• In Defense of "Assassination"
  What is Israel to do? Israel has no great desire to go hunting terrorists. (The current media convention of calling these people militants is a travesty. If the word terrorism does not apply to sending a young man to blow up 21 kids outside a disco, what possible meaning can the term have?)

  Again: What is Israel to do? Arrest the terrorist leaders? Israel would have to invade Palestinian cities and kill hundreds of civilians along the way. The entire suggestion--serving terrorists with subpoenas--is ludicrous. What country in wartime tells its soldiers not to shoot back at those trying to kill them, but instead to cross enemy lines and try to apprehend them for trial?
  
  

• Quick-Fix Mentality
  Should Israel build a fence and separate from the Palestinians? Everyone has their two cents to add to the debate; here's mine. Although a fence might decrease the volume of Palestinian violence, it would serve only as a tactic of mixed utility, not as a grand strategy ("separation") for defining Israel's borders and preserving its Jewish nature.
  
  
• Arafat's War: How to End It
  Sound familiar? Arafat initiates violence, openly provoking an Israeli military reaction. Facing massive counterforce, he calls for international peacekeepers to save the Palestinians. How did it end last time? Badly.
  
  
• New, Improved Oslo Snake Oil
  Oslo is actually marketed as a suite of curative products based on snake oil derivatives. The architects of Oslo, snake oil salesmen par excellence, have recently added several products to the line. However, before considering the newer products, you may want to check the efficacy of the earlier wares.
  Perhaps you even bought one:
  
  
• A Mufti's Unending Vitriol
  Last summer, the mufti whipped up a frenzy over the prospect of Jews praying on the Temple Mount. Any ''Jewish prayer,'' he threatened, would mean ''massacres the magnitude of which only Allah knows ... massacres and rivers of blood.'' The reaction of the Palestinian Authority? It published Sabri's words in Al Hayat Al Jadidah, the official Palestinian newspaper.
  
  
• Who Cares About Palestinians?
  Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Muslim nations have warned Israel, in various ways and with different degrees of intensity, over the Jewish state's alleged mistreatment of Palestinian Arabs. There's one major problem with these threats. These nations have done far less for Arab Palestinians than Israel has.
  
  
• Double Delusion
  To be more precise, three developments could translate the Arabs' growing taste for apocalyptic confrontation into actual war. The flashpoint could be Iraqi troops moving toward Jordan, Egyptian troops moving into the Sinai Peninsula, or Hizbullah missiles landing in northern Israel. None of these scenarios is outlandish, all are plausible.
  
  
• The Misleading Mantra!
  The history of our world fields numerous examples to demonstrate that conflicts initiated by aggressive regimes can usually only be resolved through military might and resistance, and not by negotiations.
  
  
• First Disclosures from the Orient House Archives:
  Robin Hood - in Reverse
  DEBKAfile has learned some of those secrets from sources close to the investigation of those documents.
  
  
• Thinking Outside The Box
  On August 17 Ali Shatrein, a member of the Islamic Jihad, said in an interview with the France Press Agency that "there was no Israel before 1948. She was created in 5 minutes. Now in her place we have to establish a Palestinian state. It is a job for several generations." To disregard this Arab viewpoint, dismissing it as "extremist" or "marginal," is completely wrong.
  
  
• A Culture of Hate
  For even as they target Israel with guns, bombs, and mortar shells, Yasser Arafat and the PA have also been waging an unrelenting war of words against the Jewish state, regularly engaging in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement of the vilest kind. The Palestinian media, which are controlled by the PA, have for years been a font of incitement, spewing forth a steady stream of Holocaust denial, racial slurs, and anti-Jewish epithets, as have the textbooks which are used in the Palestinian school system.
  
  
• The State of Loyalty
  That is, an MK should swear allegiance not just to the state, but to the State of Israel as a Jewish state. But it is just as important to consider candidly whether an Israeli citizen who openly declares that he seeks the destruction of Israel, and sympathizes with the worst of its enemies, deserves to send representatives to the body responsible for shaping the future and guarding the safety of the Jewish state.
  
  
• A War and Then A Wall
  It is instructive that the assault against Israel was not slowed by the intervention there of former senator George Mitchell, whose achievements in Northern Ireland are just now proving similarly illusory. Under his promptings, the IRA -- like the Palestinian Authority, a terrorist organization masquerading as a normal political entity -- made various false promises about "decommissioning" arms, abandoning violence, etc.
  
  
• Mideast Violence: The Only Way Out
  This cannot go on. No country can sustain what Israel is sustaining: one massacre of Columbine proportions after another.
  
  
• Let the People Win ....the slogan "Let the IDF win" is out of date. It should be replaced by "Let the people win." In the 11th month of the war, it is obvious to most Jews that Arafat's envoys of death do not stop short of murdering women and children in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, Hadera, Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip. All Jews in Israel have become targets of this terror, the aim of which is to force Israel to yield to the demands of Arafat and his gang.
  
  
• Arafat is Deadlier than Yassin When Hamas finds itself responsible for the lives of more than two and a half million Palestinians, it will also discover that terrorist attacks do not produce food, work, medical services or transportation, and that they similarly do not produce foreign aid from the Americans or even from the European Union.
  
  
• A Call to American Jewry: Rabbis on the Beach
  Actually, there is something that American Jewry can do. More important than contributions, more important even than visiting Israel, is to end the Resounding Silence.
  
  
• The "Cycle Of Violence" in the Middle East
  There is no "cycle of violence" in the present-day Middle East, only persistent Arab murders of Jewish civilians followed by carefully limited Israeli retaliations. The problem, for Israel, is that although murderous Arab attacks are entirely responsible for this unstable situation, Israeli military reprisals can never succeed by themselves.
  
  
• Mideast Myths Exploded
  In the face of this, in the aftermath of an attack expressly and successfully designed to blow children to bits, how dare a smug, safe-in-his-bed American secretary of state urge "restraint" by "both sides?" How does the secretary imagine his own country would respond to such a "provocation" as the Sbarro mass murder?
  
  
• An Audacious Response
  Official US statements last Thursday leave the impression that Washington sees no moral difference between Palestinian efforts to kill Israeli children and Israeli efforts to kill Palestinian bomb-makers - both are equally reprehensible. This is equivalent to giving Arafat a green light to send more bombers: not only has he been assured that he will pay no international price for doing so, but he has also been promised that Israel will pay a price for attempting to respond.
  
  
• Rolling Back the Forces of Terror
  The time has also come for the U.S. to support Israel in rolling back the forces of terror. The U.S. has other connections to the pizza parlor bombing. It's not just that the restaurant was part of a New-York based chain. Nor that at least two victims are American, including a pregnant school teacher from Passaic, N.J. The American connection goes much deeper: The very existence of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad is largely attributable to organizing and funding from individuals living in the U.S.
  
  
• The Danger Within
  It bears repetition: Israeli Arabs, despite being subject to continuing nagging official and unofficial discrimination, are still the best-off Arab population in the Middle East. This is true in regard to basic democratic rights, basic life chances such as infant and maternal mortality, longevity, health services, education, and the like. All this has been achieved as a result of the policies of all Israeli governments during 53 years in which the Jewish State of Israel has been engaged in a war of existence with the Arab and Palestinian kinsmen of its Arab minority.
  
  
• War Run on Scripted Lines
  By focusing on the mirage of Soldier vs. Stone-Throwers, we lead ourselves up blind alleys. The tactics and strategy of the Intifada are infinitely more complex than just a bunch of kids occasionally chucking rocks at conscripts. Over the past few years, the Palestinians have formed a security force existing somewhere between a heavily-armed police and a fully-fledged army.
  
  
• Cheering on the Slaughter
  Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, has been decried by doves for his hardline stance. But, having battled Arabs since 1947, he understands the depth of hatred many feel for Jews and for the Jewish nation. With every Arab cheer that goes up when Jewish innocents are slaughtered, the depth of that hatred is betrayed.
  
  
• End Arafat's Double Game
  The time has come (in fact, it is long overdue) to put a firm end to this double game. Arafat and the PA that he heads must decide whether they seek war or peace, and act accordingly. There is no more room for walking on both sides of the street, and pretending to seek peace while planning and waging war.
  
  
• Colin Powell Rides Two Horses
  Something is radically wrong at the U.S. State Department and particularly with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Various groups and nations are on the State Department's list of terrorists. They include Syria and Iraq but, they also list Hamas, Hezb'Allah, Islamic Jihad - among others. Regrettably, Bush, Jr., like his father, ignored the terrorist status of the hostiles and treated them as desirable friends.
  
  
• America's Occupied Territories
  American presidents have stubbornly held to the view that Israel should "return" Judea, Samaria and Gaza and cease settling its citizens there. In adopting such a position, the US has essentially rejected the principles of acquiring territory through the use of force and settling citizens in "foreign" lands. There is, however, something quite ironic about this stance because it was exactly these two principles that lay behind the successful expansion of the United States itself.
  
  
• Back to Oslo, Not Camp David
  The shooting is not yet over, but Palestinian leaders are beginning to run scared. Israeli pressure, of the sort that clearly works, should not be lifted prematurely. I would assume that a real change will occur only after at least one or two Palestinian leaders - one rung higher in the hierarchy than the ones recently dispatched - will be successfully targeted to join their murderous underlings, to drive home the lesson of the unavoidable price of continued Palestinian violence.
  
  
• Mixed Messages
  The negative global reaction to Tuesday's IDF operation against Hamas headquarters in Nablus highlights the serious problem Israel has in making its case to the world. Though most diplomats and governments, and many editorial pages, understand that the Palestinians are the aggressors in the current conflict, the conflict is not being treated by the world as a fight against terrorism.
  
  
• Uncle Sam as Arafat's Social Worker
  Why did it take US negotiators eight years to realize that "you can't have one environment at the negotiating tables, and a different reality on the ground," in the words of former US special Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, or that "given the makeup of his policies ... [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat [never] really gave up violence as a tool to achieving his objectives," as Indyk confirms?
  
  
• Seven Questions for Colin Powell
  Whether it is the use of economic sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, the pinpoint targeting of wanted terrorists planning attacks, or even the demolition of buildings used to carry out armed assaults against soldiers and civilians, Israel, it seems, can do nothing right in Powell's eyes.