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Commentary;
Ehud Olmert spoke last evening before Knesset giving a speech which even Ehud Barak called “cynical and troubling.”
Olmert just squeeked by as less than a majority of 120 Knesset members as Jerusalem Post’s Sheera Claire Frenkel writes;
The Knesset narrowly approved the prime minister’s speech on the Winograd Report, by 59 to 53, with six coalition MKs – Labor’s Ophir Paz-Pines, Shelly Yacimovich, Eitan Cabel and Danny Yatom, and Kadima’s Avigdor Yitzhaki and Marina Solodkin voting with the opposition. The vote was purely symbolic.
MKs from the opposition heckled Olmert relentlessly, and called for his immediate resignation.
“The prime minister is evading responsibility. It won’t help to put the responsibility on the people, the opposition, on me personally. We all supported the war, and even today we wouldn’t take it back… But we didn’t support the failed management of the war,” said opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud).
He [Netanyahu] mockingly added that the government clearly did not know the meaning of responsibility, and should return former defense minister Amir Peretz and former IDF chief of General Staff Dan Halutz to power.
MK Zehava Gal-On (Meretz), who opened the special plenum session on the report with an emotional plea for Olmert’s resignation, said the prime minister had not heard the last from the bereaved families.
“The blood of the sons is crying out from the ground,” said Gal-On. “You will continue to hear it until you step down. You won your war of survival, but the State of Israel lost. A state is not a survival plan, and therefore you must resign.”
But as posted on this blog earlier, as vociferously as Meretz calls for Olmert to leave, they would still vote in favor of any of Olmert’s surrenderist concessions to Abbas.
Frenkel continued;
The protesters outside the Knesset expressed equal disappointment with Barak and Olmert for their decisions to keep the government intact.
“Olmert may have won this round and managed to survive the Winograd Report, but this nation will demand true leadership,” Tafnit Party Chairman Uzi Dayan told those gathered. “Specifically today, when there was a bitter terrorist attack in Dimona, the nation knows that there is no security with a government that lacks the faith and trust of the governed.”
In the aftermath of the Winograd Final Report, and Monday’s attack in Dimona, one must wonder Heaven forbid, how many more such attacks will it take before the people rise up, maybe not because of the Lebanon debacle or the ongoing Gaza situation alone or perilous concessions or lack of child support payments, but the sum total of these parts with the addition of a return of suicide attacks. MB