeli civilians on purpose. This is known as "disproportionality."

Israeli officials, given bitter experiences such as Jenin in 2002, when a grossly false narrative of massacre and massed killing was disseminated by Palestinian officials, should have long since internalized the imperative to try to ascertain the number and nature of Palestinian dead in real time.

But while the figure "1,300 Palestinians killed, most/many of them civilians" is now embedded in the public consciousness, it is emphatically not too late to try to set the record straight.

Atrocity stories are nothing new. The British have been charged with using them to create popular outrage during the Boer War. The allies used them against Germany during World War I - which, incidentally, allowed the real Nazi atrocities during WWII to be dismissed long into the Holocaust.

Nowadays, it matters what masses of uninformed or ill-informed people far removed from the Arab-Israel conflict think. Dry statistics released so belatedly will win Israel no PR credit in a world of 24/7 satellite news channels and real-time blogging. Nevertheless, the fact that an Israeli narrative is finally out there is significant. Perhaps responsible news outlets will want to reexamine some of their original reporting, along with the assumption that "most" of the dead were non-combatants.

Palestinian propaganda is insidious because those being manipulated are oblivious to what is happening. Chaotic images of casualties being hurried to hospitals, gut-wrenching funerals and swaths of shattered buildings create an overarching "reality." Against this, Israel's pleadings that the Palestinians are culpable for the destruction, and that the above images lack context, scarcely resonate.

Despite six decades of intransigence and a virtual copyright on airline hijackings and suicide bombings, the Palestinians have created a popular "brand" for themselves by parlaying their self-inflicted victimization into a battering ram against Israel.

Disseminators of news should have learned better than to take Palestinian death-toll claims at face value, least of all when sourced directly or indirectly from the Hamas-run government of Gaza.

Ooops, turns out they are working on a Bomb

Monday - Intelligence has its limits


"The problem with technical intelligence," East German spymaster Markus Wolf once said, "is that it is essentially information without evaluation. Technical intelligence can only record what has happened so far - not what might happen in the future."

Perhaps that is why the director of US National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Thursday that "Iran is clearly developing all the components of a deliverable nuclear weapons program," but "whether they take it all the way to nuclear weapons depends a great deal on their internal decisions."

Blair is the American government's highest-ranking intelligence official. He released the Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence after being in office just two weeks.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan absorb the bulk of US intelligence resources, he revealed.

No one - perhaps not even the Iranians themselves - knows with absolute certainty whether they will stop just short of a test detonation once they have worked out all the pieces of the nuclear bomb-making puzzle. The mullahs may want to wait for a second-strike capability. But by the time Iranian decision makers grapple with that, it will already be too late.

When Israelis think about intelligence it is of the concrete, tactical variety that, for instance, helps the IAF target Kassam launching squads. Over the weekend, the Americans used their tactical intelligence to target an Islamist base along the Pakistan-Afghan border using drone aircraft.

The threat assessment, in contrast, while presumably informed by hard intelligence, is largely subjective evaluation. In this respect, it reminds us of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate ("Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities") which told policymakers "with high confidence" that Teheran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Last week, President Barack Obama acknowledged that Iran was pursuing "a nuclear weapon." So did CIA Director Leon Panetta: "There is no question that they are seeking that capability."

THE BIGGEST danger facing the US, according to last week's assessment, is not Iran, or North Korea or Islamist terrorism, but the world economic crisis.

The prospect of cross-border instability increases when the rising expectations of the masses are dashed by sputtering economies and runaway unemployment. Regimes that feel threatened at home become problems abroad. "The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to US strategic interests," said Blair.

The assessment also focused on nuclear proliferation, narcotics trafficking, global warming, pandemics, North Korea - even cyber-terror.

US intelligence believes that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, though still dangerous, is largely hunkered down, sidelined and finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with adherents worldwide. In addition, many Sunni Muslims, in Iraq for instance, are fed up with the indiscriminate al-Qaida-inspired violence. "We have seen notable progress in Muslim opinion turning against terrorist groups such as al-Qaida," Blair said.

At the same time, however, groups nominally loyal to al-Qaida are gaining ground in East Africa and Yemen.

Blair acknowledged that the Islamists are ascendant in Afghanistan, and a dangerous threat in Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Taliban have thrived in an atmosphere of government corruption, insidious drug-related criminality, and a failure to develop the rule of law and rebuild the economy.

INTELLIGENCE HAS its limits. It always did. US intelligence could not predict - with certainty - until after December 7, 1941 that Pearl Harbor would be attacked; nor, until after December 25, 1991, that the Soviet Union would implode; nor, until two years after the US-led invasion, that Iraq did not have deployable WMDs.

Today's 20th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan is another reminder that evaluative intelligence, especially, has its limits. Could anyone then have certified that the mujahadin who had ousted the Soviets would turn their fanaticism against the West?

Though the US president has access to the kind of intelligence that goes well beyond what is publicly released in the Annual Threat Assessment, at the end of the day his job is about leadership and decision-making. Barack Obama has declared time and again that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. To make good on that commitment, and in the absence of absolute certainty, he will have to make some tough decisions.

Jewish leaders meet the pope in Rome

Shabbat shalom to all
elliot


Friday -- Benedict's plea

On January 25, 1904 Theodor Herzl obtained an audience with Pope Pius X to seek Vatican support for the Zionist enterprise. The pontiff held out his hand, but Herzl did not kiss it - though he felt uncomfortable not doing so.

The father of modern Zionism outlined his plans. The pope's response was disappointing: "We cannot give approval to this movement… We can never sanction it… The Jews have not recognized our Lord; therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people."

The Church has come a long way in its attitude. The principal milestone was the 1965 Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate which repudiated the precept of collective Jewish guilt for the death of the Christian messiah.

In 1986, John Paul II became the first modern pope to visit a synagogue, where he called Jews "our beloved elder brothers." And in 1994, the Vatican - casting aside the age-old belief that the Church had replaced the Jews as the "true Israel" - established diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

In parallel with these signs of progress, there has been some backsliding. In the late 1980s, John Paul II met twice with Kurt Waldheim after the Austrian president's Nazi connections emerged. The Church moved glacially to relocate a group of Carmelite nuns who had set up a convent at Auschwitz. The pope sullied his papacy with a nauseating, 20-minute meeting with Yasser Arafat on September 16, 1982 - long before the PLO chief feigned his renunciation of terrorism. The pontiff went on to meet Arafat 10 more times.

BENEDICT XVI has had a troubling record. In 2005, the pope condemned a litany of terrorist atrocities while conspicuously avoiding mention of the 57 Israelis killed that year during the second intifada.

In 2007, Benedict moved to canonize Pope Pius XII ("Hitler's pope"). Last year, he reintroduced the Tridentine Mass, which Nostra Aetate had rendered archaic: The Latin original contained a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of "the perfidious Jews." Benedict's revised version lets Catholic conservatives pray that God "remove the veil" from the hearts of Jews and end their "blindness."

During Operation Cast Lead, a senior Vatican cardinal, Renato Martino, referred to Hamas-ruled Gaza as one "big concentration camp."

But it was the lifting last month of the 1988 excommunication of four arch-conservative bishops associated with the Society of Saint Pius X that brought Catholic-Jewish relations to a nadir. Jews do not much care about theological issues within the Church unless they impact on us directly. But one of those readmitted bishops, Richard Williamson, is an unregenerate Holocaust-denier.

Someone in the Vatican hierarchy did Benedict a great disservice in not forewarning him about Williamson. Only after criticism crested, and the (Protestant) German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Benedict to make "very clear" his rejection of Holocaust-denial, did the German-born pope take action. (To his credit, Benedict has refused to receive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.)

As a matter of Jewish dignity, The Jerusalem Post called for a moratorium on public contacts between the organized Jewish community and the Vatican - which is now saying Williamson must accept Nostra Aetate to be granted full communion, and has told him to publicly recant his Holocaust denial. To no avail.

ON THURSDAY, leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations met with Pope Benedict in Rome. The audience had been scheduled before the Williamson controversy broke. Canceling it would have exacerbated tensions and embarrassed the pope - which is not the Jewish way. These communal leaders sensed the Vatican wanted to set matters straight. It appears they were right.

The pope told them: "Any denial or minimization of [the Holocaust] is intolerable… This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures."

He then repeated, verbatim, the prayer Pope John Paul offered when he visited the Western Wall in 2000 and asked the Jews to forgive the Christians who had persecuted them over the centuries. Benedict ended: "I now make his prayer my own."

We welcome this reiteration of the late pope's entreaty. Still, as the Holy Father may know, in Jewish tradition, absolution requires not just the confession of a sin, but its cessation.

Likud + Kadima + YB = A government

Thursday -- National Unity


The rocket Hamas fired into the western Negev on Wednesday morning was an
explosive reminder that while Israel is bogged down in post-election
befuddlement, its foreign and security agenda can¹t be put on hold.

The issue of a tolerable Gaza cease-fire deal that would not leave Israel
worse off than it is today, but would free Gilad Schalit, remains
unresolved. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is reportedly trying to make a
surrender to Hamas¹s long-standing demand ­ 1,000 prisoners as ransom for
our soldier ­ less repulsive by excluding four uniquely monstrous terrorists
from the arrangement.

Egypt is mobilizing to reconcile Hamas with Fatah and help them establish a
united front. Jerusalem will need a coherent policy toward a Palestinian
unity government.

Mahmoud Abbas has been diligently working to have the International Court of
Justice in The Hague indict Israel for war crimes over Operation Cast Lead.
In the topsy-turvy world of what nowadays passes for international law, such
PLO lobbying is a real threat. We need a government that can credibly warn
Abbas that his continued demonization of Israel will have consequences.


Over at the UN, where, to paraphrase George Orwell, the clock is always
striking thirteen, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has established a committee
to ³investigate² Israel¹s culpability in defending itself against Hamas
violence emanating from the Strip. Israel needs an assertive, eloquent UN
ambassador who can speak truth to inanity.

Israel also needs a no-nonsense defense minister to keep an eye on
Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon ­ where there are now more missiles aimed at our
North than before the Second Lebanon War ­ and on Hassan Nasrallah who,
still in his bunker, threatens a mega-terrorist attack to ³avenge² the
slaying of arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.


Israel¹s biggest challenge is in Teheran, where President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad told an enormous crowd celebrating the 30th anniversary of the
Shah¹s overthrow that he was open to overtures from the new US
administration so long as President Barack Obama had no ulterior motives.
Ahmadinejad¹s party was spoiled by reports suggesting that Iran was short of
³yellow cake² ­ raw uranium for its nuclear weapons program.


The American Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, George Mitchell, has taken
the ³pulse² of the relevant parties. Back in 2000, Mitchell wrote that he
does ³not in any way equate Palestinian terrorism with Israeli settlement
activity.²


Now Israel needs a strong government that can relate effectively, and
respond constructively, to the administration¹s efforts to broker a deal
with the Palestinian Arabs.


ISRAEL does not have the luxury of squandering precious time on coalition
bargaining. The existential threat posed by Iran, as well as lesser ­ by
comparison ­ security and foreign policy challenges, combined with the need
to competently address the local impact of the global economic crisis,
demands leadership of the highest caliber.


Tuesday¹s elections gave Kadima 29 mandates and Likud 28 (the balance of
power can still shift once all the ballots are counted). It is clear to us
that the two winners need to join forces in a national unity government.
Together with Israel Beiteinu¹s 15 mandates they can effortlessly and
expeditiously form a ruling coalition and get down to the business of
governing.


As the Likud¹s Bennie Begin argues, the differences between Kadima, Israel
Beiteinu and Likud regarding the endgame of negotiations with the
Palestinians are purely theoretical.


Given that the ³moderate² Mahmoud Abbas could not, or would not, cut a deal
with Ehud Olmert, notwithstanding the latter¹s generosity of spirit (and
desperation to end his tenure on a high note), it is self-evident that, for
now, Jerusalem has no partner for peace.


National unity is essential. Netanyahu could form a short-lived, narrow
right-wing government (with 64 seats), while Livni does not appear to have
an option of heading a government without the Likud. The Jerusalem Post,
consequently, favors Netanyahu for prime minister and Livni in the role of
vice premier and acting prime minister. Avigdor Lieberman could play a
constructive role as minister of the interior and member of the security
cabinet.


Admittedly, such a scenario requires Livni and Lieberman to put country
first. But given the Jewish state¹s need for four years of stable government
under capable stewardship, this is not too much to ask.

Election equations -- Israel

7 AM results -- below this posting.



Israeli election results are bewildering even for those who think they
understand the political lay of the land, partly because it will take weeks
for a governing coalition to take shape.

Advocacy journalists and agenda-driven media outlets are confusing the situation even further for those abroad by claiming that Israel holds virtually all of the cards in Arab-Israel peace-making.

The importance of Tuesday¹s results notwithstanding, what Israel does ­ or
fails to do ­comprises only part of the peace-making equation.

CNN¹s Ben Wedeman¹s point of departure, ahead of our elections, was the
bogeyman of "Palestinian despair." Having "just been tear-gassed" by
Israeli soldiers while covering riots near the security barrier ­-- where
Israeli settlements have "increasingly encroached" on Arab farmland --
Wedeman implies that Israel does not, really, want a two-state solution.

The Palestinians are being offered "an ever smaller, ever more economically
unviable territory," Wedeman reports. And so they are left to seek a
"one-state solution" in which an eventual Arab majority will demographically
overwhelm the Jews.

The magnanimous, arguably reckless, territorial concessions Ehud Olmert has
just offered Mahmoud Abbas count for nothing.


IF YOU can get innocents abroad to believe that Israel has refused to offer
the Palestinians a viable two-state solution ­ you can also insinuate that
Israelis will reap what they sow. The new prime minister, London's Daily Telegraph informs, "will face one unavoidable reality: the area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean will soon have more Arabs than Jews."

No one champions the idea of 3.5 million or so hostile Palestinians living
under the jurisdiction of five million Jews. The demographic clock is ticking, but not quite as fast as the Telegraph would have its readers
think.

Pity those who lack the back-story: The Arabs have been rejecting a
two-state solution since the UN¹s 1947 Partition Plan, and that rejection
created the refugee problem. The Palestinians have also consistently
rejected exchanging land for peace, and that rejection created the settlement "problem."

Perceptions are further skewed when the idea is implanted that the onus of
peace-making is entirely on Israel. Sky News said our elections "will shape
the future of peace in the Middle East." At stake was Israel's "final
borders," Asia News opined. The Times of India reported that Palestinians hope "President Barack Obama will help ensure that whoever becomes prime minister does not bury the already teetering peace process."

It's as if there were no Arab interlocutors to "shape" or "bury" events. But
there are. Diminishing their responsibilities presents only half the
equation.

Over-simplification is another way to guarantee skewed perceptions. In 1977,
the foreign media practically lynched Menachem Begin as an enemy of peace.
Yet he became the first Israeli premier to sign a peace treaty with an Arab
state.

Similarly, Binyamin Netanyahu has been pigeonholed as "hawkish." And while
it is true that Tzipi Livni is a "centrist," Israel's entire political
spectrum has shifted rightward in reaction to years of Palestinian
intransigence.

Avigdor Lieberman is all too simplistically tagged as being on the "far
Right." Reuters prefers "ultra-rightist." But the Lieberman phenomenon needs
context. Voters susceptible to populist or demagogic appeals do, from time
to time, catapult protest parties to power, only to abandon them when the
magic wears off ­-- witness the Pensioners and Shinui.

Isn't the Guardian¹s Jonathan Freedland oversimplifying in claiming that Netanyahu rules out "any compromise" on Jerusalem, and is "still refusing" to accept a Palestinian state? Is it not a gross exaggeration to claim, as an Associated Press dispatch did, that Netanyahu "opposes giving up land-for-peace"? Netanyahu told The Jerusalem Post that he would be delighted to find a formula that allows the Palestinians to govern themselves and Israel to live in security.

Regardless of whether our next prime minister is called Livni or Netanyahu -- something that is not clear this post-election day -- Israel needs an Arab partner with whom to make peace. Ultimately, of course, a deal is dependent on what happens in both polities.

That said, Israel must not shirk its half of the conflict resolution
equation. Our next premier must ensure that all coalition partners in the
new government are committed to what, is after all, a strategic imperative
for Israel ­ peace.

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As of 7 AM: Kadima has won 28 Knesset seats, the Likud—27, Yisrael Beiteinu—15, Labor—13, Shas—11, United Torah Judaism—5, Hadash, United Arab List-Arab Movement for Renewal and the National Union—4 each, The Jewish Home, Balad and Meretz — 3 each.

The right wing bloc holds a clear majority of 65 Knesset seats compared to the center-left’s 55.

The votes of IDF personnel have not all yet been counted.

Voter turnout was 65%