ON THE ROAD TO WAR -- OR WHAT?

By Schmoel Yitzhak

The Palestinians want United Nations membership -- and maybe they'll get it.

What they'll also get -- whether they want it or not -- is what likely will be the definitive war with Israel.

Ever since Israel took on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in The Gaza Strip, the Arabs have been spoiling for a confrontation but not an all-out battle. At least, not yet.

In the South, the Arabs endlessly hurl rockets and fire mortars at innocent Israeli citizens as if they can play their game with impunity. Like any self-respecting leader, Benjamin Netanyahu orders retaliation and a few more terrorists get their what-for; but not on an even scale.

The outside world -- in this most recent case the European Union's Catherine Ashton -- inevitably reacts as if both the rocketry and retaliation occur simultaneously.

No, no, NO!

There never would have been an Israeli Air Force attack on Islamic Jihad, -- killing one militant the other day -- had he not been involved in a rocket attack aimed at killing Israelis. But Lady Ashton doesn't understand that -- surprise, surprise -- and instead of clearly fingering the potential murderers, she blithely links them with the defenders.

"I wholeheartedly condemn the indiscriminate targeting of civilians wherever they are," pleads Ashton.

Excuse me. What on earth do you mean by "wherever they are?" You know where they are because you've studied the Arab-Israeli conflict long enough. And, if you don't know by now, then do everyone a favor and resign immediately. But for just one more time, Lady Ashton, I'll explain:

The thousands of rockets have been fired from Gaza AT Israelis. The civilians whom you assert are the victims of "indiscriminate targeting" are Israelis; get it?

But in the convoluted Middle East logic, victims become the aggressors and those Arabs behind the initial assaults take on the collective mantle of St. Francis of Assisi.

This is happening before our very eyes on the political stage as well where Mahmoud Abbas, Inc. pursues legitimacy via assorted United Nations organizations. Abbas knows full-well that the longer he pulls off his UN gambit the more he'll be estranged from Israel.

Yet when Bibi announced a step-up in West Bank construction yesterday a PA spokesman somberly -- and with a straight face, no less -- replied that actions such as the Prime Minister took will result in the "Peace process being destroyed."

Peace process? What "peace process?"

That was destroyed by Abbas' mentor Yassir Arafat long ago and has been buried and re-interred by Abbas himself over and over again whenever he's invited to sit down face-to-face with Bibi and talk turkey.

Just check the facts, man, just the facts.

More than a dozen -- likely one hundred -- times, Abbas has abjectly, utterly and unequivocally rejected Israel as a Jewish state. The man who piously pleads for UN recognition outrageously declares that any Palestinian state would not allow a single Jew to become a citizen. It will be judenrein, which is another way of Mahmoud proudly stating that he';ll head an apartheid state.What does he care, the UN will embrace him no matter what.

How can Lady Ashton wonder about victim and aggressor when a senior member of the Fatah Central Committee publically reveals the Arab plan for eliminating Israel.

Speaking to al Jazeera, Abas Zaki asserted straight out that forcing Israel out of Judea and Samaria was the Trojan horse for the destruction of Israel.

Slowly -- but I'm not sure how surely -- Bibi appears to be getting the point that neither the Arabs in Gaza nor the Arabs who run the West Bank want peace any more than Adolf Hitlein the late 1930s wanted to embrace Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland as a warm, non-belligerent friend.

For too long, Britain and France tried to make-nice to the Nazi dictator and they didn't wake up until the wermacht marched across the Polish border and annihilated Warsaw.

The current rocketry and mortar bombings emanating from Gaza are the Arab equivalent of Hitler's onslaught in Europe.

If the attacks from Gaza do not stop once and for all -- and there's no sign that the sporadic cease fires ever last -- Israel will have to do what the Allies did starting in 1939 -- go to war and this time take it to a finish.

And if that happens, you can bet that Lady Ashton will be moaning about "indiscriminate targeting" on both sides.