Herbrt Zweibon

No money. That should be the word to the Palestinian Authority and yes, to Ehud Olmert, as he seeks approval – and eventually funds – from the Bush administration for uprooting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

The U.S. has agreed to provide $10 million to the PA, so that, in the words of Secretary of State Rice, “Hamas policies and actions should not deprive the Palestinian people of their legitimate humanitarian needs.” But as columnist Diana West retorts, “Why ever not? Why shouldn’t Hamas’ ‘policies and actions’ driven by a Hitlerian plan to ‘obliterate“ Israel, deprive Hamas constituents of their ‘needs,’ humanitarian or otherwise?” In the world according to the Bush administration, writes West, the voters who gave Hamas a landslide victory “remain voiceless victims even after exercising their political will at the ballot box.” Yet, she tellingly observes, “If democracy makes leaders accountable to the people who elect them, it works the other way as well: People are also accountable for their elected leaders.”

Olmert has said publicly that his plan to uproot up to 100,000 Israeli civilians from their homes will cost $10 billion (Israeli economists figure it will be twice that sum), which he plans to underwrite with funds from a U.S. traditionally eager for any and all Israeli territorial retreats. How mistaken such a U.S. position is will be clear to anyone who reads Caroline Glick’s report for Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy which identifies the ways in which Olmert’s “convergence plan” is devastating to U.S. interests.

For it is not only Israeli national security that will be seriously compromised when Hamas takes over the Jewish historic heartland, putting Israel’s population centers and national infrastructures under direct threat from missiles, rockets and ever more suicide attacks. The Hashemite regime in Jordan (whose population is nearly 80% “Palestinian”), thus far bolstered by Israel’s military control of Judea and Samaria, will be equally endangered. With both Israel and Jordan destabilized, the land supply routes to U.S. forces in Iraq (U.S. military assets are warehoused in both countries) will be jeopardized. On an operational level, a de facto terror state of Palestine, writes Glick “together with its allies Syria, Iran and Hizbullah, will provide a training, logistics and information warfare base for terrorist groups currently at war with the United States.” Given that one of the aims of the War on Terror is to deny bases of operation to terrorists, this will mean a major defeat for the United States.

In the longer range, the psychological boost for Islamic radicals is likely to be even more profoundly damaging to U.S. interests. The prestige of the terror factions and the movements and states that support them – what Glick calls “the backbone of the international Islamofascist forces currently engaged in war against the U.S.” -- will rise enormously. Glick points out that in the perception of the Moslem world, the U.S. and Israel are linked. An Israeli retreat will be seen not just as a defeat for Israel but as an American defeat and a huge victory for global jihad. This will undermine the most important effort of the U.S. in the Middle East -- namely to mobilize forces within the Arab and Islamic world to help defeat the Islamists.

After 9/11 President Bush advanced a simple and sturdy dictum: in the War on Terror, if you are not with us you are against us. The United States can win the war on Islamic terror, but only if the administration returns to that clear first principle. Hamas embodies all that we fight against in that war. So it should be obvious that we must do nothing to strengthen it. That means no money for the Hamas-controlled PA, including so-called “humanitarian aid.” And the message to Olmert should be: if you want to convert the Land of Israel into a terrorist base, such indescribable folly will not merit a penny from us.