In 1999, Ehud Barak became prime minister of Israel, bringing with him a sterling military career and the promise of better management than the outgoing government. Of course, his tenure as prime minister would become the shortest of any leader in Israeli history, largely due to his headlong drive to give the Palestinians practically all of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, half of Jerusalem, and a good portion of Jewish history and identity along with it.
Ariel Sharon has been prime minister since Barak was unceremoniously run out of office by Israeli voters in 2001. Sharon is the only Israeli prime minister in the past two decades to win re-election, because he is the only one to have stopped the wholesale surrender to our avowed enemies.
In three years, Sharon has succeeded in rolling back Palestinian, American, and even Israeli expectations about what shape a future Middle East might take. It has come to the point where President Bush is even willing to consider making a statement acknowledging that the “final boundaries” might not resemble the old “Green Line” armistice lines.
But Sharon must now deal with the next Ehud — a monster largely of Sharon’s own making: Ehud Olmert. Olmert has never been much of a hawk on diplomatic matters, and in the last six months has become the Likud’s leading leftist. He is proving what a lot of people on the right have been saying for years — — that the Likud is a centrist rather than a right-wing party.
Olmert is the man who conceived of this season’s hot political topic, the “Unilateral Pullout” plan that would have Israel withdrawing under fire from the Gaza Strip for nothing in return from the Palestinians, much like it did from Lebanon under the first Ehud. The pullout from Lebanon provided an example of what the Palestinians could hope to achieve by rejecting negotiations and resorting to terrorism, and the withdrawal from Gaza under similar circumstances will reinforce that example.
Yet Olmert has been able to convince Sharon that his plan is the way to go — despite Sharon’s vehement opposition to other, similar, plans, such as Oslo and the Lebanon pullout.
Olmert recently has made two statements that should give every Israeli patriot reason to be nervous.
First, he explained that, in his estimation, Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and four Samarian communities would not end terrorism. I find it quite impossible to follow the logic behind the plan if that is the case. It should be the sole aim of any diplomatic or security plan to end the terrorist war against Israel in as decisively victorious a fashion as possible. Yet the best this government can offer, based on Olmert’s driving force, is a plan that will deprive Israel of land and destroy a number of its communities, while not achieving anything in return.
Olmert’s second statement was that Israel should withdraw anyway, since there are 7,500 Israeli residents in Gaza, living in the midst of over one million Palestinians. This is not the first time we have heard such statements from Israel’s purported leaders. The only difference this time is that the purveyor of the statement was not a member of a left-wing party.
If we follow Olmert’s statements to their logical conclusion, then Jews have no right living anywhere in the State of Israel. After all, the Arabs have been complaining all along that we are a mere five million people living in the midst of 100 million Arabs, and that Israel should be a part of their hegemony. Why is Gaza different from the rest of Israel?