After careful examination of the record, several media analysts have concluded that many among the foreign media, especially in CNN and the BBC, are actively engaged in a propaganda war designed to delegitimize Israel.

This is a harsh conclusion, but it is obvious that these media mandarins are promoting the Arab propaganda line that Israel is a colonialist power with few legitimate rights to the land, and that it willfully kills innocent Arabs, even children.

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.

Whoever wins next week’s election will find that Israel is not easily governable, perhaps not at all. It will therefore be close to impossible to implement many of his plans or under-takings. There may ensue a deeper frustration with the political process and even a dangerous despair of democracy.

This is not only because of the obvious reason that made former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pull out of a race he was sure to win – namely, the total dysfunction of a Knesset that is torn into so many factions that only the worst populist measures seem to get it galvanized. It is also because the basically rickety machinery of the Israeli government is moved by the bureaucracy’s own agendas, which often conflict with those of the legislature, or even with the wishes of their titular bosses, the ministers and the prime minister above all.

The just-inaugurated Lauder School of Government’s conference on Assessing Israel’s National Strength comes at a propitious moment. Israel faces grave problems, and both its internal and external policies seem confused and wavering. It is therefore vital for key government, defense, industry and public figures to reconsider such basic issues as the components of national strength, the strategic environment, and what the peace process has achieved.