On November 25th, TIME magazine reported that the Bush administration is in the process of establishing relations with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and has warned Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert against resorting to any military action against it or Iran before he leaves office. If true, the US and Israel are on a collision course.

Nations not only have the right, but the obligation to defend their citizenry and territory from attack. As such, it is only a matter of time before Hamas and its Palestinian sympathizers are called to account for the death and

One hundred and fifty thousand Hamas supporters gathered and cheered in Gaza City.

destruction wrought by thousands of missiles they have fired into Israeli cities, towns and kibbutzim over the past seven years.

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar noted recently: "We do not recognize the State of Israel or its right to control any of the land of Palestine. Palestine is holy Islamic land. Our national problem is not related only to the West Bank, Gaza, and al-Quds (Jerusalem)... but to Palestine, all [the territory of] Palestine." By that he meant Israel proper, or what he terms "the Zionist entity."

Unfortunately, Zahar is not alone in this thinking. On Sunday, December 14th, one hundred and fifty thousand Hamas supporters gathered and cheered in Gaza City to mark the 21st anniversary of the Islamist movement's founding. This is consistent with a recent poll of Palestinians that asked: "Do you support or oppose suicide bombings against Israeli civilians?" Fifty-six percent (56%) said they support it. That poll paralleled the results of an earlier survey conducted jointly by Public Opinion Research of Israel and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. The survey found that only 13% of Palestinians agreed with the statement that "Hamas was a terrorist group"; 82% agreed that Hamas was a "freedom-fighting organization"; and a mere 10% believed that bombings targeting Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants could be classified as "acts of terrorism." Moreover, the world may have been appalled this year when students studying in a Jerusalem library were shot to death by a Palestinian terrorist, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84% of Palestinians approved.

These attitudes suggest an enormous ethical and moral divide betweenPalestinian and Israeli cultures. What the Bush administration fails tounderstand is that Hamas didn't get elected by accident. It got elected because its very rationale for existence reflects the prevailing attitude within mainstream Palestinian society. For the Palestinians, terrorism is not a weapon borne of desperation, but a strategic choice.

If Hamas and its Palestinian supporters seek the annihilation of Israel, then they had best understand the ultimate consequences of war. Military historian Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institute writes: "Modern Western man is faced with (an) awful dilemma, from which he recoils: real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree to which an enemy is humiliatingly defeated and so acknowledges it - the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been." In effect, only after eradicating the reasons for which wars are fought - slavery, fascism, Nazism and Japanese militarism - can real peace and re-construction follow. That moment is reached when an enemy is rendered incapable and unwilling to continue the conflict.

Only with absolute victory can an enemy's terror apparatus be dismantled, its leadership replaced, its capacity to wage further war be eliminated; its weapons seized; its militias hunted down; its propaganda machine terminated; its educational system reformed; its human and financial resources channeled back into massive social and economic reconstruction; its government and judiciary made transparent; its universities secularized; and its population prepared for a new and better future. If Hanson's historical analyses of war, victory and defeat are correct, then neither Israel nor the US will be able to accommodate or moderate an enemy whose entire rationale for existence is its "divinely-inspired" mission to conquer Israel and compel its citizens to submit to Islam.

Faced with a choice between annihilation and survival, Israel will choose survival. Like ancient man, Israelis (just like the rest of us) are hardwired to survive, and will use their full arsenal when faced with the alternative of extinction. For post-modern children of the Enlightenment, the idea that we would ever have to descend into the primeval swamp to destroy our enemies to ensure our survival is disturbing. War is neither pleasant nor desirable, but in an environment where Palestinian suicide bombers are trained from infancy to hate Jews and are revered as "martyrs," where Palestinian children play soccer with the decapitated head of a fallen Israeli soldier, and have an orgy in the blood of their Israeli victims, where Palestinian mothers celebrate the "martyrdom" of their children, and where Palestinians are taught a culture of death in their textbooks, schools and summer camps, in their mosques and marketplaces, in their radio and television programs, in their video games and on the Internet - war becomes necessary to eradicate the culture that breeds such pathologies.

Churchill, Eisenhower and Patton understood this. They understood that it would have been impossible to dismantle the Hitler Youth, the Nazi SS, the death camps and the cult of Aryan supremacy without the complete destruction of the Third Reich. Only such destruction permitted the re-birth of a new Germany from the ashes of World War II. The idea that a genocidal, messianic regime like Hamas can be bribed or cajoled into denying its rationale for existence is the height of folly and flies in the face of history.

Eventually, a point will be reached when Israel will be forced to act with or without America's blessing. Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive purge of their pre-war political, economic, military, social and cultural infrastructures, including the re-education of their entire populations and the rebuilding of their societies over many years, so Palestinian society must undergo a profound upheaval; followed by an equally profound metamorphosis that will sweep away the concept of "martyrdom" and religiously-inspired genocide, and sow the seeds for a new tomorrow.

The "death cult" which is a recurring message on both Fatah-controlled PA TV and Hamas-controlled Al-Aqsa TV must be extirpated from the Palestinian psyche. That will not be achieved by forcing the Israelis to concede

War becomes necessary to eradicate the culture that breeds such pathologies.

Palestinian statehood to terrorists, relinquishing the Golan Heights to Syria, returning the Shaba'a Farms area to Hizbullah-controlled Lebanon, dividing Jerusalem, rectifying Israel's borders, or settling on a refugee compensation formula - at least, not in the first instance. Real peace will be achieved only after the Palestinians have been brought to the realization that their dream of conquering Israel is futile, and that whatever the future holds for them, it will be far better than the ravages of war they have brought upon themselves.

The US administration and the Europeans are wrong in believing that there is "no military solution" here. Multicultural tolerance and utopian pacifism do not work well against radical Islamists. Conflict-resolution theory and the success of the UN in convincing us that disagreements are not really the result of evil actions or incompatible worldviews, but simply misunderstandings that can be rectified through dialogue and reason, will not resolve this problem.

As we have seen in Mumbai, Islamists are violently affronted when Hindus, Jews, Buddhists or Christians are sovereign over a Muslim minority. Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies points out: "Peace cannot be accomplished simply because some visiting envoy, with or without an advanced degree in negotiating from the Harvard Business School, sits everyone down around a table so they can all reason together."

In the end, Israel will be forced to re-occupy Gaza and possibly the West Bank (in the post-Abbas era), and return to its pre-Oslo administration for the foreseeable future. A return to pre-Oslo would permit Palestinian society to be restructured and rebuilt until such time as a new generation of moderate Palestinian leaders can assume responsibility for the future of their nation.

The Palestinians will eventually learn to reject violence not because it is politically ineffective, but because it is morally wrong. To achieve that level of understanding may take decades, but one thing is certain - only a society freed from the demons of its past can succeed. The scourge of "martyrdom" and the jihadist rationale that epitomizes Hamas must be eradicated from Palestinian society. Anything short of this merely prolongs Palestinian agony, delays Palestinian reconciliation and re-construction, sows the seeds for continuing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and renders a new Palestinian rebirth impossible.