It is ironic to think of Ehud Olmert as a standard-bearer for proper governmental behavior. But he nearly became just that in the Amos Gilad imbroglio – until, as always, he got cold feet.

Gilad, who heads the Defense Ministry’s Diplomatic-Security Bureau, is the point man for the Egyptian-brokered talks on a Gaza cease-fire. On February 18, he blasted Olmert’s handling of the issue in an interview with Ma’ariv, particularly the cabinet’s decision to condition any cease-fire on a deal to release kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit. Gilad termed this an “insult” to Egypt and said it undermined national security. “This is crazy,” he charged. “Do we really think the Egyptians are our employees?”

Olmert’s initial response to this outrageous behavior was impeccable. He reprimanded Gilad, filed a disciplinary complaint to the Civil Service Commission and finally fired him as the country’s negotiator.

But unnamed “senior defense officials” charged that this undermined national security, reduced the likelihood of a deal for Schalit and even endangered our relationship with Egypt, and media pundits echoed these nonsensical claims (as if national security and a 30-year-old peace with Egypt really depend on a single civil servant who became Cairo’s interlocutor only three years ago). And Olmert backed down. Last Wednesday, after Gilad finally apologized – which he initially refused to do – Olmert reinstated him as lead negotiator and withdrew the disciplinary complaint.

Unfortunately, Gilad’s apology did not solve the problem. All the reasons why Olmert’s initial response was correct remain in force.

FIRST, A civil servant’s job is to implement government policy. If he cannot square that with his conscience, he can resign. But staying in office while undermining the policy he is supposed to be implementing – as Gilad did via his public criticism – is completely unacceptable.

Second, Gilad’s ability to do his job has been irretrievably impaired. Fruitful negotiations require confidence in one’s negotiator. But in this case, the government cannot possibly have confidence that Gilad is trying to secure the deal the cabinet wants: He made it clear that he not only disagrees with the cabinet’s demands, but opposes even raising them with Egypt.

Moreover, Cairo followed the whole contretemps and now knows that Gilad shares its opposition to linking the cease-fire with Schalit. That makes it impossible for him to argue his government’s case convincingly even if he tries. It also encourages the Egyptians to remain inflexible, since they know Gilad is pushing their position in Jerusalem.

Third, Gilad’s comments show that he never was competent to do the job – because he saw his mission not as furthering his government’s aims, but as furthering Egypt’s aims. Indeed, he opposed the cabinet’s policy primarily because he deemed it an “insult” to the Egyptians, who are “not our employees.” It apparently never occurred to him that neither are Israeli ministers Egypt’s employees, and the cabinet is not obliged to accept Egypt’s view if it deems that view contrary to national interests. Nor, evidently, did it occur to him that he is Israel’s employee, and hence his job is to promote its policies, not those of its interlocutors.

REASONABLE PEOPLE can disagree about whether the cease-fire should be linked to Schalit. But no reasonable person could disagree that this is precisely the kind of policy decision governments are elected to make. And while Cairo’s role as mediator gives its views some weight, the government’s primary consideration must be national interests as it understands them.

For all these reasons, Olmert was right to dismiss Gilad and file a disciplinary complaint, and wrong to retract these decisions. Unfortunately, the negative results of these retractions go far beyond this

case – because Gilad’s behavior is fast becoming the civil service norm.

Many civil servants publicly oppose government policy nowadays. The worst offender is undoubtedly Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz, who has lambasted virtually every legal reform proposed by Olmert’s government, often using vitriolic language. In one particularly egregious case, he accused Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann of “abuse of authority” and “a campaign of vengeance against the law enforcement system,” merely because Friedmann sought to probe a clear abuse of authority by that system: concealment of relevant wiretaps from a criminal defendant.

In Hebrew, Mazuz’s title is “the government’s legal adviser.” And a legal adviser who uses such language against his client and publicly opposes his client’s policies should be fired. Yet Mazuz not only remains in office, he has suffered no consequences whatsoever.

Furthermore, a growing number of civil servants seem, like Gilad, to view their job as “selling” other countries’ positions to Israel rather than vice versa. A good example is former government spokeswoman Miri Eisin.

In an interview published in 2007, she declared that when dealing with foreign media, “I don’t try and show that the Israeli position is the right [one]” – as if that were not the essence of a spokesman’s job. So what did she think her job was? Essentially, it turns out, convincing Israelis to accept others’ positions. “Is only the Israeli narrative ‘the truth’ and all the others wrong?” she demanded in an article published this January, after leaving office. “Israel’s national fortitude would not be impaired if we learned to look at reality in a more complex way… [and] to open up to the existence of another narrative.”

Eisin was also not penalized for this attitude: She left office of her own volition.

These twin rots – publicly opposing government policies and subordinating these policies to other countries’ views – have spread wide and deep in the civil service, and uprooting them will be a lengthy process. But had Olmert stuck to his decision to dismiss Gilad and launch disciplinary proceedings, it would have been a good start. Instead, he wound up sending the opposite message: that there was nothing inherently wrong with Gilad’s behavior; his only offense was wounding Olmert’s feelings, and an apology satisfied that.

Olmert’s mishandling of this case will make it harder for any subsequent premier to address this rot. But it must be done if this country is ever to have a properly functioning civil service.

One of the most oft-repeated mantras about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that there is no military solution; the only solution is to talk with our enemies. This mantra also has a popular corollary: Because we must ultimately negotiate with the Palestinians, decisive military action is counterproductive – it merely sows hatred that makes the inevitable dialogue that much harder.

It is ironic that the leading proponents of these theories are Jews and Europeans – two groups well acquainted with the obvious counterexample: The Allies never negotiated with the Nazis either during or after World War II; they destroyed Nazi Germany and executed its leaders. The same went for Tojo’s Japan.

But World War II was a state-to-state conflict fought by regular armies; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not. And many people deem that difference crucial. That why I found David McCullough’s history of an earlier nonstate conflict, America’s War of Independence, so illuminating.

McCullough’s 1776 describes the war’s first year, when America’s Continental Army was a ragtag collection of men with almost no military training or discipline, few uniforms, only the most basic weapons and insufficient ammunition for them. George Washington recognized that given this reality, frontal combat with the well-trained, well-equipped British army would be suicidal, so he essentially conducted a guerrilla war: lightning strikes followed by swift retreats rather than capturing and holding territory.

What was noteworthy, however, was Britain’s attitude toward the war. The British commanders, Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe, believed that their goal was not to defeat Washington’s army, but to promote reconciliation with the American colonies. They even worried that killing too many American soldiers might foment hatred that would impede reconciliation. Hence at several critical junctures during that first year, the British army failed to exploit opportunities to destroy Washington’s forces, preferring instead to dialogue.

IN SEPTEMBER 1776, for instance, the British had completely routed American forces on Long Island, forcing the battered remnants to retreat to indefensible positions in New York City. But instead of pursuing and wiping out the Continental Army, Richard Howe decided this was the perfect opportunity for peace talks.

The peace conference achieved nothing for Britain, McCullough noted, but it did buy Washington time to regroup: “The British had suspended operations during what could have been a golden opportunity to attack, as one perfect, late-summer day followed another.”

Eventually, the British did chase the Americans from New York and then New Jersey. But at numerous points along the way, when a final push could have destroyed Washington’s army, William Howe held back, because he did not see defeating the army as his goal. He simply wanted “to keep the Americans on the run,” McCullough wrote, in the hope that chasing them out of more and more territory “would bring the deluded American people and their political leaders to their senses and end their demonstrably futile rebellion.”

You can hear Howe echoing down the ages in Israeli leaders who explain that the goal is not to “defeat” the Palestinians, but to “sear their consciousness” and make them understand that dialogue is preferable to terror.

ULTIMATELY, HOWE’S STRATEGY gave Washington time to achieve two militarily insignificant but morale-boosting victories, in Princeton and Trenton, at the tail end of that year. That was critical, because the American soldiers’ enlistments all expired on December 31, 1776. It was these victories that convinced them to keep fighting rather than quit, as thousands of deserters had done during the months when the war looked hopeless. And that preserved the army to fight another day.

Moreover, as the war dragged on without Britain achieving decisive victory, its European enemies, who had initially sat on the fence, decided that helping the Americans made sense. First came desperately needed financial aid from both France and Holland, and then assistance from the French navy, without which the final defeat of British forces at Yorktown in 1781 would have been impossible.

In 1776, the British could have ended the revolution. But they wasted numerous opportunities to decisively defeat the Continental Army, and that army, as McCullough noted, was “the key to victory.” Thus what should have been an easy win over the American “rabble” became a humiliating defeat – not because Britain could not have won, but because it repeatedly chose not to, since its goal was not victory but dialogue and reconciliation.

The crucial point that Britain failed to understand was that dialogue was not possible without first achieving victory, because the Americans had no interest in dialogue as long as they had any hope of achieving victory themselves. Hence at the September peace talks, American envoys refused to discuss anything except full independence – which, of course, was unacceptable to Britain.

THE PARALLELS to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are obvious. Over and over, our leaders have refrained from seeking a decisive defeat of hostile Palestinian forces, either because they themselves believed it would undermine the ultimate goal of reconciliation, or because the world believed it, and pressured us to comply. This began with the First Lebanon War in 1982, when we had a chance to wipe out the entire PLO leadership but instead let it escape to Tunis due to American pressure. And it continued right through the recent Gaza operation, when the IDF was ordered to stop well short of destroying

Hamas forces.

But by refusing to seek victory, Israel has also effectively prevented dialogue – because as long as Palestinians believe that they have a chance of achieving victory, meaning the eradication of the Jewish state, dialogue and reconciliation will be impossible. That is why even the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas refuses to concede the “right of return,” a euphemism for destroying the Jewish state demographically by flooding it with millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Hence if this country, or the world, truly wants an Israeli-Palestinian peace, the necessary first step is not negotiation, but victory – because, as America’s history shows, only decisive victory by one side can convince the other to concede its own dreams of victory. And until the Palestinians concede their dreams of destroying the Jewish state, no compromise will be possible.

Can anything good be said about electoral results that ensure prolonged and extortionate coalition negotiations followed by an unstable, dysfunctional government? Surprisingly, yes – if the lessons are learned. On the Right, the results were an object lesson in the perils of short-changing democracy. And on the Left, they were an object lesson in what responsible voting can accomplish.

Three rightist parties – Likud, Habayit Hayehudi and National Union – all lost seats by scorning their voters. In Likud’s case, the drop was particularly dramatic: It shrank 25 percent in a mere two months, from a high of 36 seats in a poll taken the day after its primary to 27 seats in the election. All these seats clearly migrated rightward, since the overall rightist-religious bloc did not shrink. And that is the key to understanding what happened.

Likud’s primary produced a list attractive to rightists; hence many who had deserted the party in 2006 initially returned. But then, in a disgraceful and anti-democratic move instigated by chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, party institutions reordered the slate’s reserved slots three days after the primary to demote some of the hawks and promote left-leaning candidates, as Netanyahu wanted a “centrist” list. And disgusted rightists, unwilling to support a party whose leader so clearly did not want them, jumped ship.

What is noteworthy, however, is that primary voters, with the “wisdom of crowds” that has made on-line betting sites such accurate predictors, read the political map more accurately than Netanyahu. He thought the battle was over the Center, so he wanted a list that would appeal to Kadima voters. But the battle turned out to be over the Right – and primary voters had given him precisely the list he needed to win it. Thus had he honored their will, he would now head a larger, stronger faction and be better placed to form a stable, functional government.

Instead, he woke up only belatedly, as Likud’s edge over Kadima in the polls steadily narrowed even though Kadima was also shrinking. He then tried to break right, but it was too late: Rightists refused to vote for someone who had shown them the door just two months earlier. Hence he is now in an impossible situation: Instead of being the obvious candidate to form a government, Tzipi Livni is in position to challenge him, enabling smaller parties to launch an extortionate bidding war.

THE WOES of Habayit Hayehudi and the National Union, in contrast, stemmed from not giving their voters a say at all. When several small rightist parties decided to merge into Habayit Hayehudi, some politicians wisely urged that its leader and Knesset slate be chosen via primaries. But the majority preferred appointing a council of public figures to choose both leader and list.

The result was almost inevitable: Some politicians and factions felt slighted by their low place on the resultant list; they also disliked the chosen leader. So they broke off and ran as National Union. Voters, disgusted with this petty quarreling, then punished both parties: The combined factions won only seven seats, down over 20% from nine in 2006. And they were spared the far greater losses predicted by early polls only because Netanyahu made their voters so unwelcome in Likud.

Yet this disastrous split, which nearly resulted in both factions failing to enter the Knesset, would never have happened had the list been chosen by primary rather than fiat – because while it is possible to accuse a public council of discriminating against you, and hence your voters, it is not possible to accuse the voters themselves of doing so. The voters’ decision is unappealable. That is why not a single Likud politician quit over his placement on the list, though many were equally unhappy. And in fact, National Union’s politicians clearly did deserve better than the public council gave them, since it ultimately won four seats to Habayit Hayehudi’s three.

FINALLY, THERE is the lesson of Kadima. According to pollster Rafi Smith, fully 40% of Kadima’s voters chose it just days before the election. They came overwhelmingly from the Left: Smith says Kadima took one-third of Labor’s voters and even more of Meretz’s. And they came for one reason only: As the gap between Likud and Kadima in the polls narrowed, leftists realized that supporting Kadima offered their only hope of forming the next government. So they held their noses and did so. As one such voter told Ha’aretz: “For years I’ve voted Meretz, but this year, since I’m no great fan of Netanyahu, I decided to vote for Tzipi Livni. I think her party is atrocious, it has terrible people in it, but I had no choice… she’s the only answer to Netanyahu.”

The results are unfortunate: a Netanyahu-Livni stalemate in which neither can easily form a government. But given that Netanyahu had for months appeared unstoppable, it was a stunning achievement, and it very nearly succeeded. Had Kadima beaten Likud by somewhat more than a mere one seat, Livni’s claim to be the people’s choice might have been convincing.

Rightists, who saw the same polls, could have prevented this outcome by holding their noses and voting Likud, thereby ensuring its ability to form a government. But they preferred to risk losing the election rather than sacrifice their ideological purity.

And in fact, rightists did lose, despite their bloc’s overall victory. Because even if Netanyahu manages to form a coalition – which is still uncertain, given Kadima’s ability to play spoiler – a government comprising six separate factions, with often clashing agendas and no one party large enough to dominate, will be too dysfunctional to do anything useful and will ultimately collapse prematurely. And that will bring the Left to power on a wave of disgust with rightists’ inability to govern.

These, then, are the election’s lessons: Give the voters a say, honor their will after doing so, and unite behind a party that could actually form a government instead of dissipating your electoral power among numerous small factions. And if Israelis learn them, our political system may even start producing governments capable of governing.

It is still too early, as this is being written, to know who won this week’s election. But it is not too early to know who lost: the democratic system and the entire Israeli people. Throughout the campaign, voters were systematically deprived of information about the candidates’ records and positions, thereby undermining their fundamental democratic right to elect people who represent their own views. And this lack of information severely hindered intelligent decision-making about who should guide us through the multiple crises ahead, just when we need the best leadership possible.

Clearly, the candidates themselves are partly to blame: The major parties in particular tried hard to blur their positions and avoid detailing their programs. The Gaza operation, which ousted the campaign from the public and media eye for three critical weeks, also played a role. Nevertheless, the main culprit is the media. Not only did the so-called guardian of democracy fail to press the candidates on the issues or publish relevant material about their records, but it actively penalized candidates who tried to address the issues by ignoring them, while rewarding those who engaged in pointless gimmicks with lavish coverage.

In a stunning display of hypocrisy, Haaretz published an editorial the day after the US election declaring that Israelis could only be “jealous” of the American campaign, which enabled voters “to learn about the positions of Barack Obama and John McCain on virtually every issue. The two presented their plans for ending the crisis in Iraq and thwarting Iran’s acquisition of nuclear arms. They offered detailed positions on federal mortgage insurance, preventing home foreclosures, health insurance, fiscal policy, federal financing for research in the universities, wiretapping, carbon emissions, subsidies for solar and wind energy, gasoline taxes, abortion and more… This was a magnificent display of democracy at its best… a worthy model for emulation.”

Yet rather than trying to replicate it here by pressing candidates on the issues, Israel’s self-styled paper of record did the exact opposite. It filled several pages every day with trivialities such as the pub crawls on which MKs embarked in an effort to woo young voters, or Kadima’s ridiculous charge that Likud’s campaign slogan – “It’s too big for her” – was a chauvinist slur against Tzipi Livni rather than an assessment of her record.

But when Binyamin Netanyahu, who polls then showed as a shoo-in to be our next premier, laid out a detailed program for education reform last year, Haaretz deemed this so unimportant that it went unreported aside from one paragraph in an opinion column on the business pages.

And, needless to say, the tabloids were no better.

THIS BEHAVIOR virtually forced candidates to focus on trivialities rather than issues, because they need media exposure to reach the voters. And since they knew serious discussion of the issues would be ignored, while gimmicks and personal attacks would get them headlines, they had little choice but to opt for gimmicks.

The result was that many voters had no clue what the parties stood for, leading to surreal scenarios like the 12th-grader at a Tel Aviv high school who, moments before casting her ballot in a mock election – and a month before doing so in the real one – told a reporter: “[B]ecause I’m right-wing, I’m wavering between voting for Tzipi Livni [Kadima] and Ehud Barak [Labor]” – both of whom are left of center. That degree of ignorance is probably unusual. But I personally met far too many people who were only marginally less clueless.

Outgoing Kadima MK Isaac Ben-Israel accurately described the problem in an interview published seven weeks ago. “Is there anyone who knows what [Tourism Minister] Ruhama Avraham-Balila’s opinions are on the issues of security and the economy?” he demanded. “No one knows, because no one has bothered to ask. The newspapers write gossip and don’t write about fundamentals. They are preoccupied by the esoteric, the sensational and the piquant. They do not take an interest in achievements and content, but rather in politics and celebrity.” And the press thereby “corrupts politics in a fundamental way.”

IN FACT, it does so in two ways. First, democracy is supposed to enable voters to influence government policy by electing leaders who share their preferred policies. But when voters have no idea what the candidates’ policies actually are, they have no way to choose candidates who share their views. Thus when the press feeds us a steady diet of gossip and gimmick rather than information, it undermines a fundamental aspect of self-government.

Second, when politicians have to hone their policy positions in response to persistent media questioning, this forces them to actually develop clear positions. In contrast, when they know that what attracts media attention is gimmickry rather than policy, they and their staffs inevitably devote most of their time and effort to devising gimmicks rather than policy. Hence all too often, prime ministers enter office without coherent policies in place, leading to the shoot-from-the-hip style of governance that has hindered the country’s development for years.

Elections have thus repeatedly produced governments that a) fail to deal effectively with critical issues and b) enact policies opposed by the very people who voted for them. Both of these developments severely undermine public faith in democracy, leading to the worrying trends we have witnessed in recent years: low voter turnout, a growing “protest vote” for small parties with no chance of entering the Knesset, and the craving for a “strong leader” that propelled Avigdor Lieberman’s rise.

Thomas Jefferson once said that given a choice between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would prefer the latter, because “the basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right.”

But when the press neglects its duty to give people the information they need to elect leaders who in fact represent their opinions, it undermines this “basis of our governments,” and hence the democratic system as a whole.

And it thereby increases the likelihood that people will someday come to prefer “a government without newspapers” instead.

That Likud and Kadima are still nearly tied in the polls is astounding when you consider their respective leaders’ records. One, despite known flaws, has racked up several impressive successes in previous posts. The other has amassed an unbroken string of failures.

To understand the extent of Tzipi Livni’s failures, all you need to do is read her own words. Asked to describe her achievements in an interview in last Friday’s Haaretz, she began by repeatedly citing the 2005 disengagement from Gaza: “I enabled the disengagement, thanks to the Livni compromise,” which reconciled reluctant ministers to the plan. “I led the disengagement legislation and processes regarding the settlers… I led and advanced the idea of communal resettlement for the evacuees.”

The disengagement was supposed to enhance our security, prospects for peace and international goodwill. Instead, just as opponents predicted, it bolstered Hamas, since Palestinians perceived it as a victory for terror. Hamas consequently won the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections, depriving Israel of a competent negotiating partner. Livni has been negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas anyway, but since he cannot actually deliver on any agreement, this is the worst of all worlds: talks in which we make real concessions without any possibility of obtaining a quid pro quo.

Moreover, the volume of rocket fire on Israel more than tripled post-disengagement, as did the rockets’ range: Hamas can now hit Ashdod, Beersheba and Gedera. Indeed, the daily fire became so intolerable that Livni’s own government just waged a war in an effort (thus far unsuccessful) to suppress it. And that war, which the pullout necessitated, brought anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment to record heights.

Finally, adding insult to injury, Livni’s “legislation and processes” proved so cumbersome that more than three years later, not one settler who requested communal resettlement has yet moved into a permanent home. Indeed, most people consider disengagement such a failure that Kadima had to shelve its plan to replicate it in the West Bank.

LIVNI ALSO boasted of her role in the Second Lebanon War: “I created the idea of a diplomatic exit… I formulated [Security Council] Resolution 1701.” That resolution created an international force to patrol southern Lebanon and prevent Hizbullah from rearming. Yet under its aegis, Hizbullah has rearmed so effectively that it now has more than three times as many rockets as it did before the 2006 war.

On Iran’s nuclear program, Livni proclaimed: “Israel has acted and continues to act on the Iranian issue. We succeeded in getting the message across.” Indeed, the world got the message so well that it refused to impose any sanctions stiff enough to have an impact. Consequently, Iran now has 30 times as many working centrifuges as it did when Kadima took office in 2006, and intelligence estimates put it only months away from enough fuel for its first nuclear bomb.

Finally, when the interviewer accused her of being “in politics for 10 years without having chalked up genuine achievements,” she indignantly replied that she had served as director-general of the Government Companies Authority and held “six different ministerial portfolios,” including “justice minister, construction minister and absorption minister.” But aside from boasting of her role in the disengagement and her (completely ineffectual) “struggle with the Supreme Court” as justice minister, she declined to list any actual accomplishments in any of these positions. Possibly that is because she could not think of any. I certainly cannot.

In short, after 10 years in politics, the only “achievements” Livni could cite were utter disasters: the disengagement, Resolution 1701, the failed effort to halt Iran’s nuclear program. If these are her successes, I shudder to think what her failures would look like.

STILL, WAS not Binyamin Netanyahu just as bad? Popular memory might say so. But popular memory is wrong.

As prime minister in 1996-99, Netanyahu had two signal achievements. First, he slashed the rampant deficits inherited from Yitzhak Rabin, laying the groundwork for rapid economic growth in subsequent years. Second, he reduced the devastating Palestinian terror he inherited by a whopping 70 percent: Fatalities dropped from 211 in 1993-96 to 63 in 1996-99.

He also had significant achievements in other ministerial posts. As foreign minister, he was widely considered one of the most articulate spokesmen Israel ever had. And as finance minister, he crafted a recovery program that not only extricated the country from a deep recession, but gave it five straight years of 5 percent growth.

So why is he nevertheless remembered as a failure? One reason is character. For instance, despite correctly predicting every negative consequence of the disengagement, he lacked the courage to quit the government until it was too late to make any difference. That is a real concern and, under other circumstances, might be reason to vote against him.

But not when his rival is someone whose record shows that she cannot even tell the difference between good policies and bad – because that is the fundamental prerequisite for being able to implement good ones. Netanyahu, as his record shows, can tell the difference. And, as his record also shows, he therefore will implement some good policies, even if he lacks the courage to implement others. Livni, in contrast, will implement no good policies – because there is no way to implement good policy if you cannot identify it first.

The second reason, of course, is that voters repudiated Netanyahu once, in 1999. Unfortunately, people forget that this repudiation stemmed largely from his failure to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, which many still considered possible back then. Hence Ehud Barak was able to win by promising to do so. Today, most people realize that no prime minister will solve the conflict. The best any premier can do is successfully manage it – which Netanyahu did during his last term.

Like all Israelis, I would prefer a perfect premier. But in reality, the choices are Livni or Netanyahu. The former has an unbroken record of failure in every position she ever held. The latter, despite his flaws, has recorded substantial achievements in every position he ever held. To me, that is a no-brainer.

If anyone thought the recent Gaza operation showed that our leaders’ strategic judgment has improved, recent leaks to the press about their willingness to pay an even more extravagant price for Gilad Schalit following this operation should dispel that illusion.

Hamas wants Israel to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, in installments, in exchange for Schalit, including 350 particularly vicious killers – people directly responsible for murdering hundreds of Israelis – whom it specifically requested by name. Before the Gaza operation, the government had reportedly agreed to the overall number and up to 220 of the specific murderers on Hamas’s list, but was balking at the rest.

Now, it has reportedly offered to accede to even more of Hamas’ demands. Why? Because, our ministers claim, the severe blow dealt Hamas in the recent fighting significantly lessens the dangers inherent in such a deal.

Nothing could better demonstrate this government’s complete inability to think more than one day ahead. Because in fact, the opposite is true: Acceding to Hamas’s terms would instantly erase every one of the Gaza operation’s putative achievements.

First, on a purely tactical level, it would instantly restore Hamas’s fighting ranks to full strength. Nobody knows exactly how many Hamas operatives were killed in Gaza, but even the highest estimates do not exceed several hundred. Hence the mooted prisoner release would completely replace them.

Worse, it would replace them with far more skilled and experienced terrorists. Though the IDF killed a few high-level operatives in Gaza, most of the casualties were rank and file. In contrast, the prisoners Hamas is demanding by name are high-level planners, organizers, bomb-makers and operations experts. Hence in terms of operative capabilities, Hamas would actually emerge stronger than it was before the Gaza operation.

Moreover, statistics compiled by defense agencies indicate that roughly 50 percent of all terrorists released in previous prisoner exchanges resumed terrorist activity. Indeed, freed terrorists have been responsible for hundreds of deaths in recent years. There is no reason to believe the Schalit deal would be any different. Thus this deal would effectively sign death warrants for dozens.

OVER THE long run, however, worst of all is what it would do for Hamas’s prestige.

The Gaza operation’s impact on Palestinian attitudes toward Hamas remains unclear. Initial reports indicate that while there may have been some disenchantment in Gaza, the organization actually gained support in the West Bank, where its wildly inflated claims of its own heroism and Israel’s casualties, reported as fact by Al Jazeera, have apparently been widely believed. But that could change once the truth emerges.

The proposed Schalit deal, in contrast, would give Hamas an undeniably genuine achievement that no other terrorist group has ever come close to matching.

Even the infamous Jibril exchange, one of the most lopsided deals in the country’s history, traded 1,150 terrorists for three soldiers, or a ratio of 383:1. The Tannenbaum swap exchanged 435 terrorists for one drug dealer and three dead bodies. The Schalit deal’s proposed ratio is over 1,000:1 – almost three times the highest ratio ever previously accepted.

No rational person looking at that figure could fail to conclude that Hamas brought the IDF to its knees. And certainly, no Palestinian will.

Worse, the rival Fatah faction, our self-proclaimed partner for peace, has been demanding the return of all these prisoners for years without success. The conclusion would be obvious: Hamas has achieved not only what no other terrorist organization ever has, but also what no negotiation ever has.

As for the government’s claim that it can solve this problem by defining most of the freed prisoners as a “gesture to Mahmoud Abbas,” that would not fool a two year old – which is precisely why Hamas has reportedly consented to it. Every Palestinian will know who really secured these prisoners’ freedom.

Finally, these prisoners all have families and friends longing for their return. And in Palestinian eyes, their joy at reunion will do much to obscure any pain and anger at Hamas by those who lost loved ones during the Gaza operation.

For all these reasons, a deal on Hamas’s terms will turn it into the Palestinians’ unchallenged leader – the group that brought Israel to its knees and secured concessions no rival ever matched, either by negotiations or by force. And that would completely undo any success the Gaza operation may have had in weakening Hamas.

THERE ARE various creative proposals for pressuring Hamas over Schalit that the country has yet to try, and should. Here is one (which might require legislation): Select a large number of prisoners who would in any case be released in a few years, once they finish serving their terms. Announce that if Schalit is returned, they will be freed immediately – but otherwise, they will never go home again. Inform their families, publish their names in the Palestinian press, drop leaflets explaining the new policy. Warn that as time passes, more prisoners will join the list of those who will not go home until Schalit is freed. And then let their families and friends pressure Hamas. They can probably do it much better than we can. And there is certainly no injustice in it: Anyone who joins a terrorist organization knowingly risks imprisonment or even death; this is the price of his own choices.

But even if we had exhausted every other possibility, there is no justification for agreeing to Hamas’s terms. Hard as it is, making cost-benefit decisions is precisely what governments exist to do. For instance: Does rocket fire on the South justify a military operation that will certainly cost Israeli lives? Or are the strategic costs of a military response too high? One can argue about the wisdom of either option, but governments can and must make choices like this every day.

And that is precisely the kind of choice the government must make in Schalit’s case. A government is responsible for the welfare of the entire country, not that of any specific individual. And no one individual justifies the immense long-term strategic damage we would suffer by acceding to Hamas’s demands.

The recent Gaza operation left many well-meaning foreigners baffled by one question. As New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner put it: “How can a war that looks so awful… be supported by such a vast Israeli public?” Bronner’s article offered some correct answers: Hamas’ deliberate use of human shields, which makes civilian casualties inevitable; our conviction that our army nevertheless strives to avoid such casualties; Hamas’ commitment to our destruction.

However, there is also another factor. It is often termed “double standards,” but goes considerably deeper than that. Consider a few examples: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!” was the slogan shouted at a Dutch rally against the Gaza war last week. Similarly offensive slogans were shouted at rallies in other countries, which collectively drew hundreds of thousands of protesters.

Many Israelis have asked where all these protesters were while 6,000 Hamas mortar shells and rockets pounded the South over the last three years. But that is actually the wrong question. Hundreds of thousands worldwide also protested America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet would never have dreamed of protesting against Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. There is a known double standard among some Westerners whereby only Western actions merit condemnation, while non-Western thugs get a pass. This is outrageous and should be fought, but it is not unique to Israel.

NO ANTI-AMERICAN demonstration, however, ever featured protesters shouting “Americans to the gas!” Nor did anti-American demonstrators shout “we are all al-Qaida,” thereby implying support for the 9/11 attacks – whereas anti-Israel protesters routinely shout “we are all Hamas,” thereby expressing support for suicide bombings, shootings and rocket launchings that have killed hundreds of civilians.

Hence the underlying message of these demonstrations is not “we object to killing Palestinians,” but rather “we support killing Jews.” Worse, that message is not socially unacceptable: If it were, hundreds of thousands would not attend rallies where such slogans are chanted; these would be fringe affairs attracting a few dozen people at most.

And that is a major reason why Israelis and foreigners view Gaza differently: A world where publicly calling for killing Jews is socially acceptable is not one whose standards Israelis find morally persuasive.

International law

UN officials have lined up to demand that Israel be investigated for alleged war crimes in Gaza. First came UNRWA’s Gaza director, John Ging, then High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay and finally Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

IDF shells hit three UN facilities in Gaza, which might indeed be a war crime. Or, then again, it might not. It depends on whether Hamas was shooting from these facilities, whether they were targeted intentionally or hit accidentally, etc.

In contrast, there is no doubt about whether Hamas committed war crimes. Over the last three years, it deliberately fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells at civilians. Nor is there doubt about where to find the leaders responsible: International officials meet regularly with both Gazan Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and the Damascus-based head of Hamas’ political wing, Khaled Mashaal. Nor, finally, is there doubt that these leaders are responsible. When they approved a cease-fire last June, Hamas (though not other Palestinian groups) stopped shooting, proving that they control the military wing.

No UN official, however, has ever demanded a war crimes investigation against Hamas. The UN proclaims itself the standard-bearer of international law, and equality before the law is a fundamental principle. But to the UN, international law’s proscriptions seemingly apply only to Israel, while its protections apply only to its enemies.

This also explains why Israelis and foreigners view the war differently: A “law” applied so unequally is not one we find either legally or morally persuasive.

Jenin

In April 2002, the IDF launched a major counterterrorism operation in Jenin. To protect Palestinian civilians, it used ground troops rather than aerial bombing, in full knowledge that this would increase its own casualties. The final death toll, according to a subsequent UN investigation, was 52 Palestinians, more than half of them armed, and 23 soldiers. Not what one would normally call disproportionate.

For months, however, in complete disregard of the facts, the international media, the UN and human rights organizations accused the IDF of massacring hundreds of Palestinian civilians. The UN’s eventual correction was issued only four months later, by which time it attracted little attention. To this day, much of the world still believes Israel committed a massacre in Jenin.

Many of us concluded if we are going to be accused of massacre anyway, we might as well at least protect our soldiers. Hence soldiers in Gaza were told what other Western soldiers are: Avoid civilian casualties where possible, but use the force necessary to protect yourselves.

However, another lesson was also learned. Just because the international media, the UN and human rights organizations all say something does not mean it is true. In Gaza, these bodies have accused us of slaughtering hundreds of civilians, often deliberately, as well as other war crimes. The IDF, in contrast, says most of the dead were Hamas operatives and vehemently denies targeting civilians. Maybe this time, the world is right. But absent hard evidence, we will remain skeptical.

Other examples abound – like the fact that most of the countries condemning us have killed far more civilians in their own wars than Israel ever has. Or that none of the people who keep proclaiming that this country may defend its citizens, “but not like that,” has ever suggested any potentially effective measure that they would consider justified.

The bottom line, however, is this: We can support a war that looks awful to others because we start from different premises – that killing Jews is unacceptable, and this country has an obligation to prevent it; that we are entitled to use the same methods of self-defense as other countries; that international law must apply either to both sides or to neither; and that not every Palestinian accusation parroted by aid workers or journalists is necessarily true.

Granted, our critics claim to accept these premises as well. But their actions, as detailed above, speak far louder than words.

One surprising aspect of the current fighting has been the foreign press corps’ unusual honesty – its open admission that it has no intention of doing what ordinary people naively consider its job.

For years, print journalists have argued that print’s big advantage over television is that television can only show pictures out of context, whereas newspapers provide the context that enables readers to make sense of these pictures. It is a good argument and, indeed, the only possible one: If all consumers want are gory pictures, print cannot possibly compete. However, it creates certain expectations: Anyone who reads a prestige publication like The New York Times or The Economist expects to finish an article with a better understanding of the subject.

Israelis have long suspected that when it comes to this country, these expectations are misplaced. But until last week, I never saw foreign journalists openly admit it.

VETERAN NEW YORK TIMES correspondent Ethan Bronner broke the silence last Wednesday, in a report on the government’s refusal to let foreign journalists into Gaza. Buried in the 20th paragraph of a 22-paragraph story, he acknowledged: “Israel’s diplomats know that if journalists are given a choice between covering death and covering context, death wins.”

The word “know” is the giveaway. When journalists want to imply that a statement may be false, they use verbs like “claim,” “charge,” “believe” or “assert,” since claims, charges, beliefs and assertions are by definition unproven. But something “known” is a proven fact. And indeed, though Bronner denies an Israeli assertion earlier in the article that foreign journalists in Gaza are “subject to Hamas censorship or control,” he does not deny that they prefer death to context. Like the diplomats, he knows this to be true.

Then, the very next day, the same point was made by Gideon Lichfield, The Economist‘s Jerusalem bureau chief in 2005-08. Writing in Haaretz, he complained that Israelis keep trying to explain why their assault on Gaza is justified, but “nobody in the outside world is all that interested. From a foreign correspondent’s point of view, it makes for boring journalism.” In other words, foreign journalists have no interest in providing the context that would help readers understand why the operation was launched; that is “boring.”

When correspondents as senior as Bronner and Lichfield, representing publications as respected as the Times and the Economist, openly admit that they have no interest in providing context, one can readily understand why much of the world views the Gaza operation as an unprovoked killing spree.

And that is especially true when one considers what “context” foreign correspondents do provide – such as Lichfield’s blithe assertion that Israel “kills people because, at best, it simply doesn’t have any better ideas, and at worst, because some Israeli leader is trying to get the upper hand on one of his or her rivals.” He is absolutely right that “no amount of hasbara [public relations] can make that look good.”

After all, most of the world sees Israel only through the media’s eyes. If foreign correspondents have no interest in explaining context to their readers, preferring to tell them that it simply likes killing people, there is little we can do about it.

However, the country can and must radically rethink its media strategy. For decades, this strategy has been predicated on wooing the mainstream media, as the best way to reach large numbers of people at once. But if mainstream journalists have no interest in presenting our position, because that is “boring” when compared to blood and gore, then we need a different strategy.

FIRST, AS Mitchell Barak correctly argued in Sunday’s Jerusalem Post, the country urgently needs its own English-language television news station broadcasting 24/7. That would not only enable it to air its own view of events – that all-important “context” – during wartime; it would also provide a window onto the peacetime Israel that the mainstream media never shows: its vigorous democracy, diverse population, hi-tech innovation and all the other factors that make it an attractive, vibrant country despite its lousy neighborhood.

Second, it needs to make much greater use of alternative media, such as Internet blogs. Israel is fortunate in having immigrants fluent in numerous foreign languages, and many have already joined the PR war on a volunteer basis. However, this effort should be formalized: Not only should the government maintain its own blogs, but it should hire effective bloggers in various languages, either part- or full-time, just as newspapers hire columnists. That would enable these bloggers to tell its story on a regular basis, during war and peace alike, rather than only when they happen to have time.

Like newspaper columnists, paid bloggers must be allowed to express their views freely, regardless of the government’s positions, and they must represent the full spectrum of Zionist (though obviously not non-Zionist) opinion. That is less effective than coordinated media messaging, but the nature of the Internet requires it: While mainstream newspapers are typically read by people with widely varying opinions, blogs are read mainly by people who agree with the blogger’s views. Hence if Israel wants people of all political persuasions to have access to a Zionist viewpoint during wartime, it must provide blogs of all political persuasions.

Third, mainstream journalists’ needs and desires should be given lower priority. This country has always tried to provide maximum media accessibility because it needs the world to receive precisely what print journalists claim to provide: context. But if journalists admit that they have no intention of providing such context, there is no reason to sacrifice operational considerations to journalistic access.

The government is already implementing that conclusion in Gaza, barring all journalists from the Strip on the grounds that the army’s obligation to protect them would impede its freedom of action. And that should be standard practice for future military actions: Operational needs trump journalistic needs.

Clearly, mainstream journalists cannot simply be ignored. But by their own admission, they cannot be trusted to provide readers with the context needed to understand Israel’s actions. Finding alternatives ways of doing so must therefore be a priority for whatever government is elected next month.

Pop quiz: How many Israelis were killed by Palestinian terror in the intifada’s third year – the one that began in September 2002, six months after Operation Defensive Shield?

Answer: 240.

You read that right. In the year following the operation that, according to Israeli mythology, vanquished terror, 240 people were killed in terror attacks – one of the highest annual tolls for terrorism-related deaths in the country’s history.

Does that mean Defensive Shield was actually a failure? Not at all. The real Defensive Shield was every bit the dramatic turning point Israelis think it was. Unfortunately, the real operation has been obscured by the legend.

The 240 killed in the intifada’s third year nevertheless represented an enormous improvement – a 47 percent drop from the previous year’s 449 fatalities. Moreover, fatalities continued dropping by about 50 percent a year in subsequent years, hitting a low of eight just four years later. That is why Defensive Shield is justly remembered as a huge success: It was the start of the process that produced this achievement.

THE OPERATIVE word, however, is “start.” Defensive Shield was not, as legend has it, a magic bullet – a one-time operation that, by its end a few weeks later, had completely destroyed the terrorists’ capabilities and/or motivation, thereby allowing our troops to withdraw and us to live happily ever after.

The government may have hoped that would be the case; it withdrew the IDF once the operation ended. But that withdrawal was followed by June 2002, the second-worst month of the entire intifada, with 58 killed. Consequently, the army was sent back in. And this time, it never really left. The IDF controls the entire West Bank to this day, operating freely wherever and whenever it chooses.

And that is the real key to the subsequent steady decline in Palestinian terror. Defensive Shield was the turning point because that was when the IDF first reentered West Bank cities after an eight-year absence. But it was the army’s continuing presence that produced the achievement for which Defensive Shield alone is too often erroneously credited.

THERE ARE three reasons for this. First, no single operation can possibly eliminate all the terrorists’ capabilities. No matter how good our intelligence is, some key operatives will escape, some weapons caches will remain undetected, and so forth.

Second, as the intelligence agencies freely admit, their capabilities are curtailed in places we do not control, due to factors ranging from the difficulty in arranging face-to-face meetings (which the agencies say are critical to getting the most from informants) to the fact that there are fewer carrots and sticks to wield under such circumstances. Hence ongoing control over the West Bank is what enabled these agencies to progress from being repeatedly surprised by suicide bombings to receiving precise advance knowledge of most of them. This is also why, as the agencies themselves acknowledge, they have much better intelligence about the West Bank than about Gaza.

Finally, and most importantly, once the army withdraws, there is nothing to stop the terrorists from rearming and regrouping. That should be obvious to anyone who observed Hizbullah after the IDF left Lebanon in 2000 or Hamas after the IDF left Gaza in 2005: Both organizations exploited the IDF’s absence to import massive quantities of arms, recruit and train troops and dig fortifications. Nothing similar has happened in the West Bank because the IDF has been there continuously, enabling it to intercept arms deliveries and arrest new recruits.

It is that slow, step-by-step work over the course of years – gathering intelligence, carrying out raids and arrests – that gradually eroded the terrorists’ capabilities in the West Bank to the point where suicide bombings have become a distant memory. Indeed, just how essential that ongoing presence was became clear every time international pressure forced us to return a city to the Palestinian Authority: Each time, terrorist activity in that city quickly resumed, resulting in a deadly suicide bombing and the IDF’s return.

DOES THAT mean the IDF must remain eternally in any place from which Israel wishes to prevent attacks? Clearly not. There are no IDF troops in Jordan or Egypt, for instance, yet neither is there any cross-border terrorism.

Those countries, however, have governments that are willing and able to control their terrorists. Without such a government, there is no substitute for IDF control – because terrorists stop shooting only when forced to do so.

And that is precisely the problem in Gaza, where the terrorists are the government. The idea that Hamas will voluntarily halt terror is delusional. Nor is there any possibility of replacing it with a government that would. Even if the current IDF operation were aimed at toppling Hamas (which it is not), any Palestinian government that replaced it would lack the capability to suppress terror even if it had the will. The PA’s forces in Gaza are nonexistent, and its cadre of trained troops in the West Bank is insufficient for the job even in the unlikely event that they all agreed to relocate to the Strip.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, there are only two alternatives: Either we reoccupy Gaza or the rocket fire will eventually resume, even if the current operation produces a temporary lull. It would be nice if there were a third alternative, a one-time operation that would solve the problem once and for all. But in the real world, there are no magic bullets. And while the myth of Defensive Shield has unfortunately obscured the reality, the reality proves its worth day after day: Even as thousands of rockets and mortars have been fired from unoccupied Gaza over the last three years, not one has been fired from the occupied West Bank.

Reoccupying Gaza is clearly not cost-free, and reasonable people can disagree about whether the costs of the rocket fire justify the costs of reoccupation. But the debate must be based on facts, not myths. And that starts with understanding what Defensive Shield really was: not a one-time operation, but a full-scale reoccupation that is now six years old and counting.

A public relations campaign must accompany any military one nowadays, and the government has consequently undertaken various PR measures, from personal diplomacy to tours of Sderot for foreign journalists. All are perfectly reasonable steps. Yet the effort is marred by one fatal flaw: You cannot convince the world that Palestinian rocket fire justifies an assault that has killed almost 400 Palestinians when you have previously spent three years dismissing this fire as unimportant.

The Gaza operation would be a hard sell under any circumstances, because it is very difficult for people who have not experienced life under constant missile fire – namely, most of the world – to understand just how debilitating it is. They look at the statistics, see that six years of rocket and mortar attacks have killed relatively few people and think “no big deal.”

They cannot imagine what it is like to never have an unbroken night of sleep, since even on nights without rockets, the constant anticipation of an alert disrupts slumber; to never go to the supermarket or send your children out to play without fear; to see your ability to earn a living vanish as large corporations leave town and small businesses collapse for lack of customers, since fear of being caught outdoors by a rocket keeps people at home. Even if you brandish statistics that never make the foreign media – like the fact that in Sderot, 28 percent of adults and 30% of children suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, and more than 75% of children display some symptoms of post-traumatic stress – it makes little impression. Most people can imagine death, but they cannot imagine the slow erosion of life with a PTSD child who refuses to leave home for fear of rockets.

The problem is worse because non-Israelis think they do understand, as they, too, live with terror. They cannot grasp the qualitative difference between daily terror, such as that experienced by Sderot residents, and the sporadic terror that most countries know.

THE TRUTH is that there is a “tolerable” level of terror. If attacks occur only at long intervals, as is true in the West, people quickly return to normal, and fear of terror does not take over their lives. Only when terror becomes the norm rather than the exception do the debilitating effects set in. That is precisely why both Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 and the Iraqi surge five years later restored a sense of security and spurred economic revivals despite not eliminating terror: They reduced it from a daily occurrence to a “tolerable” level.

Inability to grasp the impact of daily terror does not necessarily reflect anti-Israel bias. The Bush administration staked its entire reputation on the outcome of the Iraq war, yet still took four years to realize that nothing would improve in Iraq until terror was reduced to a level that enabled people to leave their houses without fear. Until then, it had accepted the Western dogma that economic development was the key to reducing terrorism. Never having experienced the debilitating effects of daily terror themselves, American officials simply could not understand that in fact, the opposite was true. And despite the evidence of the surge and Defensive Shield, most Westerners still do not.

Explaining why rocket fire from Gaza justifies the current punishing assault would therefore require a major reeducation campaign regarding the difference between constant and sporadic terror and the debilitating effects that make the former intolerable. And major reeducation campaigns cannot be accomplished overnight; they require a massive investment of resources over a long period.

Instead of conducting such a campaign, however, our government has spent the last three years arguing, in both word and deed, that the rocket fire is in fact “no big deal.” This began with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s plan to unilaterally evacuate the West Bank, which he abandoned only because of the Second Lebanon War. If the threefold increase in rocket fire that followed disengagement from Gaza was insufficient reason to eschew another unilateral pullout, such fire is clearly no big deal.

Repeated military operations that were declared successes even though daily rocket and mortar fire continued (albeit at a lower level) after they ended, and two truces that were similarly declared successes even though almost daily fire continued (again at a lower level) throughout them, also sent the message that such fire is no big deal.

The government’s opposition to reinforcing Gaza-area schools and homes – it agreed to the former only under court order, and first allocated funds for the latter, following intense public pressure, just last month – similarly sent the message that people should be able to live with rocket fire just fine.

And the message was reinforced verbally. Just last January, Olmert told the Knesset that there is “no need to get all fired up” about the rockets, and a major military operation in Gaza would be “out of proportion to the pressures we face.” Public Security Minister Avi Dichter declared in July 2006 that disengagement was a success despite the rocket attacks, because “10 months without any Israeli being killed” from Gaza “is an extraordinary achievement”; that same month, former premier Ariel Sharon’s chief strategist, Dov Weisglass, said the rockets do not detract from disengagement’s success, because “the physical damage they do is not great.” In short, daily rocket fire is unimportant as long as nobody gets killed.

One can understand why the government adopted this line. First, this is basically the same government that executed the disengagement, so if rocket fire is a big deal, the fact that it more than tripled following the pullout means the government’s flagship policy was a failure. Second, the government has proved unable to stop this fire despite several military operations and two truces, so admitting that rockets are a problem means admitting it has failed on the security front.

But the bottom line is that the government has spent three years telling the world that rocket fire does not matter. And reversing this perception will require a concerted effort lasting for years. No short-term PR blitz will suffice.