One of the most disturbing side effects of the five-year-old Palestinian terror war against Israel is the wave of global anti-Semitism that arose in its wake. The fact that the new anti-Semitic wave is rooted in the Left rather than the Right is shocking for the majority of Western Jewry, which for generations has been politically aligned with the Left.

The main manifestation to date of the institutionalization of leftist anti-Semitism has been on the international legalistic front at the UN and its protean chorus of international human rights organizations. But on January 2, the trial of Zionism and World Jewry will be enacted not in an international legal forum of questionable credibility but in a Federal District Court in Virginia. There, two former senior staffers from the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, will be tried on charges of "conspiracy to communicate national defense information to people not entitled to receive it," which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The two are suspected of having received classified information from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and of having passed this information to Naor Gillon of the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

As Eli Lake points out in the current issue of The New Republic, "prosecution of this kind is unprecedented." And yet, given the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic build-up it received since word of Franklin's investigation was leaked in August 2004, it would seem that this unprecedented case, which ascribes criminality to lobbyists engaged in work that Washington lobbyists and journalists engage in on a daily basis, is simply a step forward in the five-year assault on Israel and its advocates among World Jewry.

Almost as disturbing as the decision to prosecute Rosen and Weissman is the meek reaction that their indictment has elicited in the American Jewish community. Rather than launching a concerted and indignant public defense of these men, the organized Jewish leadership has remained mainly silent.

For its part, AIPAC fired both men and has disassociated itself from them. Pathetically, the pro-Israel lobby has sought to deal with the prosecution of its now former employees by symbolically separating itself from Israel. At its annual conference last April, for the first time since its founding, the group refrained from singing Hatikva at its dinner.

Sadly, no attempt to disassociate themselves from Rosen and Weissman will mitigate the damage that their prosecution has and will continue to cause for American Jews. Very simply, if these men are found guilty next winter then all Americans who seek to lobby the US government on behalf of Israel will be placed under scrutiny.

BUT PEOPLE in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and in Israel we have our own brand of anti-Semitism and our own anti-Zionist show trials. In Israel, the international Left's rejection of the Jewish state has caused an abandonment of Zionism by its Israeli fellow travelers. Israeli leftists – first at the fringe and subsequently in its mainstream establishment – have accepted the view propagated by the international Left that Israel has no right to exist or to assert its sovereign rights as a Jewish state.

Case in point is the trial of Avri Ran that is set to begin in the Kfar Saba Magistrate's Court next Tuesday. Ran, a rancher in Western Samaria, is accused of aggravated assault against two Arabs who infiltrated his cultivated clover field this past March with a tractor. Ran's case exposes two of the central pathologies of the Israeli Left – its activists' campaign to criminalize Jewish sovereignty and its establishment's acceptance of their right to do so. If these pathologies are not contended with, they have the potential to endanger the survival of Israel as the Jewish state.

Over the past decade, Ran has become a symbol of almost mythic proportions of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. For his supporters Ran is a symbol of all that is good and right about Zionist settlement in the Land of Israel. For his detractors Ran is a symbol of the hated religious Jewish settler. Ran earned his position as a symbol legitimately.

Ran is the father of the settlement ideology that Jews must expand our settlement of the Land of Israel by squatting on strategic hilltops in Samaria and Judea that are classified as state land and cultivating them. Since he moved to Samaria 12 years ago, Ran and his family have built four hilltop settlements west of the community of Itamar. In each case, Ran financed his moves with his own money and protected his settlements without assistance but in full coordination with the IDF. Seven years ago, Ran established the "Eternal Hills" ranch and has turned it into the largest organic farm in the country. The closest Arab settlement to "Eternal Hills" is Hirbat Yanoun, a tiny Arab community whose population had dwindled to two people by early 2003. Indeed, the entire region of Western Samaria is almost empty of Arabs.

The fact that Ran had apparently hit on a successful manner of settling the land caused a furor in the radical Left. Since the outbreak of the Palestinian terror war five years ago, extremist Israeli leftist organizations like Ta'ayush and Rabbis for Human Rights have taken an active role in inciting Arab violence against Israeli settlers and security forces. In the case of Hirbat Yanoun, Ta'ayush members along with foreign volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement moved into the all-but-abandoned village at the beginning of 2003 with the intent of convincing the residents who had left to return.

Their provocations of Ran began almost immediately afterwards. In February 2003, Ta'ayush member David Nir and two foreign volunteers came to the ranch. They were met there by an IDF detachment that they had secured by claiming that they needed to enter the ranch in order to reclaim a video camera and cellular phone they claimed they abandoned the day before. Alerted to the infiltration of the radical Leftists, Ran and his employees ran to throw the trespassers off their property. In the event, Nir claimed that Ran attacked him and bludgeoned him with the butt of his rifle. Ran was arrested and charged with aggravated assault. Continued...