Settlements have expanded exponentially in the West Bank since 1993, when the 'Camp David' accord was supposed to bring 'peace' to the region. 250,000 Israeli settlers now live illegally (according to international law) in settlements in the West Bank, an area occupied militarily by Israeli forces since 1967. Those West Bank settlements are what Mofaz was referring to in his speech, defining what 'Israel' will look like when 'final borders' are decided upon.

With Israeli forces going ahead with Annexation Wall construction in an accelerated mode since the Palestinian elections January 25th, the Wall is now surrounding many parts of Palestinian land. Instead of being built upon the 'green line' armistice border of 1967 between Israel and the West Bank, the Wall snakes through Palestinian land, protecting 'settler-only' roads and highways, cutting apart Palestinian communities, and completely surrounding some towns and cities, like Qalqilia in the northern West Bank.

Despite paying lip-service to the US-backed 'roadmap to peace', and demanding that Palestinian parties adhere to the terms of the 'roadmap', Israel itself is in violation of most of the terms it agreed to when the roadmap was established -- settlement expansion being a key violation. Even while so-called 'disengagement' of settlers was taking place in the Gaza Strip in 2005, the number of settlers in the West Bank was steadily increasing -- so much so that in 2005, the year of 'disengagement', there was a net increase in the total number of Israeli settlers living illegally on Palestinian land.

Mofaz' statement collaborates statements made several weeks ago by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said that Israel would 'take the Jordan Valley'. Their party, the Kadima Party, is expected to win in Israel's March 27th elections, after which it is predicted that they will engage in some highly-publicized 'pull-outs' from some small, isolated West Bank outposts, while firming their hold on the areas detailed by Mofaz.

The report from the UN's Office of Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) came as Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Foreign Minister, who visits Britain for talks today, told Le Figaro newspaper that Israel was cutting contact with the PA and that "the survival of the Palestinian Authority as an entity is less important than the future of the peace process".

The report warns that non-payment of salaries to 153,000 PA employees will increase levels of poverty, risk basic services like health and education and, in the case of 73,000 officers in security services, cause a "rise in criminality, kidnapping and protection rackets".

According to the report, half of the Palestinian Ministry of Health's budget is financed by international aid and cuts in this funding "will hamper service delivery and prevention activities including immunisation and mother and child care".

It also foresees a possible "breakdown of refuse collection and sewage disposal systems" that would risk spreading disease.

The report argues that more than 900,000 Palestinians are dependent on a PA wage earner in the family and that this dependence is particularly high in the poorest areas. It says that "international humanitarian agencies do not have the capacity to take over the running of PA services", even where security would allow them to do so. UN and other agencies have cut back their personnel in Gaza because of security risks.

The report says that there has already been a "sharp deterioration" in humanitarian aid because of increased security measures by Israel since Hamas's election victory.

Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Israel envisaged salaries to security personnel being cut because this did not constitute a "humanitarian" need. But he said ways could be found of delivering humanitarian aid directly to essential services like hospitals.

Mr Regev said the question was whether "Hamas would allow this or, like Saddam Hussein, refuse to do so and allow the Palestinian people to suffer".

The EU announced on Monday that it would provide €120m (£85m) in emergency assistance to prevent financial collapse, but has kept silent on what it will do once Hamas takes office. Britain is encouraging the EU to pay salaries directly and bypass Hamas.

Ms Livni's hardline views were displayed earlier this week when she said that the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was "irrelevant" and could not be permitted to become "a fig leaf for a terrorist entity".

US policy is to prop up Mr Abbas at all costs and Israel's interim ruler Ehud Olmert quickly stepped in to clarify Ms Livni's remarks, saying he hoped the Palestinian President would stay in office.

Ms Livni, 47, has made a considerable political journey from her early support for a Greater Israel to realisation that the country cannot remain a democracy while occupying Palestinian lands and ruling over a population that despises it. A teenager born to a nationalist family, she was nearly arrested for violently protesting against Henry Kissinger's ill-fated shuttle diplomacy. Despite her closely held dream of a Greater Israel, she maintains that she has long been a centrist on the national question. Raised in a hardline Likud household, Ms Livni has an ideological pedigree that is hard to top.

"My family is part of the founding history of Israel," she has said. Her father's gravestone bears the inscription, "Here lies the head of operations of the Irgun" - refering to a pre-independence military organisation set up to fight the British and the Arabs. The stone also bears a carved map of Greater Israel extending to the opposite side of the Jordan river.

A former Mossad officer, Ms Livni is the daughter of Zionists - classified as terrorists by the British authorities. Her father, Eitan, was the Irgun's head of operations when it blew up the King David hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 28 Britons, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews and five others. The subsequent wave of terror attacks he led outraged British public opinion, leading the government to abandon the Palestinian Mandate and turn the problem over to the UN, with disastrous consequences for the Palestinians.

Ms Livni was one of Sharon's favourite colleagues - part of the kitchen cabinet that planned the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last year and his key emissary. She was also the first person he asked to join the centrist party Kadima after breaking away from Likud during a row with the right over the withdrawal.

Ms Livni rose to become a lieutenant in Israel's army before joining its foreign spy agency Mossad when she was 22. During her time at the agency it was involved in a failed assassination attempt on the Black September leader Abu Daoud. In 1981, her first year as a foreign spy, Mossad arranged the destruction of a nuclear reactor Saddam Hussein was building at Osirak.

In Israel, the Russian overtures towards Hamas drew denunciations at first. But the Jewish state has adopted a wait-and-see attitude since Moscow emphasised it was sticking to the view of international mediators.

David Welch, the US envoy for the Middle East, said on Thursday that Washington wanted to to make it "enormously difficult" for Hamas to govern and was trying to dissuade
governments from meeting Hamas leaders.

David Welch: US wants to make
it hard for Hamas to govern
"We urge them against contact because in our view, isolation and pressure have to be the words of the moment," Welch said.

But if governments are going to meet Hamas, then they should put pressure on the group to change its ideology, the US says.

Adam Ereli, the US State Department deputy spokesman, said: "Our position is that if you are going to meet with a terrorist group, you should make it clear to them that their way of doing business is unacceptable, that their philosophy is contrary to the norms of the civilized world, and that they
should get with the programme."

Hamas, whose delegation is due to arrive in Moscow early on Friday, regards the visit as a chance to push its position on
the international stage.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, said on Thursday: "We will listen to the Russian government's vision on the Arab-Israeli conflict and we will clarify our own vision.

"The visit in itself is a declaration of the failure of pressure exerted by the United States on the world to besiege Hamas," he said. "Now Hamas is on the threshold of international legitimacy, thanks to the visit by Hamas leaders to Moscow."

South African invite

Pretoria has also invited the Hamas leadership to meet.

Aziz Pahad, South African deputy foreign minister, on Thursday said the government had confirmed a proposed meeting with the Hamas leadership, although details were yet to be arranged.

"The proposed meeting will take place within the context of ongoing efforts by South Africa ... to share our experiences on the transition from apartheid to democracy with both the Palestinians and the Israelis," Pahad said in a statement.

"With the election of Hamas by the majority of Palestinians during their recent parliamentary elections, South Africa is of the view that we need to engage with the Hamas leadership as part of international efforts to help bring about peace and stability in the Middle East."

South Africa, which under apartheid was a close ally of Israel, has sought to become a bridge between Israelis and Palestinians since white rule gave way to multi-racial democracy in 1994.

Returning US aid

Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has refunded $30 million in US aid, meeting Washington's demand to keep it out of the hands of the new Hamas-led government.

Welch said on Thursday the money was returned a day earlier and the Palestinian Authority had promised to give back a further $20 million before Hamas took over.

A senior State Department official said the $50 million would probably be "reprogrammed" for humanitarian aid to Palestinians but Congress would have to agree to that.

This month, there was another murder. Ilan Halimi, also 23, also Jewish, was found by a railway track outside Paris with burns and knife wounds all over his body. He died en route to the hospital, having been held prisoner, hooded and naked, and brutally tortured for almost three weeks by a gang that had demanded half a million dollars from his family. Can you take a wild guess at the particular identity of the gang? During the ransom phone calls, his uncle reported that they were made to listen to Ilan's screams as he was being burned while his torturers read out verses from the Quran.

This time around, the French media did carry the story, yet every public official insisted there was no anti-Jewish element. Just one of those things. Coulda happened to anyone. And, if the gang did seem inordinately fixated on, ah, Jews, it was just because, as one police detective put it, ''Jews equal money.'' In London, the Observer couldn't even bring itself to pursue that particular angle. Its report of the murder managed to avoid any mention of the unfortunate Halimi's, um, Jewishness. Another British paper, the Independent, did dwell on the particular, er, identity groups involved in the incident but only in the context of a protest march by Parisian Jews marred by ''radical young Jewish men'' who'd attacked an ''Arab-run grocery.''

At one level, those spokesmonsieurs are right: It could happen to anyone. Even in the most civilized societies, there are depraved monsters who do terrible things. When they do, they rip apart entire families, like the Halimis and Selams. But what inflicts the real lasting damage on society as a whole is the silence and evasions of the state and the media and the broader culture.

A lot of folks are, to put it at its mildest, indifferent to Jews. In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent. Since then, Iran has sportingly offered to solve the problem of the Israeli threat to world peace by wiping the Zionist Entity off the face of the map. But what a tragedy that those peace-loving Iranians have been provoked into launching nuclear armageddon by those pushy Jews. As Paul Oestreicher, Anglican chaplain of the University of Sussex, wrote in the Guardian the other day, "I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee."

It's not surprising when you're as heavily invested as the European establishment is in an absurd equivalence between a nuclear madman who thinks he's the warm-up act for the Twelfth Imam and the fellows building the Israeli security fence that you lose all sense of proportion when it comes to your own backyard, too. "Radical young Jewish men" are no threat to "Arab-run groceries." But radical young Muslim men are changing the realities of daily life for Jews and gays and women in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and beyond. If you don't care for the Yids, big deal; look out for yourself. The Jews are playing their traditional role of the canaries in history's coal mine.

Something very remarkable is happening around the globe and, if you want the short version, a Muslim demonstrator in Toronto the other day put it very well:

''We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.''

Stated that baldly it sounds ridiculous. But, simply as a matter of fact, every year more and more of the world lives under Islamic law: Pakistan adopted Islamic law in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984. Four decades ago, Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it's in the grip of sharia, and the other half's feeling the squeeze, as the death toll from the cartoon jihad indicates. But just as telling is how swiftly the developed world has internalized an essentially Islamic perspective. In their pitiful coverage of the low-level intifada that's been going on in France for five years, the European press has been barely any less loopy than the Middle Eastern media.

What, in the end, are all these supposedly unconnected matters from Danish cartoons to the murder of a Dutch filmmaker to gender-segregated swimming sessions in French municipal pools about? Answer: sovereignty. Islam claims universal jurisdiction and always has. The only difference is that they're now acting upon it. The signature act of the new age was the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran: Even hostile states generally respect the convention that diplomatic missions are the sovereign territory of their respective countries. Tehran then advanced to claiming jurisdiction over the citizens of sovereign states and killing them -- as it did to Salman Rushdie's translators and publishers. Now in the cartoon jihad and other episodes, the restraints of Islamic law are being extended piecemeal to the advanced world, by intimidation and violence but also by the usual cooing promotion of a spurious multicultural "respect" by Bill Clinton, the United Church of Canada, European foreign ministers, etc.

The I'd-like-to-teach-the-world-to-sing-in-perfect-harmonee crowd have always spoken favorably of one-worldism. From the op-ed pages of Jutland newspapers to les banlieues of Paris, the Pan-Islamists are getting on with it.

© Mark Steyn 2006