Israel's Debacle an Opportunity for Change

This brings us to another revolution that should be provoked by this war: not only the junking of Olmert's unconditional unilateralist approach, but its replacement with another strategy.

The recent war showed that we must not hand over territory that will become a launching pad for terrorism against us.

More fundamentally, we need to stop acting as if relinquishing territory is the core and perhaps sole component of our strategy to achieve peace. To do so feeds the myth that "occupation" is the crux of the conflict, rather than the Islamist/Arab refusal to accept the right of the Jewish people to a state in our land.

The war demonstrated that the world's - and Israel's - basic notion of an "Arab-Israeli" or "Palestinian-Israeli" conflict needs to be revised. Hezbollah attacked, as Tony Blair put it, "not to fight for the coming into being of a Palestinian state, but for the going out of being of an Israeli state."

We must lead in reenforcing the new realization that we are fighting against an axis of Islamism that regards all of Israel as "occupied territory." What is called a "conflict" is a genocidal quest for the destruction of a people and its country.

The first step toward peace is for us to demand that the world stop treating our insistence on life as a provocative act, and place the blame for Islamist aggression squarely on those who engage in it - not just against us, but against all free peoples.