The Current Discussion: Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that Hamas is doing all it can to torpedo the Mideast peace process -- but Ephraim Halevy, former head of Mossad, thinks it's time to include the Islamist group in peace talks. Who's right?

The debate over talking to Hamas tends to miss the point: why talk to someone who says outright that they are committed to your destruction? No one suggests that the US negotiate with al-Qaeda, for instance. It is not just that the latter are terrorists. The more fundamental question is, what is the purpose of talking?

Talking is for when there is room to split the difference, such as in a border conflict. In fact, the whole Arab-Israeli peace process is built on pretending that it is a border conflict -- that is, that two states, Israel and Palestine, are a given so what remains is working out the details.

The problem is that the Arab-Israeli conflict remains what it always was, one over existence -- Israel’s existence -- not borders, or refugees, or Jerusalem. At the moment that the leaders of the Arab world, including the Palestinian leadership, decides that it is time to give up the “struggle” to destroy Israel, then it will be a matter of negotiating the details.

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The Current Discussion: With the U.S. presidential primary season in full swing, there's a lot of talk here about "change" vs. "competence" in leadership. Which does your country have more of? Is that a good thing?

With Prime Minister Ehud Olmert polling in the single digits among possible candidates for his post, there is no doubt that Israelis want change. But there seems to be much less interest in change for change's sake here compared to in the United States. Former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who lost in a landslide to Ehud Barak in 1999 and seemed then politically irredeemable, is now leading the polls. The closest thing to an Obama-like fresh face -- Olmert ally and current foreign minister Tsipi Livni -- is not polling nearly as well as Netanyahu.

The conclusion is that Israelis want change, but they also want experience, even if that means choosing someone who only recently was widely considered a failed leader. Netanyahu has recovered politically both because the premierships of two of his successors, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, may look worse to many by comparison, and because Netanyahu is credited with turning around the economy during his stint as finance minister under Ariel Sharon.

Sharon still lies in a coma. As controversial as his tenure was, if he had not been struck down by illness in his political prime, he would likely have remained the most popular prime minister in decades. Perhaps his success lies in his embodiment of both "change" and "competence," or perhaps in his experience.

Jerusalem - David Ignatius detects in the panel’s responses a global and national Bush-fatigue. This is true, but should not be confused with a desire for America to disappear into its shell. Internationally at least, most people, whether they admit it or not, would dread for Americans to close their borders, close their minds, and leave the world to its own devices. That would be a disaster because power abhors a vacuum.

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The Question: After Benazir Bhutto's assassination on Thursday, what's next for Pakistan?

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto is yet another brutal peek into the world's future if the jihad threat is not confronted and defeated. Just as Syria routinely assassinates its democratic opponents in Lebanon, and just as Iraqi politicians and citizens fear for their lives while trying to escape a legacy of tyranny, we see how Islamo-fascists will stop at nothing to destroy their archenemies: democracy and freedom. We also see that no country or faith is safe from the jihadis and their favorite weapon, the suicide bomber, since they have no compunction at slaughtering fellow Muslims in a Muslim country.

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Readers of this blog may have noticed that Yossi Melman and I, though we are both from Israel, often don't agree. But in this case, I would refer readers to Yossi's excellent post on the new US National Intelligence Estimate. I would only add that an "intelligence" report should not be held immune from scrutiny by the light of an even higher authority: common sense.

One does not need satellites, defectors, and spies to determine that Iran remains, as the same U.S. intelligence community testified in January, "determined to develop nuclear weapons - despite its international obligations and international pressure. It is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations than reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution."

Even if one assumes that the discovery that Iran suspended its "military" nuclear program in 2003 is valid, this should not affect the consensus that U.S. intelligence judgment stated above. Nothing substantial has changed in Iran's behavior; what is new is the American national security system's decision to arbitrarily distinguish between Iran's "civilian" efforts to enrich uranium and the other two components of its bomb program: building missiles and assembling a weapon.

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My colleagues David Ignatius and Rami Khouri both point out the significance of the U.S. becoming "judge and jury" of the road map in the wake of Annapolis, while Fareed Zakaria sees the whole thing as part of the fight against Iran. Daoud Kuttab and Khouri both bristle at the Israeli demand for recognition as a Jewish state, and at implied American support for it.

While I think that my colleagues have touched on all the key points, I would shuffle them differently. First, David is right that appointing the U.S. as the compliance judge is a significant Israeli concession. This is so because presidents will only get into the nitty-gritty of this when it’s too late, so in effect the State Department will be the judge, and their tendency will be to be tough on Israel and easy on Palestinians.

For all the talk that the U.S. will never ask Israel to compromise on security, in fact the U.S. State Department tries to do just that all the time, as if we have not seen time and again that the result of easing the pressure on the terrorist infrastructure will be – absent a true Palestinian commitment to crush terrorism – more dead Israelis and Palestinians.

On the Jewish state issue, I don't know if my Palestinian friends genuinely misunderstand why this is so critical to Israelis, or if they understand and are resistant anyway. My most recent column explains why recognition of a Jewish state is so critical in light of the myriad ways the Arab world still denies Israel's right to exist. And this editorial explains why the Arab world's refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state shows that its claims to have recognized Israel's right to exist are a sham.

I appreciate that all this may seem paranoid to my Palestinian friends. But if you were surrounded by people who have been saying for a century that you have no right to exist, that they have every right to move to your country, that you do not exist as a people, and that you have no history in the land that they claim to be completely theirs, you might be paranoid, too.

Lastly, Fareed is right that this whole thing is about Iran, but not in the sense that he describes. Sure, Annapolis was a bid to isolate Iran, but the more salient connection is that the success of the process launched there is completely dependent on Western success in preventing Iran from going nuclear.

Imagine the Arab world making peace with Israel at the very moment when Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda obtain an Iranian nuclear umbrella. You can't, because it won't happen. By contrast, if Iran's nuclear bid is blocked or the mullahs are forced to cut a Libya-like deal, then peace becomes possible because the wind will be let out of the radical Islamists' sails. Everything depends on beating Iran – but Annapolis and any process coming out of it are not nearly enough to do that.

In just a few years, all three major Israeli peace/security paradigms have collapsed: "Peace Now," "Greater Israel," and unilateralism. While the old fringes still dominate the debate, a wide swath of the Israeli public does not want to rule over Palestinians, but also feels badly burned from previous withdrawals, which brought more war rather than more peace.

Israelis want peace badly, but don't see how to get there from here. Add to this the weaknesses of the three players – Olmert, Abbas, and Bush – and expectations for Annapolis are at rock bottom. That said, there is tepid agreement with Olmert's argument that some process is probably better than nothing.

These low expectations, however, could change dramatically if the Arab side were to make some concrete steps toward peace. The two things Israelis will look for is Arab acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state, not just our de facto existence, and a diplomatic-economic warming trend – as during the Oslo era's heyday – from the Arab states.

It’s easy to generate a kind of peace-hope euphoria in such a situation, which in turn produces massive internal pressure on the Israeli government to reciprocate. But the reverse is not true, which is why -- contrary to Western conventional wisdom -- the Arab side has a much greater ability to catalyze a peace process than does Israel.

Jerusalem - The idea that Jews are too powerful is, of course, a staple of anti-Semites throughout history. Regarding this tinge in the question and the recent book that inspired it, there is really nothing to add to Jeffrey Goldberg's devastating review in the New Republic. As he puts it, "[The Israel Lobby authors John] Mearsheimer and [Stephen] Walt are the sort of scholars who think that if you wish to understand racism, study blacks, and if you wish to understand anti-Semitism, study Jews. They are chillingly unaware that such views are complicit with the prejudice that they claim to abhor."

For those who do want to study Jews, I will save them the trouble by mentioning that my wife works for AIPAC. Yes, I am pro-Israel. I even live here and write for the Jerusalem Post!

But let us set aside conspiracy theories for the moment, rephrase the original question slightly, and address its substance. The legitimate underlying question is: Is U.S. policy too pro-Israel? The fact that the U.S. is significantly more pro-Israel than other major democracies only accentuates this suspicion.

The surprising truth, however, is that from the point of view of both the peace process and even more fundamental American interests, the U.S. should be more "pro-Israel," not less. The basic reason for this is that the Arab war to destroy Israel is a subset of Islamo-fascist jihad against the West. It makes little sense for the U.S. to be neutral in such a struggle, just as the U.S. could not be neutral as Nazi Germany proceeded to gobble up Europe.

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This is an interesting question from an Israeli perspective, since the UN voted on a partition plan for Palestine the same year, 1947. That plan was met by acceptance and even celebration by the Jews and immediately rejected by the Arab world. As our readers surely know, when the British Mandate ended a few months later, five Arab armies invaded in order to wipe the just-declared Jewish state off the map.

Now that the international community and even Israel has decided that creating a Palestinian state is central to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is interesting to think how history would have been different if two states were created back then, as India and Pakistan were. It is tempting, and even natural, to imagine that further wars could have been avoided, since the Palestinians would have had the state they ostensibly have been fighting for.

In truth, however, a "successful" partition in 1947 would not have ended the conflict. There is no reason to believe that the Arab world of that time, even if it had tactically accepted the partition plan, would have accepted Israel's right to exist, so an attempt to destroy Israel around its vulnerable birth was inevitable even if Palestine had been created then. The difference would be, if Israel had survived such an onslaught, that an independent Palestine might have emerged west of the Jordan river, rather than Egypt and Jordan occupying such territories, as was the case between 1948 and 1967.

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The war in Iraq cannot be viewed in isolation. Iran is heavily backing the jihadis in Iraq as part of a regional effort to oppose the U.S. and its allies, destroy any seedlings of democracy, and eliminate any prospects for Arab-Israeli peace. This effort includes support for the Syrian regime, for Hezbollah in Lebanon, and for Hamas in Gaza.

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