This week saw Yasser Arafat's heirs, PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, on a junket to Syria and Lebanon where they labored to shore up their base of political support. In Syria, the Palestinian "moderates" met with dictator Bashar Assad and his underlings and agreed to coordinate their positions in future negotiations with Israel with him.

That base covered, they went to meetings with the senior terror chieftains who make their homes in Damascus: Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine ? General Command; Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Khaled Mashaal, head of Hamas; and Ramadan Shalah, head of the Islamic Jihad.

Reinforced from their meetings ? where, according to Shaath, they discovered that between the "moderate" leaders and the arch terrorists, "There are no differences over the objectives" ? the three went for visits in UN-run internment camps falsely referred to as Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon. There they promised that they will never give up the demand for the unlimited immigration of these foreign-born Arabs to Israel in the framework of a peace treaty.

At the same time as they were running around in the terrorist capitals of the Levant, the U.S. announced that it would for the first time be providing the PA with $23.5 million in direct budgetary aid to make it easier for the Palestinians to conduct elections in which these three moderates will be elected.

Unfortunately, no one of any consequence seems to think it at all necessary to call attention to the fact that in order for Abbas and his colleagues to shore up their legitimacy in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, they have moved to build alliances with the most overtly extreme and violent forces in the region. Even as America is now openly admitting Syria's major role in leading and financing the terror war being perpetrated in Iraq, no one has cast aspersions at Western supported Palestinian leaders who just declared their fealty to Assad and his terrorist vassals.

At the same time, Israel has been awash this week with excitement and enthusiasm over Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's newfound adoration for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Pharaoh Hosni's decision to release wrongly imprisoned Israeli Druze Azzam Azzam from his dungeon, like his announced intention to begin to abide by his obligation to the Camp David peace treaty with Israel by returning his ambassador to Israel sometime next year, have been taken as indications that Mubarak is now Israel's all. He can be trusted, we are told, to remilitarize the Sinai and control the border between Gaza and Egypt even though he is responsible for his country's refusal to date to do anything to stop the weapons smuggling into Gaza. He can be trusted to train Palestinian military forces even though the ones he trained in the last go-around went on to become senior terrorists in the now four-and-a-half-year-old Palestinian terror war.

No one in Israel this week saw fit to mention that the very day Azzam was finally allowed to come home after eight years of politically motivated persecution, which formed the basis of his Stalinist espionage conviction in 1996, it was announced that Iran had transferred Mustafa Hamza, leader of al-Gamaa al-Islamiya terror group, to Egyptian custody. Hamza had been tried and sentenced to death in absentia by Egyptian courts three times since 1992 and is believed to have masterminded the attempted assassination of Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995. Reports of the transfer noted that ever since Egypt hosted the Sharm e-Sheikh conference aimed at preventing Iraqi elections last month, Egyptian-Iranian relations have improved considerably to the point where they are considering reinstating full diplomatic ties.

Few in Israel, or in the US for that matter, are particularly interested in analyzing what is happening with the Palestinians or the Egyptians today. This is so because it is considered impolitic, not to mention extremist, to point out anything that might cast doubt on the viability of Sharon's plan to abandon Gaza and northern Samaria while expelling some 10,000 Israelis from their homes, farms and communities.

Next week we will have the fifth annual Herzliya Conference. The conference has become a centerpiece in Israel's national politics because the prime minister has used his address there for the past two years to mark dramatic shifts in his policies. Two years ago he shocked everyone by saying that he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state. Last year he outlined his plan to withdraw from Gaza and northern Samaria. Each time, it took several months for Sharon to ram his new strategic outlook down the throats of his party members. But with the assistance of the press, this year, he is going into the conference with his withdrawal plan firmly entrenched in the received wisdom of our times.

Sharon's adoption of the leftist Labor Party's cut-and-run strategy has had catastrophic consequences for Israel's international standing. Because the plan is being advanced by Sharon, who has been demonized by the international Left as a war criminal, Israel's friends abroad have abandoned the strategic wisdom of never rewarding terror that they bravely advocated for decades and embraced the plan.

Pro-Israel writers and policymakers in the U.S. like Charles Krauthammer, William Safire and Abraham Sofaer have publicly lauded Sharon for his "strategic wisdom" and have castigated as extremists those who insist that the planned withdrawal will be devastating to Israel's national security. Sharon's lackeys in the government like Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have taken to threatening Israelis directly, arguing that if we oppose the withdrawal we will receive radical leftist Yossi Beilin's delusional Geneva Initiative, which gives up the entire store to the PLO even as the U.S. National Security Council's point man on Israel, Elliott Abrams, reportedly told leading American Jewish leftists that the White House views all Israeli communities located to the east of the security fence as slated for destruction. Continued...