Column One: How Olmert Justifies Failure, By Caroline Glick
Excerpts;
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s secret visit to Sderot Tuesday morning was met with snorts of disgusted laughter…. The message he sends is clear: Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza last summer was a national security disaster – and he knows it.
Olmert said he hid his plan to visit Sderot because he didn’t want to give the Palestinian Authority a special reason to launch rockets against the city. That statement, like the government’s decision to retake the destroyed communities of Dugit, Elei Sinai and Nisanit in a bid to halt the Palestinian rocket offensive, is a clear admission that the IDF is incapable of defending southern Israel from outside the Gaza Strip.
That is, it is a clear admission that the government lied last year when it said the IDF was in Gaza just to “protect the settlers.” If anything, the Gaza settlers, by providing a friendly base of operations, protected the IDF. And just as opponents of the retreat warned, the removal of both endangered Israel’s national security.
So now that the consequences of last year’s retreat are clear, how is the Olmert government defending its goal of compounding the failure 20-fold in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem?
The government’s line is that the withdrawal from Gaza wasn’t supposed to make Israel more secure….
As Yonatan Bassi, the outgoing head of the government’s so-called Disengagement Authority, explained, “From a security point of view, I never thought things were going to be better” after Israel left Gaza. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Bassi claimed that the retreat was important for strengthening Israeli democracy, which is “better… now than it was a year ago.”
Amplifying Bassi’s line are government ministers who claim that what is happening in Gaza is irrelevant to the government’s plan to retreat from Judea and Samaria and to partition Jerusalem. Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter explains that the failure of the withdrawal from Gaza is immaterial to Judea and Samaria because there the IDF will remain in place.
According to Dichter, all the government wants to do is to orchestrate mass expulsions of Israeli citizens from their homes and to destroy their communities. The IDF, he promised in an interview Thursday with Ha’aretz, will stay where it is. The removal of the Israelis, Dichter says, will be undertaken to strengthen Israel’s demographic balance and to enhance Israeli democracy.
Dichter’s assumption that it is possible to expel tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes and to destroy their communities while leaving the IDF deployments in the areas untouched is delusional. The Israeli Left… and the Europeans, on whom the Israeli Left depends for survival, will not back the retention of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria in the wake of the planned mass expulsions.
BUT LEAVING aside the military consequences of the government’s plans for Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, the question arises: Is the government working to enhance Israel’s demographic stature and strengthen its democratic system?
- The Olmert government bases its claim that Israel’s demographic standing is in need of immediate enhancement on a census carried out by the Palestinian Authority in 1997. That census claims there is near numerical parity between the Arab and Jewish populations west of the Jordan River.
- Yet a study published in January 2005 by a group of independent American and Israeli researchers who examined the PA population data proved that that data was fraudulent. The researchers, who presented their findings to the government and the Knesset, showed that the PA’s numbers were inflated by some 50 percent, or up to 1.5 million people.
- After the study was published, Prof. Arnon Sofer – Israel’s loudest demographic alarmist – quietly reduced his Palestinian population data by one million. Last month, in an interview with Hadassah magazine, Prof. Sergio Della Pergula, Sofer’s colleague, reduced his Palestinian population estimate by some 900,000.
- … The government may well believe that a two-thirds majority is not enough. But expelling up to 100,000 Jews from Judea and Samaria and partitioning Jerusalem will not add one Jew or detract one Arab from Israel’s population rolls.
- The fact of the matter is that if the government was truly concerned about Israel’s demographic balance, it would be working tirelessly to bring every possible Jew to Israel. Yet, not only is the government not doing this, it is subverting the rule of law to prevent Jews from coming here.
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Column One: How Olmert Justifies Failure