The New Jersey court decision that permitted gay marriage has a political tint. Three Republican-appointed judges issued a deliberately provocative opinion that calls gay union marriage. The idea was to highlight the urgency of the liberal threat to basic values and steer voters to the Republicans.

The court decision contradicts other decisions, such as New Hampshire’s Blanchflower case which ruled that same-sex relations are not even sex. The New Jersey judges ignored a crucial point: just why does society offer benefits and privileges to families? Not because families tend to have sex often—otherwise extra-marital relations would be similarly protected. Not to encourage warm feelings—otherwise the companionship of good old buddies who spend evenings in pubs would be protected too. Societies protect families because God said, Be fruitful and multiply. Societies support families because families produce children who form societies. That’s why single mothers are also supported. Unlike cabbage, same-sex pals do not reproduce and cannot claim subsidies and tax cuts intended for families.

(The failure to understand the reason for subsidizing families has only economic consequences for the US, but political consequences for Israel. In Israel, we don’t want just more children—the habitable part of the country is already densely settled. We want more Jewish children. The politically correct Israeli government subsidizes Arab families which take full advantage of the Jewish checks, breed faster than the Jews, and continuously decrease the proportion of Jews in Israel.)

Gay couples are not oppressed; they do not receive benefits which were not intended for them in the first place. Bereft of children (and gays should be positively prohibited from adopting and debauching children), gay unions produce no personal, inalienable rights. As such, gay unions need no statutory regulation like the institution of marriage; gays who wish to have sex on a regular basis could regulate their committed relationship via contract.

People are neither ethnic- nor culture-blind. Xenophobia is a natural, necessary trait that builds boundaries and cements societies. We dislike people with alien habits— dis-like rather than hate. Can we dislike those who engage in consensual sex with minors? With animals? With same-sex adults?

Non-reproductive incest is a private business. Societies have no reason to prohibit a father having sex with his adult daughter. In the age of contraception, that sex is not likely to produce and thus negatively affect the progeny. Civilized societies do not prohibit sex between mentally challenged people who may produce mentally challenged progeny. By the same token, liberal societies cannot prohibit incestuous marriage. Yet they do.

Societal values are developed through centuries and myriad interactions. Values are neither explicable nor formally provable. One option is to accept them as is, the other is to question them all. When questioned, values always fail.

The Apostle Paul famously struggled with the same problem: having abandoned the Jewish law, Paul was faced with the need to regulate his communities. He eventually developed a web of ad hoc ethical rules, arbitrary and no less restrictive than Jewish law.
The fact that the ethics is indispensable but impossible to formalize opens a way to oppose the leftists. Two millennia ago, the Sophists developed an approach that won them debates with philosophers who, like modern leftists, tried to formalize ethics. The Sophists logically extended their opponents’ views to the apparent absurdity.

If gay marriage is permitted, there is no formal reason to prohibit other non-conventional marriages. Why can’t a father marry his daughter? Why can’t three—or ten, for that matter—people enter into a marriage? Why can’t a person marry his lovely sheep?

The New Jersey court decided that people are equal and so have an equal right to marry. People are equal regardless of sex but then also regardless of number. Ten people are free to marry into one big happy family. A man is free to marry four women, or to heck with the sharia: even ten women! A person who does not find a human soul mate is still equal to everyone else, and society must protect his right to marriage—even to a dog. Homosexuality is ostensibly a natural urge, but so are zoophilia and necrophilia. Hey, we have a world of marriage opportunities!

Bizarre as it may sound, file the papers with your local court to marry your adult daughter, a few female pals, and a dog. Drive the leftist ideas over the edge. Let formal justice face the consequences of its silliness.

Jews have trusted treaties before. With Assyria and Rome and the Polish royals. Treaties are never eternal and so always violated.

Jews had a comprehensive agreement with Britain, the Balfour Declaration. That wasn’t a gift, but payment for worldwide Jewish support for the Entente. The British reneged on it soon and cut out 77% of Israel for a tribal chief ousted from Saudi Arabia; thus Jordan.

Jews achieved a comprehensive peace treaty with the Arabs. The British ruled Egypt, and the Balfour Declaration was binding on Egypt. France, which occupied Syria, concurred. The only other Arab nation also agreed. Sharif of Mecca wrote, “[The] country . . . will be developed by Jewish immigrants. . . . His [Palestinian] native soil could not retain a hold on him.” The Weizmann-Faisal pact included full recognition of the Balfour Declaration and included an Israeli Transjordan. The agreement was qualified on Arab independence, long since achieved.

The UN favored Jews after the Holocaust. The Soviet Union supported a socialist Israel. American Jews lobbied vehemently. The result? The world community further partitioned Israel in 1947 and gave the essential Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria to semi-nomadic Arabs whom the sensible king of Jordan did not want to absorb.

The tiny, indefensible speck of land was still deemed too much for the Jews. The US has strict visa quotas for Muslims. France forcibly assimilates them. Arab countries isolate Palestinian immigrants and push them out. Yet the world insists that Israel accommodate 1.3 million Palestinian Muslims who will breed to 35-50% of her population in fifty years. In about a century, the Jewish state shrinks from almost Eretz Israel back to Arab Palestine with a significant Jewish population.

The anti-semites are refuted. There is no world Jewish conspiracy. Jews are too stupid for that.

The lessons of the Holocaust are very different from what Jewish assimilators imagine. That murdering people is bad was not news; no one needed a Holocaust to understand that. The world learned from the Holocaust that Jews can be killed in masses and with practical impunity. Tens of thousands of Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, Croates, and the scum of other nations helped massacre the Jews: more than 14,000 personally shot Jews, while others hunted us, betrayed us to death, guarded us, beat us, mutilated us; still others managed the extermination procedures. Accomplices are sentenced in any legal system. In the Holocaust, only about 5% of the perpetrators and almost none of the accomplices were sentenced.

Anti-semites got the picture. Approving references to the Holocaust and implicit threats of repeating it became common from the first days of the massacre. The memoirs of Ukrainians who lived under the German occupation abound with quotations. The Soviet anti-semitic campaign of 1948-53 and the preparations to deport Soviet Jews to Siberia, the place the Nazis initially earmarked for us to starve in, unmistakably shows the atmosphere of popular approval of the Holocaust.

The Germans are a disciplined and logical folk. They logically developed their anti-semitism to the conclusion that they must save the world from the Jews. The disciplined Germans accepted even the aesthetically unpleasant means of the massacre. Now the disciplined Germans accept their government’s doctrine that they must feel sorry. They show every outward feature of being sorry: they apologize, they study the Holocaust, they help Israel. Their millennium-old anti-semitism did not evaporate in sixty years and is waiting to be mobilized by a less politically correct government.

Practically no other European country was taken aback by its role in the Holocaust. Poles, Greeks, the French cheerfully helped the Germans identify the Jews. No country destroyed police and municipal archives to make the identification impossible. Faced with the slaughter, no occupied country attempted to issue the Jews new documents with Christian names or to distribute blank passports. Students of the Holocaust commonly ignore a crucial question: how did the Germans identify Jews for deportation and massacres? Except in the ghettos, the task was not trivial. Many Jews looked like the local people. Either locals betrayed them to the Germans, or Jews gave themselves up to the Germans believing, understandably, that the locals would betray them anyway. The French like to speak of the barbarous Germans, but not about their own—indispensable—role in the Holocaust.

Americans—affluent, preoccupied with materialist pursuits, not very interested in religion, ideology, or hatred—were relatively tolerant of Jews. European immigrants to America largely parted with their original culture and shed the ingrained anti-semitism before jumping into the melting pot of American culture. Multiculturalism and demographic changes changed that. Blacks, first-generation Mexicans, and Muslims are poor, religiously, ideologically, or nationalistically charged, and on the lookout for enemies. Many Americans justly resent US involvement in the Middle East and erroneously identify it with the Israel lobby rather than with oil interests. Americans see that Europeans killed the Jews for millennia, perpetrated the Holocaust, yet remain respectable members of world society. Americans have no guilt before the Jews and feel they help Israel too much. The America of the current political culture will not slaughter Jews but would remain indifferent when others do.

Arabs smelled a lesson. If ethical Europeans massacred Jews with impunity and the other nations tolerated it, Arabs could do even more. Westerners might forget that in the apocalyptic war of 1948 Israel received no, none, zero help from the West. The US embargoed weapon shipments to Palestine, in practical terms, to Israel because other Arab countries supplied the Arabs. Arabs remember that. The Holocaust is burning in their hearts; they know they could repeat it, and they long to.

Murder is natural. At all times, people have killed. Weak governments do not prevent people from killing each other. Strong governments prompt them to kill ostensible enemies in job lots. Technology facilitates killing. Millennia-old cultural boundaries do not evaporate and provide the path of least resistance to xenophobia, discontent, and hatred. The world, indeed, learned from the Holocaust: learned it could kill a lot of Jews. And that knowledge will translate into the action.

Deliberations over the sanctions against North Korea or Iran bring to memory the League of Nations talk before WWII. Was German refusal to pay reparations a casus belli? The remilitarization of the Rhineland? Extensive military production? No single such issue is a casus belli. Politicians bogged down in details don’t see the grand picture of imminent war. Then nor now.

The West has repeatedly demonstrated its impotence in the face of nuclear proliferation. China got nuclear weapons with impunity. Pakistan got a slap on the wrist of sanctions. North Korea’s rulers bent under the weight of sanctions: the Japanese refused to sell them melons. Sanctions against Iran would hardly include oil, and even so the mullahs can do without the oil for some time—though the rising price of oil will be blamed on the sanctions.

Ahmadinejad needs a rhetorical, not a battlefield, enemy. Iran will use the bomb to gain dominance in the Muslim world. That spells the development of a shiite axis, huge discontent in the Arab world, and an arms race. Arab states will rush to develop nuclear weapons to be on a par with Iran. The Arabs know that Iran won’t attack Israel with nuclear weapons but could well attack them. Central Asian countries will also be concerned because Iran includes them in its sphere of dominance. They have oil money and Russian support against Iran, and will join the arms race, probably nuclear arms.

Iran will give Israel’s enemies such as Syria or Hezbollah a nuclear shield. When the Muslim Brotherhood officially comes to power in Egypt and switches the policy to confrontation with Israel, Iranian nuclear protection will let them build the Egyptian army up in safety. An Arab nuclear umbrella invalidates Israel’s only viable military strategy, preemption. If Iran signs a mutual defense treaty with, say, Lebanon, Israel will be unable to operate against Hezbollah since, technically, every Israeli incursion into Lebanon is an aggression. Lebanon would be able to conduct an undeclared war against Israel, Egypt would mobilize and move its troops into the Sinai, but Israel—concerned with Iranian nuclear protection—could do nothing.

Nuclear containment is a game of nerves. With Iranian nuclear warheads in Lebanon and Palestine, what would Israel do? Escalation, as Kennedy did in the Cuban missile crisis, is unlikely. Israel lost credibility when we did not stop Iran from deploying Zelzal-2 missiles in Beka’a. Iran will move nuclear weapons into Lebanon under a mutual defense treaty, a clearly protective measure. Every reasonable person would agree that Iranian nuclear weapons defend Lebanon, are not intended for aggression. The Israeli government won’t act, as it didn’t act against Egyptian, Libyan, Algerian, Moroccan, Pakistani, and Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran will win the war of nerves. Mutually assured destruction works against tiny Israel.

With sufficiently aggressive leadership, Iran could give any state willing to attack Israel a nuclear umbrella. Iran could threaten nuclear retaliation against Israel if we attack enemy population centers or even anywhere deep in enemy territory. Soviet Union used that approach successfully in 1973. It gave Egypt SAM-5 anti-air missiles to limit Israeli operations to the front zone and moved the missiles with nuclear warheads to prevent Israeli nuclear retaliation. Iran could use the nuclear umbrella to inhibit Israeli preemption, penetrating strikes, and generally any combat on enemy territory. Bereft of the Sinai, Israel lacks territory of her own from which to conduct mobile defense. Iranian nuclear capability opens the way for the Muslim world to encroach on Israel by conventional means.

Brainwashed Israelis do not support radical options for making their state Jewish. Greece, Turkey, Poland, and Czechoslovakia expelled unwanted populations without compensation, by administrative measures under the threat of force. Israeli Arabs can be similarly deported to Jordan.

If, however, the Jews want once again to surprise the world by their political correctness, several peaceful options exist to push the Arabs out of Israel. They options are not exhaustive, and pressure on Arabs to leave may proceed among many lines.

Minor, but widely publicized violence. It is not clear how many Arabs were killed in Dir Yassin, but the story made about 600,000 Arabs leave Israel in 1948.

The pressure of public discussion of deportation. Faced with the possibility of forceful eviction, many Israeli Arabs will choose to leave with compensation.

Jewish organizations could procure Israeli Arabs visas and agricultural property in Third World countries where land is abundant. Paying $10,000 per head for the country’s 1.4 million Arabs to leave isn’t a high price to keep Israel Jewish.

Jews can buy Arab property. Real estate in Israel is more expensive than in many Arab countries, and Arab farmers could relocate handily.

Private communities can set rules for admitting new members and exclude Arabs. Existing towns can be divided into private communities and close themselves to new Arabs. To the same end, towns could be incorporated and adopt pro-Jewish charters and specifically admit new members by a council vote which Arabs won’t pass.

Jews should not both with the miniscule savings from Arab labor. Restaurants with a “Cooked and served by Jews” logo could charge a small premium. Goods and farm produce marked Avoda Ivrit (Jewish Labor) will find buyers. Jews can boycott manufacturers and service providers who hire Arabs. A still more politically correct way is to increase minimum salary to a level acceptable to Jews. A policy of bringing short-term immigrant workers without minimum salary requirements or pension benefits will also reduce job opportunities for Arabs. Rotating shifts of temporary workers from China and India would bring large numbers of their people in contact with Israel and help build stronger political relations with them.

Arabs should be expelled for disloyalty to the State of Israel. Participants in pro-Palestinian demonstrations or administrative detainees should be stripped of their Israeli citizenship. Israel should not close Temple Mount to Jews for fear of Arab riots. Instead, open the Temple site, provoke the riots, and expel the participants. Their families can join them in Jordan.

The Israeli army should admit Arabs and send them to the forefront to fight other Arabs and comb the Palestinian territories. Many will desert, and many will be sentenced for negligence and their citizenship revoked.

Israel may institute patriotic procedures unacceptable to Arabs, such as obligatory singing of the national anthem daily at schools.

Israel should have a single official language, Hebrew. Arabs who study in Israeli schools and universities must study in Hebrew. Arabs must learn the history of the Jewish state they live in. Strict tests will ensure that Arab students who fail Israeli history are kicked out of Israeli schools.

Israel must normalize her Arabs. Let them pay taxes like Jews do, and stop turning a blind eye to Arab misdemeanors. Arabs happily build huge villages without construction permits which take Jews years to obtain. Let the Arabs go through the same bureaucratic nightmare. Destroy illegal Arab buildings, just as the government destroys illegal Jewish buildings. Make Arab life in Israel less than the tax-free paradise they enjoy now.

Stop the absurdity of a Jewish state subsidizing Arab families. Arab fathers collect monthly government checks for their offspring. The Jewish state should not encourage Arabs to breed. To ease the shock for Israeli ethnic-blind democracy, welfare can be privatized. The private Jewish National Fund now holds the land and gives it only to Jews. A similar private entity could disburse welfare only to Jews. Welfare benefits could also be conditioned on army service or related to the amount of taxes paid; both options disqualify Arabs.

Many Arabs depend on inefficient farming. Israel could increase the land tax, making it prohibitive for Arab villagers. More efficient Jewish farmers will survive the tax rate. The Israeli government could cut income tax for farmers to offset the land tax hike. That way, the compound tax rate for Jews would remain the same but would increase drastically for Arabs who cheat on their taxes. Arabs won’t offset the land tax hike with the decrease of other taxes because they don’t pay taxes. Their effective tax rate will increase greatly.

These measures would stir the Arabs and prompt many of them to emigrate from Israel. In the end, we must keep Israel Jewish by whatever means necessary.

Many Jewish readers criticize me for discussing the option of a Palestinian state. They point out that there was no Palestinian nation forty years ago, so it has no rights now. That argument is invalid.

Most Muslim nations are relatively new. A century ago, there was no Jordan, no Lebanon, no Iraq, no Saudi Arabia. That does not make their current political demands less valid or their armies less dangerous. Nations do form from thin air, for example, the US.

Historical rights do not matter. Jews, Muslims, and Christians all claim the right to Jerusalem. None founded the city. Muslims settled the land longer than the Jews. Christians after Paul consider themselves a new Israel and logically usurp the divine promises given to the Hebrews. Jews had the only historical state in that land (others were occupation regimes or mere city-states) and reclaimed much of Israel’s land today from marshes. Each religious group involved has what it thinks is a viable claim to the land. In politics, what one thinks does not matter. The only thing that matters in international relations is the ability to make others acquiesce. The ancient Hebrews, the Anglo-Saxon tribes, and the European settlers in America did not try to convince indigenous population of the newcomers’ religious, historical, or whatever rights.

The land dispute between Jews and Muslims shows that they understand each other’s rights differently. Religiously or ideologically overcharged Jews convince only themselves of their inviolable rights and the non-existence of a Palestinian nation. Like it or not, Palestinians have already established themselves as a nation and have achieved de facto statehood. If it lives like a nation and fights like a nation, then before world opinion it is a nation. Israelis may dispossess them and deport them to Jordan but should not deceive themselves: our Palestinian enemy is indeed a nation.

The Torah says, Do not follow the majority to evil. Plato and scores of other philosophers despised democracy. Beside the small, culturally homogeneous Greek cities, no state has practiced democracy. At most, states from Rome to the United States have used democratic rhetoric to legitimize themselves while manipulating public opinion.

Democracy works when people share basic values and goals, which is not the case in Israel. Some Jews think tolerance and democracy the objectives, while others follow Jewish religious or nationalist ideals. These views cannot be correlated; there is no room for compromise. The leftists won’t accept restrictions of Arab citizen rights, while the nationalists won’t accede to Israeli Arabs voting the Jewish state out of existence.

Most of the Hebrews wanted to return to Egypt when they ran into difficulties in Sinai. Most German Jews laughed at Zionist notions and refused to move to Palestine. Most Soviet Jews willingly stayed in their anti-Zionist state and moved to Israel only in the late 1980s when economic conditions in Russia became unbearable.

No wonder most Israelis opt for the peace process. Mob behavior is irrational. No amount of rational discourse would convince the mob that peace is historically a product of force, not concessions. The mob believes in comfortable notions, true or not. The barrage of anti-semitism and the clear statements of Nazi intent did not convince German Jews to flee the Holocaust. Most Israelis similarly ignore the facts: that the Arabs want their land back and enough of them will fight, that Israeli rulers do not care about the safety of the Jews, that demographic changes will make Israel an Arab state. We shall ignore those who ignore the facts.

True Jews, from Moses to the Maccabees to the Zionists have been a small minority. They did not care about majority opinion. If necessary, they opposed the majority. The visionaries worked for the Jewish idea which incidentally benefits the Jewish masses.

So abandon democracy and do what is right. A military coup will be most welcome. Almost all top-level generalissimos are political conformists, but a mid-level commander could bring his battalion to Jerusalem, hang the government, disperse the corrupt Knesset, and call on the army to implement a simple program: annex the core Jewish lands to make Israel a defensible state, defuse the demographic time bomb by deporting Israeli Arabs to Jordan, and introduce sufficiently draconian responses to stop terrorism.

Peaceful demonstrations are an exceedingly long-term strategy at best. Politicians in power recognize demonstrators as hard-core adherents of the opposition who won’t vote their way anyway and are not worth catering to. Mahatma Gandhi succeeded peacefully against the British because British domestic opinion wanted to abandon the colonies anyway. The British were few in India and unable to overcome the mass movement. Israeli rulers are determined to stay in power, and propaganda and police can eventually break any movement.

We no more try to convince empty souls. Our land, pride, being Jewish, means nothing to them. People who lack Jewish values could remain at home. The Jews must act.

Though the world saw in Lebanon the consequences of our withdrawal from Gaza, the Israeli government is bent on further withdrawals. The core Jewish land of Judea is earmarked for slaughter on the altar of the peace process. The Israeli government plans to demolish Jewish houses, towns, and outposts. The Jewish idea in Israel is raped oftener than the women in Moshe Katsav’s office.

The Jews fought the British and the Egyptians for our land. Now it’s the time to fight the Jewish quislings. A Jew who hasn’t been to jail on political charges is no decent Jew. The Maccabees today would not have hesitated to deal with the Jewish traitors by any means: from hand combat to clubs to firearms.

This is our land. We won’t give it back.

South Korea objects to harsh sanctions on the North. Israel cooperates with the Palestinians. Avoiding a confrontation now only exacerbates the problem later.

It is counter-intuitive to suggest that peace efforts don’t bring peace but rather that only militancy does. The communists believed that people cooperate for the common good. The problem is, neither Arabs nor Soviet peasants perceived their good the way their benefactors did. Arabs want and Soviet peasants wanted only one thing: land. Not peace or prosperity, but land. The land they consider rightfully theirs. Israelis and the Soviet workers offered reasonable terms and good compensation for the land; that didn’t work.

Are Arabs stupid, unable to realize how good the peace deal is for them? Were Jews stupid when we refused Uganda and fought both Arabs and the British? A man is not only a stomach but also a mind. To fill the stomach at the expense of one’s raison d’être is a bad trade.

Trade land for peace? How about selling a wedding ring for a good price? Some things are just not for sale. The Israeli government is ready to accept its thirty pieces of silver, a worthless peace treaty. Arabs, however, define “the land” differently—all the land of Palestine. Possibly in stages, but all the land. Older Arabs remember the sustenance economy, but the new generation doesn’t value the economic benefits of gathering up the crumbs from Israel’s table. They want neither money nor peace but land. Jews agree to peace without land; Arabs want land even without peace. Jews want to sell our inheritance, the land of Israel, but Arabs don’t want to buy it. They just want it. Strong wishes often materialize.

Commentators miss a detail in the interview of a Iraqi militant aired by Al Jazeera. He demands recognition of the guerillas as sole representatives of the Iraqi people, thus evidently a guerilla himself. He also demands, however, the return of Baath and of Saddam’s armed forces. Guerillas are now integrated in the leftovers of the Baathist army and willing to use Baath as their political front. Saddam’s dictatorship was secular. The new military rule will be religious. The sooner the US reestablishes the Baathist army, the less fundamentalist it will emerge.

The guerillas agree to Baathist leadership because they recognize that no other military group is capable of subduing Iraqi violence and that no other group is acceptable to all other groups. US attempts to foster such a group, amenable to all strata, are futile.

Baathist methods of counter-insurgence are also the only viable ones. Humanism, democracy, and due process are meaningless words in the Iraqi milieu. If the US wants the respect of Muslims, it must crush the insurgency with mass arrests, torture, wholesale executions, razing guerilla strongholds, and countering anti-US demonstrations with deadly fire. Short of that, the continuing American presence in Iraq damages America’s reputation.

To develop a solution, a few things should be recognized. Only affluent countries accept wasteful liberal democracy; poor countries opt for the cheap safety of totalitarism. The US cannot democratize Iraq at will. Nor could the US govern and police Iraq indefinitely. The only viable successor would be a military ruler who either suppresses religious and nationalist movements as Saddam did or succumbs to them. The US is concerned with three things in Iraq: nuclear non-proliferation, getting rid of guerilla training camps and other infrastructure, and an uninterrupted oil supply. The US should embark on a short and successful offensive, annihilate the guerilla camps, raze some neighborhoods and exhibit other acts of useful cruelty. Then return the Baathists to power under some other name, have them sign a declaration of non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and reject international terrorism, then go home.

Another option is to dismantle Iraq. There is no such state anyway. Historical borders are not incidental but reflect the actual balance of power. Iraq is the artificial creation of the colonial powers. Give part of Iraq to Iran in exchange for the abandoning its nuclear program, and divide the rest between Saudi Arabia and Turkey or Kurdistan.

Machiavelli was only partially right that free people couldn’t be conquered. People take generations to get used to being governed. Societal organization is a cultural phenomenon not learned in a year. The tribal entities of Iraq won’t submit to central power. One possibility is tribal self-administration with only nominal central authority, the way Pakistan deals with Peshawar. If Turkey accepts that role for Kurdistan, good; if not, sealing the troublesome region off is the only remaining possibility.

And fire that fellow in the State Department who called US policy in Iraq stupid. He betrayed the American troops fighting and dying in Iraq that same day.

I dislike Moshe Katsav as I do any corrupt, unprincipled, sleazy politico. The current witch-hunt after him, however, is ludicrous. In secular Israeli society, extramarital sex is the least offense imaginable. In corrupt Israeli politics, sex with an office worker is next to nothing compared to the flourishing nepotism and fraudulent sinecures. Coercing someone for sex is less a crime than coercing the Jews to leave Gush Katif.

Many Israeli politicians and bureaucrats have sexual relations with their office workers. Even Ben Gurion was less than discreet about sex. Katsav coerced a girl; others rape the Jewish state.

Olmert has made clear how “centrist” he is by supporting Shimon Peres for president. What’s good about Peres? The Oslo process proved a fiasco. Palestinians disregard the commitments, and Israelis detest the concessions. The doctrine equating the peace process with Israeli concessions took a blow after the Gaza evacuation. Peres is not on the record with more sensible ideas.

Peres promotes peace at the cost of the Jewish state. So far, we’re losing the Jewish state, but not winning peace. What Peres sees as settlement, the Arabs consider capitulation. What is peace process to Peres, is stream of victories to Arabs—and they are emboldened.

Peres is a Nobel Prize winner. So was Arafat. Honest Palestinians rejected Arafat’s Oslo commitments. Are there enough honest Jews to reject Peres?