Rude Awakening to a Reality Ignored …

Israel’s Rude Awakening, By Caroline Glick

It is painful to watch Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni try to contend with the terrible outcome of the Palestinian terror strike against the IDF on Sunday morning.

They use so many fancy and angry words. They sound so resolute. And yet, they have nothing useful to say. Two soldiers are dead, a third is now the prisoner of jihadist killers, seven are wounded, an IDF border post has been overrun, and a world view and a security doctrine have been blown to smithereens.

Olmert and his associates have four general messages. First, they tell us that Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas is responsible for bringing about Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s release. Second, they say Hamas better watch out because they’re gonna get it. Third, they say that Hamas won’t get it until later. Finally, while stipulating that they will not negotiate with Hamas, Olmert and his associates are negotiating with Hamas.

None of these messages and none of the actions that attend to them have any chance of making Israel safer. They also hold little promise of bringing Cpl. Shalit home. Yet there is next to no possibility that Olmert or his associates will widen their options to include any relevant responses to Sunday’s terror offensive. Doing so would involve an admission that what the Kadima and Labor parties have presented to the public as their world view is wrong.

That world view involves a denial of a basic, fundamental truth: When you empower terrorists, terrorists are empowered.

Ahead of Sunday night’s security cabinet meeting, Olmert reportedly told IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz not to present any wide-scale military options to the cabinet. This makes sense. Any major operation, just like any real discussion of Israel’s security situation or its options for contending with it would show the failure of the government’s retreat policy.

OLMERT cannot allow a counter-terror offensive in Gaza because doing so will lead to international condemnation of Israel. It isn’t the impact of the condemnation Israel’s international standing that concerns him. Olmert cannot be condemned internationally because he promised that after Israel retreated from Gaza, the international community would accept any Israeli counter-terror offensives in Gaza.

Sunday’s attack and Cpl. Shalit’s kidnapping are watershed events. In the coming days and weeks, it will become self-evident to the Israeli public as a whole just how indefensible Olmert’s plan to empower terrorists actually is. Yet public recognition of his plan’s failure is not enough.

So to our fervent prayers for Cpt. Shalit’s rescue, we should add another prayer. We should pray that whereas the demise of the so-called peace process did not cause the demise of its core policy of empowering terrorists, the demise of Olmert’s retreat policy will also cause the burial of the notion that empowering terrorists can do anything other than make terrorists more powerful.

Continue reading; Israel’s Rude Awakening

Commentary;

As a point of information only; This blog adamantly refuses to give it’s valuable space to reports such as; “Militants demand women, children in Israeli jails released in return for information on soldier” or PM: No Prisoner Swap Talks, Gaza Sealed Off, or PM Olmert: We Know Who is Holding Shalit …

The reasoning is; we MUST put a permanent end to embarrassment, humiliation and persecution of Jews. Further, this blog will attempt to refrain from dignifying Ehud Olmert’s shallow, phony indignance and blusterous remarks such as “PM: No Prisoner Swap Talks”. For in the end, dimes to dollars they’ll beg to swap anyone for Shalit rather than going out and doing something big, like kidnapping say, Haniyeh or Abbas himself and holding them for a ransom — not just Gilad Shalit, but Ron Arad and the other MIAs and throw in Jonathan Pollard too.

The point is, as Caroline Glick makes it so succinctly, for this regime to make any credible military response, as one would expect of any sovereign nation under these circumstances, involves ” … an admission that what the Kadima and Labor parties have presented to the public as their world view is wrong.” She states; “It will become self-evident to the Israeli public as a whole just how indefensible Olmert’s plan to empower terrorists actually is.” MB

Olmert Continues Ignoring Reality, Aaron Lerner

Excerpts;

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s disturbingly simplistic mantra that nothing will stop him from retreating may appeal to his household, but it hardly serves as a replacement for a well-reasoned and coherent policy.

Mr. Olmert’s team’s struggle to sell retreat to the world has become so desperate that they have gone so far as to try to package it as implementation of the Road Map, stripped of the Road Map’s requirements of Palestinian compliance.

That’s right.

The same Olmert who keeps saying that he won’t negotiate with the Palestinians unless they first fulfill their security obligations is the Olmert whose team says it is now planning to retreat from most of the West Bank, and allow for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the evacuated areas, if the Palestinians don’t fulfill their security obligations.

That’s a sovereign Palestinian state with access to the outside world via gateways not controlled by Israel.

Either the Olmert team has been so busy working on the retreat that they haven’t had a chance to keep up with the news, or they simply don’t care that the Rafiach Crossing has been a security failure in the absence of Israeli control.

That’s a sovereign Palestinian state turning the most populous areas of Israel into one big Sderot, while Mr. Olmert is incapable or unwilling to protect the original Sderot from the consequences of the Gaza retreat.

Continue reading Olmert Continues Ignoring Reality