The university students’ 41-day strike, which ended last week, may seem unrelated to rocket barrages on Sderot. Yet in fact, it does much to explain the ongoing national indifference to Sderot’s sufferings.

The students were protesting the establishment of a public committee on reforming higher education. The Shochat Committee is widely expected to recommend tuition hikes, whereas the strikers want tuition lowered.

As a pretext for a strike, this was farcical. Tuition at public institutions is currently very low, at NIS 8,383 last year (about $2,100), and the Shochat Committee is reportedly considering only a modest increase, coupled with a subsidized student loan program to aid the needy.

If the strikers truly wanted affordable education for all, the Shochat proposal trumps their idea of slashing tuition to about NIS 5,000. Currently, financial aid is available only to the neediest, whereas the student loan program would be open to everyone. Cutting tuition to NIS 5,000, in contrast, would reduce the universities’ income by more than the entire existing financial aid budget – leaving no money at all for the truly needy, who cannot afford even that sum.

Thus what the strikers were in fact proposing was that those who could easily afford higher tuition be subsidized at the expense of the less well-off.

Even more outrageous, however, a university education significantly increases earning power. Indeed, even at double today’s tuition, a standard three-year degree would pay for itself in just over a year: The difference between a job paying the average wage (about NIS 7,500 a month) and one paying minimum wage (NIS 3,710) is some NIS 45,500 a year. Thus the strikers were effectively demanding bigger government subsidies for their own entree into high-paying jobs, at the expense of funding for other programs ranging from bomb shelters to welfare for the truly poor.

And when our “best and brightest” are that self-centered, is Sderot’s abandonment truly surprising?

THEIR SELF-INDULGENCE, however, was made possible by the government and universities. A credible threat to cancel the semester would have ended the strike quickly. But university heads repeatedly backtracked on their half-hearted threats, while the government, by agreeing to negotiate with the strikers, signaled that it would not support such a measure. Thus the students could strike in comfort, knowing that the costs would be borne by everyone except themselves.

And indeed, they were. The government and universities pledged that the 41 days of missed classes would be made up, so the strikers will not suffer at all. But lecturers will have to curtail or cancel their summer sabbaticals, since the semester will be extended. Colleges will face an estimated NIS 20 million in additional expenditures, as external lecturers will have to be paid for extra weeks of work; either the government will finance this outlay, at the expense of other programs, or colleges will have to cut costs elsewhere – for instance, by firing janitorial workers who desperately need their jobs. Companies that eventually hire the strikers will receive less knowledgeable workers, since to avoid prolonging the semester excessively the universities agreed to pare down the syllabus. And students who depend on summer jobs to finance their tuition (many of whom opposed the strike) will see their earning period slashed by the extended semester, leaving some unable to finance next year’s fees.

BUT IF our “best and brightest” in government and academe have no qualms about making the innocent suffer for the strikers’ convenience, is the decision to let Sderot suffer rather than inconvenience other Israelis truly surprising?

The agreement that ended the strike also sabotaged the Shochat Committee reforms in advance. While the government refused to give students a veto over tuition hikes, it did agree to negotiate with them over the Shochat proposals once they are submitted. At best, this means a lengthy delay in implementing the proposals; at worst, the talks will produce a “compromise” stripped of any real reforms.

Moreover, unless the government folds instantly, the negotiations will certainly produce another student strike as a pressure tactic. Since the current strike cost the strikers nothing and produced substantial gains (aside from negotiations, the government pledged NIS 248 million for various student demands), student leaders have every reason to repeat it.

Thus the government effectively sacrificed the education system’s long-term interests for short-term convenience. Given that, is its willingness to do the same on the far more complex issue of Sderot really surprising?

FINALLY, there were the strikers’ excesses. Student demonstrators repeatedly blocked major roads, including the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway; clashed with policemen and disrupted classes, often by terrorizing students who tried to attend them. This should sound familiar: Disengagement opponents also illegally blocked roads, clashed with policemen and tried to disrupt pullout preparations.

But cabinet ministers and media pundits pilloried disengagement opponents, even accusing them of endangering democracy, while law enforcement agencies conducted mass arrests and prosecutions. In contrast, student strikers’ identical actions were condoned and even applauded. No cabinet minister denounced their hooliganism; the media were almost universally sympathetic; and few students were arrested, of whom none has been indicted.

IF SUCH behavior is ever justified, the anti-disengagement protests were far more so than the student strike: They were about a serious security threat and the homes and livelihoods of thousands of people, not increased subsidies for the upper classes. The very different treatment accorded these two sets of protesters thus demonstrates an indefensible double standard – one for those favored by our governmental and media elites, and another for those not so favored. Clearly, nothing could be more deadly to the social cohesion Israel needs to face the challenges ahead. But since Sderot is indubitably not part of the favored elite, is its abandonment by those who would never tolerate missiles on Tel Aviv really surprising?

Contemptible as the students’ behavior was, self-interest is at least an understandable motive. But the government, university and media elites who indulged their selfishness at others’ expense have no such excuse: They are supposed to take a broader view. Their evident inability to do so makes one wonder just how valuable a university education is after all.

As Hamas resumed rocket barrages on Israel last week, Israeli Arab leaders fired another salvo in their own war against the country. Their methods are different, but the goal is unabashedly the same: eliminating the “Zionist entity.”

The Haifa Declaration, published last Monday by some 50 intellectuals and political activists, is the fourth and final document in a series outlining Israeli Arab leaders’ vision of what Israel should be. The others were the Mossawa Center’s 10 Points, the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee’s Future Vision and Adalah’s Democratic Constitution. Together, these documents’ drafters comprise virtually the entire political, intellectual and civil society leadership of the Israeli Arab community, excluding the Islamic Movement. And their almost identical prescriptions leave no doubt about their common goal.

The Haifa Declaration, unusually, tries to conceal this goal by stating that should Israel accept its demands, the Arabs would in turn recognize the “Israeli Jewish people’s” right to self-determination. However, its demands make a mockery of that promise.

The main demands are as follows: 1. Establishing a Palestinian state – whose residents would then be given the right to relocate to Israel (and vice versa). 2. Letting 4.4 million descendants of Palestinian refugees “return” to Israel. 3. Repealing the Law of Return, which entitles Jews worldwide to immigrate to Israel. 4. Making Israel a “state based on equality between the two national groups.” 5. Giving Israeli Arabs veto power over issues that affect them.

Some of these are mutually contradictory: If, for instance, millions of Palestinians indeed moved to Israel, there would be no need for an Arab veto; they would become the majority, and no decision would pass without their consent in any case.

What all have in common, however, is emptying the Jewish people’s “right to self-determination” of any content.

The first two would accomplish this by making the Jews a minority in their own country, thereby eliminating their ability to control national decision-making. That negates the very essence of self-determination: a group’s right to govern itself.

The third has a dual goal: facilitating Arab efforts to achieve majority status and destroying Israel’s character as the Jewish national home. After all, a national home is precisely where someone tired of minority status elsewhere can go to enjoy national self-determination. That is why even liberal democracies such as Germany, Finland, Ireland and Poland have fast-track immigration procedures for members of the dominant national group. Under the Haifa Declaration, Palestinians living abroad could move either to the Palestinian state or the new binational Israel. Jews living abroad would be able to do neither.

Numbers four and five seek to curtail Jewish self-determination even should Jews remain a majority here, by making Israel binational (i.e. “based on equality between the two national groups”) and giving the Arab minority veto rights over decisions that affect them. Similar arrangements do exist elsewhere, though usually only where competing ethnic groups are closer in size, and such arrangements obviously limit each group’s ability to govern itself. A binational Israel, however, would eviscerate Jewish self-government, affecting everything from defense policy to school curricula.

THIS PRINCIPLE would, for instance, enable Israeli Arabs to veto any military response to terror attacks on Jews, as this community views residents of all the surrounding countries as kinsmen and therefore considers itself negatively affected by military action against them. That would eliminate a crucial element of self-determination: the right to self-defense.

Similarly, the document explicitly requires Israel to acknowledge full responsibility for “the Nakba” (the 1948 refugee crisis) and “the occupation,” and “acknowledging” obviously precludes educating one’s children to the contrary. Thus schools would be barred from teaching about Arab responsibility for the refugee crisis – the Arabs’ rejection of the 1947 Partition Plan, which would have created a Palestinian state, and the subsequent attack on nascent Israel by five Arab armies, sparking a war in which some 600,000 Arabs fled – or for the “occupation,” which began when Israel defeated three Arab armies that massed on its borders in 1967 with the declared intention of destroying it. Jewish schools in Israel would in fact have less control over curricula than Jewish schools in America and Europe.

In short, for all the lip service about Jewish self-determination, the document essentially proposes two Palestinian national homelands (the Palestinian state and the binational or Palestinian-majority “Israel”) and no Jewish one.

What makes this document particularly chilling is that it undoubtedly represents the most liberal component of Israeli Arab society: For instance, it explicitly declares that women are oppressed within Arab society and demands that this stop; it even unequivocally condemns “family honor” killings. But if even the most liberal Israeli Arabs refuse to accept a Jewish state, what hope is there for coexistence?

Ironically, this declaration and its predecessors were produced with funding from European and Jewish groups that seek to promote coexistence. The Haifa document was initiated by the Mada al-Carmel organization, whose donors include a Canadian government foundation and an American Jewish group, the New Israel Fund (NIF). The Mossawa Center’s donors include the European Commission, the German government, two European nonprofits and two Jewish organizations, including NIF. Adalah’s donors include the European Commission, the Swiss government, several European nonprofits and at least two Jewish groups, again including NIF. Yet by funding such projects, far from promoting coexistence, they are promoting an Israeli Arab campaign to eliminate the Jewish state – thereby convincing many Israeli Jews that coexistence is impossible.

Equally ironically, these same Israeli Arab leaders complain constantly about being called a “fifth column,” proposals to “transfer” their towns to a Palestinian state and polls showing that many Israeli Jews view Israeli Arabs as a security and demographic threat. But when they openly declare that their goal is eradicating the Jewish state, the only surprise is that such phenomena are not more widespread.

Israeli Arab leaders, and their Jewish and European donors, should understand one thing: Israel’s Jewish majority will never willingly concede its national home. Thus by encouraging aspirations to destroy the Jewish state rather than encouraging acceptance of it, they are sowing the seeds not of coexistence, but of civil war.

Nine years after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, the Northern Irish peace process successfully concluded last Tuesday with the formation of a power-sharing government comprised of once implacable foes, each the most hardline party in its respective camp: the Democratic Unionists for the Protestants, and Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, for the Catholics.

The Israeli-Palestinian process, in contrast, is nowhere near a resolution, despite having begun five years earlier; and in many respects, the conflict has worsened markedly. Yet the starting conditions in Northern Ireland were scarcely more promising. There, too, both sides claimed the same land: The Unionists wanted it to remain part of Britain, while Sinn Fein wanted it annexed to Ireland. And there, too, religious differences – centuries of Catholic-Protestant strife – exacerbated the conflict. Why, then, did the Irish process succeed while the Israeli-Palestinian process failed?

Two American diplomats involved in the former, Richard Haass and George Mitchell, described the reasons for its success in a column in last Thursday’s International Herald Tribune. And, unsurprisingly, it turns out that the Israeli-Palestinian process violated almost every one of these rules.

First, said Haass and Mitchell, while preconditions for talks should be kept to a minimum, it “was right to make a cease-fire a prerequisite. Killing and talking do not go hand in hand.” And in Northern Ireland, this happened: The IRA declared a cease-fire in 1997 and largely honored it, making the ensuing progress possible.

But while the PLO also declared a cease-fire, in 1993, this truce was never honored. In the first two and a half years after the Oslo Accord was signed, Palestinian terrorists killed more Israelis than during the entire preceding decade; in 2000-2004, they killed more Israelis than in the entire preceding 53 years. Unsurprisingly, this soured Israelis’ enthusiasm for further concessions.

So why did the IRA cease-fire hold while the Palestinian cease-fire evaporated? Again, the Haass-Mitchell guidelines provide the answer: “Sanctions should be introduced when there is backsliding. In the case of Northern Ireland, it meant public criticism, stopping diplomatic contacts, the suspension of local institutions.

There must be a clear price for unacceptable actions.” And in Northern Ireland, there was.

Even though the IRA observed the cease-fire, power-sharing governments were repeatedly suspended and/or negotiations frozen over IRA actions that cast doubt on its long-term commitment to peace. This happened, for instance, in 2001, over the IRA’s failure to decommission its arms, and in 2002, when evidence mounted that it was gathering intelligence on potential targets and raising funds through criminal activity, neither of which would be necessary unless it contemplated renewed violence. The sanctions were supported by all the international mediators (London, Dublin and Washington). And they worked: Months after the 2001 suspension, for instance, the IRA finally started decommissioning.

IN CONTRAST, far worse Palestinian violations – not mere preparations, but actual attacks that killed 1,386 Israelis in the last 14 years – incurred no sanctions at all. Indeed, the opposite occurred: Palestinian violence sparked increased international pressure on Israel to appease the Palestinians through additional concessions. Thus despite the upsurge in terror that followed Israel’s initial transfer of territory to Palestinian rule in 1994 (i.e. Israeli compliance followed by Palestinian noncompliance), Israel was pressured into signing three further agreements requiring additional territorial concessions, in 1995, 1997 and 1998.

The same occurred when, in 2000, the Palestinians responded to Israel’s offer of statehood in most of the territories, including parts of east Jerusalem, not with a counteroffer, but with a terrorist war that killed 1,130 Israelis in the ensuing seven years: Far from sanctioning the Palestinians, the international community pressured Israel to resume talks and make additional concessions; this pressure ultimately produced Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza. Even Washington’s new benchmark proposal demands Israeli concessions before Palestinian progress on terrorism.

Thus while the IRA learned that abandoning terror was essential for progress, the Palestinians were taught that terror is no impediment to further Israeli concessions. So what incentive did they have to abandon it?

The Haass-Mitchell program also mandates consistency among mediators: “British, Irish and American policymakers were consistent in what they required and in what they promised. They did not allow themselves to be played off one against the other. Their unity also reinforced the message that there was no alternative to giving up violence.”

In the Israeli-Palestinian process, however, the Palestinians have repeatedly succeeded in playing the US and the European Union off against each other. When the US halted direct aid to the Palestinian Authority over the intifada, for instance, the EU responded by substantially increasing aid to the PA. When President George Bush demanded in 2002 that the Palestinians eschew terror in exchange for further progress, the EU successfully pressured him to backtrack. Even the brief united front against the PA’s Hamas government is crumbling, with several European countries urging a resumption of diplomatic ties and direct aid to the PA. Thus even during rare US efforts to enforce Palestinian compliance, the Palestinians could count on the EU to shelter them.

Finally, Haass and Mitchell noted, leaders must be able to “survive their compromises,” which requires “preparing the public for what can and cannot be achieved.”

Israeli leaders have done exactly that since 1993, by repeatedly declaring that any deal will require “painful” territorial concessions, including in Jerusalem. Consequently, most Israelis now support such concessions, whereas in 1993, most opposed them.

In contrast, no Palestinian leader has ever publicly declared, for instance, that a deal will require forfeiting the “right of return.”

Consequently, polls still show an overwhelming majority of Palestinians opposing this concession; hence no Palestinian leader could currently make it.

The Northern Irish peace process has brought its participants both peace and prosperity. The Israeli-Palestinian process has brought neither.

The obvious conclusion is that the dysfunctional paradigm governing the latter should be replaced by the successful model used in the former.

Unfortunately, there is no sign that the international community is willing to do so. One can therefore confidently predict that the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” will continue generating bloodshed for many years to come.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not purposely trying to destroy all of Israel’s hard-won security gains of the last five years. But if she were, she could hardly have improved on her new benchmark proposal. The proposal comprises two parallel sets of “benchmarks”: steps (mainly Israeli) to increase Palestinian freedom of movement, and steps (mainly Palestinian) to combat Palestinian terror. However, it does not make either track conditional on the other. Thus should Israel accept the proposal, it would be pledging to fulfill its own side of the bargain regardless of whether the Palestinians honored theirs. And since increased freedom of movement for Palestinians includes increased freedom of movement for terrorists, that essentially means an Israeli pledge to facilitate terrorist operations even if the Palestinian Authority makes no compensatory effort to thwart such operations.

Indeed, the document explicitly requires Israel to dismantle many security precautions prior to the relevant PA security actions. For instance, it requires full deployment of a revamped PA security service in Gaza only by the end of 2007; yet Israel would have to start allowing regular convoys between Gaza and the West Bank on July 1. Thus six months before PA forces are even in position to combat Gazan terror, Israel would be required to facilitate the export of this terror to the West Bank.

AND SOMETIMES there is no parallel demand of the PA at all. For instance, the document requires Israel to remove various West Bank checkpoints on June 1 and June 15. Yet it mandates no Palestinian counterterrorism efforts in the West Bank; such efforts are required only in Gaza. Israel would thus be facilitating terrorist movement in the West Bank without any recompense in the form of improved Palestinian counterterrorism.

This lack of reciprocity would not matter if the benchmarks were all as innocuous as creating a Web site to provide information on the operating hours of border crossings (No. 6) or establishing express lanes for trucks carrying fresh produce at the Karni checkpoint (No. 11). However, several of them strike at the heart of the security mechanisms that have dramatically reduced Israeli casualties over the last five years.

One of these is the removal of army checkpoints, including around terrorist hotbeds such as Nablus. This has already been tried countless times – and each time terrorists exploited their new freedom of movement to launch a successful attack from the area in question. Put bluntly, absent dramatic Palestinian action against terrorism, removing checkpoints is a proven recipe for producing dead Israelis.

Rice’s proposal, however, goes far beyond the limited experiments of the past, demanding the simultaneous removal of dozens of checkpoints throughout the West Bank. It would therefore likely produce even more mayhem than did previous such efforts.

FAR WORSE, however, is the proposal for regular passenger and cargo convoys between Gaza and the West Bank. The document does not discuss security arrangements for these convoys, but every previous incarnation of this proposal has assumed that Israel would either not conduct security checks at all, or would at most conduct superficial checks that would cause minimal delays; the PA would bear primary responsibility for ensuring that no terrorists or weapons were smuggled from Gaza to the West Bank.

Indeed, this is essential both to the proposal’s practical goal (freedom of movement between Gaza and the West Bank, meaning without lengthy delays caused by exhaustive Israeli security checks) and its ideological goal: demonstrating that Gaza and the West Bank are a unified entity under Palestinian sovereignty.

Given that hitherto, however, the PA has done zilch to combat anti-Israel terror, there is no reason to believe that it would in fact keep the convoys free of arms and terrorists. And for Israel, this is literally a life-and-death issue: Since Gazan terrorist cells have better weaponry and more expertise (no West Bank cell, for instance, has yet succeeded in launching Kassam rockets), while West Bank cells have better access to Israel (which is why most suicide bombings inside Israel originate from there), a flow of Gazan know-how and equipment into the West Bank would significantly upgrade the terrorist threat.

Indeed, the threat posed by these convoys is even greater now than it was 18 months ago, when Rice last tried to browbeat Israel into allowing them – because Gaza terrorists have utilized this time to import massive quantities of weaponry, much of it far more sophisticated than what they had in November 2005.

Then, the main fear was the transfer of Kassam rockets and technology, which would enable West Bank terror cells to subject Jerusalem and Kfar Saba to the same daily bombardments that Sderot suffers. And that was certainly reason enough to veto the convoys. But the materiel that has since entered Gaza ranges from some 30 tons of explosives to the latest antitank rockets, the kind Hizbullah used so successfully against Israeli troops last summer. Were that kind of weaponry to enter the West Bank, the threat to Israel would obviously be even greater.

NOR IS there any doubt that Gazan terrorists would make the effort. Israeli intelligence agencies have long warned of the terrorist organizations’ feverish preparations for war. But in an astonishing report in Sunday’s Haaretz, veteran Arab affairs correspondent Danny Rubinstein cited Palestinian acquaintances in Gaza as saying that these intelligence reports significantly understate the scope of the preparations, which include massive arms smuggling and recruiting and training hundreds of additional “troops.” Given a chance, the terrorists would certainly launch a similar build-up in the West Bank in order to force Israel into a two-front war.

Indeed, Hamas publicly rejected the benchmark proposal last week precisely because the organization is “preparing for battle,” to quote one of its leaders, Khaled Mashaal. Why should Israel facilitate this effort?

For Rice, desperate to buy Arab and European support on Iraq with “progress” on the Israeli-Palestinian front, higher Israeli casualties may well be a price worth paying. But no responsible Israeli government could concur.

The only proper response to Rice’s proposal can thus be summed up in one word: No.

The events of the past two weeks alone are enough to understand why many people thought that this year’s Independence Day took place under a cloud.

Finance Minister Abraham Hirchson suspended himself due to a criminal investigation for embezzlement; the state comptroller published a blistering report about Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s influence-peddling in his former role as industry minister; the attorney-general considered opening two additional criminal cases against Olmert; the Knesset extended President Moshe Katsav’s leave due to a draft indictment for rape; and the Winograd Committee published its damning interim report on the failures of last summer’s Lebanon War.

Nor was the picture brighter on the foreign affairs front. Hamas, the senior partner in the Palestinian Authority’s new government, celebrated our independence with a massive barrage of rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel, for which it formally claimed credit. Yet even this open avowal of its ongoing commitment to terrorism was insufficient to, for instance, cause Switzerland to cancel a planned state visit by PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

INDEED – due mainly to our own government’s continued silence – the world has come to view bombarding Israeli towns with missiles as unexceptionable behavior. This attitude was epitomized by an Associated Press report on the Independence Day barrage: After duly noting that Palestinians have fired 230 rockets at southern Israel in the five months since the Gaza cease-fire was declared (down from 600 in the previous five months), it concluded that the truce “has largely held.”

In other words, daily rocket launches at civilian centers are perfectly consistent with a truce.

And farther afield, Iran’s nuclear program not only continues apace, but the international community appears to be backtracking on its already minimal efforts to halt it: According to another AP report, since Iran has remained adamant, the six powers leading these efforts are considering dropping their demand that it abandon its uranium enrichment program – or as one diplomat put it, they are weighing a “new definition of enrichment” that would enable Iran to keep some of its program.

Even the US is not unequivocally opposed to this idea; an American official told AP: “We purposely left open the possibility that direct talks could happen by being a little less committed to the requirements” – namely, the UN Security Council’s repeated demand that Iran freeze enrichment.

GIVEN ALL this, why did so many Israelis nevertheless celebrate? The answer, I think, lies in one of the most awe-inspiring developments of the past six years of fighting: the surprising number of Israelis who have responded to one of life’s worst tragedies – the death of a child in a terror attack or military action – with an impulse to make the world a better place.

After 13-year-old Koby Mandell was bludgeoned to death by terrorists in 2001, for instance, his parents decided to set up a foundation to help other victims of terror. Today, the Koby Mandell Foundation runs a variety of programs, including a summer camp for the siblings of terror victims, who are often traumatized by their brother’s or sister’s murder, and a big brother/big sister program in which specially trained counselors work with these traumatized youngsters on an ongoing basis.

After 15-year-old Malki Roth was murdered in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem that same year, her parents established a foundation to help families care for special-needs children at home. The Malki Foundation provides free long-term loans of equipment and helps finance therapy. It was inspired by Malki’s devotion to her own severely disabled sister.

WHEN BENJI Hillman was killed in combat in Lebanon last summer, his parents decided to memorialize him by establishing a home for lone soldiers, where soldiers without family in Israel can stay during furloughs and be fed, get their laundry done and receive other services that their families are not there to supply. The Hillmans have thus far raised about half the funds needed to open the home.

And after Jonathan Einhorn fell in Lebanon last summer his parents decided to use the compensation money they will receive from the government to build a public garden of native Israeli plant life: a place of beauty that everyone will be able to enjoy, which will memorialize their son’s love of the land.

This response to grief – and there are numerous similar examples – is particularly noteworthy when contrasted with a phenomenon unknown among Israelis, but not uncommon on the Palestinian side: parents who respond to a child’s death by publicly urging their other children to court similar deaths.

After her 17-year-old son Muhammad was killed in the process of murdering five Israeli teens in 2002, for instance, Um Nidal Farahat of Gaza proudly told a Saudi newspaper that she had discussed the attack with him in advance and even posed for keepsake photos, and “as a mother, I reinforced this love of martyrdom in the mind of Mohammad and of all my sons.”

Similarly, after suicide bomber Said Khutari murdered 21 Israelis at a Tel Aviv discotheque in 2001, his father Hassan declared: “I was very happy when I heard that it was my son who carried out the attack,” and added that he would be proud to have all his other sons be suicide bombers as well.

IN THE biblical book of Deuteronomy, Moses lays down a challenge from God to the Jewish people: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: Therefore, choose life.”

People like Um Nidal Farahat and Hassan Khutari have chosen death. But Israelis, as epitomized by people like the Mandells, Roths, Hillmans and Einhorns, have overwhelmingly chosen life.

For all the many things that Israelis have gotten wrong, we have gotten this one big thing right. That is indeed sufficient reason to celebrate on Independence Day. And it is ultimately why, for all our problems, I believe that Israelis will still be celebrating Independence Day for many years to come.

Imagine a country where unelected officials could bar members of parliament from asking questions or even prevent parliament from meeting altogether. To most people, this would evoke images of totalitarian states. Yet it is precisely what two of Israel’s top legal officials sought to do last week.

The story began when State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss acceded to a request by Knesset State Control Committee Chairman Zevulun Orlev to brief the committee on the main findings of his seven-month inquiry into the handling of the home front during last summer’s Lebanon war. The comptroller’s final report will not be out for another few months, as he is awaiting responses from various government agencies to the 600-page draft that he completed last week. But Orlev argued that since army intelligence believes another war is possible as early as this summer, the country cannot afford to wait another few months: It must begin correcting the problems now.

The army then petitioned the High Court of Justice against the planned briefing, arguing that Lindenstrauss has no right to present his findings before the individuals and institutions he criticizes have had a chance to respond. In response, Lindenstrauss and Orlev agreed to confine the briefing to the comptroller’s factual findings about the problems and his recommendations for correcting them; no specific individuals would even be mentioned.

That seemed like a fair compromise: It would give the committee the information it needed to start addressing the problems without compromising any individual’s right to a fair hearing. But the army rejected it, demanding that Lindenstrauss be barred from giving the committee any information at all. And, incredibly, both Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz and Knesset Legal Adviser Nurit Elstein backed this position.

THEIR ARGUMENTS were surreal. Mazuz declared that while the State Comptroller Law authorizes the committee to question the comptroller about his “activities,” this should be interpreted as meaning only the procedural steps that Lindenstrauss has taken to pursue his inquiry – not his findings or recommendations. In other words, the Knesset’s right to obtain information from a senior government official is confined to procedural trivialities; it has no right to obtain the substantive information necessary to carry out its parliamentary duties.

This interpretation would gut the accountability provision of the Basic Law: The State Comptroller, which makes the comptroller “accountable only to the Knesset”: If the Knesset cannot even obtain information from him, accountability cannot exist. Far more importantly, however, depriving the Knesset of the ability to obtain substantive information about the government makes a mockery of one of the legislature’s principal roles in any democracy: overseeing the executive. That role is enshrined in two other Basic Laws – The Knesset and The Government – which broadly authorize the house or its committees to summon any minister or civil servant and obtain “information upon request” (to quote the latter).

YET IF Mazuz’s position was problematic, Elstein’s was even more outrageous. Not content with trying to restrict Knesset members’ right to ask questions in parliament, she urged the court to bar the committee from meeting altogether, lest information about Lindenstrauss’s findings accidentally slip out even during a briefing on his procedural activities.

Allowing the judiciary to bar the legislature from meeting would clearly destroy the concept of legislative independence, and the court quite properly rejected this request at last week’s hearing. But what made the request, if possible, even more outrageous was that Elstein submitted it, as she told the court, because Orlev ignored her own order that he cancel the meeting. In other words, she was seriously proposing that she, an unelected official, should have the right to decide when and on what subjects a parliamentary committee may meet, and that her decrees should be enforceable in court.

Equally galling was her dereliction of her own duty. Mazuz at least had the excuse of an unresolvable conflict of interests: Both the army and the comptroller are government agencies, so he was technically responsible for representing both – something that no private law firm with even a modicum of professional ethics would agree to do.

Elstein, however, had no such conflict of interests: Her job, as defined by law, is explicitly and solely to represent the Knesset. Indeed, the post was created precisely to eliminate the conflict of interests inherent in the former situation, in which the attorney-general represented both the executive and the legislature, even when they were at loggerheads. Yet instead of defending the State Control Committee’s right to hold meetings on an issue of vital national importance – home front defense – and obtain the information it needs to make these meetings productive, she urged the court to bar the committee from fulfilling this core legislative function. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant breach of her fiduciary duties.

While the court refused to restrict either the committee’s right to meet or its members’ right to ask questions, it is still considering restricting the comptroller’s right to answer these questions. That, of course, would produce the same result: The committee would be barred from obtaining vital information on an issue of national importance. And until the court issues its ruling, Lindenstrauss has promised to brief the panel only on his procedural activities – turning last week’s committee session into a pointless farce.

But regardless of how the court rules, the Knesset will be left with the problem of Mazuz and Elstein: namely, the fact that the government’s two top lawyers believe that their job is not to represent their “clients” – the comptroller and the Knesset, respectively – but to bar the legislature from receiving information that it needs to do its job properly. That is clearly untenable, and can only be fixed by legislation. The house must amend the relevant laws to clearly state that these officials’ job is not to dictate to their clients, but to advise and represent them. And it must specify that if either feels himself incapable of representing his client’s position, his only option is the one that legal ethics impose on private-sector lawyers: resigning his post.

It has been a bad month for advocates of negotiations with terrorists: Three different peace initiatives in three different countries have collapsed bloodily, and in each case, even former proponents now admit that far from helping, they made things worse.

In Afghanistan, tribal elders of the Musa Qala district brokered a deal last October under which British troops, Afghan policemen and Taliban forces all pulled out of the district’s main town (also called Musa Qala), though the Taliban did not disarm. Some senior Afghan officials were skeptical from the start, but others hailed the deal, as did local residents and foreign military officials and diplomats. “If it works, and so far it appears to work, it could be a pointer to similar understandings elsewhere,” one foreign diplomat told The New York Times in December.

Abdul Ali Seraj, the nephew of a former Afghani king, similarly told the Times: “Musa Qala is the way to do it. Sixty days since the agreement, and there has not been a shot fired.”

Last month, however, the Taliban returned in force and overran the town, burning the government compound, arresting the elders (who brokered the deal) and threatening them with death. The situation became so bad that the elders took the unusual step of begging the Afghani government and NATO to expel the Taliban by force, even if that required bombing the town.

In Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf’s government brokered a deal last September with tribal leaders in North Waziristan, a hotbed of al-Qaida and Taliban activity. In it, the tribal leaders promised to end support for both al-Qaida activity and cross-border attacks against Afghanistan, while seven members of the local Taliban council, who also signed, explicitly pledged that “there will be no cross-border movement for militant activity in neighboring Afghanistan.”

In exchange, Musharraf withdrew all government troops, pledged to end air and ground operations against the Taliban and agreed to release all detainees. Each side also agreed to return any weapons and equipment seized during the previous three years of fighting. The deal elicited some skepticism in Washington and Kabul, but Musharraf touted it in both capitals as a major breakthrough in the war on terror.

Last month, however, American officials told The New York Times that since the agreement was signed, cross-border attacks against Afghanistan from Pakistan have tripled. Moreover, the truce appears to have enabled the battered al-Qaida leadership to regroup: Intelligence indicates that al-Qaida training camps have been set up in the region, and the frequency and timeliness of statements issued by Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri indicate that the al-Qaida leaders are no longer having trouble communicating safely with the outside world.

In Thailand, whose south has suffered from a vicious Muslim insurgency for three years, the junta that overthrew former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra last September also reversed his hard-line anti-terrorist policies. Coup leader Sonthi Boonyaratglin, himself a Muslim, gave Muslims key positions in the new administration, including the prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, and the interior minister, a proponent of instituting Shari’a law in Muslim-majority provinces.

Boonyaratglin also offered to negotiate with insurgency leaders, launched a rapprochement with neighboring Malaysia (the insurgents are mainly ethnic Malays) and revived an administrative system that gave the south’s local leaders more input into policy. Chulanont publicly apologized for Thaksin’s policies and ordered police and soldiers in the south to be less aggressive. And, according to the International Herald Tribune, southern Thais welcomed these initiatives, hoping that they would bring peace.

Instead, the violence worsened dramatically, culminating in 28 coordinated bombings last month that killed or injured some 60 people. In a New York Times article a week later, experts lined up to describe how badly the situation had deteriorated. Sunai Phasuk of Human Rights Watch noted that “Buddhist monks have been hacked to death, clubbed to death, bombed and burned to death” in an effort to inflame sectarian tensions; “this has never happened before.”

Schoolteachers and schools have also been favorite targets. Francesca Lawe-Davies of the International Crisis Group warned that “insurgent groups are actually starting to control territory in a more conventional sense.”

Srisompob Jitpiromsri, a Thai academic, said: “The separatists can pick and choose the time and place of the violence without any effective resistance.” And southern residents of both faiths told the Times that “they have never been so frightened.”

Even Chulanont publicly admitted last month that his policies were not working, and he has reverted to a military approach: He sent another 20,000 troops to the region and ordered checkpoints established along key roads.

In each of the above cases, it turned out that what the terrorists wanted was not peace or redress for their “grievances,” but a respite from military pressure that was impairing their capacity to operate effectively. And in each case, once they had recovered and regrouped, they resumed waging war with redoubled vigor.

A single case could have been considered a fluke. But when the same thing happens simultaneously in three different countries, it cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence. Rather, it indicates a pattern: This is how Islamic terrorists operate. And other Islamic terrorist groups are likely to behave similarly.

Anyone familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will recognize this pattern: Here, too, every truce or formal agreement has ultimately led to renewed terror once the terrorists regrouped. The world, however, has always insisted that if Israel would just keep making concessions, the terrorists would eventually be satisfied.

Last month’s events are unlikely to shatter this international consensus; that will probably require additional sad experience. But they ought at least to prompt intelligent people of goodwill to start questioning whether deals with terrorists are really the best way to bring peace, or whether, as occurred in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Thailand, they are merely recipes for greater violence.

And this in turn ought to prompt serious contemplation of the unpleasant alternative: that perhaps the only solution is to militarily degrade the terrorists’ capabilities to the point where they are no longer able to fight. Or in other words, that achieving peace might require waging war.

A seemingly minor item published two weeks ago could herald an important turning point in Israel’s foreign relations: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed support for transferring four Jordanians jailed in Israel to Jordan. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter also reportedly back the idea.

Olmert being Olmert, this does not mean that the transfer will actually happen. But if it does, it would constitute a start on reversing a long-standing Israeli policy of scorning friends while rewarding enemies.

The Jordanians were convicted of killing an Israeli soldier in 1990, four years before Israel and Jordan signed their peace treaty. King Abdullah II of Jordan, like his predecessor, King Hussein, has repeatedly asked that the four be freed, or at least transferred to Jordan, where relatives and friends could visit them more easily; the issue has particular resonance in Amman because one of the four has a brother in parliament. Nevertheless, successive Israeli prime ministers have refused, saying they will not release prisoners with “blood on their hands.”

This refusal is puzzling even on legal grounds, since the killing took place while Israel and Jordan were technically at war, and the victim was a soldier, not a civilian. Granted, there was no hot war at the time, but a state of war essentially makes the other side’s soldiers fair game. Had the victim been a civilian, the situation would be different, since deliberately killing civilians is unacceptable even in wartime. The same is true had the killing occurred after the peace treaty was signed; during peacetime, killing soldiers is also a crime. But killing soldiers in wartime is standard practice, which is why most peace treaties include prisoner exchanges. Legally speaking, therefore, Jordan’s request is unexceptionable.

What makes Israel’s refusal truly absurd, however, is the foreign relations dimension of the case. Standard foreign policy goals usually include trying to make other countries into friends rather than enemies. But this requires demonstrating that friendship pays better dividends than enmity: If the reverse were true, any rational country would prefer enmity.

Israel, however, consistently does the exact opposite: It makes concessions to its enemies while denying these same concessions to its friends. And nothing better illustrates this destructive habit than its policy on prisoner releases.

For decades, Israel has periodically released large numbers of prisoners to its worst enemies as a reward for their success in kidnapping Israelis. Three years ago, for instance, it freed some 400 prisoners to Hizbullah, an organization sworn to its destruction, in exchange for one kidnapped drug dealer and the dead bodies of three kidnapped soldiers. Currently, it is negotiating the release of several hundred prisoners to Hamas, another organization sworn to its destruction, in exchange for one kidnapped soldier.

JORDAN, IN contrast, has been a good neighbor. Not only is it formally at peace with Israel, but – unlike Egypt, with whom Israel also has a peace treaty – it has faithfully executed its main responsibility under this treaty: preventing cross-border attacks and arms smuggling. Consequently, Israel’s border with Jordan has been quiet for years.

Yet in the 13 years since the peace treaty was signed, Israel has consistently rejected Amman’s pleas that it release a few dozen Jordanian prisoners, with one insulting exception: When it released 400 prisoners to Hizbullah in 2004, Israel simultaneously gave Abdullah a measly 10 Jordanians.

The message could not be clearer: What Jordan could not obtain by making peace, Hizbullah obtained by making war. And under those circumstances, any rational person would have to question the value of peace.

Nor, unfortunately, is Israel’s policy on prisoners an aberration: It is part of a consistent pattern of treating enemies better than friends, both at home and abroad.

DOMESTICALLY, the outstanding example is Israel’s treatment of its Druse citizens. The Druse have been loyal allies of the Jewish state since its inception. They serve in the army, at an even higher rate than Jews do, and have integrated fully into Israeli political life: Druse can be found in almost every Zionist party, and their MKs are no less concerned with the state’s welfare than their Jewish counterparts.

In contrast, other Arabs (aside from a few Beduin) do not serve in the army; their politicians and media organs consistently and publicly side with Israel’s enemies; and their leaders repeatedly declare that they will satisfied with nothing less than Israel’s elimination as a Jewish state and replacement by a binational entity.

Under those circumstances, a sane policy would reward the Druse for their loyalty, thereby creating an incentive for other Arabs to change their behavior. Instead, the Druse suffer even worse budgetary discrimination than do other Arabs – because they are already our friends, and can therefore be ignored, whereas the Arabs, being hostile, must be appeased.

Consequently, many Druse towns are bankrupt; the Druse unemployment rate stood at 38 percent in 2004; and only 26 percent of Druse high-school graduates qualify for university entrance.

The result is that Druse society has lately been questioning the value of its alliance with the state – as any rational person would. “The Arabs are constantly telling us that the Druse give everything, yet the state of Druse villages is even worse than that of Arab villages,” said Sheikh Muwafak Tarif, a community leader, explaining this increasing disillusionment in 2004.

Sheikh Ali Fellah, honorary president of the Druse Zionist Movement (yes, there is such a thing), echoed this message in 2005: “You have to remember that a deprived Druse is oxygen for Israel’s enemies,” he said. And indeed it is – because, like the affair of the Jordanian prisoners, it leads friends to question their friendship and discourages enemies from abandoning their enmity.

Regrettably, Olmert’s declared support for releasing the Jordanians does not appear to herald any broader rethinking of this destructive behavior pattern. But by shattering a decades-old tradition of irrationality, it might nevertheless open the door to change. And that is urgently needed – because if Israel continues abusing its friends while rewarding its enemies, it will soon have no friends left.

It is becoming fashionable among politicians to blame the public for governmental corruption. Former Shinui Party chairman Yosef Lapid was one of the pioneers, writing in these pages in 2005: “It is not just the politicians who are responsible; even more at fault are the voters who send signals to the politicians that the corruption is okay… Labor and Likud voters… don’t give a damn about the integrity of their elected officials.”

Former Meretz chairman Yossi Sarid recently made similar comments in Haaretz. And other politicians are jumping on the bandwagon.

Clearly, blaming the public is convenient: It exempts politicians of any responsibility for trying to improve the situation. But is it accurate? According to January’s Peace Index poll, the public is hardly indifferent to corruption: When asked how a list of issues should rank on the public agenda, a clear plurality put fighting corruption on top. This issue received a weighted grade of 31.5 out of 100, compared to 22.1 for the second-place issue (rehabilitating the IDF and Israel’s deterrent capability), 20.1 for closing economic gaps, 15.4 for fighting crime and violence and 10.8 for making peace with the Palestinians.

But if Israelis are so worried about this issue, why are they not marching in the streets, making themselves heard at the ballot box and otherwise trying to throw the bums out? The answer might lie in another poll published earlier this month. That poll, conducted by a public committee studying proposals for governmental reform, found that 78 percent of the public is unhappy with the country’s leadership, with a significant plurality citing corruption as the main reason. But the poll also found something else: Fully 61% of respondents wanted the electoral system changed so that voters could directly elect their Knesset representatives.

In other words, a majority of the public appears to have grasped what the “blame the public” movement conveniently ignores: Under the current electoral system, voters have no power to throw the bums out – because ballots are cast for parties rather than individuals, and voters have no say over the composition of party slates.

THIS SYSTEM makes it doubly impossible to oust corrupt politicians. First, parties are rarely black and white; most include corrupt politicians alongside others who are honest and hard-working. Thus withholding your vote from any given party is as likely to punish the innocent as the guilty: The party will indeed lose seats, but the individual politicians who lose their jobs will not necessarily be the corrupt ones; they will merely be those at the bottom of the party’s slate.

In fact, because the public has no say in determining this slate, cutting from the bottom often disproportionately harms younger, cleaner politicians: It is precisely the most corrupt who usually specialize in gaining control over party institutions, which in turn guarantees them safe spots at the top of the slate.

The second problem is that in a country like Israel, which still faces existential threats, it is simply unrealistic to expect people to vote for parties whose diplomatic/security platforms they view as dangerous. Meretz politicians, for instance, are generally perceived as clean, but most Israelis consider the party’s platform on the Palestinian issue suicidal. And even to punish corruption, Israelis will not – and should not – vote for a party whose policies they fear will jeopardize the country’s survival.

THE OBVIOUS solution to both problems is to introduce direct, personal elections for MKs. That would allow voters to specifically target corrupt politicians while reelecting those who are honest, instead of firing broadside at an entire party, which is as likely to hit the good as the bad. Moreover, it would enable them to do so without sacrificing their preferred party platform, though the method would vary according to the electoral system ultimately chosen.

In the Anglo-American “first past the post” system, each party runs only one candidate per district; thus in general elections, voters who want that party’s platform must choose that candidate, even if he is corrupt. Therefore, primaries are vital in this system: These enable party members in each district to decide who their party’s candidate should be, giving them an opportunity to oust corrupt incumbents in favor of cleaner newcomers.

In the more likely event that Israel retains the proportional representation system, primaries are less important. With proportional representation, voter choice is generally achieved by creating multi-candidate districts in which each party’s total number of seats is determined by its overall proportion of the vote, but the particular candidates who fill those seats are determined by the voters: For instance, voters might be asked to rank their chosen party’s candidates in that district, or they might be required to vote for a single candidate, with the candidates who get the most votes getting the party’s seats.

Paradoxically, however, the very fact that Israelis are starting to grasp that fighting corruption requires changing the electoral system may be partly responsible for the public paralysis. Ousting a particular corrupt politician through the ballot box would be comparatively easy. But how do you persuade the Knesset to change the entire electoral system, when many of its members have a vested interest in the current system for fear that direct elections would cost them their jobs?

Moreover, electoral reform can all too easily be done badly, as our brief experiment with directly electing the prime minister demonstrated, and if done wrong, it could make things worse rather than better.

That is a frightening prospect, and one that understandably generates hesitation.

Therefore, it is precisely those politicians (and former politicians) who claim to care about corruption who must take the lead on this issue: Instead of facilely blaming the public or voicing futile disgust, they must spearhead efforts to change the electoral system.

Israel is virtually the only Western democracy that still denies its voters the right to directly elect their representatives, and it is long past time for that to change. And any politician who fails to push such change is clearly crying crocodile tears when he bemoans corruption.