Despite its brilliant tactical victories, Israel has never truly won a war against the Arabs. In fact, Israel has habitually snatched diplomatic defeats out of the jaws of military victory. In part this was due to the lack of an overall strategy, as none of Israel’s leaders defined goals for war or the means to achieve them, or to consistently pursue them.

My recent piece “NPR’s Bias against Israel” demonstrating how National Public Radio repeatedly promoted Arab propaganda line by distorting facts or ignoring them, and drew many responses. Most felt that a warning about NPR’s success in defaming Israel, especially among inexperienced, “idealistic” university students, was long overdue.

But even more instructive, perhaps, were the few angry responses I received from avid NPR listeners who identify strongly with the station’s message and who are convinced that NPR stance against Israel is justified.

The BBC is at the forefront of the anti-Israel media pack in Europe. It has been so effective in smearing Israel as a rogue state that in a recent poll, Europeans rated Israel as more dangerous to world peace than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Iran or North Korea.

Immediately after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority’s “cultural” organs started celebrating “Canaanite festivals.” They were designed to underscore the PA’s newly invented claim that the Palestinian Arabs — whose ancestors conquered Palestine in the seventh century, about 2000 years after the Jewish tribes settled the Holy Land — were actually descendants of the Canaanites, and therefore the land’s “original” inhabitants, possessing a prior claim to it.

Innocently, Israelis dismissed these claims as yet another harmless Arab fantasy. But recently, as widening Western circles subjected to Arab propaganda started questioning Israel’s rights to the land, and suggesting that it was stolen from the Arabs and should be returned to them, Israelis finally realized that the web of historical fabrications, distortions, and outright lies (like the insistence that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish place of worship) spun by the PA and its Western sympathizers is a serious challenge to Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist.

Try getting your Ford Taurus back from the Palestinian Authority, and you will learn why Oslo failed.