|
|
|
Jewish World Review Nov. 16, 2007 /6 Kislev 5768 Fantasists vs. realists By Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
On the eve of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "peace summit" in
Annapolis, the political house of cards which is Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's Kadima government is poised to collapse.
Olmert owes his parliamentary majority and his governing coalition to
two sectoral right-wing parties — Shas, the Sephardic
party, and Yisrael Beitenu, the Russian immigrant party. Today both
are being pressured by Likud and their own voters to leave the
government against the backdrop of Olmert's intention to offer massive
concessions to the Palestinians at Annapolis. If they bolt his
coalition, Olmert will be going to Annapolis without a governing
majority. As far as Israel's national security is concerned, the
government can't fall fast enough.
The Kadima-led government has been a national disaster. Kadima is a
party of fantasists. It was established by the fantasists who pushed
Israel's withdrawal from Gaza two years ago. With the active
assistance of the delusional Israeli media, during the 2006 election,
Kadima was able to hide the dire consequences of that retreat from the
voters until after the elections.
While the public swallowed Kadima's promises of peace and prosperity,
Gaza was transformed from a tactical nuisance into a strategic threat.
While Kadima's leaders promised the country responsible, honest
government, terrorists from Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt marched
into Gaza. Advanced weaponry, money and indoctrination materials
flowed freely across the border between Egypt and Gaza that Kadima's
leaders — against the stated opposition of the IDF — ordered the IDF
to vacate. The destroyed Israeli settlements were turned into terror
training bases and launch pads for rocket and mortar attacks against
the Western Negev.
Since launching a major ground operation against Gaza would involve an
acknowledgement of the fact that the withdrawal was a colossal
mistake, for the past two years the government has refused to act. As
Kadima clings to its delusions, some 40,000 Israelis under rocket and
mortar attack are beset by the reality that they have been abandoned
by their government which refuses to defend them. Not wishing to die
for the government's delusions, some fifty percent of the residents of
Sderot have already fled their homes.
In the meantime, as Hamas's 15,000-man Iranian-trained army, formed
after the 2005 withdrawal improves its rocket and mortar arsenals and
increases their range, another 250,000 Israelis — residents of
Ashkelon, Kiryat Gat, Netivot and Ashdod look on with worry knowing
they are next in line.
Rather than contend with the failure of their grand retreat strategy
in Gaza, ahead of last year's elections, Kadima's leaders announced
their next big plan. They called for an Israeli retreat from Judea and
Samaria and parts of Jerusalem. Indeed, in the early months of their
tenure, Olmert and his colleagues were so busy harassing settlers and
building walls between neighborhoods in Jerusalem that they failed to
note the approach of war. And so they were caught by surprise when on
July 12, 2006, ten days after Hamas and Fatah attacked Israel from
Gaza and abducted Cpl. Gilead Shalit, Hizbullah attacked in the north
— kidnapping IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and
shelling northern communities with Katyusha rockets.
In reacting to Hizbullah's campaign, Kadima's maintained their
penchant for delusion. Rather than waging a real war against Israel's
enemies, they decided to wage a pretend war.
In their testimony before the Winograd Commission, senior cabinet
members and IDF commanders testified that during the government's
meetings in the two days following Hizbullah's attacks, they didn't
think that Israel was at war.
Apparently they never got the memo. The government's decisions during
the war only make sense when viewed as the moves of a government that
refused to recognize reality. Its refusal to draft reservists; its
insistence on not launching a ground offensive until after the UN
Security Council had already passed the ceasefire resolution; its
decision not to bomb Hizbullah targets in Syria; its refusal to
declare a state of emergency and evacuate residents of the north, and
its insistence that Israel achieved all its goals only make sense when
seen in the context of a governmental campaign to ignore reality.
And now, with the Winograd Commission poised to release its final
report, rather than contend with the wreckage of their last failure,
Kadima's leaders are marching towards their next failure at Rice's
peace parley in Annapolis.
Kadima's leaders promise us that we have nothing to worry about. They
learned the lessons of the Gaza withdrawal.
Unfortunately, it seems that they have learned the wrong lessons. The
decision to withdraw from Gaza was founded on an understanding that
there were no Palestinian leaders willing to make peace with the
Jewish state. Instead of fight to victory and so enable a peaceful
Palestinian leadership to emerge, Israel opted to cut and run.
Far from learning that cutting and running is a bad strategy, Kadima's
leaders embrace it. What they learned from Gaza is that they were
wrong to acknowledge that there are no Palestinian leaders interested
in making peace with Israel. So rather than repeat that "mistake,"
they invented the fiction of Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority
Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as a credible leader.
If Kadima's leaders are allowed to go forward with their "peace" talks
with their fictional Palestinian partner, the consequence will be the
transformation of Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem into the
second Gaza. And this is something that Israel cannot allow. While the
Gaza terror state directly threatens 250,000 Israelis, the Judea,
Samaria and Jerusalem terror state would place millions in its
crosshairs. Every major city is within rocket range of the areas. A
partitioned Jerusalem would become uninhabitable for Jews.
Unfortunately, Kadima's leaders don't care. What is important to
Kadima's leaders is, in Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's words, "to
create processes."
Livni, it would seem, has taken on the role of chief defender of the
government's new big strategy. Speaking at the Knesset this week, she
claimed that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Israel's
concessions will only be implemented after the Palestinians fight
terrorism. Of course by agreeing to conduct negotiations Israel
surrendered its former position that nothing could be discussed until
after the Palestinians fought terrorism.
As for Olmert, in the current iteration of Kadima's strategic myopia,
he shows that he learned nothing from Lebanon. There he decided to
launch a counter-strike without accepting that Israel was at war. He
then spent the next five weeks pushing policies that were aimed at
forcing reality to bend to his imagination.
Today, as then, Olmert moves ahead with negotiations with Abbas and
Rice without any consideration for the consequences. Indeed, like
Livni, he denies that there are consequences. He refuses to consider
the effects of his support for Abbas — a leader with no followers, who
already lost an election to Hamas in 2006 and lost Gaza to Hamas in
2007. He thinks that the fact that he is offering Jerusalem, Judea and
Samaria to a leader of a society that refuses to accept Israel's right
to exist is cost-free.
Of course, this isn't the case. His willingness to offer such enormous
concessions has radicalized his powerless interlocutor still further.
Then too, Olmert's willingness to accept Abbas as a negotiating
partner and embrace the fantasy that his Fatah group is something
other than a terrorist organization has had dire consequences for
Israel's relations with the US. Seizing on Israel's willingness to
deal with irreconcilable foes, Rice invited Syrian dictator Bashar
Assad to send a representative to Annapolis. There, Iran's junior
partner in nuclear weapons development will demand that Israel
surrender the Golan Heights to its Iranian-trained army.
Against this backdrop, led by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu,
Wednesday Olmert's political opponents began their offensive against
the Olmert-Livni government. First, the Knesset moved to begin
checking Olmert's power to concede Jerusalem. By an overwhelming
majority, its members approved - in a preliminary reading — Likud MK
Gideon Sa'ar's bill requiring the approval of two-thirds of the
Knesset for any plan to limit Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.
Joined by MKs from Kadima, Shas and Yisrael Beitenu, Netanyahu and his
Likud colleagues then reconnoitered at the City of David. There,
nestled between the Temple Mount and the Kidron Valley, the
parliamentarians vowed to block any concessions on Jerusalem.
As one would have expected, sitting among politicians who base their
policies on reality, the representatives of Shas and Yisrael Beitenu
looked a little embarrassed. Here they were, announcing that they
reject the Olmert's new delusional flagship policy, while enabling him
to implement it by remaining in his government.
And that's the thing of it. It would seem that Shas and Yisrael
Beitenu haven't decided yet where they stand on the reality-delusion
spectrum. Yishai and Lieberman apparently believe that simply by
denying the self-evident dangers of Kadima's policies, they will be
immune from criticism when those policies fail. But their voters are
not so easily gulled.
Monday, Netanyahu and Sa'ar paid a visit to Shas's spiritual leader
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef in a bid to impress on him the dangers of the
moment and to convince him to withdraw Shas from the government. As
they exited the rabbi's home a young Shas voter approached Netanyahu
and asked, "Why is Shas still in the government?"
The two parties claim that they will leave the government if it
damages Israel in any way. But of course, it already is damaging
Israel. From a security standpoint, the government's decisions to
release terrorists from prison; grant "clemency" to wanted terrorists;
curtail IDF counter-terror operations; and continue to do nothing in
Gaza in the interest of the peace process, are endangering the
country.
And then there is the symbolic damage. By announcing a freeze of all
Jewish building activity in Judea and Samaria, the government has
effectively said that Jews have no right to Judea and Samaria. By
agreeing to discuss massive territorial concessions in Jerusalem, the
government has effectively provided the Palestinians with veto power
over Israeli sovereignty in the city.
For the past three years, Kadima's leaders have annually introduced a
new "grand strategy" for solving Israel's woes. In each case, after
their grand strategy collapsed, before the country could force them to
pay the price for their idiocy, they moved on to their next grand
strategy that then collapsed.
The only way to prevent Kadima from moving forward with its most
dangerous grand strategy to date is to bring down the government by
forcing Yisrael Beitenu and Shas to bolt the coalition. They are
feeling the heat. But it has to be turned up several notches.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
| ||||||||||
