The View from Olmert’s Looking Glass

The Editors

Jerusalem -- How often, inquired an editorial in a leading Israeli daily following a deadly Kassam rocket attack on Sderot, “is it really necessary to point out that Israel withdrew from Gaza over a year ago so that there are no Israelis to ‘resist?’"

The answer by now should be self-evident:  As often as it takes the

Olmert government to realize that the Kassam rockets falling on Sderot have 

nothing whatever to do with Israeli “resistance,” everything to do with

Israeli “existence,” whether in the western Negev or on any other dunam of land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River over which Israel exercises sovereignty. Contrary to the bewilderment of the editorial writer, Israel’s abandonment of the Gaza Strip and its 22 Jewish communities 17 months ago was regarded as an engraved  invitation by Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad to hit the Jewish state as hard and as far as their Kassams would take them. It was a reprise of the invitation extended to Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian enablers five years earlier in south Lebanon. The response in both cases was predictable. 

In the jungle that is the Middle East, those who act like wounded animals should not be surprised by the heightened blood lust it inspires in the predatory community. Mr.  Olmert’s inability to grasp that singular law of nature and its consequences is repeatedly exemplified. In a recent interview with London-based Sky News, Israel’s head of state was heard to express puzzled disappointment at the Palestinians’ “not knowing how to take advantage of the opportunity of disengagement” when, in fact, according to the Middle East’s jungle code, they knew precisely how to take advantage of a nation that abandons its sovereign territory and hightails it into the bush.  Did he really expect the predator to shower the fleeing prey with garlands of gratitude? 

Proving he’d learned nothing from last year’s Gush Katif debacle, Mr. Olmert took the occasion of the Sky interview to proclaim the wisdom of his ignorance. Even as Kassams, launched from the very areas Israel had surrendered 17 months earlier, were falling on Sderot, he declared that he was “proud” to have been one of the initiators of the Gaza withdrawal.  “I am still proud of it,” he averred, “because it was an essential step forward in creating a new reality.”  A “new reality,” to be sure. By virtue of this incomprehensible act, the western Negev, right up to Ashkelon, has been transformed into a terrorist free-fire zone, well on its way to becoming uninhabitable.

The prime minister could only lament, in yet another display of ignorance of jungle jurisprudence, that “they didn’t stop shooting at us.  What else do you need in order to change the priorities and get them [the Palestinians] to the table?” How about a show of strength, up to and including  reestablished  Israeli sovereignty over the land he is so proud to have had a hand in deeding to Hamas?  It won’t restore the 10,000 ruined Jewish lives and fortunes that unconscionable act left in its wake, but it just might halt the western Negev’s descent into no-man’s land.

“There is nothing we want more than quiet,” Mr. Olmert  told the Sky News reporter. “Quiet?”  The mere sound of that word should send a chill up our collective spine.  “Quiet” is the lollypop the extortionist proffers to his victim between blackmail installments.  That the prime minister should be seen virtually pleading for that demeaning substitute for an honorable, equitable peace, says all that needs to be said about the depths to which Israel has been plunged by it present and recent leadership.

Having  rewritten  the famed U.S. Marine Corps motto to read: “the irrational we do immediately, the inconceivable takes a little longer,” Mr. Olmert has now effectively declared himself willing, indeed eager, to compound the tragic consequences of the Gush Katif  2005 and south Lebanon 2000 catastrophes.  On the eve of his departure for a woefully ill-timed  visit to President Bush, the prime minister issued what amounted to an open invite to Palestinian Authority chairman Abu Mazen (aka, Mahmoud Abbas) to come and pick Israel’s pockets. “I am ready day and night, any time, any place, without preconditions, to sit down and talk,” he announced.  “He [Mazen] will be surprised how far we are prepared to go. I can offer him a lot. How “far” Mr. Olmert was prepared to go became clear within hours – 90 percent of Judea and Samaria and a sizeable chunk of eastern Jerusalem. So just when everyone thought “realignment” lay dead and buried under the rubble of  Kiryat Shmona, it rearises Phoenix-like.  Six months after Hezbollah’s Katyushas sent a million Israelis into exile from homes, schools, businesses and jobs, the prime minister proposes ensconcing Hamas and Islamic Jihad at the gates of Kfar Saba.

Hear! Hear! comes the echoing voice of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, leading contender for the diplomatic circuit’s Miss Congeniality trophy .“A stalemate was not and will not be the policy of the government,” she warns.  “We can’t ignore what’s going on in the PA, but we can’t use it as an excuse for ruling out diplomatic steps.”  What those “steps” might entail she leaves to our imagination, except to observe that it is incumbent on Israel to “create a diplomatic package, little by little, carefully and quietly, to strengthen Abu Mazen and add content to the diplomatic process.”

Part of that “package”  -- the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners  -- is already tied and bowed and ready to be deposited on Abu Mazen’s doorstep. “I will not release even one of the prisoners to Hamas,” Mr. Olmert boldly asserts, “but to Abu Mazen I am ready to release many – not because he is a ‘patriot for Israel,’ but because he is decent and against terror.  I have a lot of respect for Abu Mazen.”

From whence such profound “respect” for Mr. Mazen derives is a mystery perhaps known only to the prime minister and Ms. Livni. Eliminating the fact that he was (and remains) a Holocaust questioner, paymaster to the Munich Olympic murderers and Yasser Arafat’s most subservient flunkey doesn’t leave us ordinary mortals with much to go on. And what exactly adorns him with moral preference in the prime minister’s eyes over Hamas, the bed partner he so arduously and ineffectually wooed, is a conundrum wrapped in a fig leaf.

Mr. Olmert would just as soon leave it that way. “The Palestinians do not know how many prisoners could have been released,” he bellowed to Sky News, “how many of their kids could have been home.”  

If  his employment of the innocuous  “kids” in reference to would-be homicide bombers, arsonists and kidnappers and the rocks they crawled out from under as “home” doesn’t fill us with  disgust, then we have probably forgotten the meaning of the word. In what purported “democracy” would a leader with a 93 percent disapproval rating and a constituency that openly regards him as the most corrupt politician in its midst dare offer a testament so redolent of  moral vacuity?  Only in Israel, circa 2007, one must be shocked to admit.

It can only be hoped that the people of Israel – that long-suffering, self-sacrificing  citizenry that has never faltered in its nation’s time of need – will finally deliver to this disgraceful leadership the stinging rebuke it has so richly merited. What they need to do, however, needs to be done soon.  Time is not on their side.