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In 1994, a deranged Israeli settler shot to death 29 Palestinian worshipers at a mosque in Hebron. With the exception of a few right-wing extremists, Israelis unequivocally condemned the atrocity.

There was no rationalization related to the «root causes» of the settler’s rage, no equivocation about the «frustration» of Israelis under constant Palestinian stoning and harassment, no justification on the grounds of some higher cause.

Since the Palestinian Authority was created and Yasser Arafat made his victorious comeback to Palestine from exile, more than 75 suicide and car bombings have racked Israel. Only last month 125 Israelis were killed by Palestinian terrorists.

Yet Palestinian condemnation of these attacks is rarely heard. In the exceptional instance when a bombing is condemned, it’s done in English and with such ambiguity that one is left wondering who are the real victims. In Arabic, it is different. Palestinian suicide bombers are praised as «martyrs» and their parents congratulated for the «honor» of having such a son or daughter. Shockingly, the parents themselves rejoice.

Even today — as suicide bombings terrorize Israelis — Arab leaders and Muslim authorities find themselves unable to condemn terrorism — Palestinian terrorism, that is.

The «Israeli crimes» against «freedom-loving» Palestinians are clearly protested. As the Arab League’s 22 members sanctions Palestinian attacks against Israelis as legitimate resistance to occupation, the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference rejects any link between terrorism and the Palestinian struggle.

In their morally distorted view, an Israeli soldier who shoots at a Hamas militant in Jenin who’s planning an attack against civilians commits an act of terror, but not so if a Palestinian blows himself up in Netanya and kills many Israelis.

Rather, the latter is the act of a freedom fighter, a shahid. As such, he or she enters the pantheon of Arab and Muslim heroes. Iraq, by the way, pays $15,000 per martyr to the families of these «heroes,» while Saudi Arabia has granted relatives of suicide bombers free trips to Mecca.

To their credit, and unsurprisingly, Israelis have not descended to their neighbors’ level of macabre barbarism. There in lies the fundamental moral difference between the parties in this conflict.

In fact, only a few of the ethnic groups that suffered throughout, modern history have resorted to terror. For instance, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust did not engage in a campaign of systematically murdering German civilians after World War II. After Hiroshima and Nagazaki, Japanese did not generally carry out revenge attacks against Americans. Nor did most Americans react with rage against Muslims after the abominable Sept. 11 attacks. Despite the legitimate feelings of resentment, the peoples of these nations made an ethical decision vis–vis their behavior toward their former or present enemies.

But the Arabs and Muslims have not. Morality is not permitted to intrude in their political machinations.

Suicide-bombing is not the result of some desperate reaction to unbearable suffering. It is a deliberately chosen, carefully planned, generously financed, indiscriminately implemented and collectively celebrated policy of death. Palestinian suicide terror has sealed with blood and fire a collective «Mark of Cain» on this generation of Arabs and Muslims.

The Palestinian embrace of, and Arab and Muslim support for, suicide attacks underlies the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is not about a clash of two national movements aspiring to the same piece of land. This isn’t even a clash of cultures, or of two distinct civilizations. The Palestinians’ bestial, primitive and depraved practice shows that this conflict is really about a clash between civilization and barbarism.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

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When one realizes that some 300 foreign journalists have entered Israel in the past 10 days, joining the 500 who arrived in February — not to mention those hundreds already permanently assigned to the country — one cannot but be amazed at the fascination that this tiny nation holds for the international media. Often, this fascination blossoms into obsession — an obsession that can lead to distorted perception, which in turn results in biased reporting.

The Washington Post provides an outstanding case study of such misrepresentation. And you don’t even have to be literate to see it.

In the last two weeks, The Post has run about 25 pictures of the Palestinian uprising/war; 15 portrayed Israeli tanks on their way to a refugee camp or a Palestinian city, or Israeli soldiers searching or arresting blindfolded Palestinians. In other words, Israel’s «expansionist aggression.»

When a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in a Jerusalem cafe killing 11 and wounding more than 100, The Post (on March 10) published four pictures: two of the carnage and two of Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinians. The qualification was obvious: You cannot show Israeli victims without exposing Israeli oppression, the «roots» of terrorism.

When Palestinian gunmen killed six Israelis traveling in the north of the country, The Post (on March 13) captured the event with a picture showing Israeli soldiers, in full combat mode, searching for the terrorists. No Israeli victims were pictured.

Not that The Post doesn’t have a soft spot: You can almost always find pictures extolling Palestinian victimhood such as the one published on March 13, illustrating a Palestinian father comforting his son in front of their ruined home — destroyed by the Israeli army — in the Jabalya refugee camp (Israel targeted the camp as a breeding ground for terrorism).

Another example: The March 2 picture highlighted «protesters in Gaza wav[ing] flags as Israel continued an assault on two West Bank refugee camps. «The effect of the sunlight behind the Palestinian flags was artistically brilliant.

But The Post’s best photo commentary thus far was published on March 8 (the same picture later showed up in Time): white doves soaring in front of an advancing Israeli tank. A Pulitzer for sure.

All this is not to say that pictures portraying Israel in a negative light shouldn’t be published. The problem is that the media generally tend to display a disproportionate amount of these pictures. In fact, this selective photo editing is an unrepressed manifestation of the hostility that some journalists harbor toward Israel. Or, alternatively, of the infinite sympathy that some in the media feel for what they perceive as the Palestinian longing for freedom and independence. Their perspective is hopelessly trapped in the David-versus-Goliath framework that the journalists themselves helped to create during the first intifada.

Still, it requires a wide stretch of the imagination to see «underdogs» in murderous terrorists who blow defenseless civilians to bits only to be later eulogized by their society as honorable martyrs. It’s an even greater stretch to portray the Palestinians — who have all the geostrategic weight of the Arab world behind them, with 22 countries resting on a vast territorial expanse that surpasses Israel’s meager size in a 1/500 ratio — as the weaker side.

In any case, the media’s professed motto «to sympathize with the weak» is wrong. Terribly wrong. The media should not side with perceived victims; their job is to report, not to take up causes. But if they must adopt a stance, they at least should side with the righteous side, not just necessarily the weak, for the weak can be mistaken. Indeed, the media have to abandon the insufferable moral equivalence between self-defense and aggression even, as best-selling author Bernard Goldberg argues, » if it means going against their liberal sensibilities and reporting that sometimes even the underdog can be evil.»

But the media won’t. They won’t abandon conceptual prejudice, they won’t embrace fair reporting, and they won’t strive for professional objectivity. For doing so would destroy the simplistic paradigm that journalists have built up and perpetuated — driven by their cherished intellectual fetish of moral relativism, the «blame Israel first» Pavlovian reflex, and their Holy Secular Bible that commands them to «see no evil.»

In sum, to maintain even moderately balanced reporting in this conflict, journalists would have to jettison the axiomatic principle by which they always see Israelis as victimizers and Palestinians as victims. This, they cannot do.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

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Picture this dramatic scene. During a heated meeting in the Oval Office, President Bush — angered at comments made by CIA Director George Tenet — slaps Tenet across the face and pulls a gun on him, shouting, «I will kill you!» Trembling from nerves, Bush lets the gun fall to the floor a few seconds later, and Tenet leaves the room accompanied by the uncomfortable silence of the president’s aides.

Difficult to imagine? An equivalent drama occurred just last week between Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and Preventive Security Chief Jibril Rajoub at the PA’s Ramallah headquarters.

It seems that the two-month-old decision by the Israeli government to designate Arafat as «irrelevant,» sever ties with him and confine him to his Ramallah office — surrounded by tanks — is having quite an impact on the chairman’s emotional stability.

For one of the world’s most well-known frequent flyers, this was to be expected. Whenever there was a major crisis in the Palestinian-Israeli arena, Arafat was sure to be found in the sky on his way to Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, Durban or Paris — anywhere but Gaza or Ramallah. One of his confidants once remarked to an Arafat biographer that, during a particular month, Arafat had spent more time in the air than on the ground. So legendary is this reputation that some Arab political commentators have called the Palestinian leader a «flying-carpet revolutionary.» No doubt he is upset by his confinement.

But Arafat’s stress is most deeply rooted in the message that Israel’s decision conveys. By cutting him off, for the first time in a decade, the Israelis have declared to the PLO leader, the Palestinians, the Arab world and the international community that Arafat is in fact expendable. He understands this message well; hence his outraged reaction. So do, for that matter, his many strongmen, many of which are engaged in a bitter power-struggle behind the scenes.

In any case, Arafat is mortal and, sooner or later, by natural cause or human design, he will depart from this world. Who will be the next leader of the Palestinian national movement? This is how the political horizon looks:

Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, and Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), secretary-general of Fatah, are the two most likely candidates to emerge from within Palestinian Authority bureaucracy.

• Both are close to Arafat, both have taken part in high-level diplomatic negotiations with the Israelis, and both are regarded as moderates in much of the West.
• Neither, however, enjoys significant support from the grass-roots leaders of the intifada or the masses.

Alternatively, power could fall into the hands of militant leaders, such as Tanzim head Marwan Barghouti or the PLO’s historic «foreign minister» Farouq Qadoumi, a staunch opponent of the peace process.

Analysts agree that much will depend on whether the succession takes place during a period of political negotiations or military confrontation with Israel. Under more-tranquil circumstances, PA leaders may have a better chance of enticing popular support. Conversely, during clashes, the militants will have the upper hand. Whoever the successor, he undoubtedly will be dependent on the good graces of the many security-service heads who have their own power ambitions.

In the current geographical reality (discontinuous territory divided by borders, settlements and checkpoints) the Palestinian polity may end up broken into cantons of power controlled by various security leaders. Israeli TV commentator Ehud Ya’ari terms this scenario the «United Palestinian Emirates,» in which Arafat’s successor would be a nominal head running a de- centralized administration whose legitimacy would rest in the provinces. In addition to affecting Palestinians in the territories, Arafat’s passing will impact those in Israel (Arab Israelis) and in Jordan, as well as Palestinian refugees all over the Arab world.

Moreover, the failure of Palestinian secular nationalism will give space to the radical Islamic groups that are eager to see «Palestine» governed by the laws of Shari’a. Also, don’t expect Syria, Iraq and Iran to remain aloof; they will view this unstable context as an opportunity to gain a foothold in the Palestinian political arena.

Thanks to Arafat’s legacy of selfish leadership, managerial incompetence and political myopia, his successor will not have an easy time. As a consequence, neither will Israel, the United States or any other concerned party in the Middle East quagmire.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

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Jan. 22: A Palestinian opens fire with an M-16 assault rifle against Israelis waiting at a bus stop in  Jerusalem, killing two and wounding 40.

Jan. 25: A Palestinian suicide-bomber explodes himself in a cafe near the old bus station in Tel Aviv, wounding 25.

Jan. 27: A Palestinian suicide-bomber kills one and wounds more than 150 in downtown Jerusalem.

This is the war of liberation of the Palestinian people.

It would be bad enough were this the only front in which Israel had to fight back. But Israel often finds itself under diplomatic and media assault, too. In addition, it’s now also under attack on another, unusual front: that of corporate warfare.

This involves subtle, almost silent, yet scandalous aggression in the business filed. The name of the game is legitimization or delegitimization. The political battle for Jerusalem, settlements and other contentious issues is thus waged not only in the corridors of the United Nations and chancelleries of the world but also in the executive offices of multinational corporations. For example:

• Giant cellphone company Motorola’s most recent service manuals exclude Israel from its list of worldwide company branches – despite the fact that Motorola has been operating in Israel for 38 years. Too impatient to wait for the Palestinian state to be established, Motorola added to its list the nonexistent state of «Palestine» and listed Jerusalem as a Palestinian city.
• The British department store Harrods, owned by Egyptian businessman Mohammed al-Fayed, has recently removed from its shelves Israeli-made products manufactured in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Another British megastore, Selfridges, joined the boycott just before last Christmas.
• The McDonald’s website in early 1999 did not show Israel, where the hamburger empire has 80 restaurants, in the company’s country list.
• Burger King came under heavy economic pressure in recent years after it opened a restaurant in a settlement. The idea of selling hamburgers there was considered politically atrocious by some dictators, sheiks and kings in the Arab world.
• The Italian manufacturer United Colors of Benetton refrained from building a new outlet in the «territories» to avoid the Arab wrath.
• The U.S. telephone conglomerate Sprint was persuaded to remove a picture of the Dome of the Rock from a commercial ad tailored for Israel.
• The hotel chain Days Inn, too, was persuaded to withdraw its name from a lodge in a settlement.
• Ben & Jerry’s Israel prompted a torrent of Arab condemnation after the company announced its ice-creams were made with water from the Golan Heights.
• The Walt Disney Company found itself in the eye of the storm when it had allow Israel to portray Jerusalem as its capital in a millenium pavilion in Epcot Center, and it gave in.

It would be wrong to conclude that these companies are fundamentally pro-Arab or anti-Israel. In truth, they are simply protecting their economic interests, and it would be reasonable to assume that they’d rather not get involved in the Arab-Israeli quagmire at all.

Costumers, though, have a right (and a duty) to voice their opinions, and companies do adjust to the degree of pressure they receive from patrons. To the best of my knowledge, after receiving complaints from Israel and the Jewish diaspora, Motorola, Selfridges, McDonald’s, Burger King and Ben & Jerry’s have backtracked on their original decisions of vowing to Arab blackmail.

This awkward situation turns every Jew, Muslim, Arab, Israeli and their respective sympathizers into » political consumers.» They are an «army» whose weapon is their purchasing power. In Shakespearean fashion, these consumers decide «to buy or not to buy» from companies that adopt a negative attitude toward one of the parties. Sublimely ironic as it may be, the simple act of purchasing a product has thus become politically charged.

Next time you chose to eat this or that hamburger, to have this or that ice-cream, or to use this or that cellphone, you will be making a dramatic statement of political proportions.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.

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Last week Israeli naval commandos seized the Karine-A freighter as it was transporting more than 50 tons of weapons – worth tens of millions of dollars – through the Red Sea. Its destination: the Palestinian Authority-controlled Gaza Strip.

Evidence reveals extensive PA fingerprints. The ship was purchased in Lebanon in October 2000 for $400,000 by Adel Moghrabi (also known as Adel Awadallah), head of the PA’s weapons-acquisition office. The ship’s captain, Omar Akkawi, is a veteran Fatah member and a naval advisor to the PA’s Ministry of Transport, and the 12-member crew included other Palestinian officials. The operation was funded by Fuad Shubaki, head of finance administration in the PA’s security services.

Yet Palestinian officialdom denies any involvement in the affair. That Akkawi is also a Coast Guard colonel adds little to the PA’s credibility. Ironically, the 1,000-man Palestinian Coast Guard is an elite unit whose function is to prevent the smuggling of weapons and goods into the Palestinian areas. The fact that the freighter may have been purchased at the very beginning of the second Palestinian intifada does not speak well of the PA’s intentions. Who knows when plans for its acquisition began? Those well-versed in history may recall that Yasser Arafat’s first call for a cease-fire in the present intifada was issued, precisely, in October 2000.

This is not the first time that the PA has engaged in weapons smuggling. Since its inception in 1994, the PA has been bringing in illegal weapons through various underground tunnels along the Egyptian border. Attempts to smuggle arms through the Mediterranean Sea have been foiled by the Israeli army, and similar operations through the Jordan Valley have been thwarted by Jordanian authorities. Although in previous instances the weapons were provided to the PA by radical Muslim and Palestinian groups based in Lebanon and Syria, this time Iran was presumably behind the deal.

This marks a disturbing development for Israel. Because Iran apparently had not supplied arms to the PA before, this incident may herald a worrisome rapprochement. This past December, Iran’s president called for the destruction of Israel by nuclear means. The mere thought of unconventional Iranian armament falling into the hands of hostile Palestinians located just a few miles from Israel’s population centers is chilling indeed.

The quantity and quality of materiel seized is no less disquieting; the PA has never before possessed these types of weapons. The deadly cargo included LAW anti-tank missiles capable of blowing up Israeli tanks; highly potent C-4 explosives with which a car bomb or suicide bomber could bring down an entire building; and 122-mm Katyushas rockets that would put almost every Israeli city in peril. Given that 70 percent of Israel’s population and 80 percent of the country’s economic infrastructure are located just minutes away from Palestinian towns, one can only imagine the major disaster that was averted by the capture of the Karine-A.

This episode alone should give pause to the advocates of Palestinian statehood. While we could argue about the historical, legal, political and moral legitimacy (or lack of thereof) of such an entity, a Palestinian state would carry strategic dangers for Israel. Arafat’s «ship of death» (as The Jerusalem Post described it) has proven that this threat is not a figment of Israeli paranoia.

Indeed, the potential Palestinian state would not be democratic, peaceful or stable. It would be a small state sandwiched between two enemy neighbors. It would be overpopulated, poor, underdeveloped – and deeply resentful of Israel. As military analysts have pointed out, a Palestinian state behaving like Denmark or Switzerland obviously wouldn’t represent an existential risk. But a state along the lines of Iran or Iraq undoubtedly would put in jeopardy the Jewish state’s survival.

It would be unrealistic to assume that the Palestinian state’s political culture would be any different from that of other Arab countries. It would be unrealistic, too, for Israel to expect that the new state treat it any better than other hostile Arab nations have in the past. If the performance of the Palestinian Authority thus far is any indication of future behavior, there is little room for optimism.

The Palestinian state may be inevitable at this point. Inevitable, however, is no synonym for desirable.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

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The recent dramatic decision by the Sharon government to term the Palestinian Authority a terror-supporting entity» and to regard its leader «irrelevant» rendered redundant all the previous talk of Yasser Arafat’s inability or unwillingness to fight anti-Israel terror coming from areas under his jurisdiction.

This issue didn’t really make much of a difference to Israeli victims of terrorism. It was irrelevant whether the bombs that killed them were manufactured by an Islamic radical of Hamas or by a secular nationalist of Fatah.

But for politicians in Israel and elsewhere, it was a different story. What was really at stake was PLO Chairman Arafat’s viability as a peace partner. They knew that Arafat could have fought Islamic terror, but chose not to. The evidence was so overwhelming that it is hard to understand how the «debate» could persist for so long.

Arafat has built an apparatus of 12 security services that employ 40,000 men whose annual salaries reach the amount of $500 million. The PA has the highest ratio of policemen per capita in the world: one policeman for every 60 residents — the most heavily policed territory in the globe. (For comparison, Israel has one police officer for every 236 residents; the United States, there’s one police officer for every 400 residents.)

Besides, Palestinian forces were trained by the CIA and Scotland Yard as well as by the French, German, Austrian and Dutch police.

Even the United Nations provided a few training courses to PA security forces. For years, Israeli intelligence has warned that the Palestinian «police» had an arsenal of grenades, anti-tank missiles, bazookas, mortar shells and rifles.
And yet, we have been told again and again that this amazingly huge security body was unable to deal with the militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad who, by most estimates, are fewer than 2,000 people. In fact, far from fighting terrorism, Arafat tolerated it and even promoted it. The official Palestinian media and school curricula praise the virtues of Jihad and armed struggle.

In 1996, after the Israelis killed Yihye Ayyash, a leading figure in Hamas’ military wing, Arafat paid a televised condolence visit to the home of Hamas leader Dr. Mahmoud a-Zahar. He later called Ayyash «a hero of the Palestinian people,» declared him an official martyr, had the Palestinian forces honor him with a 21-gun salute at his funeral and named a square in Jericho under his name.

When Hamas spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin was released from an Israeli prison in late 1997, Arafat flew to Jordan to kiss and hug him. Imad Faluji and Tala Sidr, two Hamas activists from Gaza and Hebron respectively, are cabinet ministers in Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. His ceaseless «green lights» to terrorism left the Israeli government with no other option but to declare him no longer relevant and his PA a terror-sponsor entity.

Under great diplomatic pressure and sensing international isolation, the Palestinian leader came out with an unprecedented speech Sunday calling for a halt to terrorist activities. What’s more, he pronounced these words not in English, as customary, but in Arabic, no less, on Palestinian television on the eve of Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

Very impressive – and very superfluous. The last time Arafat called for a cease-fire was on Sept. 27. Since then, 67 Israelis have been killed and scores wounded in terror attacks, which should be the least surprising.

In Jordan and Lebanon during the ’70s and ’80s, Arafat declared and/or signed dozens of such cease-fires. Haaretz columnist Yoel Marcus once remarked that the Palestinian leader celebrated more cease-fires than I birthdays in his life.

In 1993 Israel imported the PLO leadership from Tunis and gave it international legitimacy, land, weapons and an economy. Astonishingly, Israel delegated to the PLO its paramount responsibility to protect its citizens from Palestinian terror. In other words, as former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has observed, Israel chose to «subcontract» the fight against terrorism to the terrorists themselves, paving the way for an unprecedented wave of death across Israeli cities.

That year, Israel allowed the emergence of the sole place in the planet where Palestinian terrorists would be immune to Israeli retaliation. It was a tragic mistake. Now, eight years later, a national-unity government headed by veteran hawk Ariel Sharon and prominent Oslo architect Shimon Peres had to reverse that fateful decision.

This has put Arafat back where he rightly belongs — not among world statesmen but with unreconstructed terrorists.

As to Israel, the valiant decision signals a healthy return to national sanity.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

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With the laudable exception of some prominent European individuals and organizations, Europe’s overall attitude toward Israel can be defined as contradictory at best, problematic at worst. Consider:

• At the dawn of the 20th Century, the British were in favor of establishing a Jewish national home in Eretz Israel (Palestine), thus allowing a Jewish state to reemerge in its ancestral homeland. A few decades later, Great Britain was doing its best to stop Jewish immigration to Palestine; it went so far as to return ships full of Jewish refugees, who ended up in Nazi ovens.
• The French, who in 1956 (together with the British) assisted Israel during the Sinai Campaign, imposed a military embargo on the Jewish state in 1967 at a time when Israel’s national existence was in critical jeopardy.
• Post-World War II Germany did emerge as an unequivocal diplomatic ally of Israel. However, by the early 1990s, it had become such a major supplier of biological weapons to the Arab World that when Saddam Hussein launched Scud missiles against Tel Aviv, some Israelis noted that — had those missiles carried nerve gas – it would have been the second time in the same century that Jews would had been murdered with German gas.
• The Oslo process was a European (specifically Norwegian) contribution to «peace and stability in the Middle East.» Yet this political program resulted in Israel’s relinquishing strategic land assets, making it more vulnerable geographically and more isolated regionally. Eventually it led to today’s tragic war of attrition.
• Belgium is currently trying to prosecute Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a war criminal for his role in the Lebanon war, which took place almost two decades ago.
• Denmark created a diplomatic scandal recently when it objected to Israel’s designation of Carmi Gillon as ambassador to Copenhagen. (In the end, it accepted him.) Gillon is a former head of Israel’s security services, who publicly has said that he favors using «moderate physical pressure» against suspected Palestinian terrorists.
• Europe funds incitive and outright anti-Semitic textbooks in the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Syria. It holds many «constructive dialogues» with terror-sponsoring states; it confers a red-carpet treatment upon the most brutal of Middle Eastern dictators. It has a vocally anti-Israel intelligentsia (a French newspaper recently likened the Palestinians to a people hanging on a cross, while a British daily questioned the wisdom of the existence of a Jewish state).

When you consider all these facts, you realize that a fundamentally Arabist orientation is a deeply ingrained reality of European politics.

Which leaves us with some difficult questions: Why is Europe so anti-Israel? Why does it almost al- ways side with Israel’s most implacable foes?

One could point to Europe’s 12 million-strong Muslim community, to the fact that the Middle East has half of the world’s oil reserves, and to the continental determination to chart a separate political course from that of the United States (thus «balancing» the perceived pro-Israel American stance).

But in addition to these factors, Francois Zimeray, one of the 10 pro-Israel supporters in the 626-member European Parliament, has suggested a psychological consideration. He argues that Europeans still carry around with them the burden of responsibility for the Holocaust. It is a heavy load to bear, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict brings «an extraordinary opportunity to expiate this responsibility.» Accordingly, he says, many Europeans – often unwittingly – reason that they bear less guilt for what they did to the Jews in the past in light of what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians today. In other words, if yesterday’s victims are today’s aggressors, then the guilty of yesterday feel more innocent in the present. Thus the need to portray the Israelis as consummate victimizers.

There is an even deeper and more-ominous question concerning the problematic nature of European history as it intersects with that of the Jews. Over the centuries, the Europeans have visited upon the Jews massacres, expulsions, book-burnings, inquisitions and gas chambers. Although today’s Europeans are not actively engaged in murdering Jews, they are nonetheless supporting -militarily, economically and diplomatically – the states and entities that can impose a national tragedy on the only Jewish state in the globe.

Evidently, there is something very wrong at the root of European behavior toward Israel. Something that may go beyond political, economic and even psychological considerations. Something that may have to do with a moral disease that has afflicted mankind for millennia. We all know its name.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.

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It was only a matter of time. We knew it was coming.

Anyone even superficially aware of the dominant themes in Arab media knew that sooner or later they would blame the Sept. 11 attacks on the Jews. And, in vintage fashion, they have.

Take Egyptian sheik Muhammad Al-Gamei’a, Al-Azhar University representative in the United States and imam of New York’s Islamic Cultural Center. In early October he said, «All the signs indicate that the Jews have the most to gain from an explosion like that. They are the ones capable of planning such acts.»

The evidence? «It was found that the automatic pilot was neutralized a few minutes before the flight, and the automatic pilot cannot be neutralized if you don’t have command of the control tower,» reasoned the sheik.

So how do the Jews fit in? In case you didn’t know: «Jews control decision-making in the airports.»

For his part, well-known Islamist Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huweidi wrote in the Saudi press that the Israeli secret service was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Hezbollah’s television channel reported that 4,000 Israelis who worked at the World Trade Center were warned by the Israeli Mossad of the attack in advance. And of course, according to this report, none of the 4.000 went to work that day.

What’s more, some Jews rejoiced in the streets the day of the attack, but you didn’t know about it because «the Jews who control the media acted to hush it up,» in the candid words of the above-quoted sheik.

America itself is not let off the hook. When New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani rejected a $10 million donation from Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal, the Saudi press called him a «homosexual» guilty of «»idiotic behavior,» whereas Hafez al-Barghouthi, the editor of the Palestinian Authority’s official newspaper, added that the mayor «hides his first name, chosen for him by his Italian father, so as not to remind the Jewish voters of the infamous Rudolph Hitler [sic]. This is why he prefers to shorten it to Rudy.»

There’s more: Palestinian official Adli Sadeq charged that «the U.S. is the enemy of the democratic aspirations of the Arab peoples,» and that «it is the No. 1 schemer against development in the Arab world.»

It does not stop even here. Ibrahim Nafi, editor of the government-owned Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, called the American humanitarian food drops over Afghanistan a «crime against humanity,» given that U.S. planes were dropping food «in areas full of land mines, which cause damage to the Afghani citizens trying to gather it up.» He went on to claim that «there were several reports that the humanitarian materials have been genetically treated with the aim of affecting the health of the Afghani people.»

For years, Israelis and Jews have been subject to this kind of treatment. The official Syrian daily Tishrin once accused Jewish and Israeli organizations of colonizing «100 percent» of the Internet, and as a result, no material on the information highway could be defined as «benign to Syrian interests.»

When Time magazine chose Albert Einstein as scientist of the century in late 1999, the largest Egyptian weekly charged that Zionists had «resuscitated the dead» in order to prevent an Egyptian scientist from being awarded the distinction.

What can we say about all this? First, the Bush administration may want to revisit its coalition politics. All of these quotes came from Arab countries that, save Syria, are regarded as «moderate» by official Washington.

But can America really trust partners this delusional?

Second, it is to be hoped that advocates of political negotiations between Arabs and Israelis now understand why peace has remained so difficult to achieve in the Middle East. The real conflict is not about land and settlements, but about a colossal clash of cultures.

This harsh fact no longer can be ignored, and policy should be constructed accordingly. After all, as Saudi columnist Suleiman Al-Nkidan courageously asked last October:

“If this is the condition of the enlightened elite (of the Arab world), what can be said about the cave-dwellers?”

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Jerusalem.