Shiite religious leader Sayyed Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah played a leading role in the increasing Islamic radicalization of Lebanese Shiites and laid the foundations for Hizbullah's ideology of violent struggle against the West and Israel. He supplied an organized doctrine for the mujahid who is ready to sacrifice his life. Yet he opposed the aspirations of Iran to establish an Islamic republic in Lebanon.

Gaza is not cut off from the outside world. In the last year, the markets of Gaza have been flooded with produce and merchandise.
From June 2007 (the date of the Hamas military takeover of Gaza), overall monetary transfers to Gaza have totaled over $5 billion from governmental and extragovernmental sources.

Israel’s creation, far from being a foreign colonial transplant, can actually be seen as the vanguard of and impetus for decolonialization of the entire Middle East, including a significant part of the Arab world, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Mahmoud Abbas' new precondition that the international community recognize the 1967 lines in the West Bank as the new Palestinian border bolsters the assessment that the Palestinians have largely abandoned a negotiated settlement and instead are actively pursuing a unilateral approach to statehood.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad published a plan in August 2009 to unilaterally declare statehood after a two-year state-building process. However, any unilateral action that undermines the existing Oslo interim framework could jeopardize the peace process and remove the basis for the existence of the Palestinian Authority.

Israel and post-communist, resource-rich states have similar geopolitical priorities in opposing terrorism and radical Islam. By developing closer ties with Kazakhstan - and with Eurasian countries in general - Israel can expand its ties to the secular Muslim Turkic states.

The Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, that the Palestinians demand to transfer to their control, is the most important Jewish cemetery in the world. The area has constituted a religious and national pantheon for the Jewish people and the State of Israel, containing the tombs of the illustrious dead of the nation over the course of 3,000 years.

On April 3, 2009, Hizbullah published its political platform in advance of elections to the Lebanese parliament scheduled for June 7, 2009. The document calls for the abolition of sectarian politics and for the enactment of a new election law that would alter the equation of sectarian forces in Lebanon. The abolition of the existing political system will advance Hizbullah toward its fundamental goal: the establishment of an Islamic state and a complete Iranian takeover of Lebanon.

NGOs that are supported financially by special interest groups or even states for the benefit of their own agendas have been instrumental in the implementation of universal jurisdiction against Israeli officials. Universal jurisdiction and the International Criminal Court are applied when a country does not or cannot act to prosecute. Yet Israel is a democracy with a well-developed judicial system and does not need external intervention to conduct any investigation.

It is widely believed that the PA in Ramallah only pays the salaries of civil service employees in Gaza to encourage them to stay at home to avoid working with Hamas. However, PA Prime Minister Fayyad also pays the monthly salaries of between 6,000 and 12,000 Hamas Executive Force operatives in Gaza, in line with the 2007 Mecca national unity agreement, as well as to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades terrorists. The U.S. must avoid the temptation of once again blindly relyin

In March 2002, at the height of a terror campaign in which 1,804 Israelis were killed in Palestinian suicide bombings, the government of Israel decided to take a defensive measure to block terrorists from reaching Israeli population centers by establishing a physical obstacle. Even Israel's worst enemies confessed that the security fence saved Israeli lives. In building the fence, great efforts were invested and solutions were provided to meet the unique needs of the Christian churches.

Human rights groups have criticized the Israeli government for denying access to Gazans seeking to receive permits for care in hospitals in Israel, the PA and Jordan. Yet the data shows that the number of patients receiving permits for referrals to hospitals in Israel – or the PA or Jordan – increased by 45 percent from 4,932 in 2006 to 7,176 in 2007, and continued to increase in the first six months of 2008, despite increasing rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian population.

For the British government, formal negotiations with the IRA could only occur in a context in which republican violence had been brought to an end. With the IRA in a position of declining military and political fortunes, it sought to extricate itself via the peace process.

By exchanging prisoners with the proxy organizations as if they were law-abiding states, Israel can be seen as upgrading the status of the organizations’ unlawful combatants from terrorists and war criminals. Such exchanges afford them the same rights as lawful soldiers, without demanding from their leaders the reciprocal obligations. At the same time, Israel downgrades the rights of its own captured soldiers by overlooking the organizations’ systematic depravation of POW rights.

In the past sixty years as a nation, Israel has survived many existential threats by means of its intense motivation to restore national sovereignty and through the adoption of various strategies and tactics. Threats of ballistic missiles, nonconventional warheads and mass terror attacks have increased in the recent past, with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran posing a problem for the future.

The charge that domestic politics determined our policy on Palestine angered President Truman for the rest of his life. In fact, the President’s policy rested on the realities of the situation in the region, on America’s moral, ethical, and humanitarian values, on the costs and risks inherent in any other course, and on America’s national interests.

Between 2003 and 2005, the Iranians refrained from any nuclear activity under the influence of the impression created by America’s pre-emptive policies in the region, which served as the main instrument that enabled the Europeans to force Iran to postpone uranium conversion and enrichment. But when the Iranians realized in 2005 that there was no actual threat behind their fears of U.S. pre-emption, they decided to start conversion and then enrichment.

In an unimplementable “shelf agreement,” Israel will be seen to have committed itself to certain far-reaching steps that it has not implemented. On the one hand, this will be seen as the starting point for any future negotiations, and on the other hand, it will invite increasing pressure on Israel, with the added element of ongoing terror.

Israeli Arabs increasingly affiliate with the Palestinians and at the same time are undergoing a rapid increase of Islamization. Most of Israel’s Arab citizens are still seeking greater integration with the Israeli Jewish population. More than 70 percent of Israeli Arabs favor national service so as to gain equal footing with Israeli Jews and Druze, who serve in the army.

Rachel’s Tomb lies on the northern outskirts of Bethlehem, about 460 meters (about 500 yards) south of the Jerusalem municipal border, and for more than 1,700 years has been identified as the tomb of the matriarch Rachel. In 2000, after hundreds of years of recognizing the site as Rachel’s Tomb, Muslims began calling it the “Bilal ibn Rabah mosque” – a claim that ignored Ottoman decrees that gave Jews the right of access to the site at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

While prominent voices in the West are calling for a new political dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Arab world many serious analysts warn about its continuing violent nature and global ambitions.

In the aftermath of Israel’s air operation over Syria, Dr. Andrew Semmel, Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Nuclear Nonproliferation Policy and Negotiations, warned that Syria might have a number of “secret suppliers” for a covert nuclear program. Syria is reported to have thousands of rockets with ranges of up to 56 miles positioned along Syria’s southern border with Israel.

Contrary to the assertions of Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who claim that no compelling strategic argument can explain American support for Israel, the two countries have, in fact, developed strong strategic ties over the years that have evolved into a unique alliance. USEUCOM commander General Bantz J. Craddock stated on March 15, 2007, that Israel was America’s “closest ally” in the Middle East and that it “consistently and directly” supported U.S. interests.

European states over the past decades did not understand that the threats Israel was encountering in those years were essentially precursors of the menaces they would face as well. Had leading European politicians realized that a broader assault by radical Islam was underway – ultimately directed at their countries rather than at Israel alone – they likely would not have made the major errors they committed – particularly in the area of immigration – that have undermined European security today.

Once Israel dropped its past reliance on a diplomacy based on its own rights and adopted a new concession-based diplomacy instead, its spokesmen essentially acquiesced to the Palestinian historical narrative.

Al-Qaeda generally thrives wherever central authority of governments is collapsing and therefore its current success in the war-torn Gaza Strip should not come as a surprise. Just after Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, there were reports that al-Qaeda had exploited the new security vacuum that had been created and begun to dispatch its operatives to this territory.

Some European Muslim leaders make no secret of their intent to change Europe to their tune, not to adapt to it. They demand their own school systems, in their own native languages, financed by the host state and, in the long run, to its own detriment. There are already areas in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Britain where Muslim children constitute the majority of the school population.

The genocidal attacks on Israel and the distortion of Holocaust history should be seen as part of Ahmadinejad’s overall political agenda concerning the West and Israel. They derive from his apocalyptic Islamic ideology. Iranian Holocaust manipulation is therefore likely to continue as long as he is in power.

It is necessary to adopt an alternative concept of victory, which should be called “minimal victory,” in which terror is not destroyed, but is contained at a minimal level, and one must invest constant energy in order to prevent its eruption. In a continuous and uninterrupted effort since Operation “Defensive Shield” in April 2002, after it counted 132 dead in one month (the equivalent of 1,400 deaths a year), Israel’s terror casualty rate declined to 11 civilians for all of 2006.

In responding forcefully to Hizballah’s provocation in the summer of 2006, Israel not only restored much of its deterrent capability, but did so against a weapon of the Iranian and Syrian militaries. Israel acted only after exhausting a number of other options over the decades, including everything from all-out invasion and regime change to quiet diplomacy and open negotiations. Israel’s overall response was not disproportionate when considering the enemy Israel was fighting.

Ultimately, religion defines identity among Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, and is the basic element upon which the Jewish attachment to the Land of Israel is based. In parallel, the Arab political awakening and worldview also draws its own attachment to the same land from religious sources.

The European Union has for many years announced its ambition to be a global political actor - to act as a counterweight to the United States on the world scene. The summer war in Lebanon could have been a major opportunity for the EU to show that it could move rapidly to stop a conflict in its tracks by offering a solution in which it would make a major contribution.

Israel is not better off strategically than it was at the beginning of the war; this in itself is a Hizballah victory. Israel must prepare to win the next round decisively. The IDF knew that Hizballah could not be defeated without a major ground operation: its plan did not fail - it was never implemented.

Prospects for peace in the Middle East have been dealt an enormous blow by the election triumph of Hamas in January 2006. Palestinian education, television shows, websites, and even families are all being mobilized in an intensified environment of agitated hatred toward Israel and Israelis.

Vladimir Putin inherited a strong Russian-Iranian relationship from his predecessor Boris Yeltsin. Russia under Yeltsin made major arms agreements with Iran, selling Tehran jet planes, tanks, and submarines, and also began building a nuclear reactor for Iran at Bushehr. The two countries also cooperated on regional issues such as Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

The U.S. military victory in Iraq did at first create a more congenial atmosphere among Palestinians for peace with Israel. However, the present situation in Iraq, as well as Iran and Muslim fundamentalism in general, have caused matters to move in the opposite direction. The Palestinians are further away from a spirit of reconciliation and compromise than ever before.

Hamas has reaped the fruits of the "Green Revolution" that it led in recent years to win many local authority elections, obtain a stable majority in the Palestinian parliament, and take decisive control of executive authority. Hamas' tactical agreement to play by the democratic rules was a Trojan horse.

Mideast policy has been dictated by the Quartet-sponsored Performance-Based Roadmap, which was based on guidelines outlined by President Bush on June 24, 2002. A careful analysis of President Bush's speech, along with meticulous adherence to the Roadmap, might actually lead the way to a clearer policy toward Hamas.

The cornerstone of Hamas' program, its very raison-d'etre, is the destruction of Israel, replacing it with an Islamist, fundamentalist, intolerant state reaching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River and beyond. The dominant theme of all their statements includes no territorial compromise - no peace even if Israel were to hand over all the territories and eastern Jerusalem; at most, some sort of temporary armistice (hudna).

When the President of Iran calls for "wiping Israel off the map," while his country provides weapons and training to terror groups, and the International Atomic Energy Agency officially declares that it is in violation of its commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons, what can the advocates of human security and multilateral disarmament offer in response?

For the first time, Israeli defense experts are noting that groups identifying with al-Qaeda - or the global jihad - are determined to acquire operational footholds close to Israel's borders. The most dramatic sign was the announcement of "al-Qaeda Mesopotamia" - the organization led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - that it fired four Katyusha rockets from Lebanon on December 27, 2005, that struck northern Israel.

A peace agreement can only successfully end a conflict if it enjoys underlying, wide-ranging support from its respective populations. In particular, past efforts to achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace have failed to deal with, or even acknowledge, the deep-seated psychological mechanisms of partisanship that are endemic in Palestinian culture.

Iranian President Ahmadinejad's call for the elimination of Israel led to many condemnations, including from the UN Security Council and the European Union. This censure - though only verbal - differed from the usual Western silence concerning genocidal statements of Iranian leaders in previous years. Possible explanations for the West's reaction include opposition to Iran's nuclear program and Iran's support for terrorism in Iraq.

The International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) in its advisory opinion on the legality of Israel's separation barrier uncritically adopted the UN General Assembly phrase "Palestinian territories" as applying to all the territories. The UN General Assembly is a political body. It is not a global legislature that creates international law through its resolutions.

Looking to explain to the British public the "deep roots" of the July 7, 2005, terrorist attacks on London, Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed to the underlying causes of the violence including the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Clearly, Israel is one of many international grievances cited in the Islamic world today, but the purported link between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rage of al-Qaeda and its supporters is patently groundless.

Judaism and Christianity emphasize man's freedom to act morally. Their legacy provides a foundation of thought which effectively supports the proposition that democracy is for all, although it may require an extended time-frame. Some European elitists consider democracy to be the enemy of excellence, with the leveling effects of egalitarianism destroying genuine diversity and strengthening the weak.

The rejection of the proposed European Union constitution in France and the Netherlands has weakened Europe's overall status and may influence Europe's role in the Middle East. While past EU policies have been heavily biased against Israel, as it enters a period of disarray, EU policies may become structurally less threatening to Israel. For many years, France has been the driving force behind anti-Israel political attitudes in the EU.

The U.S. offensive against terrorism has succeeded in reducing the extent of global terrorism. However, under the surface, the financial channels that are the arteries of radical Islamic movements from Hamas to the Chechens continue to operate. U.S. pressure has managed to force Islamic financiers to alter their pattern of operations, but the substance of their support persists - in a financial jihad that backs the wider global jihad against the infidels.

The German postwar governments have made great efforts to reeducate the population. In recent years, however, there are increasing signs of shifts in German attitudes toward rewriting its past. Some of these involve the sanitizing of history, while others are reflected in an increasing lack of sensitivity among society's elites as well as the mainstream toward the use of concepts and semantics from the Hitler period.

Iran is moving steadily to a nuclear weapons capability, European diplomatic efforts notwithstanding. The "window" within which Iran might be stopped short of the finish line is closing quickly. But many Europeans argue that Iran will, of necessity, act as a responsible nuclear power in order to avoid catastrophic destruction.

President Bush's perception of democracy as being at the forefront of American foreign policy is a change from the traditional U.S. policy in the Middle East of realpolitik - supporting the stability of friendly leaders no matter how autocratic they are. The fundamental political culture of Muslim Arab societies is based on the unquestionable sovereignty of God, and democracy and popular sovereignty, in its Western sense, appear to be contrary to this concept.

British Muslim organizations are becoming far more vocal on foreign policy matters. Two positions would appear to be axiomatic: opposition to the Iraq war and Britain's continued involvement in Iraq, and a resolute anti-Zionism which both delegitimizes the State of Israel and scorns Jewish anxieties when it comes to anti-Semitism.

British Muslim organizations are becoming far more vocal on foreign policy matters. Two positions would appear to be axiomatic: opposition to the Iraq war and Britain's continued involvement in Iraq, and a resolute anti-Zionism which both delegitimizes the State of Israel and scorns Jewish anxieties when it comes to anti-Semitism.

At President Clinton's failed Camp David peace summit in mid-2000, Barak offered more than any Israeli prime minister in history. Yet the talks exposed vast remaining disparities between Israel and many of today's post-Arafat Palestinian leaders on key issues that must be considered before the Bush administration dispatches a "presidential envoy" or risks convening yet another peace summit in the period ahead.

The experiment in Palestinian autonomy, as implemented in the Oslo framework, was unsuccessful, with deeply-rooted corruption, administrative chaos, terror, and lawlessness - the characteristics of a failed state. In this environment, international efforts to provide assistance to the Palestinian population have also been ineffective, and have contributed to the corruption and the terror attacks.

In light of Israel's planned disengagement from Gaza, to take place in 2005, and the termination of Yasser Arafat's hold on power, the eventual take-over of the Gaza Strip by Hamas certainly cannot be ruled out. Would a Gaza "Hamas-stan" become another al-Qaeda sanctuary in the future?

While there are obvious limitations in any analogy between the situation in Northern Ireland and the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, many in the British government and military believe there is such an analogy. As a consequence of the Troubles of the last 30 years, Northern Ireland has become the defining national security experience for that generation of people who now have stewardship for British policy.

Academic and professional reports implicating Israeli policy and actions in the deterioration of the mental health and education of Palestinian children are characterized by questionable scientific methodology and a reliance on distortions, omissions, and misrepresentations. Mental health consequences are discussed without reference to terror activities and incitement to violence in Palestinian media, schools, and universities.

The current focus in Israeli discussion on whether some Jews have to leave their homes makes consideration of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan unnecessarily and harmfully divisive and misses the real issue of whether the current proposal improves or worsens Israeli security now and for the future.

A modus vivendi that could give both Palestinians and Israelis an opportunity to start going their separate ways in relative normalcy may result from Israel's disengagement plan, while real, contractual peace will perhaps come only after a generational change.

Several important manifestations of anti-Semitism originate in the ideology and political culture of the former Soviet Union, whose legacy has survived its demise. A special type of political language which it devised has served as the bridge which links the earlier Soviet-styled anti-Semitism to that of the present.

After initially seeking a "hands-off" policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, in part because of Clinton's failures in that area, the George W. Bush administration has pursued an activist policy on four different occasions - only to see its policy initiatives fail, primarily because of outbreaks of Palestinian terrorism.

On April 1, 2002, some 200 armed Palestinians entered one of the most important shrines and holy places in Christianity - the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem marking the place where Jesus was born - and remained inside until May 12.

The many classic examples of low-intensity conflict - in Indo-China, Malaya, Algeria, Cuba, and Northern Ireland - are irrelevant to the case of Israel. Not a single citizen in Britain, France, or the United States had his daily routine in his native country disrupted as a result of the low-intensity combat conducted by his country's army on a foreign battlefield.

The UN General Assembly (GA) resolution asking the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion is actually a request for an endorsement of an already-stated political opinion of the GA. The ICJ lacks jurisdiction over the case because the GA has dictated the desired result. The court is not authorized to make endorsements of the GA's political opinions dressed in legal garb.

In mid-September 2000, two weeks before Ariel Sharon's Temple Mount visit and the outbreak of widespread Israeli Arab violence, Israeli Knesset member Abdel Malik Dehamshe told a meeting of the Supreme Monitoring Committee of the Israeli Arab Leadership that "the Arab public is on the verge of a new, massive, and popular intifada."

Trevor Asserson, a leading British litigation lawyer, has undertaken three well-documented studies detailing the BBC's systematic bias against Israel. The BBC is increasingly developing from an organization that reports news into an organization that manufactures it. Where Israel is concerned, the BBC is in breach of all or most of the guidelines set forth in its Agreement with the Government to which its material must conform.

The European Union's massive investments (financial and political) in Middle East peace efforts in the past three decades have failed to produce positive outcomes. Relations between Israel and Europe, as reflected in official channels and public opinion polls, reflect unprecedented hostility. From the Israeli perspective, European political officials, NGOs, journalists, and academics are perceived as contributing to the demonization of Israel and Jewish sovereignty.

The Islamic victory over the USSR in Afghanistan, the creation of the al-Qaeda global network, and the spread of Islam in many Western countries are seen as signs of an Islamic awakening that from the radical Islamist perspective may lead to the restoration of Islam as the world's most dominant power.

A new critique of Israel proposes its elimination and replacement with a bi-national Palestinian-Jewish state. Israel's new detractors doubt the legitimacy of Jewish statehood, though they say nothing about the validity of dozens of new states that have emerged in the last half century, many of which lack any firmly rooted national identity.

At the Organization of the Islamic Conference summit, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir, the conference host, represented relations between Muslims and Jews as a worldwide frontal confrontation, offering some new examples of a "Jewish conspiracy." His words were broadly applauded.

Saudi Arabia's past involvement in international terrorism is indisputable. While the Bush administration decided to redact 28 sensitive pages of the Joint Intelligence Report of the U.S. Congress, nonetheless, Saudi involvement in terrorist financing can be documented through materials captured by Israel in Palestinian headquarters in 2002-3. In light of this evidence, Saudi denials about terrorist funding don't hold water.

Israel and the PLO have been confronting each other according to completely different paradigms of conflict. Since the late 1960s, the PLO has adopted a "people's war" paradigm that continued to guide its policies even after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords.

The record of formal efforts to negotiate peace in protracted ethno-national conflicts (Balkans, N. Ireland, Sri Lanka, etc.) is not encouraging. Israel needs a serious insurance policy, in the form of unilateral separation, to minimize vulnerability to another and potentially more deadly terror campaign, should the "roadmap" fail.

The roadmap has significant roots in the UN, an organization long understood as biased against Israeli interests and Jewish well-being in general. Examples include the work of the UN "Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories," established in 1968, and the UN "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People," created in 1975.

The quest for defensible borders has been an axiom of Israeli governments since 1967 on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242. Defensible borders for Israel has been explicitly backed by Washington since the Reagan administration. In Rabin's last Knesset address he made clear that Israel "will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines."

One of the harshest fronts of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the information war, in which powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with major influence on the international media consistently display a biased approach. The hijacking of the Durban anti-racism conference in 2001 by anti-Israel NGOs illustrated the dangers of politically motivated humanitarian groups that derive credibility simply on the basis of mission statements promoting "universal human rights."

In recent decades, municipalities and governments in all parts of the world have struggled with illegal building. However, compared with the incessant denunciation of rather infrequent demolitions by the Jerusalem Municipality, there has been nearly a complete lack of publicity when other governments demolish illegal structures.

The impending renewal of Arab-Israeli contacts after the Aqaba summit is an appropriate occasion to reassess one of the weak points of Israel's information effort. At the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, then Deputy Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu "broke the ice" with scores of Arab reporters when he provided articulate explanations of Israel's positions.

Since 1993, attempts have been made to portray Palestinian-Arab perpetrators of suicide bombings as desperate individuals understandably coping with a difficult situation, in effect, transforming the attackers into victims, and thus diminishing the impact of one's revulsion at such attacks. The use of the "bomber as victim" model has led others to similarly view, and incorrectly justify, the motivations behind Palestinian-Arab suicide bombers.

International news organizations covering the Arab-Israeli conflict frequently refer to international agreements and resolutions in ways that are prejudiced against Israel's legal rights and claims. Frequent references to Israel's legal obligation to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders are inconsistent with UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords.

Creating a mechanism that would ease the situation of Palestinian refugees in a way that promotes an eventual resolution of the conflict could contribute more toward long-term peace and stability than the current donor strategy.

The Christian community in the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority (PA) is a small but symbolically important one. About 35,000 Christians live in the West Bank and 3,000 in Gaza,1 representing about 1.3 percent of Palestinians. In addition, 12,500 Christians reside in eastern Jerusalem. This population is rapidly dwindling, however, and not solely as a result of the difficult military and economic situation of the past two years.

Summary: The Middle East "road map," designed to implement the peace initiative presented by President Bush on June 24, 2002, is based on a number of extremely optimistic assumptions, and successful implementation depends on fundamental changes in the environment.

Israel's economy has contracted for two consecutive years, and a third such year may well be in prospect.1 Savings and investment are down, unemployment has risen sharply,2 and Israelis' standard of living has dropped sharply since the end of 2000. Poverty and welfare payments are on the rise, together with defense expenditures occasioned by war with the Palestinians.

The Israel State Comptroller's report released on October 7, 2002, leveled unprecedented criticism on Israel's public relations efforts. The State Comptroller revealed that "since its establishment in 1948, Israel's intelligence organs have not succeeded to respond to the broad-based propaganda and incitement by the Arab world."

The second Camp David summit (July 2000) was the culmination of nearly ten years of political dialogue between Israel and the representatives of the Palestinian people, and of almost six years of interim agreements since the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO. Yet Camp David II did not result in the conclusion of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement to end the protracted conflict between the Palestinian national movement and the Jewish national (Zionist) movement.

Until September 2000, hopes were high that soon an agreement on the final status of the West Bank and Gaza would pave the way for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians. These hopes have unfortunately been shattered, as Palestinians violently attacked Israelis in both the administered territories and in Israel proper, provoking violent reactions by Israel.

The unity and control of Jerusalem have been among the most contentious and complex issues in Israel-Arab relations. Until recently, Israel's stance that Jerusalem would remain under its sole sovereignty as its eternal, undivided, and sole capital was not open to compromise. That position enjoyed near-unanimity among Israelis, the international Jewish community, and Congress.

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem represents the greatest point of sanctity for the Jewish people. King Solomon established the Temple, or Beit Ha-Mikdash, on Mt. Moriah. The Temple had a section known as the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant, containing the Ten Commandments and the Torah, was housed. While it stood, Jews were required to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year.

The story of the death of the child Muhammad Al-Dura -- who, according to reports from world and local media, was shot and killed by IDF soldiers at Netzarim junction -- became the symbol of the intifada: the Palestinian martyr whose blood must be avenged by the Muslim and enlightened world. His death turned into a blood libel accompanying the terror and violence, and it became the altar upon which the good name of the people and the State of Israel was sacrificed during the last two years.

The Persian Gulf is a region of outstanding anomalies and immense energy wealth. About two-thirds of the world's proven energy reserves are located in the Gulf States, foremost in Saudi Arabia (25 percent). As long as the rest of the world requires this energy, its dependence on this region will continue.

A summit of religious leaders on the Middle East was held in Alexandria, Egypt, on 20-22 January 2002. The summit was held at the initiative of Dr. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, and more than a dozen senior Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders from the Middle East attended, among them rabbis from Israel and sheikhs from Egypt and the Palestinian Authority who had received approval from their governments.

Today the Jewish community in France finds itself in a completely new social and political situation, which could represent a turning point in its history. There are a number of external factors that have contributed to the creation of a public image that does not really reflect the daily experience of most Jews. However, they cannot ignore or disassociate themselves from it because of its strong influence.

The riots by Israeli Arabs in October 2000, which took place in conjunction with the outbreak of a renewed wave of Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews, resulted in the deaths of 12 Israeli Arabs (and one from the West Bank) in confrontations with the police. The widespread rioting shocked the Israeli Jewish community and the Arabs even more.

The idea of the democratic peace, although not explicitly named, was an essential element of the Oslo Accords. The term "democratic peace" is generally understood to have two components: the assertion that democracies are inherently peaceful, and that they do not, as a rule, wage war against other democracies.

On the morning of March 21, 1983, one week before Pesach, in a high school in the town of Arrabeh in the Jenin area of the West Bank, Palestinian girls (between the ages of 15 and 17) were sitting in several classrooms when they suddenly began to faint, one after the other. They were taken to hospital and checked, but no medical reason was found for their fainting. Yet they had fainted, so a search began in order to find the reason.

The moral aspects of Western attitudes toward the Jews and the Holocaust since World War II have not yet been analyzed systematically. However, the current campaign of hatred against Israel and the Jewish people -- unprecedented since the end of the war -- recalls many elements of the prewar decades. Yet it is too easy to generalize and describe this as one more outburst of the ancient illness of anti-Semitism.

It is not often that two articles are enough to shake a powerful pillar of conventional wisdom and trigger an international firestorm. The influence of these articles, "Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors," by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha in the New York Review of Books,1 and "Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why it Failed," by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times,2 cannot be understood simply in terms of their content.

The Israeli decision, under intense American pressure, to cancel the sale of the Phalcon Airborne Early Warning System to China during the Camp David summit in July 2000 threatens to be a major foreign policy debacle for Israel. What was once a promising Israeli endeavor to develop strategic and lucrative commercial relations with a rising great power now lies in tatters.

The October 1991 Madrid Peace Conference represented a breakthrough in relations between the State of Israel and the Arab world. For the first time, Israel engaged in direct, face-to-face negotiations with all its immediate neighbors, and not just with Egypt, with whom Israel had signed a peace treaty in 1979. These talks were between the political leaders of the region, unlike the armistice discussions that Israel undertook in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Following the last prime ministerial elections held in Israel in February 2001, the Knesset voted to change the electoral system and restore the former system. Instead of separate ballots for prime minister and for political party, in the next nationwide elections, voters will again be given only one ballot -- for political party -- and the leader of the party that is able to put together a majority coalition in the Knesset will become prime minister.

At the heart of the Palestinian diplomatic struggle against Israel is the repeated assertion that the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are resisting "occupation." Speaking recently on CNN's Larry King Weekend, Hanan Ashrawi hoped that the U.S. war on terrorism would lead to new diplomatic initiatives to address its root "causes."

Since the 1967 Six-Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem, new Israeli neighborhoods have grown as satellite towns all around the core of the city beyond the old demarcation line. Mount Scopus, now connected to the city by a major network of highways, has been rebuilt into a mammoth fortress-campus which accommodates Hebrew University and the Hadassah Hospital. New roads and highways crisscross the city, linking its new neighborhoods.

Confronting bin Laden's rallying cry of "good" and "bad" terrorism lies at the heart of any battle to defeat terrorism. This now entails the courage to address directly the terrorists' and their state sponsors' rhetorical weapon of choice, the accusation of racism. In fact, their claim inverts the very heart of a civil libertarian agenda, since it is closely associated with a deep-rooted antisemitism.

As the military and political leaders of the Roman Empire understood, in a hostile and anarchic world, in order to preserve the peace, it is often necessary to prepare for war (Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum). The promise of unacceptable consequences and retaliation following an attack may not be politically correct, but in the face of deep-seated hatred and hostility, there is often no realistic alternative.

As the smoke clears in New York and Kabul, one blind spot still blocks the Western lens in the war against terror. There remains no official definition of "terrorism." The need for such a definition was affirmed by representatives of over 150 countries at a UN conference held in October 2001 on "What is Terrorism?"

In Israel, ongoing contingency planning in the military, political, economic, and information fields is particularly essential now, especially in light of the structural global changes that may occur after the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Such evaluations are done elsewhere for other reasons, such as by stock market analysts, and for those who draw accurate operating conclusions the rewards are very significant.

The Israeli Druze community is the only major non-Jewish group in the state whose sons are required to serve in the IDF. Over the past 50 years the community has forged a covenant of blood with the Jewish state, suffering hundreds of casualties while loyally defending the State of Israel.

After the September 11 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many American analysts have been seeking to understand the source of the intense hatred against the United States that could have motivated an act of violence on such an unprecedented scale.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main successor state, Russia, emerged in a greatly weakened geopolitical position. Complicating Russia's problems was a politically weak and often physically sick President Boris Yeltsin. Concerned about its "soft underbelly" in Transcaucasia and Central Asia, regions that were threatened by radical Islam, Moscow focused its Middle East efforts on Turkey and Iran, both of which had a considerable amount of influence in the two regions.

On May 15, 2001, the Associated Press circulated an article covering Arafat's Al-Naqba speech, marking the day Palestinians recall the "catastrophe" of the creation of the State of Israel. The article boasted direct quotations of the Palestinian leader's statements.

In the midst of an already crumbling cease-fire, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell dropped what to Israeli ears was a bombshell. Standing next to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat after their June 2001 meeting in Ramallah, Powell said, "I think as we get into the confidence-building phase there will be a need for monitors and observers to...make an independent observation of what has happened."

In the UN safe area of Srebrenica, 6-8,000 Bosnian Moslems were murdered in July 1995 by the Bosnian Serbs, making it the largest civilian massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. The United Nations leaders, those of their peace-keeping forces, and the Dutch government had known for some time that the enclave was not defensible and had not taken adequate protective measures.

The wave of Palestinian violence and terrorism that began at the end of September 2000 led to a widespread tendency to focus exclusively on Israeli-Palestinian political and security relationships. This narrow concentration of attention is potentially misleading and obscures the fundamental security threats that Israel is facing at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

At present, there are no substantive Arab-Israeli peace negotiations underway. Israel has had to contend with the ongoing armed offensive launched by the Palestinians in late September 2000 after the failure of the Camp David summit.

Since the Al-Aqsa Intifada erupted in the Middle East in late September 2000, an almost simultaneous wave of violent anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment has accompanied it in the Western democracies, initiated and executed mainly by locally nationalized Arab or Muslim immigrants, long established or recent arrivals, legal or illegal.

Israel has been increasingly facing new diplomatic initiatives that, in effect, call for a freeze in Israeli settlement activity in exchange for a cessation of the eight-month-old, low-scale warfare on the part of the PLO, which the Palestinians call the Al-Aqsa Intifada. This new linkage has arisen in two distinct forms.

An examination of the historical record reveals many examples of failures of perception, and of leaders and governments refusing to integrate compelling information of existential importance. Taking account of new information and responding to changing circumstances is vital to man's relationship with his environment. When a dysfunction in the process of absorbing important new knowledge and correcting mistakes occurs, the faculty of rational judgment may be fatefully impaired.

After seven years of the peace process, catastrophic remarks about the end of the State of Israel are much more frequent than they were before the Oslo agreements. Judaism has a long tradition of religious apocalyptic thought; in the secular end-of-days fantasies of the last few months, however, no salvation is offered the community.

Recently, Israel Television asked Shimon Peres, the architect of the Oslo process, whether he still believed in the efficacy of that process, to which he replied that the question should be put to Yasser Arafat.

Since its independence in 1948, and indeed even in prior times, Israel's rights to sovereignty in Jerusalem have been firmly grounded in history and international law. The aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War only reinforced the strength of Israel's claims. Seven years after the implementation of the 1993 Oslo Agreements, Prime Minister Ehud Barak became the first Israeli prime minister to consider re-dividing Jerusalem in response to an American proposal at the July 2000 Camp David Summit.

Ask Israelis or Arabs to characterize the U.S.-Israel relationship and most, particularly on the Arab side, will argue that the picture is one of unwavering support for the Jewish state. Indeed, the outgoing Clinton administration has been widely perceived and labeled as the closest to Israel in the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Why is it that Israel's per capita GNP still lags substantially behind that of the leading countries of the world? Why is it likely to take decades for the Israeli economy to catch up? This is while the Israeli papers are full of news about very promising high-tech start-ups, and we even hear occasionally about payments of billions of dollars by major foreign firms to acquire Israeli businesses which were founded a few years ago and have at most several hundred employees.

A number of factors are impeding the implementation of privatization in the Israeli economy. Here I will review those factors based on my own experience, both as someone who has represented investors who purchased government companies through privatization processes, and (from the other side of the fence) in my positions in the Ministry of Finance, when I had an opportunity to observe the governmental process from the inside.

Watching the television coverage of the daily Palestinian riots, known as the Al-Aqsa intifada, one is immediately struck by the near total absence of adults. Indeed, most of those hurling Molotov cocktails and stones are teenagers; many are even younger.

During the past twenty years, beginning with the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement talks following the 1973 war, the tension between secular and religious perspectives on the Middle East peace process and the "land for peace" formula has grown steadily.

Over the last two decades, the reliance on separate negotiating tracks in the Arab-Israeli peace process has resulted in a cumulative loss of territories vital for the defense of Israel's very existence, without any corresponding buildup of peace and security for Israel that could last for generations.

Ten years ago the UN Security Council imposed upon Iraq some very specific requirements for disarmament. After Iraq had been expelled from Kuwait, the Council decided unanimously that Iraq may not have nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons; or missiles which could fly beyond 150 km. The Security Council's decisions were taken with the full authority of international law.

The political influence of Islam is increasing in South East Asia. While the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc have contributed to the decline of communism as a revolutionary political force in the region, religious and ethnic issues are now assuming renewed and increasing significance.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak's tenure started out with almost everything going his way. He had what was often, though misleadingly, described as a "landslide victory" in the 1999 elections (though, in truth, Jewish voters gave him only a slim 3.2 percent majority over Netanyahu - compared to the almost 12 percent margin by which Netanyahu had defeated Peres in the previous elections).

In the 1950s, the French Catholic academician, playwright, and former Ambassador to the U.S., Paul Claudel, asked the cultural attachי of the Israeli Embassy in Paris to convey the following message to Martin Buber: Now that the Jews had recovered their sovereignty, would they consider granting citizenship to Jesus, thereby putting an end to his "statelessness" status both for Judaism and Christianity?

For most of the Cold War period, the spread of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction to the Middle East was severely constrained by the existence of a global regime of arms control agreements and export controls that was chiefly supported by both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But in the last decade this regime has crumbled.

On 21 December 1997, just four days before Christmas, Muslim zealots fenced in the area at the foot of the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, declared it waqf land (a Muslim holy endowment), erected a large tent as a provisional mosque, and demanded the construction of a permanent mosque with a towering 86-meter minaret.

Following the economic stabilization plan in 1985, several financial reforms were introduced in Israel which were designed to accomplish a number of goals:

1. To reduce the level of government involvement in Israeli capital markets.
2. To increase capital mobility.
3. To promote competition in financing activities.
4. To develop the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Three basic conditions prevailed when the Arab-Israeli peace process began in 1991 in Madrid and accelerated in 1993 at Oslo. First, the Soviet Union crumbled and eventually collapsed, removing what had since 1955 been the strategic backbone of the Arab military option against the State of Israel.

Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, has biological weapons capable of killing hundreds of thousands of Israelis with infectious diseases such as anthrax. These weapons could be delivered either by missiles, by small pilotless planes, or by infecting the passengers of a plane landing at Ben-Gurion Airport with less than an ounce of agent spread through the plane's air conditioning system.

Professor Edward Said of Columbia University is the Western world's foremost spokesman for the Palestinian cause. Said, a world-class writer, elevated his personal parable of a paradise destroyed and dispossessed to his trump card in articles, books, lectures, interviews, and television documentaries.

Europe, both in terms of the individual states and collectively through the 15-member European Union, seeks to play an active role in the Middle East peace process. There are many reasons for this - substantive, political, and symbolic.

On the eve of the High Holidays in Israel in September 1999, just days after the Sharm al-Sheikh accord was signed by Israel and the Palestinians to relaunch the peace process between them, two car-bombs exploded in the northern cities of Haifa and Tiberias, injuring innocent passers-by. Within days, the Israeli security authorities had arrested six Israeli Arabs, all affiliated with the northern faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

In recent months, since shortly after the collapse of the Russian ruble in August 1998, an upsurge of antisemitism in Russia has generated a startling increase in emigration of Russian Jewry. Among Jews in Israel and many diaspora countries, concern has grown about the fate of those Jews remaining in Russia, the largest of the post-Soviet states.

The myth that the great majority of the Dutch people had a highly positive attitude toward the Jews during World War II, identified with their suffering, and took risks to help them has gradually been unmasked in The Netherlands itself over the past decades.

Prime Minister Ehud Barak will not get a period of grace or a post-election honeymoon. Immediately upon taking office, he faces a number of pressing issues. Many of these are domestic - including religious-secular relations and economic concerns. However, the most urgent items are in the realm of security and foreign relations.

Blaming "the other guy" for current problems is a human frailty, but there are cases where there is substance to the allegation. I believe that the widespread criticism of Netanyahu's economic record lacks, at the very least, a sense of fairness and balance.

During U.S. President Bill Clinton's second term in office, the U.S. "dual containment" policy toward Iran and Iraq, which he inherited from the Bush administration and then intensified during his first term, had come close to collapse.

During the ceremony of the presentation of my credentials as the Ambassador of Israel to the Holy See on April 10, 1997, I told His Holiness that, actually, this was not my first connection with the Vatican.

On June 10, 1998, Turkish police and Islamist students scuffled at Istanbul University after authorities refused to allow eleven women wearing Muslim headscarves to take final exams.

Since the beginning of the atomic age in 1945, the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons has become the dominant factor in the international system. Those countries that acquired nuclear weapons have become (or maintained their status as) primary world powers, but as the number of such countries grew, the potential for the use of nuclear weapons also increased.

In early July 1997, Chaim Musicant, Director of the Conseil Representif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF), France's most important Jewish organization, told this writer with a combination of anger and astonishment: "It is incredible that fifty years after World War II, a racist party has arisen in France that was able to capture 15 percent of the vote in the May 1997 legislative elections."

The stability of Saudi Arabia (and the Persian Gulf as a whole) is crucially important to the world's industrial countries. According to the Gulf Center of Strategic Studies, "oil is expected to account for 38 percent of all the world consumption of energy until 2015, compared to 39 percent in 1993.

Maps are a very important part of the political process of conflict resolution known as the peace process. Maps are important parts of all territorial conflicts. We often walk around with the idea of a map in our head and think we know what we are talking about, but often we do not.

The Hebron agreement is now finally in place. During the months that it took to reach that point, some must have been reminded of what the nineteenth century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerstone once said about the Schleswig-Holstein question: there were only three people who understood it - one of whom was dead, one was in an asylum, and he himself had forgotten it.

When Mustafa Kamal (Ataturk) founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923 (he was its president until his death fifteen years later), he set as his main objective the modernization of the new republic. His preferred means was speedy, intensive secularization and, indeed, every one of his reforms was tied up with disestablishing other Islamic institutions from their hold on Turkey's politics, economics, society, and cultural life.

The unexpected victory of the religious (meaning Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox) parties in Israel's elections surprised many people. For years, reporting from Israel and the comments of those Israelis whom the reporters cover or interview has suggest- ed that Israeli Jews are divided into two groups: the overwhelming majority who are secular and a small minority who are religious.

For the first time in the 73-year history of the modern, secular Turkish Republic, the Turkish Grand National Assembly on July 8, 1996, narrowly approved Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the pro-Islamist Refah Party (RP), as prime minister. (Refah is usually translated as "welfare," but "well-being" or "prosperity" is probably closer to the actual meaning in Turkish. The party's symbol displays a full stalk of grain.)

The Druze are a minority within a minority in the State of Israel, an Arab-speaking community loyal to the state that has suffered hundreds of casualties in its defense, and whose men serve today in high-ranking and sensitive positions within the Israeli military and security forces.

Saudi Arabia has experienced budgetary deficits in every year since 1983, in sharp contrast with its large surpluses of the previous decade. Between 1983 and 1992 the cumulative deficits of Saudi Arabia amounted to $141 billion, while in the previous decade its cumulative surpluses had totalled $107 billion.

The problem of water scarcity is a growing worldwide phenomenon. Net renewable water resources per capita have declined dramatically over a single generation, and in little more than thirty years from now will reach dangerously low levels. By the year 2025 the average net water resources in the Middle East are expected to be less than 700 cubic meters per person per year, half of what they are today.

The Islamic Jihad is one of the most complex and dangerous of the Arab terrorist organizations, with cells in many Middle Eastern countries and, apparently, in Europe as well. These groups generally act on their own initiative without coordination, sometimes even within the same country. All these groups share a fundamentalist Islamic ideology which espouses holy war (jihad) against the infidels, and which is under the powerful ideological-religious influence of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

Certain new strains in the U.S.-Israel relationship are now coming to the fore, stemming in part from different views of the outcome of the Gulf War. After the war, the U.S. came to the conclusion that Israel's strategic environment had changed radically. Since the U.S. had apparently flattened a major military threat to Israel, Israel now lived with a much lower degree of risk.

The Madrid and Washington peace talks have elevated the question of the Palestinians to new heights of international interest. The reason for this is directly tied to the results of the Second Gulf War (the First Gulf War was the Iran-Iraq War). The Americans had promised Israel that as a result of the war many things would change in the Middle East, but many things did not change.

The Hamas movement is an offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood in the Israeli-administered territories, or as defined in the second and fifth articles of the Hamas Charter: "Hamas--the Islamic Resistance Movement--is a division of the Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine.

[Editor's Note: After Syria's appearance at the Madrid Peace Conference, we must remind ourselves with whom Israel must deal. The U.S. needs to be reminded, too; hence, this Special Report.]

The world has now entered a period in which the end of the classic colonial era and the beginning of the Third World is coexisting with the end of the Cold War and the absence of Soviet-American confrontation. Indeed, it is often now said in East Europe, for example, that the Communist era will be seen historically as a 45-year interregnum and that the 1930s are in many ways being resurrected.

The world is moving into a new era in international relations in the wake of the apparent end of the forty-year Cold War. After viewing the first year of the Bush administration following eight years of the markedly pro-Israel Reagan administration, one may begin to assess the impact of this changing world on U.S.-Israeli relations.

At the outbreak of the Six-Day War, I was serving as the commander of the district of Jerusalem. On the afternoon of June 7, 1967, I was riding in a half-track on the way to capture Bethlehem when I received a call on the radio to come back to Jerusalem because the Minister of Defense wanted to see me. I argued that I was in the midst of the campaign, but they repeated the message and kept insisting.

Most of the focus on Arab-Israeli relations over the last two decades has centered on the situation of the Arabs in the administered territories, to the neglect of the Arabs in Israel. Yet the intifada has triggered scattered acts of violence by Israel's Arabs as well, mandating a new look at this community.