One of the most bizarre aspects of the current Lebanon crisis is the international community’s unanimous insistence that the Lebanese government is an innocent party, and should therefore not be made to suffer for Hizbullah’s actions.

The official statement issued by the G-8 on Sunday, for instance, said that Israel must avoid doing anything that would destabilize Lebanon’s government. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters at the summit: “We are convinced that the government of Lebanon must be given all support.”

US President George W. Bush said last week that while Israel has the right to defend itself, “whatever Israel does should not weaken the … government in Lebanon.”

And this presumption of Beirut’s innocence has inevitably affected criticism of Israel’s response to the Hizbullah attacks. Thus, for instance, the European Union’s rotating president, Finland, issued a statement last week declaring that the EU “is greatly concerned about the disproportionate use of force by Israel in Lebanon in response to attacks by Hizbullah on Israel… The imposition of an air and sea blockade cannot be justified.”

In fact, this blockade would arguably be justified even if the conflict were solely between Israel and Hizbullah, since its main purpose is to cut off Hizbullah’s supply of rockets – for which Beirut Airport, in particular, has been a major conduit for years. But in state-to-state wars, blockades are unquestionably legitimate: They are the standard means of impeding the enemy’s supply of arms. It is the EU’s distorted view of the war as being strictly between Israel and Hizbullah, with the Beirut government a mere innocent bystander, that causes it to view the blockade instead as an unfair punishment of an entire country for the acts of a few rogue terrorists.

In reality, Hizbullah’s attack was far from a rogue action committed in defiance of the government: The Lebanese government has actively supported it, in both word and deed.

First, of course, Hizbullah remains a member of the government, with seats in the cabinet. Admittedly, it probably launched last week’s attack without its coalition partners’ knowledge or consent. But in any normal country, a junior coalition member that attacked a neighboring country without its partners’ consent would be swiftly disavowed and ousted from the government.

Instead, the Lebanese government has passionately defended Hizbullah’s actions on the international stage. At an Arab League meeting on Saturday, for instance, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, reportedly backed by representatives of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, lambasted Hizbullah’s assault as “inappropriate and irresponsible.” But Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh, far from agreeing, presented a draft resolution defending the attack.

The resolution stated that Lebanon has the “right to resist occupation by all legitimate means,” demanded the release of Lebanese prisoners from Israeli jails, and asserted Lebanon’s right to “liberate them by all legitimate means.”

THESE, HOWEVER, are precisely the justifications that Hizbullah offers for attacking Israel. First, Hizbullah does not accept the UN Security Council’s determination that Israel withdrew fully from Lebanon in May 2000; it insists that an area known as Shaba Farms is also Lebanese, and that it has the right to continue attacking Israel until Israel quits this area as well. Thus when Salloukh declared that Lebanon has the “right to resist occupation,” what he meant was that the Lebanese government concurs with Hizbullah, rather than the UN, about the status of Shaba Farms and supports Hizbullah’s “right” to attack Israel over this issue.

Second, Hizbullah has long advocated kidnapping Israelis in order to trade them for the one Lebanese national still in Israel’s jails: Samir Kuntar, who is serving multiple life sentences for having infiltrated into Israel, entered a house in Nahariya, killed the owner and his four-year-old daughter in cold blood, and then killed a policeman before being captured. That, incidentally, was in 1979 – three years before Israel invaded Lebanon and began its 18-year occupation of the country’s south. Thus when Salloukh asserted Lebanon’s right to “liberate” its prisoners, what he meant was that the Lebanese government agrees with Hizbullah that freeing this terrorist is a national goal, and supports Hizbullah’s “right” to attack Israel in order to achieve it.

But the government did not even make do with defending Hizbullah’s attacks after the fact: It also actively facilitated them.

CLEARLY, THE attacks were made possible in the first place by Beirut’s failure to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which demanded that the government disarm Hizbullah and deploy the Lebanese army in southern Lebanon in its stead. Currently, the Lebanese army allows Hizbullah free rein in southern Lebanon by steadfastly avoiding the area. But given the government’s weakness relative to Hizbullah, this failure is usually excused as being due to inability rather than malice.

That excuse, however, cannot be made for other government actions that facilitated the attacks, such as its failure to stop the ongoing supply of rockets and other war materiel to Hizbullah. Far from being smuggled in without the government’s knowledge, weapons earmarked for Hizbullah arrived openly in Beirut Airport almost every week – and the airport, unlike southern Lebanon, is fully controlled by the government and the Lebanese army. Yet the government never ordered the army to confiscate these shipments.

Regular arms shipments also came overland from Syria. Yet these, too, passed openly and without hindrance through border crossings controlled by the Lebanese government.

The Lebanese army has even openly assisted Hizbullah during the past week’s fighting. Hizbullah’s successful missile strike on an Israeli naval vessel Friday night, for instance, would have been impossible had the army’s radar stations not given Hizbullah the ship’s coordinates. Hizbullah does not have radar stations of its own.

Far from repudiating Hizbullah’s attacks on Israel, the Lebanese government has actively defended, facilitated and assisted them at every turn. There are thus no grounds for treating it as an innocent party in this conflict. And until the international community recognizes this, its efforts to resolve the crisis will inevitably fail.

The international crises over Iran and, more recently, North Korea have made the fallacy of the “engagement” theory of international relations starkly evident. At first glance, this theory seems truistic: A country that provides aid and trade to another will obviously thereby acquire leverage over it. The catch, however, is that this leverage stems from the implicit threat of aid or trade cutbacks in response to bad behavior. If the recipient knows that aid and trade will keep flowing no matter what it does, then engagement provides no incentive for it to modify its behavior. And that, unfortunately, is the case today: Because no provocation appears sufficient to goad apostles of engagement into reducing aid and trade, rogue states have no qualms about continuing their provocations. The Iranian crisis offers a perfect example of this process. When it first emerged that Iran had been deceiving the International Atomic Energy Agency about its nuclear program for 18 years, Britain, France and Germany, all ardent proponents of engagement, promptly offered Teheran a substantial package of benefits if it would permanently halt uranium enrichment. Over the ensuing months, however, Iran rejected the package, sharply restricted IAEA monitoring of its nuclear program and demonstratively resumed enrichment, which it had earlier halted temporarily. At that point, the time had seemingly come to play the other side of the engagement card: not merely rewarding good behavior with aid and trade, but also punishing bad behavior by reducing aid and trade. And since the European Union is Iran’s biggest trading partner, it had considerable leverage to exercise. HOWEVER, the EU refused to employ this leverage without Security Council approval – a euphemism for refusing to employ it at all, since two veto-wielding council members and fellow engagement advocates, Russia and China, made it clear that they would not countenance sanctions. Instead, the Europeans pressured the United States to offer Iran even more carrots, including direct talks with Washington, state-ofthe-art nuclear technology and even eventual acquiescence to uranium enrichment on Iranian soil – something the earlier offer had ruled out, given Iran’s long history of nuclear deception. Moreover, this blatant reward for bad behavior was not even accompanied by clear commitments from Russia and China to back UN sanctions should Iran reject the new offer. On the contrary: Their few public statements on the matter, though vague, seemed to indicate that their all-embracing opposition to sanctions remained intact. The message to Iran was thus crystal-clear: Not only could it scoff at the EU without suffering any negative consequences; it would even be rewarded for doing so. It thus contemptuously announced that it would reply to the new offer only two months after the EU’s requested response date. UNSURPRISINGLY, North Korea also got the message. As the Sydney Morning Herald aptly put it, having seen Iran’s defiance so richly rewarded, “it is not astonishing that North Korea … reached the risky conclusion that nothing succeeds like excess.” Pyongyang therefore decided to grab world attention with a provocative missile launch last week. And, once again, engagement proved its weakness: China and Russia, two of the few countries with ties to North Korea, promptly announced that they would neither impose sanctions themselves nor allow the Security Council to do so, thereby assuring North Korea that it had nothing to fear from continued bad behavior. South Korea, in contrast, initially applied the engagement theory properly: It used its engagement as a lever, announcing the suspension of planned shipments of rice and fertilizer until the missile crisis was resolved and rejecting North Korea’s bid to begin military talks. However, it then undercut the message by scolding Japan for making a “fuss” about the launch and assuring Pyongyang that it would “propose a date” for military talks later, thereby allowing North Korea to believe that Seoul would also soon relent on the food aid, and that its bad behavior would result in only temporary inconvenience. AND IN fact, Pyongyang has good reason to believe this, given the precedent set by the EU in a different case: its decision to withhold aid to the Palestinian Authority unless the new Hamas government meets certain conditions. That decision initially seemed like a classic use of engagement: As the PA’s largest donor, the EU had significant leverage, and it was exercising this leverage to influence Hamas’s behavior. However, not long afterward, the EU announced that due to “humanitarian concerns” (which, incidentally, are far more pressing in North Korea), it would substitute a new aid program for the one it had just canceled: Instead of giving the PA money with which to pay salaries, it would pay most PA employees itself, and it would also make welfare payments directly to needy Palestinians, to replace the welfare allowances (or wages) that they no longer received from the PA. This, however, effectively negated the impact of the original sanctions. If ordinary Palestinians suffered no more than a brief hiatus in their usual salary and welfare payments, they would have no reason to be unhappy with the Hamas government: It makes no difference to them who signs their checks. And that, in turn, means that Hamas would have no reason to fear being voted out should it fail to change its policies. By deciding that “ordinary Palestinians” – the very people who elected Hamas – must be spared the consequences of their choices, the EU effectively obligated itself to keep the aid flowing no matter what Hamas does. And it thereby forfeited all the leverage that engagement theoretically provides. This, in a nutshell, is why engagement has become an empty vessel: Its leading practitioners – the EU, China and Russia – all appear to have forgotten that it was supposed to be a means of influencing other countries’ behavior; instead, they treat it as an end in itself, with which no amount of bad behavior can be allowed to interfere. And as long as rogue governments know that aid and trade will flow no matter what they do, engagement provides no incentive for them to change their ways.

Justice Minister Haim Ramon’s proposed Basic Law: Legislation has generated a storm in legal and political circles. Yet the critics have ignored the proposal’s most outrageous element: the Supreme Court’s active involvement in its drafting, in gross violation of the principle of a separation of powers among the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

The bill itself is not without positive elements. First, it would finally set rules for how Basic Laws, which the Supreme Court regards as constitutional legislation, must be passed. This is vital to prevent a recurrence of the farce generated by the last two Basic Laws, which passed by votes of 32-21 and 23-0, or about one-quarter and one-sixth of the 120-member Knesset – thereby making Israel the only democracy in history whose “constitution” was adopted by minority vote. That the Supreme Court cites these laws, passed by considerably less than half the Knesset, as justification for overturning legislation passed by far larger majorities is obviously problematic from a constitutional standpoint.

Second, the bill deserves credit for acknowledging that since a constitution is supposed to reflect a broad consensus on the rules of the game, constitutional legislation ought to require more than a one-vote majority to pass. Unfortunately, the threshold it sets – 70 MKs, or 58 percent of the Knesset – is still too low, since many governing coalitions are that size. The bill would thus enable constitutional legislation to be enacted without any support from the opposition, thereby sabotaging the main purpose of a constitution: genuine societal agreement on basic ground rules.

Finally, the bill would for the first time introduce a legislative override of the Supreme Court. Certain other democracies, such as Britain and Canada, also enable such overrides, but in Israel, they are absolutely essential, since Israel lacks the mechanism used by other Western democracies to maintain the balance of power between the court and the other branches of government: the appointment of Supreme Court justices by the elected branches.

Unfortunately, the bill’s proposed override is too limited as long as the current judicial appointments system, which essentially allows justices to select their own successors, remains unchanged: It would enable the Knesset to reinstate a law that the court declared unconstitutional, but only for five years, after which the law could not be reenacted.

THE STORM over the bill, however, is due mainly to Ramon’s plan to pass it separately rather than as part of an overall constitutional package. That is indeed a valid concern. A constitution usually contains compromises aimed at satisfying different sectors of the population, and it is these compromises that enable it to attract widespread support. But such compromises are almost impossible to craft when the constitution is passed piecemeal, without serious negotiations over the total package, and that will ultimately undermine support for the finished product. Nevertheless, the judiciary’s involvement in preparing the bill ought to be of equal concern. Yet this problem has been almost completely overlooked.

Ramon not only met with Supreme Court President Aharon Barak about the bill; he even announced that its content had been coordinated with Barak. Senior legal officials added that Barak played an active role in drafting the bill. The Justice Ministry, which is finalizing the actual wording, formally asked the Supreme Court for feedback on its draft. And Judge Boaz Okon, the director of the Courts Administration, publicly announced his support for the bill, as if the judiciary were just another lobby trying to influence the Knesset.

Allowing the judiciary an active role in drafting legislation – a job that all other democracies entrust exclusively to the elected branches – not only outrages the separation of powers principle; it gives the court excessive input into the content of our constitution. Normally, the legislature and executive write laws and the courts interpret them, thereby enabling each branch to contribute to the law’s ultimate shape.

But while Ramon’s bill would duly anoint the Supreme Court as the constitution’s authorized interpreter, with explicit power to declare ordinary Knesset legislation unconstitutional, the court is also its co-author. Thus the other branches of government have been rendered superfluous.

AT AN academic conference last month, former Supreme Court justice Yitzchak Zamir was distraught over a bill now before the Knesset that would authorize the Supreme Court president to draft binding ethical rules for judges. Zamir argued that out of respect for the separation of powers, the Knesset should be denied any say over judicial conduct – even to the minimal extent of authorizing the court president to draft binding rules. “Something has changed in the perception of Israeli society, certainly in that of the Knesset, regarding the concept of separation of powers, and something has happened to the respect that Israeli society and the Knesset have for judges,” he mourned.

Something has indeed happened to the separation of powers principle. But the main culprit in this principle’s radical erosion is neither the Knesset nor Israeli society, but the Supreme Court itself. It is the court that has usurped the executive’s power by overturning numerous government policies merely because the justices deemed them “unreasonable” – even though setting policy is the executive’s main task, and the question of whether or not such policies are reasonable is precisely what voters are asked to decide in every election. It is also the court that has usurped the legislature’s power, both by overturning Knesset legislation without explicit authorization, based solely on two Basic Laws passed by a minority of the legislature, and by interpreting other laws in ways diametrically opposed to the legislators’ intent, as clearly indicated during the drafting process.

And now, the court is taking its usurpation of the elected branches’ prerogatives to new heights by encroaching on the job of drafting the country’s constitution.

One can decry Zamir’s crocodile tears over the eroding separation of powers, but one cannot reasonably expect an obviously power-hungry Supreme Court to restrict itself.

Only the elected branches of government can restore the court to its proper place. And a good place to start would be by removing the court from the constitutional drafting process.

Whether the Prisoners’ Letter, which Fatah and Hamas initialed on Tuesday, will end Palestinian infighting remains unclear. As propaganda, however, the document has been an unqualified success.

Both in Israel and abroad, the media (this paper notably excepted) have universally lauded the document for “implicitly recognizing Israel,” something Hamas has hitherto refused to do. Even the Wall Street Journal – not usually a Palestinian apologist – credited it with “implicit recognition of Israel” in a June 15 editorial.

Yet in fact, the document does nothing of the sort – and not only is this plain from the text, but Hamas spokesmen have said so explicitly.

To see the document as “implicitly recognizing Israel” requires interpreting its demand for a Palestinian state in “all the territory occupied [by Israel] in 1967” as signifying this territory only, thus implying an Israel alongside. Unfortunately, the text belies this interpretation.

According to a Hebrew translation published by Haaretz, the actual wording is as follows: “The Palestinian people … desires the liberation of its lands and the realization of its right to liberty, return, independence and self-definition, including the right to establish an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital on all the territory occupied in 1967″ (emphasis added).

In other words, a state in this territory is merely one part of the broader goal of “the liberation of [Palestinian] lands.” Or to put it in historical context, this is a reincarnation of the PLO’s 1974 “phased plan,” under which any “liberated” territory would serve as a base for pursuing Israel’s ultimate destruction.

And, lest anyone misunderstand, both the documents’ authors and other Hamas spokesmen have stated this explicitly.

ON JUNE 6, Abdel Khaleq Natsche, who signed the document for Hamas, and Bassam al-Sa’adi, who signed for Islamic Jihad, issued the following clarification: “We scorn the attempts to attach nonexistent content to the document, and therefore, we emphasize that it does not contain any declaration or hint of recognition of the occupation state and does not contain any call for this.”

Mohammed Abu Tir, a senior Hamas parliamentarian, also made this point in a subsequent interview with Haaretz (June 8): Hamas, he said, has no problem with the document’s demand for a Palestinian state in “all the territories occupied in 1967,” but does not accept its “recognition of international decisions that indirectly mean recognition of Israel.”

In other words, Hamas does not see the call for a Palestinian state as implicitly recognizing Israel; it if did, it would object to this article, too. Rather, it views such a state as compatible with its goal of Israel’s destruction.

BUT THE document also offers additional proof of its nonrecognition of Israel’s right to exist: its insistence on a “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, which is a euphemism for eliminating Israel demographically. The 4.3 million refugees and descendents (according to UN figures), combined with Israel’s 1.4 million Arab citizens, could democratically vote the Jewish state (5.3 million Jews) out of existence.

Natsche and Sa’adi, incidentally, have since withdrawn their support of document entirely. However, according to Natsche, this was due not to its content, but to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s “abuse” of the document for political gain.

Media outlets have also lauded the document on another score: an alleged Hamas concession on terrorism. Granted, far from renouncing terror, it explicitly urges continued attacks on Israelis in the territories. Nevertheless, say media pundits, confining attacks to the territories, while eschewing them inside Israel, would constitute progress.

However, the document does nothing of the sort: It says merely that “resistance” will “focus” on the territories. In other words, the territories will be the main, but not exclusive, venue for attacks. And this is how Fatah and Hamas both understand it – as proven by the fact that Fatah, according to Haaretz‘s veteran Arab affairs correspondent, Danny Rubinstein, unsuccessfully urged Hamas to indeed limit attacks solely to the territories by adding the word “solely.”

BUT THE document does not merely preserve the terrorist status quo: For the first time, it enshrines terror as official PA policy. Hitherto, while Hamas and Fatah both practiced terror, Fatah at least paid lip service to the need to end it. The document, however, calls for “establishing a unified resistance force, called the Palestinian Resistance Front, which will lead the uprising against the occupation, and also unifying and coordinating resistance operations and creating a unified political authority for the Front.”

Since “resistance” is the Palestinian euphemism for terror attacks, this means that terror, rather than being the work of “opposition groups” (as the PA used to claim), would become official policy.

Indeed, the only mystery about this clause is how Abbas, who publicly adopted the document “as is,” can still be lauded by the world – including Israel’s government – as having “repudiated terror.”

Finally, the document has been praised for accepting international agreements, thereby also allegedly implicitly recognizing Israel. Yet as Natsche and Sa’adi explained in their clarification, “the document’s reference to recognizing just international resolutions does not mean recognizing all resolutions, but only those that do not harm the Palestinian people.”

And, to remove all doubts, Fatah and Hamas agreed in negotiations last week to amend the text to explicitly recognize only resolutions “that serve the Palestinian people.”

Hamas, however, does not believe that any existing Israeli-Palestinian agreements serve the Palestinian people; it denounced them all as betrayals, mainly because they recognize Israel. Thus these agreements are clearly not among those that the document recognizes, and this article cannot be read as implicitly recognizing Israel.

The international community set three conditions for relations with the Hamas government: recognizing Israel, renouncing terror and accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements. The Prisoners’ Letter, however, does none of the above: It does not recognize Israel, even implicitly; it does not recognize previous agreements; and far from renouncing terror, it enshrines it as official policy.

Despite this, the media have swallowed Abbas’s propaganda wholesale and are touting the document as sufficient to satisfy international demands. One can only hope that world leaders will scrutinize it with greater care and honesty.

The blueprint for educational reform that Education Minister Yuli Tamir presented this week was a major disappointment: It eliminated the best elements of the previous government’s proposed reform, the Dovrat Plan, and replaced them with little beyond an NIS 8 billion annual increase in government spending. Worst of all, however, it failed to address one of the key problems facing the education system: Its systematic discouragement of excellence and initiative.

Most talk about education reform in recent years has focused on reducing educational gaps between rich and poor. This is indeed important: For a country like Israel, whose only natural resource is its people, a well-educated workforce able to support sophisticated industries is not a luxury, but an economic necessity.

However, it is equally necessary to encourage excellence and initiative among the best and brightest – those who will provide the country’s motive power by becoming hi-tech entrepreneurs, prize-winning scientists, devisers of innovative social programs and leaders in other walks of life. Yet far from encouraging such traits, Israel’s school system systematically discourages them.

Consider the following sadly typical incidents, from three different high schools, all with excellent reputations.

• R. wanted to do a senior-year research project. The school discouraged her, arguing that research projects are meant mainly to enable students to raise their grade point averages, and R., a top student, had no need of this. R. persisted: She had a topic that interested her and thought she would learn and grow from the experience. The school replied that it had nobody to serve as her adviser. R. found an instructor at a local college who agreed to advise her. The school then said it had nobody to grade her project. R. gave up and abandoned the idea.

• L., a senior at an arts school, wanted to take the five-point m a t r i c u l a t i o n exam in music. The school discouraged her, saying she was unlikely to get a top mark, and should therefore stick to the three-point exam, where she would do well. L. insisted: She understood that she might not do as well, but she would learn more and stretch her own abilities further by preparing for the five-point exam. Her parents backed her decision. But the school denied her permission, apparently afraid that she might lower the school-wide average.

• A. and T., two sisters, wanted to start a school newspaper. They found a donor to cover the printing costs, so the project would not require school funding. They found a printer who agreed to print the paper. They recruited staff, prepared a sample issue and took it to the school administration. The administration refused them permission to start the paper. The main reason: The sisters viewed the newspaper as a forum for public debate, and therefore included opinion pieces on various topics. The school insisted that any paper be confined strictly to reporting school news.

WHAT ALL these very different incidents have in common is that in each case the school squelched students’ desire to go beyond the required minimum, thereby sending the message that initiative and the pursuit of excellence do not pay. That, needless to say, is the opposite of what our school system should be teaching.

And while some students ignore such discouragement and go on to become high achievers after graduation, overall it seems to be having an effect. As Dr. Dan Ben-David of Tel Aviv University noted in Haaretz on Tuesday, Israel’s students do not just score dismally on international tests on average – something that could be partially excused by factors such as the high proportion of new immigrants. Rather, even its best students do poorly. In the 1995 and 1999 TIMSS international math and science tests, for instance, Israel’s average rank was 39th out of 53 countries. But even the top 5 percent of Israeli eighth-graders averaged only 35th place.

TAMIR’S NEW plan not only fails to address the excellence issue; it would actually make the problem worse. Its main elements are a long school day, free preschool education, an expanded school lunch program and the construction of new classrooms. Some of these are worthy initiatives, but they are all peripheral to the central issue of what and how Israeli children learn. And until that central issue is addressed, a longer school day will actually be counterproductive, because children will be spending even more hours in what is essentially a non-learning environment. That would indeed reduce social gaps, but by reducing achievement to the lowest common denominator: Even parents with the means and desire to provide their children with extracurricular education would no longer be able to do so, because after-school hours would no longer exist.

Moreover, Tamir’s plan eliminates the Dovrat Plan’s best ideas for improving the system: giving principals more autonomy, so that at least those who want to encourage excellence would be able to do so; giving local authorities more control over the schools, thereby making it easier for concerned parents to press for improvement in their own districts (something that is virtually impossible when it requires taking on a centralized, nationwide behemoth); and reducing the Education Ministry’s enormous bureaucracy, which not only wastes money that could be spent on actual education, but also invests great effort in squelching innovation by concerned principals and parents.

What makes Tamir’s non-program particularly depressing is that there were grounds for expecting better. Last year, as an MK, she presented an impressive, well-thought-out plan for a student loan program that would make college affordable to everyone while also bolstering university budgets through a modest tuition hike – all with virtually no increase in government expenditure. One might therefore have anticipated similar creativity with regard to our primary and secondary school systems.

Instead, she has offered a program that will significantly increase government spending without providing any real improvement, and will even exacerbate the systemic discouragement of excellence and initiative. One can therefore only hope that either the cabinet or the Knesset will have the sense to send her back to the drawing board.